Air New Zealand nothing to hide ad
In the current recession, I have not seen many interesting ads (the focus on cost cutting has sapped creativity out of the process, it seems) but two ads caught my attention. I have really enjoyed watching Catherine Zeta Jones knocking on doors for a mobile makeover (who would say no if she came knocking) for TMobile and this really clever ad that has everyone talking about Air New Zealand. In case you can’t notice, the attractive flight attendants and other crew members are wearing nothing but body paint.
Can I make a living blogging?
Since Mark Penn wrote in WSJ that “there are almost as many people making their living as bloggers as there are lawyers. Already more Americans are making their primary income from posting their opinions than Americans working as computer programmers or firefighters,” there has been a lot of commentary on the web related to whether someone can actually make a decent living in America by merely blogging. Here are some of my comments:
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Lorena and I do make a respectable living blogging. We belong to that small group of bloggers that have made it so big that we can type away from the comfort of our home and see the payments roll in each month.
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Blogging for dollars, or as we like to call it, nanopublishing, is like any other business. It requires a business model and all the business processes that one would need to run a hot dog stand or semiconductor company or bank.
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Unless you really do something outrageous or crazy or are a celebrity or have something very unique to share, blogging is a difficult niche to break into. Lorena and I started publishing on the web in 1999. First movers have a huge advantage and newcomers are struggling simply because they started so late.
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There are very poor statistics out there on blogging and both Technorati and all the other sources that Penn cited are so wrong (though, they give you a flavor). To give you an idea about the traffic needed by us and the revenue potential (including ups and downs since 1999), for every $50,000 in revenue we need at least one million monthly visitors. After trying many advertising models, we work almost exclusively now with Google Adsense.
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For obvious reasons, I am not going to disclose how to succeed like us at blogging, but unless you are very talented at something, I wouldn’t suggest that you even try your hand at making a living from blogging. It is a very competitive market and only getting tougher as more and more content goes online.
How to get started with key account management?
I have written extensively about key account management strategy. As anyone can appreciate, it is a highly complex and time-consuming initiative for an enterprise of any size, so when a reader asked me how to get started, this was my short response highlighting five simple steps that one can take:
- Organize a meeting with people in your company that often meet with the customers the most, for example, sales, marketing, and support.
- Develop a summary of what they think their key customers need the most.
- Now take this information to the key accounts and refine the list (add or delete based on what they want).
- Develop an organization chart that will include a few people that will interact regularly and then have a supervisor to manage these individuals.
- Go back to the key accounts 6 months later to see if it is helping them. If not, make improvements.
