Tech Support Is Your Secret Sales Sauce

I’ve been big on using your technical content as sales material for a long time, but it’s a strange concept to many businesses and often they don’t see the bottom-line value of investing in technical content.

But now there’s another voice to join my chorus—Andy Sernovitz, of Word of Mouth Marketing.

Internet Marketing Start to Finish: A Review

It’s becoming increasingly critical for businesses to invest in online marketing, but online marketing is also growing more complex. Small and medium size businesses are under great pressure to beef up their Internet marketing efforts, but often they don’t have the resources or the expertise to handle such an enormous challenge.

Internet Marketing Start to Finish, by Catherine Juon, Dunrie Greiling, and Catherine Buerkle, aims to provide some relief. Designed to provide “a breakthrough system for attracting more customers on the Internet,” the book lays out an online marketing strategy from beginning to end.

Serious About Marketing? Better Be Serious About User Guides Too

Scott Abel, The Content Wrangler, posted a terrific article this week that got a lot of attention from the technical communications community. Looking ahead to 2012, he poses several challenges to the tech comm industry. One challenge in particular strikes at every small business that’s serious about reaching customers.

Could Apostrophe’s Ruin Your Companys Reputation?

If you’re already posting a correction in the comments section, bully for you! If not, this article is for you.

Nothing makes an exceptional business look mediocre like bad punctuation. It efficiently distracts from the message you mean to send and replaces it with messages of sloppiness, incompetence, and apathy.
Don’t let simple grammar mistakes send the wrong message to your customers. Here’s a couple quick videos that’ll help you master the comma’s role in your messages.

The Greatest Sales Lead Source You Never Knew You Had

Technical documents have great potential to be powerful sales and marketing tools, but they typically get overlooked as something you need to have that nobody will read. If that’s your view, then your materials won’t do a thing for you. In fact, they might actually hurt your marketing efforts. On the other hand, technical media, when it’s done right, can excite your customers while showing them in a fun way how to use your product. Yes, I used “excite” and “fun” to describe technical documents. No, I don’t have a fever.