Zero Cost Magazine Advertising

Coming up with new and innovative ways to advertise is one of the biggest headaches any seller can have. If you’re smart, you will start a data base or card file of all the ideas you have. Even if you don’t plan on using them right away. I even keep track of the really crazy ones. You never know when they can be the catalyst for a new idea themselves.

Here is a tip that almost anyone can use to help get your stores’ name infront of the public. I have all my neighbors save their old magazines for me. If your neighborhood is anything like mine, you will probably have more magazines accumulate in a month than you could imagine.

I take these magazines and do two things with them. One, I take and staple or glue (I like staples because people can remove the cards for their own use) these cards to several pages in some of these magazines. Then I take and donate them to local doctors’ offices for their waiting rooms. Another place you can take them is community centers. You probably have other places around you that would love to have old magazines given to them.

The other thing I do with these magazines with a business card in them is to also insert a ½ page flyer between a few pages. These I like to leave libraries or other places where the magazines will be read.

Copyright © 1988-2008, The Hand Made Product Directory / New Creations Consulting, LLC

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info@dmpmc.net www.dmpmc.net/THMD

Is There An Elephant in the Room With You?

It’s the elephant in the room — the thing no one wants to really talk about, for fear of being forced to admit it’s real.

… But the fact is, the U.S. economy (and by extension, the global economy) is experiencing a downward spiral right now, and the ripple effects are being felt by everyone from Bill Gates to the smallest home business owner.

However, hiding your head in the sand isn’t going to change things!

You can’t just act like everything is "business as usual" and pretend it isn’t happening.

Many of your customers are going to be forced to tighten their belts. You may find that people are going to be less likely to make a purchase online than they have been in the past. But that doesn’t mean you should close up shop!

The best way to deal with an economic crisis is to FACE IT HEAD ON and look for ways to make it work FOR your online business — instead of against it. By tweaking your sales message to speak to the financial challenges your customers might be facing, you will get a better response out of them.

Here are a few ways you can do this:

1. Emphasize the VALUE of your product — and the amount of money people will save in the long run by buying it. Emphasize value on your website… in your newsletter… in your pay-per-click ads — everywhere you reach potential customers. By showing them how your product will help their bank balance rather than harm it, they’ll be far more likely to make a purchase!

2. Offer special discounts and free trials — The best way to appeal to people on a tight budget is to offer them a great deal. And there’s no better deal than free! A great way to convince people of the value of your product is to let them try it out for free for a limited period of time. It’s far more difficult to say "no" to a great product once it’s already in your hands! Also consider offering other perks, such as free shipping or free gift wrap. You could also include more free bonuses with your main product. By offering "added value" items like these, you’ll set yourself apart from your competitors and encourage more people to buy from you.

3. Focus on your existing customer base — The greatest asset of any business is its customers. These are people who have already shown they trust you by buying from you once — which means they’re far more likely to buy from you again. … And THAT means it will cost you less money to convince THEM to buy, compared to someone who’s never even heard of you. Work hard to build a strong relationship with your existing customers. Offer them lots of free valuable information, combined with special "customers only" discounts to encourage them to buy.

Above all, make sure they haven’t forgotten you — and that they always think of you as the person who "sends them all that interesting and useful stuff!" By staying on their radar, you will guarantee that when they do decide to open their wallets, your site will be the first place they go.

Copyright © 1988-2008, The Hand Made Product Directory / New Creations Consulting, LLC

All rights reserved

info@dmpmc.net www.dmpmc.net/THMD

You Say Marketing With Email ??????

Email marketing has developed a really bad image because of all the spam we all are receiving these days. In fact many businesses are becoming extremely leery of doing any form of email marketing. This is unfortunate as using email effectively can result in increased sales with practically no effort on a store owners’ part.

The effectiveness of the technique I am about to describe will be proportionally effective based on the amount of email you receive and reply to plus the amount of regular email you generate yourself. The more you use email, the more effective this technique will be.

Practically everyone who uses email has a Signature on the bottom of their email. Most times it is simply text and text links. That was the only way you could have it for a very long time because very few people could see any graphics in an email. Today however, most email users are using email software that allows them to see a rich variety of graphic and even verbal content.

I received an email the other day from a store that had the right idea. Besides text and text links in their Signature, they had a linked graphic of some of their products which when clicked on took them to their web site. The graphic wasn’t obnoxious in size but sure caught my attention just like it was intended to. The graphic was a simple picture of several of the stores products. What made this stand out wasn’t its size of the products themselves but the fact that it was there in the first place took me by surprise.

Below is a workup I did using our email Signature. Our Signature isn’t normal. It’s much bigger than I would recommend for the average store owner. It will however give you the concept. If you want, you can ad some text above the image also.

If you don’t know how to slide a graphic into your email, your email program will have instructions on how to do it.

Copyright © 1988-2008, The Hand Made Product Directory / New Creations Consulting, LLC

All rights reserved

info@dmpmc.net www.dmpmc.net/THMD

Two Unusual Ways To Increase Sales

As most producers and sellers of handmade and hand crafted products have learned, you can’t depend solely on online sales and marketing to make a living at your chosen craft. It takes a combination of the real world and internet to succeed. Here are a couple of ideas that the reader might find useful. One is for the real world and the other for on line.

When I was young, I had an uncle who had a hardware store. My uncle not only was he a marketing wiz, but his ideas worked. He grew a small store into a medium sized chain in a little more than a decade, using marketing ideas big and small.

I loved the time he had his business card printed on one side of a card, with the other side printed to look like a folded $20 bill. He would then hire me and some of my friends to drop the fake $20s near the store, and people would get $20 off when the cards were "redeemed."

Now $20 isn’t a magic number. It could be anything from $1 on up. The amount would be determined by your individual product pricing. Although this idea is related to the real world, with a little variation, could be utilized for on line sales simply by adding a unique number to the card that the customer would use to redeem their discount.

This next idea isn’t mine. It is however an unusual but effective on line marketing idea that might work for the reader if your product is right. There is an e-tail site called www.Woot.com. But don't yawn yet until you've seen it. They sell one thing each day. That's it. It changes every day but they only ever sell one thing. The prices are not spectacular, but the writing is hilarious and the key difference (a one-product store!) is brilliant.

I’m not suggesting that you go out and create a one-product store, but you can learn a lot from how the people at Woot did it. They don't take themselves too seriously and they have cleverly highlighted their point of difference. Do you have a point of difference that will let you stand out from the crowd? If you don’t know, you should be investing a significant amount of your energy into developing or discovering one.

Just a note on the lighter side. Most customers consider themselves to be pretty smart shoppers. Whether that is a truth or not of course depends on the individual customer. The point is that as a retailer we can’t take this fact as a truth. There are times when you run across a customer that just doesn’t know up from down. This isn’t something new. These types of customers have been around from the beginning. This is supposedly a true fact that on the side of the Great Pyramid of Giza in Egypt, a hieroglyph actually reads "this end up

Copyright © 1988-2008, The Hand Made Product Directory / New Creations Consulting, LLC

All rights reserved

info@dmpmc.net www.dmpmc.net/THMD

Using The Wonderful World Of Social Media

Like it or not, if you sell on line, you need to be involve the wonderful world of social media. As with search marketing, there is both an “organic” and an advertising component to marketing on social networks, news and media sharing sites.

As social media usage increases month over month, marketers have found a way to use these popular sites as channels for promotion. Companies have been using MySpace for years to create custom pages for their promotion and making friends with current and potential customers in and around their target demographic.

Now that a savvy online marketer can build a profile, network and strategically contact said, it is time to bring in the advertising. Here are 5 things to know about social media advertising.

Understand your targeted social media channel –

By knowing who is using which social media site, you can promote your products to their targeted audience on the appropriate social site. Just as a point of interest, Facebook users represent an older, more mature crowd than MySpace users, so if you were advertising rap music it might not be the most appropriate content on Facebook.

Target the correct users with your message –

I some times think you need to have a degree in psychology when it comes to advertising particularly since when using social media’s you are really trying to get into the heads of those who will be viewing you material. How you phrase your ad is often more important than what is actually said. Who are you targeting? Young affluent customers, middle age blue collar workers, senior citizens, ect.. You get the idea. When my children were young and I just teaching them how to fish, I would tell them that if you want to catch fish you use the bait that the fish are striking on.

Ensure the advertisements are supplementing the present content on the social site –

If your social media location is primarily made up of young singles and most of the conversations taking place are about dating and such things, it doesn’t make much sense to be placing advertising there for children’s clothing.

Have a social networking presence –

Integrating social media advertisements with social media usage is just plain smart: two impressions are better than one. And because searchers seeing either a brand name or a company name, PPC ads are likely to then click on the organic results for the same company, social media users could see the advertisements and search for the same company as a user on Facebook, Flickr or del.icio.us.

Another interesting thing is tha seeing a company successfully networking with the opinionated and persnickety social media community can really boost their reputation as being a caring company that is just “one of the guys.” Many people respect companies that are more down to earth and that interact with their customer base.

The time to get on board the social media train is now –

Just like with social media networking, the early bird gets the worm. Being one of the first to successfully use social media as an advertising vehicle shows innovation and understanding who will respond best to the advertisement’s messaging.

Incorporating social media advertisements with social media networking practices can give more impressions to the companies’ targeted users as well as a channel for users to connect with the company they trust.

Copyright © 1988-2008, The Hand Made Product Directory / New Creations Consulting, LLC

All rights reserved

info@dmpmc.net www.dmpmc.net/THMD

Email And Your Marketing Efforts

The concept of using email as part of a marketing plan can be a touchy subject these days. The fact that we all are flooded with Spam these days is a growing problem for us all and no one wants to be tagged with the title of Spammer. So how do we use email effectively in our marketing efforts?

Let me dispel a common myth held by many on line merchants. Particularly those that have their store on sites like ebay or any of the many other Cyber Mall formatted store hosting sites. Most of these sites have given way to the pressure of some buyer advocate groups and forbid a seller to contact a customer they have already done business with. In the first place, that customer is yours as the seller. Not the hosting site’s. In most instances the hosting site did little if anything to bring that customer to your store. It is bad enough that these hosting sites charge some outrageous fees at times, what they really want to do is run your business. Don’t let them. I’m not saying that you should abuse your rights as a seller and bombard a previous customer with solicitations either but when used properly, email can be an important part of your marketing.

One of the first thing you should remember is that you should never use a store’s hosting site’s communication system to conduct business with your customers. After the first initial contact, all communications with a customer should be done using your own business email. If a customer isn’t willing to provide you their email address, there isn’t much you can do about it. Not everyone feel like this but any customer who isn’t willing to provide us with their email at the initial sale isn’t a customer we really want to do business with in the future. It just leaves the entire sale process open for problems if you can’t communicate with a customer. I always ask myself, “are we being scammed” and that feeling doesn’t go away until the money is in the bank. These types of customers are also the type that usually cause you problems in one form or another.

All this said, there are some real advantages of using email as a part of your marketing. Stefan Pollard from Ecommerce Times wrote an excellent article about the best way to use email. I suggest reading it as it gives the reader some really good information. This is the article’s link.

http://www.ecommercetimes.com/rsstory/62491.html?welcome=1207914542

Copyright © 1988-2008, The Hand Made Product Directory

All rights reserved

info@dmpmc.net www.dmpmc.net/THMD

Think Marketing – Think Out Of The Box

With all the different traditional marketing methods available to any seller these days, why should we do something different? I think the simplest answer is that for those in the business of selling handmade and hand crafted products, the traditional methods of marketing are not producing the results most of us would like to see. In fact, for some sellers, they aren’t working at all. My goal in this post is not so much to tell you how to do something as it is to help you start a thinking process.

It has been said that there really aren’t any new ideas, just modifications of ideas that someone else has thought of before. I don’t know if that is really true or not. I do know that I have seen some very wild marketing done in the last few years and just a few years ago, no one would have ever thought of doing some of the things that are done today. Maybe it is that the changes we are seeing in our society make these unusual marketing techniques acceptable today. No matter what the reason, they seem to work. Isn’t that what counts anyway?

What we as business owners need to do in today’s market place is not necessarily scrap the old traditional marketing methods but to twist, bend, tear, stretch, add to, subtract from, combine or other wise modify them to work for us. We might as well face the fact that most of us are not marketing geniuses. In fact for most of us we don’t like marketing at all. We would much rather be creating than selling. The fact that we are creative can be a really big advantage for us compared to the average business owner. We are used to using our imagination more and that is exactly what we need to do.

Some years ago I developed a little mental exercise to help me come up with new marketing ideas. It isn’t really anything extraordinary and probably a good many people have used it before without ever giving any thought to it. He concept goes like this:

1 – Think of the most outrageous thing you could do to market your product.

2 – Take and write out all the aspects of this idea. Every little detail.

2 – Now Disregard the main idea itself because you probability don’t have the courage to do it.

3 – From what you have written down however figure out just how far with the plan would you really be willing to go.

4 – With these details you have the basis for your very own Thinking Out Of The Box marketing plan. All you have to do is refine it so that it is really feasible for your needs.

One of the best ways to get started here is to keep a little note pad handy at all time. Any time you think of a really crazy idea, write it down. You might not want to make the contents of the note pad public because some people may think you have gone off the deep end. You don’t want a paper trail just in case.

Copyright © 1988-2008, The Hand Made Product Directory

All rights reserved

info@dmpmc.net www.dmpmc.net/THMD

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