On Your Market

Dave Young and the talented crew from Wizard of Ads have recently launched On Your Market.

On Your Market is for business owners who want to learn more about marketing and advertising.

You can sign up and check out a sample for free – the 12 Most Common Mistakes in Advertising.

Joining this community offers not just high quality educational material. With On Your Market, Dave, Tom, Michele and Craig are creating a community of business owners with a common purpose. Access to marketing and advertising experts, together with access to like minded business owners – what is that worth to you? Check out the introductory offer, which is a lifetime membership for a flat fee. Opportunities like this don’t come around that often.

OM4 helped On Your Market set up the website using WordPress, including integration with membership, forum and e-learning modules. Quite a few moving parts for James to wrangle. The overall result looks great, using a design commissioned directly by On Your Market.

Rubicon 2008 Online Advertising Market Report

Ten years ago only 5% of consumer time was spent online, today consumers are spending 33% of time online.

The stat is a bit odd – I think this percentage must refer to the time consumers spend consuming media.

But what I am interested in is the shift represented, a shift in attention. 6 times as much attention online as there was 10 years ago. More attention available online than ever before.

That is why online marketing is so important for a business.

Am I the only small business owner who doesn’t really get the whole brand thing?

When people want me to part with my cash to ‘build my brand’, I am suspicious.

Sure I want a good name for my business, and a good logo.  And I do believe that brands exist (easy to say, hard to do).

I just don’t think they exist in the way that most people seem to want me to.  You know, spend up big on graphics, colours and things I can’t measure.

In the meantime, Seth Godin has written a post on Tribe Management that really worked for me. It speaks to me so much more than brand management.

Seth’s writing just gets better and better. If you haven’t subscribed to his blog yet, do so.

When you market a business online, you have a lot of tools at your disposal. At times it can be very confusing to try and understand how they all fit in.

Here are 5 categories for the new tools of online marketing. Understanding these 5 categories will help you plan and budget for your online marketing.

I’ve used this categorisation for some time now, and its pretty useful. There are other marketing tools online that don’t fit that neatly into this model – feel free to suggest how you see those tools either fitting into these categories, or requiring new categories of their own.

The best blog in the world is Seth’s Blog. And he has just republished one of his best posts, written four years ago.

Only 2 Years Left

Don’t you just love it?

we still live in a world that’s filled with opportunity … stop thinking about how crazy the times are, and start thinking about what the crazy times demand … there has never been a better time for the new

While not reading Seth’s Blog back then, I did read an article by Chris Anderson (just over three years ago) that fired me up with enough of the same sense of opportunity to get out and chase some of those opportunities.

But Seth’s article asks a very challenging question. He says it is not only is it possible to do something, it is possible to do something different. Very different.

… the one question that every organization and every individual needs to ask today: Why not be great?

Great doesn’t mean enormous, doesn’t mean biggest. But great is very apparent when you come across it.

Its a great question. Time to plan for the new year!

Rebecca Spicer of Dynamic Business Magazine prepared an article on Online Marketing for the October 2007 Young Guns edition. I was one of the people she interviewed for the Online Marketing story.

Here is a link to the article: Online Marketing, Dynamic Business Magazine, Oct 2007 ‘Young Guns’ edition.

Naturally I think the article is excellent, as I am one of the interviewees.

Rebecca also interviews Michael Rom of NetStarter (web design and SEO), Paula O’Connell of Returnity (email marketing) and our clients Paul & Jenny Geelen.

Rebecca’s summary is clean and to the point:

The general consensus among our experts is that while all these online marketing channels can be used individually, they’re likely to achieve better results when used together in an all-encompassing online marketing strategy, which should also integrate with your offline marketing.

If you live in Australia, there is currently a special offer that means you can subscribe to Dynamic Business for 12 months for $11. You can find it from their website, or here is a link to their subscription page.