CornerSoul.com - Blogging for money, business, finance, etc.

Do you own your own business? Do you offer a product or service that you wish to promote? Do you love your business and want to see it expanding? Are you creative and tenacious? Any or all of these may define you or may highlight an area that is a challenge for your business success. This article will offer, through a case study, some useful techniques that will assist you in promoting your product or service.

I assume that you have a GOOD product or service, or, at least, a very good idea for a business. No matter how good your product or service is, if people do not know about you, you will not be able to sell your product or service at the highest levels. Since each product/service is different and each market (or community) is unique, you must be creative in interpreting these basic concepts so they apply most appropriately to your specific situation.

The example that I will be using may be a stretch to fit for your business, but when you see the creative ideas that we came up with in coaching this business, you will see how these concepts may be worth trying for your business. This is for a brand new business in the Los Angeles area. The business is a new Rock Band. Obviously the competition is high and average returns are generally low. So how can you use these promotional principles to achieve a greater than average level of success?

Let’s assume that this band is musically good and plays a style of music that people have enjoy. Not all musical experiences are good or enjoyable. This band is talented and creative enough to create their first album/CD and is ready to take it to the next level. No one knows about this band or their music, but there are few venues/clubs that hear their music from the website or CD and are willing to let them play in front of their clients (an audience.)

It is obvious that the band must rehearse their music and create a decent show but how do you promote the band and fill the seats. You need people in the seats to get paid by the club owners and through sales of your CD’s. Eventually, when the band is successful, people will know about them, pay money to come to their shows and buy CD and band related merchandise. Most bands have young people who are focused on their music, not promotion and not the business of getting people to come into the club or venue and pay money for this experience. In fact, most bands are filled with dreamers who can appear to be lazy when it comes to doing “the business.” Dreamers want the audience to magically appear and then adore the band and buy stuff… This is a problem for most businesses. Selling the product or service is a necessary, but often a disliked part of “the business.”

The band was coached on what they might do and their coach held them accountable to go out and do these activities… (Even if we know what to do, we often need help with the accountability of following through on the promotional activities.) Here is the beginning list of necessary promotional activities:

1. Gather names and e-mail addresses for fans and people to invite to the shows. Have an e-mail sign-up list at EVERY event.

2. Get the venues/clubs to help promote shows through their e-mail lists AND ask the club for contact information for any media (TV, radio stations, newsletter, entertainment magazines/newsletters) they advertise with AND a list of many major businesses or organizations within a few miles of their club.

3. Get a list of any internet music promotion websites. Assign someone to contact and update these websites on a regular basis, with enough advanced time.

4. Create a press release and media kit for distribution to entertainment media like TV, radio stations, newspapers, magazines, etc. Be ready to go when you have found the person in the media organization to send these to.

5. Get a list of local colleges in the area of the music venues that might attract fans through college newspapers, college radio stations, or announcements/fliers (OFFER discounts on CD sales when they come to performance and announce that they have heard of their local promotion… Get their e-mails for future promotions…) Offer to play shows, for a discounted rate, for their students to create fans and future conversions to fans/clients.

6. Contact other local bands that may have success in the venue/club and offer to CROSS-Promote by using each other e-mail lists to cross-promote events. (Sign up for the other bands e-mail list to make sure they follow through and send out promotions for your band… and do not forget to send their band info to your e-mail list…) The more successful bands will have large lists. Both bands can win by getting more visibility and may convert fans.

7. Keep your website current with show information and any promotional events. Many businesses are lazy about keeping current but this can be important for communication with your customers/fans.

8. Contact the network of media that the club/venue has provided to promote your event… Allow as much time as possible, 4-6 weeks in advance. Do Not Be Lazy! Send them: media kit, cover letter, press release, and sample of music/CD. FOLLOW UP with telephone call. Do not assume that they will see your stuff and open it and read it. Taking time to find the “right” person in this media outlet can be very important, Do not be lazy… Give them a GOOD REASON to promote your event… The band that I was coaching was donating money from the sales of their CD’s to the Cancer Society and were volunteering to provide music at local cancer fundraising events like the “Relay for Life” fundraisers. Give something back to the community! Also, be timely with current news events, locally or globally, if your product or service can be adapted as a newsworthy item for the media.

9. Contact the local businesses that are in the area of the venue. Speak to the personnel office and offer an employee incentive discount for CD’s sold at the venue. ALSO, ask if the business ever requires entertainment at their employees rallies/picnics, awards programs, or their promotional events. Offer these business a discount for paid business as a “get to know you” networking trade. Promote the local club/venue so that it is a win-win situation for the club’s future cooperation. (The higher up in management you can network at the business, the better the chance of future professional business relationships.) By helping them with their personnel, you can build a relationship with this business that leads to future business relationships. Consider promoting to local service clubs where you can network with other businesses and organizations. Be creative in networking and ask their help with additional networking referrals. Service clubs need entertain or speakers and may be consider sources of clients.

10. At the events, announce future shows, any new merchandise, and consider announcing the donations to a local or large non-profit organization from sale of CD’s or in a donation jar (and send donations to the non-profit…)

11. Offer to volunteer at fundraisers and invite your fans/clients to participate in the good cause, plus get exposure to new fans/clients and promote these events in local media.

12. Contact radio stations for “Playtime” by sending media kit and sample music to the “right people” at the radio stations. Offer to do interviews or play at any fundraisers they are involved with. Always invite radio people to your fundraising events to keep them informed regarding your good work in the community. Always let these people know about new products or major shows that you are offering, to stay in front of their consciousness and to maintain a good relationship.

This case study is a current project. So far, the clubs/venues love it and are looking at the band as “professional.” The media likes it and are opening the doors for music radio playtime. The Non-profits love the donations and are getting the band booked for fundraisers and so more community exposure events. The businesses love to offer their employees discount incentives that are entertaining and stress reducing. And by the way, there are more people attending their shows and becoming fans…

Now these promotional principles may need some translation for your business. Be creative. Most of these activities are low cost or no cost. (You can always send lots of money to advertise but you can build better relationships with these low cost activities.) Do not be lazy. If you are struggling with creative ways of applying these promotional ideas, you can get mentoring or coaching that can help translate these activities to fit your business.

Please take good care of yourself.

Cocktail parties and professional meetings provide a great way to make valuable business contacts. The trick is to make the most of these situations without appearing to be a mercenary networker.

If you receive an invitation to an event, go! Business roundtables, professional-association meetings and cocktail parties all are invaluable forums for feeling out the competition, creating business allies, drumming up new business and strengthening bonds with existing clients. So try to attend as many functions as you can.

Whether you can attend or not, you should always R.S.V.P., because it helps the host or hostess and increases your chances of being invited back. In addition, it’s smart to speak with your host or hostess before the party. By telephoning ahead, you have the advantage of arriving at the party already knowing someone.

If you did not telephone beforehand, be sure to introduce yourself to the host as soon as possible. Remember, it his party, and it in his best interest to make that you have a good time and mingle. An “in” with the host can provide you with needed introductions to other guests, as well as future invitations. Your host may know other guests in your field and will “insist” that you meet them.

Once you are at the party, there are as many different strategies for circulating with the other guests as there are people at the party. Here are five successful circulation strategies I advise my clients to use:

1. Arrive early. By arriving early you can chat with the person who is checking in the guests while at the same time checking out the name tags. Often, the tags include people’s titles or company names. That way, you can target potential customers before the party starts.

2. Stay near the food. Everyone gets hungry, and eventually people will end up near the food. This is preferable to standing near the bar, where you could get a bad reputation.

3. Arrange an introduction. For example you could approach someone you know and say, “I hear that Ms. So-and-So is here; I have always admired her. Would you introduce me?” Your friend won’t mind doing this for you, and your new acquaintance will be flattered.

4. Introduce yourself. Another technique is to stand on the periphery of a conversation. When the conversation turns to a subject you know about, smile and say, “I couldn’t help but overhear.” A common experience can often make best friends out of complete strangers.

5. Be bold. If you want to meet someone, walk right up to her and say something like, “Hello, Ms. Smith, my name is John Doe, and I have admired you for a long time.” Ms. Smith is certain to be flattered and may even be grateful for a break from her current conversation. When meeting someone always remember to give him or her a firm handshake, smile and look him or her straight in the eye. This projects confidence and sincerity.

To place yourself firmly in the minds of your new acquaintances, be sure to follow-up in some way.

For starters, when you are preparing to leave the event, say good-bye to all the people you have met. This is important if you hope to have them remember you. Stop by and for say something like, “Sally, I’m on my way out, but I wanted to say it was a pleasure speaking with you.”

With your host or hostess, one of the best tools for following up is a thank-you note. Emails are fine, but a handwritten one is more personable. The art of the well-written thank-you note is a dying one. Your host or hostess will no doubt be impressed with your thoughtfulness. You can send a note also to any new acquaintances you have made. Forward an article of interest or some other piece of information that follows up on the conversation you had.

If you want to follow-up with a telephone call, keep in mind that you shouldn’t telephone someone unless you have warned him or her in advance, or unless you have a legitimate reason for doing so, such as an upcoming event he or she might want to attend. If you know you want to speak with someone again, you can close your conversation at the party by saying, “I would like to talk with you further. Perhaps we can get together for lunch.” The rule with phone calls is: If you don’t have to call, don’t.

The more parties and professional meetings you attend, the easier it will become to introduce yourself to strangers and begin conversation. And once you master the art of mingle, you will find your professional opportunities skyrocketing.

Copyright 2008 by Joe Love and JLM & Associates, Inc. All rights reserved worldwide.

The Leaning Tower of Pisa, appropriately located in Italy’s Field of Miracles for it is a miracle that this monument is still standing, is one of the world’s most famous pieces of architecture. But what has this iconic building have to do with business success strategies? Bear with me, it will all become clear. The first lessons can be learnt from why this building is leaning in the first place.

The answer to this question, despite baffling engineers for centuries, is simple. It was built on a poor foundation. The soil upon which it was built was loose, sandy soil - inappropriate to support a monument of such stature.

The leaning actually started early in the construction phase and several attempts were made to rectify the problem. Special construction devices were used, columns and damaged parts were replaced but to no avail. The inclination continued because the underlying cause of the inclination had not been tackled.

In more recent times, concrete was poured into the foundation to help stabilise it but, alarmingly, the building sank further into the ground. It took an international committee of which a key player was a Professor of Soil Mechanics from the London Imperial College of Science, Technology and Medicine, Professor John Burlap, to come up with a viable solution.

After anchoring the building, soil was carefully extracted from the North side causing it to sink on that side. It was a very delicate procedure because it was paramount that the building remained stable during this extraction process. The remedial action was set up so that the building could be carefully monitored and the position soil was extracted was altered where necessary so that the realignment of the building was controlled centimetre by centimetre.

Today, after an investment of $40M the tower still leans because to bring it to a completely vertical position would be out of character for the building. However, it has been shifted by 15 centimetres, restoring it to its 1838 position. This action is expected to prolong the life of this historic landmark for another 300-400 years.

So what business success strategies can we learn from this beautiful yet flawed building.

1. The first thing is, when building your business it is important to start on a firm foundation that is appropriate for your business.
2. Pouring cement into the tower’s foundation almost proved to be its undoing. Similarly, pouring too much ’stuff’ into your business without careful consideration can do more harm than good. It’s important to receive strategic, accurate and focused advice.
3. Sometimes a subtraction process is more valuable or relevant that an addition process. What can you subtract from your business that would significantly boost its performance and multiply its results?
4. Correcting mistakes can be costly. It may seem expensive at the time, but getting the right advice at the start of your project will pay for itself many times over. As Benjamin Franklin said “An investment in knowledge always pays the best interest.”
5. Learn to look below the surface for solutions to your challenges. The problem with the tower lay not in the structure but in its foundation. Your business problems may lie in the invisible realm such as your mindset and or that of your employees.
6. Think outside of the box when seeking solutions to challenges and learn to look to other industries for solutions that can be adapted to your business.
7. Don’t press on irregardless if you have evidence that what you are doing is not working. Construction work on the tower was stopped twice and it has now been determined that had workers not done this the tower would have toppled over before it was completed. Take time out to analyse and evaluate your progress and modify your business strategy where needed.

However, having said all this, if you have an idea that you believe in then action it. The adage that “you don’t have to get it perfect, you just need to get it started” still holds. For many the quest for perfection rather than progress is one of the biggest obstacles to getting a business off the ground.

Despite its flaws the Leaning Tower of Pisa is, nonetheless, a remarkable building. It has been around for centuries and has had millions of visitors - a success that many businesses would love to emulate. And, if you pay attention to the success strategies given here your business will soar vertically just as it was originally intended for the Leaning Tower of Pisa.

The trick being owning an entrepreneur home business is marketing your products or services for your target audience. (People quickly learn to spend their time on marketing and product creation, rather than repetitive tasks. A good relationship with loyal customers is worth a fortune in your internet marketing strategy.

Some of you keep hearing from other business associates that internet marketing is the greatest method of increasing business and building a foundation for customer support. Diving into the internet marketing community with your wallet open will result in a disaster if you aren’t properly trained on how to spend your money wisely. Promotion & advertising are crucial for your website’s success.

There are thousands of marketing tool kits available online for a whole range of prices, but what if you are not interested in buying someone else’s tool kit and are more interested in creating your own internet marketing product and toolkit to sell. Whatever information you are including in your marketing product, make sure it is viable and relative information your customers can use and will find practical. If you are able to develop an effective business now, your income could grow at a compound rate for the next several years.

Affiliate

Some internet home businesses that involve affiliate tend to have website with the same content. For example, do you sell a product and want someone to purchase or are you an affiliate or using Ad sense and want some clicks. There are few that recommend creating content sites with valuable information to promote your own products or affiliate products.

I started promoting some affiliate programs to my list and ended up making some money. Essentials like advertising, monthly fees if an affiliate business, different software programs etc. So many business opportunities for the taking whether yours’ or someone elses affiliate program or product.

You may have even heard them called by a few different names, such as VRE (stands for ‘Virtual Real Estate’), Adsense sites, or affiliate sites. The buzz around niche sites lately, comes from the fact that savvy affiliate marketers have realized that they can build tightly focused sites on different themes, or niches, and monetize them with an affiliate programs. To have a profitable internet business, whatever it be (products, services, e-goods, affiliate programs, etc) first you have to understand the right process involved in it.

Offer your products, services, e-goods, affiliate programs, net auctions, whatever you do trough outstanding content that will make your visitor get the click to buy your merchants.

Advertising

I will talk about paid advertising first. So actually you can pay a company who offers advertising services and buy ads. Tracking for Marketing and Advertising Campaigns.

Your advertising expenditures are your investment for your online business too. However, many internet home based businesses are utilizing advertising as both a means of generating revenue and as an expense to increase the traffic to their site. Advertising can either generate revenue by others paying to advertise on your website or advertising can be an expense to business.

Internet visitors scan webpages for information instead of reading through them, so all the rules of advertising world which helps in writing the content for the advertisement apply here. They usually have a bunch of links and advertising on them and sometimes have some good content. It is a good idea to keep records and documentation on everything, including expenses, income, advertising costs, etc.

But advertising online is not as simple as it seems. Last but not least, if you cannot spend another cent on paid advertising, there is always the last resort you can use: use bartering to get free advertising.

Opportunity

If you do decide to partake in this exciting and profitable opportunity remember to gain as much knowledge on the topic first before inputting your money or purchasing a training course. However, in the mean time you can make a profit and have a firsthand opportunity to be involved in the startup of a developing industry.

Here is an example of an opportunity for a new information product that I came across recently. Because all businesses, regardless of their size or location, have the same opportunity to create a web presence and market online. Grab that opportunity when you first start building your home business and make the most of it.

Running an Internet home business gives you plenty of opportunity to make yourself known to your potential customers without much effort on your part. If you want to know more about how to do online advertising to your business, make sure you click the link at resource box below.

You can gather in plenty of inspirations for your calendar printing. With this ripe season where you can send out your very own calendars as gifts and even turn them into a promotional material for clients in the coming New Year, there really isn’t anything stopping you.

Acquiring design ideas for themes and images can be quite hard, especially if you don’t have a concept to begin with. Planning your calendars can be just as simple or hard. Remember to always assess how you want to use your calendars, the response you can gather from them and so on.

If you want calendars to gratify your personal hobbies and interests, all you need to come up with is a concept or theme. If you need a calendar that would do well to build up your image, augment your sales or other, then it may do well for you to sit down and think it over.

Nevertheless, here are some ideas you can use for your calendars that are more or less popularized by noted artists, the pop culture and more.

Themes for Your Calendars

1. Get inspiration from the noted photographer Anne Geddes. If you are into baby portraits or your business and interests are aligned to it, then create or shoot portraits that presents babies in cute dresses.

For personal family affairs, why not shoot your very own babies and toddlers. This would make as a great replacement for Christmas cards you send out.

2. Spoof. If you have a big family or are involved with different organizations, you can very well create group pictures or images that are injected with a bit of humor. You can spoof other notable television series. Make families pose as the Simpsons of the Family Guy among others.

This is not only a memorable calendar you can look back to, but an overall activity that would be great for the holidays.

3. More than including photos or portraits of groups of people, it is better to picture people in actions. Groups or organizations can create a documentary of past accomplishments within the year. Highlight important events. Make sure to use photos that take you or your group out from the usual environment. Let your audiences know that you are actually out there and doing something.

4. If you want a trip down memory lane, this idea may be most useful for high school reunions. You can use images on the most memorable television series of your time. Put up images of actors that were the rave back in the day. Include your own high school pictures or those events that were highlighted in your year book.

5. If you are into cooking or culinary arts, a calendar with its generous space would also serve to be a great cookbook in one. Highlight a special dish and use it as your portrait. Leave enough room to give out the recipe and instruction.

6. With the previous idea, use the same concepts for other interests, hobbies or activities. Show your audience with an end product they can come up with. This can be applicable from arts and crafts, gardening, beading, and more.

Use these calendar printing ideas for your own use and create more inventive ways for a calendar that will last all year long.

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When you decide to start a business the first thing to do is to come up with a good idea. That is probably the most important thing and you have to do it the right way. If your idea isn’t good enough than, probably, your business will not be good either.

There are a lot good ideas that aren’t discovered yet. Of course, it can be very hard to find them. Much often you will find (or come up with) a bad idea. So, if you want to avoid failure be sure that your idea is great or at least good enough.

The best way to find out if you are on good track is to ask. Talk to the people, describe them what are you planning to do and listen to them. If they all say it’s a bad idea, than it probably is. Just try to come up with some interesting and useful stuff that people will like.

Your idea doesn’t have to be great from the start. It can be just average but with time you can improve it until it becomes great. Some of them give up the moment they figure out it’s not great. Don’t be one of them, if you don’t try you will never know.

Most people on the world are poor or with average wealth. Do you know why? Because they are afraid to make the next step. They think that they aren’t good enough or that they can’t do it, or that they don’t have enough money etc. Do not be like them. Do not waste your time thinking what and why can’t you do something, think about things you can do. There are people who are rich and successful and the only weapon used on that road to success was their knowledge and a computer. Do you have a PC? Do you know how to use it? Well, that’s a start. The internet is full of useful information so start searching and learning today. There are millions of things that you can do from your home on your PC, you only have to discover them and learn how to use them.

Take the opportunity right now, do not hesitate. If you want, with just a little effort the universe can be yours.