seth godin

Why Are You Remarkable?

September 17, 2013 by Marc Guberti Leave a Comment

You have to be remarkable in order to be successful. Safe is dangerous and risk leads to success. There must be a reason why people will want to talk about your business.

People talk about athletes because they are either extremely good or bad. People talk about Apple because of all of their excellent products.

What makes you remarkable? What part of your business are people probably going to tell their friends about? Make yourself remarkable. The more remarkable you are, the better you will become.

Take A Risk

September 9, 2013 by Marc Guberti Leave a Comment

Every day, you should be doing at least one thing that you’re afraid of. If you did more than one thing you’re afraid of every day, that’s extra credit.

People are afraid of taking risks because they are quick to think of the negatives. If the product gets changed, people are quick to see the negative point of view such as losing clients and sales.

It’s better to be risky than it is to be safe. Every successful entrepreneur took some kind of a risk. Seth Godin took a risk with his self published book, Purple Cow when he gave away a milk carton that looked like his book for free. The risk paid off, and Seth got himself a publisher again. Now it seems as if all of his books become bestsellers.

Risky is the new way to dominate business. Safe isn’t safe. Safe is dangerous.

Good Isn’t Good Enough

August 22, 2013 by Marc Guberti Leave a Comment

How To Make Your Business Remarkable is a good title. It tells you what the book or blog post is going to be about. We know what we’re getting out of the book or blog post. We will learn how to make our businesses remarkable.

It’s a good title, but in today’s world, good isn’t good enough. Good is a standard. However, when a majority of those people are good, there are too many people at that standard. Good got crowded, and not good isn’t enough.

Seth Godin’s book, Purple Cow, is all about making your business remarkable. He could have just as easily named Purple Cow something like How To Make Your Business Remarkable instead.

The other title is the safe zone. The majority of authors choose titles like those. Who would have ever come up with the title Purple Cow though?

Good is only good. Good is no longer something to strive for. Good has simply become average. Set the bar higher, and if you set the bar right, you’ll find turning your business remarkable as a goal.

What Gets Shared A Lot?

July 15, 2013 by Marc Guberti Leave a Comment

I was reading one of Seth Godin’s posts, and I looked at the number of times people shared his post on social networks. The numbers for the post I was looking at and all of the others are impressive. I also knew his statistics are up on Quantcast.

If you type in the URL for Seth’s Blog into Quantcast, you will see how many visitors he gets in a day. Most of the time, he is getting over 10,000 visitors every day, but I decided to look deeper into the statistics. There were some moments when Seth’s traffic skyrocketed. I took a look.

I identified the days when he went from a constant rate of 10,000 visitors a day (or something like that) to over 30,000 visitors on a single day. That traffic stayed on his blog for a few days which meant more subscribers and more sales. I looked at three days in particular.

On the first day I saw Seth’s traffic spike up was when he was giving away a free book to download. The book included advice from many well-known entrepreneurs. The book was over 70 pages long, and at the end of his book, Seth advised his readers to share it.

What happened? According to Seth’s blog post, the book was trending on Twitter for 7 hours, and there were 20 tweets a minute about the book. That’s almost 10,000 tweets about a single book. The place to get Seth’s free book was on his blog.

Seth’s book was also about getting your goals done in the New Year, and since he started giving away the book in December, a lot of people wanted to know how to keep their New Year goals alive.

Another time when Seth’s traffic spiked was when he shared a fascinating picture. There were 3 blocks that compared the death rates per watts produced involving nuclear energy, oil, and coal. The death rate for nuclear energy was by far the lowest. Coal was the highest. It was a stunning picture, and the post was able to sum up the picture nicely.

If we guessed, we all would have thought nuclear energy would have caused the most deaths. The answer ended up being coal. I had to look at the picture twice to see the tiny square for nuclear energy. No one expected it, and that created a lot of buzz.

The other post that got a lot of traffic was an April Fool’s joke about the Kindle Zero which was a free Kindle. By the way, you could also make money with the Kindle Zero by reading challenging books. A lot of blogs featured this post from Seth Godin among the other April Fool’s tricks.

So those were three posts that resulted in a skyrocket of traffic for Seth Godin. There is something we can all take away from this knowledge: be clever, stunning, and give stuff away for free.