Yesterday I was at the Santa Cruz farmers market.

Walked by the Sauerkraut stand.  I like sauerkraut and they make it well.

Not a particularly ‘sexy’ product you might think…..

But that’s the angle they take!

And they do a good job of getting some quality sauerkraut to people.

There are wooden barrels upfront with the sauerkraut and you can sample each type.  Those wooden barrels just look like what old fashioned saurkraut was made in.

Signs around the stand talk about all the health benefits of sauerkraut- priobiots, vitamins, all that jazz.  Fits in well with the healthful tendencies of the city.

They have original, jalapeño, horseradish leek, pickle, and change up the flavors every so often.  Popular varieties seem to return.  But the ingredients aren’t always in season.

Apple fennel was a pretty tasty one.

And you can sample all of them!  Giving the samples draws people in to try the sauerkraut and a lot of them end up purchasing.

They also have their sauerkraut at local grocery stores.

Seems like they have their act together as a business and I’m glad, since I like what they make.

The laws of physics apply to many things and can even help your business.

Energy, mass, acceleration, and other physics concepts exist in the world of business.

I saw a TED video with Dan Cobley about physics and marketing the other day, and I have a masters degree in applied physics, so I thought I would cover some ideas in physics and their application to marketing.

One idea that Colby brought up was Newton’s Second Law.

Newton’s Second Law states that the force is equal to the mass multiplied by the acceleration.  The force and acceleration are both vectors which means they have a direction.  That’s what the little arrow symbol above the F and a stand for.  If you divide each side of the equation by mass, you get an equation that states the acceleration in terms of the force and mass.

So the acceleration, how fast something can change speed and direction, can be increased with a smaller mass.

A small company can change direction much faster than a large company.

It can respond to changes in the market more efficiently.

The small company doesn’t have to form a committee to make decisions or pass delegation through multiple layers of management.

The mack truck

cannot turn as quickly as a Ducati

A clear example of this can be seen with large companies trying to umbrella many products under one name.

The American beer Budweiser sells as

Budweiser, Bud Light, Bud Dry, Bud Ice, Bud Ice Light and more….

The brand name no longer stands for one particular type of beverage.

The better approach would have been to keep distinct names for different types of beer.

“Budweiser” is recognizable and gave a little bit of initial strength to each variation.

It takes a bit longer to establish awareness using unique names for the different types of products.

Unilever owns dove soap and lipton tea, they’re not calling them unilever soap and unilever tea since it would confuse consumers.

WordPress provides you a faster way to get a website up and expand your brand and gain additional sales.

It is an open source content management system (software for running a website simply and without the need for a computer science degree) can save you time and money and continues to be supported by a growing and enthusiastic user base.

Owning a local business can free you of having to work for someone else, but it can also require a great deal of hard work and time, not mention money.

When a business is local, it faces the challenge of only having a customer base in the nearby area.  The best method to increase sales outside of that local market is using a website to help expand your client base.

Creating a website can be a technical challenge though.  And maintenance generally requires computer programming skills.  It is much easier to maintain it with programs designed to simplify the site management.  WordPress uses a language called CSS to keep the look of the website consistent across all pages.

WordPress.com can get you started with a free website and WordPress.org is a popular option to effectively manage your website. WordPress.org provides software for your own domain name.

Once you register your domain name and get a hosting account you can install WordPress software.  Then you can upload videos, pictures on top of writing articles.  You can create an entire website using WordPress and not looking at computer code (although you always have that option if you feel so inclined).

If you’re using WordPress on your own domain name and server you’ll still want to sign up at WordPress.com first.  You can experiment with the system and gain access to a very useful spam filter and also a statistics program that you can add to your other websites.

It only takes a few minutes and the best part is…it’s free!  It will begin with a welcome screen and there are many tutorials for each step should you need any assistance.  A local company should focus on making a statement about who they are and how they help their customers.  Pictures of their store location and products they sell can also be added.

You can easily embed videos within the website.  One easy and clean way to do this is to upload the video to youtube and then use the code provided by them.

WordPress is hugely popular with millions of websites utilizing their software to make their company sites function much smoother and look more aesthetically pleasing.  The programs are free to use and much easier than trying hand coding a successful website on your own.

Author Seth Godin wrote something by that title.

Probably most of us have seen a terrible presentation (or hundreds of them).

Powerpoint (or keynote) presentations seem like they should more effective than just speaking or just seeing images.

You can use pictures, videos, and speak at the same time.

But if a speaker reads a long list of bullet points that are displayed on the screen, the result could be a refreshing nap for the audience.

One idea to keep in mind is that the screen shows things visually.

And you can reach the audience through both their eyes and ears.

So don’t use bullets that you read!

Make the images connect emotionally and then speak and explain things logically.

The images should be the main piece on the screen, a few words are fine, don’t use too many!

Facebook has more users than many countries.

300 million+

A while back, facebook was mostly populated by college students, but now everyone and their mother (often quite literally) uses it.

Advertising on facebook can help your business because it is where people spend a great deal of time when they use their computers.

You can also target your customers.

For example, your demographic might be females aged 25-30 who like jazz music.  You could get your ads shown only to that population.

The people for which you feel your message best fits.

Basically, SEO helps you get customers from Google and other search engines.

Here’s a non-techinical breakdown explaining SEO and what it can do for you:

Once set up, it provides free targeted traffic. That gives you credibility and value.

SEO is about the battle to gain a better position in the search engines.

There is both ‘on page’ SEO and ‘off page’ SEO.

‘On page’ SEO includes stuff you can see- title tags, headings, internal links, etc.

‘Off page’ SEO is all the stuff not directly on your own web page.  That means incoming links, the age of your site, how related your domain name and individual pages are to the search term, and more.

If you can conquer SEO then you can acquire customers for a lot less!

We would like to become your marketing partner and we’ll do all the SEO for you and for cheaper then you could hire it in-house.

If that sounds like a good deal to you then get in touch!

Thanks for stopping by!