Marketing Your Small Business Advertising Is Not An "Extra" Expense

I need to bring in more revenue before I start advertising.

As a former media account executive, I heard this phrase regularly. In marketing a small business, the old adage, You have to spend money to make money, is an inescapable truth. Advertising is an investment in growing your business. While an unlimited advertising budget would be great, obviously this is not the reality for most businesses. They key to managing your marketing budget wisely is making every dollar count. While most business owners realize that having a marketing plan is a must, often they dont know where to begin.

A good marketing plan is an integrated one. Many businesses rely only on Internet marketing, or running TV commercials on local cable networks, or a weekly newspaper ad. A successful campaign will include several advertising media vehicles as part of an overall marketing plan. Below are a few to consider.

Television
People love to see themselves and their businesses on TV. Remember, though, that you aren't selling to yourself. Make sure to identify your target audience before buying any TV airtime. For example, if you are selling eyelash extensions, your target audience will most likely be women ages 18-49. A good media salesperson will help you choose the programming to best reach your target audience. Television can be costly, so if youre just starting out, you may want to wait to launch a TV ad campaign.

Website
By now, most people realize that to be competitive in todays business environment, having a website is an absolute necessity. You can hire a web designer to create your website, or do it yourself. In the past, it was necessary to invest in expensive software, or learn specialized web programming skills or HTML code to design a website, but today there are several website builders that let you place your text, images, and design elements to create your own website. You will also need to decide on a domain name and arrange for website hosting. The best do-it-yourself website companies serve as a one-stop shop, where you can design your site, have it hosted, and get your domain name set up all at once.

Radio
Radio advertising is a great way to get your message out to targeted groups of people. Each radio station reaches a specific demographic, based on its programming. As with television, a good salesperson will provide you with an advertising proposal best suited to reach your prospective customers. Sponsoring special programming, such as traffic or weather reports, is a good way to break into radio advertising while staying within your budget. You can also combine sponsorships with a traditional 60-second spot schedule for maximum impact.

Newspaper
Both daily and weekly newspapers can be effective marketing tools. A big, splashy ad is great for advertising a special event, like a weekend sale. However, for long-term branding of your business, you may want to consider running smaller ads more frequently to keep your message in front of your audience on a consistent basis. Another advantage to running a more frequently is that most papers offer a discount for advertisers who run more often.

Direct Mail
A major advantage of direct mail is its ability to target very narrowly. You can purchase mailing lists that sort by occupation, zip code, household income, leisure interests, and more. Direct mail can be in the form of postcards, brochures, interactive CDs, or coupon books. Whatever you choose to mail, be sure to design an eye-catching piece with just enough text to get your message across. Dont try to cram too much information on the back of a 4x6 postcard. Instead, direct recipients to your website or 800 phone number.

Whatever marketing efforts you decide on, remember that consistency is key. The goal is to plant your company name into the minds of your prospective customers. This takes place over time, so plan ahead, be patient, and be creative and have fun with your marketing!

Michelle Mizuno is the marketing director at SpinSite, Inc. Her background includes advertising agency and media sales experience.

For information about websites for small businesses, organizations, or associations, visit http://www.spinsite.com

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Creating Income Thru Forum

Few people know that by joining and hosting a forum, one can generate a considerable large income out of it. Businesses have tried and participated on to many different forums and have made quite a successful business particularly in advertising and marketing their products. Below are some of the tips one can use to further utilize forum as an avenue to generate greater income.

You can leave your site links on forums. There are a lot of forum sites that allow for an individual to leave their link addresses. By doing this, you are given a huge opportunity to advertise and market your services and products for free. And by posting and leaving relevant information about your product, people may get interested with your offers.

Since you are in a forum, it is no doubt that you can build tie-ups and relationships with numerous people. This makes it easy for you to establish a credible and trusted portfolio as some sites allow for pictures to be posted on each post that you make.

Make your forum participation regular. Your regular presence on the forum will allow you to gain popularity and recognition from the regular chatters of the forum site. This gives them the confidence about you and the company that you are representing.

Lastly, when dealing with forums, you have to observe the highest degree of politeness. This may be a common sense, but there are forumers who cannot just control at times their feeling or emotions about a certain topic. May it serve as a reminder that you are there to primarily strategize your advertising and marketing plans.

Do you want to learn more about how I do it? I have just completed my brand new guide to article marketing success, Your Article Writing and Promotion Guide

Download it free here: Secrets of Article Promotion

Sean Mize is a full time internet marketer who has written over 1574 articles in print and 11 published ebooks.

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Ramp Up Annuity Sales Using Secret Tool

Lots of annuity sales with this Tool. Most of our competitors hammer us and our prospects about the surrender penalties in annuities.

7 years, 10 years, 17 years - YIKES!

I look at it differently. I love surrender penalties because they provide me with lots of future prospects and clients. How can that be?

It is the exclusion ratio. The exclusion ratio has made more annuity sales for me that anything I can ever think of. The exclusion ratio is a benefit we should all make certain our clients and prospects are aware of. Explain it this way:

If you convert accumulated funds in an annuity to an income stream you can access the exclusion ratio. The exclusion ratio is the percentage of income that is excluded from tax liability.

I like this example

A $50,000 deposit has grown to a value of $100,000.

If the annuitant takes any funds from this account it is 100% taxable at ordinary income tax rates.

In our example lets pretend that the annuitant selects a 10 year payout and we will round off the calculations for the sake of illustration.

$100,000 will provide an annual payment of $10,000 for 10 years.
$5,000 basis and not taxable, $5,000 interest and taxable.

The $5,000 basis is the exclusion ratio.

Because we have accessed the exclusion ratio we can spread out the tax liability over the selected time period which in our example is 10 years. This means that only 50% of the income received is taxable. By spreading out the payment we have spread out the tax liability!

An annual payment of $10,000 will only have 50% tax liability. Mrs. Prospect, this allows you to completely manage your annual tax liability and to take advantage of the Exclusion Ratio. How about selling the exclusion ratio to the client for the beneficiary?

Mrs. Prospect did you know that when your daughter receives these funds as your beneficiary she can also access the exclusion ratio?

Your beneficiary can accept the funds out over a fixed period of time and spread the tax liability over the payout period.

When a prospect asks me about surrender period I always say this:

Mrs. Prospect, you cannot enjoy the benefits of this contract unless you allow the insurance company to hold your funds. There are many benefits you can enjoy with this product, have you ever heard of the exclusion ratio?

I use the power of the contract and the exclusion ratio to explain the need for surrender period. Easy to explain and makes for very happy clients. This is especially good when someone comes to me with an existing annuity. Often times they are not happy and did not understand the time period for the surrender penalties. I would say this..

Mrs. Prospect, unfortunately your agent did not really understand your contract well enough. It is really not his fault; he probably did not have access to the training that I have had. Let me explain a terrific benefit of your contract, the exclusion ratio.

Once I am able to explain this powerful benefit it is easy to sell another annuity to her. The benefits of the contact sell the annuity for me.

Bill Broich is a 30 year annuity salesman who helps agents increase their annuity sales. Visit his website to learn more. Annuity.com.

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Email Marketing : Is It Really That Easy

'The money is in the list". You must have heard the phrase many times. And I am pronouncing it once again in front of you. I hope you do not mind that. A responsive list of email addresses is your asset for long term growth of your business by repeatedly offering them back end products and other opportunities.

In online marketing, if you really want to succeed, the first and foremost quality you need to have is to know "HOW TO SELL". This is also called "preselling". Preselling means educating the readers, through great content, with the topic related to the product. This makes them very interested in the product so that they ultimately buy it.

Suppose you send your subscriber a newsletter consisting of certain number of email issues, preselling a product. Now what if they find your first message boring? Should they bother to open your next email messages? Obviously not. Maybe they unsubscribe from your newsletter.

So as a newsletter or ezine owner, you will always want to provide good content to your subscribers. You need to satisfy your subscribers with interesting messages. But this is NOT an easy task to do when you are sending the contents via email. There may be certain words in your subject line or body of the email message that can trigger the spam filters (anti-spam software) of the domains of your subscribers. If the spam filter find any of those words, it may block your domain from sending further emails to that domain. Thus your domain gets blacklisted. And if you are not aware of this, all the messages will not be delivered (or bounce back). So can you see it? You carefully crafted a number of email messages for your subscribers to read, but they are not receiving them.

What a waste of your time!

A subscriber can send a domain to his domain's blacklist by filing a complaint of spam message, or an ISP itself can put a domain in its blacklist. There are many processes to avoid these things. But the best easy way I have found you can do is to subscribe yourself for your newsletters and check whether you are receiving the messages. Also read your message like a casual fellow and see how enjoyable it is to read. You can also tell one of your friend to read it and get his opinion. This will help you gauge how interesting your contents are.

You can also create different email addresses from different domains and subscribe to your newsletter from all those addresses. In many cases you will find that you are not receiving the confirmation email. In these cases, you can always wait for some time to see whether you are actually receiving it. Many autoresponder domains (specially of free autoresponders) can not deliver message if there is heavy load on the server. So wait for at least a day to see that you actually receive the confirmation email.

If, for a particular domain, you really do not receive the confirmation email, you can instruct your subscriber not to subscribe with any email address from that domain. You can also set an instruction page telling subscribers how to put your newsletter domain in whitelists of different other domains.

Email marketing can produce very disappointing results... and thus, can be very frustrating. But if you know how to avoid the changes and pitfalls related to email marketing, you can significantly increase your income from the email messages you send to your subscribers.

This Article is composed by Shouvik Mazumder
Visit my site and also get updated information on online marketing with free resources from here.

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Internet Lead Generation For Insurance Agents

Insurance agents have two sources of leads when it comes to Internet lead generation. An agent can buy leads from an Internet lead generation company, or they can build a lead generation web site and create their own leads.

Buying Leads

It's important to buy leads from a company that has experience generating Internet insurance leads. New Internet lead generation companies have a tendency to rely upon questionable marketing tactics, and this can affect the quality of your leads.

Internet insurance leads can range from $5-$30 each, depending on what kind of lead it is (life insurance, annuity, auto, etc.), and whether it's an exclusive lead or not. An agent should verify if the leads are exclusive because some lead generation companies sell the same leads to multiple agents.

Also, legitimate Internet lead generation companies will credit you back for bad leads. You should be able to call into the lead generation company and speak with a service representative on the phone in case you need to discuss a bad lead so that you can get credited for it.

Building a Lead Generation Web Site

There is a good opportunity for agents to build a quality lead generation web site of their own. An agent can create a web site in their local market and build pages based upon what people are typing into the search engines. For example, if an agent lives in California, he/she can research keywords like insurance, and California, as well as specific towns or counties in his/her area (keywords is a term used to describe what people are typing into the search engines). So if an agent discovers that people are searching for California insurance broker, and San Francisco insurance agents, he/she can create one page for each of these keyword phrases.

As an agent digs deeper into their keyword research, they may uncover quite a few keywords and keyword phrases. But one page is not going to do it. You need a combination of dozens of pages because each page will get a few searches per month, and this can add up. Plus the more pages you build, the better chance you have of getting ranked in the search engines. Web sites with multiple pages of content are called content based web sites.

The key to success in building a successful content based web site is to focus on quality content first. The reason that content is important is because you don't want your web site to look like you're trying to sell something. You want to build pages that relay good quality information in order to build trust with your prospect.

The second mechanism that is needed is an opt-in lead generation system. For example, offer a free quality newsletter, and/or a free course that your prospect can subscribe to via an autoresponder (an autoresponder is a simple web based marketing tool that automatically sends information to people who opt-in for your information). This way, you capture names and e-mail addresses (as well as mailing addresses) for your Internet direct marketing and direct mail efforts. But if you do not have quality content and you ask for someone's e-mail address or mailing address to sign up for your newsletter or auto responder, you may not get good results.

Fortunately, the time you spend building this web site can pay off because big commissions can arise from just one lead, paying for the time and money you have invested.

An alternative to the content based web site is a landing page web site. A landing page is basically a one-page web site and its main goal is to get the prospect to subscribe to a free report, mini-course, or newsletter. Instead of relying on your content to build credibility and trust, you will have to rely upon your copywriting ability to get your prospect to give up their contact information on your landing page.

A landing page web site usually does not get good placement in the search engines, so in order to generate Internet insurance leads, an agent will have to rely on pay per click advertising (where you pay for traffic to your web site), and other advertising mediums.

An insurance agent can build a significant clientele buying leads from reputable insurance lead generation companies and building a quality web site. All it takes is a little bit of due diligence and patience.

Copyright 2006 Brian Maroevich

Brian Maroevich is an Internet marketing entrepreneur and has written courses on lead generation and marketing for insurance agents, financial planners, and small businesses. You can read Brian's articles for free at http://www.insurance-leads-advisor.com

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Understanding Legal Issues In Adoption - Adoption Tips

The laws on adoption are different from state to state. Furthermore, if you are planning to adopt, you also need to know the federal laws and procedures. Like all legislation, adoption laws are constantly under undergoing changes. Understanding adoption laws will help you speculate your financial obligations and responsibilities. You should also look into potential situations when you decide to change your minds.

It is advisable to make an adopting plan. You should learn about adoption as much as possible. Try to figure out what type of child you want to adopt in your family. For instance, you can decide the age and nationality of potential adopting child. However, you should be flexible about your choices. Your adoption plan should be a long-term series of goals for a family.

The laws by all state require you to complete an adoption homestudy before placement. A homestudy is basically a survey on an adopting family. Sometimes homestudy may include educational information for adoption. Why is a homestudy important? A home study can help the social worker to assess the living condition and safety of a child. In general, a homestudy will require a criminal background check, personal background information, medical records, and safety assessment of the home. If the homestudy goes well, the potential adopting parents will be matched with a child. However, there will be the placement period.

Your adoption expenses are tax deductible up to about $10,000 per child. If you try to adopt the child domestically, you can claim credit for qualifying expenses even if an adoption fails.

Check Out More Articles:

Russian Adoption Agencies Big List , Is it legal to fake doctor sick notes?, Can mom who is involved with webcam porn win a child custody?,

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Knowledge - An Important Key To A Successful Renovation Project!

You have as much chance of getting expert advice on home renovation materials and installation methods at a Big Box retailer as you do in winning a major lottery. Of course if you do win the lottery you can always hire experts to help you choose the materials and provide the installation.

In most cases the poor advice given is due to a lack of specific product training and having little if any actual experience in the profession. The greatest number of clerks at any of the big box retailers are part-time employees who either work at the big-box to augment their incomes or because they are going to school to become something that has nothing to do with home repair or renovation. The primary function of a clerk at a big box retailer is to ensure that the products are stacked neatly on the shelves, that aisles are clear of debris and to point customers in the right direction within the store on where specific merchandise is. All big box retailers merchandise the products that they sell in order to promote self service.

Where are the biggest areas of poor advice? I can only speak for myself, but I find that it is specific application of materials. Following are some areas that I have encountered where the wrong product, for the application, was recommended. Luckily, I read the label before buying the product.

Caulking caulking has matured over the years and now there are specific types of caulking for almost every job. Some caulking will not adhere to certain materials, some can be painted, some are specially designed for indoors, and others are designed for high heat applications (to mention only a few variations).

Electrical devices I asked for a dryer receptacle and was given a stove receptacle (I know the difference).

Adhesive for PVC pipe I was given adhesive for ABS pipe (the label specifically said, Not For PVC Pipe in bold letters), after pointing out the error, I was given the correct adhesive, without a recommendation to use PVC cleaner before applying the adhesive.

Screws I was given a box of drywall screws when I requested flooring screws.

This article is not a complaint against big box retailers. They provide a great function, they have everything under one roof and because of their existence the cost of renovation and repair materials have gone down in price. And in order for them to keep prices low, as a general statement, they cannot afford to have experts on staff.

Product knowledge is one of the keys to a successful renovation project, whether it is small or large. Invest some time before you buy, visit the Internet and get the knowledge that will allow you to do the job right the first time, it will save you time and money. And when you do buy material, take a moment and read the label to ensure that you understand its safety, recommended use and how to install it.

For additional information on home renovation materials or projects, visit Renovation Headquarters

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Mexico: Who Farted?

Do you have embarrassing gas problems? Do you find this problem creeping up on you when you least expect it? I bet not.

If you have lived in the United States all your life, I bet youve never seen a gas main or line and have just taken it on faith that it is there pumping gas into your house. The same with water. How many of us would shudder at the thought of not being able to get a refreshing drink from the tap whenever we wanted it?

In Mexico, it is a part of everyday life that you have no gas lines leading into the house nor can you drink water from the tap. Thats just life here.

What we depend on are these screaming men who walk through the streets from early in the morning and until late at night calling out,

Gas! or Agua! (water)

These gas and water servicemen are those on whom every resident in the country of Mexico depends to bring these two vital components of our existence. I dont know what we would do without them.

How it works is that your gas for heating and cooking comes in two four-foot-high tanks. These bellowing supermen will carry these tanks on their backs to where your outside connection is and replace the empties with newly filled ones. They test to see whether there are any leaks and off they go to their next customer.

Having never had to deal with such a setup, I had to have gas lessons from my landlady who took no end of pleasure in instructing the poor, ignorant gringo in how to turn on the gas tanks. What happens is that one day you will have hot water and the next day you will not. Whoops! Time to change the tanks.

Since there are two tanks, you have to switch from the empty one to the full one by turning off the valve on the empty one, pushing a lever to open the line, and turning on the valve on the full tank. Once both are empty, you have to wait for the street patrolling gas guy to happen by and get his attention. Or, you can call the gas company and they will make an appearance--eventually. Sometimes these men (and they are always men) will be wonderfully musical in their plaintiff cry, Gas! One guy, I swear, sounds like he is calling out, Gas! Get your nice and friendly gas! But, of course, he isnt.

Judging when you need more gas is easy. Doing the water is not. How many of us know how many times a day we would hit the tap in America for a cool drink? Who counts? That made the potable water issue a little harder to judge.

At first, we were using three five-gallon jugs a week, but that wasnt enough. Therefore, we went to four, which suited us fine. It is hard to decide how many jugs are enough at first. To complicate matters, the water guys in our first neighborhood would not come by daily and sometimes we ran out of water!

To get a refill of gas is cheap. Two tanks will cost $480.00 pesos and will last about three months. Water, in the five gallons jugs, will run $18.00 pesos each. We were spending $160.00 pesos a month for purified water.

You can hear the cries of these servicemen all over the city. They are out, rain or shine, to make sure that you dont run out of water and that the embarrassing gas problem wont catch you unaware.

Doug Bower is a freelance writer and book author. His most recent writing credits include The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Houston Chronicle, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Associated Content, Transitions Abroad, International Living, Escape Artist, and The Front Porch Syndicate.

He is founder of Mexican Living Print & eBooks.

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