Small Business Marketing

As I ponder this question, as I am sure you are too, there are many thoughts that whip around in our minds. Students of marketing are no longer only being taught the standard marketing strategy. The shift to online marketing has gained such strength that those that had never considered the Internet a viable choice are now including it as an important part of all their marketing efforts. One of the reasons for that shift is the vast amount of monies that are saved on printing costs vs. online set up fees.

In the past business owners had no choice but to pay out the hefty fees necessary to print hundreds of copies for their ad runs only to find that the ad campaign failed or had at most a small response rate. If they were tracking the response then they had to go back to the board and create a new ad campaign and print and mail that doubling their initial investment. On the contrary, once the website has been created the expense of changing the look or feel of your campaign is minor.

Both online and offline the length of time that it takes a browser to become a buyer may not be much different. But how do you turn a browser into a buyer? As marketing professionals and students alike know very well, it takes seven to ten contacts with a customer before they become the sought after buyer. Familiarity is the key. You have to build trust and that only comes with time. After the sale that trust must continue to increase or the new buyer may not come back and certainly won’t refer their friends and family to you. However, I am getting ahead of myself. We’ll save this discussion for another time.

Some of you may think that your business is different. You don’t have a product that would benefit from an online presence. Perhaps you think that traditional marketing is the only way to go. I would like to offer an example if you will indulge me. Let’s say you own a bakery. We’ll call it My Little Taste of Italy. You are located in a small town in southern California and have a loyal, local, customer base. As you sell perishable goods how can you possibly benefit from an internet presence? I will now show you just how viable the internet is for a business such as this.

Our first step is to put together a web presence. This will take some marketing dollars that you may feel are better spent in the local market but realize we are now talking global marketing. As you know very well, as your market area increases so does your potential customer base. When putting together your website you will need to optimize your web presence with every available means. So what you need to consider are not only your keyword density but what keywords you should use. This is done by checking out the competition. Look at the words like, bakery, Italy, Italian, and perhaps some of your product line biscotti, rosettes, cakes, cookies, muffins, brownies, and any combination of those words. After checking out the competition you will know whether you should continue to use these as your keywords or look for more specific ones.

Once your site is complete and your online presence is there you need to begin your marketing efforts. One thing that you should do is to link the offline with the online markets. Perhaps you can send a custom postcard to make your offline market aware of the convenience of online ordering. Continuing to mix the two marketing arenas is always a wise investment. As I have heard it said many times before, putting all your eggs in one basket is asking for trouble.

There are specific steps you should take to optimize your web presence. Having a website is just the beginning. Lead generation, customer acquisition, 1st transaction, subsequent sales, delivery of content, and back-end sales marketing efforts should be interlinked both online and offline. If you are not doing this you risk leaving sales unrealized and money on the proverbial table.

It is well known in marketing arenas that spending minimum amounts of money to obtain leads will result in minimum, low quality leads. So what I am suggesting you do is to narrow your lead base by qualifying your buyer. If a customer is really interested in what you have to offer they WILL take the time to learn all they can about you. One of the things the bakery we used as our model, My Little Taste of Italy, does is to network effectively both online and off. You are your best salesman, let others know you are there and if your product is as good as you believe it is your customers will come back again and again.

Besides networking what else does My Little Taste of Italy do? They have products of the highest quality, yet if others don’t know they exist how are they ever going to win new business. Let’s see what else they do to further promote their goodies? One idea they might try is adding a little something extra in outgoing packages. Why would they spend hard earned income giving away goods for free? If they truly have the best products around, then giving out samples can only increase the chance of customers trying something different in their next order. The more they try the more they will buy. That is why samples have been such a profitable investment in any business effort over the years.

Another point I would like to make here is presentation is priceless. No matter how good your product is you want to wow your customers. Make sure when your customers receive their packages they are satiated with all of their senses. Remember the eye is the window to the soul and the presentation is as important as the offering. For this reason the bakery we have chosen as our example, My Little Taste of Italy, packages with care each and every outgoing shipment.

Now you have your product and packaging, your web presence and a few customers. Let’s see what we can do to increase the customer base. Article marketing has been proven to be an effective tool. Use the media, whether offline or on to grow your business. Be sure the information is such that the media will even care. A holiday is a good time to send out an article or press release to announce an event, new product, or business expansion that you are promoting. Again we turn to the bakery. One thing that My Little Taste of Italy could do is put together care packages for the soldiers stationed overseas. That would be a good idea for promoting their business while serving the community. The media loves the holiday angle. One of the benefits is that any coverage you gain by making the media aware of your efforts costs you only the time and effort to put the information in-front of them if you have the ability and talent to write an effective press release or article. Your press release communicates a newsworthy story and should not be a blatant ad. Once crafted, you will need to disseminate it to the right audience if you expect it to be picked up; this is where a press release copywriter becomes invaluable. The amount of money you will invest to have a skilled press release writer send your release out is one of the wisest investments you will make. In addition, once you get picked up by one media source the possibility of being picked up by another greatly increases.

While you continue to market your business in non-traditional ways and traditional alike you should always remember that with marketing the terms are always changing. What I mean by that is look at the telemarketers, email marketing, and such. With the ever changing tide of laws governing how we can market and what we can do to avoid spamming our marketing efforts should never be stagnant or single focused. In other words, use several types of marketing, not just a single email campaign. Varying your efforts guarantees you won’t suffer huge losses in revenue if what you are doing is affected by these changes.

Copyright 2007 Ginger Marks

By: Ginger Marks

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For many people, constantly shuttering in the shadow of debt has become a way of life. It may seem as though their debt is never ending and their dream of being debt-free is unattainable. For these people, there is no better solution than a debt consolidation program.  

Debt consolidation is taking all of your debts, whether you have credit card debts, student loans, or home mortgages, and putting them into one larger payment that is paid off over a longer period of time.

These programs are more manageable because you do not have to worry about multiple debts that all need to be paid at the same time. By stretching them out to be paid over a longer period of time, your monthly payment decreases. Also, they tend to have low interest rates that are much more reasonable than paying high credit card interest rates.

Let’s look at an example:

Credit Card – $10,000 at 16%

Student Loan – $15,000 at 11%

Car Loan – $18,000 at 10%

Mortgage Loan – $57,000 at 8%

In this example, we have $100,000 of debt at various interest rates. If you consolidate all of your debt into a program, you might be able to get a favorable 6% interest rate. Depending on how low of an interest rate you receive, you can cut your interest payments in half. But do not get too comfortable with a consolidation loan because you are still in debt.

In the end, debt consolidation can make your debts a lot more manageable and your life a lot less stressful. If you decide that a debt consolidation program is right for you, the next step is to go to a local bank and talk with one of their representatives.

By: Nick Tart

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When there are lots of debts against you name, then you are likely to come across a crises situation soon, which may prove to be disastrous for your future. Certainly, you must take adequate steps for debt management, so that repaying the debts becomes lot easier, keeping your circumstances in mind.

There are many ways of controlling your debts. You can make a plan of your own for reining in the debts, but it may not yield fruits as you may be lacing the experience. So, it would be wise to take the debt help from those who have gone through the crises or better you take the services of experts of the field.

You can find plenty of companies, which are providing it help to the people. Just when you have enrolled you name with them, they will contact you and take charge of your debts. But how they work is what you must know beforehand.

You will be provided with a plan of repayment of debts. This plan will be prepared in consultation with you, keeping in view your monthly earnings and the amount you can easily spare for repaying the debts, without cutting much on the routine expenses. So, the experts arrive at an amount by deducting your expenses from your income, which implies that you can easily make debt repayment through it.

Know that the companies, providing debt management help, also have contacts with your creditors. These contacts can be used for negotiating with your creditors over reducing your interest payments on debts or even the overall debt amount can be pruned. This means that you then make low monthly payment to pay back the debts.

But one crucial part of management is that you are provided with counseling services, which keeps you away from falling again into debts in future. You are told to stick to a budget by controlling your spending as much as you can, so that you can save lots of money for timely repaying your debts. While searching for a suitable help for managing your debts, ensure that the company is experienced one and provides counseling services as well.

By: Gracie Bishop

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Create a video blog

This is a subject that I am excited about because you really can start a no investment work from home business and earn your way to a six figure income. Sounds incredible but it is true. What I am about to share with you has made millions of dollars for the average person and it can work for you too. This is a condensed formula with limited references but is enough to inspire further investigation on your part.

So how do I start a no investment work from home business anyway? The following will be enough to get you started. First you need a business model that is free to join. The most popular of these is affiliate programs. They cost nothing to join and the affiliate owner shares a generous commission with the affiliates. ClickBank is one of the most reliable and used affiliate networks on the net and is a good place to start.

ClickBank will send you a check every two weeks for the sales you generate through their system. Some products pay a whopping 75% commission! Get a free account with them.

After you have gotten your account with ClickBank browse the Marketplace for products that you might be passionate about. You need to pick a product that you can write about in a general way. When you decide on a product create your hoplink to your affiliate sales page.

Next you will need to create a free blog through Blogger or WordPress to use as a presale site and link to your affiliate sales page. All traffic will be sent here first. The general rule of thumb is never send traffic straight to the affiliate sales page. You need to brand yourself on the blog and pre-sell the affiliate product. Blog at least once a day on a general topic that is relevant to your chosen affiliate product. Don’t blog junk. Try to use original content that will answer questions, solve problems or how to steps relating to the affiliate product of choice. Make sure you link to your sales page in each blog you post and also create a visible link on the side bar of your blog for people to click through to your affiliate sales page.

Next you will need to drive free traffic to your blog. You can do this using article marketing and news releases. If you generate 2 clicks a day to your blog per article you need to write until you have at least 200 – 300 active articles before you get significant traffic. Those that have 1,000 active articles generally get great traffic. What do you write about? Your theme must carry through with the idea of your affiliate sales page. Your second source of article ideas will come from your key words.

Choosing keywords is the most important part of this process. If you pick good keywords you can explode your traffic. You need to pick high demand low results keywords. By low search results I mean that there are under 5,000 listed results for your keyword used with quotes. You have a good chance of ranking higher in the search engines that way.

Use your keyword in the article title, in the first paragraph and make it a link in the last paragraph. This is basic SEO that will help you rank well so people can find you and you can get that free traffic to your blog.

If you do a fair job at writing your articles people will click through to your blog. Many of those will click your affiliate link if you make it visible and tempting on the side bar of your blog. Then the sales page will do it’s job and get you sales.

Now this is all free marketing that will get you sales. It is important however that you reinvest your initial checks into your business so you can secure and speed it up. The missing pieces are a good capture pre-sale page, an auto responder and paid advertising. They are not extremely expensive but are a necessary next step.

This brief plan can get you up and running and earning checks in no time. There are other paths to the same end that you can take, I mention these because it is what I used with success. So you really can start a no investment work from home business and build it into an empire.

By: Vance Williamson

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