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Few giveaway type items are more useful than lanyards. Offering a great way to hang on to an identification card or even a house key, lanyards can be smart and even a tad stylish. Plus, for the company giving them away, buying lanyards can be a real boon in free advertising if the right purchases are made.

If you're buying lanyards, you'll need to know a few things first to decide what kinds to get. The prices you'll encounter when buying lanyards will vary from style to style and will also vary depending on the features you want. In addition, you'll find there are multiple options for materials, from cotton and cord to nylon and beyond. Nylon tends to be the product of choice, however, because it's easy to wipe clean and it's fairly strong, too.

Let's take a look at some of the features you might encounter when buying lanyards:

* Retractable lanyards. These allow users to pull the lanyard ends down without having to remove them. When buying lanyards, these are ideal for companies that use security card swipe systems for entry to certain areas or even for giveaway lanyard key chains. This feature might cost you a little more over a regular hanging lanyard when you're buying lanyards, but it's well worth it.

* Breakaway lanyards. When buying lanyards you'll find the only real downfall to these devices is the fact they can present choke hazards under the right circumstances. When breakaway features are included, this risk is minimized. Since the lanyard will come apart if it's tugged on too hard, a breakaway feature is smart to consider when buying lanyards.

* Attachment holders. Since lanyards can be used for everything from holding identification cards to holding pens, the attachment holder needs to be considered. You'll want to decide what you'd like the users to use their lanyards for before making this decision. Absolutely make this decision before trying to buy lanyards as it will impact the quotes you receive.

When buying lanyards, the features are important, but so too might be any imprinting you'd like done. One of the biggest reasons to buy lanyards beyond helping employees keep track of their ID cards is the advertisement possibility they present. What you can do with your lanyards will depend a whole lot on how wide they are, but in general when buying lanyards you can have small logos and words imprinted on them. This means everyone who wears the lanyards you've bought will be a walking ad for your company or product.

Buying lanyards for employees or even for tradeshow giveaways can be a very practical decision. These relatively cheap devices are very useful and are generally appreciated by those who have to carry ID cards, extra keys and even by those who have trouble of keeping track of their pens. Before jumping in and ordering lanyards, take the time to research the options and buy the best for your money.

Getting bargains when buying lanyards is more than possible, too. Just shop around and consider buying lanyards in bulk to really enjoy a cost savings.

Business Money Market Rate

Look like a Fortune 500 Company for Less Than $200 –

Twelve Tips for Saving Your Business Money

By Bronson Tang

Let's face it starting a business is risky. According to Paul E. Adams author of Fail-Proof Your Business, “US statistics indicate that 80% of businesses will fail, while only 2% of businesses will ever become successful enough to earn real money.”

Businesses from the corner deli sandwich shop to the large publicly traded corporation are always looking for innovative and creative ways to reduce their costs. In other words if you have a business or happen to work for one, and your company is spending more money than it is generating you may become one of the casualties that we have become all too familiar with.

According to Tim Cohn of Advanced Marketing Consultants, “For every small business success story there are nine failures. At least that is what the statistics tell us. After ten years, only one out of every ten small businesses started is still operating. What causes small businesses to fail? Conventional wisdom says there are many factors that contribute to business failure, yet in reality there is only one reason: Mismanagement.”

Mismanagement can come in many forms: mismanagement of sales and marketing, mismanagement of operations, mismanagement of research and development and/or mismanagement of accounting and finances. While it is true that many businesses may take the initiative of reducing costs as a primary goal; many of these businesses can further reduce their costs of doing business and save even more if they were only aware of their choices.

The intent of this article is not to provide business acumen on running a company. There are tons of great books on this subject. The purpose of this article is to provide some useful cost saving business ideas that I personally use on a daily basis.

The following are twelve tips for dramatically saving your company money:

1.       Laptop Insurance. ($30) If you run a business then you are probably all too familiar with the term “road warrior.” For those of you unfamiliar with this term, “road warrior” refers to someone who travels extensively for their business. They are on the road traveling generally 4 to 5 days out of the week. For all of you “road warriors” have I got the tip for you and for those of you who may not travel as often as our friendly “road warriors”, if you have a mobile phone and use a laptop this tip will also be of use. Insurance companies now offer what they call “laptop insurance.” For as little as $30 per year with no deductible you can get both your laptop and your mobile phone covered on the same policy. The policy covers you against theft, damage, loss or simply if you mistakenly spill water on your keyboard and your laptop no longer works. Before I got this policy I was paying $4.95 per month to my mobile phone provider for insurance and this only covered my cell phone. In other words I was paying close to $60 a year for just cell phone insurance. To the best of my knowledge you do not need to have an existing policy in order to qualify. It has been my experience though that many insurance agents would like the opportunity to provide you with additional quotes on other insurance such as auto or home before signing you up with laptop insurance. Hopefully you don't mind getting some additional insurance quotes in order to take advantage of this great opportunity. You probably can contact your existing insurance agent and ask him or her if they have laptop insurance. I personally use State Farm. One final thing to consider is that laptop insurance is not intended to give you carte blanche to go out and trash your laptop and/or mobile phone. I tell you this for selfish reasons because I don’t want to see my insurance premiums go up or worse have this coverage or type of insurance no longer be offered. So please don't redefine the term “road warrior.”

2.       Managing Your Contacts. ($20) Managing contacts with your customers, vendors, partners and employees couldn’t be easier and less affordable. Yes I realize that there are a ton of contact/customer relationship management (CRM) tools out on the market. Trust me I have tried my fair share. What I love most about the hosted CRM solutions is that they give you all the functionality, flexibility and scalability that most large corporations have with their expensive and labor intensive in-house solution without the expensive and labor intensive cost. In addition you can access your contacts from anywhere in the world as long as you have a connection to the Internet. I personally use Sales Force Automation, a product from E Business Suite () to manage all our contacts. The interface is completely customizable. As you can probably see I am a huge fan of hosted services because you can allow the employees of your business to work remotely. E Business Suite handles all the backing up, training, maintenance, support and storage of the CRM. It’s like getting an extra employee for only $20 per month. What more could you ask for?

3.       Hit counters and traffic analysis. (FREE) Marketing Guru Jay Abraham in his article, Jay Abraham 101, discusses maximizing what you’re already doing, examine and evaluate. According to Abraham,” You have all these activities going on. You have sales people. You have ads running. You have people calling. You have word of mouth, phone calls, customer service. You have all these contact and impact points. And you must, first of all, maximize what you’re currently doing before you can go out and rebuild your organization. Because only when you do that can you measure, can you quantify, can you improve.” When I first read this statement it was a bit of a challenge for me because at the time I had no idea what was going on with all my marketing efforts. When we first started our company I was just working every angle possible. I clearly had no idea what advertising was pulling and what advertising was failing miserably. Hit counters and traffic analysis is a fantastic way to measure performance. Many Internet Service Providers (ISP) already provide this service with their hosting plans. However if you are with an ISP that does not offer this service or the service is at best mediocre than I would suggest Site Meter Basic ( ). There is nothing that you have to install on your home page.

4.       Promoting your web site. (FREE) When you think of traffic, you might envision smog-filled, congested highways with frustrated commuters battling to get to the office. But when it comes to promoting your Web site, traffic is a good thing.

So how do you increase traffic to your Web site? This is accomplished through Web site promotion, also known as Web marketing or search engine optimization (SEO). Search engines rank Web sites based on content, therefore, SEO can help your Web site rank higher on main search engines such as , , , or .

Check out these great websites. They are extremely helpful and best of all they are FREE:

·         -- This is a useful site and it's free, although the owner of the site has suggested donations, which are given to the Salvation Army.

·         Open Directory Project or ODP () -- hosted and administered by Netscape Communication Corporation. It provides core directory services for some of the most popular portals and search engines on the Web, including , , , , and .

·         -- Useful site for answering frequently asked questions.

·         -- Excellent site for those interested in keeping on top of trends, as well as tips, helpful tools, etc. regarding SEO.

5.       Virtual office. ($34) This is a great service that provides all the features of a virtual receptionist, which includes faxing, dial by extension, voicemail, conference calling and call forwarding. It is essentially a virtual office without the “brick and mortar” costs that are often times associated with having a comparable service. There is a one time $65 set up fee. The $34.95 applies if you have a Costco membership. If you don’t I would highly recommend getting one. And for those of you who are Costco Executive Members the service is $29.95 per month. For more information:

6.       Freeconference.com (FREE) This is one of my favorite all time services. For all of you that hold conference calls with prospects, customers, vendors or employees this service is ideal. The service is absolutely free and can conference up to 100 people. In order to take advantage of the free service the maximum duration of a call is three hours and quite frankly if you are having meetings longer than three hours there may be other more pressing issues that we may have to talk about, like possibly . You can also record the calls for FREE to an MP3 file format.

7.       Telephone services ($39) With the emergence of Voice Over the Internet Protocol (VoIP) small businesses can now take advantage of unlimited local and long distance calls to Canada and the United States. These fantastic services offer businesses all the same PBX/Centrex features without the huge up front capital costs. VoIP is quickly becoming an easy way for businesses to reduce the cost of their monthly phone bill. With VoIP you can be up and running in a matter of minutes. The services provide the flexibility to centralize all your calls through one phone number. The services offered are extremely feature-rich with music on hold, dial by extension, caller id, bridge conferencing and an auto attendant. For more information:

8.       Financial & Accounting ($25) Finance & Accounting is an interesting part of the business, you either enjoy it or you don’t. If you don’t enjoy it, then you pay some one else to do it for you. The challenge with paying someone else to do your accounts payable and receivable is that you may not have any money in the first place to pay someone. It’s a sort of crazy vicious circle. Well I have a suggestion that will help. Intuit, the company that creates the popular accounting software QuickBooks, has an online version of their accounting software for a low monthly subscription. For only $25 you get three licenses plus an additional fourth license for your accountant. That's a total of four licenses for only $25. (If I sound like an info-mercial that’s because I really love this service.) You can have four concurrent users logging into the application and working simultaneously on the system without any conflict. Because it is a hosted application you can have your accounts payable person work remotely (That is of course, if you can afford one.), there’s no need for importing or exporting files. The online version has many of the same features as the professional version. The allows me to view my accounting records anywhere in the world. Moreover because the application is hosted and I no longer have to be concerned with backing up my accounting software files because the staff at QuickBooks takes care of all that. For more information:

9.      Connecting to the Internet (FREE) For nearly a decade I've heard the term information superhighway used as a metaphor to describe the Internet. It's true the Internet provides a vast amount of information easily accessible as long as you have an Internet connection. The challenge for some is the hefty implicit “toll charge” required to first begin your journey of discovery. Yes it's true all paths may eventually lead to the same destination, the question you may want to ask yourself is how much are you willing to pay? If you're interested in unlimited dial-up Internet access and you cannot afford the high cost of high-speed broadband Internet access than I have a solution for you.

All Free ISP is the fastest way to find a cheap or free internet access service provider in your local area. With this comprehensive database of free isp local dialup access numbers, you can quickly find all free internet service providers in your local calling area throughout the USA and Canada. We also provide detailed information and ratings for each free isp to help you compare the free ISPs and select your new free internet access provider. Plus, All Free ISP now includes a selection of full-service, discount ISPs. For more information:

10.   Backing up your valuable information (FREE) It’s important to have the documents, legal contracts and agreements properly stored and filed away. Many of us know what to do we simply don’t do what we know. It’s vitally important to work “on” the business and not “in” the business. I heard a great acronym for the word system: Save Your Self Time Energy & Money. A well-crafted System creates the necessary signposts to help you navigate smoothly and travel leisurely at your own pace. A reliable and cost effective back up solution for your electronic files is a necessary piece toward establishing a S.Y.S.T.E.M. It’s important to have a solid and reliable back up service in place. There are many fantastic online back up services available, I recommend A Drive. This is a great company that has an affordable and highly reliable service. One of the things that I like most is the software client called the “Adrive Desktop”. The “Adrive Desktop” allows you to instantly download files and it integrates seamlessly with your computer just like an external hard drive. You can drag and drop files and entire folders directly into your account. You can schedule multiple automated backups of your PC to your Adrive; manage and share files on Xdrive directly from your desktop; "Save to" and open files directly from your computer applications; and drag and drop entire folders from your computer to your Adrive. They offer 50 gigabytes of FREE storage. For more information:

11. Press release distribution (FREE) How many of you are familiar with the television show “The Price is Right”? If you want to talk about great sales and marketing, this definitely is in a class all it’s own. Its one of the longest running and most faithfully watched shows in television history, next to soap operas and that captivating and provocative talk show host in Chicago, Oprah Winfrey. Unfortunately many of us do not have the unlimited financial capital or resources that the big television studios have. As a small business owner many of us are left to market our companies by “boot strapping” our finances. There is however an alternative that is both cost effective and that provides the greatest bang for your buck. Online press release distribution. Distributing a press release online is phenomenal way to leverage the media in helping you to promote your product. PRLog is a free online press release service. You can submit your press releases at no charge. All of the services are free. Each month, more than 27 million people in the U.S. use Google News and Yahoo News to find the latest information about a wide range of topics that interest them. When they conduct a news search, they often find relevant press releases along with articles from thousands of news sources. PRLog gets you submitted to Yahoo News, MSN and Google. For more information:

12. Newsletter distributions (FREE) One of the single most important tools for helping to successfully stay in front of prospects, customers and vendors has got be an email newsletter. It is by far the easiest and quickest way to have a positive impact and create instant brand recognition. By providing an ongoing email newsletter you are consistently marketing you and your company. Moreover you are providing valuable information through the content in your newsletter and many of those who receive it may even consider you a” trusted authority” because your words are in print. Every month I send an email newsletter and every month I get instant brand recognition and more importantly I get the opportunity to do what I love to do the most, I get the privilege to positively contribute to those around me and quite possibly help them to grow. A newsletter is an opportunity to educate your prospects, customers, vendors, friends, and family with tips, ideas, and helpful tools. It is a fun and exciting way to make a difference in the lives of those that read it. The service I use to distribute email newsletters is Constant Contact. It’s a great service because they provide templates for your newsletter; you can build and manage your email lists in different groups; and you can easily measure and track your email campaign results as they happen. I especially like the real time reporting feature because I know instantly which emails bounced, which emails were opened, which emails were not delivered, and I can even track where recipients of my newsletter clicked through if I have links in the newsletter. They also provide a feature that allows you to schedule your newsletter months in advance. They offer it FREE to those with less than 200 subscribers. For more information:

Additional services:

While it’s true the following tips, tools and ideas may take you over the prescribed $200 I still feel compelled to mention these services:

·          ($99) – this a terrific product that takes all the work out of setting up, managing, monitoring and paying affiliates. It’s the cheapest around for the money.

·          – this is a favorite destination to find out what’s going on locally and locating deals in your neighborhood.

·          – provides reviews and downloads of software applications.

·          - the name pretty much speaks for itself.

·          – I generally like to visit a few online book dealers to gauge the average market price of a book. Hamiltonbook has a wide variety of out of print books.

·          ($7) – This a reliable and inexpensive hosting plan AND unlimited storage. Great customer service and all the tools you could ever need.

·          - Do you need content for your website or email newsletter? Well look no further. Ideamarketers.com provides a forum for you to share your own articles or feature articles from others as content for your website or email newsletter.

·          – is a fantastic price comparison aggregator.

·          – is a kind of online warehouse with some great deals.

·          ($25) – the same service I use for managing contacts also has a great service that helps you track and service your customers, manage service requests and cases, publish knowledge and solutions.

·          – is an online resource that scours the Internet for the very best deals.

·          - If you need a website and don’t have a lot money to afford a high price web site design studio check out this site.

·          Language translation (FREE) - there are several great websites that can help you to easily translate different languages. Believe it or not has a great language translation tool.

Resources:

Additional resources include:8

·          Page 4, Jay Abraham 101 - A Brief Overview of the Jay Abraham Philosophy and Strategies for Creating Greater Success, Income and Wealth by Jay Abraham.

·          Page 1, Small Business Marketing Strategy by

·          Fail-Proof Your Business by Paul E. Adams

·

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Both Ray La Foy & Bronson Tang are contributors for EditorialToday. The above articles have been edited for relevancy and timeliness. All write-ups, reviews, tips and guides published by EditorialToday.com and its partners or affiliates are for informational purposes only. They should not be used for any legal or any other type of advice. We do not endorse any author, contributor, writer or article posted by our team.

Ray La Foy has sinced written about articles on various topics from Home Improvement, Software and Parenting. More information on lanyards. Ray La Foy's top article generates over 135000 views. to your Favourites.

Bronson Tang has sinced written about articles on various topics from Internet Marketing, Business Marketing and Computers and The Internet. Bronson Tang has consulted and work with companies such as Microsoft, GMAC, Mattel, Countrywide, Sempra Energy, Smith Barney. He has 15 years professional experience with Information Technology and Business Consulting. He has a degree in Economics with a. Bronson Tang's top article generates over 880 views. to your Favourites.

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