Archive for January, 2009

Toronto Referral Workshop

Thursday, January 8th, 2009

We are well into 2009 now (some people are just sobering up after the festivities to see how many of their new year resolution they have already broken so far).

With that, we are starting a series of referral workshops for small businesses and professional who are looking for better ways to increase their word-of-mouth business. Here’s the link:

http://www.TorontoReferralWorkshop.com/mrant

I just posted a short video there with comments from some of the previous attendees.

I plan on doing a lot more of these, both self-marketed and for other organizations. If you run events attended by or or manage an association made up of small business owners, let’s talk. Also, take a look at this page: http://www.AlexMakarski.com.

This workshop was originally created by David Frey. I flew down to Houston in May of 2008 to spend some time with him and attend one of his workshops. Then I took his material and made it “mine” by using my examples, my clients’ case studies, and some of my referral tools. Every time I deliver these, I add something new and take something out to create room for the new.

The biggest testimonial to the quality of this material is the fact that some people come back several times to take more notes, ask more questions, and refresh their knowledge of these concepts. Some of them bring their friends.

If you live in or plan on traveling to the Big T.O. in the next few weeks, you owe it to your business to come to the Toronto Referral Worskhop.

Reality Marketing

Tuesday, January 6th, 2009

Welcome to 2009! We have arrived. 

And I’m going to be posting here at Marketing Rant a lot more often now.

Instead of trying to pontificate on all things marketing, I decided to radically change the “direction” of this blog. The new focus is going to on documenting my own marketing journey, sharing the lessons I’ve learned and the projects I’m working on.

My goal is to be here at least weekly. Sometimes daily. Or even several times a day.

Here’s what I have done over the holidays:

- Moved this site from Blogger to WordPress (I found Blogger to be easy to start blogging with but not very flexible later on when you want to make your site do some interesting stuff).

- Re-launched Network Marketing Heroes. I find this topic interesting to me and I find I have things to say that are realted to the network marketing industry. So that’s where my own articles are going to go.

- Re-launched Fast MLM Results. That site is an article directory that other people submit their content to. There are 1-2 new articles on that site every day, and the way I set it up is that it’s 100% automatic. I don’t have to do anything to have more content added daily. The purpose of the site to make search engines fall in love with it and send some traffic. I will then convert that traffic into a list and I will have some information products to sell to that list. Most details on that later.

The purpose of this entire exercise is to create an “online property”, a site that is favoured by the search engines and that is frequented by people building a network marketing business. This is a big task. And this whole project may turn out to be a dud.

The good news is that much of what I’m doing right now doesn’t come with a high price tag. Again, I will give links to all the tools that I’m using in the future posts.

I will be explaining everything that I’m doing for this project and sharing my results with you.