Taco Bell advertising makes me want to poop in a shoebox and mail it to my neighbor in December marked, "From Santa."

If you watched the lamest World Series in history like me, you must have seen the Taco Bell commercials somewhere around 44,000 times. I'll give you a quick recap of the commercials, I'll get to the stolen base promo debacle later. They go something like this:

Actor pretending to be Keanu Reeves at a Phish concert: Yo! Little Bro! I gotta tell you my three rules of life!

When I was in high school I found myself working at a Culvers. It was a new restaurant and I had never eaten there before so I figured it would be some kind of diner or steak 'n shake type place. Bzzzt...Wrong! I found out on the first day that it was officially fast food.

I should point out that when I said I was working at Culvers, what I really meant to say was that I dragged myself to work for 3 weeks, wearing a baseball hat and a tie (looking like a hoosier), and bitching about it non-stop on my days off. It sucked. I just started dating this girl I really liked and the last thing on earth I wanted was to smell like fry-grease and flip burgers for a living. I mean if you were one of her friends you'd tell her to dump me for a guitar player or an architect or something. Culvers was a black hole of fun. Even working boring jobs occasionally you can find light moments. Nope. Not at Culvers. Culvers is about as fun as an Oprah Winfrey pole dance.

....

Yeah, you know those annoying things on the front page of websites that take forever to load and you usually skip because you don't want to watch some two minute long flash movie?

Such as this guy:

www.navypier.com

So recently I needed to get some coals and tobacco for my hookah. Being new to Chicago I had no idea where to go, and wasn't sure who to ask. When there's doubt, there's Google. So after doing a Google search for "Chicago hookah store" or something like that, I came up with http://www.guesshookah.com/. I went on their website, it looked pretty legit, had directions to the store and hours. Went to the store, it was basically what I had expected, talked to the guy behind the counter who was pretty enthusiastic about hookah culture and he recommended some great tobacco for me.

Now here's the take home point. There is a good chance that Guess Hookah isn't the best hookah store in Chicago. There are probably hundreds of stores that I could have patronized. But the reason I ended up there, is because they were easy to find with a search engine.

Lets say Akbar Hookahpuff owns a wonderful Hookah store called, Hookahpuffalupagus. He has the best tobacco in the city, knows more about hookah and hookah culture than anyone, and sells his hookah at a great price. Too bad I'll never know about him because he doesn't understand how a new customer finds a business these days.

Okay folks here is a free marketing technique that will make your customers like you more with about zero effort on your part.

Are you ready?

Tell jokes.