Duct Tape Marketing: The World’s Most Practical Small Business Marketing Guide is a fabulous, no-nonsense book about marketing that gets results. So many times advertising is like throwing spaghetti at the wall and hoping some of it will stick. With this easy-to-read book, the guess work is taken out of advertising. John Jantsch makes a great point at the beginning of the book: “every business is actually a marketing business. . . The failure to grasp this fundamental notion is at the heart of the alarming rate of failure experienced by so many small businesses.”

The book focuses mainly on three things:

1. Help your clients to know you better, so they will trust you. This is done through discovering who your ideal client is, deciding upon your core message, and developing advertising materials that convey this message. This may sound easy, but it takes quite a bit of thought.
2. Help your customers contact you and refer to you more. This is my favorite part of the book because he specifically talks about white papers and customer success stories as great ways of achieving your marketing goal. They are cost-effective and tend to be “sticky.” In other words, white papers and customer success stories stick around longer. They aren’t thrown out like fliers and other advertising items.
3. Discovering what works and doing more of it. John Jantsch discusses the power of positive expectancy as well as goal setting and budgeting as they apply to marketing.

So pick up a book today and learn how to have a “turn-key system for small business marketing – marketing that sticks, every time.!”

Success means different things to different people. If you don’t know what it means to you, you’ll never achieve it. Take a moment right now to dream about success in your life. Close your eyes and think about what a perfect day would be like. What would you be doing? Is it congruent with what you are doing now?

How can you use this vision of your perfect day to reach success? When I first did this exercise my perfect day was mapped out in 10 minute increments before and after work. Work was thought of as “at work.” In other words it didn’t matter to me what happened at work – it was just a job. This was a huge indicator to me that I wanted desperately to work from home. Just by visualizing my day, working at home, I was able to move home to do my work. It didn’t happen all at once; but by focusing on my greatest desire, I found myself unconsciously working towards realizing my dream.

I have found that I have to continually revamp this exercise to help me be productive at home. Working from home means that lots of things call for my attention; laundry, dishes, blog writing, bookkeeping, marketing, etc. This was especially brought home the other day when my daughter called me from school because she was ill. I grouchily picked her up from school (after all she had interrupted my very important work!). I grumped into the house, put on a movie for her, and went back to work. In a little while I felt small arms encircled around my neck and a soft, “I love you, mommy.” Then I remembered why I worked from home – for moments just like this.

Of course I decided that work could wait for the time it took to do a puzzle and both my daughter and I were happy I work from home.