This issue is fifth in my series of five articles that show you little changes you can make to ensure more customers to your business.

This month’s article deals with how promotions can influence customers to your business. The best business promotions make it easier for your customers to buy from you; to buy more often from you; and to buy more products from you.

From customer’s perspective, they must perceive more value from your promotion than cost involved. From your perspective, promotion must cost you little but add great value to customer.

Many popular business promotions fail because their only objective is to get customer to buy now. Creating promotions that influence customer to buy now, buy more often and buy more products are much more effective for your business.

Let’s look at two popular promotions to see their limitations and how they can be changed to foster goal of getting customers to buy now; to buy more often; and to buy more products or services.

Buy One Get One Free One popular promotion is, “Buy one, get one free” You can buy a pair of shoes or a shirt and second pair or second shirt free.

What happens when you offer a two for one promotion? If your customer is smart like most consumers, they will be very happy to buy a shirt and get a second one free. This promotion may help customer make initial purchase, but why wouldn’t they wait until that promotion comes again before they make another purchase? You have cut your profits in half but you have not stimulated customer to make any additional purchases.

What if, instead of giving second one free, you gave a related product free? Instead of giving two shirts for price of one, you gave a free tie with shirt? With this promotion, customer will still need another shirt and you have only given away smaller margin involved in cost of tie.

The rich are rich in part because they know how to invest their time wisely to create more time to find and build investments. To do this, they know exactly how to prioritize things they have to do in normal day:

Instead of doing piddling things first, such as cleaning a minor mess, dropping off something, picking something up, ironing, or laundry (unless it’s critical!), or things like that, they do most important/time-consuming things possible first; things like spending a set amount of time searching for a good investment property, things like investing time developing and promoting their website that pulls in extra cash, buying vending machines to place in shops, or, even more important than any of these things that will pull in money, investing time developing a deeper relationship with their family, and even more importantly, with God.

If you would like to know how to develop a deeper and closer relationship with God, or if you’re interested in learning how to develop a relationship with Him in first place, please look for my article How The Rich Develop A Deeper Relationship With God.

To earn or create money, you need to have time. Time is most crucial of all things needed to become rich and/or wealthy. Even if you have plenty of money to invest, if you have no spare time to put it in an investment, all money is good for is paying off bills, rather than putting it to work earning money to pay bills for you, without having to work.