Sometimes old school is the way to go. When we talk about advertising on this blog, the first thought that pops in the minds of many readers is online advertising. They think of Google AdSense, banner ads, and other marketing materials that show up on the various websites on the Internet. Maybe you think about newspaper spots and television commercials too.

Along the way, many companies neglect one of the oldest styles of advertising: direct mail. To many people, direct mail campaigns are no different than junk mail. We’ve all received countless pamphlets and other piece of mail that are meant solely to advertise a product or service to us. Perhaps you’ve received a direct mailing around election time from a particular candidate.

There has to be something about direct mail that has allowed it to survive all these years. Before you consider adding direct mail to your overall marketing plan, you will want to make some preparations. First, it is important to hire a good copywriter to produce the most effective text possible. Next, you will want to look toward a good typesetter or graphic designer to assist you with the layout. Good words won’t go far if the format is not appealing.

The most important element of all is distribution. Blanketing the entire city with your pamphlet is not going to be cost-effective. Instead, look into targeted mailing lists from customers that are more likely to convert. This is why so many retailers ask for your postal code at time of purchase. By compiling the demographics of their clientele, they are better able to understand which neighborhoods they should be targeting. Otherwise, it’s just a waste of money.

Shout out to Etienne Teo for the inspiration for this post.

Last week we asked what microblogging system will be a contender against Twitter and 45% said you thought Identi.ca will be. This weeks question is…

Blogging is not a one-way form of communication. It’s a conversation and a great way to encourage conversation is to reward your top commentators. Many blogs, like Beyond the Rhetoric and Derek Semmler dot Com, make a post to highlight the top commentators of each month.

Generally, these same blogs make use of a plug-in that displays the current top commentators, but what if you are not around when the count is reset? There are techniques to run a mySQL query or to check into the Google cache of your blog, but there is actually a WordPress plug-in that is a lot more powerful than that.

My Top Commentators places a utility inside the WordPress Dashboard where you can check on all sorts of information on the people who are leaving comments on your blog. Just like the default Comments section, you can see their email addresses, URLs, and IP addresses. The difference is that you can see who left the most comments over a defined period of time.

You can see the top commentators for today, yesterday, last 7 days, this month, last month, this year, or last year. The My Top Commentators plug-in can be downloaded here. It was coded by Pawan Agrawal of MaxBlogPress.

Last night Netenberg updated b2evolution, Coppermine, Drupal, Gallery, Joomla, Mambo, Moodle, SMF, TikiWiki and WordPress…

Updates:

- b2evolution: 1.10.2 -> 2.4.2
- Coppermine Photo Gallery: 1.4.16 -> 1.4.18
- Drupal: 6.2 -> 6.3
- Gallery: 2.2.4 -> 2.2.5
- Joomla 1.5: 1.5.2 -> 1.5.4
- Mambo Open Source: 4.6.3 -> 4.6.5
- Moodle: 1.9 -> 1.9.2
- SMF: 1.1.4 -> 1.1.5
- TikiWiki: 1.9.10.1 -> 1.9.11
- WordPress: 2.5.1 -> 2.6

If you are using these software’s I suggest you upgrade.

The human mind tends to see the world as a series of opposite extremes. There’s city and then there’s country. There’s fast and then there’s slow. There’s rich and then there’s poor. All the gray areas in between are then defined by these extremes.

Looking at the speed of road vehicles, for example, you could say that a low-powered scooter is very slow and a high-powered Italian supecar is very fast. The average daily commuter fits somewhere in between. You could say that a Toyota Yaris would be about a third of the way along on this spectrum, whereas a V6-powered Mustang would be a little closer to the “fast” end of the spectrum.

Following this same line of thinking, this is how we would typically define the difference between success and failure. We can be pretty hard on ourselves when something doesn’t go too well with our businesses. Maybe you missed out on a potentially lucrative contract. The anguish can be quite punishing. That said, we can sometimes forget to celebrate our successes. Where’s the reward to counter that punishment?

Without celebrating your successes, it may start to feel like you are working for nothing. By celebrating your successes, you can place greater value in your small victories and generally be more motivated to seek out greater success. It’s all about positive reinforcement. Reward yourself and you will want to seek out that reward again.

Don’t forget to share these successes with your employees and associates too, because it will help motivate them as well.

Attention bloggers if you have manually installed WordPress then you should immediately upgrade to 2.6. There are lots of enhancements to 2.6.

For those who installed WordPress with Fantastico, Netenberg usually has the upgrade released a week or two later. We do post Fantastico updates on the blog so keep an eye open for that.