Affordable Marketing for Your Small Business

Affordable Marketing for Your Small Business
When I started my business four years ago, I had enthusiasm
and passion for my work, but a very small marketing budget.
I also lacked a marketing plan for getting my message out
to my target customer. I have learned a lot along the way
and hope to impart what I've learned onto you. Whether you
have just started your small business or are in your tenth
year, there are some simple, affordable ways to keep your
name in front of prospective clients and customers.

News releases. I recommend to clients that they distribute
three to four news releases (better known as press
releases) each year. This gives clients an opportunity to
shout news out to the world about new products, services or
partnerships; key hires; industry awards and
certifications; new locations; events and more. News
releases should be distributed on a timely basis to local
media, trade publications and online. In addition, a
well-crafted news release makes a great direct mail piece
or a nice addition to your sales or media kit. Depending on
whether you do the writing and distribution yourself, costs
are variable. Distribution costs will also vary.
Distribution via e-mail or fax is virtually nothing. Online
distribution varies. Many news distribution sites are free,
but I like to include a contribution to PRWeb.com to
guarantee inclusion in popular search engines.

Online forums and networking sites. As social media
continues to grow, relevant online forums and networking
groups (Linked In, Connexions, Konnects) are a great way to
interact with professionals and prospective clients. By
actively participating in Q&A forums, you expand your
reach. To take full advantage of these free opportunities,
make sure you complete your online bio; include your
contact information and web address; and participate
regularly. Such participation can also help to position you
as an industry expert.

Referral program. About half of my business comes from
client referrals. To let clients know I appreciate their
referrals and to encourage them to keep sending them to me,
I include my referral program in my business agreement. In
exchange for a prospect who does business with me, I offer
the referring client two complimentary hours of writing,
editing or marketing services. Aside from my time, this
costs me nothing and benefits both my clients and my
business.

Newsletter. There are so many affordable e-mail services
these days that sending an e-newsletter to prospective
clients is a no brainer. The service I use costs about $5
per month, and it not only maintains my e-mail lists for
me, but it provides templates and tracks reader stats.
Clients can opt-in, unsubscribe or change their e-mail
address at any time. This is an inexpensive way to stay in
touch with clients and prospects.

The next question, of course, is how and when to implement
the above. I recommend pulling out your calendar and
scheduling time for marketing and business development.
Schedule a news release for each quarter, or at least three
times a year. For online forums and networking sites, set
aside a certain amount of time each week to participate. A
referral program requires a little bit of set-up time and a
notification to clients of the new program, but aside from
that, it doesn't require much time. For your newsletter, I
recommend sending them to clients at regular intervals. If
you can't manage biweekly or monthly, at least put together
a newsletter on a quarterly basis. Save ideas in a folder
so they are all in one spot when you're ready to get
started.

Try these ideas for at least six months and watch your
business grow and, if you find that one method works better
than the others, focus your efforts in that category. Enjoy
your new affordable marketing solutions!

Copyright © 2007 by Dana Blozis, Virtually Yourz

----------------------------------------------------
With 20 years of business experience, Dana Blozis of
Virtually Yourz started her own Seattle area-based writing,
editing and marketing business. In addition to writing for
publication, she offers writing, editing and marketing
services to small businesses and nonprofits. To learn how
Virtually Yourz can help promote your small business, visit
http://www.virtuallyyourz.com .

Unleash More Profits with Business Model Innovation

Unleash More Profits with Business Model Innovation
Many business leaders believe that they should just keep
doing what's always worked. In some areas of business,
such as providing good service, that can make sense. But
often too much consistency holds a business back from
earning its full potential. To capture more of that
potential, businesses should continually upgrade their
business models (who, what, when, why, where, how, and how
much of what they offer). Here are three examples of how
to think about this question in terms of the dimensions
who, where, and what.

Who Is Served and Where

Let's first look at "who" is served. The lesson is to keep
it simple. Change as little as possible while becoming more
efficient and effective as an organization for your
customers and beneficiaries. The simplest way to do this is
to put more volume through an existing organizational
structure without adding fixed costs or increasing the
ratio of variable costs to sales.

In a for-profit organization you will naturally first want
to attract the most profitable potential customers. If
current customers buy a very small percentage (say 1 to 2
percent) of their needs from you, such a profitable
expansion may simply be possible by selling 40 to 50 times
more to selected current customers. You are already
spending time and money to gather a small part of these
customers' total requirements. In many cases your overhead
costs to provide more products and services would not
increase.

Let's assume your current pretax profits are 10 percent of
sales and your contribution to profits before overhead
costs is 30 percent of sales. This circumstance means that
selling more of the same mix of offerings at the same price
to an existing customer would almost triple the profit
contribution margin on the increased sales. Were that to
occur, a 20 times increase in volume would lead to a 60
times increase in profits!

By contrast, if an organization picks people and
organizations to serve who are located far away and desire
less profitable offerings, this choice of who is served and
where to serve them can increase costs to serve each
customer and beneficiary versus doing more with the same
customers. For instance, if the for-profit company seeks to
serve new customers globally who require local support, the
company's overhead and the cost of offerings may grow
faster than revenues. In that case, absolute profits may
decline or even turn into a loss. See Exhibit 1 which
quantifies this circumstance.

Exhibit 1: Adding Less Profitable Revenues in Diverse
Locations Increases Offering and Overhead Costs

More volume doesn't automatically translate into more
profits. If you have to sell items with less profit
contribution as a percentage of sales due to new customer
preferences and your overhead costs grow, you'll more than
offset the profit gain you hoped to obtain. In this
example, the corporate overhead cost remains almost
constant as a percentage of sales through the need to
support more geographic areas with administration, while
the profit contribution percentage drops from 30 percent to
20 percent. However, if overhead costs go up enough as a
percentage of revenues, the effect can be to turn a profit
into a loss.

Annual Pro Forma Financials Before Volume Expands

Revenues $1,000,000

Cost of providing offerings $700,000

Profit contribution $300,000

Corporate overhead cost $200,000

Pretax profit $100,000

20 Times Volume Increase with Higher Offering Costs and
Overhead

Revenues $21,000,000

Cost of providing offerings $16,800,000

Profit contribution $4,200,000

Corporate overhead cost $4,150,000

Pretax profit $50,000

What Is Served

Selling or providing more of what you already offer can be
a big help in creating efficiencies. But sometimes you are
serving virtually all of someone's needs for those items.

When that happens, consider what else you can profitably
sell or provide at a fair price with desirable qualities
and service that the customers you already have want to
buy. The advent of the Internet makes this evaluation much
more potentially rewarding because postal, air freight, and
electronic delivery choices enable you to serve most of the
world.

As with the previous examples, this for-profit challenge
requires considering the potential volume and the effects
on overhead costs and profit contribution margins. Exhibit
2 shows the kind of effect that a positive change in volume
can make by adding volume through more profitable items
that do not increase overhead costs very much.

Exhibit 2: Adding More Profitable Items to Expand Revenues
Without Increasing Overhead Costs as Rapidly Further Speeds
Profit Growth

This example shows the profit multiplying potential of
increasing profit contribution margins from 30 percent to
40 percent while decreasing corporate overhead costs from
20 percent to 3 percent of revenues. The result is a 7,700
percent profit solution. If revenues could be grown even
more, a 40,000% solution (a 2,000 percent squared solution)
could result.

Annual Pro Forma Financials Before Volume Expands

Revenues $1,000,000

Cost of providing offerings $700,000

Profit contribution $300,000

Corporate overhead cost $200,000

Pretax profit $100,000

20 Times Volume Increase with Higher Profit Contribution
Products and Limited Additional Overhead Expenses

Revenues $21,000,000

Cost of providing offerings $12,600,000

Profit contribution $8,400,000

Corporate overhead cost $600,000

Pretax profit $7,800,000

Copyright 2007 Donald W. Mitchell, All Rights Reserved

----------------------------------------------------
Donald Mitchell is chairman of Mitchell and Company, a
strategy and financial consulting firm in Weston, MA. He is
coauthor of six books including The 2,000 Percent Squared
Solution, The 2,000 Percent Solution, and The 2,000 Percent
Solution Workbook. You can find free tips for accomplishing
20 times more by registering at:
====> http://www.2000percentsolution.com .

Poker & Passion - The Power of a Perfect Question

Poker & Passion - The Power of a Perfect Question
There are times in life that seem to naturally give us the
opportunity for self-reflection. I don't mean the big life
events of births, deaths, graduations, weddings, and so on.
In fact, I've been to many of those, as I expect you have
too, and I find they breed the usual reflections over and
over... "What's the meaning of my life and how am I doing
against my idea of what it ought to be?" and so on.

And there are the 'normal' questions that work so
powerfully with my consulting clients - "What is working
well, and what could be working better?" These questions
open the floodgates for folks who haven't had a moment to
stop and look at what is going on in their business and
their life. They create the opportunity to reshape our
efforts and achieve new and different results. I'll come
back to those questions over and over in my coaching and
writing and offer you plenty of chances to use them. But
today I offer you another type of moment.

I'm talking about the unusual events that we're not
expecting and so they slide in under our radar and some of
us catch them, and some of us miss them altogether.

For me, one particular occasion was a family dinner at the
change of season called the "new" year. A group of us had
decided to have dinner together and in the middle of
passing chicken and veggies back and forth, someone posed
the question

"What gives you 'sheer delight'?"

"You know, " she said. "The type of thing that makes you
hum, makes you feel great and makes you appreciate the
place you're in and the thing you're doing."

Her own answer was "Singing." She had a busy life, a
successful career doing work she loved. The question made
her realize how empty one quiet corner of her life was for
the lack of time spent singing. She missed using her voice
to create beautiful sound, the challenge of mastering notes
some composer had laid out, voicing in combination with
others. With that discovery, she got involved in a choir.
No dramatic change of career, no upheaval of life. Yet the
realization that there was a missing activity that added
spice to the rest of her life was profound for her.

My answer worked its way up and spoke itself with quiet
simplicity.

At that point in my life I'd lived overseas twice, worked
in other cities, traveled widely, changed jobs at least
five times. If the question had been worded "Someone, tell
me what gives Linda 'sheer delight'." the answer from the
folks around the table would likely have been "Travel!" or
"Fixing problems!"

And they would have been off base. Those are among my
gifts, my expertise and my enormous satisfaction. But not
at the heart of the matter. My answer?

"Great conversations!"

What gives me intense joy is being engaged in
conversations, ones that raise new ideas for me, that
create energy with the person I'm in conversation with,
information that shifts my perspective and adds new
resources to the Mary Poppins kit bag I carry in my mind.
It doesn't matter the subject or location. A side benefit
of those conversations is in the rich problem-solving that
can take place.

And understanding that distinction changed my life.

I realized by voicing my answer, that the consulting I was
doing at that time was boring me. It was analytical work
resulting in written reports presented to appreciative
clients. It didn't matter that I have a very analytical
mind and I was identifying critical issues and valuable
solutions effectively for my clients. And, it wasn't making
me smile when I got out of bed on Tuesday mornings.

We're all so used to putting on our poker face and carrying
on that we forget to look inside ourselves. My discovery
that I could name what made me hum allowed me to take a
fresh look at how to incorporate great conversations in the
foreground, on purpose, in my daily life. And that led to
changing the form and the content of the work that I do in
my consulting and coaching. I now build in an emphasis on
conversations where ideas and visions and goals are up on
the table, assumptions get challenged, new perspectives and
approaches are offered toward achieving results more
effectively. All things considered in order to shape new
successes.

The results speak for themselves. I get calls and letters
telling me that the question I posed to a client, the idea
I shared in a conversation, the approach I used for running
a meeting or facilitating a management retreat changed
someone's perspective, their internal assumptions, their
know how, and their results in their work and life.

Building my life around my sheer delight has helped me
create a six-figure income, relationships with people
looking to increase the effectiveness of their efforts in
their professional and personal worlds, and has me smiling
when I wake up on Tuesday mornings.

Being inspired by sheer delight has had the same result in
the lives of others who have looked behind their own poker
face for their passion. What might you create with yours?

----------------------------------------------------
© 2007 Linda Feinholz Management expert, consultant,
and coach Linda Feinholz is "Your High Payoff Catalyst" and
publishes the free weekly newsletter The Spark! and
delivers targeted solutions, practical skills and simple
ways to boost professional and personal results. If you're
ready to focus on your High Payoff activities, accelerate
your results and have more fun, get your FREE tips at her
site http://www.YourHighPayoffCatalyst.com

What Do You Do And Say To Build A Successful Home Based Business

What Do You Do And Say To Build A Successful Home Based Business
When I first started my home based business career, I was a
pretty shy person. I was awful in talking to people. The
thought of picking up a phone and calling a stranger
horrified me. I used to literally sit at my desk staring at
the phone for hours trying to sum up the courage to call
the people. It was ridiculous, but my mind found a way to
justify my inaction with one excuse or another. The
problem stemmed from my lack of confidence. When I would
call finally, I came from a place of weakness and
desperation. I was spending every spare cent I had on leads
and tools, and I HAD to sponsor a new rep soon or I would
be out of money and a failure. That desperation and lack of
confidence came though on the phone... and people took
advantage of it. I came from a position of servitude, doing
anything I could to please the prospect and keep them in
the pipeline. This is a major problem with people new to
this industry, but it can be quickly conquered with a
little education.

First of all, today I do not chase people. No longer I
spend money on leads that don't work. Today I have a
system, through which people contact me. They want to work
with me!

So what does it mean to prospect with posture? Simple. To
be blunt: The person on the other end of the phone is a
"nobody". They must qualify for and justify my attention
and time. Until they prove themselves worthy, they are just
a voice and a phone number. I don't care if it's a doctor,
lawyer, business owner, etc. They can waste my time just as
easily as anyone else. They have to earn it. The best way
to build posture if you are lacking it, is to first and
foremost, sit up straight or stand while on the phone. Have
energy in your voice, and know in your head that you have
the keys to the vault. You have already found the pot of
gold at the end of the rainbow. If that is not your normal
personality, then change it. This is what it means to
become the person you need to be to succeed. I honestly
like to think of Donald Trump, sitting there in the
boardroom on "The Apprentice." It's an honour for his
contestants to have the opportunity to work with him, and
they all know it. It should be no different with you and
your prospects. You're the Donald. Act like it. The best
way to assert your posture on a call is to keep control of
it. Once a prospect asks a question and you answer it, you
have lost control. They are now in charge of the entire
call and its outcome. You need take back control
immediately! You don't have a choice if you want the call
to be successful, not only for your sake, but for your
prospects as well. (They just don't know it yet). The best
way to do this is to defer their question and ask them one.
Asking your prospect questions keeps you in control of the
conversation.

First, it positions you as a leader. If you're not a
leader, how can you expect people to follow you?

Second, it positions you as an expert instead of a peddler.
Prospects and customers seek out experts because they have
the answers they're looking for.

Third, it allows you to guide them through your information
system on your terms for maximum effectiveness. People do
not partner with you in business because of your great
products. They do not partner with you because of your
great compensation plan. They partner with you because of
you and your leadership. They see you as a leader and
someone who can help them achieve success they want.
Everything else is secondary. What has helped me in the
past in a great way to develop my posture is to just say NO
to your next five prospects. Do it. Tell them you are
sorry, but they are not who you are looking for right now.
This exercise will change your mindset and your posture
instantly because it gives you all of the power. Your mind
will finally understand that you are the leader, and the
prospects need to prove their worthiness for your time and
efforts.

In all honesty, you should be telling this to at least 50%
of everyone you talk to each day if you are building your
business correctly! The vast majority of people you meet
will not have the characteristics you want in a business
partner!

----------------------------------------------------
1. Helena Syptak is a top leader in the home business
industry. Helena works with entrepreneurs and success
minded people around the world. She devotes her time,
energy and skills into her team and helps them to reach
their success. To reach Helena directly visit '
http://www.coaching-2-success.com

Holiday Marketing Magic for New Year Success

Holiday Marketing Magic for New Year Success
Can you believe it's November already? The holidays are
here and then the start of a new year will be upon us. Now
is a perfect time to reflect on your business and see if it
is all that it can be. Is it running at full speed and do
you have all the clients that you need?

If not, it's time to get those engines moving and start
into action before the New Year begins. I know, it's the
holidays and there's a lot's going on. But also it's the
perfect opportunity to connect with your clients or
potential new clients and get a head start on potential
work for next year. You will find that communication is so
much easier when you can utilize holiday greetings, holiday
goodies, and holiday presents. Holiday gifts and candy
will ease the way to a "Hi, how have you been? Send me
more business!" Or for those new potential clients, "Hi,
how are you—You need ME."

First, reconnect with ALL your clients and let them know
how you appreciate them and perhaps how you can help them
with other needs they may not even know you offer. Send a
personalized holiday card or greeting. For local clients
stop by their office and drop off presents, popcorn tins
for the staff and/or their favorite coffee for their
afternoon pick-me-up. For potential new clients, drop off
a Holiday cup full of wrapped candy with your business card
or perhaps get your business name printed on the candy bar.

For all you Virtual Assistants or word processors out
there, don't forget to stop by any small post offices or
UPS shops and offer to put your business cards there. Many
of these places will add your business card holders
directly to the counter. Think how much traffic is going
through these places shipping out those presents and what
great exposure that can be. And the best news is that they
usually do allow business cards with a business card
holder. Just think about it, people waiting impatiently in
line, pick up your card and BINGO—New client.

Also, many gyms now allow places to place business cards or
Gift Certificates. Come the beginning of the year we all
know how beneficial that will be.

Other tips include:

1) Read and research new things. So many great promotions
are going on now with the holidays and New Year coming.
Look to them and see what's out there and how you can apply
it to your business. Take advantage of the teleclasses and
seminars that are offered by the pros. Also, so many
established authors will offer free giveaways this month.
It's part of their marketing campaigns and you can reap the
benefits of it.

2) Join Associations: Join the association that you've
heard about by so many but haven't made the commitment yet.
Start the New Year with a firm commitment to attend at
least one engagement a month or more. See what a
difference it can make in your business by talking with
pros in your industry or networking with businesses, who
might utilize your services or products.

3) Take the Time to review Your Website. Now it can all go
to waste if they these potential clients get to your
website and see a unprofessional, poorly built,
error-ridden, mess of a site. Take a look at your website
and see if it is the best that it can be. Look to the
overall appearance, the professionalism of your wording,
the explanations explaining the benefits you provide, etc.
In fact, everything in your site needs to convince a client
to work with you. Now ask yourself, does it do that? Is
this something I can be proud of? Too often we throw
together a website, just to have it done. Remember this
can often be a client's first impression of you. Is it
selling you well?

4) Review your marketing. Is it still effective? Can you
do better? The first of the year is a great time to redo
some of your marketing and promotional pieces.

So this year as others are shopping and preparing for the
holidays, you can instead be preparing your business for
the New Year. What a gift that would be for YOU—to
start your business off with a bang and lots of new clients
you secured in your holiday marketing efforts.

November is a great time to reflect back on the year and
plan for the next. Why not plan to make next year, your
best one ever! Good Luck and Happy Marketing.

----------------------------------------------------
Diana Ennen, President of Virtual Word Publishing,
http://www.virtualwordpublishing.com and author of Virtual
Assistant - The Series: Become a Highly Successful, Sought
After VA and Accompanying Workbook; WordPerfect OfficeReady
Virtual Assistant Solution Pack, (http://www.corel.com).
Available for media by contacting
diana@virtualwordpublishing.com. Free to reprint as long
as author's bio remains intact. Stop by for free booklets.