I know, I have not blogged in a while. I am sorry, and I do plan to make it up to you. I have a great excuse, though. You see, I was busy looking for just the right job. I decided that I would stop taking new clients way back on January first.

In order that you may excuse my absence and in hopes that you will find your way back here for more sensible marketing advice (you subscribe to my blog, right?) - I want to share what I’ve been up to. This is how I shared it on Facebook, so rather than totally re-write it …

HERE IT IS!

The time has finally come when I can make the announcement I have waited anxiously to share.

As my friends know, I made a decision in early 2012 to change my career path. I had simply stopped feeling the love in my work, and I was ready for a monumental change. The change I had expected was to work as a Chief Marketing Officer or Senior Vice President of marketing for a corporation other than my own. That would be a big change, but it was very exciting to me, and felt like a breath of fresh air. The biggest obstacle would be to find a company I could respect and feel good about.

My path was changing for a few years - but 2012 was monumental. As a marketing professional since the late 1980’s, I realized a huge shift since 2009 the likes of which I had not seen in the preceding decades. It was as if clients were almost intentionally sabotaging their own companies and stopped taking even the most prudent and well-researched advice. They all seemed to gain confidence in their own “gut feelings” (mostly fear-induced) while putting solid market research and planning to waste.

Who is vetting this Internet and deleting all the misinformation?

Yes, that is a nice idea, but let’s face it - there is a lot of information online, and it cannot all be true. Let’s consider how false information is often deemed true, true information is deemed false, and how people decide for themselves what is “true” or “false”.

Like it or not, the things people believe are often based on what they want to believe - and what others around them believe. We are each influenced very uniquely, and whether marketing an agenda or defending ourselves, it is important to recognize those influences.

If you pick a fight with time, time will always win. When it comes to your marketing and business strategy, time is not a good excuse for failure, but it is a popular scapegoat.

I often hear people say they just don’t have enough time. I want to inspire you to question how you are using your time, and how you could be doing it better.

You can scale this however you like - from an individual to the largest corporations - time is a very precious business resource. I want you to take this personal, so I’m scaling this down to just you. That’s because you are responsible to yourself, first. It’s easy to scale this up and see how it can affect any company of any size.

If you are wasting time doing the wrong things, you can stop complaining right now, because you are getting exactly what you asked for.

Do you think you need a search engine optimizer? Let’s get serious. Your company is not a hobby, and you’re not working to build it only because the work is fun. Companies - smart companies - want to receive profit from their investment of hard work and money. Profit is what companies use to pay the bills.

It would be unwise to throw away your profit on SEO services just because you hope it may work out - someday. Don’t pretend to be shocked if I tell you that’s exactly what a lot of people are doing every day. I see it all the time that companies test the water and shakily hand over their credit card to the next SEO that gave them a good pitch. Other companies have all the skill they need for success, but they fail to use it.

I will give you some good pointers on how to select a good SEO, the basic components of their role, and even why you may (or may not) be able to handle much of it without their help.

What will it take to make your brand more durable? It is an important question for any business, and it’s worth some careful consideration.

Branding can be described as the “feel” that develops around a company or a person. Once a brand is forged in a person’s mind, it can be a time-consuming challenge to change that feel. Just consider the correlative affects of branding to understand why it is important to get it right.

Pick a brand - any brand - and consider what it brings to mind. For me, if you mention K-Mart, I think of grade school in the 1970’s when saying “Your mom buys your clothes at K-Mart” was an insult of the highest degree. That was memorable for me.

If you mention Applebee’s restaurant, I get a knot in my stomach, along with an ugly flashback of the last time I ate at Applebee’s. On the other hand, if you mention McDonald’s, I may nod my head and think to myself “yeah, I really do deserve a break today.”