Promotional Products and Advertising Specialties are Excellent Low Cost Ways to Increase Traffic and Sales

Look around your house. You probably have dozens of pens, refrigerator magnets, key fobs, drink coasters, note pads, calendars and other items that carry the brand of a local business owner. You might generally think of these items being associated primarily with real estate and insurance salesmen, but in fact the promotional products business has 70,000 distributors and 20,000 suppliers offering 700,000 products that can be imprinted, embossed, or otherwise labeled with your identification.

For twenty of the past twenty-two years I have been manufacturing and selling bicycle water bottles (aka sports bottles, squeeze bottles.) My company sold close to 100,000,000 bottles during that time to everyone from the local pizza parlor to the US Army, from State Farm Insurance to Curves, and from the Girl Scouts to the local little league. During those years I was featured in articles within the industry on various aspects of providing a better approach to the sale of promotional products that would deliver better results.

Most sellers of promotional products are very happy to ask you what you want, then hope they have the best price. You see, almost all promotional products salespeople can offer you the exact same 700,000 products. And you may think that the most important thing to you is whether the pen costs $.79 or $.89. As a marketing professional, I see it from a completely different perspective. Here is how I suggest you make the purchase

First, consider what your goal is in purchasing the promotional product. Commonly the reason you are buying the item is because you did it last year, and you ran out. But, did the item actually result in any kind of new business for you. If you can identify the result you hope for (e.g. more phone calls, repeat sales, employee motivation, customer retention, direct mail response, salesman's leave behind, trade show traffic builder, or new product billboard) then you might decide that a pen at any price is not the right product. So with 700,000 products to choose from, a more thoughtful and marketing driven consultant might have some highly unique ideas to suggest.

Over the years I developed a concept called the perfect promotional product. Each time you need an item for a promotion, you may not be able to find an item that meets all these criteria, but it is still a great place to start.

1. Demographics. Who am you trying to appeal to? Men, women, young, old, athletic, couch potato, hip, not so hip, student, church member, vacationer, outdoorsman, etc. The product should suit the demographic you are hoping to reach.

2. Utility. You should try for maximum utility. When they get it home (if they get it home,) where, how, and how often will the product be seen so that the ad can be viewed. Some items only last a day. Some items last for years. Some are used once. Some are used repeatedly (think coffee mug.)

3. Other eyeballs. A plus for this new perfect promotional would be if it would get seen or be used by someone in addition to the intial recipient. When it is used, will it be seen? Is it cool enough to show off? Will others in the household use it? Beach balls and water bottles come to mind.

4. Pallet. The more possible colors the better. Having a low minimum order quantity for custom colors would be a nice touch.

5. Fast turn around. The promotional products industry has become very fast at order turn around time. Try to have at least a week to play with.

6. Large area for art. The larger the better. Of course, there are applications where the client wants their logo or design to be subdued. The larger the billboard is to begin with, the more that a pretty large logo still doesn't appear obnoxious. Pens are not very good at this. Calendars are.

7. Four color art possible. Even better would be if the product can also be printed with multiple spot colors beyond four, so that cartoon art, or several logos with different PMS colors can be used.

8. Multiple locations for the art. Two is better than one and almost always adequate.

9. Small and ships cheaply. For the first time we have an element that is conflicting with other goals. (Small, but large billboard.) But maybe it is an item that can be unfolded.

10. Perceived value compared to cost. Wouldn't it be nice if you could find an item that the average person would look at and think was $10 in the stores, but you could buy it for $.90? That doesn't happen often. In fact, maybe never. However, the perfect promotional product would have a very high perceived value compared to its cost.

When we help you with your promotional product needs we take all of this into account and also help you devise methods for tracking the results.

Using Your Website to Increase Traffic and Sales for Your Local Business

Most websites created for local businesses are merely online brochures providing a description of products and services offered at the business. The website has potential to do so much more as explained in the video below. A market driven website designer or developer will provide you with the other four key components of an excellent website.

Ten Reasons for Using YouTube for Local Small Business Internet Marketing

Yelp.com and CitySearch both maintain that having a YouTube video on their listing for your company doubles the likelihood that the visitor to your listing will take some kind of action. What their claim leaves out is that a poorly created video will not produce those kinds of results and might have a negative effect. On the other hand, there are dozens of other good reasons to create one of more YouTube videos for your local small business other than its effect on Yelp.com.

2. Not every business, but most, will generate more customer calls and decisions to shop if the client has a reason to trust you. The written word is good at this, because folks tend to trust what has been made permanent on paper or screen. But you can really increase trust by allowing your customers to hear and see your personal passion about your products and services through a video.

3. The internet is hungry for information. If your YouTube video has information that your client base is seeking, they will find the video to get that information.

4. YouTube has a search function. If you do a good job of Titling your video, creating a good description, and providing relevant keywords in the title, description, and tags, your potential customers will find you through the search mechanism on YouTube. They may also find you because you are related to other searches they do and videos they watch.

5. YouTube videos show up on Google Searches and other similar search engines. It is not uncommon for a thoughtfully keyworded YouTube Video to show up higher than your $5000 website.

6. By adding YouTube videos to your Google Maps Local Business Center listing, MerchantCircle listing, Yelp.com and others, you improve your ranking on those local search engines, and that helps to improve the ranking of your website.

7. You can add your YouTube video to your website as a URL link, like this http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hV-0VIHJCRk, or as an embed (see below). By putting the video on your website, you generate far more chances of it being seen. This is where you can really build trust and increase reasons for your customer to shop with you.

8. You can add your YouTube video to your blog, your facebook, you can Tweet about it, and you can socially bookmark the original video, the article on your blog, and the facebook entry. All of these increase the chances of the video being seen, and also benefit your activities on these other web tools.

9. Daily Motion and other video depositories similar to YouTube may pick up your video and add it to their listings. But if you don't want to wait and see if they do so, you can upload the same video to each one, or you can use an aggregator to put the video up on numerous of these sites all at once.

10. A single YouTube video that we did for a client for less than $300 resulted in the sale of a $6000 bicycle. This is just one of many such examples. The best part is that the YouTube video is listed on page one of a Google search for Specialized Transition and is going to still be selling bicycles for this client a year from now.

You can create your own YouTube video. But I caution you that it needs to be thoughtfully created, edited, superscripted, titled, keyworded, described, and uploaded. Please take a look of one we did recently for an apartment management company on this page. We can do a video like this for you for $300. If you are not located within driving distance of our headquarters, you may need to send us some raw footage or we can work from pictures and create a slide show with voice over.

Give us a call. We can dramatically impact your business with a single YouTube Video

Using Press Releases (PR) to Advertise and Promote Your Local Small Business

Getting in front of the press has never been easier or harder. The traditional press release is almost dead, but the new wave methods are not sufficient in themselves to get major regional or national coverage. If you are interested in getting press coverage for your event, new product release, special, change in personnel, or any of the many, many reasons for sending out a press release, take a minute to review the following. It could save you thousands of dollars.

If you are releasing a new movie or automobile, have the latest invention that will solve the energy crises or cure cancer, or you are attempting to establish a national brand most of the old rules apply, but there are some new ones. You will not turn to Page1Listings.com for this type of release. You need an experienced professional PR firm that has connections...lots and lots of connections. You see, because of the new rules for lesser PR events that follow below, the press has more than enough news coming their way to fill their ever smaller newspapers and magazines. So, these editors have put up more walls between themselves and small PR producers than ever in the past. This means that unless you have one heck of a story, or you are connected, you are not going to get the time of day from most mainstream media: print, TV, radio, or even internet.

On the other hand, let's say you have a great new idea, or you're going to have an event that has a potential to be of interest to 1000, 100,000, or a few million folks. Getting your information out to narrow interest groups is simple and no longer requires massive PR expenditures. You can do some of it yourself, although a professional can increase the chances of wide exposure very substantially. If you are a writer, and you know something about the structure of a Press Release, you can easily put it up on PRlog.org absolutely free of anything other than your time. I have tried as hard as I can to find other truly free web based press release sites, but all the others are either too painful or have too many tricky ways to get you to pay something. (Do you want a picture? Is it more than 800 words? Do you want it to be targeted to more than one interest group?) PRlog.org is 100% free and no tricks. Not only that, due to their size and presence, their releases commonly place very well on Google Search.

Now the tricky part. Like any other web based effort, your press release needs to have key words in title, description, and content. But you also want the release to be compelling and interesting to the press and to your target group. And, what are the key words that you should use? Now that the Press Release has been put on PRLog.org, what else should you be doing to get the word out? How can you maximize the results of this PR campaign.

Your PR release placed on PRLog.org or other "free" or paid internet services will be seen by 1000's of people, many of whom will be bloggers, internet news sources, and traditional media. That is, if the release is properly created and promoted. There are still industry and local news organizations that you can contact to reinforce your interest in having the news published in their online or traditional media products. Most of this you can do yourself. And I'm pleased to provide you with this short primer for DIY. If you'd like some help, you can check out examples of some of the press releases we have done recently by going to http://pressroom.prlog.org/Local_Biz_Marketing/

Here is a short video that offers some additional ideas



If you would like us to write your press release, please know that it will be written from the standpoint of a marketing professional, not a reporter. We will design the press release to maximize the potential for being read, but also being acted on. This means that we will be very conscious of your organizations goals and expectations, and make every effort to see that the presser fits in with other elements of your campaign. We will do independent research regarding your article to flesh it out and make it readable and likely to be seen on Google and Google news. We will research key words and report back to you for your input on which keywords to emphasize. This entire effort commonly costs less than $500.

Give us a call and let us help you get the word out!

Dream Maker Has Inspirational Message for Local Small Business Owners

Most men live lives of quiet desperation and go to their graves with the song still on their heart... Thoreau

Business is never easy, and for the local small business owner just keeping up with changes on the internet is a full time job. In this video Randy Kirk speaks to the methods that time-strapped small businesses can get visible on the web.

Bing, Caffeine, Google Maps Local Business Center, Hot Frog - What You Need to Know

Change. The word is on everyone’s lips. It was the central theme of the just past political season. It is currently the underpinning of legislation being pressed on Health Care and Energy policies. Alvin Toffler in his talk of ever accelerating waves of change foresaw a time when change would be so rapid that the vast majority of the population would give up trying to keep up. Has the internet brought us to that place? For the local small business owner, the answer would
seem to be a resounding yes.

Marketing a small business in 2009 is complex beyond understanding, or at least the average small business owner thinks so. Internet marketing is now the primary driver of traffic to local businesses who supply goods and services to consumers (B2C) and to other local companies (B2B). Strategies for being visible on the internet change so fast that even many experts have difficulty keeping up.

In just the last three weeks, we have had the merger of two major internet forces. The resulting new search engine, Bing, raises new questions about how to stay relevant. Not surprisingly Google has responded with Caffeine, a faster, more sophisticated engine. Google
Maps Local Business Center, Yelp, YellowPages.com, CitySearch, MerchantCircle, and over 65 other national Local Search Engines (LSE's) duke it out for their share of search for products and services at the local level. HotFrog, a more recent launch, goes from obscurity to solid contender in just weeks, after Merchant Circle did the same within months.

Randy Kirk, CEO of Page1Listings.com spelled out the current situation: "For the local bakery, restaurant, lawyer, or general contractor, the ability to be seen on page 1 of a Google Search has
dropped exponentially in the last 24 months. Where a well designed website with decent Search Engine Optimization (SEO) may have provided that visibility two years ago, the LSE's now control most of the top 10 - 20 positions on most searches, not specific business websites."

Page1Listings.com President, Ollie Danner laments: "Unfortunately, the LSE's content is pretty awful across the board. When you go on even the best of them, a search for Italian Restaurant in Las Vegas will commonly include many, many listings that have nothing to do with
Italian Restaurants. Moreover the consumer may or may not realize that reviews on these sites may be "flames" (bad reviews) created by competitors. We realized this need for better results for local businesses and created local search engines directories such as
www.GoToKern.com and have plans to roll out close to 100 such GoTo sites in the coming months."

What can the local business owner do? Kirk, author of "Running a 21st Century Small Business" answers: "For many, the answer has been to move to other methods of advertising and promotion that are throwbacks. There is a lot more networking taking place. This is not
just the kind found on Facebook or LinkedIn, but real, face-to-face interaction with others in groups like LeTip or BNI. Where 20 years ago the major local business group might have been Rotary or the Chamber, today businesses are being far more explicit in what they hope to gain from membership in a business club. They want a business connection that will result in dollars in their pockets"

This new direction has spawned networking meetings that are similar to speed dating clubs. Twenty to 40 local owners will meet and spend five minutes with each of the other attendees seeing how they might be able to connect and do business together.

These ideas are useful and can produce business. But for many businesses, not being visible on the web is the kiss of death. So how can these small businesses possibly keep up with the change. Kirk points out, "there is a growing group of companies who specialize in visibility issues. We have created one such company that will use up to a dozen different methods to get our clients on page 1 of Google searches for key words that matter to them.

Danner adds: "We have used YouTube videos, PR releases, Flickr., Blogs, Craig's list, and many other methods. Of course there is still a need for an outstanding website, and for many businesses, we can get them excellent visibility with their website. We also concentrate on
those 72 Local Search Engines. We make sure that our clients are on all of them and that they're listings are optimized on those LSE's.

"While there are some other companies doing what we do, we believe that we are unique in that we employ a full-on marketing department to make sure we are creating the greatest potential for a return on the client's investment. Even with those resources being employed, our services are priced starting well under $1000."

But what about the changes? Won't there be another new LSE like HotFrog emerging next week or next month? Won't Bing and Google and other search engines be changing how they rate businesses almost monthly? Besides, the small businessman in this climate has to be constantly
changing, too. How will he be able to communicate his latest invention or idea or product to those 72 search engines.

Kirk acknowledges that it isn't easy: "We have to stay on top of all these changes every single day. The local owner does not have the luxury of doing that. So we offer them a service for about $100 a month that makes sure they stay up to date. We even call them from time-to-time to check on changes that they might not have called in to us. We insure that they will stay on page 1, and stay relevant."

So how do companies that need the kind of service you are offering find a quality provider? Kirk concludes: This is just one part of the change we are in. We don't know of anyone else that does what we do. We invite competition, because we can't possibly do this for 5,000,000 small businesses. We're even willing to create partnerships with others and teach them what we know. For now, we just try to handle all the business that is coming our way."

For more on Page1Listings.com visit their website or call 800-708-1748.