Business Blog for American

When marketing your business, you do not have to break the bank just so you can have yourself a promotional campaign that can generate leads. These are precisely the times to be conscious of where your hard earned money is going. As such, you really have to look into possible ways that you can save on costs on your marketing efforts.

Times are hard and you might find yourself struggling to keep on attracting new clients to your business. And although it is quite tempting, do not even think about cutting your marketing budget just so you can make ends meet. If you want to start losing your client base then go right ahead and stop your marketing activities. But if you want to survive these difficult times and remain on top, you have to start thinking of clever ways to promote your business.

You do not have to regularly come up with more costly collaterals such as catalog printing or print brochures so that you can have as many leads as possible. There are other cost-effective ways to go about marketing other than your print catalogs. Here is how:

1. Market with thank you note cards.

You can always purchase a pile of them at discount shops, and then send them to your loyal clients just to let them know that you appreciate the business they provide you. Handwrite the message to make it more personal. And end with a wish for their success and well-being.

2. Be an expert.

Write articles on your expertise. If you are in catalog printing, then write articles on how to print catalogs that work and then submit these articles on websites. The more people who will be able to read your articles, the more chances of your expertise to get you the leads you need for your client base.

3. Share data and information.

This time, if you found a great article, you can share it with your customers that will appreciate such information. It will show that you are interested in them, so much so that you are keeping tabs of what can provide them solutions to some of their issues.

4. Contact people. Talk to them.

This is the most basic means to get in touch with your target clients. Just go ahead, pick up the phone and dial that number. Ask for feedback on current marketing campaigns or the ones you did for them last year. By getting in touch, you will be able to generate new business and revive old ones in the process.

5. Network, network, network

Go to events and attend trade show exhibits. But bear in mind that networking is not about getting as many business cards as you can. Networking is about making connections and forming working relationships that can help you grow your business.

There are lots more ways to market your business without costing you an arm and a leg. You just have to be creative in finding out the means to promote what you have according to your budget to generate leads for your business.

The e-mail auto-responder is probably the greatest invention ever in Internet marketing, and quite possibly in the history of all marketing. There’s no more having to figure out how to keep contact with people through snail mail, phone calls or knocking on their doors. Now you’ve got the perfect way to follow up with prospects and customers, automatically, every day or two days or three days, or whenever you want.

You can sequence the whole thing, all of your information marketing correspondence, through an auto-responder. The computer takes care of it, so you don’t have to worry about it at all. It’s incredible what you can do. Just think of how you can:

● welcome new subscribers and direct them to your web site;
● send follow up messages, as many and as often as you want;
● introduce information products, answer questions and deliver downloads;
● track clicks through your own domain name; and
● deliver e-mail automatically when prospects are most likely to read, click and order.

Now you can get auto-responders quickly and easily to support your information marketing efforts. Just go to aweber.com, icontact.com, or getresponse.com and get your own up and running for just $10 or $20 a month. Some of the providers also offer templates, e-mail analytics, online surveys, and video e-mail capabilities to back-up their basic services.

You can get access to detailed reports that identify who opens your messages and who is clicking through to your links. Easy-to-read charts and graphics are offered in real time. Addresses that bounce messages are captured and purged automatically. Deliverability rates can reach 98% to 99%. There are tons of other technical benefits, too.

But what I like best is how auto-responders allow me to “visit” my prospects and customers as often as I like. I sit down and I say, “Okay, I can’t go to their house. I can’t have a conversation with them in person. But I can imagine how it would go, and I can build an e-mail sequence that will be like having that private conversation.”

The here’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to write answers to their questions. I’m going to build trust. I’m going to give away my free-line content to them. I’m going to really do a great job at building a relationship.

And you know what else? At the end of everyone of those auto-response e-mails, and maybe even sometimes in the middle or the beginning, I’m going to say, “By the way, if you’re getting value from what I’ve been bring you, and you want to get in the fast lane, why don’t you come buy my information products over here and skip all the interim stuff. Get right to the advanced information products I’ve created for you.”

And that’s how I think about using e-mail auto-responders for information marketing. You might want to turn up the pressure and be a hard-sell person, or you might turn it down and make your auto-responses more soft-sell. In any event, this is best the way you can follow up with people. This is how you can use e-mail to build relationships. Auto-responders make it all possible.

Walt Disney was in his late 30’s when he got the idea for Disneyland. His daughters were young and he enjoyed taking them to the amusement park on Sundays. But while his daughters sat on the rides, he sat on the bench, munching peanuts and thinking.

He thought about how much fun the parks were for kids – but not the adults who brought them. They were dirty, ugly and litter strewn and he wondered if it had to be that way. Most of all he thought of ways to build a park that would be bigger, brighter, cleaner and more fun for the whole family.

It took 15 years for his vision to become a reality. And yes, there were a great many obstacles in the way, including being on the brink of bankruptcy.

But when the park opened in 1955, it was every bit as big and exciting as Disney’s dream.

A few years later, Disney decided to build the park in Orlando, Florida. Walt didn’t live to see the completion of the park – he died almost 5 years before it opened.

On the day it opened, someone commented to Mike Vance, the creative director of Disney Studios, “Isn’t it too bad, Walt Disney didn’t live to see this?”

“He did see it,” Vance replied simply, “That’s why it’s here”.

Now you may be saying, “That’s all very well for Walt, but how do I get creative?”

Here are 6 steps for unleashing your creativity:

1) Exercise your brain!

When I was a child, my grandmother constantly told me that “brains get rusty if you don’t use them”. Science has now proved that if you don’t exercise your neural pathways, they atrophy, and conversely, the pathways that get used, strengthen.

SO START THINKING. Solve problems, learn to play chess, get creative. Just do it.

2) Read

In 1964 a Danish engineer, Karl Kroyer faced a nightmare problem. A freighter, Al Kuwait had capsized and sunk, hull upwards in Kuwait harbour.

The submerged hull, full of rotting drowned sheep carcasses, threatened to contaminate city’s desalination plant.

Kroyer’s solution? He pumped a total of 27 million ping pong balls into the hull so that the freighter slowly came back to the surface.

Where did he get his idea? From a Donald Duck comic book he’d read to his children!

One of the greatest ways to get inspired is to read inspirational books. Biographies, autobiographies, books on attitude, winning in life etc.

Just do it for 15 minutes a day and you’ll notice the results before you know it.

3) Be observant

Most people go about their lives with their minds turned off.

Just observe what’s going on around you. Can it be done better? Most inventions occur this way.

A 27 and 29 year old wondered why it was do difficult to share their personal videos with their friends. Utube was born and recently sold for 1.65 BILLION dollars! Now there’s the power of observation – and doing something with it.

4) Spend time with creative people

A fire in a fireplace will not burn with just one log. It takes two logs to burn. The flame from one is reflected in the other.

Surrounding yourself with creative people ensures that your flame ignites and continues to burn.

5) Brainstorm

One of the things Disney excelled at was “imagineering” sessions where the top people get in a room and do nothing but imagine the possibilities and design the ultimate in theme park attractions etc.

In these sessions there are no mental limits, no horizons. The Disney organisation has created a culture that is completely idea friendly, honours the imagination and unleashes creativity.

And Google, the world’s leading search engine (and boy wouldn’t I have loved to have shares when they were starting), has EXACTLY the same culture. Maybe that’s why they’re number one?

6) Turn your ideas into action

Ideas are absolutely worthless until we take action. Without action, an idea is just fantasy, a dream. An idea empowered with action becomes a force for change.

Learn to focus, communicate and take risks with your ideas and bring them into fruition. Playing safe is boring. Go out and do something!

SO WHERE TO FROM HERE?

It’s almost the end of 2006. I don’t know about you, but we found the year screamed by.

Whether you’re in business or employed, now is the time to reflect. Take that helicopter view and look at the swamp. See the crocodiles? Drain the swamp!

Decide on your major priorities for 2007 and make your business or job revolve around them, NOT the other way round.

So here are some questions you may wish to ponder before the new year starts: (Thanks to Paul Blackburn – our coach)

Are you satisfied with your performance this year? Are there things you really wanted to do, but didn’t? Did you have a plan for 2006 and did it unfold the way you thought it would?

Ask yourself: What did you do right? What did you learn? What would you want to do in 2007 as opposed to 2006? How much of what you learned in 2006 will you apply to 2007?

Who did you learn from and why? Who do you need to thank? Who supported you and who dragged you down?

What’s your life going to be like in 2007?

Decide your major projects, holidays, whatever it is you want to do.

Get out a calendar and mark them down first. Put down immovable items like birthdays, anniversaries, school activities you want to be present for etc. Then put down the projects you want to work on.

Now and only now go into finer detail. Remember the Stephen Covey’s analogy of putting the big rocks in the jar first. Then the smaller ones, then the pebbles and sand and finally the water.

Do it the other way round and you don’t fit very many big rocks in.

If you want to get your website and business in front of a lot of people fast, one of the most effective ways of advertising is pay per click advertising. There is no faster way to get your business in front of targeted traffic. However, pay per click advertising must be done the right way or you could lose a lot of money. In this article were going to talk a little about how pay per click advertising works, so you can decide whether or not you want to use it to promote your business.

The basis behind pay per click advertising is pretty simple. Search engine such as Google or Yahoo will allow you to purchase advertising on a pay per bid basis. For example, you get a choice of how much you want to pay for a specific keyword. The higher you are willing to pay, the higher your ad will rank on the search engine page. Your ad will appear to the right side of the search results page. So for instance, you can place a bid for 15 cents for your ad to appear on the search engine page. Every time someone clicks on the ad you pay 15 cents and they are taken to your webpage. If your webpage is up to par, then chances are you can generate sales from these clicks. Sounds like a good deal, doesn’t it?

The downside to pay per click advertising is that it can cost you a lot of money, if you’re not generating any leads or sales. So let’s say that you have been on a specific keyword for 15 cents per click. If you have 100 people click on your ad then you would owe $15.00. If out of those 100 clicks you generate 50 sales then it is safe to say that your pay per click campaign is profitable.

But if out of the 100 clicks you made no sales then you have spent $15.00 for nothing. The more clicks on your ad, the more you will owe. So there must be a fine balance achieved between clicks and fails to make paper click advertising profitable for you.

One of the best things about paper click advertising is how fast you can see real results. You can literally have your ad on the first page of the search engines and generating traffic and sales in a matter of few minutes from the time you set up your pay per click account and post your ad. The key here is to find find keywords at a low bid price that will still generate a large amount of clicks. As with any type of advertising your pay per click campaign will require testing, tracking and practice so that you can receive the best results.

Many of the large paper click advertising companies,such as Google and Yahoo will have detailed instructions and tutorials that will help you learn how to get the most out of your campaign. Some of them even have user forums where you can go ask questions and receive a lot of help that can potentially save you wasted advertising dollars. It’s important that you learn how to use pay per click advertising properly. My best advice is don’t be in a hurry and take the time to learn what you’re doing and you will achieve much better results.

So there you have it, if you’re looking for a fast and inexpensive way to generate traffic to your website you may want to consider using pay per click advertising. Just be careful. You need to make sure that you’re making more money than your spending for your pay per click advertising campaign to be profitable.