When you meet someone new, do they remember your name? Do you remember theirs?

Sometimes you do, but more often you don’t. But, the more often you meet that person, the more times you hear their name, the more likely you are to remember them, recognize their name, and know who they are the next time you see them.

Exposure

Get out there. Put a smile on your face, introduce yourself, and expose yourself to people. In business, half the power of arriving is just in being “out there”. Marketing your product, marketing your services, or marketing yourself all includes the initialization of exposure.

Name Recognition

In order to get name recognition, your name has to be out there, publicized, and be remembered. The more your name is seen “out there”, the more recognizable it will be. Once your name is recognized, your options broaden, and the possibilities become endless.

Network

When you meet people, give them a business card. Be prepared to tell them what you do. Give them a marketing spiel that brings them back to your card thinking, “Great, I’m going to call this guy!”

Ask about them, get their card, ask what they do, and note their information. Make a contact. Next day, give them a call, tell them you were glad you had an opportunity to get to know them, and ask if there’s anything you can do to help them meet their goals.

Market

Your objective, as ever, is to make a sale. After you offer to help them, you get an idea of what they need that you might have. Provide it. Give them what they want. Meet the needs of your clients and they will be back.

Your business will expand. Profits will increase. And you, my friend, will have made a new friend.

Exposure: It’s the future of network market planning.

Impact your market as never before. Be seen. Be alive. Be creative in your endeavors to brand your business and consume your market. Let eBiz Blitz empower your dreams by infusing your business publications with Dynamic Content. Visit Dynamic Content Creator, Jan Verhoeff, at http://www.freewebs.com/ebizblitz

Most business owners don’t realize the importance of using a simple business card to generate tons of customers. It simply does not matter what kind of business you are in, you have to utilize this primitive business technique in order to grow your business fast.

The three main mistakes people make when marketing with business cards are:

1. Not having a business card.

2. Being stingy and only giving out one card per person.

3. Not giving a card to every person they come into contact with.

Not having thousands of business cards at your disposal at all times is not only stupid it is a crime against your business. If an employee of yours stole as much money from you as you lose from not utilizing business cards, they would go to prison for a long time. With today’s super low cost business card printing prices there is no reason not to have business cards and an abundance of them for that matter.

I started my professional concrete cutting service business with absolutely no capital and grossed almost $400,000 in my first eight months of business. My only means of advertising was business cards. As many of you already know, it can sometimes take up to an entire year to get your ad placed into your local yellow page directory and it can be quite costly to a new business. The following are techniques that I used to generate tons of business from business cards and I believe that these same techniques can benefit any type of business.

1. I started with an eye catching logo and had a design that really said “this guy is a pro.” It is worth the modest initial investment to get your cards designed right.

2. I kept my message “short and sweet.” I have seen way too many people over do it with tons of bulleted text that cause confusion with the reader. I do concrete cutting and a few other services that relate to it but my business cards say only “Concrete Cutting.”

3. I ordered my cards in quantities of 5000 at a time. Too often do I see new business owners print cards off of their computer and literally “ration” them off.

4. I never gave out a single card! I always handed out at least five at a time and sometimes more. I still look at my business cards as “lottery tickets.” The first job I get from the batch pays for all of them so the rest can pay off huge. If they get thrown in the trash – Who cares? There are thousands more where those came from.

5. Any time I would meet someone in the construction trades I would hand them a stack of cards. I hand them to people that are standing next to me in line at the Home Depot or that are pumping gas across from me at the fuel pumps. I get questions like “What are these for?” or “What do you want me to do with these?” and I just simply say “You may not need my services now but when you do, you’ll know who to call.” At the same time I am thinking “I don’t care what you do with them, they were basically free and the fact of the matter is that I get hundreds of calls from people that say “Remember Me?” “I met you at the Exxon Station or at parent teacher’s night.” Or “John Smith gave me your card and said I should call you” yet I have never heard of John Smith. Or “I’ve got your business card on my desk and I don’t know where it came from but I need your services.” I simply hand tons of my business cards out to people and the calls roll in.

6. I buy a mailing list of contractors from a list broker and I simply put three business cards in an envelope and mail a thousand envelopes at a time. I do not put an expensive brochure or a flyer, I simply put three business cards in and I get hundreds of calls and referrals from the mailing,

I now get hundreds and hundreds of calls from my existing customers and my yellow page ads but I still use business cards more than I ever have. I now have five trucks and seven employees and giving out business cards in the same fashion as I have described above is part of their job description. They have all seen the power of business cards and that business cards ensure each of our survival and actually gives them a good feeling knowing that they got a specific customer. If I contact a new customer and they happen to mention that one of my men did not give them a stack of business cards then I immediately contact the employee, ask them if it is true and explain to them that it is part of their job, then I hand them a big box of business cards and tell them not to let it happen again, ever.

© Copyright 2005 Affordable Concrete Cutting, Inc.

About the Author: Robert Short is a professional concrete cutter, seasoned article writer and an expert on search engine optimization and linking. He is responsible for ranking our local service company’s website at number one on all major search engines for more than a dozen keyword terms. Our website now generates as much revenue as our main service business. Visit our website for more articles on linking and webmaster resources http://www.affordableconcretecutting.com/construction_seo.html

Hard times create amazing successes.

Despite all the talk today of an oversupply of goods and services, industry consolidation, menacing imports, stalled prices, and shrinking margins, a few remarkable businesses have discovered how to make their brands irresistible to more and more customers. And they have done it in remarkably speedy fashion, seemingly coming out of nowhere to virtually own their markets. Consider, for example, Google, which went from being a nonsense word to a global verb and supernova of the Internet in only three years, which then led to its becoming a publicly traded company with an $80 billion market cap.

Or how about the gizmo named TiVo, which changed television viewing forever for millions of American families by creating buzz outside the typical sales and marketing channels.

Dozens of similarly surprising brands — names like American Girl, Best Buy, Chico’s, Hardiplank, and Washington Mutual — are thriving in all sorts of sectors, from manufacturing to wholesale to retail, and they have been built far more quickly and inexpensively than brands that rely solely on traditional approaches, most notably advertising. How do these luminaries do it? They overpromise and they overdeliver.

It’s a new, faster, and less-expensive approach to beating the competition that I call TouchPoint Branding. Simply put, they have made big promises to their customers, and they are delivering on them in big ways at three important points of interaction.

TouchPoint Branding begins with a unique, attention-grabbing brand promise that radically differentiates a company from its competitors. Google, for instance, vows to lead you to virtually anything you want to know, in 0.2 seconds. TiVo’s pledge is: TV — your way! American Girl promises dolls that enchant girls and teach them how to live a life of substance. And in a glutted business environment in which everyone seems to be shouting the same message simultaneously and at peak volume, exciting, breakthrough brand promises are the best way to stand out from the crowd. New companies must develop unique brand promises just to battle their way into the marketplace.

Established businesses, faced with fighting off upstarts and differentiating themselves from their rivals, have to periodically overhaul their brand promises to adjust to changes in their environments, their competitors, and their customers. But simply coming up with a unique brand promise, or overpromise, isn’t enough. When you overpromise, you will be saying that you are confident your brand will perform. You will be putting your whole reputation for honesty on the line, making a solemn contract with hundreds, thousands, maybe even millions of customers. And, as wise managers know, trust is the hard currency of business success. The price for squandering it — sabotaging a brand’s promise — is always too high to pay, because, at the end of the day, the priceless intangible called integrity is the richest asset on any company’s balance sheet.

After a brand promise has been clearly established, you must also overdeliver by keeping your promises in imaginative, dynamic, and unique ways. And to do that, managers will need to get their entire organizations aligned to execute that big promise flawlessly and, above all, consistently every day with every sale or interaction. You must give your customers more than they ever expected from you at each of three critical moments of interaction — the Product TouchPoint, the Human TouchPoint, and the System TouchPoint. That’s where your advantage over competitors will emerge.

When properly executed, TouchPoint Branding enables managers at every level to inspire their employees to overdeliver on the company’s brand promise. This is the breakthrough that can revitalize your company, just as it has propelled the trailblazers I’ve written about here.

Copyright 2005 Rick Barrera

Create breakthrough brands and deliver extraordinary customer experiences with tips from Rick Barrera’s new book, Overpromise and Overdeliver; The Secrets of Unshakable Customer Loyalty. Free excerpt available at Rick’s Overpromise Website

If you are interested in earning income from your website, should you consider using the Google AdSense program to place targeted ads on your web pages? When I first considered this idea, I wasn’t sure if it was right for me. You see, I have a number of websites that promote affiliate links to products and services in my market. I felt that if I put Google ads on my pages they would compete with my affiliate sales. Sure, I knew you got paid when visitors clicked on these ads, but could it be a significant amount? Eventually, I saw that many other top marketers were using these ads on their pages. So I decided to dive in and give it a try, and after a year of using these ads here is what I can tell you.

The first thing I noticed was the ease of use in using Google AdSense. Once you have joined the program for free, you can start creating your ad codes. And the neat thing is, you can customize the ads to your web pages. You can choose the color of the ads so that they match the color theme of your pages. You can choose from many different size ad blocks. For example, they have 468×60 regular banner size and 120×600 towers. This way, you can choose the size that is right for your page. Once you have made your selection, you simply cut and paste the html and place it where you want on your page, and your part is done!

You can track your ads with ‘channels’. Let’s say your website has 10 pages. You can give each page it’s own channel so that when you log in to check your ad stats, you will see how many ad views and clicks you are getting on each page. This is helpful because it shows you where your ad revenue is coming from.

I haven’t really noticed any competition with my other affiliate programs! I’ve realized that Google ads don’t compete with my website, they are an additional income stream. My sales and sign-ups didn’t plummet once I started using the ads. What I believe now is that a certain percentage of visitors aren’t going to convert into customers, so the ads are simply another way to generate revenue from visitors who weren’t going to be customers anyway. As long as your own offers are well laid out on your site, if a visitor is interested in what you have they will still become a customer.

A good thing about Google ads is that they are ‘targeted’. This means that the ad content normally matches the content of your site. For example, if your site is about Boston terrier dogs, you will mostly get ads about Boston terrier dogs, or at least dogs. I can’t explain how they do it, but the ad html you post on your site picks up the keywords on your pages, and ads are generated that match the site keywords. This is good because the ads will match the target market for your website. And since the ads rotate on their own, it gives you ‘fresh’ content.

Another bonus is that you are associating with a trusted source in Google. They are presently the number one search engine, which means that people know them and trust them. Having their presence on your website will therefore not lose you credibility.

Yes, but how much can I make, you ask! That depends on how much traffic your website gets, and the subject matter of your website. Generally, the more visitors your website gets, the more clicks you will receive on the ads. Since you get paid per click, your earnings go up with more clicks. Secondly, the subject matter of your site plays a large part. Advertisers have to bid on the keywords for their ads, and the bids generally go higher if there are more advertisers bidding on the same keywords. Likewise, subjects that deal with highly profitable industries, like loans, mortgages, and home business, tend to get higher bids. The higher the bids, the more you get paid for click. To sum up, if your website deals with popular subject matter in a profitable field, and you get steady traffic, you should do well.

In closing, if you decide to join the Google AdSense program, make sure you read their terms of service so that you follow all the rules. They have recently added some extra features to allow members to earn more, such as paying for referrals and toolbar downloads. The growth in online advertising keeps getting bigger and bigger with no signs of stopping. The AdSense program is an excellent way for you to benefit from this and earn an extra revenue stream from your website. I highly recommend it!

Robert Borhi is a freelance writer who operates a marketing website at http://www.HugeGrowth.com. For information on free advertising and online opportunities, visit his website at http://www.HugeGrowth.com

I grant permission to publish this article, electronically or in print, as long as the byline is included, with a live link.

I got more calls yesterday than I have in weeks and from real people too. Holiday weeks are when smart marketing takes place. Chances are you will get to talk to someone for the following reasons:

People are in a good mood - Its the holidays;
People are in their offices instead of traveling;
People aren’t engaged in serious work because its the holidays;
People feel more giving of their time and resources.

So who took the time and called me this week? Three new clients who wanted to expand their personal brands. 4 people who read my latest article and wanted to know more. Two companies who wanted to hire me as an expert. And ‘piece de resistance’… An interview as an expert for the Faith Popcorn BrainReserve

Now this isn’t ego talking its a demonstration of a carefully orchestrated plan. It was by no means my first article and I get considerable response every week. This week’s issue "Does your packaging, UMM, Smell?" brought considerable comment both pro and con. But the point is that it brought commentary. Never consider a negative response as a bad thing. People read you/heard you and the key thing here is listened to what you had to say. Most important of all took the time to write a comment. Its one of the best ways to get a dialogue going with someone.

I have been building my expertise credentials for a while and get tons of inquires every week and I try to respond to each one personally thanking them for the request. But I will have to admit it was very flattering to be asked to serve on the Popcorn BrainReserve. Best of all to get paid to do it too.

None of this happened overnight. As I have been explaining for months, you have to work at it. Every week add something to your portfolio of branding. Whether its a press release, setting up your personal website, becoming a speaker or simply creating your own blog, you are moving forward and the momentum will grow.

GOOGLE Women in Packaging or even me, JoAnn Hines and so what you come up with. This could be you too if you work at it.

So what if its a holiday who have you called this week?

For more insights on how to build your brand email me JoAnn Hines at Pkgcoach@aol.com

As you begin to write your sales copy for your advertisement keep one thing in your mind…Everything you put into the must point out a specific benefit to your prospect.

Ask yourself as you write, “How will this help to get my prospect to act now?”

Always focus on the prospect, no matter what everyone else says or thinks. Tell them you’ve got a solution to their wants, needs desires, RIGHT NOW! The purpose is to get them to act.

1. Identify the prospect pain. (Research your target prospect to understand this)

2. Make them really feel it (they will do more to avoid pain than they will to gain pleasure…so really hit them between the eyes)

3. Let them know you can take it away right now. (Go into absolute detail here)

4. Let him know the pain will stay unless they act now. (Remind them of the pain they are currently feeling. Go into detail here as well)

5. Remove the risk of taking action for them. (make it so simple and risk free, they would feel silly not using your product or service)

Write your ad as though they are sitting beside you. You know their needs, wants and desires intimately because you have now done your research thoroughly.

Write the same way, as you would have a conversation. Use a friendly, matter of fact manner, (Don’t beat around the bush! This is serious)

Read it back to yourself out loud, putting yourself in their shoes.

Do you feel the pain? Can you truly empathise with him? Use short sharp spunky words. These will get more reaction from them.

Tell them exactly what you mean and what they need to do in a step-by-step way. Make it as simple as possible.

Take the risk out of it with a very strong guarantee. This will earn their trust for your product or service. They’ll feel like they got absolutely nothing to lose.

Make it as easy for them!

Make it interesting. If they get bored by what you have to say…so will lots of other prospects. Make the phone number, e-mail address, coupon, or whatever it is, easy to see and simple to use!

Make this information plain as day. Make them feel special, important and worthwhile.

You will win their loyalty.

Smarter Business Leads specialize in using Low Cost Advertising & Marketing Ideas that will explode your businesses cash register. Check them out at http://www.smarterbusinessleads.com if you hurry they may even send you a free report go to http://www.smarterbusinessleads.com now.

You want to know how these guru’s are making money??

They spend a lot of time and effort to achieve good product and name recognition.

People may forget your site, they may forget the name of your ezine, but they won’t forget your name if you know some good way to gain name recognition.

Email

When sending out email, make sure your name appears in the Senders area. Not an email address but your full name.

When you are sending out your ezine, depending on what type of software or list host you use, make sure your name or at least your ezine name appears in the Sender’s area.

Online

Take part in message boards and discussion lists. Become active in these communities and offer any help you may have to give.

Take part in joint ventures

Exchange ad swaps and links with other webmasters

Write testimonials for other publishers and webmasters. We all love testimonials. You can never have enough testimonials!

Submit your site and ezines to directories. People will see your name, they will see your product and what you have to offer.

Give feedback on a product or an ezine.

For those of you who have unique sounding names, just as mine, then rejoice. People will always remember the unusual names first.

Aren’t You glad now that your mother gave you such a unique name!!

Copyright (c) KDM Publishing

Donesia Muhammad has been doing business online since 2001. Sign up For her Newsletter My IBiz Weekly ==>http://myibizweekly.com The Business Ezine For All Netpreneurs. Learn how to start and maintain your internet business and ezine, and stay sane while doing it. Read Our Archives and Learn with Valuable Resources. Helping Readers Online Since 2001… And Counting.

http://EzineAdHelper.com
http://KDMPublishing.com

Word-of-mouth advertising is one of the cheapest and most effective types of advertising your company can invest in, but how do we generate this elusive type of advertising? Most experts in the area will say, “Get out and ‘network’.” So we go to a Chamber of Commerce meeting with dozens or even hundreds of other people trying to promote their company or service, and we attempt to promote our company or service as well. Very few people come to these meetings to buy things. The odds seem to be stacked against from the beginning, so is it any wonder why most of us come back from these meetings thinking that we just wasted an hour or two?

It doesn’t have to be that way. By making just a few simple changes to our approach, we can become a center of influence in any room and in effect, generate significant word of mouth advertising. One of the first things that we have to realize, though, is what ‘networking’ actually is and what it is not. Networking IS NOT selling. If we know 99% of the people at a networking function are there to promote their own product or service (not buy from us,) and we try to sell our product or service to them, we are likely to frustrate (and bore) ourselves and the people we are talking with.

Networking IS increasing our sphere of influence in order to promote our product or service to this sphere of influence at a future time. People do business with and refer people to people they, know, like, and trust. So our goal during a networking function is not to sell, but to get more people to know us, like us, and trust us. That way, they are more likely to buy from us in the future or refer people to us. One way to get people to know us, like us, and trust us more is to help them get what they want.

People like other people who are interested in them. The most important topic to anyone you are speaking to is himself or herself. And since they are at the meeting to promote their product or service, then if we help them do that better, they are going to like and trust us more. The following questions are things that you can ask someone at a networking function that will get them to open up to you and tell you about themselves:

· What is you name? Obviously a first question. · What do you do? Still nothing out of the ordinary. · Do you travel much? What territory do you work in? Any question about location. · What do you like most about what you do? Keeps the conversation positive and gives you more insight about the person and his/her company. · What makes you or your company unique or different from your competition? Let them brag. · What are some of your accomplishments or things you are proud of? Let them brag more. · How would I know if someone I was talking to would be a good prospect for you? This one question can make you more money than any other you can ask.

These questions will help you really get to know the person and what he or she can do. With this type of information at your fingertips (and it is a good idea to write the information down—possible on the back of a business card,) as you network, eventually you will come across someone who would be a good prospect for that person. The moment you introduce those two people, you become a center of influence in that room. Do this just a couple of times, and the word will spread very quickly about how YOU are the person that everyone needs to know.

What makes this process so successful is the third party endorsement. The person who you are helping to promote his or her product or service is no longer struggling to find a warm prospect, now they are receiving a third party endorsement from you. That gives that person tremendous credibility to the prospect. You are helping both parties. These people tend to remember this type of help, and they return the favor ten-fold.

Eventually, you’ll walk into a room, and people you have never even met before will begin bringing prospects to you. The key to making this process work is consistency and the ability to catalogue information about the people you meet. If you create a system that works for you, you will dramatically increase the word-of-mouth advertising about your company.

Doug Staneart, doug@leaderinstitute.com, is CEO of The Leader’s Institute, www.leadersinstitute.com, specializing in leadership, public speaking, and team building training for individuals and groups. He can be reached toll-free at 1-800-872-7830.

A client of mine once called after I had given a presentation to him about his company’s brand. He was calling to say we needed to change the shade of taupe we had all agreed upon for the firm’s logo.

I was surprised to hear this busy man talking taupe, convinced he had more important things to attend to. I found it particularly strange because just that day, he had approved the color scheme.

As the conversation progressed, he confessed that his wife didn’t like the color. She had experimented with that very shade of taupe for their living room curtains and hated it. Ignoring our strong suggestion to the contrary, the color was changed.

What does this 20 year old story have to do with anything? Most people think of branding as a pretty logo. Instead, branding embodies the entire customer experience, with the logo merely acting as the visual mark.

The brand experience should reflect the soul of the company. More important than whether or not you "really like" everything about it, your brand should represent your company’s "image attributes."

Image attributes are adjectives and descriptive phrases that capture the essence of a company and their creative project. They describe the core values of an organization, the feeling that a brand should evoke or the essential goals of a Web site.

At the start of a project, I work with my clients to elucidate a set of brief terms to identify the basic precepts of their project. These image attributes become a list that we can all agree on, easy-to-remember reference points that help everyone on the team, both client and developer, stay on target throughout the process.

Developing them may be the most important exercise of the project, because it helps ensure that the final result—the brand identity or Web site—embodies those descriptors. For every project, I have many levels of goals, but as long as my work reflects the image attributes on presentation day, I have done my job.

So what do image attributes have to do with my client’s wife who doesn’t like taupe? One of the most common mistakes in purchasing creative services is that clients judge results based on personal likes and dislikes.

Unlike choosing a curtain color for your living room or buying artwork for the space over your fireplace, creative choices related to business have nothing to do with your (or your spouse’s!) personal preferences. They have everything to do with solving your business problems and improving your customers’ experience.

Many clients think they have to “like” the artwork that creative services firms produce for them. But what if those clients’ likes and dislikes don’t line up with their corporate needs? What if they aren’t qualified to determine what works visually for their firm? By agreeing on image attributes that will guide and gauge the outcome of an assignment, we assure ourselves that the end result achieves the business goals that we set at the beginning.

Look at brands that work: Coke, Nike, Apple Computer; their brands on packaging and products, Web sites and brochures, carry a simple, compelling visual message that elicit very specific feelings in their audience. Whether or not people like the red used in the Coke lettering or the simple apple icon used by Apple Computer, they are compelling and significant icons that evoke strong recognition and often positive feeling.

That’s what a brand is about: embodying the attributes of your company or product. Everything else is window dressing.

Kara Brook is the founder and President of Brook Group, LTD, a Web design firm devoted to online branding and customer experience design. For more FREE branding resources, visit http://www.brookgroup.com/brand. To learn more about Brook Group’s branding services, visit http://www.brookgroup.com/branding.

Figuring out what to budget for trade shows as part of your overall marketing is as much an art as it is a science. The artistic side relates to the communication of a message that hundreds or thousands of attendees will understand and act on. The scientific side focuses on ROI, how many prospects must you reach to realize a payoff for your effort.

My rule of thumb for trade show and event budgeting is that for an overall marketing budget of 5%, 20% of this should go toward trade shows. Every company is different, however if you depend on relationships, market awareness, and can communicate your message in a visual way, then trade shows are a terrific investment. Where you invest, what shows have your target audience in attendance and how often you attend is going to be unique to your company.

Not surprisingly there are many hidden and not so hidden costs to attending a trade show. Transportation, for example, depending on the size of your trade show display and the amount of trade show “stuff” you take can $250 to over $1000. In some cases it is required or financially smart to join the association or group that is sponsoring the trade show. This again can be from a few hundred to over $500. Below is a simple budget that can give you an overall picture of your next trade show and what the cost categories will be.

The key to success is understanding your market and the players or buyers and reaching them through trade shows in the most efficient way.

Trade Show Budget

Estimate Actual

1.Space rental $ __________ $ __________
2.Display & Graphics $ __________ $ __________
3.Marketing Material $ __________ $ __________
4.Promotional Gifts $ __________ $ __________
5.Freight & Shipping $ __________ $ __________
6.On-Site Services $ __________ $ __________

(electricity, setup, flowers)
7.Pre-show promotion $ __________ $ __________
8.At-event promotion $ __________ $ __________
9.Hospitality $ __________ $ __________
10.Personal expenses $ __________ $ __________
11.Miscellaneous $ __________ $ __________

(10 – 15% of 1-10) $ __________ $ __________
12.Travel, meals $ __________ $ __________

& accommodation
TOTAL SHOW BUDGET $ __________ $ __________

If you would like more information on this topic or if you would like to suggest a topic for a future article, please contact Peter Winters at: peterwinters@presres.com
For over 10 years Mr. Winters has been consulting businesses on strategic planning, marketing, and public relations.

He is the owner of Exhibit Warehouse a Richmond Virginia-based trade show display and trade show exhibit fabrication company.