It's called a continuity sale, and variations of it abound all over the place. If you've ever seen or used a business punchcard -- you know, those "buy five pizzas, get one free" deals -- you've seen continuity sales at work.

Here's the thing: they work in virtually any service business to increase the number of sales you'll make.

More and more, brands are recognizing that a strategic approach to content is becoming important. Content is moving from being among the final considerations of a Web-development project to being front and center in a digital-marketing strategy.

But content is merely a means to an end: Content drives conversations, conversations are how you engage with people, and engaging with people is the only way brands will be able to survive in the social-media-disrupted world we now live in.

Formulating a content strategy can be a difficult process, partly because of the many considerations and partly because of the number of stakeholders. So, to help, here's a simple 10-step systematic process for formulating a content strategy.

By guiding the design of customer interactions, the principles of behavioral science offer a simple, low-cost route to improved customer satisfaction.

I know that proper use of trademarks and service marks gets confusing for many entrepreneurs. The following is a simple and handy guide on the proper use of the marks in your business. It’s important to review your website and marketing material and make sure that you are preserving potential legal protection for your marks

If you are like most small businesses, though, video is likely the last type of content that you are actively using online to promote your business. After all, it seems much harder to produce than it really is. In fact, video can be the easiest type of content to create if you follow a few basic rules.

Putting together a list of viable prospects, and ensuring that information about them is accurate and relevant, can be a daunting task. There are a myriad of list and contact vendors in the marketplace today, each with its own set of data.

But buying a marketing list that you have confidence in does not have to be a stressful process if you ask the right questions before you make a decision. Here are eight questions to ask vendors before buying a list.

Determining compensation for sales professionals is often a trade-off between salary and incentive-based plans. Anne Coughlan examined a multitude of compensation arrangements to discover the “best” plan for a person depends on a number of factors.

Given the rising pre-sales investment to pursue and win opportunities today, it's increasingly important that organizations know why they are winning and losing sales opportunities. However, most firms, by their own admission, are weak in performing this analysis. A CSO Insights study found that only 18% of companies rate themselves as very good or world class in conducting win-loss (W/L) reviews, whereas 41% rate themselves as dismal or poor. In sales, the selling outcome is usually binary – one company will win, and winner takes all. The winning seller or sales team typically wins the entire opportunity and all the commissions, revenue stream, cross- and upsell potential, and referrals that go with it. Understanding why winners win and losers lose is the essence of sales and all competitive endeavors.

The question that thousands of experts, bloggers, publishers, and content creators want answered is, "If there is so much free content on the Web, what content will people actually pay for?"

Having been involved with launching more than 1,000 paid-content websites over the last few years, many of which are now very profitable businesses, I've concluded that the following are attributes that enable them to charge for their content.

Marketers have been applying behavioral economics—often unknowingly—for years. A more systematic approach can unlock significant value.

If you're using direct marketing to sell your products and services, then you know that it's all about making an offer.

But are you testing your offers to find out what work best?

Did you know there are many ways to present an offer that can boost your response and increase your sales?

There are hundreds of offers and thousands, perhaps millions, of offer variations you can test. However, some offers are proven winners. Here are 59 of them.

Dave Schappell, founder and CEO of TeachStreet, talks about his company’s transition from a free to a paid service, and shares five tips that may help other startups make the leap as well.

It's important to ensure that visitors find the information and products they're looking for once they arrive. Whether you're marketing an e-commerce, informational, or B2B site, your site search is a critical feature of your site and deserves your time and attention.

By making some small improvements to your site search, you can reap higher conversion rates, more leads, and happier repeat customers.

Advertisers pay millions of dollars to air TV ads that are subsequently ignored by a third of viewers. New research by HBS professor Thales S. Teixeira offers a simple, inexpensive solution for marketers to retain brand recognition.

Companies that make the deep strategic, organizational, and operational shifts required to become effective digital marketers can not only make themselves more agile and productive but also accelerate revenue growth.

What’s differentiates the great ones? What makes some people superstars, while most of their peers hover near the mediocre middle?

It’s not too hard to pinpoint the difference between average performers and poor ones. Easy to spot skills like work habits, product knowledge, communication style and use of sales tools, are all indicators of general competence.

The challenge for most organizations is not determining the difference between good and bad; it’s discerning the difference between good and great.

Why are some sales people superstars, while other people in the same situation, selling the same stuff to the same customers experience a much lower rate of success?

Bookmark this page. Then, before a cold call, open this link. As you talk with the customer, listen for the objections below. When you hear one, click on it, and use one of the responses. Then click on ASK FOR THE APPOINTMENT and use one of the requests. Try it!

Assessing its impact as well as its volume will help companies take better advantage of buzz.

There's no shortage of advice about which strategies work or don't work for services marketing, yet they seem to conflict with each other regularly. So what's the scoop? Which strategies work?

It's less a question of which ones work than a question of which ones will work for you given the dynamics of what you sell. Answering that question requires many considerations, but there's one that many firms overlook: whether the service they offer is demand-driven or demand-driving.

If consumers like to choose the products they buy, then providing more choice would seem like a smart business decision for a retailer. Research by Alexander Chernev suggests this is not always the case.

Consumers are moving outside the purchasing funnel—changing the way they research and buy your products. If your marketing hasn’t changed in response, it should.

Predictive analytics enables you to develop mathematical models to help you better understand the variables driving success. Predictive analytics relies on formulas that compare past successes and failures, and then uses those formulas to predict future outcomes.

This article provides a quick explanation of the nine most common data-mining techniques used in predictive analytics. Becoming familiar with them will go a long way toward enabling you to recognize patterns in customer preferences and buying behavior.

Landing pages have become an important part of the marketer's toolbox. To create effective landing pages, you should understand the anatomy of a landing page and it should be part of your landing page and optimization framework. After optimizing thousands of landing pages over the years, Bryan Eisenberg wants to offer this framework for understanding the 10 key elements of a landing page.

Not all of the following elements always need to be on a page to create an effective landing page. However, there are several elements that are essential to your success.

He can close, but how's his interpersonal sensitivity? A guide to screening sales candidates.

Our prehistoric ancestors spent much of their waking hours foraging for and consuming food, an instinct that obviously paid off. Today this instinct is no less powerful, but for billions of us it’s satisfied in the minutes it takes to swing by the store and pop a meal in the microwave. With our physical needs sated and time on our hands, increasingly we’re finding psychological outlets for this drive, by seeking out and consuming concepts.