Why Marketing Should Matter

Seth Godin is one of the most inventive and down to earth marketing guys around.  He has written various books with titles that might lead you to conclude he looks at things a bit differently:

Meatball Sundae: Is Your Marketing out of Sync?

Purple Cow: Transform Your Business by Being Remarkable

This latter example discusses his purple cow theory which, in a nutshell, is that you can take your business (or blog) to new heights by differentiating yourself from your peers.

In any event, one of his latest posts reflects on the concept of marketing budgets and whether ads work.

His blog is always brief and hits home with often a truly compelling message.  I personally am better at the latter than the former … still have not figured out how to come up with a short blog post.

Maybe next time.

Read Seth’s blog.  That’s all I really needed to say!

Quality of Life Daily Nov 11 08

The purpose of this blog in the broader context is to augment my primary website (www.MarkRafter.com)  as a place people can come to learn more about my philosophy of wealth, developing their own Inner Expert, personal mastery and find other resources (websites, articles, products, insight and perspective) about increasing their quality of life.

To that end, there are tons of other people out in cyberspace (do people still use that term?) blogging about similar topics.  I check out lots of other sites on a nearly daily basis and am going to start doing a nearly daily entry here to provide my readers with links to those blog postings and authors that I think are worth reading.  I’ll weed out the crap and blatant product-selling copy so you can sample the writers that I feel are offering the most value.  As an expert in the area of identifying and monetizing individuals’ expertise, I don’t Read more

Zen, Motorcycles, Mud and Quality

That should get someone’s attention. This is not one of those “MAN BITES DOG!” headlines … these things are actually very definitely connected….

Anyone that read books by Vonnegut and JD Salinger in High School back in the ’70s probably came across Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig. It is a semi-autobiographic, road trip, father-son bonding book about Pirsig and his son Chris. It’s is about Zen, some about motorcycle maintenance. And a good bit about Pirsig’s emotional and mental breakdowns that led him to spend part of the early ’60s in and out of mental institutions (with Electro Shock Therapy thrown in as well). But the book is really about is Quality.

Which is why I was assigned the book as a text for a Ceramics class. Read more