Top Ten Frugal Ways To Market Your Small BusinessWritten by Bonnie Jo Davis
Most, if not all, small businesses are built on a budget. Available funds must be used to buy technology, additional phone lines and marketing materials such as business cards. In this article you will find ten low cost or no cost tips that will help you get your first customer and build your business.1) Obtain free or low cost business cards at a company such as www.VistaPrint.com. Add an explanatory tag line to identify your product or service. While you are running your normal errands drop off a business card at every business you see such as drycleaners, restaurants, gyms, etc. 2) Have a new or rebuilt shopping center opening in your town? Attend grand opening and chat with business owners and staff and hand out your free or low cost business cards. 3) Create flyers with your phone number on tear off tabs and place them at library, grocery store, coffee shops, etc. Carry a few in your car with push pins so you never miss an opportunity. 4) Hold a contest. People love freebies. When you're handing out business cards and designing flyers highlight your contest for a limited time. Anyone who books at least two hours of your time during contest month is entered into a drawing for a gift basket. Put together an inexpensive gift basket with sample size coffee, a coffee cup, a business book or best selling novel, cookies and crackers. Put names of qualifying clients in a hat and have your child draw winning name. Take a picture of gift basket and your child drawing name out of hat, scan pictures and put them on your website along with name of winner.
| | Autoresponder EtiquetteWritten by Shelley Lowery
Autoresponders are one of most widely used promotional tools on Internet. They're also known as mailbots, automatic email and email on demand. They were derived from very popular fax on demand and designed to automatically respond to any email message sent to it with an automatic response. Autoresponder programs vary from autoresponse messages set-up within an email program to a script that runs on a server. This script may run a web-based autoresponder system that utilizes a web page form or it may run with a pop email account on a server. It's programmed to automatically send out a pre- determined message when a message is received to a specified script address or email address. Not only are autoresponders one of most widely used promotional tools, but are becoming one of most widely abused. While using autoresponders will enable you to put a lot of your daily tasks on autopilot, autoresponders can also wreak havoc on innocent individuals who may cross their path. Autoresponder addresses should NEVER be used when submitting your website to Search Engines, Directories, Free For All sites, or in Classified Ad contact forms. Many of these types of websites use autoresponders to send thank you or welcome messages to their users. When their autoresponder sends a message to your autoresponder, this creates what is known as a loop. Each autoresponder will continue to respond to other. When subscribing to an ezine or email discussion group, always use a real email address and NEVER subscribe with an autoresponder address. Subscribing to these types of
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