Attract Media Coverage Without Spending Advertising $$$

Advertising is expensive. PR is often low cost or free.
Try these ten tips for attracting free PR to your business. But here is a word of caution. When sending press releases to the media, remember that less is more. The journalist who encounters a press release from your company every week learn to ignore anything with your name on it.

1. Capitalize on an Anniversary
Is your business having a significant anniversary? Tenth year in business? Ten thousandth customer served? Five thousand books sold? Arrange some sort of celebration, draft a press release and contact your local media. You can never tell. You must might coverage from the local newspaper, radio or television station.

2. Donate Something
Does your networking group have draws for door prizes? Offer to donate the prize, then give something that's heavily branded with your businesses name and contact information. Similarly, find out if local charities are engaged in fund raising opportunities. Offer one of your products or services as a prize or to be auctioned.

3. Host a Special Event
Have a Singles Night, a Kid's Night, or a Senior Citizen's Night. Send a press release to your local media. A supermarket did a smashing business following a well publicized Singles Night complete with dancing in the aisles, games and contests.

4. Sponsor Something
Provide sponsorship at a trade show, a convention, a sporting event, or an arts festival. Sponsor a local kid to attend an event in another city. Sponsor a kid's sports team. Offer a scholarship to help a young person attend university. Remember to send the press release.

5. Decorate Creatively
Put up a stunning decoration or window display for the Holidays, or for spring, or fall, or in recognition of some particular event in your city. Then invite the media to take a look. The key is to have something unique or original that'll warrant pictures and video taping.

6. Write Articles
If you're in business, you're an expert on some topic. Write articles on your area of expertise. Submit them to local or national media, magazines, web sites, trade journals or other pertinent publications. Your article should not be a promotion of your business, but should inform readers about a topic of interest. Accountants might write articles on tax tips, for example, or florists could write about plant care.

7. Let Them Know You're an Expert
When newsworthy stories become available, media often look for a local expert for quotes and comments. Contact your local or national media, and let them know you are available to comment on topics within your area of expertise. Suppose your expertise is ecommerce, for example. Next time your local paper has an ecommerce-related story, they just might contact you for a comment. You (and your business) will get some excellent and cost-free publicity.

8. Get T-shirts and Go Public
Decorate t-shirts with your company's logo. Sign up your staff to participate in charity walks and other community events. Ensure that everyone wears the t-shirts.

9. Donate Something to a Local Charity
Donate books, used computers, products or services to a school or charity. In one community, local businesses attracted enormous publicity by organizing an event in which they outfitted adolescent youth from low-income families for the spring prom. Participating clothing shops, beauticians, florists, even taxi companies got in on the act and attracted enormous publicity while doing good works.

10. Publicize a New Product, Service or Research Finding
Have something new to offer? If it's at all unique in your area, write your press release and send it to media and trade journals. Even if you get mentioned in the gossip column of a trade journal, it's still good publicity!

11. Offer Something Unique
Local shops in one community worked together to hold a Men's Night and shortly before the Holidays. Males received assistance in purchasing lingerie, perfumes, jewelry and accessories for the woman in their lives. It was a new concept in the area and a big success. The media loved it.

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Advertising Your Home Business on a Budget

When you are starting out in a new home business and no one knows who you are, one of the greatest challenges you will face is how to drum up new business.
If there were not people in your community or marketplace that you knew who needed your products or services, you probably would not have started your business to begin with. But, once you have talked to those who you personally knew who needed your what you offer, then your next task is to find others who will help keep your doors open.

Many people know that they must turn to advertising at some point in the future, but they hope that day will be long down the road. For some, this utopian concept will come to fruition. But for the rest of us in the real world, we must come up with creative solutions for meeting our home business advertising needs while working within our budget.

Most people have a misconception about having to spend lots of money in order to advertise their home business. When you start out, you honestly will not have much money available for advertising, and if you do, you should still spend it wisely.

Before you jump headfirst into the world of advertising, let me share some of the lessons I have learned concerning this most important topic.

LESSON #1

It does not have to cost an arm and a leg to advertise your home business, unless you fail to plan and fail to test.

As much as is possible, you should always test your advertising. If you jump in and start dumping tons of money in to advertising without first testing your advertising, you might find yourself broke and without sales at the end of the road. Most people who commit this error write off their failure on the home business they chose or the economy or any of a hundred other excuses. But, if they are unwilling to take responsibility for their mistake, they will never learn from their mistake. Don't let
this be you.

LESSON #2

All testing should be done in blocks. If you begin to advertise simultaneously in newspapers, radio and television, how will you know which advertising is bringing people to your cash register? You won't. All you will know that something might be working, but you will not know what is actually doing the trick.

Even if you tell people in your advertising to tell you how they found you, my experience shows that fewer than 10% of the people ever will tell you anything --- and those people who do may not even get the facts straight! You cannot rely on your customers to tell you what advertising is working for your home business. You must put in the extra effort to know for yourself.

LESSON #3

Only when you have a proven and solid advertising portfolio should you venture to drop big bucks in an advertising campaign.

Even then, you should be careful to keep further measurements to determine how much the maximum advantage of an ad would be. Sometimes you might be able to reach ten times as many people, but depending on the kind of media and other factors, the additional exposure will only generate twice as many sales. Keep your eye attuned to situations like this to get the most from your advertising dollars.

LESSON #4

As Lesson #3 illustrates, sometimes your best advertising investment may actually cost you less money. When you are first starting out, whether you are running a home business or a business outside of your home, you need to be able to get people talking and thinking about your business.

If you are busy testing ads in media's such as the newspaper, magazines, radio, and television, you need to learn ways of promoting your business that do not require large cash expenditures. A few examples are:

· Word of Mouth
· Business Cards
· Press Releases
· Non-Primetime Ads on Radio and Television

Here is more information about each type of low-cost advertising:

WORD OF MOUTH

This of course is the cheapest kind of advertising on the planet --- it does not cost you anything. Ask your customers if they know anyone who could also use your products or services. When they are happy with your offerings and service, they will be willing to tell you whom you can contact, and they will pass the word for you.

BUSINESS CARDS

You can usually pick up 500 business cards for about $20. When you do, hand them out. Do not give more than a couple of cards to each person. If they need more cards from you, they will ask.

Some people are known to network with others on a regular basis. Some of these people are also known to be always looking for an extra few bucks. With these people, you can suggest to them that if they write their name on the back of one of your business cards and the card is presented to you, then you will pay a referral fee to them. You do not have to offer much --- sometimes one dollar is enough. Look at your home business and your offerings and decide how much would be a good referral fee.

PRESS RELEASES

Press Releases are a good source for generating news about your home business. The business editor at your local newspaper is always on the lookout for a good business story to fill the business news section of the newspaper.

Of course, the business editor understands the economics of running a paper and is more inclined to run your story if you buy advertising in his/her publication, but will still print stories for special events and openings.

The important thing to remember about Press Releases is that it must be constructed in the form of a news story. Even if you are a sole proprietorship, quotes from you should be written in a third person format: John Doe said, "Your quote here."

A Press Release should pack the most important information at the beginning of the copy, and leave extra details towards the end.

You should always provide the reporter who gets the task a simple and easy way for him/her to contact you directly. Often the reporter will want to contact you to get details that will enhance their take on your story.


NON-PRIMETIME ADS ON RADIO AND TELEVISION

Believe it or not, some of the best rates for radio and television are on the overnight and non-primetime venues. These target times are not a total waste as they can easily keep the infomercial people in business.

These off-hours are just less populated than the primetime hours.

Don't be afraid to check your local radio and television rates for non-primetime hours to see what bargains may exist. With television, primetime is 7pm to 10pm. With radio, primetime is 8am to 5pm. This sure leaves a whole lot of hours available to
advertise your home business at discount rates!

IN CONCLUSION

When it comes down to it, there is a lot to understand about advertising, but when you have the basic knowledge down pat, everything will fall into place and bring more dollars to your bank account.

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Affiliate Strategies Of Pay Per Click Advertising Networks

The Untold Secret Of Pay Per Click Advertising:
An often misunderstood reality of Pay-Per-Click advertising is that many times you can't determine where you ad will be displayed once you sign-up with one of the PPC Search Engines. In the incestuous world of online advertising, companies are often simultaneously competitors and partners. This is never more true than in the case of Search Engine Advertising.

Even The Big Guys Do It:
If the Pay-Per-Click program you're using is from one of the major brands that has it's own consumer search destination site (Google, Yahoo, Lycos etc,) it's a little easier to tell where your ads will show up. However, even if you're working with the major players, your ads won't be limited to the Search Engine you signed up with. For example, Google has agreements with Lycos, Ask Jeeves, AOL, and other lesser known brands, to display ads from the Google AdWords program. Yahoo has relationships with MSN, and CNN.Com to display ads from its Overture Pay Per Click Program. Lycos owns HotBot.Com and has partnered with affiliates outside its network to increase the distribution of ads from the Lycos AdBuyer Pay Per Click program.

Distribution Strategies Of Smaller Search Engines:
Once you go beyond the major Pay Per Click Advertising programs it becomes increasingly difficult to know where your ads will appear. Most of the second tier Search Engines rely exclusively on networks of unknown sites for their distribution. FindWhat.Com, Kanoodle, Enhance and Search 123 don't operate sites that consumers use to search the web. Because of this they have developed relationships with thousands of smaller sites to display ads from customers who sign up for their Pay Per Click programs.

Affiliate Traffic Isn't Necessarily Bad:
Just because a Pay Per Click Advertising program doesn't have its own search site to drive traffic doesn't necessarily mean that the traffic is of lesser quality. Like everything else when it comes to a successful PPC Advertising campaign, the key is to track and analyze results on a daily basis. Set-up independent tracking URL's for each PPC Search Engine you are working with, or use a third party tracking tool like Atlas One Point to track how many clicks you're getting from each Search Engine, and how much of the traffic is converting into sales.

Can You Cherry Pick Affiliates?
As a rule, most Search Engines won't divulge the list of affiliates they are working with to display your ads. Even if you are able to determine which affiliate sites are converting better for you than others, the Search Engines generally won't allow you to cherry pick which affiliates will display your ad. However, some Pay Per Click Search Engines like Google allow you to opt out of their affiliate network.

Conclusion:
Driving traffic by displaying ads across a network of affiliate sites is a fact of life for Pay Per Click Search Engines. It's not necessarily bad, but it is something you need to be aware of as you analyze which PPC Search Engines to use, and which ones perform. By displaying your ad on affiliate sites your marketing message is put in front of more people who are looking for the products you sell. The downside is once you move beyond the big brands and venture into the vast mysterious world of affiliate networks, there is a chance the quality of your traffic will decline. As long as you monitor your traffic sources for volume, and conversions, and adjust your campaigns accordingly you should be able to benefit from the increased distribution affiliates provide, while maintaining the profitability metrics for your Pay Per Click Advertising campaign.

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