Posted by: bblackwood
on Aug 30, 2009
Here are three things you can do TODAY to improve your market. They'll only take you a few minutes and two of them cost nothing.
1. Tweak Your Voicemail Greeting
Posted by: bblackwood
on Aug 24, 2009
Fact: people buy from people they trust. No trust, no sales. So, building your trustworthiness is crucial to building your enterprise.
Trustworthiness can include several factors from honesty to timeliness. But perhaps the MOST important aspect of trust is authority. Here are four proven - and no-cost - ways to build your influence so you can influence sales.
Posted by: bblackwood
on Aug 16, 2009
Whenever I can, I try to expose you to Freesources - sources of absolutely free marketing tools and tactics. You simply can't lose using Freesources.
But if you can invest just $50 in a marketing tactic, I can give even more options. Here are fou that pack the potential of much more expensive marketing initiatives.
Posted by: bblackwood
on Aug 9, 2009
If your small business needs to conserve cash while still building your brand with customers, clients and prospects, I have some ideas for you - four in fact.
Here are some of the most reliable marketing tactics you can undertake and they'll only cost you some time.
1. Become a PRo
Posted by: bblackwood
on Jun 29, 2009
Back in the day, marketers subscribed to clip art services, which sent out dozens of seasonal designs each month that could literally be clipped from oversized pages and pasted into layouts when art or illustration was needed.
Today, like many other things, the Internet has made that cumbersome and costly process obsolete. Now, there are a lot of art Freesources available online for businesses, groups and organizations doing smart marketing on a limited budget:
Posted by: bblackwood
on Jun 14, 2009
The largest ad agency I worked for used to charge up to $5,000 to design a logo. Then, we'd watch, green with envy, as some local companies would pay $75,000 to a big, out-of-state logo firm. (Most clients in our area were too small to use the REALLY big corporate identity firms - who charge up to $250,000.)
I'm pretty sure the majority of you reading this wouldn't pay a quarter of a million dollars for your logo - even though you believe a strong logo is a crucial marketing tool. (It may or may not be, see here.)
You'd prefer something more in the range of... FREE.
Posted by: bblackwood
on Jun 9, 2009
There are few challenges a new enterprise faces that are more serious than choosing its name or the name for its latest product. I'll show you a fun way to come up with any number of names in this article.
If you've ever named a child, or a pet, or even a boat, you know how difficult it can be to come up with the perfect choice. With humans, anyway, there is nothing more basic to who and what we are. It's our Prime Descriptor - the identifier most of us will use throughout life. If you're smart, you'll think especially hard when choosing a name.
A lot rides on it.
Posted by: bblackwood
on May 23, 2009
How To Get FREE Photography For Your Marketing
Back in the 1980s B.I. (before Internet) there were just two ways to get photography for marketing brochures, ads and other projects. You could hire a photographer at $1,500 a day and up plus expenses (and usage rights or royalties,) or you could comb through stock photo catalogs, call the stock house and wait for a package of actual photos or transparencies to be shipped to you. The photos you chose would cost up to $2,000 each to use - once. (And you'd have to pay for a scan of the photo to use in your material.)
Today, the Internet has changed all that. Most people now use royalty-free stock downloads from online brokers like iStock. It's smart. The quality is usually pixel-perfect and images are available for download instantly. The cost is very low, like $10 - $20 per image. That's pretty high on the BB Bang4Buck index.
Posted by: bblackwood
on May 15, 2009
Where to find music for your marketing projects for FREE.
Years ago, when singing jingles were still considered an advertising necessity, roving teams of music-pluggers criss-crossed the land, armed with industrial-sized boomboxes and a satchel full of tapes from America's jingle mills.
One of the proven sales tricks they learned was to play the prospect jinglee three or four famous ditties and then ask if the listener could identify the clients represented. Most people could. The kicker came when the salesman revealed that none of the jingles had been in use for at least ten years - and yet we all still remember not only the tunes but also the sponsor they represented.
