small business, Self improvement, working at home, mental health, cooking, hobbies, gardening, wellness, health, fitness, motherhood and raising families

A ROSE GROWING GUIDE for gorgeous roses http://tinyurl.com/cjxy2p

With your small business marketing, do you organize some special events a couple of times a year to promote your business? You might wonder why you would do this, but when you think about it, organizing one or two special events a year attracts lots of attention whereas some of your other marketing may not be measurable.

For example you can organize something like a coloring competition for kids, a fishing competition for the family, a sausage sizzle or a stall in the local park when there is a featured local occasion or anything at all.

Some of the beauties of marketing this way is that:

A. You have a lead up time to the event and you can promote your business that way

B. You can hype up your clients and give them a reason to visit you away from your place of business

C. You may get seen to be getting involved in the community (depending on what you do for a special event. Community involvement is always excellent promotion.)

Running an event has two achievements:

1. It gives you a reason to promote your business without necessarily discounting something;

2. It gets your customers talking about what is happening.

To run a successful event though, it needs to be properly planned, no hit and miss stuff. That would do you more harm that good. Small businesses would benefit from running at least 2 events a year. I know it is a lot of work but it can create quite a buzz about your business.

THINK OUTSIDE THE SQUARE WITH YOUR BUSINESS MARKETING

Should you decide you want to get involved in event marketing it would pay to sit down and write up some of the criteria that would make a successful promotion for you. It may be that there needs to be X number of people attend an event, there needs to be support from X number of other activities, it needs to be run in spring when the weather is perfect, and so on. Make a list of the requirements that would make it a successful marketing promotion for you.

If you run a competition of some sort you may be able to get the local paper to take a photo and run it in the community section which will give you free advertising as well.

Put your thinking cap on, have a look at what other larger businesses are doing and emulate their strategies. Plan it carefully, cost it effectively (they can actually be quite cheap to run) and have fun.

Small business operators can learn a lot from larger businesses but they just need to make sure that their marketing budget is right and that they are staying within their marketing plan.

I AM DEFINITELY NOT GOING TO BE PROMISING YOU THE WORLD, BECAUSE LIKE EVERYTHING ELSE, RICHES ARE NOT MADE IN A DAY, but it is possible to sell a site in a couple of months if you can put the time into writing for it.

I have decided to write a few blogs with the view to help people who have found themselves unemployed and with time on their hands.

Being unemployed can be a devastating state of affairs, in fact even to own a business that is losing money can be just as devastating.

If you have found that you have time on your hands I would like to give you pointers for starting to make some money on the internet and also I will give different websites where you can get information to help you on your way.

FLIPPING WEBSITES

What is done here is a person sets up a website, a membership site or a blog and develops it to the point where it is making some money.  At that point the site is then a saleable product.  Have a look at http://marketplace.sitepoint.com/ where you will see different sites that have been set up and are now up for sale.  Have a good look around this site and you will see the types of sites that are creating interest and see the various amounts of money that sites are being sold for.

If you do not have great technical skills do not be too concerned about that.  By setting up a Wordpress blog you can quite easily have that up and running in a short space of time without too many tech skills needed and you can sell that too.  The beauty of taking on a blog as your first 'flipping' exercise is that Wordpress is so easy to work with and you can edit your material easily and you can pop info on there each and every day if you wish and even a number of times a day. 

They way I would do that is find a niche where people are looking for information and start a blog about that.  For example, if you are out of work as I have suggested above, you might set up a blog about staying positive for job hunting, dressing for interviews, preparing your resume and so on.  The great thing about that is that as you are searching the net for info to put on your site you will probably be finding things that you can do for yourself which may improve your chances in the work place as well.

Other topics could be:

• budgeting
• understanding teenagers
• reviews on mod con stuff like IPods, laptops, etc.etc.
• jewelry
• shoes
• latest trends inclothes

You get the picture.  Find a topic that is HOT and work on it and work fast.  That way you will be able to build the site fast and flick it quickly.

From there you can develop into other sites, like a product website, maybe selling an ebook.  You don't have to write the ebook yourself, but can get it written at one of the writing sites like Elance.com or Guru.com. 

I am in the process of having a cover made for an Ebook on How to Set up a Blog.  Hopefully I will have this loaded into my site within the week.

Keep in touch as I will add more and more helpful hints to get you up and running.