I was someone who struggled with math growing-up. I liked math and wanted to do well  but had horrible test anxiety. My college math experience was so bad. One day I went to my instructor and plead with him to pass me through my final math class. I had already taken the class and dropped it two or three times.  I was doing okay on the homework but I was bombing the tests. Much to my terror my pleading didn’t work. My instructor told me the worst thing possible. “Hmm…Well…let’s …

You probably already know there are only three ways to grow your business.

Get more customers
Increase the per sale profit margin
Increase the purchase frequency of existing customers

Getting new customers is always a challenge. Increasing profit margins can be done any number of ways with upsells, point of purchase displays, extended warranties, coupons, discounts, etc…
Increasing the purchase frequency is something can be handled with frequent mailings of new and exciting offerings, scheduling followup services in advance, memberships, cross promotions etc…
But how do you get new customers? Here are five ideas to add …

That’s right, you should test everything and make sure every advertisement you run has some key code. It’s really the only way to know if money you spend on advertising is well spent.
I am used to testing ads online, but it’s been a while since doing much offline advertising. Today however as I was mulling over what to write about a situation arose. I noticed my supply of business cards was getting low and I am getting ready to launch an offline campaign and thought it would be good to …

Wow…A few months ago the FTC came out with a slew of new rules relating to blogging and marketing online, and now, just the other day a client sent me some new rules being laid down by Mastercard. Smack!
Now I get that these laws are meant to protect consumers from unwittingly being duped by fake reviews and bogus weight loss stories. Shameless opportunists are fucking things up for everyone.
Check these new rules sent over from Mastercard:

Billing Practices

Terms Disclosure

a. The terms of billing …

I just wanted to keep you updated. I am still working on my membership site but things are progressing slowly as I have been busy with copy, design, and consulting gigs lately.
Anyhow, a couple of things.
First, remember in part one I said that I was trying to find affordable video hosting. I have over a hundred videos and they take up about 8 gigs of space. I purchased a couple of years of Godaddy Grid Hosting but recently discovered an even better solution. Amazon’s S3 service offers incredibly low cost …

Well, I messed around with my membership site some more yesterday and had a frustrating time. More about that in a minute. If you’re just reading this you can find the rest over in part one.
Anyhow, like I said, I decided to use Wordpress to deliver my content. Because I feel a membership site should be simple and without a lot of distractions I chose a very simple Wordpress theme “Alibi“.
Alibi is a two column theme with tabbed navigation. My idea is to have the main categories on the top …

I have talked about the value of membership sites before on this blog. I have also discussed being a part of several successful membership sites. I may have even mentioned that I had a failed membership site that never got off the ground. Yup, I dumped $15k into it but it is still sitting on my server waiting to be finished. I’ve had bad luck with developers.
I also have another tattoo design membership site I built using Amember. This site was a little bit different than what I am putting …