Above And Beyond Promotion

Posts Tagged ‘price’

Best Advertising For Small Business

Word Count:
432

Summary:
The best advertising, whether for a small business or large, is advertising that works. The price a small business owner pays for advertising would not be an issue if the outcome of the ad was known.

Keywords:
small business, business advertising, small business advertising, pay per click

Article Body:
The best advertising, whether for a small business or large, is advertising that works. The price a small business owner pays for advertising would not be an issue if the outcome of the ad was known.

If a small business owner had a choice of paying $1000 a month for advertising that brought in a guarantee of at least $2000 a month profit, or paying $500 a month for advertising that brought in $750 worth of profit a month, there would be no hesitation. That savvy small business owner would gladly shell out $1000 each month for the advertising.

Small business advertising has no such guarantees however. It’s not like buying a refrigerator that is guaranteed to keep the milk and eggs cold. $1000 of advertising might bring $8000 of profit, or it might bring in zero. So, what’s a small business owner to do, especially if faced with a limited budget?

The best answer is to use small business advertising that only charges the owner when and if it works. There are several ways of doing this.

The primary method is called pay per click. This Internet option is available with numerous online merchant sites as well as hundreds of newspapers across the country and the globe. Simply put, a small business agrees to pay a specified amount to the publisher, or the merchant site, for each ad that entices a consumer to come to the small business site. The price paid is generally an amount that the small business owner has bid on. More and more newspapers are offering this option as they struggle to maintain competitive online with eBay, Craigslist and other pure play classified and marketplace sites.

Another option for pay per click and inexpensive advertising for a small business that wants to concentrate on local customers is with regional publications or some of the larger metropolitan newspapers and groups that are introducing citizen media sites. These zoned products offer a much less expensive buy because the small business advertiser is buying the local neighborhood instead of the total metropolitan circulation of the metropolitan paper.

Companies such as YourHub, a product of the Denver Post and Rocky Mountain News, are licensing these citizen media sites to other newspapers in other areas and those welcome small business advertising and discount the price. They also encourage citizen journalism. The small business owner can contribute articles, photos and local stories, although the paper will undoubtedly edit something too unabashedly self-serving. This is still a great way for a local entrepreneur to introduce himself or herself to the neighbors in a friendly, casual and soft sell way.

The Epson SX405 is a compact all-in-one printer with a sleek design and solidly put together while still managing to be light weight. As well as a reasonable purchase price the SX405 also has reasonable running cost in terms of the price of its printer cartridges compared to its competitors. Epson SX405 ink cartridges consist of four ink cartridges, one for each of the colours, this means when one colour has run out the others are unaffected unlike tri-colour cartridges where ink gets wasted when only one of the colours is empty. A full set of genuine Epson ink cartridges for the SX405 costs around £30 which is reasonable but if you want real value for money compatible ink cartridges are available for half the price and yield the same. The Stylus SX405 has a vast array of functions which include photo quality printing, scanning and coping. Some of the features do not require the device to be connected to a PC, one which being direct photo printing from various formats of memory card thanks to the SX405’s built-in memory card reader and LCD screen. When printing from a memory card the SX405 has a strange flaw in that it doesn’t make the best quality setting available as an option that’s available when printing direct from a PC which is a very strange decision on Epson’s part. Print quality produced by the SX405 is excellent for all types of documents and is probably the SX405 strongest feature. Although all the other functions like scanning and photo copying are good they’re not as much of a stand out feature as the print quality. Overall the Epson Stylus SX405 should be a hit with various home office users.

One of the biggest mistakes people make when holding a garage sale is not advertising enough. Most people think that it is enough to put a single ad in the local paper one week before the sale. Usually these people are too worried that they will lose money on their sale because the ad costs too much. That is nonsense.

When you don’t advertise much, you don’t get many customers. When you don’t get many customers, you have to sell at their price, because if you don’t, there is no other customer looking to buy that item. However, if you have a lot of customers looking at the same items, you can set the price and not need to haggle because you know that there is already another person wanting to pay for it. The more you advertise, the more customers you get, and the more you are in charge.

Most people don’t bother to use flyers very much anymore. Perhaps they think they are too busy to put them out, or that they won’t work. However flyers are not that difficult to use effectively. When done right they can bring tons of people into your sales. You just need to keep in mind that while places with bulletin boards set up for flyers and such get a lot of traffic they also get a lot of ‘flyer competition’.

This means that your garage sale flyer MUST STAND OUT and CATCH PEOPLE’S ATTENTION or it will simply be lost in a sea of paper! So, use bright paper, and a LARGE BOLD HEADLINE that gets attention by being different. Then let the rest of the flyer give the details of your sale. Let me say that a little differently: you need to use a headline that causes people to stop and read your flyer.

This does not mean you need to be wildly promotional or crazy with your headlines. But if there are 19 flyers on the board that say “Garage Sale on Saturday”, and your’s is the same, it just won’t be read. However if your flyer says something different it will attract more attention. So try something like the following instead:

- We’ve Got What You Need for your garden at 90% off new prices
- Huge Discounts On all Home Products this Saturday

Then all you need to do is print them up and put them in your car and ask if you can post one at every store you visit during your weeks chores. No extra work is involved at all. Take these ideas and run with them and your next garage sale will be on its way to a resounding success.