Bellagios Pizza - well done, sir!

We went to the Portland Zoo yesterday to celebrate Lori's birthday (note to self: parking is awful!!) and then stayed overnight at a friends house. It was a lot of fun and on the trip home we stopped for some lunch.

Not being familiar with the area we were driving through we just followed the signs to a Burger King (or BK or whatever its called now) because Sarah Jo likes the crown shaped nuggets. Nathan, on the other hand, won't touch them so when we saw a sign in a nearby store saying "Pizza by the Slice" we were sold.

The Pizza parlor was "Bellagios" and I guess there are a few in the Portland area. When Lori and Nathan went in they were out of cheese pizza (go figure!) and so offered to make a fresh one. While they were waiting and making small talk Nathan mentioned the trip to the zoo being for his mom's birthday.

And so - to finally get to the point of this story - the gentleman behind the counter gave us the pizza for free. That's right - three slices of pizza (I had BBQ chicken - yum!) gratis.

So why did this impress me? Well...

1. He (I wish I could give his name but he wasn't wearing a name-tag) knew we were not from the area and would not become regular customers.
2. We had already ordered so they already had our money.
3. Lori's birthday was three days ago!

So basically, there was no need for the kind of customer service we got. No way for that generosity to come full circle. And that is what struck me so much - they were nice JUST TO BE NICE. And you can bet that if we are ever in Beaverton again looking for lunch, Bellagios will be on our short list.

So if you live in the Portland area, please check out Bellagios Pizza (one near you!). If this experience is representative then they deserve your business. And the pizza was really good, too!

Internet Marketing anyone?

I've been dipping my toes in the waters of Internet Marketing recently; signing up for free e-books promising to make me a fortune, getting on lots of email lists, following gurus on Twitter and the like. I've always kind of figured that internet marketing was the web's version of a back alley shyster ("wanna buy a watch?") but I'm beginning to change my tune a little. Sure, there are a fair share of scammers but there are also a lot of regular folks making a living (some more and some less) in the industry.

So far I've learned a bit about CPC and CPM and CPA, about opt-in pages and auto-responders, about PLR and squeeze pages, about affiliate systems and even why those sales pages are

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So will this dabbling turn into an additional revenue stream for me? I dunno yet (I'm still making my list of "good guys" and "bad guys") but the fact that there are some honest marketers out there gives me hope.

Stay tuned...