Small Business Marketing Blog from Duct Tape Marketing

My monthly expert interview series continues in July with a live session with David Meerman Scott on Wednesday, July 16th Noon CDT.
David is an online thought leadership and viral marketing strategist and author of The New Rules of Marketing and PR: How to use news releases, blogs, podcasts, viral marketing and online media to reach [...]

Tom Wilson, Executive Director of AT&T’s Small Business Group, is my guest this week on the Duct Tape Marketing podcast.
I’m a big fan of technology for the small business because I think it’s one of the great ways to level the playing field. In this show we spend time talking about tools the small business [...]

I am doing an interview today with a journalist writing a story about entrepreneurial cities.
You’ve probably seen these kinds of articles before, but to me this is such a tough question. What’s the best place to be an entrepreneur? Most of these types of polls take a look at tangible things like access to capital, [...]

Maybe you’ve heard of this term that some marketers use called “Lifetime Value.” The idea is to calculate what a customer might be worth over the course of doing business with you perhaps for years as opposed to a single transaction. The determination of this number might change the way you look at how much [...]

There are really only four ways to grow a business – Get more leads, close more deals, increase your average transaction or add products and services to your offerings. Of the lot, trying to generate increasing numbers of leads is the most expensive.
Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m not suggesting that you drop your lead [...]

As frequent readers of this blog know I am building an army of Duct Tape Marketing coaches in an effort to take the message that marketing can be simple, effective and affordable to the legions of small business owners out there trying to grow their companies.
I have to tell you that I am personally very [...]

This article on the AP wire is such a good reminder – mid year financial check-ups
The grade school my kids went to used to celebrate 1/2 birthdays – the 6 month date between one birthday and the next – why not celebrate 1/2 vision day for your business.
So, you sat around the fireplace in [...]

I’m not really that fascinated with Facebook but many of my readers are so here’s a hack that someone noticed I was doing and they asked me how so figured maybe others wanted to know as well.
Each time I write a new blog post it automatically changes my status in Facebook to something like: John [...]