<span style=”color: #888888;”>*This post is shared courtesy of <a href=”http://www.brightercausemarketing.com/” target=”_blank”>Brighter World Cause Marketing</a>, leading firm in marketing communications for cause-related campaigns.</span>

While staying at a lovely bed & breakfast in Snow Hill, North Carolina, I was introduced to an incredibly tasty coffee. When I asked my innkeeper where the coffee came from, she named a North Carolina-based business that donates a portion of its coffee purchases to a turtle rescue nonprofit.

My ears perked up as I heard this. Have I discovered a new, delicious coffee company that uses cause marketing? How exciting!

The business is Joe Van Gogh, a coffee roaster based out of Hillsborough, NC with coffee houses in Chapel Hill and Durham. I really love their campaign because when it comes down to the heart of it, they support a handful of excellent causes, and combine these into their overall brand as a sustainable, community-focused business that appreciates the fine nature of coffee.

My Fave Joe Van Gogh Campaign

For the month of May, Joe Van Gogh sells the Organic Sea Turtle Blend, that benefits the Karen Beasley Sea Turtle Rescue and Rehabilitation Center. The program rescues, rehabilitates, and releases injured sea turtles. With every bag of Joe Van Gogh coffee, 10% of net profits are donated to the rescue center.

Even more inspiring is the company helped come up with the coffee blend by working with an 11-year-old girl, who shared a passion for turtles and helping to save them. As a joint effort, they used profits and marketing in the community to help raise awareness for sea turtles and their endandered status.

And here’s a quick glance at some other causes the coffee company supports:

• JVG worked with the local Habitat for Humanity during the holiday season, offering their “Home for the Holidays” blend. A clever coffee name and a wonderful charity.

• Last autumn, they supported Grounds for Health, a fantastic charity that offers much-needed screenings to detect and treat cervical cancer for women in coffee growing countries. Check out the description.

The recipe for Joe Van Gogh’s cause marketing success has to do with the stories they tell with their featured coffee blends. When promoting a cause, the organization uses the art of telling a story behind each coffee to get things going.

Great job, Joe Van Gogh!

(posted by Megan)

*This article appears courtesy of Bob Bly’s Direct Response Letter, located at www.bly.com

The lift letter, also known as a lift note, is the second, small letter that is sometimes inserted into a direct mail package along with the main multi-page sales letter. It often has a headline that reads something like, “Read this only if you are NOT interested in buying [name of product].”

The purpose, as its name implies, is to lift response. But what do you put in a lift note to achieve that goal?

John Forde suggests 10 possible topics and goals for lift letters:

1. To counter a key objection.

2. As a place to test your second-best or alternative headlines.

3. To give readers an extra testimonial.

4. As an endorsement (approved, of course) from an authority or a celebrity.

5. To emphasize a time deadline on the purchase.

6. To focus on the best aspect of the offer (premiums, guarantees, discounts).

7. To emphasize long-standing credibility (a formal letterhead might work well here).

8. To keep the message newsworthy. Let the lift note cover events that have happened since the initial mailing was written.

9. To underscore the ONE THING that really gives your product an edge over everyone else.

10. To emphasize track record, unusual and impressive credentials, or to make the benefits of the most important package feature especially clear.

Source: The Copywriter’s Roundtable.

*by John Forde, whose free weekly e-Letter, “The Copywriter’s Roundtable” is definitely worth subscribing to.

Alex Osborn, founder of a super-successful New York ad Agency and of the Creative Education Foundation, came up with a list of brainstorming “rules” in 1963:

No judgment in early stages: Collect as many ideas as possible without imposing criticism.

Encourage wild or stupid ideas: Don’t refuse to write anything on the board. You never know where it might lead.

Forbid discussion: This may seem counter-intuitive to old-school thinkers. What’s a meeting without talk, after all? But at the start of brainstorming, analysis is death. Wait until you have your long list of ideas, first.

Ban cynics: Early criticism of ideas guarantees you fewer good ideas overall. Anyone who can’t accommodate randomness of thought shouldn’t be there.

Make the process visible: Be sure to record the ideas as the come on a flipchart or board. They must be seen by the group to be useful.

Impose time limits: The pressure of the clock helps ideas to flow more quickly, spontaneously. 30 minutes is good.

These rules aren’t easy to keep. But they worked for Osborn and thousands of others, from copywriters to politicians to engineers. Systems work if you give ‘em a chance.

*This article appears courtesy of Bob Bly’s Direct Response Letter, located at www.bly.com

Incredibly, sites can actually have different positions in Google depending on who is searching for them!

“Several things can account for differences in search engine position results,” says my SEO guru Ed Taylor. “One factor is the Google server (data center) that is accessed. Google has many data centers around the world and they often have slightly different rankings.”

Another factor affecting the results you see in the Search Engine Results Page (SERP) is the location of your PC. According to Ed, this is especially evident on searches that Google deems of a local nature (i.e. a dentist). In the case of local searches, very often the Google Map setting will appear with a group of listings specific to the local area.

Ranking differences can also result from the searcher’s computer settings. Computers that are logged into a Google account often display different ranking results that than those that are not. These results are influenced by the web sites the searcher has visited in the past.

Recommendation: The best way to view core Google indexes — the rankings uninfluenced by your browsing history and location – is to log out of your Google account, clear out your browser’s cookies and cache, and then perform a search on your keyword.

Source: Ed Taylor, www.edtaylor.com