Yesterday we went to see the visiting circus in a nearby town. I must admit, I’m a sucker for circus, not just because of the glamour, performers pushing themselves towards perfection, the smells of sawdust and animals intermingled with that of animals small and large. It’s also a question of circus being one of the last places in modern society which actually focuses on grace. I always catch myself becoming moist in the corner of my eyes while watching these graceful performers, for a moment forgetting all the hard work that came before this exact moment of excellence.

There is in fact a pertinent marketing lesson to be had here – not the least if you’re trying to break into the internet marketing arena. Never, ever forget, that behind the shining examples (who more often than not are trying to sell you an image of internet marketing being something far removed from ‘work’) are tons of hard work.

Now, I won’t go as far as to say that there’s a lot of grace in the world of internet marketing – I think that’ll have to be left for the circus-world to carry on into the future. But it is safe to say, that if you treat your online endeavours as a serious business, you stand a better than average chance of becoming a success.

But it does need a lot of hard work, and something else that circus can teach us a lot about. You see, one of the other things about circus that has always fascinated me immensely is what goes on behind the scenes. The task of securing that the infrastructure is in place, that all the stuff is at hand at exactly the right time when the performers need them, the incredible setting up and pulling down of the big tents in no time short – there’s no glamour or fame in that, but it’s equally as important in securing that the audience has a great time.

Remember that, the next time you launch a new product etc. – make sure that all the stuff behind the scenes are taken care of. There’s nothing worse for a customer than for instance, having something go wrong with the payment, then going to the support site (if that’s at all advertised) and being unable to log a support ticket, because someone forgot to update the system with some new information. And it goes in your business exactly the same as in the circus-business – if your customer has a bad experience, chances that they’ll return are quite low.

Well, it’s been as close to three months as possible, since this blog was last updated. Shame on me!

Now, normal (whatever that might be) operation will be resumed as of this moment, and this is just a small note to announce a new feature.

If you sign up for the excellent, new MarketingResourcesForFree weekly newsletter, you get a great, 53-page eBook, titled “How to Write and Sell Your First Ebook Fast” for free, as thanks for checking it out – and not a forced continuity payment in sight

Seriously – check it out. Once a week you’ll receive a roundup of what’s been happening at the blog, news I’ve snapped up in the marketing world, special offers, and perhaps most importantly (well, this site is about free resources, right) a new free gift every week.

I’ll be back soon with some real content

Let’s start a new week on a slightly off-beat note.

Marketers are only human – and humans do not live on serious business alone (in fact – to my knowledge, serious business is what allows us to survive and pay our bills – everything else is what makes us alive )

Well – here’s the (in my humble opinion) absolutely best site for free games on the net

GameTop.com has got loads of downloadable (full) Windows-games, as well as further loads of online-playable games.

A word of warning is appropriate though: Many of these games are extremely addictive, and as such are not recommended if you’ve got shoddy work-ethics   – my advice is to set your timer, and remember not to mutter “just one more level” when the time’s up

Happy relaxation!

About a month ago, a great new free tool saw the light of day.

InstantBannerCreator is a deceptively simple concept: You login to the site, you choose which kind of graphic you want to create (banner, header, footer, button, animated gif, peelaway-ads), and you get to choose from loads of templates, fonts, and clip-art.

This way, you can simply point-and-click your way through quickly creating new banners and other graphics. Søren and Richard even lets you store a limited number graphics (and templates) on their server, so you don’t need to use your own bandwidth.

So – if you’ve ever needed to create a header or banner (and who hasn’t) and PhotoShop or the Gimp baffles you – just head on over to InstantBannerCreator and create your free account now. (There’s an upsell for you to consider – which you should of course only take if you really need it)

To me, one of the really heavy things when trying to start up a new project is… site design.

I admit freely, that I really suck at sitting down and designing a new site from scratch, creating graphics, trying to get things to just remotely look like I’m envisioning things inside my head.

So – what I usually do is head out on the net in search of a template that’ll suit my needs. One of the places I usually visit is FreeCSSTemplates.org

At the time of writing this, there’s just about 350 different templates, all freely available, under the Creative Commons 2.5 Attribution license (which means you can use them for whichever purpose you want – besides selling them – as long as you provide a link back to the creator).

There’s plenty of different templates to choose from, and it shouldn’t take much work to personalize it into something that’s exactly to your liking.

Oh, yeah, by the way, these are normal html-css templates. If WP themes are more to your liking – try out the sister-site at FreeWPThemes.net – they’ve got an assortment of the themes at FreeCSSTemplates converted to WP.

Enjoy!