When daily deal sites like Living Social and Groupon came to the market, many observers looked at it as another nail in the coffin for offline retailing. By bringing huge discounts to consumers via their local business partners, Groupon and others like them would show business a new way to make more money, while bringing more customers to them. Except it’s not quite worked out that way yet. Short Term Gain, Long Tail Miss The problem with daily deals sites…

Last night on Twitter, I was part of the #sbt10 chat, part of the Start Blogging Today project (disclosure – I’m a partner in the project). As usual, there were a ton of great topics discussed on how to make your blog work better for you. One of the conversations that arose was how to reward loyalty – i.e., how to make sure that your blog community knows you appreciate them. Michael Schechter asked how you’d go about that, and I…

How are you offering value to your customers? How is your business doing it differently from your competitors and peers? Are you taking their service and adding a slight twist to it, or are you thinking of ways to separate you from the many other similar approaches that others are using? “Customers” doesn’t necessarily need to refer to people paying for your services, either. Customers could be readers of your blog; or connections on Twitter; or watchers of your YouTube…