Mark Cuban has a great post on his blog titled “Success & Motivation - 2009”

Though the post is directed for those looking for a better job in the recession, it’s also great business advice. Cuban’s 5 ideas for changing your fortunes this year include:

• Recognize that its [sic]ok to live like a student…. The cheaper you can live, the greater your options. Remember that.

Same goes for a business. You don’t need fancy offices or computers to get started. Just need an adequate space to get going. Your basement or garage works just fine

• Take Lots of Chances….Creating opportunities means looking where others are not.

Don’t follow the herd. The world is full of ways to update Twitter. Develop the next social networking or lead generation breakthrough on your own.

• Figuring out if you are in the right job….If you love what you do so much that you are willing to continue to live like a student in order to be able to stay in the job, you have found your calling.

If you love the business you’re staring or are working hard at, then keep with it. It beats wasting your time at something you hate.

• Figure out how to be the best…. So rather than trying to convince people you are the best, let the quality of your work do your talking.

Do something better than anyone and knowing how to market it is the KEY to making your business dreams a reality.

• Start the day motivated with a positive attitude.

Not much to add here. If you approach the problem with the right mindset, you’re bound to work harder and create more opportunities for yourself.

You can read Cuban’s entire post here.

You can now follow Sapha on Twitter at http://twitter.com/moreleads

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve probably heard of “The Best Job in the World.” The job paid $100,000 for six months and involved “exploring the islands of the Great Barrier Reef for six months and report back to Tourism Queensland and the world via blogs, a photo diary, video updates and interviews.”

Sounds like a great job, right?

Turns out it was also a great PR campaign by Tourism Queensland to promote tourism to the area.

“This is probably the first time that a campaign has achieved this sort of reach with so little advertising spend other than a few strategically placed job ads around the world,” said Australian marketing analyst Tim Burrowes, editor of media and marketing website Mumbrella.

“This has all been about the power of people passing things on, largely through YouTube. The main lesson to be learned here is that if you have an original, exciting idea that gets people talking you don’t need to spend huge on advertising.”

The “Best Job in the World” campaign began in January with Tourism Queensland launching an advertising campaign centered around the lure of a job that is more like a paid holiday.

Within days, the campaign was one of the most popular items on the web, as applicants from all over the world sent in 60-second video applications and news of the contest spread on social networking sites….

Tourism Queensland has hailed the advertising campaign as an enormous success, calculating the $1.7 million spent had reaped an estimated $110 million in global publicity.

“The worldwide response to Tourism Queensland’s “Best Job in the World” campaign has been nothing short of phenomenal,” said Tourism Queensland’s CEO Anthony Hayes.

“The key now however is to convert the global interest raised by “The Best Job in the World” into visitors to Queensland — to bring more tourist dollars into Queensland’s economy, protect existing tourism jobs and hopefully create new ones.”

If they can accomplish their goal, this could go down as one of the best PR campaigns in history.

In this recession, a debate had raged whether or not organizations should cut their marketing and advertising budget during lean times. According to a New Yorker article, numerous studies have shown that those who keep spending during tough times do better in the long run.

In 1927, the economist Roland Vaile found that firms that kept ad spending stable or increased it during the recession of 1921-22 saw their sales hold up significantly better than those which didn’t. A study of advertising during the 1981-82 recession found that sales at firms that increased advertising or held steady grew precipitously in the next three years, compared with only slight increases at firms that had slashed their budgets. And a McKinsey study of the 1990-91 recession found that companies that remained market leaders or became serious challengers during the downturn had increased their acquisition, R. & D., and ad budgets, while companies at the bottom of the pile had reduced them.

The best part?

…the benefits from recession investment are often surprisingly long-lived, with companies maintaining their gains in market share and sales well into economic recovery.

You can read the entire article here. In the meantime, start cranking up the marketing budgets!

Yesterday the Detroit Lions unveiled a new logo.  Bubbles, the lion mascot that has adorned the team’s helmet since the 1960s, underwent a makeover. Instead of a somewhat shapeless Honolulu Blue lion, the new logo has a fiercer look with muscular accents and teeth.

In talking about the logo Lions President Tom Lewand said, “It says to everybody else who’s looking at us, ‘Don’t forget about Detroit,’ ‘We’re tough. We’ve got character. We’ve got motion. We’ve got animation. And in contrast to the old lion, you might not want to take on this one.’ ”

The question is whether or not rebranding is enough to save one of the worst managed franchises in the NFL.

I think not.

A logo can help give the company a new look and maybe set the tone for the new and improved organization. In the end, however, it’s the product(s) and the employees that make a company or a sports team successful.

Last year the Lions were the first NFL team to go 0-16. Without a top-notch leadership running the organization, talented players on the field, and a coach that can get the most from his players, the new Lions logo might be all the fanfare the Lions achieve this year.

Is persuasion more of an art or a science? Author Noah Goldstein argues that it’s a little bit of both. The video below highlights some successful persuasion techniques as well as common mistakes to avoid.

The video’s a must see for anyone interested in increasing their lead generation rates.

Tired of wasting your time sending email to invalid or fake email addresses that appear in your sales pipeline?

If you receive an email address in your sales pipeline that you’re unsure about, now there’s a way to check its validity before you send the email.  BuzzBuilderPro has just launched Email checker - an email verification tool that quickly checks the validity of an email address.

I ran a few tests using a few of my own personal email addresses and a few that I know don’t exist. Email checker passed all the tests with flying colors.

You can check it out for yourself here.

And, no, this isn’t an April Fool’s joke.

Webinar: 7 Key Elements of an Irresistible Offer
When: March 4, 2009
Time: 2:00 p.m. Eastern (11:00 a.m. Pacific)

Register now. 

Tired of putting a lot of effort into your marketing campaigns and not seeing the lead generation and sales conversion you were hoping for?

There’s an easy solution: Make your target audience an offer worthy of their time and money.

At Sapha’s upcoming webinar, 7 Key Elements of an Irresistible Offer, you’ll learn how to create an offer so compelling no sane person who is interested in what you’re selling could walk away from it without feeling a sense of great regret.

Our main presenter, George Paiva, a.k.a The Copy Bully, will show you seven key elements that will transform your direct marketing campaigns into surefire success.

From George you’ll learn:

• How to create a solid value proposition
• How to make your audience an offer that makes them willing to take a chance on you and your product.
• How to create a powerful hook that plays to your audience’s emotions.
• How to effectively use psychological triggers to get people to take action.
• And more!

Whether you’re focus is B2B or B2C, you won’t want to miss a webinar that will help you accomplish your lead generation and sales conversion efforts.

Sign up before it’s too late. Register now.

About George Paiva
George has quickly earned a reputation as a direct response copywriter and marketing strategist who knows how to deliver maximum response and bring the money in.

He is obsessed with writing and putting together “head against windshield” campaigns that communicates his client’s core message and moves people to action. Just a few of George’s clients include Jay Abraham Group, Robert Allen Media, Prospercorp, Stephen Cooper Stock Investing, John Cummuta Transforming Debt into Wealth, Rasmussen College, Prime Visibility SEO and the Phoenix School of Law.

If done right, online forms are an effective way to turn a website visitor into a lead. However, most companies don’t put much thought into the information they ask for or how many fields they require a person to fill out.

As a rule of thumb, the more fields you have prospects fill out, the lower the lead generation rate. However, the quality of the leads tends to be higher. So if you ask for a name, email address, and phone number you may get more leads but the quality of leads will be lower than if you also ask for information like their title, number of employees, industry, annual revenue, etc.

Which approach is best? That depends on your audience, the product or service you’re trying to sell, and your sales cycle. If you don’t know what works, experiment with different forms and landing pages and find out. The one thing about conversion is that that a good analytics tool will give you an unbiased report of what worked and what didn’t. (And if you don’t have one, you’ll want to check out our conversion-centric analytics tool.) The more you know about your audience and their behavior, the easier it is to optimize your website and increase your overall conversion rates.

Analytics has always focused on basic reporting such as number of visitors, page views, and referring URLs. While that’s information’s important, they don’t show how effective your website is in turning visitors into leads. By understanding your site’s conversion metrics, you can make better decisions regarding marketing efforts and find ways to better tweak your conversion rates - allowing you to get the most bang for your marketing and website dollars.

Fusion provides you with all the standard data that other analytics tools provide but does it from a conversion-centric view. One of its many features is a dashboard where you can see at a glance not only how Sapha lead generation tools are converting, but also the conversion rate of your entire website.

Read more about Fusion here.