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When my daughter complained recently about the prohibitive cost of news media advertising, we had a discussion about the ways in which she could sell her range of body products (hand creams, lip balms etc). I explained to her that huge firms like K Mart wouldn’t spend millions of dollars annually for advertising if it wasn’t necessary. But every week, a K Mart catalogue arrives in our mail box. Every week, like clockwork, ads appear on television for K Mart specials … there are always specials.

All of us in business, whatever our size, need to have an effective, efficient advertising strategy. If you can afford an all bells and whistles television advert and run it in prime time like K Mart, that’s great. Most of us however, can’t afford that type of advertising and have to find alternatives that are cheap, but still bring home the bacon.

A few years ago email looked like being a cure-all for those of us without huge budgets. Unfortunately, spammers killed the golden goose; it is now only effective for selling to those who have agreed to receive our messages. And even then, there’s no guarantee that the messages we send will not be deleted by overactive spam filters long before they reach their intended destination. Adding to our misery is the anti-spam legislation in the US, AUS and various other countries that makes the task of legitimate marketers unnecessarily difficult when it comes to email marketing.

Fortunately, the “Spam Act 2003″, at least in Australia doesn’t outlaw sending commercial fax messages*. So suddenly, the fax has fallen back into favour because it has several additional advantages:

1. It’s cheap. Not as cheap as email and some pay-for-click advertising, but much cheaper than advertising in news media.
2. You can target specific markets
3. You can send as many pages as you like (but don’t irritate recipients)
4. It’s quick and simple
5. You don’t need a fax machine
6. While it’s true recipients can discard faxes, most arrive and at least have a chance of being read
7. You don’t have brochures left over when a product or price changes

There are many service providers out there in cyberspace who provide a comprehensive faxing service. I pay my provider up front and can do a broadcast message to as many fax numbers as I please by clicking one button … Send! When the broadcast has finished I receive an email message telling me how many were successful and unsuccessful and the cost for the transmissions. It beats hell out of doing it manually. The last
transmission I sent involved 58 destinations that cost me $10.44 AU or $0.18 per A4 page. Of the 58 sent, all arrived.

Here’s how I run my campaigns.

First I decide on a strategy eg, the first part of my current strategy targets real estate agents across the Australian continent to whom I’m selling a marketing package. I look up real estate firms using the Google search engine and almost without exception, each agency is listed with phone and fax numbers. I use a great little program called Web Data Extractor to extract the fax numbers from each of the addresses. It takes a couple of minutes to collect them and save them in a data file. When I import the data file into the list management section of my fax service provider, I’m ready to broadcast.

Automatically extracting fax numbers in Australia, unlike extracting URLs is not illegal.

After the broadcast, sales and queries flow in up to a week or so later. So far, sales have far exceeded the expense for faxing and I’ve just completed faxing to real estate agencies in one Australian State. There are still thousands more to go in the remaining five States and two Territories.

My sales message consists of a standard A4 page that I created and saved as an Adobe PDF file.

It is worth noting that many target markets do not have their fax numbers displayed on the Internet. This being the case, do a little research as you design your strategy to determine whether getting fax numbers will be problematical. If so, find another target market. Once you’ve found one with fax numbers, the rest is fairly easy, provided your products or services fit their range of needs.

Another benefit I receive from the fax provider I use is a free fax number whereby people can fax me and the fax arrives as an email. This suits me perfectly as I only print those faxes for which I need a hardcopy. The rest I file in a relevant folder on my hard drive.

You should now be thinking about some opportunities to use broadcast faxing in your business. If you’re in doubt, spend a few bucks to give faxing a test run. If it works as well for you as it does me, I’m sure you’ll take to it like a duck to
water.

Here’s to many successful fax campaigns.

* - You need to check out the spam laws in your own country before embarking on a fax advertising campaign

Published June 2005. Copyright Robin Henry 2005.

Robin Henry is an educator, human resources specialist and Internet marketer whose firm, Desert Wave Enterprises, helps individuals and businesses improve their performance by using smart processes, smart technology and personal development. He has a number of tertiary qualifications including a Master of Education degree majoring in education technology and online learning. He lives at Alice Springs In Central Australia. Visit Desert Wave Enterprises

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Are you a business owner representing a product or service? What’s your point of differentiation? What separates you from your competitors? Is it quality? Is it the price? Is it the packaging? Is it placement or promotion? The bottom line is are you selling? If not, why not? The answer may lie in advertising.

They say nothing happens unless you advertise. No advertising = no sales. But many business people are leery of paid advertising because it just doesn’t seem to return the investment. There are many reasons for thisthrowing out spotty advertisements, whether online or offline doesn’t work well most often and who can afford to advertise en masse regularly? People are desensitized by hyper advertising on TV, radio, Internet, junk mail, magazines, etc. People are getting smarter and tuning advertising outpeople are getting tired of the Wall Street advertising mentality that has spurred so many books and college courses. As a result, big business advertising focuses on higher and higher volumes of repetitive mass advertising to beat their message into the fewer and fewer minds still receptive to this kind of junk noise. Don’t believe me? How do you REALLY feel about advertising you see or hear? Are you sick of it? So are 300 million other people. But what are the alternatives for communicating your offer?

Advertisers are very creative little sneaks who try all kinds of angles to fool you into not realizing you are being advertised atthey cloak advertisements into “infomercials” and now they cloak infomercials into looking like some PBS interview. Buzz words like “info-ads” which are designed to highlight the problems you didn’t know you had (like Ezine articles) and set forth-easy solutions to complicated problems if you only “buy now”. And you can read article after article, book after book and the bottom line remains the samethe only people making money advertising are the ones selling advertising.

And do you realize the product or service you offer really doesn’t matter when you advertise? You can take all products and services in the world and put them into two big piles: The GOOD products and the BAD products. Keep in mind that a good marketing team can sell bad products but a bad marketing team cannot sell good products. And what is the definition of a “bad product” anyway? The definition for a bad product is when people send it back because it sucks and they want their money back. If your product sells and you don’t get a return or a compliant then, for all practical purposes you have a good product. Why isn’t it selling then?

People have a tendency to blame the product if the advertising doesn’t sell it. But if you have a good product and run an ad and nothing happens how can you blame the product? The product is inert. It’s just sitting there waiting to be sold. It’s not the product fault. It’s the ADS fault. So you can simplify your life by eliminating the “product problem” mentality and wrap your mind around the fact you have an advertising problem instead. Which takes us back to the beginning of this article.

Point of differentiationwhat’s the point of differentiation of a paper clip? Keep in mind that paperclips are a competitive billion-dollar industry.

Okay, here’s the bottom line to this articleif you are not having any luck advertising your product online and can’t afford mass advertising then a really SIMPLE solution is to use Off-line classified ads in newspapers. These ads are cheap ranging from $10.00 to $50.00 depending on the location of the newspaper and readerships/subscriptions. But there is no better place to spend advertising dollars if you are on a small budget. You are going to make mistakes when you advertise as you hone up your headline and hook to get people to take action and you can do very specific tests in various markets to gauge classified advertising response. Do you have a website? Take a cue from Travelocity.com, PriceLine.com and other big players on the Internetthey all advertise conventionallyon TV! Why? Internet advertising sucks. We have a business kit called “Advertising Works” which is a very carefully constructed manual on writing effective classified ads to drive people to your website. It shows you how to write ads but more importantly it shows the entire U.S. market and how classifieds can be used to drive the market to your website cheaply by reducing the amount of type in the classified advertisement so they only cost a few dollars. For example a classified ad could read as follows: ADVERTISING WORKS! www.smart67.com and that’s it! CHEAP AD! No phone, no hype, just a headline and a website address. The goal is to test headlines. Test, test, test! Check it out

Copyright © 2006
James W. Hart, IV
All Rights reserved

SBS is an online information resource for people. Our focus is real estate and business and we have a number of important books, kits and Ebooks including free downloads and high quality link categories to help you get information fast. SBS has an aggressive link exchange program for anyone with a websitevisit us now by clicking this link http://www.smart67.com.

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“Sales All Day”I wish I hear you yellone sale would be great!

“Under The Radar Advertising Strategy”…sounds like something out of a Star Trek Movie!

You see in the world of advertising as quick as you can say “Beam me up Scottie”; new tools are constantly being created in order to differentiate one company from another. These innovations try to as much as possible, maximize resources, minimize costs, and optimize the results of any advertising campaign.

So much money goes into the brainstorming for these new and innovative tools you could travel around the world on the lunch meeting costs alone. If you’ve worked in the corporate world you know exactly what I mean and if you haven’t count yourself very lucky indeed. Businesses could save themselves a small fortune on advertising campaigns if it looked at previously employed advertising strategies and modifying them to suit their needs.

Some of the most widely used advertising strategies and marketing strategies in existence are multi-level marketing, audio visual advertising, catalogue advertising, telephone advertising, and even person-to-person distribution of marketing tools. One, however, stands out in terms of potential and even capacity to translate advertising strategies with tangible sales.

This my friend is what is known as advertorials. Seemingly a new linguistic concoction, advertorials were in fact first conceived in the early 1960s as a combination of the words, advertising and editorials. This more than sufficiently describes the purpose of an advertorial.

An advertorial is basically an advertising strategy designed to resemble an objective editorial. This would lend the degree of objective credibility to you the advertiser, as well as make the advertising pitch most believable even to the most skeptical of consumers.

How will this necessarily build sales profits?

Advertorials are usually written as special promotional features with a form similar to that of a press release than an editorial. What is most beneficial in comparison to other editorials is the fact that the advertiser has control of the content that will appear on the advertorial.

First, these advertorials are written at times within already well-established columns or sections of a newspaper. These sections, with the following that they already have, assure the readability of the advertorials. Placed in sections where people are predisposed to reading articles close to the form of advertorials, the strength of the promotional approach of the article will not necessarily offend or ostracize any of the readers.
Read that again”placed in sections where people are predisposed to reading articles close to the form of advertorials”this is the Under The Radar effective a work!

Moreover, advertorials afford the option of discussing the strongest characteristics of the product and service, and at the same time printing the various locations and contact details of the company or establishments offering the product or service. This means that the moment a consumer finds his or herself convinced of the merits of the product or service, no extraneous effort on their part is necessary in order to find where to get access to it. They can also incorporate another profit pulling advertising strategy by having various testimonies from some previous impressed purchases of your product ore service.

More importantly, advertorials come with the persuasive strength of an editorial, with a simulation of authority and expertise produced in the article. Consumers may be likely to trust the content of the advertorial with this sort of approach and semblance of authority and expertise than an individualized pitch derived from the company purse. Objective and informative information packaged as truth can very well fuel the entire company’s sales!

Another way by which advertorials can help assure business sales is the fact that its content may be screened and approved by the company. While it is not likely that an advertorial will discuss the weaknesses of the product or service, this level of control is still necessary especially when hoping to avoid any sort of dangerous slant or suggestive statement that would imply a weakness or flaw. Moreover, control over the content of the article can assure that the advertorial will be in-line with any and all marketing and advertising strategies that the company is currently employing. This can both strengthen and supplement the collective campaign and create a consistent message that can stick to the consciousness of the consumer.

At the end of the day, these various features of the advertorial help provide the level of recall that will translate to sales if used correctly. Moreover, its very form can best maximize person-to-person referrals, especially when one reader or consumer finds his or herself quoting and referring to the advertorial as a particular objectively written piece. While it may be unpopular with many companies, the potential of the advertorial is very much viable and tangible for today’s companies. It may very well be that innovative new idea that is needed to boost your profits.

Scott Wilson is the author of “How to Create Money Sucking Ads That Work on Autopilot While You Go Fishing” a free 12 page report available for a limited time at http://www.smarterbusinessleads.com

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