If I haven’t mentioned that the weekly Gibson newsletter is my current favorite email newsletter, let me share my appreciation again. I read this newsletter cover to cover every week and look forward to each new edition each week. Are they pitching me on Gibson? Absolutely. Is this old school marketing 101? You bet, it still works.

Last week I learned through the newsletter about Gibson having a cool presence inside Second Life and wrote about it at VTOR, this week I learned that Arlen Roth is offering free daily video guitar lessons. His first lesson is on the pentatonic scales.

If you want to learn guitar there are hundreds of different techniques. I think the fastest way to learn is getting a few lessons from another guitar player. Somebody who will show you how to play songs and techniques and teach you music theory, not only the latter.

I’m in the camp that says don’t spend too much time on learning the scales right away. Eventually scales will be your lifeblood, especially for things like improvisation and soloing, but when starting out you just want to learn to play something or it will be frustrating. For that, learn how to read tablature and pick up a handy tab read/writing tool like Power Tab Editor (freeware) or Guitar Pro (free demo, commercial). After that you’ll find tabs for popular songs all over the place.

Gibson provides a good business example website
Getting back to Gibson, business owners should look at how they have done their website as far as features, not so much as functionality. They are a fairly progressive company with links on many of their pages to digg, StumbleUpon, Reddit, etc. They offer podcasts and blogs (kind of weak, from what I’ve seen thus far) as well as have wiki (generating a lot of errors, not so good) and fairly active forums community area.  Their newsletter provides a great example of how to soft sell with value both your prospective and current customers.

Did this post make you go hmm?

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