I had a great time last year. Enjoyed driving up from Phoenix, meeting cool vendors, making partnernships, and attending parties.

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In every situation, there are a few signs that tell you it’s time to let your client go. Get ready to walk away if your client:

The one thing the article doesn’t cover is that is YOU who picks the client. If you have the wrong type of client, something went wrong for them to get there. It could have been you needed the money and overlooked some undesirable qualities. Money does that sometimes. It could be you have terrible positioning. If that’s the case, read this book, then do it.

Now, sometimes clients change because things change on their end and you can’t help that. That being said, if a deal starts off with ‘not so great’ somewhere in the mix, it usually doesn’t get better.

Fix your inbound marketing problem and get the clients you want and need to get to the next level.

University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU) shows that people who use cosmetics buy these products primarily for emotional reasons. The study was carried out on facial creams (hydrating and nutritive ones, coloured or non-coloured, and anti-wrinkle creams) and body creams (firming and anti-cellulite creams).

“The study shows that both the emotional and utility aspect of cosmetic brands have a significant impact on consumer satisfaction, but that the emotional component has a greater effect,” Vanessa Apaolaza, a researcher from the UPV and lead author of the study, which has been published in the African Journal of Business Management, said.

Original story here.

What you can glean from this is use positive imagery in their brain to create good vibes for your stuff and you’ll win the sale. Paint pretty pictures for them to imagine.

Online consumers thought to be motivated primarily by savings are, in fact, often willing to pay a premium for purchases from online vendors with clear, protective privacy policies, according to a new study in the current issue of a journal of the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS^®).

Check out TrustGuard guys. I think they’re pretty much been around the longest and therefore have the most eyeball trust. Again, don’t just blatantly trust. All I’m saying is it’s worth testing.

Original story here

Dr. Danit Ein-Gar of TAU’s Faculty of Management at the Leon Recanati Graduate School of Business Administration, working in collaboration with Baba Shiv and Zakary Tormala from Stanford University, has uncovered the “blemishing effect,” a counterintuitive benefit of negative information. When utilized in the right way, she says, a small flaw can actually improve consumer opinion of your product — and make people more likely to purchase it.

“Intuition tells me that if I have a small flaw in my product — nothing harmful, just a minor imperfection — I should hide it,” explains Dr. Ein-Gar. “But providing consumers with information about both strong benefits and a small shortcoming may improve their overall evaluation.” The surprising study will be published in theJournal of Consumer Research.

Not to be a humbug, I’m glad they put this info out there because there are ethical businesses who don’t know it and therefore are missing out. If they wanted to get to this conclusion quicker, they could have just run a A/B test on a direct marketing campaign and then look and their bank accounts. 😉

Try google-ing ‘damaging admission’ and I’m sure you’ll come across some valuable info on this topic. Try it your marketing and reap the rewards. 😉

When it comes to economic development in American cities, the trusted old theory “If you build it, they will come” may not work, a Michigan State University sociologist argues in a new study.

Conventional wisdom holds that job growth attracts people to urban areas.

But according to a study in the Journal of Urban Affairs, MSU’s Zachary Neal found the opposite to be true. Bringing the people in first — specifically, airline passengers traveling on business — leads to a fairly significant increase in jobs, he said.

Original article here

The same is true of online properties and websites. So many customers come to me and they just have really thought out their website…or really how great they think it’ll be and how much everyone will love, etc…but they haven’t really figured out or put much thought into traffic or how they’re going to spread the word. It’s almost like they just think magic will happen.

Dirty little secret: it won’t.

It’s work to get people to your site. It’s work to get them to convert. It’s work to change from what you *thought* was going to be great but now have to change/evolve/revise based on actual data.

The flexible ones win.

Call me if you need an SEO Phoenix company. I may not have room for you but I’m happy to hear you project ideas and give you a little direction.

Found this great little infographic link bait article that really breaks it down on how to use this for your business growth. The cool thing is, when it comes to local business, you already have a ‘local’ perspective because you likely live and work in that community. Finding an infographic that works and then making your own angle on it is sure to get some coverage from the local news channels or other high traffic sites around you. (Don’t steal. Innovate.)

Created By Voltier Creative South Florida SEO

PS Check out my Phoenix search engine optimization company if you want to dominate online.

ZenDesk– reinventing how companies support & engage customers. Has an iPhone app -pretty cool.

Vision Help Desk– kinda hard to take them seriously with a site design like that but seems like a pretty good product nonetheless. I really like the GoogleApps integration & the migration tool coming from other help desk software and discount for doing it!

Tender Support– These guys look they really understand simplicity. Probably the closest in look-n-feel compared to Zendesk. Kinda looking forward to the trial myself.

HelpSpot– Beyond efficiency is their slogan. Not sure what to make of that but this thing seriously looks like a tricked out help desk support suite. Looks like you can integrate this thing with just about anything out there.

TeamSupport– Support software that lets your team work together. I like pretty interfaces and this one seems like it has that. I kinda want support to “feel” good, so customer don’t hate you when they’re going through it. Most support systems “feel” like death.

Kayako– Speaking of support desk that have a bad “feel” and look like they’re left over designs from the 90s, this one is it. However, it must be pretty cool to someone in some way because I see this thing darn near everywhere! Why? Don’t know….

Cerberus– These guys just seems like really cool developers. Just reading through the text and how they put everything up on GitHub is downright cool. Looks like a cool product but the user interface will probably keep me away.

Yes, I know there are a few other help desk systems but I’m just being opinionated and showing you the ones I thought were cool or HAD to be on the list. If you really want to chime in with your favorite help desk software for the rest of the world to see, use the comment form below.

Here’s one of the interesting parts:

“Heavy multitaskers are often extremely confident in their abilities,” says Clifford I. Nass, a professor of psychology at Stanford University. “But there’s evidence that those people are actually worse at multitasking than most people.”

Hilarious right?! You probably know ‘that guy’ in your office, huh?

Original article here in case you ARE that guy and don’t know it.