jaacob.com

I’m incredibly excited to finally announce the launch of BePrivy, the company I (and my partner in crime) have been developing the last few months. BePrivy is an email marketing firm that focuses on passion—portraying your company’s passion for their offering and igniting the passion your customers feel for your product/service.

Passion is an interesting emotion in the world of business. Most companies think they would love to have customers passionate about their products and their brand, yet they purposefully do everything possible to water down their message so that it “appeals” to as many people as possible. This level of appeal only lasts until something better comes along because convenience or a lack of competitive options do not equate to passion. Your company is designed to be preempted by your competition when passion isn’t a foundation principle in your overall strategy. Passion can be a double-edged sword, yes, when one person loves you another might hate you—but you’ll keep your loving customers for life who in turn will advocate for your brand, expanding your reach.

BePrivy operates with the idea that creating passionate customers is the most beneficial strategy a business can adopt, and we help companies achieve that goal through the most targeted, cost-effective method of reaching your advocates—email marketing.

BePrivy is looking for clients who share these same sentiments. It doesn’t matter where you are on the “path to passion”—maybe you just realized you need passion, maybe you’ve got it in droves. We develop innovative email marketing campaigns to spark and stoke that passion in your customers.

Visit our website at BePrivy.com—I’d love to hear your feedback on our company, ideas, website, anything. Be sure to sign up for our email list while you’re there!

While we were out enjoying an incredible movie (Good Night, and Good Luck.), having a couple of drinks and getting away from the computers, somebody decided that they wanted the girl’s car and forgot to ask before taking it and subsequently destroying it.

Now we’re stuck in the exciting limbo of waiting to hear back from insurance adjustors, who will decide whether we are going to become very friendly with the rental car people while they take forever to fix it or are going car shopping ASAP.

So—what do you think? Is this car totaled?

Poll is closed, thanks for voting.

Pricing your product or service is one of the hardest things to do, especially when you are first starting out. Searching for the masters in pricing to emulate, businesses that clearly do it “right” is difficult, both because it is such a hard thing to judge as an outsider, and even if you did have all the information, how do you apply it to your unique situation?

A “holy grail” of pricing is something you may never find, (it’s just one page long, with your ideal price in 80pt font)—but The Art of Pricing comes pretty damn close. Rafi Mohammed breaks down different ways to determine your ideal price (of which there isn’t just one!), shows different strategies to capture the largest market share via differential pricing and highlights the pitfalls that many other companies have fallen into along the way.

One of the key points (if not the underlying theme of the entire book) is that to really discover the hidden profits in your business, you have to price your product/service based on the value it delivers to its purchaser—not your costs. Realizing that every client decides how (and how much) your product is valuable to them and bringing your price inline with their determination allows you to maximize the profit you can make from each sale.

I was really blown away by the quantity of tactics Mohammed laid out in the book; this isn’t a one-size-fits-all system but an all-encompassing strategy that you can pick and choose key elements from to apply to your business. The explanations are really easy to grasp and the whole book flows quite well; filled with ancedotes and a fast, clear writing style, this is a pretty quick read.

I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t slightly disappointed that I didn’t obtain a “perfect price” from reading this book, but that’s just the selfish part of me that is searching for that holy grail. This book is the start of your pricing adventure—it lays out the path and gives you a map, but you have to travel on your own.

Regardless, this book is a must read. Even if you think you’ve got your pricing lined up perfect, I guarantee Mohammed will show you tactics to squeeze additional profits out of your business, even while making your clients happier. Just remember, a 1% increase in net price will (on average) boost your operating profits by 11%!

1000tags.com is a new online advertising channel that allows you to purchase a “tag” (although in this instance it would seem “keyword” would be a more fitting description) that links to whatever site you wish. You can purchase either shared or exclusive tags, exclusive giving you sole rights to the tag, along with the option to ante up more cash to make the font size larger. Only 50 tags out of the “cloud” are exclusive at any one time. Shared tags follow standard tag cloud rules, with more popular tags getting larger; you’re more apt to be clicked, but you’re sharing those clicks with a larger pool of advertisers.

Since its launch 5 days ago, they’ve already garnered over 14,000 visitors and 20,000+ clicks. I’d guess that a majority of those are “web 2.0 people” checking out the site, but with the low cost of testing the site out, who knows - it just might take off. Nobody wants to miss out on the next Million Dollar Homepage, that’s for sure!

InBubbleWrap has granted me a second prize - three cheers for InBubbleWrap! This time around, I won persuasion - the art of getting what you want by Dave Lakhani.

I’m about two-thirds through The Art of Pricing, my first win from InBubbleWrap - I’ll post a full review once I’m finished. So far, a decent read, some good stories and strategies to transform how you price your product/service.

So, go check out the newest offerings at InBubbleWrap and enter every day to win - then stop by 800-CEO-Read and help support the backbone that runs InBubbleWrap - Ryan deserves your business!

Celebrities pitching in to help out law enforcement is the new rage - apparently Jason Lee has time in between filming My Name Is Earl to attend to traffic accidents in LA.

Yes, I know it’s a mistake with Yahoo!’s automatic name matching…

Automattic’s spam plugin Akismet looks to be quite the skilled comment spam blocker - my only question is with the fact that it requires a WordPress.com API key in order to run. Will this not create a mass of empty blogs at WordPress.com, generated just to get an API key?

For example, I’m now the owner of jaacob.wordpress.com, which I won’t be using since I have this site. While I doubt my empty blog puts a strain on the WordPress.com servers individually, multiplied exponentially does it become an issue? I know servers & bandwidth are cheap these days, but basically building in abandoned blogs doesn’t seem smart.

I know thousands, if not millions of blogs are created on services like Blogger and then abandoned - usually for lack of follow-through with the author. With the massive popularity of wordpress as a publishing platform, is Akismet forcing WordPress.com to catch up to Blogger’s numbers in abandoned blogs, and (possibly?) in a much shorter time?

Maybe I’m totally off-base here … ?