Friday, November 28, 2008

Promoting Heavy before the Holidays - NOT just for Retailers

Whether you wait all year to cash in during the holidays or you dread each week that brings you closer to the inevitable slowdown, promoting is your only option.

There are many businesses that can offer customers incentives to purchase before the end of the year tax breaks, insurance benefits or heavy discounts.Whatever the industry, there is usually something that can be done to capitalize on the time of the year.

What to offer?
A good way to market for holiday spending is to determine if you can offer a loss leader.A loss leader is something you offer that you either break even on or lose money on just to get a customer in the door.Many times the customer will buy more than just what was offered in the promotion, which makes up for the loss.Ever wonder why Wal-Mart can afford to have such low prices?Well, I read once that they bank on every person coming in the door spending an average of $45.00.So, even if someone came in to buy the super-discounted item that was on sale that week, they would end up buying more before they walked out of the store.

I can come up with a few ideas hereif you are an optometrist, you can offer a pair of sunglasses at 50% off with a purchase of one pair at full price for a limited time only.Someone could buy themselves a new pair and then one for their spouse for Christmas or Hanukah.Dont forget, there are many holiday shoppers that end up buying gifts for themselves when they are shopping for others I am one!

If you are a jeweler imagine having a sale where you offer the matching earrings for a designer ring for a whopping discount.Or if the jewelry designer does not allow discounts (many dont), you can offer some other non-brand piece of jewelry for a nice percentage off.Imagine all the men who would buy more just to get that extra bling so they can appear even more generous to the women in their lives (moms, sisters, wives, etc.).

If you are a dentist (and who really wants to go to the dentist for the holidays?), you can make sure your patients know that they might lose their medical benefits for the year if they have not used them before December 31st.Many benefit plans are able to be used during one calendar year and expire the last day of the year.Think of all the dental work people have been putting off thinking they had benefits to use whenever they wanted, only to find out they wont have those benefits if they dont use them before December 31st!What a flood you will have in your office!And you can go all out with a special Christmas offer of free teeth whitening or some other such offer.

If you are a business that promotes only to other businesses, think of what you can offer before the end of the year that would not only pad the books profitably, but allow you to deliver products and services well into the New Year by having companies gain an incentive to pre-pay for their next years business.There are tax breaks for some companies who do this and many will just so they dont have to report so much income at the end of the year.

Really, I could go on and on.But the purpose of this article is to get YOU thinking and solving your own holiday income problems.

Once you figure out what you are going to offer, get started on the promotion.Direct mail postcards mailed to your target market multiple times are not only cost-effective, but a very targeted method to promote your offer to the people that will be most likely to respond.But to make your new ideas come to fruition, you have to start early.Six months is optimum.Three months will do.And 2 months is still better than NOT promoting.If you have waited too long to get started, start planning for next years holiday campaign.

And remember, get ALL your staff excited about your promotion and offer so they talk it up with e-v-e-r-y single customer that they come in contact with.Excitement is infectious and even if one particular customer does not bite, they might just go tell another who will!

Happy Holidays, Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah!Or whatever you celebrate!Get your new year off to a good start by promoting heavy and early to end this one off with a bang!


About the Author

Using a powerful, simple, extremely cost effective way of communicating with customers has earned Joy Gendusa Inc.

Magazines recognition as the nations fastest growing direct mail postcard-marketing firm with year 2007 revenues close to $19,000,000.Gendusa began in 1998 with zero investment capital.Today, her Clearwater, FL firm called PostcardMania, employs over 150 people and prints 4 million and mails 2 million postcards representing 31,000-plus customers in over 350 industries each week.Visit http://www.postcardmania.com


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Sunday, November 16, 2008

Law Firm Marketing Tip: How Personal Injury Attorneys Can Optimize Their Websites For Results

As a personal injury attorney, marketing your law firms website is the most important part of your online business. Not only is it meant to provide prospects with information about you and your services, but it is also intended to turn them into clients.

If your website is failing to consistently convert prospects to customers, then it is time to find out what is wrong.

There are a number of things a personal injury attorneys website needs in order to be successful. Here are the top six ways to improve it so you can maximize its performance and boost your law firms internet marketing efforts:

1. Understand the Problem: Before you consider putting anything on your website, you first need to find out what your prospects are looking for. If you dont understand their issues then you wont be able to provide a solution. And even if you do understand their issues but dont respond to them on your homepage, you risk losing visitors because they werent able to find what they were looking for. Give visitors a clear indication of how you can help them.

2. Provide the Solution: After addressing your prospects concerns, it is time for you to offer a solution. Your front page should discuss easy-to-understand benefits that are both tangible and believable. Do not focus on your services; focus on the benefits, value and results you can achieve for your clients.

3. Establish Trust: Beyond addressing the problems your clients have and offering the solutions they need, you must prove yourself to be trustworthy before theyll ever consider contacting you. There are a number of ways you can do this: include testimonials or impressive statistics on the front page, a section that discusses your awards and results, an about us page that is easy to navigate to and from, and a number of resources such as white papers or blog articles they can research so they can discover what makes you such a great personal injury lawyer.

Also, dont forget to include links on the bottom of your site to a privacy policy and a terms and conditions page. While people hardly ever read these pages, they play a significant role in establishing credibility.

4. Make it Easy to Navigate: Dont try to be fancy, you need to make your website as easy to navigate as possible. This means you should have a navigation menu either on the top of your page beneath the banner or on the left hand side. Besides that, your pages should load quickly; even with a slow internet connection. The easier your site is to read, the more likely your prospects will stick around and explore.

5. Use a Professional Designer: While some personal injury lawyers dont believe its necessary to spend money on professional web design, they dont realize what theyre missing out on.

In real life, when you meet somebody in person for the first time they judge you based on your appearance. If you show up in ripped blue jeans and a tank top, you wont get the same response as you would have if you were wearing a suit and tie. Its the same with your website.

When people visit your homepage they quickly judge your services based on your presentation. If your site looks like it was developed by a high-schooler in 1995, your prospect will quickly leave without ever finding out that youre the best personal injury attorney in town. However, if you site looks professional and pleasing to the eye, you will instantly improve your image.

6. Test Rigorously: There are so many things you can test on your website, so it might seem like an overwhelming process, but its not. With free tools such as Google Analytics you can find everything you need to know about your website and visitors. You can find out how people went to your homepage, what city they live in, how long they stayed on each page, what links they clicked and more. When you find a page that isnt performing well, you can make the necessary changes and see your statistics improve.

By understanding what your prospects are looking for and presenting yourself as a personal injury lawyer they can trust, youll greatly increase your chance of earning new business through your website.

Much like creating a brick and mortar business, establishing an effective online presence takes time. However, if youre willing to put in the effort to consistently improve your reputation and presentation then you will have no problem emerging from the pack of personal injury attorneys and marketing your law firm on the internet.
About the Author

Stephen Fairley is CEO of LawFirmMarketingStrategies.com and The Rainmaker Institute, the nations largest law firm marketing company that specializes in helping small law firms. Attorneys visit

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Sunday, August 24, 2008

Internet Marketing Education Tools

Internet has a wide market with numerous entrepreneurs battling the competition to survive. A well-planned marketing strategy is what you need to have to stay ahead in the Internet marketing race. However, there are many such online businesses that have failed due to poor marketing or advertising strategies. Many online companies come and go without even getting noticed. The reason for the failure is nothing, but their ignorance about the changing trends and avoiding the need to learn and understand the importance of Internet marketing. Thus many online courses have been chalked out to help the newbies to stay in the World Wide Web.

Internet marketing education tool is nothing, but a way or methods to learn about the marketing trends and to use the means available to become successful and financially stable. Here are a few Internet marketing tools that can help you get stability and profit on the widespread online market.

. Pay per click- this is one of the most popular Internet marketing tool. Over here, you simply have to choose a product and market it, in return of which you will get a good charge. You desire to prefer and publicize the style, so that you can earn a fee everyplace between 5 to 75 proportion. This depends upon your make and gorgeous entrepreneurship. This machine is still telephoned as the Information superhighway affiliate agenda. To be prosperous in this method, you hunger suitable exercises and education and of passage firm textbook without which you cannot accomplish.

. Articles- This is an extra positive and flourishing process to publicize your make or package. Take note of that almost about additional than 70 fraction employees peruse the Information superhighway in search of awareness around the goods or services. Authoring appropriate articles concerning your merchandises or services may possibly assist you to bring forth commerce and let employees appreciate almost about your total interest. For case in point if you covenant in garden equipments, you can keep up a correspondence countless proper articles on stuffs appropriate to gardening and furnish a link to the website that speaks near to your style or provision. There are numerous articles directories, where you can submit your pleased and therefore intensify the coincidences of attaining acknowledged.

. Blogs- it is one of the hot and coming about gears in the planet of World wide web advertisement. You can either pick to put up a banner ad on the certain frequent blogs or promptly put up a link to your online page. Writing entertaining and active blogs will abet you bring in hefty business. Blogs in itself is an educational device, as you can bring together lot of shrewdness on countless stuffs.

. Link exchange- if you are a new entry in the market and asked to make a correct commerce, you can exchange links plus the common web pages. This is one more prosperous World wide web sales promotion tendency. If you cant exchange, you can take to pay the ordinary online pages and put up your links. Except, the websites should have content germane to your brand or you will dishearten to promote it to the right auditor.

World wide web marketing plays a key role for your success in the online business. By mastering the art of Cyber web sales promotion, you can grasp to survive the competition and reach victory. The on top of Web commercial educational gears is in the midst of the common ones and will assist you in your affair to a immense extent. If you havent further educated yourself almost about Web sales promotion, its phase you did it.


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