Recommended Resources
The Return of the Monday Mash-Up, Vol. 2, Ep. 1
I used to send an email to my list called the Monday Mash-up. Every Monday, a mash-up of five short items. A quick tip. A reading or music recommendation. Quotable quotes. A gratitude snippet. And so forth. I stopped sending them in late 2019, and many people told me they missed them. I knew the…
Read MoreA less complicated way to power up business growth
Happy National Screenwriters Day. (Yeah, that’s a thing). Last night, to get into the holiday spirit, I picked up my copy of “Story – Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting” by Robert McKee. Great book — especially if you want to be a screenwriter. Marketers swear by it, too… …especially ones who understand…
Read MoreRecommended Reading…
During my down time last week, I read this essay by Ann Patchett, published in the January 2021 issue of Harper’s Magazine. Ann Patchett is a writer whose books I like. And she’s a business owner whose bookstore I love. She opened Parnassus Books on the south side of Nashville in 2011… …because the city’s…
Read MoreHow TV’s Greatest Host Can Help You Be a Great Marketer
I was browsing through some of my favorite old marketing training discs the other day and came across one by Dave Dee… …whom I still listen to today. Back in 2007 Dave offered some unconventional advice about how to write better emails: Watch Regis Philbin on television, Dave advised. I don’t recall what I thought about…
Read MoreRecommended Reading and Big Lessons re: What You Control
Roughly once a year, I read Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl. Frankl was a Holocaust survivor who later wrote about his experiences as a prisoner at the Auschwitz concentration camp. The book is heavy stuff, yes. But it’s also full of huge lessons for business and life. These are strange days. Many call them “dark…
Read MoreCool Tools to Remove Background and Apply Effects to Photos
Last week, I shared “5 things you might not know about me…” on LinkedIn. The post included this picture of me… A few people told me they liked that picture, and they suggested I use it as my profile picture — instead of the one I was using. “Sure, why not?” I thought. But before…
Read MoreHow a Tiny Story Can Pack a Giant Punch
Legend has it that Ernest Hemingway won a bar bet by writing a story that contained just six words. Here’s the story: “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.” That tiny story reveals a giant truth for marketers: Great stories don’t have to be long stories. In fact, one of the greatest marketing stories I know…
Read MoreHow to Land More Business With Less Selling
I read a definition of “marketer” yesterday that may be the best I’ve ever seen.It came from Troy Broussard, one of my favorite marketers and a top-notch product developer. He co-created Learnistic, the mobile platform on which I run the Story Power Marketing app. He said a marketer is “a person that creates such a strong…
Read MoreHow to Be a Better Listener So You Can Craft More Powerful Stories
The other day I was in a Zoom meeting with a group of prospects when… …I realized I had zoned out — completely. I don’t know for how long I had not been listening. I just knew I was staring at the squirrel in the tree outside my office window. Yep, my gray matter had…
Read MoreUnderstand This and Your Marketing Will Be Better
I read something cool this morning. It comes from a book called Breakthrough Advertising, by Eugene Schwartz. He was one of the great direct response copywriters of the twentieth century. Breakthrough Advertising is a Bible for those who want to write copy that works. At the beginning of Chapter Seven, Schwartz writes… “…Advertising is the literature of…
Read More