Crikey! First we have Troubleshooter with Sir John Harvey-Jones and Gerry Robinson. Then we have a few years gap. Then suddenly The Apprentice goes on over in America, we take the format and shoehorn Sir Alan Sugar into The Donald role and voila a triumph. This sudden apparent interest in business has led to Dragon’s [...]

Sabirock guy Originally uploaded by Marketing Magician. This is the Sabirock guy. He appears all over Manchester and simply stand there. Is it art? who knows. There are a few Manchester people commenting about him on BBC Manchester’s blog. He does get a lot of stares though and I suspect more than a few people photograph him with mobiles – [...]

I was reading Lee Odden’s blog comments on his post for 25 tips for marketing your blog and came across Stacy asking why they should pay vast sums to get blogs set up for them. The simple answer is you don’t need to. Having said that if you have the money you should delegate to experts [...]

Someone asked me what the copywriting process is … So I’m letting the secret of good copy out of the bag. These are the vital parts that make up good copy. Familiarise the copywriter with everything you’ve produced so far: brochures, business cards, web sites, video, adverts, yellow pages you name it Agree the aims for the [...]

Well that was fun. I’ve just taken a personality profile evaluation. I took the Personal Orientation Profile (applied by The Self Management Group). The results seem to be pretty interesting and the summary says: “People would see you as being an achieving person, one who can be quite hard driving, eager, active and occasionally impatient. [...]

There is absolutely no doubt whatsoever that managing your time has to be your utmost priority. Look at a typical small to medium business scenario… The boss gets into the office early, maybe before 7am (to play catchup) He starts to read through stuff from yesterday (stuff he didn’t get round to) His staff start to [...]

Today is my 20th Wedding Anniversary. So it was great to receive this lovely blue plaque through the post from a coaching client. He’s started up a blue plaque company. Where if you want to celebrate other people you can get them their own personal blue plaque produced. So now you can get one of these as a bit [...]

Sun Tzu, the author of The Art Of War said,  “All men can see these tactics whereby I conquer, but what none can see is the strategy out of which victory is evolved.” This is exactly what I keep harping on about in business and in particular marketing. Think about this … If you select [...]

Loyal readers may remember the ongoing story I’ve been engaged with Virgin Mobile. I posted on it last in December 2006 in an item called ‘Virgin Mobile: “The Story So Far Of a Promise Broken”.’ To bring you up todate I’ve had several equally pathetic replacements for the Lobster 575 mobile I’d been given as [...]

“Have you ever been stuck behind your desk, past time for Coronation Street, wracking your brains trying to sort out a knotty problem involving your high-profile project? Did you get that sinking feeling in the pit of your stomach when you know a project you’re working on is starting to fail?  Have you had to play [...]

I’ve been struggling for the last week to find enough time to go through the blog HTML code to find out why it’s not displaying correctly on Internet Explorer yet appears lovely on Firefox! And of course I discovered that I’d amended some of the code but I’d missed a single vital element which Internet [...]

For those of us who live in Manchester there was a brief moment of excitement yesterday when one of the old office blocks just outside the city centre caught fire. Along with concern for the people living and working there! I’d phoned Rob from Artisan to touch base when he told me that he’d got [...]

eBay is an enormous site where almost anything can be sold. Funnily enough I’ve just discovered that you can blog within your eBay account. So I’ve created a new competition for my first post on my eBay blog. We’ll see how well it goes!   Technorati tags: eBay, New competition, blog If you liked that [...]

Wow! That was rapid, faster than a speeding bullet or a rocket at lift-off. I mentioned yesterday that my standing in the Google search results competition for the coolest guy on the planet in the whole universe had plummeted like the proverbial stone. Good news today is I’m back at page 3, at search result 24. [...]

The coolest guy on the planet competition is still going strong. My position in it has dropped a lot. I talked about the competition for the coolest guy on the planet in February 2007 when I was 24th out of 1,040,000 results. If you put “the coolest guy on the planet” in quotes and search [...]

I’ve been coaching and mentoring for 10 years now and I see three types of people and a pattern of their actions that emerges from coaching. The three types of people are: Those that take action Those that take action, too late Those that say they’ll take action People ask me to coach them for any number of [...]

Remember on two previous posts we talked about sustainable marketing  and how your stationery was killing the environment? And by the way costing you more money too! In the most recent post we talked about the way stationery is printed affects the environment. Now I want to talk about how you can market more sustainably and save [...]

I waited until Mrs Squirrel went out to do some nut shopping. Armed with my trusty squirrel prodder (nice long broom handle) I went into them loft to “encourage” the baby squirrel to vacate its penthouse suite. I was giving it some grief by flashing my 500w light at it and prodding it when it got [...]

As you know horse drawn buggys started to die out as the craze for automobiles really got motoring (sorry about that one!). A natural consequence was that the buggy whip died off too. Tough on buggy whip manufacturers of course. Now, think about the Internet… The Times has just reported that Britain’s second biggest chain [...]

Perhaps you read my previous post on email: Outlook Folder Structure For The Clinically Organised? If not this post’s an update on using junk mail checking software and a great book on using email more effectively. And remember even though I speak from an Outlook perspective the principles apply to other email clients too. Spam [...]