How creative are you? (Small Business E-commerce Link Digest – June 5, 2009)

Since reviewing Hugh MacLeod’s “Ignore Everybody”, I’ve been giving lots of thought to the nature of creativity. Why does creativity matter? Because, as Bryan Eisenberg points out, most marketers suffer from impotence. And not because they have bad ideas for how to promote their product, but because they don’t have enough ideas on how to have a different product. It reminds me of the story in Harry Beckwith’s “Selling the Invisible”
– one of thinks’ 12 most important books of the last 10 years – about Beckwith wasting 3 days trying to write copy advertising a new product. A flawed product as it turns out. As Beckwith’s boss noted, “If it’s that hard to write the ad, fix the product.”

Is your product or service equally flawed? What can you do about it? Read on, Big Thinkers. Read on:

• Short of creative ideas? Here are 10 blogs designed to stimulate your creativity. [Hat tip: David Armano on Twitter]
• Or maybe you’re the type that prefers case studies. ProBlogger has a fascinating piece today about how one remarkable product drove 12,000 pageviews (and countless downloads) for a small business. Well worth the read.
• Lowering prices is rarely a creative solution. Anyone can race their competitors to the bottom. And while value adds have been around for a long time, Linda Bustos explains why value adds like free shipping work so well. Using these reasons, can you think of other creative ways to get customers to buy?
• Once you have the right product, you’ve still got to promote it. Sitepoint offers several tips on how to self-promote without turning off your audience.
• And, since it’s been the biggest story of the week, you should read about a truly creative product: Google’s Wave. While it’s awfully preliminary to predict how much Wave may change the way we communicate – there’s no shipping product yet, for Pete’s sake – it’s safe to say Wave has the potential to reshape the web as we know it. Mashable presents the best overview I’ve seen as to why.

Hope this stir your creative juices, Big Thinkers. Use ’em to hit the ground running next week.

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