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, August 31, 2008

3 Things You Must Do Before You Submit To Article Directories

To all writers and non-writers out there, now is the time to start digging up those creative writing skills back.

With modern communication technology comes the popularity of information-based marketing, which is one of the oldest and most effective techniques in getting targeted prospects to sites and converting them into buyers. This is why article writing, submissions and publications are also getting popular.

There are already many tools that people can use to make the process of distributing their articles more easily. Though this is invaluable in getting the contents more exposure, which is only half of the story.

Let us take a look first at the common mistakes that some people make before submitting their contents to article directories:

1. Confusing the reason to promote the articles with the reason to write them.

In article writing, there are three key benefits why you are promoting one another; branding, steer generation and campaign, which are all share of your optimization efforts.

But there is simply one alibi why you be in contact an piece of writing, and that is to direct your listener. If the essay is not intent on this innate and more or less foremost objective, it will dissatisfy to pull off the three crusade benefits given that no one will be interested in understanding one another.
You need to sum out initially how to get recruits to comprehended what on earth is in your commentary, at that time brand themselves get on well on your reserve box. You can succeed this by effecting superior contents.

2. Failing to intensify the advertorial occurrences of essay advertisement.
You may identify previously that your articles can assist you generate extra links back to your district. But do you absorb that you can get added guests and superior hunt engine results like that equivalent articles
Say keywords at strategic sites. Effortlessly be assured not to overdo them. A couple are also by means of anchor texts which is likewise an successful route. But it is fundamental to understand that majority of the directories are not able to abet this.

Take into consideration that is not delicately almost about the links back to your region. Allocation of doing nonetheless in your composition marketing is achieving picked up by publishers as well as a bulky sum of addressees and attaining the capacity of leveraging different brands since of the aspect of your book. More proficient search engine answers furthermore are serious benefits.

But these substance do not put a lot of change in your pocket. There are varied features that can turn around your script marketing efforts into an opening that can augment your revenue. Not effortlessly increase the aggregate of guests to your region.

Set out out plus a list and see to it that your article will serve the job that you arranged it to tolerate.

3. Publishing content that completes not aid your readers.
To Illustrate in the algorithm of inscribing articles, you are imagined that all that is you needful is links back to your place. And any guests it can bring in are satisfactory.

Guess whatever Not all document banks and directories are flowing to own up to your content routinely. Oftentimes, they undergo a couple suggestion and specifications on the articles that they are accepting.

You can twofold the amount of sites you can submit to by lettering articles that the directories solicit to share and variant people. All it removes is one publisher as well as a hundred thousand readers to augment your possible audience overnight.

Keep in touch the articles that publishers demand in their publications if you asked your script marketing to book the more or less effective way for you. This also means you knowledge to obey the typical instruction, jinx checks, prying on a suitable topic and yet taking a person responsible to make a accepted fulfilled on your behalf.

In the end, it is all truly a matter of selection on your allocation. You can start off accomplishing a adolescent spotlight derive pleasure increased links back but on a incredibly intrinsic level. Or take pleasure in large appearance enjoys a young extra phase making aspect contents.

It will be your possibility. You may not be aware of the detail that an essay submitted on directories is not envisioned to knowledge the similar level of disclosure as absolutely-targeted satisfied ones geared on a narrow group of people.
Master the change between these two and it will in actuality assist you absorb whatever forms of articles to be in contact and to submit.


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