Marketing and Promotion - Edited by Laura Wheeler

Marketing and Promotion are not one time events. They are a series of ongoing things that you do. Variety, chosen for effectiveness, pays off!

We focus only on low cost advertising options. If you get to the point that you want to advertise on TV or radio, or run a full spread in the newspaper, then chances are you don't need us anymore!

 Try one of the Guerilla Marketing Handbooks (Click here to find it on Amazon.com) for details on how to do many types of promotion.

Classifieds

Forget online free classifieds. If you have to do paid advertising online, advertise on a site that has a reputation behind it, and where you know people go who are looking for what you have to sell. Local newspaper classifieds can be used effectively if they have a hook. In other words, you have to give people something. Run a classified offering a discount coupon or catalog if they call. Run it for a week, keep it short. If it works, keep it up. If not, dump it.

Exchange Links

You can use a service for this, or do it on your own. The trick is to seek out related sites that are not direct competitors. Offer a link exchange. Find sites where lists of resources are kept, and refer your own site for a listing. Find eGroups where people are discussing the topic, and participate, then leave a signature line at the bottom (check their advertising policies to make sure you comply). There is no substitute for hard work in this area, seeking out places online where you can drop your link as a resource on someone else's site. Short of paying for ads, this is the single most effective thing you can do on the cheap, and it helps your search engine listings to be more effective also

Email

Most email lists you can purchase are outright illegal, or at best a stretch of the law. They are frankly not worth your money because people with sense do not trust unsolicited email anyway. There is a much better way.

Develop your own email database from customers and "opt in" newsletter subscribers. Email is more effective for newsletter type mailings, and for encouraging repeat purchases from existing customers than it is for cold contacts anyway.

Bulk Mail

This may or may not be effective. It is for some products, not for others. It generally costs about $1 per mailing. Fairly expensive in large amounts. We do not consider it cost effective for a shoestring startup, and only worthwhile if you can expect a good response rate from your target market. Targeted mailings are more effective in many cases than generalized bulk mailings.

Creating a Website 

Many Web hosting services offer free site builders. Typically these look like canned websites, without much personality. I cannot recommend them for more than just a basic "get it going" option. You really need a cheap HTML editor (Front Page Express or Netscape Composer will work, or download a copy of NVU, which is free) and you need to learn how to use it if you want to build your own. You will have to have a sense of functional style also, it is simple to create a website, rather complex to create one that works in all the ways it needs to. Adventure Tech-Web offers inexpensive website design services for people who need a site on a budget. For complete coverage of this topic, check out our eBooks at http://www.skinnyshoestring.com/ebooks.htm .

Shopping cart is available at www.mals-e.com. Amazing features, and free. Totally functional from your basic website hosting services. Steep learning curve, but only a few hard things to learn. Adventure Tech-Web can also offer services to help build a store at a reasonable price.

Marketing a Website

Great tool for promoting websites online. SelfPromotion.com is a resource for do-it-yourselfers where you can learn to prepare your pages for the search engines, then use a sophisticated url submission robot to submit your webpages to all the important search engines and directories. You'll also find tutorials about website promotion, submitting to yahoo, and much more. Best of all, you can use the site for free -- if you like it, pay what YOU think it's worth! The guy who runs it has reinvented tipping! We get a commission if you pay for the service, but frankly, we would recommend it even if we did not. We have used it and seen results. Well worth paying for!

Online Marketing

There are tons of "free" classified sites out there. DON'T BOTHER! Once you are listed with them you will be innundated with SPAM, much of it obscene. And they never really get you a single customer. There are other things that are better. Heck, PATIENCE works better than free classified sites!

Register your site with the search engines through Self-Promotion.com, and get a PayPal account. List yourself in the PayPal shops. You don't get a huge amount of hits there, but you do get people who are ready to shop. Do some simple Search Engine Optimization tasks (http://www.skinnyshoestring.com/sohotools/optimization.htm), and then market through free sources as listed in the eBook in the previous section. Whether or not you pay for anything else depends on if you can afford it. I never have until recently. My sites do get traffic, and they do draw customers. They may take a little longer to do it, but they get customers who return again and again.

Business Cards

Keep a fistful of these at all times. They will cost you about $.05 to $.10 each (or more), even if you make them yourself, but are one of the best forms of advertising there is. You can hand them out to all and sundry, print a special discount offer on the back, mark them with a code to put in other businesses so you can pay the other business a commission if a customer using one makes a purchase, clip them to orders, send them as a tear off on a postcard, or use them in other creative ways. People will show up with them at the oddest times! A good business card will serve as a mini-introduction to your business, and leave the person with a reason to look. Business cards are not only a good idea for every business, they are absolutely essential for many.

Brochures

Brochures are fairly expensive, and only really worthwhile if you have a product or service that needs explaining. Otherwise a business card will do instead. Brochures can be very helpful if images and text are used well, and if they are logically laid out. They can be anything from a classic tri-fold to a single sheet flyer, to half size or more creative choices. Whether or not they are worth having printed (or even printing yourself) depends on whether they are an asset in your line of business or not.

Events

Sponsor an event, book a booth at an event, hand out cards or pens, etc. Almost any business can make SOMETHING out of an event if they do not have to pay too much to be there. If a free table is offered, Go. If the table is low cost, GO. Set up a booth that contains some basic elements - Something to look at, Something to talk about, and something to take away. Even if the item they get to take is only a business card (tiny samples are great if you can afford it, but anything with your name on it helps). Make sure your business name is written down more than once where people will see it - they remember better if they see it. For a startup business, half the battle is letting people know you are there. The other half is persuading them to walk in the door. If you do your job right and establish an honorable business, repeat sales will occur. Events are prime opportunities to spend a little time, and get exposure to a lot of people. Generalized events are good opportunities, targeted events (like homeshows, computer shows, airshows, etc) are best for reaching the people most interested in your product if you can find a show that relates. These are also, unfortunately, often the most expensive ones.

Create Your Own Event

Hold an open house, sale, sidewalk event, or other simple attention getter. Gear it to what you can afford, but do serve some sort of refreshment at least for an hour, and give people something to take home with them, if only a business card (balloons, pens, postcards, or other fun or usable items are great if you can afford them - check out Oriental Trading Company). Put the money into the event where it will make the most difference. Go cheap on cups and napkins, put up just a few quality decorations, serve something simple, but elegant, and make sure you and a few other representatives for the company are there to welcome people and talk to them (even if it is just your husband or a good friend or two who know enough about your business to help you out for the event). Put a few things on sale to give people an incentive to purchase if they are so inclined, but mostly have fun and help people develop a relationship with you so they think of you when they do need what you offer. The more personal you can make the whole event, the more memorable your business will be to people.

Building Your Contact Database

Every time you get an order, the customer needs to be entered into your database. It can be as simple as an address book program, but is more useful if it allows mail merge capabilities. This allows you to make periodic announcements of changes to your existing customers, and you can do it in such a way that it encourages repeat sales. You can also announce sale items, offer special discounts, etc. If your business develops sufficiently personal relationships with your clients, Christmas cards are appropriate. Remember, if you send emails, you need to offer each person the ability to get off the list, or to "opt out".

A second set of names are assembled for prospective customers. You cannot send them unsolicited email, you must have their consent to receive periodic mailings. You want to keep separate those who have ordered from those who might, and keep track if you can of how long you mail things out to people who do not order so you don't waste the mailings forever. This can be tracked as simply as a date in the database of when you begin mailings, then transferring them from the prospect to customer database if they purchase.

 Affiliate Marketing

Once your business is proven to work (the major bugs are worked out), try an affiliate network. You can do it for free using Mal's shopping cart and mTracker (www.mals-e.com), or try something like Commission Junction that costs a bit more, but does more of the work for you. Affiliate links generally pay only for actual purchases made by customers who click through from their site. You can choose whether they get paid for new customers only, or each time that customer returns also. If you go the free route, you have to cut the checks and mail them out, or otherwise pay the affiliates. and you have to recruit the affiliates yourself. Payments are generally low though, affiliates get paid anywhere from $2 per purchase, to 1%, or rarely higher percentage rates. Compensation can be fairly low though because people who use affiliate links expect to earn from cummulative earnings. Affiliate marketing harnesses the power of exponential contacts though, and can be very effective.

WebRings

You can join a webring of related sites. Go to www.webring.com to see if other people have already established a ring that relates to your topic. Webrings can bring in traffic on a moderate scale, and are usually worth the effort. They will require that you paste some code into your web page (paste the code into the HTML code, not into the page directly). You can choose the page you put them on, but that page must be registered as the site URL.

Try Banner Explode

It is free, and takes just a few minutes to set up. It relies on people helping people, so there is no entity directly profiting from the program. Go to http://www.supermomunlimited.com/freehits.htm to read about it.

Market to Existing Customers

Don't get annoying about it, but put purchase incentives in with items you ship to customers, send them flyers with specials listed, email them with current sales, etc. Send them a "loyalty reward" in the form of a coupon or a discount code.