Everyone spends money, even in a Recession. The difference is that they are more selective about what they spend their money on. And they are also looking for ways to stretch their budgets, so looking for good deals.

One of the basics in marketing is to measure your Return on Investment. The goal of course is to get the maximum return on every marketing dollar you invest. And a known fact that you might not be aware of, is that it’s cheaper to market to your existing customers than it is to acquire new customers.

So now that you’re armed with that fact, how do you use it to your advantage? Develop a marketing campaign to any current customers that haven’t been into your office or received services for awhile.

If you have your customers listed in a spreadsheet, this will be a piece of cake. If not, take the time now and get your customers’ names, snail mail addresses, phone numbers, and email addresses into a spreadsheet. Then you’ll be able to market to them later.

Assuming you have your customer database, review it for any customers that might be deceased, moved out of the area, or those “difficult” ones that you don’t necessarily want to encourage to return. Remove those names or move them into a different spreadsheet.

Then design a simple coupon that offers your past customers a discounted price on a basic service to entice them to call for an appointment. Put a time limit on it to create some urgency. And then mail this coupon to every customer in your database.

If your database is very large (I have a client with 3000 names in her database from 20 years of practice), then spread out your mailing over several months by sending out 250 coupons per month. This will spread your mailing costs out so you don’t have a huge up-front cost before you’ve generated any incremental revenue.

From my experience, you will get a 10-20% response rate on this type of campaign. The reason is because these people have done business with you in the past so they know and trust you… and because you’re offering them a discount! Who doesn’t like a bargain?

So that’s it! An easy marketing campaign to get you started generating more revenue now, even in a recession.

Contact me to get started on your postcard campaign today.

Technorati Tags: customer retention, customers, marketing campaign, postcard campaign, recession, return on investment, revenue, small business

This list works for most businesses even though my focus and passion as a business marketing consultant are small business marketing services for professionals such as chiropractors, massage therapists, dentists, optometrists, salon owners, etc.

1. Market to your list of current customers by sending them some sort of discount coupon to encourage them to come in for another visit. Don’t have a list? Get started now!
2. Create a Google Local listing for your business (Google Places). This is also free and is becoming more important as Google shifts focus to local results. You need to be keyword-optimized and have reviews from clients for this to be successful. But this is a powerful technique, so don’t skip it.
3. Create a Facebook fan page for your business. This is free… so definitely start your online presence here if you don’t have a website. Over 250 million users go onto Facebook each day… can you afford to miss out on that traffic?  By the way, this is different from your personal profile.
4. Create a website for your business. Already have a website? Be sure it’s keyword-optimized for the words customers are typing into Google to search for service providers (this is probably not your business name).
5. Make sure your website is mobile-friendly. More users are searching online using smart phones than computers nowadays so make this process easy for your potential clients.
6. Create discount coupons and post them on your Google Places page, Facebook page, and website… this gives current clients a reason to keep coming back to your online sites.
7. Ask all your customers to write reviews for your services and post them online at places like Yelp and InsiderPages. Google scrapes these sites and includes them in your Local listing page.
8. Write articles about topics of interest to your customers and post them on your website or blog. These should educate, inform, and entertain your audience not sell.
9. Create a video showing your customers how to do something and put it on YouTube.
10. Subscribe to RSS feeds using Google Reader so you know whenever someone publishes anything about you or your business.

Most of these techniques are pretty simple to implement if you have the right tools. The goal of all this is to increase the number of times you come into contact with your audience of potential customers. The more contacts you have with your audience, the more you will sell.

There are additional tools you can use to communicate with your marketplace such as Twitter and LinkedIn. Implement this Top 10 before you spend time on other social media tools such as these.

Which of these techniques have you tried for your business? I’d love to hear your results!

If you don’t have the time and energy to implement these techniques, contact me and I’ll be happy to help you.

Technorati Tags: blog, business marketing consultant, facebook page, google places, insiderpages, internet marketing, linkedin, mobile friendly website, small business marketing services, twitter, yelp, youtube

Article Marketing started off as something that you had to do manually to the top article directories….

Then came semi-automated software, to make it easier to do what you used to do manually.

After this it was article submission services that submit to these article directories for you. You will know these services well and may have even used them before.

What you may not know is that many of these submissions actually fail…

Even the automated systems.

What I am about to reveal to you now is “Next Generation” article marketing.

Real websites that will accept your articles in a completely automated manner so that all you need to do is write great quality content.

Did I mention that each website will also get a unique version of the article you write if you follow the system?

What about the fact that there are thousands of sites in the system that you could instantly have your articles published on?

As if that were not enough, what if I also told you that a select group of beta testers have been using this very same system to dominate front page google results for keywords in their Niche and that you can have access to the very same system….

At a crazy low price!

This “Next Generation” marketing service is called Article Marketing Automation.

I am not sure how long they will keep the service at such a low price for…

Or how long they will keep an Article Marketing system like this open for.

All I know is that I have my membership secured and that you can guarantee that very soon they will have 1000′s of people trying to get access to this same system.

If you want to take advantage of being one of the first users in the system & start distributing your articles in a way that gives you up to 10x the results, then you should join today before they change their price or close the doors.

The next generation in Article Marketing Automation.

Technorati Tags: article directories, article marketing, article marketing automation, article submission services

Weʼre internet marketers and we want as many spots on the first page of Google as possible. There is still one way we can grab some extra Google love and it all comes down to RSS.

In the Thirty Day Challenge we tell you to submit your RSS feed to certain ping sites, RSS directories and RSS aggregators. The issue is that once youʼve submitted your siteʼs RSS feed then youʼve used up your chance. If you try to resubmit the same RSS feed again then you normally get a message from the RSS directory / aggregator which says something like “this feed already exists in our database”.

The other problem is that on a WordPress blog you only get one RSS feed for your site, and if you try to grab the RSS feed for your individual blog posts, then you only get the comments feed, which isnʼt good because it isnʼt your keyword optimized blog post (and normally the only links which are in there are links back to the peopleʼs sites who make the comment).

So what we need to do is get multiple RSS feeds for your site and then submit them to the RSS directories and aggregators, and this will result in multiple backlinks and more importantly multiple listings in the search results.

So, how do we get individual feeds for each of our blog posts? Using Dan Raine’s RSS Bomber.

Technorati Tags: backlinks, dan raine, google, internet marketing, rss bomber, RSS feed, SERP

Technorati Tags: directory submissions, rss directory, search engine submissions, seo software, social bookmarking, traffic bug

These Google results are awesome and repeatable… anyone can do it!

If you’ve already seen the ‘Grass Skirt Interview’ video of internet marketing guru Frank Kern with WordPressDirect creator Marty Rozmanith, you already know how cool this tool is. If you haven’t seen the video, click here to watch it.

Marty made another video to reveal the results in more depth. Check out that video here:

To get your free WordPressDirect account, click here.

Technorati Tags: frank kern, google, search-optimized blog publishing, thirty day challenge, wordpressdirect

The key to getting lots of traffic is ranking on the first page of Google for your chosen keywords.

If you want to be able to…

* Effectively analyze your SEO competition instead of fighting and losing costly and time-consuming battles against almost unbeatable competitors.

* Find relevant web content that fits your chosen keywords instead of being forced to research and write content the old way – from start-to-finish by yourself, or paying for outsourcing.

* Find opportunities to build high-value backlinks to your content from relevant sites, practically on autopilot – including valuable blog pingback links.

… then make sure you go here now before it’s too late.

And more important than anything, Market Samurai enables you to follow the 3 Golden Rules of SEO:

* SEO Golden Rule #1 – Pick keywords that ATTRACT TRAFFIC, and avoid 90% of all keywords that will NOT attract traffic.

* SEO Golden Rule #2 – Pick keywords that have COMMERCIAL VALUE, and avoid all of the unprofitable, useless-traffic keywords.

* SEO Golden Rule #3 – Pick keywords with LOW LEVELS OF COMPETITION – and avoid keywords that have no chance to get front-page Google rankings.

Only around 1% of all keywords fit within these 3 Golden Rules.

If you EVER want to drive free search engine traffic to your website, then without Market Samurai you’re playing “SEO Roulette” with the odds stacked against you at 100 to 1, trying to “GUESS” the right keywords to target!

If you don’t own Market Samurai yet, you need to get it now. This is one tool that you’ll use practically daily; it has more advanced features than any other piece of internet marketing software available today, and at $127 (with no hidden subscription fees), it’s a no-brainer.

Especially when you consider that this product should be selling for AT LEAST $500+ or more based on what it can do for your business!

If you want TOP RANKINGS in Search Engines;
If you want to find PROFITABLE KEYWORDS;
If you want to know what it will take to DOMINATE YOUR COMPETITORS…

…You need to get on board, and get this software.

If you’re an SEO newbie, don’t worry.  Market Samurai offers hours of free video training to show you exactly how to use the software to get the best results.

If you’re already using Market Samurai (like I am), you’ll already know it’s one of the few must-have pieces of software in your internet marketing toolkit.

To Your $uccess,

Kathy Hargis

Technorati Tags: backlinks, google rankings, internet marketing software, keywords, Market Samurai, pingback links, seo competition