How did marketing get so stale? A word from the Traveling Wilburys

Doncha just love these lyrics by the Traveling Wilburys?

I’ve been fobbed and I’ve been fooled
I’ve been robbed and ridiculed
In daycare centers and night schools
Handle me with care

Been stuck in airports, terrorized
Sent to meetings hypnotized
Overexposed, commercialized
Handle me with care…

Pretty much describes the state of most online marketers, doesn’t it? When e-v-e-r-y-b-o-d-y is clamoring to become a super affiliate, an info marketing trillionaire or web rock star, everybody starts sounding the same, don’t they?

Don’t you get sick of the mindless repetition? Stale. Banal. Utterly predictable.

My friend, anything that “everybody” is attempting to do is the WRONG thing do. I’m a contrarian. Doesn’t matter what it is – hot new stocks, American Idol or beanie babies, by the time it’s front page news, it’s old news.

It’s like they say in poker – if you don’t know which person at the table is the sucker, it’s YOU.

Why has marketing lost its power?

• Shamelessly pitched as the cure-all for everything
• The whole biz is incredibly incestuous – 15 people all hawking the same thing
• The lack of originality is astounding. Where’s the innovation when everyone’s following people who are following people who are lost?
• In every industry there’s maybe 3-6 people who are true innovators. Everyone else is a lame-o copycat. It’s always been true.

That’s why things are the way they are. Ain’t it great?

Because of my frustration with the inadequacies of past business models, I have largely stopped listening to other marketers.

I don’t get their emails.

I don’t read their newsletters.

I pay attention to precious few. I just got tired of rehash.

So I began searching for an answer in completely different corners of the world. I made three discoveries:

1. From a hyper-advanced offline, brick-and-mortar marketing specialist. 2. Structural forms in biology. Fascinating. Never applied to advertising before now. 3. A little-known field of research called cellular automata.

Today you did NOT get 12 emails about the 3 Bombshell revelations I’ll stream next Monday. But I assure you it’s 100% original and it’s breakthrough.

Today you probably got 12 emails from all kinds of people about some product launch for some hot new thing, that is neither hot nor new nor innovative.

This is hot, it is new, and it is innovative. Frankly it’s bleeding edge.

I hope you’re paying attention. Because if you need 12 emails before you think something’s important, you’ve already missed the train.

On March 14 I’m introducing 3 Bombshell strategies via live stream from Maui Hawaii. All can be used on Google AdWords. One was applied in Pay Per Click for the very first time in 2011 and produced 200-500% improvements in ROI.

ALL can also be used in other ad media as well. Two apply to every form of marketing you can think of.

None have you ever seen before.

I’m heart-attack serious. If you’ve felt like marketing has become stale it’s because it has.

It won’t be stale after March 14.

http://www.perrymarshall.com/maui/game-changer/

Perry Marshall

Illinois will crush affiliate marketing if you don’t act now.

A few days ago I posted a warning that the state of Illinois is about to pass a law that adds sales tax to online commerce if an affiliate in the transaction lives in Illinois.

The resolution has passed both the House and the Senate in the Illinois legislature.

An insider has told me that emailing the governor will do no good. If you did so, nobody’s listening.

Here’s what I want you to do instead: Please write the governor as a public comment on this blog page below. My contact will hand deliver a hard copy of all the responses to a state employee who works for Governor Quinn. You’re welcome to include your business street address. Please write to Governor Quinn in the comment section below.

Explanation of the Bill:

If a person in Kansas buys a teddy bear made in Vermont, and an affiliate in Illinois is involved in the transaction, the state of Illinois will force the Vermont company to pay Illinois sales tax. That means the teddy bear company in Vermont now has to muck around with the byzantine layers of state and local sales tax. Potentially different rate for every city and county.

Of course no company in Vermont would ever be willing to slog through all that red tape, so they’re just going to terminate all their affiliates in Illinois. Which is exactly what Amazon has promised to do. That will kill Illinois’ tax revenue instead of increasing it.

My assistant called Springfield and confirmed the following information about HB3659:

- The Senate voted “Yes” on 1/5/2011
- The House voted “Yes” on 1/6/2011
- The bill is now on it’s way to the Governor and once it reaches his desk he has 60 days to decide whether or not to pass it

The actual verbiage of the bill, Amendment 3 of HB 3659, is here. Please write to Governor Quinn in the comment section below. My contact will hand deliver this to the appropriate influencers.

The Last Post on bg Theory

2011 is going to be an exciting year for our company. We have big changes planned, including moving the bg Theory blog and the AdWords Seminars to our new training and tool site, CertifiedKnowledge.org.

For our current subscribers, there is information at the bottom of this post that will let you know if you need to do anything to stay subscribed.

For those readers who are not intimately familiar with bg Theory, let me provide some background.

How bg Theory Came to Life

I started my marketing career thirteen years ago when I discovered affiliate marketing. It was a fun time as everything I did was for me. If I made money or lost money, I was the only one responsible. All of my stress was self-imposed. So if I needed a vacation – I just took one.

However, the success I had lead to others asking me to help them with their marketing.  At first I resisted, or was highly selective of who I worked with, but the guaranteed revenue (assuming client’s get results and renew), was nice to supplement the risk of affiliate marketing. Eventually, my clients lead me to starting my first agency in 2001.

I ran that agency for a few years until I decided to join another company, LocalLaunch. I helped grow that company up to not just being another agency, but to also being acquired by RH Donnelley (now DexOne). We weren’t just another Yellow Page acquired agency though, we became one of the few Google and Yahoo resellers in the world.

However, agency life is focused around maximizing returns  for your clients. One of my passions is teaching and empowering others to succeed. That’s why after years of agency life, I decided to form bg Theory and make education our primary focus.

Too Many Sites + Too Many Brands = Resource Draining

bg Theory grew quickly thorugh a variety of means. I wrote a book on AdWords which is selling very well. We work directly with Google to host AdWords Seminars for Success and have had several thousand attendees. We do some custom in-house training for companies. A few months ago, we launched an online training site called Certified Knowledge.

In addition to having a variety of training programs, I also tweet, blog, write for Search Engine Land, moderate at Webmaster World, guest blog, give interviews, speak at a large variety of conferences, host webinars, and I just started a radio show called Marketing Nirvana.

This combination of training and content creation has been successful for us. However, I also think it hurts us from a branding perspective because we are so spread out across the web (which sounds funny as that’s the goal of many companies).

Not only do we have multiple domains with unique branding, but we have created groups, pages, and profiles at the major social media sites for each of these brands. This has also caused not only a resource drain, but some brand confusion among our various followers. To amend these problems, we ultimately made the decision to focus on a single brand name and house everything under a consolidated company nerve center. As I believe strongly in the success of Certified Knowledge, we have chosen that to be our central brand going forward.

I will still be writing for SEL, hanging out at WMW, blogging, tweeting, and speaking at conferences. That part will not change. The part that will is where you will find our content, upcoming seminar registrations, and where we will be spending most of our time.

Changes at Certified Knowledge

When we first started Certified Knowledge, it was purely based around a subscription membership program. Over the past month, we’ve been tweaking the system to allow for both free memberships and paid memberships. Our goal is to create a comprehensive internet marketing training system on one site. We still have a long ways to go; but our AdWords training and tools are a good step in the correct direction.

You might be wondering with all of the VC funded social media sites and large community forums, why would we create a social network? I have bootstrapped everything, and we own 100% of our own company, but we don’t have millions of dollars laying around to build system.

As both a professional in the marketing world, and having a family, I have found it personally difficult to communicate with relevance across the social web. Of course, I wouldn’t start a site just for me, this is a sentiment that I heard echoed quite often.

For example I have a FaceBook account. My grandmother, my wife, my close friends,  my marketing acquaintances, my conference friends, my old high school friends, and yet more people are all on it. It has made FaceBook very difficult to use as my family could care less about marketing and my marketing friends could care less that I’m outside building a snowman with my 20 month old daughter.

LinkedIN has potential, but its lack of integrated support between groups, events, profiles, and followers has made it hard to use as a true social network (I do like LinkedIN overall and hope it succeeds). Twitter, well, is twitter. A following is not a community – it’s an excellent place to communicate (and listen)  – but its not a community.

Our new Certified Knowledge design offers a lot of the social networking tools like Facebook or Twitter (much smaller scale).  However, it is just for marketers. You don’t need to worry what your grandmother thinks about your questions, or if you shouldn’t friend an EXs friend because they might find out. The site is all about marketing. If you’re not a marketer – then you’ll be bored at the site.

The above features are free to anyone.

We also have tools and lessons which are accessible through a monthly subscription.

I hope you take a look at the new site, register for an account, and help us grow a new community that’s created by marketers for marketers.

It’s still new. It’s still rough. It is steadily growing. But most importantly, if you want to find us or our content – it’ll be at Certified Knowledge along with the rest of the bg Theory team.

Your Subscription

If you are subscribed by email, then you will continue to get emails as we post new content. If you are subscribed to our FeedBurner RSS feed, then you will continue to receive new content.

If you are subscribed to the old ewhisper feed or the bgTheory feed, you *should* continue to receive your subscription; but that might depend on your RSS reader as some aren’t great at following redirects. If you’re unsure, feel free to subscribe on our new subscription page.

Illinois Will Kill Affiliate Marketing Unless You Act NOW

Dear Reader,

If you live in Illinois I strongly suggest you stop what you’re doing right now and write Governor Quinn. I got this disturbing email from Amazon today:

Greetings from the Amazon Associates Program:

We regret to inform you that the Illinois state legislature has passed an unconstitutional tax collection scheme that, if signed by Governor Quinn, would leave Amazon.com little choice but to end its relationships with Illinois-based Associates. You are receiving this email because our records indicate that you are a resident of Illinois. If our records are incorrect, you can manage the details of your Associates account here.

Please note that this not an immediate termination notice and you are still a valued participant in the Amazon Associates Program. But if the governor signs this bill, we will need to terminate the participation of all Illinois residents in the Associates Program. After that point, we will no longer pay any advertising fees for sales referred to amazon.com, endless.com and smallparts.com nor will we accept new applications for the Associates Program from Illinois residents.

The unfortunate consequences of this legislation on Illinois residents like you were explained to the legislature, including Senate and House leadership, as well as to the governor’s staff.

Over a dozen other states have considered essentially identical legislation but have rejected these proposals largely because of the adverse impact on their states’ residents.

Governor Quinn’s office may be reached here.

We thank you for being part of the Amazon Associates Program, and wish you continued success in the future.

Sincerely,

Amazon.com

You can read the actual legislation, Amendment 3 of HB 3659, here.

My friend, affiliates are a VITAL but INVISIBLE part of the economy. If they kill us off, they’ll never know what happened. They’ll just collect even less tax revenue than they are now and they’ll have to go strangle someone else. I implore you to act now.

Please go to the following web page and SPEAK OUT. Do it now while it’s on your mind:

http://www2.illinois.gov/gov/Pages/ContacttheGovernor.aspx

The Last Post on bg Theory

2011 is going to be an exciting year for our company. We have big changes planned, including moving the bg Theory blog and the AdWords Seminars to our new training and tool site, CertifiedKnowledge.org.

For our current subscribers, there is information at the bottom of this post that will let you know if you need to do anything to stay subscribed.

For those readers who are not intimately familiar with bg Theory, let me provide some background.

How bg Theory Came to Life

I started my marketing career thirteen years ago when I discovered affiliate marketing. It was a fun time as everything I did was for me. If I made money or lost money, I was the only one responsible. All of my stress was self-imposed. So if I needed a vacation – I just took one.

However, the success I had lead to others asking me to help them with their marketing.  At first I resisted, or was highly selective of who I worked with, but the guaranteed revenue (assuming client’s get results and renew), was nice to supplement the risk of affiliate marketing. Eventually, my clients lead me to starting my first agency in 2001.

I ran that agency for a few years until I decided to join another company, LocalLaunch. I helped grow that company up to not just being another agency, but to also being acquired by RH Donnelley (now DexOne). We weren’t just another Yellow Page acquired agency though, we became one of the few Google and Yahoo resellers in the world.

However, agency life is focused around maximizing returns  for your clients. One of my passions is teaching and empowering others to succeed. That’s why after years of agency life, I decided to form bg Theory and make education our primary focus.

Too Many Sites + Too Many Brands = Resource Draining

bg Theory grew quickly thorugh a variety of means. I wrote a book on AdWords which is selling very well. We work directly with Google to host AdWords Seminars for Success and have had several thousand attendees. We do some custom in-house training for companies. A few months ago, we launched an online training site called Certified Knowledge.

In addition to having a variety of training programs, I also tweet, blog, write for Search Engine Land, moderate at Webmaster World, guest blog, give interviews, speak at a large variety of conferences, host webinars, and I just started a radio show called Marketing Nirvana.

This combination of training and content creation has been successful for us. However, I also think it hurts us from a branding perspective because we are so spread out across the web (which sounds funny as that’s the goal of many companies).

Not only do we have multiple domains with unique branding, but we have created groups, pages, and profiles at the major social media sites for each of these brands. This has also caused not only a resource drain, but some brand confusion among our various followers. To amend these problems, we ultimately made the decision to focus on a single brand name and house everything under a consolidated company nerve center. As I believe strongly in the success of Certified Knowledge, we have chosen that to be our central brand going forward.

I will still be writing for SEL, hanging out at WMW, blogging, tweeting, and speaking at conferences. That part will not change. The part that will is where you will find our content, upcoming seminar registrations, and where we will be spending most of our time.

Changes at Certified Knowledge

When we first started Certified Knowledge, it was purely based around a subscription membership program. Over the past month, we’ve been tweaking the system to allow for both free memberships and paid memberships. Our goal is to create a comprehensive internet marketing training system on one site. We still have a long ways to go; but our AdWords training and tools are a good step in the correct direction.

You might be wondering with all of the VC funded social media sites and large community forums, why would we create a social network? I have bootstrapped everything, and we own 100% of our own company, but we don’t have millions of dollars laying around to build system.

As both a professional in the marketing world, and having a family, I have found it personally difficult to communicate with relevance across the social web. Of course, I wouldn’t start a site just for me, this is a sentiment that I heard echoed quite often.

For example I have a FaceBook account. My grandmother, my wife, my close friends,  my marketing acquaintances, my conference friends, my old high school friends, and yet more people are all on it. It has made FaceBook very difficult to use as my family could care less about marketing and my marketing friends could care less that I’m outside building a snowman with my 20 month old daughter.

LinkedIN has potential, but its lack of integrated support between groups, events, profiles, and followers has made it hard to use as a true social network (I do like LinkedIN overall and hope it succeeds). Twitter, well, is twitter. A following is not a community – it’s an excellent place to communicate (and listen)  – but its not a community.

Our new Certified Knowledge design offers a lot of the social networking tools like Facebook or Twitter (much smaller scale).  However, it is just for marketers. You don’t need to worry what your grandmother thinks about your questions, or if you shouldn’t friend an EXs friend because they might find out. The site is all about marketing. If you’re not a marketer – then you’ll be bored at the site.

The above features are free to anyone.

We also have tools and lessons which are accessible through a monthly subscription.

I hope you take a look at the new site, register for an account, and help us grow a new community that’s created by marketers for marketers.

It’s still new. It’s still rough. It is steadily growing. But most importantly, if you want to find us or our content – it’ll be at Certified Knowledge along with the rest of the bg Theory team.

Your Subscription

If you are subscribed by email, then you will continue to get emails as we post new content. If you are subscribed to our FeedBurner RSS feed, then you will continue to receive new content.

If you are subscribed to the old ewhisper feed or the bgTheory feed, you *should* continue to receive your subscription; but that might depend on your RSS reader as some aren’t great at following redirects. If you’re unsure, feel free to subscribe on our new subscription page.

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