Category: Sales & Marketing

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Sales & Marketing

Some Facts About Table Tent Printing

Table tent cards, despite the presence of other promotional tactics, are still a great and innovative manner of promoting for your business, particularly if it is a tinier business establishment. They have evolved a lot during the past decades. In addition, these print services have gotten a lot wiser than before and keep coming up with new, creative ideas for successful business promotion. To further improve your knowledge about these things, below are some of the facts that you can always keep in mind. All you have to do is to read on and understand.

1. These table tent cards have gotten so well known.

In fact, that the above stated services have increased in number over the past few years. These trade prints more often than not make it so easy for most of you to display your business to all clients without even forcing these things to all of those people.

2. Most of you get to select what type of color scheme or color them you want to use.

This truly depends on what your business, your business logo and all other details, which more often than not puts you and your business in the best position to decide on it. Most of you can even select to have either sides of these prints colored, or just the visible part. The former, of course, costs more than the latter.

3. Great and vivid colors are, for sure a great manner for promoting your business using these trade prints.

That is not to say that black and white themed alternatives are not effectual. These days, table tent printing services more often than not offer wisely planned black and white tents that can draw clients interest and attention by virtue of them being different from other prints. How good these can be differs from services to service though.

4. You are also given the alternative to select from certain standard dimensions for your trade prints.

This will more often than not depend on where you intend to place these things. For example, you can also get 4 ¼ by 4 ¼ prints or even the 6 by 4 ¼ dimensions, since these are considered as the standard ones. Of course, for a tiny additional fee, you can also order custom dimensions or even very large ones to display at events or other suitable places.

5. The type of material used for making these trade prints also matters a lot for effectual business promotions for your business establishment.

The two primary alternatives that you can more often than not find are the uncovered and the gloss. These then most of the time branch out to custom alternatives like the gloss on only the visible side, uncovered on the other, and gloss on either sides. Great business promotional tools also because these things are easy for all clients to carry around with them if they want to. If well planned, most people might also want to keep these prints on display at the comfort of their own home.

Given lots of selection that printers give, there is no way that you cannot find a table tent printing plan or template that will perfectly suits you and your business establishment. With the convenience offered by all of these services, most of you can choose and even plan your own prints for great satisfaction.

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Sales & Marketing

5 Reasons Why You Shouldn’t Do Your Own PPC

It’s true that Pay-Per-Click Advertising (PPC) such as Google’s “Adwords” and Microsoft’s “Bing” can be a remarkably effective, low-cost advertising solution that can almost instantly bring a flood of eager buyers to your website, if done correctly. However, it’s also true that you can take a terrible beating in a very short time if you’re not careful and don’t know what you’re doing.

You see, Adwords™ and Bing™ (the dominant Pay-Per-Click platforms) are promoted as being easy to use. In a sense that’s true. You can sign up for an account and be walked through how to put up a PPC ad in a matter of a few minutes. But, I can’t tell you how many local business clients have come to me mentioning that they have spent thousands of dollars on PPC – and yet they received zero sales for their efforts. They report that money is leaving their pockets – and it’s not being replenished. They have almost given up on Pay-Per-Click Advertising.

Here Are 5 Things That Can Go Wrong When You Try to Manage Your Own Pay-Per-Click Advertising Efforts

1. You target the wrong keywords.

Some search terms can get a lot of clicks, but very few sales, because they’re too general, and there’s no buying intent. For example, you have a tire shop specializing in off-road tires, and you bid on “tires.” That term is searched on over 16,000,000 times a month, so even if your ad wasn’t very good, you could get a lot of clicks. But that searcher isn’t your prospect—he’s in the early stages of looking around, and it’s likely that all you’re going to do is pay for a very expensive click and not get a sale.

2. You under-estimate the amount of clicks you can get, and don’t set an appropriate limit on what you want to spend.

Sure, you can set a daily budget for your campaign, but that’s for all the adgroups in the campaign. You could spend your whole budget early in the day on one poorly-chosen search term, and have all your other ads not get shown at all. Or you could mistakenly set your budget at $3,000 (what you wanted to spend for the month) instead of $100, and come back a few days later to find that you spent thousands of dollars. Happens all the time—and the search engines aren’t user-friendly when that happens. They still want to get paid.

3. You have a local business, but you advertise in geographies that can’t possibly bring you any business.

If you advertise your dry-cleaning business located in central Denver in Google’s Denver “metro” area, your ads will be shown throughout northern Colorado, including places 250 miles away. That will get you some completely worthless clicks.

4. You advertise, using broad match, without properly using negative keywords, and pay for a lot of useless clicks.

For example, if you sell guns, and you don’t set “Top Gun” as a negative keyword, you’ll pay for a lot of clicks from people looking for information about the movie, not about guns.

5. You bid on a keyword, and write a good enough ad to get the click, but your landing page isn’t congruent with the ad or the keyword.

For example, you’re a signage and graphics shop, and you bid on the keyword “trade show graphics”, but when people click your ad, you send them to your home page where there are pictures of lighted building signs and vehicle “wraps”. Your visitor doesn’t see what he expected to see, so he hits the “back” button, and he’s gone.

I could write about a hundred similar errors, and probably a lot more than that.

With So Many Things That Can Go Wrong, Should You Continue to Invest in Pay-Per-Click Advertising?

Pay-Per-Click is a fiendishly complex beast, capable of amazing and subtle refinements, and not at all easy to master. One of the most popular PPC manuals is over 300 pages, and that’s just the beginner’s guide. Not only that, PPC changes all the time, so it’s difficult, even for experts, to stay on top of it.

Now, I’m not saying you shouldn’t be doing PPC. You very likely should. Done right, expert Pay-per-Click management can improve website results phenomenally. Traffic and sales increases of several hundred per cent are common—at minimal cost, leading to a very large return on investment.

You just shouldn’t do it by yourself, unless you’re willing to devote a LOT of time (and money) to learning it.
Because we’re experts in local search marketing and pay-per-click advertising, we’re able to help our clients avoid mistakes and get the kind of results they want, like:

  • One very happy reverse mortgage specialist obtained exclusive, hot leads for less than half what he was paying to buy leads that weren’t nearly as fresh, and weren’t even exclusive.
  • A physician, who was using pay-per-click advertising for years, increased his inquiries three-fold, at no increase in cost.

If you’re looking to achieve excellent results from Pay-Per-Click marketing, I urge you to consider investing in a PPC management expert who can handle all your PPC needs – because in the long run, it pays!

About the Author:

Local Search Marketing and Pay-Per Click Management expert Scott Harvey works with business owners who want to improve their website marketing , get better search engine results and capture more clicks. Now, he is offering an 82-page, step-by-step guide to better website performance, covering PPC and many other proven website marketing strategies. Grab his FREE “Make the Phone Ring” eBook now at: http://www.honestwebsitemarketing.com

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Sales & Marketing

3 Mistakes Conscious Entrepreneurs Make When Launching a Product or Program

Of all the marketing tools out there (and make no mistake about it, product launches are a TOOL — nothing more, nothing less) product launches have got to be the most frustrating, misused and misunderstood tool.

There is nothing that will bring an entrepreneur to their knees faster than a busted launch. Worse, even if the launch ISN’T a failure, it’s still the cause of more worry, anxiety and sleepless nights than any other marketing tactic I’ve ever seen (and trust me, I’ve seen a lot).

However, since launch failure certainly is one of the top concerns (not to mention a bad launch makes everything else look worse) I thought I’d take some time today to discuss the top 3 mistakes entrepreneurs make when launching a product or program.

Mistake 1: They rush into the launch.

Let me explain what I mean by this because it’s not as clear cut as you might think. While I do think giving yourself some time and space to launch something properly (especially when you’re doing it from scratch) is a good thing, if you have a big enough list to meet your sales goals, you can rush your launch as much as you want.

Where I see the biggest problem with rushing your launch (other than just keeping yourself up nights working on all the promotional pieces) is when your list is small and you are dependent on affiliates or joint venture partners to meet your sales goals. If this is the case, you are pretty much guaranteeing your launch will fail.

You see, affiliates and joint venture partners are busy people. They have their own products and services to promote plus they too have agreed to help other people. The less lead time you give them the more likely they will tell you they can’t help you promote.

However, there is another way to look at this, which actually leads into mistake number 2.

Mistake 2: They don’t know the numbers.

Here’s how this mistake plays out. You’ve been hearing about these 6 figure launches, but you’re just starting out — you don’t expect to have a 6 figure launch. You would be happy with 50 people in your program. And with 200 people on your list that should be doable, right?

Well…

You do the launch and end up with 8 people in your program. You’re crushed.

Now the reality is with your list of 200, that’s a 4 percent conversion of your entire list. You should be THRILLED with that conversion.

But, because you don’t know the numbers (specifically the CONVERSION numbers) you’re just looking at the end result — how many people actually bought. And if it’s lower than what you wanted (or expected) you’re going to be disappointed.

But if you know the numbers, then you’ll know going in how many people you can expect to buy. And you’ll ALSO know what to expect regardless if affiliates help you promote or don’t. And that’s a really powerful way to keep yourself from getting too disappointed or frustrated.

Mistake 3: They either give up or decide not to send “one more email.”

This happens if they either get too discouraged from lack of sales or they just start feeling “icky” about the whole launch. At that point, they just stop.

And when you stop, you’ve also just stopped getting any more sales. And even if you’re stopping because you’re feeling sort of icky, you’re probably going to feel even more icky when people stop signing up for your program. (You CAN cut down the number of emails, just as long as you know which emails to cut.)

So you need to know going in you’re probably going to feel like giving up somewhere in the middle. If you know this, you can stand firm when it happens and make sure you still send that “one last email.” (Who knows, that could be the email that turns everything around for you and to think you almost didn’t send it!)

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Sales & Marketing

3 Steps to Crafting Your 2012 Marketing Plan

There’s no question you can start and grow a business without a marketing plan. However, I can tell you from personal experience, if you’re feeling stuck and can’t get to the next level, it’s probably because you never took the time to put a marketing plan together.

Having a marketing plan really is the key to growing and sustaining a successful, profitable business. Otherwise all you’re doing is winging it, and winging it only takes you so far.

So if you’re ready to craft your 2012 marketing plan but you’re not sure where to start, read on — I’m going to walk you through 3 steps to get you there.

1. Start with the end goal. If you don’t know where you’re going, then you really don’t need a plan. (And it’s impossible to plan without knowing where you want to end up anyway.)

It’s probably easiest to start with the money. How much do you want to make in 2012? Write that down. You probably also want to divide it up into monthly or quarterly goals so you know how much you need to make each month or quarter to reach that goal.

Now figure out how you’re going to make that monthly or quarterly figure. How many of your products/programs/books/service packages do you need to sell to hit that number? Write all that down too.

2. Put the big blocks in place. In order to meet your quotas are you going to need to do some launches? Put those in first. Or is there something else you need to do to get clients or customers? (Attend networking events, host teleclass, etc.) Make sure those are all accounted for before you do anything else.

Once you’ve put in the big blocks, take a moment and eyeball your calendar. Is it packed with launch after launch? Or do you have hardly anything in there? Check that it’s balanced — you want to have enough launches or big marketing events in there to generate some visibility and momentum for your business but you don’t want so many you feel exhausted and overwhelmed just looking at your calendar.

3. Fill in the details. Marketing is a dance — a dance between promoting and giving. Creating and building relationships then harvesting those relationships. You need to make sure you have all both things covered. (And if you’re wondering what I mean by marketing activities that create and build relationships, I’m talking about doing things like an ezine or answering people’s question on Facebook — content-rich activities that don’t obviously lead to a promotion.)

You may also want to take the time to actually fill in the actual launch steps. When are you doing the preview call? When do you want the emails to go out? When are you going to have all the copy written?

The more specific plan, the easier it’s going to be to execute. Not only will you know exactly what you’re supposed be doing at all times but your team will be able to help you a lot easier.

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Sales & Marketing

Top 12 Social Networks for Entrepreneurs and Small Business CEOs

Article Contributed by Goranka

Do you need a leg up to jump start your career or business venture? Or launch and grow your small business? Well, we all do sometimes, especially when young and inexperienced. Not even our closest friends can always help us and give the right advice or support that we really need. Thankfully, there are social networks and communities where we can connect with seasoned professionals who can provide us with valuable tips, potential partners and like-minded people with similar interests, aspirations and goals.

Here are the 12 most useful social networks for entrepreneurs, small businesses and business professionals who are building their career.

1. LinkedIn

LinkedIn is the world’s largest and most important social network for business professionals with over 120 million members. Obviously, it is a must social networking site for everyone who is serious about her or his career and business. If you are not convinced, check out how many members use the following in their profile:

  • 1,553,123 LinkedIn search results for “business owner”
  • 1,532,870 results for “CEO”
  • 2,420,655 for “general manager”
  • 325,807 for “entrepreneur”
  • 619,354 results for “business expert”

LinkedIn is therefore great for developing relationships and meeting people that you may want to work with. Furthermore, LinkedIn company pages can help you to increase visibility and brand awareness, as well as attract new customers through recommendations.

2.Viadeo

Viadeo is a network for entrepreneurs, managers and business owners with 35 million members worldwide. Founded in France in 2004, it is very popular among professionals from western Europe. Viadeo can help you to identify useful contacts, share information and knowledge, find new leads and partnership opportunities, showcase your expertize and strengthen your personal brand, discover and recruit talent or get recruited.

3. Xing

Xing is a social network for business professionals with more than 11 million members globally. Through Xing you can find new contacts, experts, colleagues, partners and jobs, or get headhunted. You can also discover events, groups and companies of interest.

4. Ryze

Ryze is a network for smaller business professionals. It helps the members to make and grow connections, and especially to “rise-up” through quality networking. You can network to build your career, grow your business or make sales. On Ryze you can customize your profile page, send messages to other members, join groups, add friends and keep in touch with them.

5. Biznik

Biznik is based on a premise that “it sucks growing a business alone”. This is simply a community of entrepreneurs and small businesses dedicated to helping each other succeed. Biznik is about sharing ideas, not resumes. It is targeted to people who are building real businesses, not looking for their next job.

6. Cofoundr

Cofoundr is a fast growing social network for entrepreneurs. This is a community of startup founders such as CEOs, advisers, investors, programmers, developers and designers. By joining this community you can find co-founders, build teams and get advice.

7. PartnerUp

PartnerUp is a social network for small businesses. As a small business owner, you can use it to connect with professionals who can help you build and grow your small business, join discussions or get advice.

8. Ecademy

Ecademy is a business community for business owners and entrepreneurs to connect, share knowledge, support and transact with one another. Ecademy helps you to connect to the right people, market your business and grow revenue.

9. Entrepreneur

EntrepreneurConnect is a social community founded by Entrepreneur.com. It is intended for entrepreneurs who seek to connect, share expertise and network with their peers. Users can also promote their products and services.

10. Startup Nation

StartupNation is a free service founded by entrepreneurs for entrepreneurs. Startup Nation offers lots of useful resources like helpful articles, step-by-step guides, expert blogs. Members can also join very active small business and entrepreneur forums.

11. FledgeWing

FledgeWing is an online community for aspiring student entrepreneurs. It provides entrepreneurial students the opportunity to connect with professionals and mentors in their field of interest, have their ideas tested out with other users on the site and get advice on launching and growing their start-up.

12. Young Entrepreneur

YoungEntrepreneur is one of the largest online forum communities for entrepreneurs worldwide founded back in 1999.

Have you joined any of these communities yet? Or some other? Please share your experiences and opinions on networking for business.

About the author:

Goranka is an online marketing specialist and a small business consultant as well as Internet enthusiast. She is also an executive editor of a Serbian marketing blog.