What is the Best Bit of Marketing Advice you ever got?

I was thinking about this yesterday, and realised that picking out one piece of advice would be a challenge for me, the way I think about and, do business has changed so radically in the past 8 years. I was a real unbeliever in the power of on-line, and now I think I bore everyone to death with my love of Social Media.

Think it all started when I failed spectacularly at my first foray into running an on-line business. After building a website, that I spent a fortune on developing, thinking this was my future… to realising my business model and understanding of how people search and use the internet – was a complete wrong.

I decided to get educated! I attended a number of conferences, with speakers like Brian Tracey who is one of the most phenomenal speakers on all things sales… and boy does he know how to market himself as a brand. I went to a weekend listening to Mat Basac … my first live on-line marketer,  he started to stretch my mind some more, and I started to read a number of great books, The Power of Influence by… and anything by Seth Godin, and all of these things added up to me changing the way I think about marketing,.

I have always known about the positives of selling benefits not features (I mean I sold life insurance on the phone once) I knew that you tell people that their friend/ neighbour has bought a product and they are more likely to buy, but I was and still am in love with the whole area of Social Networking, I am a natural connector and love people and what makes them tick.

So perhaps failure was my best teacher!

What was yours ?

PS The picture of the puppy is an experiment – have been told so many people will click on cute images, wanted to see if it was true – and its Friday!