Small Business Marketing Blog from Duct Tape Marketing

Search is big, right, you know that. Why not create your own search engine using Google’s Custom Search. Custom Search allows you to use the Google search engine as designed by you. You get to determine what is indexed and what gets shown. I hacked together a very simple marketing related search engine I called [...]

Sending gift certificates, good towards the purchase of your products and, yes, services too, can be a great way to stimulate additional purchases. It’s also a great tool to use for referrals. Send out gift certificates to customers and ask them to give them away to someone who might use it. Then give your customer [...]

Every now and then something comes along that works so elegantly I get giddy. I know that’s my inner geek talking, but today I feel compelled to share a new (not really marketing related) resource called TripIt.
I do a fair amount of traveling and anyone who does can tell you that it takes a little [...]

Beginning with the current issue, and most months hereafter, you can find my column titled “Hype” in Entrepreneur. You can also read the article, along with much of the content from the magazine, online at Entrepreneur Magazine: If You Build It . . .
This month’s column covers one of my favorite topics – marketing strategy. [...]

Direct marketing pros will tell you that a great offer, sent to a lousy list, will most likely get lousy results. But finding great mailing lists is tough, particularly for the small business owner. Compiled lists from companies like InfoUSA are better than nothing, but often produce less than desirable results in terms of [...]

Email is still the killer app, no matter what folks, including me, predict about RSS and the like being email’s demise. Using email as a marketing tool is still very effective, it’s just gotten harder to do. (When I talk about email for marketing I am only referring to legitimate, opt-in email that people [...]

I spent a few minutes with Siamak Taghaddos, CEO and founder of GotVMail for a recent episode of the Duct Tape Marketing podcast. GotVMail is a virtual phone service provider that targets small entrepreneurial firms.
Virtual phone services, meaning online services that take the place of the old PBX phone system, are great for small to [...]

With every passing day more and more folks are using a mobile device, such as an iPhone, to do their daily web reading. Web sites and blogs can be visited and read by any browsing phone, but the small window makes it pretty tough to navigate around a page designed for a 21″ monitor.
About a [...]