Often, your own members' posts will be enough to keep you updated about major issues that affect your business, saving you time and money on reading and research.

2. Allow members to mention your COMPETITION'S products & services; let them even make personal comparisons.

These posts will give you valuable insights for improving YOUR OWN products & services... and how you can convince even your competition's clients to change their minds and trust YOU.

3. Finally, remain VISIBLE in your own message board or discussion list.

Give helpful comments, offer positive feedback, and praise every real effort made by members to share what they know. This is your chance to establish a real, ongoing relationship with people who frequent your website... and turn most of them into friends, or clients or (if you're lucky) both.

4) Chat Event

If you're just starting your own business, however, you probably won't have time to manage a message board or mailing list just yet.

What you CAN do is promote & hold a regular chat event on your site each month, inviting both regular and potential clients alike.

To make each chat event worthwhile, remember to:

- Focus on a specific topic, preferably something your surfers will be very interested in.

- Set a definite schedule and time limit. Be aware of time differences among your surfers, and try to set a schedule that is convenient for everyone.

- Promote event well in advance. Tell as many people about it as you can (just make sure your servers can handle them). And finally -

- Give everyone clear & concise directions on how they can participate.

Minimize their chances for getting errors or getting lost during event, so they can focus on what they want to say -- which is exactly kind of feedback you need.

5) Feedback Forms

Of course, feedback collection process won't be complete without familiar online form.

Although these forms are common, not all of them work as well most business owners need them to.

To set up kind of form that's easy to send & easy to reply to, observe following DOs & DON'Ts:

- DON'T just invite them to send all queries & requests to same email address.

- DO create a drop-down menu for "Recipient" field listing different departments in your company, so each email will be instantly routed to right person or mailbox.

- DON'T just use a generic form mailer for your "contact us" page.

- DO use a drop-down menu for "Subject" field, listing most common reasons people have for wanting to email you.

Aside from helping your client/surfer focus his reason for contacting you, it also helps you categorize each request quickly so you can deal with each batch of email more promptly.

The truth is, feedback is important not only in business, but also in our dreams, and our everyday lives.

Some feedback will be good, and some of it will be bad. Some will encourage us, some might crush us, and some might even have chance to totally disillusion us.

But important thing to look forward to is that feedback will always CHANGE us... and WE decide if we're going to be better because of it.

© Tatiana Velitchkov

Because more likely than not, this will be same energy/enthusiasm that all your flyer readers will pick up on, increasing your chances of getting them to actually visit your site and act on your offer.

Why do I say this is something actually worth trying?

Two stories from two friends of mine, proving that this really WORKS!

The first story comes from Charles Burke, who lives in Japan. He just read an article about a Japanese researcher who proved that thoughts can physically change way water freezes.

"Pure mountain spring water naturally freezes in beautiful and complex crystalline patterns." says Charles, in his ezine 'The Sizzling Edge' (www.sizzlingedge.com).

"Polluted river water, on other hand, forms ugly, misshapen non-crystalline patterns."

In experiment Charles mentions, a researcher named Dr. Masaru Emoto directed various thoughts such as "love," "gratitude," and "you fool" toward different bottles of water. He then quickly froze droplets of this "treated" water, and took photomicrographs of them.

The results were dramatic! "When Dr. Emoto or his assistants sent thoughts of love or kindness into polluted water, beautifully complex crystals formed during freezing process." Charles relates. "These ice crystals approached complexity and beauty of natural water crystals."

On other hand, clean water that was subjected to harmful or insulting words became degraded, and actually lost its ability to form complex crystals.

Charles reports that these tests are "repeatable," so anyone interested in verifying findings can try same experiment and get same results.

The second story that convinces me about effect of "directing thoughts / energy" comes from Joe Vitale, from his new ebook called "Spiritual Marketing" (available on www.MrFire.com).

Here Joe talks about his friend Sandra Zimmer, who runs Self-Expression Center in Houston.

"Sandra consciously infuses her ads with her energy." says Joe. "She actually sits and meditates over her ad, sending her energy into ad. As a result, her ads have a magnetic quality to them. She once told me that people hold on to her ads for as long as seven years.

"While her ads didn't look different, they FELT different. There was just something about (them) that made them more memorable. That something was Sandra's own energy."

So, do you still think this "hocus-pocus thing" about directing your enthusiasm into your flyer is a step you can ignore?

I'll leave that decision up to you. =)

FINALLY, AFTER PRODUCTION

....Comes "distribution."

Hopefully by this time you have a very clear idea about what makes a good (or even an outstanding) flyer, and soon you'll be ready to create one that would make your own business fly.

But as with all forms of advertising, flyer-distribution has to be TARGETED, so make sure you give them away to people who:

- can really benefit from your service - will know people who will benefit from your service - or would at least be able to get on Internet & visit your site within 10 minutes of seeing your flyer.

You can even choose to distribute your flyer in less conventional ways, like: - through fax - as posts on public bulletin boards - as inserts in packages - or even electronically as pop-under ads!

After all, there's no limit to how high your flyers can fly, as long as it's propelled by a business owner's imagination.

© Tatiana Velitchkov