The Hollard Pay As You Drive car insurance solution is aimed to reward people like you. A tracking device accurately monitors your monthly mileage, and you are only billed for the distance you travel. So if your car remains parked for half the month, you could save up to roughly half off on your premiums!

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Don’t underestimate your own reputation and its effect – positive or negative – on your brand’s performance.

At a base level, people trust people and their opinion over branded constructs. There is no such thing as a highly successful brand or organisation with anonymous leaders. Give people a trustworthy face they can relate to, and don’t be afraid to build your own personal brand.

Your sales approach says a lot about your business, and if you’re not aware of how you sell, you risk not selling. I’ve worked for two fairly (to very) successful salesmen. The one was The Maverick, casually rocking up for business meetings in his relaxed fit faded jeans, the other The Serious Suited Salesmen, jet-setting internationally and seeing government sized figures as a function of his daily routine.

Both these images worked for different reasons. The first says my technological solution works so well that I don’t need to impress you with my Armani suit, the other said you are now dealing with the illuminati; you’re getting the Bentley of solutions and the hefty price tag is just a function, a relatively insignificant cost of opportunity to be associated with sheer, serious awesomeness.

If the Matrix would do day to day business in IT, this is what they’d do, say and look like, etc.

So whether your selling style says “it works” or whether it serves to justify premium prices, it pays to be aware of how you do it, and what it achieves – or doesn’t.

Speaking of Mavericks, The Daily’ Maverick’s First Thing is highly recommended. It’s a very short, worthwhile and informative read that will ensure that you know what’s going on in the world.

FREE Fax2Email: How it works

It’s ridiculously simple. Sign-up takes about 30 seconds – you just give them a name, pick a number and indicate the email address you’d like dodgy shit like affiliate contracts and job offers faxed to.

You stick your own free Fax-to-Email number in your email signature, and voilas, you  get faxes in your email inbox.

No more paper costs, jams or pre-menstrual fax machines when you’re running late.

Not only does it mean that you can get faxes discretely and on the move, it also means that you look more established as a business (as you have a fax line). Best of all, you don’t pay for this  – the person faxing you just pays a slightly higher per-minute rate.

Sign up now – it only takes a minute and will eradicate the need for paper faxing for life:

Dear SARS

I submitted my tax registration application for a closed corporation at the SARS Cape Town branch what must be close on 2 months ago, if not longer. After queuing for about an hour, I finally got to the front desk, where a middle-aged rather curt woman with perm-style hair accepted my printed application for turnover tax and put it in a box.

I asked her whether I could have a copy of the document or some reference or receipt, failing that. My request was firmly declined, and I was informed that “this is how it works”.

It’s now been two months or so later, and upon phoning your call center today, I was (predictably) told that there is no evidence or trace of my registration.

Now I’d like to do the right thing and declare my additional income, but I am getting messed around.

Now I cannot phone said department – I tried, but was refused – so now I have to go back down there and queue yet again.

I am not going to.

I want someone to get back to me, follow up on my application, find it in that box and finish this registration procedure.

And I want it done promptly.

I look forward to hearing from you in this regard, and you can look forward to me escallating this pathetic service on every platform I can find and being really unreasonable about it should I not, as you make doing the right thing near impossible.

I will also set fire to the building and abduct your staff’s pets and set them on fire too.*

Kind regards

(*OK OK, I didn’t really say the latter.)

The bottom line? Get a fucking receipt.

No one wants to do their first home loan application on a Saturday evening, but who’s to say they won’t want to get a quick home loan affordability indication by the first thing on a Sunday morning?

When you select service providers to team up with, look for people with the technological capabilities to accept client queries or quote requests outside of business hours. Outfits with the 7 days a week level of commitment to customer service.

No one expects the solution up front, but a human response at the time when it suits them can go a long way toward closing the sale and building customer loyalty.

Fucken A it was emo, and he can scream like a bitch in a blender, but over the past 4 years they’ve built something, and I’ve bought into it. Not as a rabid emo head, but as a consumer of music.

Branded band, branded fans

This is War, the band’s latest concept album, features thousands of (well rabid) fans on backings vocals. Two thousand odd unique cds featuring their faces on the covers got launched, turning 30 Seconds into ‘their’ band. These kids go and tell their mates, and their mates, and their mates’ mates. They blog about it, they cover the songs on YouTube. They buy into the band’s iconograpy and get Leto’s tattoos done on their arms. Referred to as the Echelon and categorised per region or city (each with their own ornate legion style logo), these fans will buy, sing, spend and do anything Monsieur Leto tells them to.

Very emo. Very brand loyal, more like. Music video direction, packing and visual presentation is flawless and handled by the top world’s top branding agencies. But it gets even better

Purpose-built for multi-channel consumption

Apart from the videos, the mp3 and CD sales, their is something called touring. It makes bands fuckloads of money. And by pre-loading their War album with crowd-singable, stadium-ready bridges and choruses, they are stimulating concert attentance. I don’t think stimulating is quite strong enough; I think it’s like incentivising junkies to attend a party with the promise of free heroine.

It’s opium for the masses; produced, refined and packaged to perfection.

See you at the concert.

Mastering the moment is key to selling and success. On a hunch, being hoofed out of bed early today, I wanted to check how my one PPC campaign was doing. Fuck. All. It turns out that in my frugal presumptiousness I was only running PPC adcs between 8am and 7pm!

Now one’s got to call it a day at some point, but why prevent people from dropping you an email before 8am? Stupid is as stupid does.

The question is why.

I would say that two things informed it’s commercial failure:

• They arrived late with the service bundling idea
• Nothing they presented us with beat the existing offering by other service providers convincingly.

The lesson to be learnt is that market leaders arrive early, and that not even a fad wad of cash can buy you a competitive advantage. And the way Google pitches themselves could do with a repeat – just check out the gmail.com front page for the mother of uncompelling sales pitches – the mother of all free web based mails… we think.

As one of the sorry bastards who’d bidded banked on the wrong keywords being ascendant, or optimising for secondary generic phrases that are both impossibly contested and disappointing in terms of traffic delivery, I will say but the following: Do proper keyword research before you start wasting your time.

Branded search trumps generic search for bonds in SA

Case in point is ooba bond originators, aka the former Mortgage SA. Although Google Webmaster Tools is not 100% accurate in its reporting, the difference in search volumes associated with the following keyword phrases tells me everything I need to know:

SEARCH PHRASE & IMPRESSIONS

ooba     1,000
home loans     260
ooba bond originators     260
ooba bond calculator     170
ooba properties     91
home loan     73
types of bonds     73
homeloans     58

“ooba = bonds”

If you’ve been optimising for home loans, you’ll understand my pain. The brand name and brand/generic phrase combinations deliver the lion’s share of traffic, and given the extent to which their site is optimised, out-ranking them on branded terms is near impossible. They invested the money in brand-building, and the public at large now associates them with bonds. It’s like Coke for soft drink or Google for online search.

It makes me rather bitter.

I haven’t investigated the situation for home loans yet, but I have my suspicions who’ll be winning in that space…