This joke makes me laugh every time I read it so I thought I’d share.

Before I get your hopes up too high, just keep in mind I’m a big dork…

What Is Marketing?

You see a handsome guy at a party. You go up to him and say, “I’m fantastic in bed.” — That’s Direct Marketing.

You’re at a party with a bunch of friends and see a handsome guy. One of your friends goes up to him and pointing at you says, “She’s fantastic in bed.” — That’s Advertising.

You see a handsome guy at a party. You go up to him and get his telephone number. The next day you call and say, “Hi, I’m fantastic in bed.” — That’s Telemarketing.

You’re at a party and see a handsome guy. You get up and straighten your dress. You walk up to him and pour him a drink. You say, “May I,” and reach up to straighten his tie brushing your breast lightly against his arm, and then say, “By the way, I’m fantastic in bed.” — That’s Public Relations.

You’re at a party and see a handsome guy. He walks up to you and says, “I hear you’re fantastic in bed.” — That’s Brand Recognition.

You’re at a party and see a handsome guy. You talk him into going home with your friend. — That’s a Sales Rep.

Your friend can’t satisfy him so he calls you. — That’s Tech Support.

You’re on your way to a party when you realize that there could be handsome men in all these houses you’re passing. So you climb onto the roof of one situated toward the center and shout at the top of your lungs, “I’m fantastic in bed!” — That’s Spam.

If you have any one liners you’d like to add, go for it - I’d love to read ‘em.

I don’t really get too fired up about politics.  In fact, politics tends to piss me off so I’ve found that ignoring them is best for me.

However, since there’s less than a month to go before the election (as I’m typing this) I’m finding myself at least paying a little attention.

However, this just makes me more pissed off.

Today, however, I’ve come up with the solution to my problem (and really, the solution and cause of all of life’s problems)… ALCOHOL.

So here is my twist on how you should play a presidential debate drinking game… special thanks to John Carlton for helping inspire this.

The Rules:

Pick your horse (trust me, you don’t want to ride the fence as you’ll see in a moment)

This is a game played with shots… of whiskey (Wild Turkey recommended)

This is really a simple game best played with fans of both candidates.

Here’s all you do… whenever you think the other candidate is lying, take a shot.  For example, if you’re a fan of McCain, then whenever you think Obama just lied, you take a shot.

That’s it!

Note:  If you haven’t decided who you’re voting for yet, then you have to take a shot when you think either of them are lying.  So if you like to drink, indecision is a good thing.

Now, for those who want some other games with more drinking opportunities, here are some rather detailed ones (personally, I think they have way too many rules… remember during drinking games you tend to get drunk)

http://brainyjane22.wordpress.com/2008/09/25/the-presidential-debate-drinking-game/

 http://davethenovelist.wordpress.com/2008/09/25/presidential-debate-drinking-game/

***DISCLAIMER***

This post for entertainment purposes only.  Never drink and drive.  Drinking games have been known to kill people. Oh, and don’t drink alchol in excess if taking Cialis.

Just got back from Orlando, and I’ll try to make a post & podcast (yes, I’m podcasting now) in the next day or two.

I’m ready to go back - it’s a heck of a lot warmer there.  I don’t mind winter, and love to snowboard, but I’m ready for winter to be over now.  And the 80 degree weather in Orlando already has me lusting for warmer weather - oh well, soon enough.

When I checked my email this morning, one of the first things was an email from my friend, Lawren - and she told me that Transformers got the snubbed at the Oscars - can you believe that?  Outrageous, I tell you.

I met a bunch of really cool folks at the seminar I was at, and I’ll give you some highlights of stuff that I think will help anyone in business for themselves.

I’ll also talk about some very smart things that Disney does that I think are very smart (and a couple not so smart things) - after all, the entire place is engineered to help extract as much money from you as humanly possible and have you leave happy about it.

This post is NOT about the iPhone. In fact, I’m not going to mention the iPhone at all.

Instead, I’m going to talk about getting traffic to a website since everyone who has a website could probably use more traffic.

My area of expertise in the online world is actually in getting traffic from search engines like Google.

I just finished taking everything I know about building links and putting it into a series of ten videos totalling nearly 11 hours of solid content.

I just want to give you a chance to get those videos at a steep discount since I’ll be raising the price dramatically after the first 300 copies sell.

The product is called Mission Unlinkable and you can get the videos from www.MissionUnlinkable.com.

If you ever wanted to learn about how to get FREE traffic from search engines then you’ll want to take a look at this comprehensive video series.

I promise this isn’t going to be an iPhone blog, but since that’s all anyone wants to talk about, and everytime I load up my homepage I see at least 3 stories about that damn thing, I’m going to post about it again.

 Today’s Topic:

Why Possessed The People At Apple To Sign An Exclusive Deal With AT&T For It’s iPhone?

In my life I’ve had four different cell phone providers - Cellular One, Sprint, AT&T (Cingular at the time), and Alltel.  I liked three of them - hated one of them. 

Any guesses as to which one I hated to the point I broke contract?  You get a gold star if you guessed AT&T. 

 Where I live, despite that fact that their website says they have service in my area, the reality is that they have rather sparse coverage in the city.  In some parts of the city it works like a charm, and in others you get no coverage.  My home happens to be one of those places where you get not coverage. (I live in a city of over 200,000 people, so it’s not exactly like I live in the middle of nowhere.)

Depsite the fact that they have those commercials claming the fewest dropped calls, if you look at their track record in customer service you’ll find that they consistently rank at or near the bottom. 

So let’s go back to this iPhone deal, and Apple signing an exclusive deal with one of the worst cell phone companies - why?

Well, one of the reasons likely has to do with the fact that Apple was allowed to control the promotion of the phone and AT&T was to provide the service - a rather unique arrangement in the cell phone industry.

Another has to do with Apple’s Visual Voicemail system.  It probably wasn’t feasible to get all the carriers to work together and have the system work the way Apple wanted, so they had to go with one company who would work with Apple’s take on voicemail. 

But still, why AT&T.  I mean if you’re Apple and you have this hyper loyal crowd who will buy anything you produce simply because of your reputation for innovative and easy to use products, why would you go with a cell phone company that is pretty much the opposite - a lot of people *hate* AT&T, and trust me, they’re not a lot of fun to deal with.

Apple was smart, they made the process of getting a phone and signing up pretty easy.  You go to the store, buy one, go home and activate it through iTunes.  A great idea because you don’t have to sit in an AT&T store for half an hour while they get your phone setup - can you imagine the lines then if everyone had to wait - you’d be in line for days.  However, while Apple did their job, AT&T dropped the ball.  A lot of people are reporting that activiation is taking quite some time, up to 24 hours or more which is completely unreasonable since nothing on the phone, not even the music, will work until the phone is activated.

How I Plan To Surive Without The Latest Must Have Gadget

I’ve typically been an early adopter of cell phone technology - I got my first phone in 1996, this was before minutes were even included in plans (although at $9.95 a month I wasn’t complaining.)   When the first smartphones came out, I bought a Kyocera QCP-6065.  When the RAZR was released, I was instantly in love and had to get one.  But since as mentioned in my previous post, I don’t want an iPhone, what am I going to do?  And if you’re on one of the other cell phone networks that doesn’t support the iPhone, maybe you’ll do this too, but the RAZR 2 looks to be one hell of a phone, and it hasn’t forgotten the fact that it needs to function as a phone. 

And my carrier (Alltel) doesn’t cripple it’s bluetooth features like some others *cough* Verizon *cough*.  So that’s what I plan to do since my current RAZR is getting old and everyone and their brother has one.

If you haven’t been living under a rock these past few months, you’ve undoubtedly heard of the Apple iPhone set to be released on June 29^th 2007.

You’ve probably seen the commercials showing off its innovative features and maybe even visited Apple’s website to learn about everything it can do in detail.

I have to say that as much as I like cool toys, I won’t be buying an Apple iPhone.

Here’s why:

Yes, does it make calls?

I don’t know about you, but for me the most important thing I need to do with a phone is… drum roll please… make phone calls. If you’ve seen the commercials the fact that the iPhone is actually a phone is downplayed. Sure, you can get on the Internet and surf using a real full featured web browser and you can listen to iTunes, and you can watch videos and movies as well.

However, I like most people, primarily use my phone to make phone calls. Once in a while I send a text message or use the voice recorder (does the iPhone even have that), but that’s about it. I have owned smartphones in the past and never really found all the extra features that useful.

Lack of buttons

In order to make the phone as simple as possible, there is only one real button on the phone. Everything else is on the touch screen. This makes the phone simple, but means whenever you need to do something you’re going to need to look at the screen. You may say that you typically look at your screen anyway, but do you? I know that I can get my phone out and speed dial several people without ever having to look at the screen with my current phone. I can change the ringer from loud to vibrate without ever opening up the phone or taking it out of my pocket. I can record a memo to myself by pressing a single button.

On the iPhone to do all of these thing I would need to get the phone out and activate the screen, and then find the button that takes me to the menu that performs that task and since a touch screen provides no tactile feedback for me to “feel” my way around it’s keyboard, I would almost certainly need to be looking at the phone to make sure that I’m really changing my ringtone instead of playing Pulp Fiction.

iTunes are Great but…

I got an iPod for Christmas last year and I have to say that I really do like iTunes and the iPod, and you’d think that I would think that since the iPhone works with iTunes I’d consider it an iPod replacement.

The truth is that I use my iPod mainly when I’m at the gym. Besides the fact that you’d look like a major tool walking around listening to music from your iPhone, it’s just not a practical device at the gym or if you’re out running – it’s too big. For music, I’ll take my iPod Nano over the iPhone any day.

I will admit that being able to watch movies and TV shows is pretty cool, and for plane flights, that would be an awesome feature to have, but I don’t travel as much as I used to so it’s really not the useful to me since when I’m at home I have TVs I can watch and when I’m driving I can’t really watch TV anyway. And even if I’m on a plane, a laptop will do the same job better anyway.

The Deal Killer

While the iPhone is fairly pricey, that wasn’t ultimately a deal killer for me, the real deal killer is the fact that they signed and exclusive agreement with AT&T so the phone is only available on one network. Even if I wanted an iPhone I couldn’t get one – not because AT&T doesn’t have coverage in my city but because I live in one of their “dead spots” in my town. And I need to be able to get phone calls in my house.

So if you’ve stopped by this blog anytime in the past three years you’ve probably noticed something - yeah, this sites looks completely different.

I’m not done customizing it yet - there’s likely a picture of me coming in the header somewhere and I may play around with the colors and layout some but overall this is what the new site is going to look like.

Where Are The Old Posts?

If you’ve visited before, that’s probably that next thing on your mind - where the heck did all those old posts go? Well, I have them backed up but I decided not to restore the old database files.

Why?

Well, there were a lot of crappy posts and I decided I wanted a fresh start on this blog. I’m going to try to post at least once a week on this blog - no promises, but that’s a heck of a lot better than the five or six times a year I was managing before.

The Topic of This Blog Will Be…

As an Internet Marketer, most people would probably expect that I use this blog as a pulpit to promote myself and services. To them I say fooey. I have other blogs that I use to promote what I do. I’m going to use this blog to write about whatever I damn well please.

I know - I know - I should have a well defined theme if I want to attract a loyal following of readers… blah blah blah. The truth is, I just want a place where I can write about whatever it is I feel like. If for the day it’s marketing stuff, then so be it. But don’t be shocked if I feel like talking about ice cream flavors, motorcycles, iPhones, or something else that seems completely off topic.

And that’s all I have to say for today - I’ll be posting again soon, but not too soon.

Thanks for stopping by.

Gary
(If you really feel the need to see the business side of Gary Ruplinger, then you can see a few of my websites in the “links” section in the sidebar of the blog.)