Salesmanship has always been a little bit about hype. Putting a shine on what you’ve got. Painting it in the best possible light. You get the idea. But when it crosses a line, it becomes fooling your customers. Not only is it unethical, but it doesn’t really work very well anymore. The Internet makes it [...]

There’s a lot of talk around the interwebs about building a business by making passive income. You know — the kind of income that brings sales into your business when you’re sleeping and turns your email box into a cash register — ka-ching, ka-ching! For most people that means they need to [...]

If ever a cause was near & dear to me, this is definitely one of them. As an affiliate manager, affiliate marketing is my livelihood.  Over the last year, several states have introduced legislation defining affiliates as tax nexus for businesses.  This means that if a merchant has affiliates in a state with this [...]

It takes effort to build and operate an online business, while some marketers will spend nearly all their working hours focused on building their business, others will be looking at ways to run their business more effectively. The question is whether it’s possible to reduce the number of hours you’re working on your business AND [...]

Online ad spending is not resilient. That would be the wrong description since it has not really needed to come back from anything yet. Even in this economy that continues to keep many mired in the muck, online spending is going up in ’09 and thru 2011. Sounds like a guarantee, right? Well, of course [...]

Whenever I’m asked “what type of click-thru-rate do ads on Marketing Pilgrim receive?” my reply often suggests that the inquirer take a look at Google AdWords, if they’re only interested in CTRs. Why? Because, I know that display ads are the perfect platform for increasing brand awareness and trust, but are pretty lousy when it [...]