Building A business can truly be a very difficult and frustrating experience for a lot of people. This is usually a result of people not given the proper training and support.  They have no option but to go it alone and the failure rate is astonishing.

If people do it alone it’s certain failure for them.  It doesn’t have to be that way.  It just takes the right training, a lot of disciplined work and implementing the right marketing techniques for people to achieve the success they are looking for.”

Reason people go it alone is they are not given the proper training and support needed for success in any home based business.  Also what people don’t realize is in order for a business to succeed there has to be some sort of trusting relationship.  You can’t have a long term successful business if you are not helping others become successful as well.

Paul Birdsall’s 7 Day Online Success Boot Camp does just that by teaching proven techniques for successful marketing that get real results. It’s a no nonsense step by step training video series on how to generate a solid income online without having to do any selling or personal marketing if people don’t want to.   

The 7 Day Online Success Boot Camp out performs anything else she has ever tried because it does the one thing that people are loking for.  Help people with a problem.  You can achieve success in this world if you just take the time to help others along the way.”  

If you help other you are building trusting relationships and after all that is what it is all about.

If you want to get online marketing help and achieve online success, go to http://www.bootcamp.systemforchange.com

In the last article we looked at the top 5 advertising approaches to attracting new customers. There’s no doubt they work if properly done. There is also no doubt that traditional advertising can cost a bundle, and leave you a little unsure of what you got for your money.

So let’s move on and discuss some less traditional ways to get the word out. Some of these methods are often over-looked but they work if you’re willing to put in a little effort. Here are 7 of the most over-looked ways to advertise on a budget.

1. Cold Calling

Cold calling is when you pick a list of people from a directory, or some other existing list, and contact them out of the blue. Many people hate making cold calls because you get rejected many more times than you get accepted. If you are going to cold call, understand that one positive response for every 10 calls is as good as it gets for cold calling. Don’t get discouraged until you’ve made a lot of calls. You can’t judge the effectiveness of a cold calling campaign until you’ve called on at least 50 people.

Like direct mail, cold calling is sometimes frowned upon, but it is still around for the same reason direct mail is around – it works.

2. Directories

Millions of people still look to business directories, such as the yellow pages, every day when they are looking for product or service providers. Don’t forget about the many other business directories available to you like your local Chamber of Commerce.

3. Press Releases

Press releases are often overlooked as a way of advertising, but any kind of media coverage can be very good for business. Part of what makes press releases so valuable is that they come across as information instead of advertising. The other reason is that if they get picked up by a newspaper you can get a lot of coverage for free.

It is very important that you give your press releases a human-interest spin to get the attention of the editors. Although press releases can be very effective, there is no guarantee they will get picked up and run by anyone.

4. Articles

Writing articles for local media, or getting profiled in business articles is another great advertising method. This is good advertising because it doesn’t look like advertising. It’s just a human interest story. Like press releases, articles can be submitted to local papers and magazines, but there is no guarantee your story will get run unless you get a regular column. This might be easier than you think if you are willing to start with the community newsletter.

5. Events

Sometimes the best way to advertise your business is to hold a special event. Every so often you see a free seminar being held in your city. You can attend for free, you just have to register. Hosting an event like this is a great way to meet a group of people interested in the topic you want to discuss. These events are designed to educate people in what they need to know about a topic, and what you can do to help them. It is very important to not give people an hour long sales pitch. Spend 80% of your time giving them as much useful information as you can. If you focus solely on making the first 50 minutes of an hour useful for them they will be interested in what else you have to offer. Then you can spend the last 10 minutes telling them about your products or services.

6. Joint Ventures

Joint ventures are one of the best ways to generate new leads. Find businesses that have similar, complimentary offerings to you and put together a joint advertising campaign. This is an excellent technique for generating new leads for because both you and your joint venture partner already have lists of customers who buy the type of products and services you are offering. The effectiveness of advertising has a lot to do with getting your message to a group of people already interested in what you do. Few methods can target your message as well to a new group of people as a joint venture campaign.

Keep in mind that when doing a joint venture campaign, you don’t need to give your customer list to your joint venture partner. You take his message and send it to your customers. He takes your message and sends it to his customers. You both receive back only the interested responses from the other persons list. That way you are not compromising your customers’ privacy, you are just making them an offer. Your joint venture partner only gets their contact details if the customer decides to call the number, or go to the website on the advertisement and divulge their information. Always respect your customers’ right to privacy.

7. Referrals

Nothing beats word of mouth referrals. Do a great job for you customers and encourage them to refer others to you. Offer incentives or discounts for referrals, and give the referred customer a special deal as well. Let your customers know that they are not only getting something for themselves, but they are getting something special for the friends and family they refer to you.

Summary

Whether you are working with a tight budget or not, don’t overlook the power and effectiveness of these 7 lead generation methods. Many small companies have grown to multi-million dollar enterprises using these methods. With a little effort these methods can bring many new customers to your door.

If part 3 we look at moving all of these lead generation techniques into the twenty first century with the power of the Internet. The future is on-line, and the future is now.

One of the best ways to help people find you is using the Internet. In fact most of today’s successful businesses are using the Internet in one way or another.

A common misconception is that you put up a website, and then people will find it. Nothing could be further from the truth. Websites with a lot of visitors get that way by advertising.

It’s also not true that you need your own website to take advantage of the Internet for finding new sales leads. As you will see you can do a lot of things using services and websites that are already out there.

Let’s take a look at some of my favorite Internet based lead generation techniques.

Banner Advertising

This is what most people think of when they think of Internet advertising. You create some sort of graphics banner advertisement, and then pay to have people put it on their websites. Although this can work for some companies and circumstances I consider it to be one of the least effective Internet advertising strategies around.

Online Newsletter Advertising

Like magazines, online newsletters have very wide distributions and can be very effective places to advertise. Like magazines they are read by a group of people interested in a specific topic. You can often advertise in them for a fraction of the cost of advertising in a traditional magazine. More and more people are subscribing to online newsletters every day.

If you want to find online magazines in your market niche, just type your market niche into Google along with the word “magazine”, “ezine” or “newsletter”

Online Directories

Just like the big yellow pages beside your telephone, there are hundreds of directories on the Internet for everything you can imagine. Just go to a search engine, like google.com and search for the product or service you offer and go through the search results. Many of them will be directories of similar products and services. The good ones make it easy to contact them to add your website or advertisement.

Search Engines

Search engines are great way to get traffic. The challenge is to get your website far enough up the search engine rankings to get visibility. Most people never search beyond the first page of search engine results for things.

The good news is that there things you can do to improve your search engine ranking and a lot of companies out there that specialize in search engine optimization (SEO). Their job is to get you near the top of your chosen topic. Make sure you choose a reputable company, and make your payment terms based on the results.

Direct e-Mail

Direct email is just like direct mail, but without the mailing charges. Like direct mail, you need to do some preliminary lead generation before you can use direct email (so you know who to email to).

In email marketing it is important that people first give you permission to email them. In most western countries legislation prevents us from just spamming people with a lot of unrequested emails, but if you can get people to subscribe to a newsletter or website that interests them, then you can get their permission to send them periodic emails with special offers, etc.

A lot of software companies ask for permission to send you information and updates when you register the software. They are essentially asking for permission to direct email market to you as new things become available. If you are interested in the topic, then these messages are welcome news.

Online Press Releases

Just like traditional press releases, there are sites on the internet that publish electronic press releases. Unlike traditional press releases, the resulting press release often stays posted for years. The web service publishes your press release, and submits it to hundreds of other press release sites for publication. This type of press release can be seen by hundreds or even thousands of publishers.

Many people publishing on-line magazines, and even traditional paper magazines are looking for content to put into their publications, but the real benefit of this type of press release is that it allows people to find out about you on the internet using web searches. This is very important since more and more people are using the internet to make their buying decisions every day.

When submitting press releases it is very important to remember to include your name, company name and how to contact you. If people can’t contact you after finding your press release then the press release has been wasted.

Some of my favorite general purpose online press release sites are: prweb.com, newswiretoday.com, and pr-inside.com

On-line Articles

Similar to traditional articles, writing articles for the internet is a great advertising method. Online articles can get picked up by hundreds of websites looking for relevant content to add to their pages. This exposure lets you be found using on-line searches. Many of the web sites that pick up your story will have extensive web-traffic generating strategies to get people to their websites. When you submit your articles on-line you get to enjoy the benefit of their efforts.

When writing articles for the Internet, there are a few things to keep in mind. First of all, don’t write articles that read like sales letters. Make the purpose of your article to inform people, not to sell them anything. If people like what they learned they will come to you for more information. The second thing is that when you submit an article online you will also be asked to supply a short biography, or bio, about yourself. This is where you are allowed to put your name, the name of your company, and your website or your email address. If you forget to include this information in your bio, the article will be of no value to you.

A few of my favorite article submission sites are: articlecity.com, submityourarticles.com and goarticles.com

Summary

There are a lot of ways to use the internet to generate new sales leads. This is a great way to get your name out there in front of a very large number of people. You don’t have to be an internet genius, or even have your own website to enjoy the benefits of internet marketing.

In upcoming and final part of this series we will turn our focus from finding new prospects to turning them into paying customers.

E-commerce is a cut throat business. You have to arm yourself with the proper know-how and the tools to make your site a cut above the rest. Each day, more and more sites are clambering to optimize their rankings in websites and if you lose your guard, you may just get trampled on and be left in the abyss filled with so many failed e-commerce sites.

Search Engine Optimization or SEO is a term widely used today by many e-commerce sites. For the past few years and the next ten years or so, search engines would be the most widely used internet tool to find the sites that they need to go to or the product or information they need.

Most people that use search engines use only the ten top search results in the first page. Making it to the first page, more so to the top three is a barometer of a sites success in search engine optimization. You will get a higher ratio of probability in being clicked on when you rank high. The more traffic for your site, the more business you rake in.

So just what is search engine optimization and do you have to use it?

The answer to why you have to use it is an easy one. You need search engine optimization to be number one, or maybe at least make your site income generating.

With search engine optimization you can get the benefit of generating a high traffic volume. Let’s just say you get only a turn out of successful sales with 10 to 20 percent of your traffic. If you get a hundred hits or more a day, you get a good turn out of sales already. If you get only twenty to ten hits a day, you only get one or two if not any at all.

So once again, what is search engine optimization?

Search engine optimization is utilizing tools and methods in making your site top ranking in the results of search engines. Getting yourself in the first page and better yet in the top half of the page will ensure that your site will generate public awareness of your site’s existence and subsequently generate more traffic, traffic that could lead to potential income and business.

Try to search the internet for many useful help. Tips, guidelines and methods for search engine optimization are plenty to be found. Read many articles that can help you optimize your site in search engine results. The more knowledge and information you gather the better. This will all help you in getting those high rankings. This may require a little time and effort in your part but the benefits will be astounding.

The first stage in getting more customers is lead generation. You’ve got to identify potential customers and making first contact with them before you can do anything else. Converting all your new potential customers to actual customers is the second stage of growing your customer base, and a separate topic unto itself.

In this multi-part series we’re going to focus on management tips for lead generation first, and then move on to conversion strategies. When it comes to increasing the number of customers you have, you must have a good method of contacting potential new customers or it doesn’t matter how good the rest of your business is.

What follows are 5 of the best traditional advertising techniques available. They are the most effective and most common. Each of these lead generation techniques is an article or a book in itself. Use this list to spark some ideas, and then do a little research into the ones that interest you.

1. Radio & Television Advertising

Radio and television advertising offers a lot of flexibility and has the potential to reach huge audiences.

Television advertising can elicit a very strong emotional response due to the powerful combination of audio and video. Television is excellent for running emotion based campaigns because it is a very intimate advertising medium using both audio and video together.

Like television, radio reaches enormous audiences and offers great potential for emotional response using sound. Unlike television, radio is often listened to at work and in the car. This means that people tend not to go to the bathroom or go make a sandwich during commercial breaks. It also means they may not be paying attention at all when your ad is run. Like television, the time and frequency of the ad is going to be important.

Both radio and television are predominantly useful for consumer advertising (as opposed to business to business) and can be difficult to target to a specific audience. Although the costs can be prohibitive for small to medium sized companies, lower cost local stations can be a good place to introduce yourself to the benefits of radio and television advertising.

2. Newspaper and Magazine Advertising

Newspapers and magazines have very wide distributions and can be very effective places to advertise. Printed media has some advantages over radio and television as newspapers and magazines are often kept around for days, weeks or months and read multiple times.

Newspapers are a good choice for time sensitive advertisements, specific to a local geographic area. Some examples advertising suitable for newspapers are special events, weekend sales, job openings, homes or apartments for rent, etc. Notice that many of these are consumer based advertisements, as opposed to business to business ads. Although newspapers reach a lot of people, they also have a very diverse audience which makes them less effective for targeting specific markets (other than geographic targeting). They have a short shelf-life, but do tend to get read regularly so are great for last minute announcements.

Magazines have a longer shelf life than newspapers, and offer much better opportunities for target marketing. If your product is sailboat winches, then a newspaper ad would probably be ineffective because only a small percentage of newspaper readers sail. An advertisement in “Island Sailing” magazine would be much more effective. Magazines are only purchased by people interested in the specific topic of the magazine, so they are a great way to send a message to a group of people who will be more likely to be interested in what you have to offer.

3. Display Advertising

A billboard or bus shelter advertisement in the right place can get a lot of attention. You can also easily blow your advertising budget with large display ads, so make sure you know what you are doing and you make your message simple and easy to understand in a few seconds.

4. Brochures, Flyers & Leaflets

Brochures, flyers and leaflets can be distributed in a wide variety of ways including door to door, at events and on advertising poster boards. How you distribute them depends on the type of audience you are trying to reach.

5. Direct Mail

Direct mail is sending postcards, or letters to a specific list of people. You need to do some preliminary lead generation before you can use direct mail (so you know who to mail to). Direct mail helps you qualify which leads in a generic leads list may be interested in a specific opportunity. Suppose you have an existing business, and you are about to offer something new. You already have a list of your existing customers, but you have no way of knowing who might be interested in your new offering. A direct mail campaign to your existing customer list could be a cost-effective way to generate leads interested in your new offering without trying to advertise to the whole world. Many high cost advertising firms frown on direct mail campaigns, but there is one simple reason they are still around – they work.

Summary

So there you have the top 5 traditional advertising methods for attracting new customers. Consider who you are trying to reach and choose the ones that work best for you. But don’t stop there, some less traditional methods work every bit as well, and are often overlooked by small and large businesses alike.

In part 2 of this 4 part series we’ll look at some less expensive, yet powerful ways to get your message out.