So many people think they need to re-invent the wheel when it comes to marketing. Always with the next big thing, the bang, the schwizzle, the bling, the blam… the yawn. Sure, there are some pretty exciting new ways of doing things but often people put all this time and effort into fantastic new marketing gimmicks only for them to fail because they’re too complicated, or too stupid.

But I stumbled across a new promotion from Australia’s largest ISP and phone company just now, in a business journal. In a bid to increase its share of the broadband pie, Telstra has copied one of its most successful phone promos and transplanted it straight into the mobile broadband realm. Where customers can get a “free” phone handset if they sign up to a cell plan, they can now get a free laptop with a contracted mobile broadband plan. Uhh, it’s pretty simple!

The customer has to win, of course, when these plans are rolled out, otherwise they won’t succeed. But let’s face it, the concept has worked brilliantly for years with phones so why not laptops? It’s something customers are both familiar and comfortable with, and after 36 months they can trade in and get something new.

I hate to say it, but a big ISP has impressed me (albeit with their pragmatism and common-sense).

Already people are wondering why we chose the name “Strong Arm Tactics” for our blog. So, I figure we owe an explanation. We’re the little guys. We like to support other little guys, and we’re not exactly huge fans of those massive software companies that roar and beat their chests and drive little companies out of business.

That said, let me tell you a little about our company. Our parent company is called Manaccom, which is a small cap stock listed on the German and Australian stock exchanges. Manaccom has traditionally been a software publisher focused on delivering boxed software to retail outlets. In 2007 Manaccom and another company merged. This other company, Jumbo Corporation, has been in the e-commerce business since before broadband was invented. Currently they do some cool stuff in the online space selling lottery tickets and running a nifty little affiliates program (Jumbo Affiliates) and a cool rewards site (Jumbo Rewards).

Our little division doesn’t actually fit into any of the departments above, but kind of works side-by-side. Our group is nominally called Sellerbyte and we started off with a network of online stores mainly selling software. ZoneAlarmStore is one of our flagship software stores and it incorporates our unique selling point - the shopping cart. Most of our development time has gone into making the shopping cart the easiest to use online payment system around. Go ahead and visit ZoneAlarmStore and go through the motions of buying a software download. Of course you don’t need to actually buy it, just have a look. I’d love your feedback about its ease of use.

So there’s the first part of what Sellerbyte does. The other focus of our business is to build online tools to make the life of small business people easy. Our first product 2Large2Email is billed as the simple way to send large files. No more bounced emails, no more FedEx, no more having to get the tech guys to setup an FTP server (that you can’t use anyway). Just a plain vanilla, even-my-mother-can-use-it way of sending those large files that you really want Mary Jones to have today. It’ll be up and running in July and we’ll be asking for a monthly subscription for people who want to use the product. Although, I should point out that we have a dozen premium accounts to give to people who would like to test it out and answer a few questions about performance and ease of use.

We’ll be releasing other products soon too, all designed to make operating a small business easier, more efficient and sometimes even fun. So stay tuned and drop by every now and again. We’ll be blogging about what’s new on the web, tips about how to run a business efficiently (yep, that’s my background) and cool developer tricks. Nige our Web Chef will comment on the tech stuff, Ben our Web Marketing Guru will write the about-once-a-week article on marketing (when he can drag himself away from his SEOing) and because I really am not a technical person I’ll make observations about business.

Oh yeah, and that brings me back to why we called this space Strong Arm Tactics. It’s basically the antithesis of our business ideology. We’re the little guy working for the little guy, battling against the megatron companies of the world, just trying to eek out our little market niche. Why not help us?