“Hard times
Baby, well they come to us all
Sure as the ticking of the clock on the wall
Sure as the turning of the night into day.”
—Bruce Springsteen

We haven’t seen the Count since Presidents’ Day, so what say we visit him again? Ready for a weekend’s worth of reading on a Thursday? Let’s go:

10 foolproof ways to earn your landing page visitor’s trust.

9 P’s of small business marketing.

8 ways to offer better customer service on Facebook.

7 bad habits of insanely productive people.

6 things they don’t tell you in business school.

5 tips for running a social media contest.

4 steps to improving your search engine marketing strategy.

3 questions you must ask before you rebrand your business.

2 exciting things about QR codes.

And finally:

1 thing you should measure to guarantee an improvement in marketing ROI.

You could do much worse today than to spend your lunch hour (plus eight minutes) watching this Marx Bros. classic. Fast forward to the 46-minute mark if you want to watch the mirror scene (don’t ask who cleaned up all the broken mirror shards, just go with it).

According to this blog post, which is reporting on a survey of 1 million small business websites by SMB DigitalScape, 6 out of 10 small business websites in the U.S. are missing either a local or toll-free telephone number on the home page to contact the business and nearly 3 in 4 lack an email link on their home page for consumers to contact the business.

Those have to be two of the most appalling statistics I’ve seen in a long, long time.

Takeaway for marketers: If you have to ask why, you need to find a new job.

A year ago I told you that no one wanted ads on their cell phones. The other day, Will Oremus said the same thing over at Salon. I wonder how many more years it’ll be before cell phone companies get the point.