Words Have Meaning

Far be it from me to criticize CBS news anchor Katie Couric, who generally does a fine job, but when she refers to the Democrats winníng the House, Senate, and Presidency as "single party rule" it raises the hackles on the back of my neck. Words have meaning and presentation has impact. But I am not just talking about proper grammar, syntax, and usage, something many of us stumble over at times, but what of idiom, metaphor, and voice; elements that are just as important in effective marketing communication as proper usage.

Years ago while visiting London, England I passed a store with the sign that read "Fags and Mags," a disconcerting message until I got acclimatized to the British slang. When it comes to marketing, you can get away with a lot, but even countries that speak the same language have different patois, slang, and cultural references.

One of the great advantages of being from Canada with its proximity to the USA, its historical ties to the British Commonwealth, and its multicultural population is that we understand these differences and can translate them into effective North American marketing campaigns.

Not Profit Yet From The Sites

Gregg Rottler began contemplating his Web empire last year on his desktop computer at his home near Tampa-Fla, without quite having a clear plan,

As many bloggers have done, Mr. Rottler, a state environmental code officer, followed an impulse to share stories about annoyances. He and his wife, Karen, an elementary school teacher, often eat out, and he realized that people liked to talk about restaurant experiences gone wrong.

“I’ve had my share of bad dinners, and I thought this could provide some catharsis and also be a source of entertainment,” he said. “I always wondered how people put those Web sites together. So I bought a humongous manual and worked through it” to learn how to create a site about bad restaurant experiences.

He needed a domain name. Surely, an obvious one, Dinnersfromhell.com, wasn’t available. It was.

The site went up in January, festooned with text and video links, and readers soon began posting tales of woe. Later, Rottler saw a television commercial depicting a man trapped in a tiny airplane coach seat between two slobs who were slurping, belching, snorting, sneezing and bellowing on either side. It was an ad for Princess Cruises, to show that cruises have none of these torments.

“It clicked to me that Flightsfromhell would be a cool site,” he said. But surely, Flightsfromhell.com wasn’t available.

It was. It turned out, so were Cruisesfromhell.com and other things from hell, domain names he snatched up as quickly as the ideas occurred to him. Domain-name registration is cheap, about $9 a year.

Rottler hasn’t made any profit yet from the sites. Still, his airline site has links to a gift shop he runs in an arrangement with CafePress.com, selling T-shirts, sweatshirts, track suits and coffee mugs with the Flights From Hell logo.

It also has links to air-travel books on Amazon. (Among them are “Plane Insanity: A Flight Attendant’s Tales of Sex, Rage and Queasiness at 30,000 Feet,” by Elliott Hester.)

Promotion with writing Article

One of the great thing about article marketing is that it goes hand with blog marketing. You write the articles, post them on blog and then you go and get even more mileage out of your articles by getting listed in the article directories

Article marketing is definitely a favorite of a lot many people because there's so much you can do the following:

• Post the article to your blog
• Email the article to your list
• Post a link to it in the sig file on your forum posts
• Get listed in article directories
• Get the article reprinted on other websites
• Give the article to other list owners, and have them send it to their readers

And the list goes on and on. If you haven't tried article marketing yet, you really should give it a try