Saturday, November 21, 2009


6 Low-Cost Marketing Strategies

By Sharron Senter

Small businesses must be extra imaginative with their marketing efforts in order to attract customers and get them to open their wallets. Even more challenging is that most entrepreneurs have shallow pockets and shoppers are being more selective as a result of the sluggish economy and volatile stock market. The following are six proven low-cost marketing ideas that help small businesses increase sales and generate referrals, ultimately helping you build your cash cow, while spending very little.


Get Out and Walk
Next time you walk down a street with high foot-traffic, pay attention to storefront windows underutilized. Approach the store owner and offer to pay a small fee to advertise your business in their window. Imagine, you pay $50 per month for a location that costs someone else $2500 a month in rent. This idea also works in reverse. If you’re the store owner with great window visibility, approach other entrepreneurs and offer them an affordable advertising opportunity.

Special Deal Today Only
The next time business is slow, try sending out an email to your prospect list that reads, "Please call me. I have a special deal I can offer you if you call me today. You'll be glad you did! (978) 000-0000. Thanks, Sharron." This method really works. Prospects call because of the urgency you create using such a short deadline and to make sure they don’t miss out on a worthy opportunity. Be careful. You’ll lose credibility with your prospects if your offer isn’t aggressive enough, i.e., 10% off won’t cut it!

Under Your Nose
Are your vendors doing business with you? Why not? Here’s a short list of the prospects you should contact within 48 hours of reading this article, your: accountant, attorney, plumber, electrician, daycare provider, housekeeper, greens keeper, mechanic, realtor, friends, family, minister/priest/rabbi, etc., dentist, physician, gynecologist, nail technician, hairdresser, Mary Kay Consultant, marriage counselor, coach, personal trainer, financial advisor, etc. If you and your vendor are not a match, he or she probably knows someone who should be doing business with you. All you have to do is ask your vendor to provide some word-of-mouth about you. At minimum, ask to display your business cards and flyers at their office, or to mention your business in their customer newsletter. Take a moment and make sure people in your immediate circle understand what you’re selling.


Customers on the Fence
Before you send off your next proposal, call your prospect and tell her the proposal she requested is ready. Tell her you'd like to forward the proposal, but before you do, ask her what time tomorrow would be convenient to discuss the proposal. Remember, always set up your next appointment before releasing any information.

Charge at Least Five Bucks
Always charge a fee for all your event marketing efforts. Fee-paid seminars and workshops almost always generate more participants than free events. The fee does two things. First, when you charge for something, there’s an implied "value" built in. Your prospect will believe they "get more" when they pay, versus not paying. Second, when a prospect pays you, they’re showing a commitment and are now a more qualified prospect and more likely to show up. Don’t just take my word for it; test it. It’s true.

Stimulate Customer Senses
Do you think the smell of fresh baking bread flowing throughout the grocery store or music playing is by chance? Absolutely not. Retail businesses have been going out of their way for years to stimulate shoppers and keep them browsing. Stimulating the senses works outside of bricks and mortars too. For example, let’s say you're a business development expert and you're getting ready to mail your quarterly newsletter on white stock. Instead, try a red or pink-hued paper. Or, if you’d prefer to remain conservative, use a white textured stock. Another example: There's nothing worse than the smell of a disinfectant used in a doctor's office. Try burning vanilla candles in the waiting room, they’ll help sooth your customers while they wait. If your business is notorious for long waiting room times, fresh baked cookies work well.

Remember, the more comfortable we keep our customers, the longer they’ll stay, the more memorable experience they’ll have and the more they’ll spend, or pass on positive word-of-mouth. When you’re planning your next marketing activity, remember to stimulate your customers’ senses, including eyes, ears, nose and mouth.

Sharron Senter is a New England-based marketing consultant who helps small businesses deploy low-cost marketing strategies. Visit her at http://www.sharronsenter.com.

Sunday, September 6, 2009

MLM and Blogging for Business

Welcome to the wonderful world of blogging, the frequent, usually chronological publications of personal thoughts and Web links. Often a mixture of what is happening in a person's life and what is happening on the Net. Call it the Reality TV of the Internet.

There doesn't seem to be much that isn't covered as a topic for a blog, so why not jump in with both feet and blog about your business and how to be a successful MLM marketer. What a tremendous vehicle for telling people what you are doing, how you are doing it and all about your team and training. You can also add pictures, product descriptions, and yes, even comments from other people.

Blogs have been around since early1997, but really took off in popularity when automated publishing systems were introduced - ie. Blogger at blogger.com. Just so you don't get confused, stick to the term blog, rather than the other alternative "weblog" as it means a server's log files. By 1999 there were 23 in existence, but it didn't stay that way long. Blogs and blogging mushroomed rapidly until it was almost impossible to keep up with them. Those who designed software got into the mix and came up with even more ways for people to publish their own blogs.
http://website.ws/workfromhome09



The history that's important for you to know, because it directly relates to what you can do with your blog, is that original weblogs were link-driven. Today's blogs are also link driven and there is your key to the success of your MLM marketing blog. Seek out unusual links, interesting links, teaching links, and learning links for your blog, and add you own review or commentary to them. Send your blog link to existing customers, potential customers, your team, even others in your up and down lines. You'd be surprised at the exposure you'll get so long as your blog is well done and doesn't come across like one large advertisement for your business.

Eye Earn

Saturday, May 16, 2009

Affiliate Funnel Is A Different Way Of Thinking When It Comes To Downline Building

Downline building has been around since the beginning of the internet. The offer is very exciting, let people know about your product or service, refer a few folks and presto, you are on your way to massive success. What's the problem with this scenario though?

Simple, downline building isn't as effective as it once was years ago. Sure there are people making lots of money online using their downlines and affiliate marketing strategies but during the past few years a change has been taking place.

It's called the marketing funnel and if you think of the pyramid look of a 'downline', flip it!

Here's how it works. Get as many people as you can into the top of your funnel and funnel them down into paying customers. Start with a free front end product or service and then let your marketing turn those free leads into paying customers and clients.

Affiliate Funnel is a service that does this plus so much more. It is an all in one business hub that shows you how to properly promote online using the best free resources around and channel these leads into a thriving downline. This is the power of a well put together marketing funnel, taking leads and turning them into clients.

Affiliate Funnel is owned by two guys who have build massive six figure businesses using free resources and their own marketing funnel. Paul Kinder and Jon Olson have put their experience in a bottle and packaged it for anyone to check out for free at:

http://affiliatefunnel.com/?rid=36192

Be sure to check out the Funnel today and start to promote your business the right way using the absolute best tools on the net. The results are there, it's time to grab them...

Saturday, April 25, 2009

PayDotCom.com ROCKS!

Hi

Dave Egan here...

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Did I mention it is 100% FREE to Join!

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OH! - Also, they have their won affiliate program now that pays you COLD HARD cash just for sharing the site with people like I am doing with you...

They give you cool tools like BLOG WIDGETS, and they even have an advertising program to help you get traffic to your site.

If you want an ARMY of affiliates to sell your products for you, they also allow you to have Free placement in their marketplace!

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Blogging for Cash

What every website is looking for is for traffic for people either looking for their services or products. Anyone who creates a website definitely wants the search engines to notice it and even index it as one of the top sites. To have your website properly indexed then you can use the relevant keywords that will get you the expected traffic. The reason why many websites are not performing well is that there are too banner ads that are flashing across the screen. This is one mistake many website developers don’t know about. These people mainly deal with development and design but not on how to optimize their sites for search engines.

For your site to perform well and get the targeted traffic that you so much need then you need to remember this: whenever anyone is using the search engines, they are mainly looking for information. If you have to forget anything else in this article don’t forget this. Content is what people are looking for when they come to search engines. Any search engine user is a client of the search engine. So the robots will look for the site with the most relevant content that will satisfy the users’ needs. It would not be wrong to say that search engines favor their users. T

For a cheap way to direct targeted traffic then you have to create relevant articles. These articles are created after spending time in intensive research for the relevant keywords and putting into place meta-tags. It is important to maximize your website to be indexed highly by search engines in such a way that when certain keywords are used, your site will be among the top results. Web content generation is one of the ways to do this. These ghostwriting services will get you the targeted traffic from both search engines and high traffic generating article directories. Other services that are involved in this are web content writing, creating of high value links, having relevant titles, doing extensive research on keywords and keyword phrases and generating relevant tags for your web pages.

You may think generating content is easy but how valuable is it to get the traffic?