The JEHM Net News

By: james lowe

Any small or big business, must keep advertising from becoming too costly so you can closely monitor all your target markets to get maximum impression made for your business or organization. Not so obvious a point.

Many small business owners find it difficult to engage in home business marketing, because it appears to be so expensive. However, there are many ideas that you can use to increase your visibility. Many are good. Interestingly, some are not so good but you can make them so if they let you find your desired leads and customers by testing.

Here are some ideas that can be very useful in home business marketing:

Begin a frequent buyer club.
Reward your loyal customers for patronizing your stores. That way, they will give their business to you, and even like you and no one else. It might be helpful for you to track the purchase information of your customers, and once they have reached a certain threshold, by buying your products or helping you sell them, give them a gift certificate or a rebate.

Also, you can consider giving them future discounts, or simply a free gift. These ideas can be varied almost endlessly, so get creative and experiment with what works best for you. Test, a great word in internet marketing.

Use your phone time wisely.
There are many ways to use your phone time for advertising purposes. The best is to call and thank them in person or leave a message of thank you on their message machine after they make a purchase. Hardly anyone does this and it is very powerful.

Again, you simply have to be a little creative. For example, when you put your customers on hold, instead of playing some music, remind them of some of the upcoming events concerning your company. For, example, invite them to a sale. Also, ask if there is any problem, at all, with your relationship with them and your company that they would like you to solve. Solve a customer problem and you will keep a customer forever.

Give away business cards.
This is pretty important, so you really should have me earn my keep and tell you this. A reminder always helps. Especially so when someone is scrambling for help when they need a service like yours to help them fill their needs at a critical time.

Business cards are one of the most inexpensive ways you can advertise, so to neglect their use would be wasting a great opportunity. As much as possible, the card should have an attractive design, and it must include all information relevant to your business.

Give your business cards to just about everyone that you meet. You never know when your little gift will earn you money. Have a tiny discount for ordering any purchase from you on your card. This will give your card guts.

Cards, with pretty pictures, designs and services can be bought extremely cheap with excellent quality on the internet. Put in keyword, business cards, and shop for the best prices.

When anyone ever asks you anything, take out one of your cards and write their needed info on it, and give it to them and you will have a hard working 24 hour, 7 day ad out there for you forever.

Utilize email signatures.
Whenever you mail a potential customer, furnish him or her with your complete business information. This helps you to form associations in your prospects mind. You want them to remember the business when they think of your name, and vice versa. Tinker with this medium frequently to update and improve it.

Website promotion.
Aside from the usual methods of getting listed in online directories and optimizing for the search engines, you should seriously consider other, less prestigious methods. For example, try to include your URL on just about every surface available, on your business cards, the uniforms of employees and you, and on all promotion items such as key chains, coffee mugs, and tee shirts.

Make your url extremely brief and pertinent to your website business. You want people to be reminded of your site everywhere they turn and to be able to remember it easily.

Many website promotion tools out there are very good. The trick is to shop and shop and always be shopping for better ones. The last few years have brought on fierce competition for better and better web site advertisers and promoters.

Never be satisfied. Always be looking for cheaper and better with higher quality services ad places and promoters. They are there and are getting better.

Home business marketing is not as difficult as it may first seem. As long as you have a good supply of creativity, you should be able to generate enough ideas to promote your business. The ideas enumerated here should get you started, but make sure you think up your own variations!

Remember to always keep testing for better ad and promotion places and never be satisfied with a few because they are always getting better. Competition is great which is good for you and your time and money budget.

Article Source: http://www.upublish.info

About the Author:
James M. Lowe writes original articles about www.contenttomarket.com/ArticleWriters/ home business opportunities.

By: J D Moore

I bet you didn’t know that there are multiple levels of advertising and promotion that correspond to intent and stage of business. Understanding these levels helps small businesses tailor their promotions and ads to the proper purpose thus making more money. Let’s look a little closer…

Stage 1 - Awareness
Hey mom look at me! Cries the little child who wants attention. One of the biggest threats to small business is the fact that there may be thousands of people out there who need what they offer - but don’t know they exist.

This stage works on the “if you build it they will come” principle. It’s good if you don’t have much competition, or if you are an established brand opening a new location.

This is the most basic form of advertising and it has its uses. Unfortunately most small businesses never move past this level.

Stage 2 - Gain Market Share
This is a very important stage of promotion an advertising. This is where you put your unique selling proposition out there so that people will choose you over a competitor. You have to be compelling in a way your competitors aren’t.

Most advertising (even from a lot of the big guys) just doesn’t go this far. Your job here is to compel action from the customer.

Stage 3 - Increase Consumption
Gaining new customers is very important, but what are you doing to bring your old customers back? What kind of advertising or promotional tactics will increase the frequency and the size of your average purchase.

Advertising to your current customers is not a waste of money. In fact your ROI is likely to be far higher than advertising to get new customers.

Think about ways to get customers to come back more frequently and spend more with you when they do. You can realize an exponential growth in sales if you get these two components down.

Stage 4 - Capitalize on Opportunity
This stage is where you use opportunities to increase sales. What kind of opportunities? How about holiday sales, long weekends, current events?

Be careful about using very bad news for promotion. Being seen as too mercenary can come back to haunt you. There were some companies that sold terrorist insurance after 911 - but I can’t imagine any did well.

However, offering deals to offset rising gas prices or beat the heat of summer deals can be great was to promote all kinds of things.

You can boil these four stages down into finer points of distinction, but mastering just these basics will give you a head start for a more profitable future.

Article Source: http://www.upublish.info

About the Author:
JD Moore is a small business marketing expert and author of the Marketing Comet small business maketing blog: marketingcomet.typepad.com

By: Adrian Kennelly

“You can have the most wonderful product in the world, but if people don’t know about it, it’s not going to be worth much. There are singers in the world with voices as good as Frank Sinatra’s, but they’re singing in their garages because no one has ever heard of them. You need to generate interest, and you need to create excitement.”
Donald Trump, American real-estate tycoon

Advertising doesn’t cost, it pays! And good advertising can pay you well. Bad advertising, or no advertising at all, invites disaster.

You have to advertise if people are to be made aware of your business and the benefits it offers them. Without advertising you rely on word of mouth recommendation or press editorial, both extremely effective, but slow and generally unpredictable.

Advertising takes many different forms, from painting your name on the side of a van to delivering leaflets door-to-door or posting printed cards in shop and post office windows. More often the term applies to classified and display promotions in appropriate media, usually newspapers and magazines, and it is with this definition we concern ourselves here.

Advertising by itself does not sell. It will not sell a bad product (customers will ask for refunds) and it won’t open up new markets. It is not a miracle cure that can generate sales for a dying product. Conversely, advertising will not sell your must successful products to people who simply don’t want them.

Main Points About Effective Advertising

* It reduces the entire population to your target audience and reaches as many of those people as possible at least available cost.

* It must always have an objective. This means having a clear idea about what you want to accomplish in your advertisement. Reasons for advertising include:

* To invite orders or enquiries

* To launch new products

* To publicise price changes.

* The message must attract your target audience, it must interest them, create a desire for your product and prompt people to act (order or ask for further information). This acronym AIDA is one you will encounter many times in advertising.

* It must be truthful and straightforward. The nearer your advertisement is to reality, the more effective it is.

* Sufficient resources must be allocated to accomplish your advertising objectives.

* Testing is crucial to effective advertising, allowing good promotions to be repeated and bad ones to be eliminated.

* Every aspect of your advertisement must be prepared from the customer’s point of view. That person wants to know how you and your product can benefit him. The most important feature of any advertisement is the benefits it contains.

* It must be placed in the appropriate media.

Newcomers to business tend to confuse the real benefits of advertising, frequently considering it a necessary, and expensive, evil, not the long-term investment it really is. In short, effective advertising is the lifeblood of your business. Without it you will surely fail!

Deciding When and How

Advertising can be a major headache for many firms, not just new businesses or those without specialist advertising departments.

But it isn’t always costs that are to blame as much as making that vital choice between classified or generally more costly display advertising.

Returning to basics, all advertisements must follow the general AIDA principle. They must attract attention, generate and retain interest, create desire, and stimulate action.

But what will best achieve this objective: classified or display?

The answer depends on a number of things, not least of all an understanding of what these two methods involve, how they differ and what similarities, even overlap, might exist.

Classified advertising, sometimes called ‘lineage’, generally employs just words, without embellishment, other than perhaps a few words emboldened, and sometimes impact lines or boxes around the advertisement. Where these minor forms of decoration are included, the format is frequently referred to as ’semi-display’.

Display advertisements, on the other hand, are designed to stand out from the crowd, using a variety of techniques including: occupying a set position on the page, taking up a specified amount of space, including graphics and illustrations, adopting a variety of fonts, and so on. The argument is that display advertisements are more noticeable, more profitable than their counterparts buried amongst countless others in the classified columns. Hence the far higher cost of display advertising.

The following main points will help you decide:

* Classified ads are usually cheap and are excellent for generating enquiries. Many successful classified advertisers use the two-stage enquiry method, allowing the customer to obtain further information before placing an order. A major benefit for dealers is the chance to build a useful mailing list for future offers.

* Display advertising is best for selling straight from the page. Readers are more likely to trust their money to someone who has paid for a larger advertisement than someone whose advertisement occupies a tiny space among so many competing entries. Classified advertising is rarely effective for selling off-the-page except for very low cost items, commonly £10 or less.

* Classified advertising can be used to test interest in your product before venturing into more costly display advertising.

* Classifieds can be used to test and compare advertising sources.

* Classified advertising is generally unsuitable for anything that requires a lot of ‘telling’ to accomplish the task of selling. Too much grey matters in classifieds is boring and readers can easily lose interest halfway. If it can’t be said in a few words, try display advertising.

* For classified advertisements, the words themselves must do the job of selling. Sometimes a maximum wordcount is set and every word must pay its way. Conversely, display advertising allows a variety of other techniques to be used to attract and retain reader interest. Based on what they say about a picture being worth ten thousand words, it follows that, if the design, style or appearance of your product is important to the potential customer, display advertising is usually best. If the product markets well ’sight unseen’, classified ads might be appropriate.

* Classified ads usually focus on a single offer. Display advertisements can include several products, or an invitation to send for further information, obtain a catalogue, send for samples, and so on.

Article Source: http://www.upublish.info

About the Author:
(c)2006 eGDC Ltd
Adrian Kennelly is the webmaster of DirectoryGold Web Directory & Portal which has an Article Directory

By: prepage

Tips for advertising on an inexpensive budget
Copyright 2006 ©Lloyd & Emmanuel D. Scott
http://www.prepagebuilder.com

Advertising is the life blood of any business, no matter how big or how small. So, the problem is how to make ones advertising dollar get the most bang for the buck. It’s not enough to advertise. Your advertising must be effective. Check out the following ways to advertise for little or no cost.

Having a Website - The age of the internet has expanded the possibility of owning your own business to an almost unlimited number of people. It also has expanded the advertising audience to a tremendous amount of new people, world wide, who otherwise you would never have been able to reach. Things like link exchanges and article submissions allow you to get exposure to your website with no cost except for your time. The advantage of a website is that it centralizes all your business and products into one central location. It gives you somewhere to send people so that you don’t have to do as much selling because you let your website do the selling for you.

Advertising coop- Many businesses, especially work at home businesses, offer advertising coops. They will send people to your business for a fee. Usually the fee is relatively small. This is nice because you already know that these people have at least some interest in your business. Although they may not spend a penny with you, you at least get the exposure.

Answering Machine-Change the message on your answering machine to reflect the fact that you are now in business for yourself. That way when you call that person back, they may ask you about your business and thus the door is open to discussing your business.

Wear your ad-Place your website on a sweatshirt, tee-shirt, or a hat. So, when you are out in public, people will see you ad and again it will open up the door to discussing your new business.

Place a magnetic sign or bumper sticker on your car. Now, when you are riding down the road, sitting at a stop sign, or leaving your car parked at the mall or grocery store, you are getting free advertising.

Flyers-There are many places that will allow you to place a flyer about your business. Businesses like grocery stores, libraries, laundromats, hair salons and others will let you place a free ad on their public bulletin board.

Business cards - Don’t leave home without them. You never know when the chance to hand one out will happen. You may see an old friend, or meet someone looking to get out of the 9-5 rut or who is in need of a new opportunity.

Free Classifieds - Use the internet and the many free classified ads on it to advertise your business. A search using “free classifieds” will give you an almost limitless number of places to submit your website and ad.

Place your web address in your e-mail signature.

Place a flyer or business card in your out going mail.

Word of Mouth-The least expensive form of advertising and maybe the most effective way to advertise your business is word of mouth. Simply tell those you come in contact with that you are in business for yourself. They will tell others and they will tell others and it can go on and on. The point is you don’t have to have the big bucks to successfully advertise you business or product.

Article Source: http://www.upublish.info

About the Author:
About the author Emmanuel & Lloyd are specialists in Information Technology and have an online business for web TEMPLATES www.prepagebuilder.com COPYRIGHT 2006 ©Lloyd & Emmanuel D. Scott support@scottsempire.com