Happy Halloween. To celebrate, we’re sharing an oldie-but-goodie post from Jim ... with a Halloween theme: Word Stock Market: Spooktacular The Word Stock Market is an occasional feature on SellingOut.com, where I will tell you whether to buy, sell or hold a certain word based on whether that word has a strong future or has seen better days. For example, if you’d bought the word “hybrid” 10 years ago (when it meant a cross between a horse and a donkey, not...

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When we create marketing content, it's good to keep this fact in mind: "According to Chartbeat: 55% of people read your post for just 15 seconds or less," reports Search Engine Journal. We've got to grab our patrons' attention fast, and SEJ shares some tips on "how to optimize your blog content for 55% who skim while still delighting the 45% who don’t." "Keep Intro Paragraphs Short & Sweet Most people get carried away with introductions. Tons of intros can feel like their...

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One strategy to attract new patrons and gain exposure is to create partnerships -- with organizations similar to yours and with ones in other industries. The social media video app TikTok has a knack for partnering up. David Cohen reports for Adweek, "TikTok has entered into ... partnerships ... with Girls Who Code to support women in technology in the #MarchForSisterhood campaign, with Conservation International to address marine plastic pollution in the #SaveOurOceans challenge and with the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty...

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We've got one less weekend to plan for holiday marketing this year. "In fact," reports Vincent DeSantis for Adweek, "2019 has the shortest holiday season since 2013." DeSantis lists a number of dates to keep in mind this season, including Single's Day (Nov. 11) and Green Monday (Dec. 9). He also outlines a number of strategies to drive more sales, like: "During Cyber Week Retailers are planning their tactics not by the day, but by the hour. It may make sense to start Cyber...

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Here's one way to build excitement for your season: Add an element of surprise. Becca Martin-Brown reports for the Northwest Arkansas Democrat Gazette: "Jason Miller, the executive director of the Arkansas Philharmonic Orchestra, has an interesting theory about this year's season announcement. He isn't going to make one. Instead, he says, he wants to surprise audiences as the year goes along." Miller tells Martin-Brown: "We want to announce little nuggets at a time and build as much excitement as we can....

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Chidike Samuelson highlights eight examples of brilliant instagram marketing for Entrepreneur. "The good news," Samuelson writes, "is that thriving with Instagram marketing isn't about burning millions of dollars or hiring the most prominent influencer to share your posts. Rather, it requires more of a more nuanced approach to making an impression on the right target audience." Here are a few of his top picks that we could learn from: "Lego Remember last year's royal wedding? It was one of the most followed global...

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According to HubSpot, "the average recipient spends about 1.1 seconds scanning an email prior to deciding whether or not they want to stay or abandon the message." Which means ... email design is important. Kristen Baker lists 10 Email Design Best Practices. Here's the first one: "Craft a strong subject line. Your email subject line is the first thing anyone sees when you send them an email. It’s the brief statement that’s supposed to pique the interest of your recipients. It should capture their attention so they...

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A Cheetos Fashion Show. Sounds intriguing, right?! Bettina Makalintal attended the first-ever Cheetos fashion show in NYC and posted about it on VICE. Inside the House of Flamin' Haute, "guests waited for appointments at the 'style bar,' where one could get their hair spray-painted with spots, their lips adorned with orange, and their nails covered in Chester-inspired 'pawlish,'" writes Makalintal -- and the food and drink all contained Cheetos. A "runway show and style bar" is a creative way for Cheetos...

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Reading Olivia Perreault's article on TicketNews about the Oakland Athletics offering kids under 12 free tickets in September brought to mind Jim's post about trying to “get ‘em young." Jim wrote: "Should a live entertainment/arts organization bother trying to “get ‘em young?” Yes, but for two reasons, and a third pseudo-reason. First, you should try to get young attendees because they’re a great, underserved audience. Take it from a guy who sells a lot of tickets to a lot of different kinds...

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"To save opera, we have to let it die," writes Olivia Giovetti for The Washington Post. She continues: " ... selling opera to the next generation means selling opera to a more diverse and liberal demographic, which has more options than ever for entertainment. ... we must no longer romanticize the bygone eras of opera’s so-called golden age so much that we fail to imagine the genre’s future." In 2016, Jim commented on an article by Anne Midgette in the same...

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