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Back in advertising’s glory days, the generally accepted corporate goal was to make money. This was a simple, if not easy, task with fairly straightforward steps. The ad man (and he was a man – the whole “marketing to women” thing hadn’t exactly taken off yet) knew what he had to do. Take a product. Advertise it properly. Watch the sales roll in. Collect industry awards and take his wife to Palm Springs for the week.

Now, though, things have changed. The road to success is no longer a simple exchange of products or services for money. As product or service providers, we want something more, something different. We want people’s time. And time is something far more precious than money.

When you’re 17 and bored and restless, time doesn’t seem that hard of a thing to give. The older you get, the more you have to do, the more you want to do, the closer you are to lawn bowling in Florida, the more precious time becomes. I’ll happily drop $20 on something unknown. But 20 minutes? Good luck. I have a home business to run. Time is finite, and you’re going to have to make it worth my while for me to give you some of mine.

A customer is anyone from whom you want a favorable reaction.

They may never give us money. We may never ask them to. But we want something from them, and that makes them our customers.

The people you want to subscribe to your feed? Customers. The people you want to link to you? Customers. The people you want to enroll in your affiliate program? Customers.

You’re asking each of these people to devote time to you. Subscribing to your feed doesn’t take a lot of time, but reading it does. Linking to you doesn’t take a lot of time, but scouring your site to find something relevant and then writing a decent post about it does. Agreeing to be your affiliate doesn’t take a lot of time, but going through the enrollment process does.

Stay tuned for more. Tomorrow we’ll talk about your first steps in treating everybody like customers so your readership will skyrocket.

Liked this? Subscribe to my feed. It’s awesome, I promise.

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