In a long-overdue move, I'm relaunching The Stapler as a Wordpress blog. You can read new posts HERE.  

My friend and graphic designer colleague Jennifer Duarte passed this along to me today. Amazing. A high profile example of how free Internet stuff, used for commercial purposes, can easily blow up in your face.. and how open source ideals can lead directly to real world problems.
 

Marketing, as a discipline, has many strengths over mere salesmanship - but the ability to reduce benefit to easy-to-read numbers usually isn't among them. You want a return on your marketing investment: how should you be figuring out your ROI and success rates? (part 1 of 2) 

When I first started in my business, the hardest skill to wrap my head around wasn't writing. That I could do. No - the problem was marketing; I didn't have the slightest idea how to get new work through the door, a serious skill failure for a guy selling himself as a marketer.  

Long, busy weekend, working to get a handful of projects out the door. Good friend Susan Greene sent me this amusing little bit about the differences in marketing terms.. truer words never written. Enjoy.  

No matter what marketing piece you have in mind, from a brochure to a website to even a simple press release, there are certain questions that demand answers before we even get started. The most basic, and most important, is about your audience. 

If there's one aspect of freelance work that drives me insane more than any other, it's the tendency of some clients to mistake the work we do for magic. They expect their money to conjure an almighty genie from the lamp of idea, a marketing daimon ready to do their bidding. But the work is never like that. 

These days I'm asked often if I ghostwrite for blogs, and the answer is yes. Within reason, I write for nearly anything. But just like any other communication medium, it's important to distinguish myth from reality, and to begin with an honest appraisal of that medium's ability to effectively carry your message. 

I tend to get emails from just-starting-out freelancers and new businesspeople a lot. Sometimes it's about a project; other times there's a more direct question involved. Those are the ones who want to know how they can do what I did - get a home-office-based professional services business onto a paying basis. They want the secret. 

God, what a summer. Call it global warming, call it a heat wave, call it whatever you will - those power bills sure haven't been fun lately. So let's take a moment to talk about cutting your home office power bill, the way Floridians do it.