Examine each of these items and determine if you have the best mix, we have an opportunity to experiment now. Take it.

Do you have the best possible product? In a bull economy, you can have a so-so product, and still have great gains, but when the market turns bear and it becomes a buyers market, you must make sure your product stands up. Can you honestly say your product is the best on the market for its chosen niche? Seriously, be honest.

Is your product priced right? Are you in the right pricing category? Do you have a high quality item that is priced similar to low quality… If so, it’s likely you are being bought based on price. This may be an opportunity to increase your price, and see sales increase because you are now in a different price category.

Is your placement right? Real Estate can be a great marketing tool, do you have a good location? Or are you hidden and people must hunt you down. Or are you in the right stores? In retail products, many people try to be in the big stores, but sometimes finding the smaller stores that will give you better placement are much more valuable.

Are you promoting yourself? In a slow down many  businesses go into hibernation mode. Take advantage of this. Market the hell out of yourself and see your market-share increase. Even if you don’t see a huge gain in total volume right now, increasing your market share will benefit you when the market rebounds.

There are plenty of times to pull out the big guns, and get real creative in your marketing, but other times going back to basics will have the biggest gains.

A Daisy... how creative

Now, how did I know you would draw that? Because its simple and easy, and didn’t take too much thought. Unfortunately, many marketers design their ads the exact same way. Why not break the rules for once?

The lesson here:

Stop it already!

But I came across a really cool way to store data in GMail… Take a look at the Micro Persuasion Blog post Make Magic with Metadata in Gmail

I am going to start using this technique. Anything I can do to get a little more organized, and save me a little more time is going to make me more money. Plain and Simple. Check it out.

Business is the art of extracting money from another man’s pocket without resorting to violence. - Max Amsterdam

What are you doing to extract money? We are almost to the 4th quarter, do you have your pickpocketing plan in place? Sorry for the alliteration… it was wrong of me.

marketing

Roughly every quarter Advertising Age Magazine comes out with its examples of good ads from the past few months. See What Print Ads Worked this Summer and get an idea of the creative elements were that made these ads stand above their competitors.

Is this a definative list? No, but its a good starting spot. And if you have designers, print out the ads and show them. Hell, even discuss what they could do better in your designs to be like these winners.

Here’s are some easy and quick ways to see how your website is doing. And better than that they are free. (Disclaimer, I have no association with any of these companies, they are just cool free tools. Everyone likes free.)

1. Hubspot offers its Website Grader tool. This tool scans your site and grades it based on some very basic SEO principles. Fix some of the areas you are lacking, and you should start to see better results.
2. One of the most important tools in SEO is back links, or links from other sites that point at yours. Link Diagnosis offers its competitive link tool.
3. Aaron Walls website SEOBook.com is a great resource. But my favorite is his Free Search Engine Ranking Checker. You’ll need Firefox to use it, but seriously, if you don’t already have it you’re probably beyond my help.
4. SEOMoz.com is a great resource to learn more, but if you just want the tools, go to SEOMoz Tools. There are both free and premium tools. If you want you can get a premium account, but a basic account gets you access to a lot of great tools.
5. And finally, once you know where you stand, you might want to look for keywords to target to get more traffic. Head on over to Google’s Keyword Tool . This will give you approximate search volumes for various keywords from your site, or from others you may consider targeting.

There are plenty of expensive tools out there, but with a little elbow grease and some good free tools you can give your website a small (or possibly a big) boost in traffic. Will this stuff make you rich? Probably not, but ever little bit of traffic helps.

Do your tools look like this?

If you are trying to be a fashion photographer you wouldn’t show up with a camera like this. So as a marketer, what tools do you show up with each day that shoud actually be retired? I was going through all my tools recently and have identified some areas to address.

Software:

• What are you using to create graphics? If you are still using an original version of photoshop, it might be time to upgrade. There are so many advances in software these days, its amazing what you can do.
• How about your office suite? Still using Office 2003? Office 2007 or my preference Office 2008 for the Mac is heads and shoulders above its predecessor, its time to upgrade.

Computers:

• Are you still rocking an old Pentium 3 with Windows 98, if so, its time to upgrade. Or better yet switch to a Mac and never worry about your computer again.

Hardware:

• If your camera looks like the one in the picture above its time to switch. Try something like the the Nikon D90 if you need a pro level camera, its a full digital SLR with the ability to shoot digital video. Or if that is too much, try the Nikon Coolpix P80, you get a lot of the pro features in a more easy to handle point and shoot body.
• If you are still backing up files on CD’s, you are wasting a bunch of time. Hard drives and DVD burners are cheap. Use external hard drives as much as possible, but if you absolutely need a hard copy, use a DVD.
• Are you still using that free plastic flip phone your cell provider gave you. If so, its time to invest in a professional level phone. Take a look at the Blackberry, iPhone, or the Treos. Your productivity will thank you.

So is this whole post about just going out and buying new stuff? No, its about saving time and producing better results. If you waste a bunch of time fighting with your tools, then that is time you could have been devoting to creating better campaigns and greater results.

If you are a business, give customers a reason to try you out. Give them a reason to try a new product. Guide them through your store.

As a great example of coupons spurring sales, take a look at CVS Pharmacy. With the extra care rewards care card you can scan your card when you walk in the store and get coupons for that purpose. Talk about an opportunity to guide a customer through the store, and spur sales that you might not normally get.

How can you increase your traffic with coupons?

As a marketer this rings truer everyday. What are you doing to break through the clutter and reach your customers. Do you have the weapons necessary to win the war for your customers mind?

First off, I explained to him that if he really wanted to, finding dollars for marketing would be easy. I know what kind of vehicle he drives…

But I said that if he didn’t want to divert dollars from more important things, (his BMW), then he needed to get creative and plan on putting some work in. As they say, you invest Time or Money, but you always have one. So since it was time, I told him he needed to get writing. Send out press releases to all the local media, as well as any trade publication that he could find. He also needed to guest blog on some blogs in his niche.

Simple enough… Then we talked about using a tool like Twitter to communicate to past customers… But I told him just spewing info wasn’t enough, he also needed to seek out people with a problem on Twitter and help solve them. By doing this he would get more interest and more followers.

Finally I told him to find a conference where a lot of potential customers would be (he’s in the B2B field), and then he needed to book the biggest suite he could find at the host hotel, and have a networking event every night.

Ok, so I know the last one cost some money, but with a quick search online I found a suite for 249$ per night for 3 nights. He couldn’t even buy a decent sized ad in his favorite trade magazine for that.

I told him to make friends with local liquor store, and make his room the networking center. It wouldn’t be easy, but he could make a ton of contacts in a short time.

So what can you do that is different than just throwing up some ads and hoping?