Laypeople who look down on marketing ? especially long-copy, hard-sell direct marketing like e-book microsites ? say, ?If your product was any good, you wouldn?t have to promote it with such hype.?

Doctors, attorneys, and other professionals have traditionally held that point of view, along with many others.

Nice to think so, but na?ve. Sad to say, it doesn?t work that way in the real world.

?The expression ?If you build it, they will come? is not true,? said Steve Murphy, CEO, Rodale Inc., in an interview with Fast Company (3/05).

?We had lots of great properties at Rodale, but not enough of them were known. We needed to expose them to the mass market.?

Does your product or service ?sell itself?? Or do even good products need great marketing?

At first glance, Richard Kirshenbaum ? co-chairman of Kirshenbaum Bond & Partners ? is not my kind of guy.

He dresses too cool, has long hair, and runs a trendy NYC ad agency focusing on branding. Yuch!

So I was pleasantly surprised when, in an interview with Psychology Today (4/05, p. 34), he had this to day about humor in advertising:

?Humorous ads are troubling because you have to create a link to the product and its benefit. Often, people remember a funny ad but they don?t remember the product.?

I now have a growing admiration for Richard, and think his assessment is spot on ? really clever or funny ads become memorable as ads, but often do squat for product sales.

What do you think?

In a ?Views? column in DM News (4/25/05. p. 32), George Le Pera makes the case that long sales letters are better than short sales letters.

Accoding to Le Pera, who is creative director at Chinnici Direct (New York, NY), long letters cement relationships, strengthen brands, stand out in the mailbox ? and get read.

Being a freelance copywriter who specializes in writing long sales letters, I want to agree with George.

But I don?t think that a long letter is always better than a short letter in every situation.

Your thoughts?

The song ?I Am? by Train has this line: ?I never had a day where money didn?t get in my way.?

Is money a problem for you?

Numerous surveys show that couples fight about money more than anything else, with the possible exceptions of division of household labor, parenting, and sex.

I am in the middle of the road as far as money is concerned: I like money and it is important to me, but I am not obsessed with it.

Here are 5 money tips that have worked for me; they may or may not work for you:

1. Do something in which you can make a higher than average income. A lot of white collar corporate guys my age (47) in my neighborhood (Bergen County, NJ) make around $100,000 a year. So I want to make at least double that. (I typically make at least 5 to 6 times that, but my goal is to double it.)

2. The best piece of financial advice for self-employed people I ever got was from Florida freelance writer David Kohn: ?Live below your means.? This was easy when I was single; having a wife who likes to spend money makes it more difficult.

3. Train yourself to enjoy feelings of affluence and wealth from having money rather than from having possessions. If you have to buy and own stuff to feel wealthy (the BMW), you will get caught in a vicious cycle of spending money as you make it ? and always needing more.

4. Have no consumer debt. I always pay cash for cars. I bought my first home with a mortgage because I had to. But the next house I bought for cash.

5. Avoid ?compare despair.? There will always be people richer and poorer than you. Unless you are Bill Gates, you will never be the richest kid on the block. So don?t get caught up in worrying about whether your neighbor has more than you.

There are two types of salespeople: good salespeople and bad salespeople.

The bad salespeople rely on outdated 1960s sales training, spewing canned scripts that repulse and annoy prospects, sending them running for the door.

My wife and I were fed one of these lines recently when shopping for a mini-van.

We were in an exploratory stage, and had no reason on Earth to hurry: our old mini-van was running fine, and would do so for many months. But it was getting old and unreliable, so we were planning to upgrade.

When the salesperson saw that we were going to walk out of the dealership without buying, he ran after us and repeated, like a robot, a line I knew he was given in Sales Training 101: ?What would it take to put you in this car today??

Our skin crawled and we ran, he in hot pursuit. Did he ask where we were in our buying cycle ? just looking or in dire need ? and tailor his approach accordingly.

His question was clearly 100% motivated by his self-interest ? his desire to get a sales commission ? and not what might be best for us? So his personality immediately became repellant instead of attractive to us, and we responded accordingly?

What experiences have YOU had ? what things have salespeople said or done to you ? that similarly turned you off and lost them the sale?

Are there certain industries whose business model is dependent on not helping customers?

Here are some that have been suggested to me by various people:

1. Insurance ? my late father, an insurance agent for five decades, once said, ?Insurance companies want to write fire insurance policies for pig iron at the bottom of the ocean.? They want to collect fat premiums for policies they will never have to pay off, and often make it difficult for policyholders to collect on legitimate claims.

2. HMOs and managed health care — see #1 above.

3. Psychotherapists ? if the psychotherapist quickly cures every patient in a few weeks, the lifetime value of each client diminishes drastically.

4. Stock brokers ? Wall Street is rigged against the individual investor. Brokers are told to push shares their firms underwrite, not those stocks that are the best investment. If the stock they recommend loses you money, they make commissions three times — first when you buy, then when you sell, and again when you put it into something else.

5. Advertising agencies ? have a financial incentive to sell you ad campaigns that are (a) the most elaborate and expensive (increases billings) and (b) win creative awards (which helps win them new business).

I don’t mean to imply that everyone, or even the majority, of practitioners in these fields are out to cheat customers.

I am just observing that there is an incentive inherent in each business model NOT to always do what is best for the customer (which a smart practitioner knows is canceled out by the business benefits of delivering superior customer satisfaction).

Would you dispute any of the above? Or do you agree wholeheartedly? Any other industries you?d add to the list?

Business book authors tell us we can succeed by ?working smarter, not harder.?

The problem is, many of our competitors are as smart as we are. And some are smarter.

Therefore, ?work smarter, not harder? is a myth.

The fact is, almost without exception, the very successful people I know ? all of whom are smart ? also work hard: 50 to 60 hours a week or more.

The people who regularly post on this blog are successful, so let me ask you ? how many hours a week do YOU work?

A. less than 40.
B. 40 to 49.
C. 50 to 59.
D. 60 to 69.
E. More than 70.

And do you work that hard because you want to ? or because you HAVE to?

I hate networking for several reasons.

One is I?m introverted and shy.

The other is I like to be home ? not out schmoozing for business.

But let me ask you?.

If you HAD to pick one or the other, what factor would you say is the most important contributor to business success?

1. WHAT you know — your skills, knowledge, training, expertise, and experience, or

2. WHO you know — the contacts you make through networking?