Danny Brown's Blog, page 32

New Ebook on Sale: Why Simple Works

Marketing and business ideas can be overloaded with so many facts that none of them actually stick.

Sometimes the simplest of ideas work. Not always, but more often than you might expect.

Letting the point speak for itself can be easier for marketers to create and customers to consume and retain. Which is where my new ebook, Why Simple Works, comes in.

This eBook offers reasons why simple might work for you, your business, and your customers. Comprising of 31 one-page “chapters”, Why Simple...

Auto-Pilot is Life’s Blindfold

Being on auto-pilot is just the same as switching off your senses and letting the machinery take over.

You miss the real things that are happening, the real stories, the real people.

Fine if you’re a machine, but as a human being?

Auto-pilot is life’s blindfold.

Auto-Pilot is Life’s Blindfold originally appeared on Danny Brown - there's more to life than social media - all rights reserved.

Related StoriesThe Beautiful Freedom of Not Giving a CrapThe Future of Content Part 3: with Richard Be...

The Beautiful Freedom of Not Giving a Crap

When I was much younger – say, around 8-9 years old – I used to get in trouble with my school teachers, and other adults in positions of authority, regularly. Pretty much not a day would go by without my mother receiving some troublesome news about me.

I guess, looking back, I simply had an aversion to authority.

And while that continued until my early teens, when I learned what it meant to really show respect and understand conflict with authority was primarily in my mind, I also learned som...

The Boy With the Bread – A Business Parable

In a small town not far from you, a boy watched his father at work. His father was the town baker, and every morning without fail he’d rise at 3:00am to begin the day’s baking.

Fresh pastries, sugar-coated sweetbread, biscuits of all shapes and sizes and – the most popular – the softest bread you could ever hope to eat.

All the ingredients for the bakery came from the local farmers and shops. Since the town was small and fairly isolated, this was more of necessity than choice, although helpin...

The Boy With the Bread

In a small town not far from you, a boy watched his father at work. His father was the town baker, and every morning without fail he’d rise at 3:00am to begin the day’s baking.

Fresh pastries, sugar-coated sweetbread, biscuits of all shapes and sizes and – the most popular – the softest bread you could ever hope to eat.

All the ingredients for the bakery came from the local farmers and shops. Since the town was small and fairly isolated, this was more of necessity than choice, although helpin...

The Future of Content Part 3: with Richard Becker

As content continues to become an ever-important staple for businesses of all shapes and sizes, I thought it’d be interesting to share some thoughts on what the future of content might look like.

However, instead ofsharing just my own thoughts, I wanted to bring you what the future of content looks like for some of the folks I look up to and respect in this space.

This mini-series will bring you some of the web’s most critical thinkers when it comes to content – hopefully you’ll enjoy reading...

Why We Shouldn’t Confuse Real Time Marketing with Data Driven Marketing

When I was a teen, back in the 80′s – yes, I’m old – there was this bakery just off my local high street.

It was a family-owned bakery, and had a mix of fancies, pastries, bread and sweets (candy, in North America). While the goods being sold were a great mix, and kept the bakery successful, it was what the owner did to keep it that way that interested me (and probably instilled the first concept of marketing to my subconscious).

If there was a sports match on, he’d make small cakes in both tea...

Important Message for Subscribers to DannyBrown.me

A little over two years ago, I shared a post on why I was leaving Feedburner which, up until then, had pretty much been the go-to service for bloggers looking for an easy way to offer a subscription service for readers, either by email or RSS.

At the time, I mentioned I was moving to Feedblitz, and offered reasons why. However, since then, Feedblitz has continued to lack in certain areas – statistics around subscribers are always erratic, very limited templates to work with, delays in publishi...

3 Types of Editorial Calendar to Manage Your Business Blog

This is a guest post by Sarah Arrow, and is part of her 30 Day Blogging Challenge.

If you’re going to grow your blog, and publish content that your audience will love on a regular basis then you’ll need an editorial calendar.

In this post I’m going to share with your three types of editorial calendars, and how to populate them so that they free up your time and work for you.

When planning future blog posts ask yourself these questions about reaching your audience:

Where does your audience current...

Loyalty Is Not a Given – Like Trust, It Needs to be Earned

Back in July 2012, I spoke at an event in Toronto. During my talk, I made a quip about whether or not anyone still used Canadian smartphone giant BlackBerry (previously known as RIM).

While it was a throwaway joke that most people laughed at, it attracted its share of criticism too. James Howe, for example, thought it was classless and a low blow at a Canadian institution (for the record, we had a chat afterward and have since had beers and spoke at the same event, so all good).

Recently, on Fa...