Now, more than ever, businesses are feeling the crunch of the times. It was so easy to be overly optimistic in December, when the year was ending. The rationale of many people was that, a new year brings new beginnings. Things can only get better, right?

But did you see Circuit City closing? How about Timberland? Not to mention many other smaller companies closing shop because of financial reasons.

This does not mean, however, that your business has to close as well. In fact, you can even bank on the economic troubles as part of your selling point. Instead of painting the prettiest picture you can come up with, you might want to stick closer to reality and use that picture to convince people to buy. When doing so, however, you should bear some things in mind.

One, do not lay it on too thick. Everyone knows how hard the times are but it does not mean that you should dig too deep to make a connection between “recession” and your business or product. If your business is related to the financial sector, then yes, you cannot avoid talking about the recession but let’s say you sell meat products – you really can’t go around using big words such as financial planning and relate it to what you sell. Don’t force it.

Two, find the right approach. This is to counterbalance the first point. Going back to the example above, the meat products store…instead of throwing around big financial terms, why not stick to something that your customers will understand? Something like value for their money? Make your sales pitch revolve around this idea and cash-strapped people will flock to your store.

Got any other sales/marketing ideas banking on economic woes? Why not share them with us?

Just to recap the tips that I gave in the last post…when choosing Christmas cards to send for your business, remember to bear in mind these three things:

1. Do not be a scrooge.
2. Be careful with your sense of humor.
3. Be sensitive to your customers’ religious beliefs.

Here are some more things you can bear in mind for your business Christmas cards.

Do write a personal note inside the card.
If you decide to get store bought Christmas cards, there will be messages written on the inside already. However, what you want is to make your customers feel your personal touch and that is why you have to add at least a short note of your own. If you have time to write it yourself, that would even be better.

Do use a company stamp.
Remember that one of the reasons that you are sending out Christmas cards is to help promote your business. As such, it would be good to include information about the company in your Christmas cards. To make it look professional, have a company stamp made which contains all the pertinent info – business name, address, contact number, web site, and email. Alternatively, you can print out small labels which contain the same information. Just make sure you use high quality paper and ink when printing out these labels as the last thing that you would want is to make your card look tacky.

I hope that I convinced you to send Christmas cards to your clients with my last post. I really think that it is one way of keeping in touch with them in a genuine manner. Here are some things that I believe you should bear in mind when choosing Christmas cards and sending them out.

Don’t be a scrooge.
There are Christmas cards and there are Christmas cards. What I am saying is that you can probably buy Christmas cards for dirt cheap but the quality might suffer. How would you feel if you received a card that is obviously of poor quality? I need not explain further, do I?

My point is that you should go for the best quality cards you can find. If needed, you can have your own printed out. The impression that this will impart to your clients is worth the extra that you might have to pay.

Be careful with “humorous” Christmas cards.
Between friends, naughty and humorous cards will probably not be a problem. However, if you are sending out cards in the name of your business, I suggest playing it safe. It is not really business-like to be sending out cards with a naked Santa on them, right? Well, unless your business leans towards that nature, that is.

Be sensitive about beliefs.
There are two things that you should be careful with on most occasions – religion and politics. When sending out Christmas cards, do realize that not everyone shares the same beliefs. If you are unsure as to what faith your clients may have, stick with the generic themes – Happy Holidays and the like.

(more in the next post)

When I was a child, one thing that I looked forward to each Christmas was the chance to send out Christmas cards. There was no email back then. We had to go to the bookstore to pick out the cards, write on them, and send them through postal mail. I would almost clap my hands in glee as I picked out special card for each person I wanted to send one too. It was like a ritual for me.

In these days where email and other electronic means of communication are the rave, it is quite rare to see people going gaga over Christmas cards. However, I would like to challenge you to think of ways that sending out Christmas cards would benefit your company. In one way, it could be a marketing technique. Having Christmas cards – “real” ones and not the electronic kind – made and sending them out to your customers is a great way to personalize your business!

If you are thinking about the cost, why don’t you just add it to the total cost of your marketing plan? After all, you are already probably setting aside a certain sum for marketing activities. Just add Christmas cards to that. The time, money, and effort that you spend on Christmas cards will definitely be worth the results. This is especially true if you place high value on building relationships with your clients – which is always advisable. If I were you, I would get those cards printed now and send them out asap.

That does not sound particularly attractive or glamorous, does it? Don’t shut me off though – hear me out and you might think differently of placemats before the end of this post. I actually got the idea for this post from Small Biz Survival – same place where I found the simple article on accounting for small businesses. In his post, the blogger highlighted the idea of perceiving common everyday things in different ways. It’s kind of like the “glass half full or glass half empty” thing.

Anyway, he shared an experience wherein he saw placemats being used for ads:

I’m from a big town. 300,000 people live within 14 miles of me. It’s almost the smallest town I’ve lived in.

When I look at a placemat like this, I think “small town.”

It’s an advertising medium designed for people without access to or budgets for large media. It’s an advertising medium designed for diners and cafes and pizza joints rather than steakhouses and chains. It’s an advertising medium with instant gratification for local businesses. (“Hey, I just saw your name on the placemat.”)

I saw this placemat last week in my big town. It was in a diner, yes. And it got me thinking.

What if you used a placemat to drive traffic to your business’s website?

Indeed, what if you used a placemat to advertise your web site? I think it is brilliant – whoever thought of doing this should be given an award or something. For small businesses operating in a relatively small area, placemat ads would provide wide coverage for a relatively small cost. What do you think?

In the last post, we took a look at the 4 P’s of marketing. In this post, we are going to take a deeper look at the last P – promotion. Actually, I just realized that for some people, marketing is all about the promotion. While this may be true to a certain degree, we cannot overlook the planning that goes before promotion. That was discussed in the previous posts. Now what are some of the strategies that you can employ when it comes to promotion?

There are actually a lot of strategies to choose from. Here are some of the most common ones, which have been tried and tested:

• advertising media
• print media (newspaper, magazine, classified ads, Yellow Pages advertising, brochure)
• radio
• television
• networking
• business cards
• tee shirts, hats, buttons, pens

The question now is which strategies to employ. One thing that I should emphasize from the beginning is that you should not limit yourself to one option. These strategies could actually work together and indeed, the results may be better if they are combined. The idea is to be able to identify clearly which strategies will be able to effectively reach out to your target market. This means that it has to be clear in your mind who your target clientele is. Once you have this down pat, then you can pick out the strategies that will most likely cater to these people. The next step is to focus on these strategies and to develop materials and other necessary resources in order to implement your plan.

Niche blogging is not that much different from blogging about general topics. The basic premise is still the same. The significant difference is that a niche blog is tightly focused on a specific subject.

When it comes to networking, though, a niche blogger still needs to exert some effort. Just because you are focusing on a particular topic or subject does not mean that you will be getting the traffic that you want for that topic. Not everyone knows that your blog exists. More so, not everyone will see your blog as the authority in that field, especially in the beginning.

One important thing for niche blogging is making comments in other blogs in your chosen niche. Just like with “ordinary” blogging, leaving pertinent comments in other people’s blogs is a good way to make your mark in the blogosphere. For niche blogging, though, you have to be very particular about the blogs where you leave your comments.

The most profitable thing for you to do is to comment regularly and actively in niche blogs that are similar to yours. More so, it would be better to choose those niche blogs which have more traffic than yours. Why is this so? One reason is so that you can increase your exposure. The more traffic the niche blog has, the more chances you have of being discovered by other people interested in your topic. This way, you can also gain more traffic. An other reason is that you can build relationships with these “successful” bloggers and that is always a good thing – basically what networking is all about.

What else can you put in your sidebars? Read on to get more ideas.

Archives and categories
Whenever I look around the web and browse blogs, I always appreciate it when I can easily find the content that is relevant to my needs and preferences. The archives section makes it very convenient to browse the contents of a blog with regard to the timeline. Though this is quite useful in many cases, I find that a categories section is even better. This is especially true when you are new to a blog. In this case, the archives might not be of much help. On the other hand, if you can browse through posts based on the topics, then it is much easier to find posts that you want to read. So, make it a point to include these two things in your sidebar.

Ongoing promotions
One of the best things about your business blog is that you can use it to promote new activities, products, and services. You can use your blog to let your customers know what’s new with you. I think that the sidebar should be utilized fully in this sense. You can always publish a post on an ongoing promo but if you place another banner in your sidebar, it would catch people’s attention more. You can even be creative about it and design something that is more than text.

These are only some of the things that you could include in your sidebars. Can you think of other ways?

One of the most time consuming activities that you have to engage in when it comes to business blogging is promoting your business blog. I suppose that it does not really differ much from the more conventional ways of marketing. You have to take certain steps to ensure that people will know that your business exists and you have to exert effort and set aside time for these things. The same goes with blogging.

Creating a blog is easy. Whether you want to use a free blog platform or you want to use your own domain, the idea is the same and the execution very simple. Coming up with content for your blog is relatively easy as well – perhaps writing might prove to be a task for some but it can be handled quickly.

Marketing your business blog, on the other hand, I find to be more tedious. With the millions of blogs on the Internet today, how will other people find yours? More so, how do you get people you are targeting to discover you online? That is where marketing comes in.

One effective way is to submit your blog or web site to search engines. I have been working on a blog of mine in the past month or so and I have only recently been reminded of the importance of submitting to search engines. Before I did this, I barely had traffic to my blog. After spending several days on focusing on blog search engines, I began to see my traffic going up in the next few weeks. It does not happen overnight, mind you, but you do get results.

We’ve come to the end of this series about the Four Ps of Effective Business Blogging, as Tom Pick has explained. To recap the first three, they are Personality, Persistence, and Passion. The last of the bunch is something more measurable and quite practical – Promotion.

With every business venture, promotion is one of the most important activities. To realize how important promotion is, it is necessary to go back to the core goal of the business activity. For blogging, why are you in the blogging business? Or rather, why are you maintaining a blog for your business?

The answer is simple – you want to reach out to the countless people out there who could be potential readers. For business blogs, you want to extend your business’s reach and let the whole world know that you exist and inform them of what you have to offer. The main role of a blog is to achieve this goal and the main way by which you can do this with your business blog is to promote the blog.

There are many ways by which you can promote your blog – SEO practices, making use of social networking sites, exchanging links with other blogs and sites, and so on. All these do not happen by themselves, you need to exert some effort in order to make your blog known to the world.