I remem­ber 10 years ago.

In the wake of rumored pro­pos­als to reg­u­late the web, in 1999 the CRTC, com­pa­ra­ble to America’s FCC, offi­cially declared that the Inter­net is not a broad­cast medium.

Now, that rul­ing was sig­nif­i­cant for many reasons.

Tech­ni­cally, the Inter­net is a medium. But the gov­ern­ment based its deci­sion on the fact that the web is inter­ac­tive with its audi­ence — unlike other uni­di­rec­tional, one-​​way broad­cast media such as the TV or radio. As a result, reg­u­la­tors con­cluded the Inter­net could there­fore police itself.

(The “Net Neu­tral­ity” debate of late is a per­fect exam­ple that it is different.)

Nev­er­the­less, my point here is not a polit­i­cal one but a marketing-​​related one.

Read the rest of this post or share it »

A few weeks ago, we wanted to update our fam­ily pho­tos since all our kids have grown up, and we wanted some­thing more recent.

So we had a com­plete fam­ily pho­tog­ra­phy ses­sion done by a local exec­u­tive pho­tog­ra­pher, Luc St-​​Amour.

“Isn’t our fam­ily beau­ti­ful?” Says the proud dad.

(When you com­pare these to the pho­tos from our wed­ding, you can see how much they’ve grown. Now I really feel old!)

There’s my wife, Sylvie Fortin. The blond is my daugh­ter Megan Malette (24 years old). The red­head is my daugh­ter Céleste Coley Fortin (20). The brunette is my daugh­ter Paige Coley Fortin (17). Last but not least there’s my son, Tyler Coley Fortin (16).

(By the way, did you know Sylvie’s birth­day is on Hal­loween? Don’t tell her I told you, but this year she’s turn­ing the big 4–0! But no mat­ter what age, she’s as beau­ti­ful as ever.)

Obvi­ously, I couldn’t wait to share these with the world. I hope you don’t mind this lit­tle sneak peek into the per­sonal life of “Michel Fortin.” Click the pho­tos to enlarge.

I couldn’t talk about this when I first learned about it, but now that it’s pub­lic I wanted to pass the info along.

You may or may not know Julie Perry.

She’s a very dear friend of mine, a well-​​known Inter­net mar­keter, and an entre­pre­neur. We con­stantly see each other at sem­i­nars and always have a great time. She’s always laugh­ing, fun to be with, and a great person.

If you can’t pic­ture her, to help you here’s a photo of the both of us — you might have seen her at Inter­net mar­ket­ing sem­i­nars, yourself:

She’s known for her love of boats. She’s writ­ten a book on yacht­ing, and she’s also the host of The​Boaters​.tv, a web­site for yachters and boat lovers.

Now, the sad news…

Read the rest of this post or share it »

The most com­mon mis­take new­com­ers to busi­ness make is to think that by expand­ing their port­fo­lio they will secure more busi­ness. Con­versely, they think that by nar­row­ing their mar­ket they will also nar­row their chances of get­ting more busi­ness. In either case, noth­ing can be fur­ther from the truth.

A man­age­ment con­sul­tant who I believe had a knack for human resources also offered book­keep­ing ser­vices, think­ing that hav­ing more to offer will keep her busier — she then won­dered why she wasn’t get­ting any work!

The truth of the mat­ter is the fact that spe­cial­iz­ing and nar­row­ing your focus as much as pos­si­ble will increase your like­li­hood of get­ting more business.

Read the rest of this post or share it »

Some of the tests results I love to fol­low are those from The Poyn­ter Insti­tute. Their eye­track­ing stud­ies are some of the largest ever con­ducted in this space.

While their tests are pri­mar­ily done for, and funded by, major news­pa­pers, their stud­ies are incred­i­bly reveal­ing nonethe­less. For instance, they’ve tested how read­ers read sto­ries in three dif­fer­ent for­mats: tabloid-​​style (folded ver­ti­cally), broad­sheet (larger size, folded hor­i­zon­tally), and online.

Of course, my inter­est is cer­tainly focused on the online ver­sion. But their news­pa­per stud­ies are very reveal­ing in terms of what cap­tures people’s atten­tion, how they read, and how much of it they do read.

Their web­site has come out with five key find­ings. (Their full report is due out in a few more weeks from now.) But let’s take a closer look at these find­ings, and my inter­pre­ta­tion of what they mean for the web.

Read the rest of this post or share it »

Some peo­ple have asked what Web 2.0 tools do I use. Now, that ques­tion is two-​​sided. One is, what tools do I use with my copy? And the answer is, “not many.” I do use a few, and I’m test­ing a lot more, too.

Other than video and graph­ics, such as using YouTube​.com and Flickr​.com, which are the most pop­u­lar but not really impor­tant when you have your own ded­i­cated server like I do, there are some tools to allow my web­sites to be a lit­tle more interactive.

(If you remem­ber from my report, The Death of The Saleslet­ter,” I talk about the rise in “sam­pli­fi­ca­tion.” If there are any tools that I would pre­fer, other than video and audio, they would cer­tainly be those that helped to give my read­ers more proof, and to make their buy­ing expe­ri­ences eas­ier and more secure.)

I will blog about those once I get more sta­tis­tics to share with you.

But the sec­ond part of that ques­tion is, when it comes to run­ning my busi­ness, there are a few Web 2.0 tools and ser­vices that have helped my life quite tremen­dously. Here’s a list of some of them.

Read the rest of this post or share it »

Some peo­ple have asked me to give a few tips and tricks they can start using right away to apply some of the strate­gies I wrote about in my “Death of the Saleslet­ter” report, with­out resort­ing to audio or video, or fancy scripts.

Aside from the var­i­ous tech­nol­ogy you can start apply­ing to make your sales expe­ri­ence more dynamic, there are some very sim­ple things you can do to your saleslet­ter, right now, to improve its read­er­ship. And ulti­mately, its response.

It’s easy, it’s fast, and it’s proven to increase results.

Read the rest of this post or share it »