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Posts Tagged ‘marketing strategy’

In my direct response print and Yellow Page ad design business, I offer a FREE 60 point ad audit at my website www.InstantYellowPageProfits.com. Of all of the hundreds of ads I audit each year, most include the same 3 profit killing mistakes.

The first profit killing mistake I see in small business advertising is having a weak headline. The weakest headline you can usually have is the business name which normally contains no benefit for the consumer. Imagine you are a consumer with a leaking pipe and you go to the Yellow Pages under “Plumbers” to find someone to fix your leak.

You review ads under the heading, and the first 2 have the following headlines. Let’s say ad example #1 has “Joe’s Plumbing” and ad example #2 has, “Get Your Leak Fixed In 60 Minutes or Less!”?” Which ad would you read and reply to? It is obvious that the only thing you learn in the “Joe’s Plumbing” headline is that Joe has a big ego. That fails to be a benefit to your prospects. Your prospect will be attracted to the headline benefit of getting their leak fixed in just 60 minutes.

So when you are writing your headlines, ask yourself, “What is the greatest benefit I can offer my prospects, and what is their greatest desire when they are viewing my ad?” If you take those most sought after benefits and include them in your headline you will dramatically increase response to ALL your advertising.

The second profit killing mistake is to have no offer. If you want to increase your response to any advertising, I recommend you add a compelling offer. You kill your advertising response and profits when you fail to include an offer.

So what is the best type of offer to include in your advertising? Including a offer for your new customers is what I recommend. A “dollars off” offer or an additional bonus on thier first service is a good welcome offer for new clients. Most ads do not include an offer, so you can make your ad stand out and outperform your competition with a well crafted offer.

The third profit killing mistake is to not include a guarantee. A guarantee is something all small businesses need to include in their advertising. Small business advertisers find that adding by a 100% Moneyback Guarantee they increase ad response by removing the risk of a new client trying your business. I know what you’re thinking, “If I offer a 100% Moneyback Guarantee like Larry says, everyone will ask for their Moneyback and rip me off!”

I know how you feel, because I felt the same way before I included a 100% Moneyback Guarantee in my advertising. My concern was that my prospects would rip me off, but when I tested the guarantee I saw positive results. My guarantee more than DOUBLED response to my advertising. I was shocked that in 7 years of having a Moneyback Guarantee, there were only 2 clients that requested a refund. In both cases, things did not go according to plan and these clients deserved and got their moneyback. If I had not given them their Moneyback, I would have had 2 lawsuits that would have exceeded the price of my refund. This moneyback guarantee did double duty by increasing my advertising response and profits while simultaneously removing legal liability when unusual things happened.

Businesses that can not have a 100% money back guarantee, can guarantee a portion or part of the first purchase even if this means limiting what services you provide on their first purchase. The best guarantees reduce or remove the new client’s risk of trying your product or service.

So you can see that having doubled my business from the same size ad and having only 2 (deserved) refunds in 7 years and over 1500 jobs is a tremendous financial gain.

So upgrade your print and Yellow Page advertising by having a great headline, a money back guarantee and a new client offer. This gives you a long-term competitive advantage because when you get 200% response, you are getting new clients at only 50% of what your competition has to pay.

Larry Conn’s personal experience in advertsing and direct response marketing has been built over the last 34 years. He is celebrated world-wide as a top direct response marketing expert, copywriter, speaker and author. Top direct response marketing experts recommend Larry in their books and products for creating profitable marketing strategies, and writing copy for high ROI print and Yellow Page ad design. At his website www.InstantYellowPageProfits.com  Larry offers a FREE 60 point Advertising Audit worth $150.00.

One of the most powerful strategies for marketing any website or business is article writing, but online it boils down to search engine optimization. That means that if you’re going to be writing articles for use online, you need to be optimising them for search engines. The first rule of thumb in article writing is your article title must have the main keyword in it.

Make sure you have enough keywords and helpful content in your articles for the search engines to smile about, don’t overdo the keywords though and turn your article into an unreadable spam piece. A well written interesting article with a keyword density of about 2% with usefull info is what you need to achieve for your articles. Give people great content and they will stay on your pages longer giving you a better chance of making an affiliate sale, an Adsense click, or sign up to your newsletter.

Article writing can be very rewarding once you get the hang of it. Ideas can be gleaned from anything and everything. Newspapers, news, other articles and magazines are a good place to start, jot your thoughts down on paper first. Make things easy for yourself by always having to hand a notebook to jot down ideas or information for articles or even a handy gadget like a personal voice recorder. You will be pleasantly surprised by the amount of content you can gather in a short space of time.

Once you get the hang of it article writing is not hard, it just takes a little bit of discipline and you are on your way. Organising yourself and setting aside time to write is a very important aspect of good article writing. Get in to a routine and you will enjoy your research and writing articles a lot more!

Website owners and blog sites need fresh articles and content and they are continually searching. Directories are full of articles you can freely use to publish. Once found Ezine publishers and webmasters use thes articles on their own sites making sure they do not alter the article in any way and keep the resources live. Backlinks to your websites are vital and these are created through the hyperlinks in the resources section of your article, improving your search rankings.

Article writing can be rewarding and easily learned, and article marketing is a great way to promote your website. Using article directories to publish your articles has the potential for great riches. Although it’s very important to remember that to be a profitable venture you must provide high quality articles that uses keywords that are often searched on therefore attracting a great deal of free web traffic to your site.