YOUTILITY

Why Smart Marketing Is About Help, Not Hype

The difference between helping and selling is just two letters. But those two letters are critically important to your company’s success.

You’re not competing for attention only against other, similar products. You’re competing for attention against everything. To win in this hyper-competitive environment, you must ask “How can we help?”

If you sell something, you make a customer today, but if you genuinely help someone, you create a customer for life. This is Youtility.

Includes interviews with dozens of companies practicing Youtility, and provides 6 blueprints for building Youtility in your company.

Available for pre-order soon (get up to 7 exclusive bonuses) at http://YoutilityBook.com
Blogging and Content Creation 18  |  Add Yours

The 10 Social Media Thoughts You Liked Best

Looking back on an exhilarating 2010, I wanted to take a second to just say thank you. No frills, no flourishes. Just thanks. There’s a LOT of places you could go to get you social media and digital marketing fix, and I’m incredibly honored that you choose to spend time here. As part of my [...]

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Blogging Success Summit – 23 Tips From Blogging Top Dogs

If you want to take your personal or corporate blogging to new heights in 2011, here’s an opportunity to get a leg up. The Blogging Success Summit kicks off in February, with 23 presentations from a murderer’s row of blogging luminaries (+ me). And for a short time, you can save 50% on registration at [...]

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The Dirty Secrets of Time, Priorities, and Honesty

I hate excuses. And the one I despise most of all is “I don’t have time.” Bullshit. You can find the time. It exists. You choose not to devote the time, and there’s a big difference. I don’t work out. (people that have met me in person are LOLing about the understated nature of that [...]

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Humanizing a Critically Important Industry, From the Ground Up

The public dialog about agriculture in California and beyond is largely negative, with tales of agribusiness nefariousness commonplace. This is despite the fact that 98% of America’s farms are still owned by families. Farmers are literally feeding us every day, but are routinely pilloried in social media and elsewhere by a very vocal minority. This [...]

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Is Content Marketing a Necessity For Your Brand?

Content Marketing – Give Them Something to Talk About If customers and prospects are already chattering about your brand on the social Web, your social media initiative can focus primarily on becoming an authentic part of those existing conversations. If someone throws you a surprise party, you just need to show up – you don’t [...]

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Content Lessons Learned From 25 Popular Blog Posts

I’ve been writing Convince & Convert for more than two years, and have produced more than 300 posts. Mostly from me, with some terrific assistance from talented guest authors. Last week, I was on a content marketing discussion panel (moderated by Jeff Rohrs) at the ExactTarget Connections conference. I was joined by Joe Pulizzi from [...]

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5 Ways to Turn Helpfulness Into Marketing Greatness

We’ve talked in the past about helping vs. selling, and that the former approach takes you a lot further in the realm of social media and word of mouth marketing. When I discuss this concept with companies, however, too often I hear something in the realm of “we don’t know what to provide our customers [...]

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Are You Growing Enough Voices

I’m back from my family vacation in Canada. While I was away, Convince & Convert featured 11 guest blog posts from friends, clients, and colleagues. Some of the guest writers blog on occasion at their own sites. None of them blog routinely. You might expect that this blog that has been written almost entirely by [...]

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5 Steps to Winning Fans with Content Strategy

Guest post by Mike Corak, Vice President of Strategy at digital consultancy Tallwave, and blogger at Digital Marketing Strategy. About a year ago, I wrote a guest post here titled “Use Online Listening for Competitive Research. The post explored the topic of utilizing common interactive marketing tools in unintended ways to tap into consumer demand. [...]

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