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[S1126]Success Stories Small Business

by Brian May, Bri

Advertising and marketing for a small business takes effort and a plan to be successful. Many small business owners become discouraged too quickly because they do not receive the windfall of customers that they expected after they ran their initial advertising campaigns. You must keep at it. Advertising is a art that takes constant monitoring and refinement and a long term plan that will lead to your success. The main reason you want to spend the time to develop a plan is that it significantly reduces costs. Running ads inconsistently and not in line with your plan is expensive because you can not get good long term rates from publications and you will not reach your customers as well as you would if they consistently seee your message. Here are three things that small business owners can do in to increase their chance of success in their advertising campaign.

1. Be Committed To Your Long Term Plan - This strategies assumes you have a long term plan. If you do not, then you need one, fast. Just like planning to open your business needed a business plan, your advertising needs a plan. This helps you to meet deadlines for publications and lay out different messages that you want to to get in front of your customers at different parts of the year. You should at a minimum have a six month advertising plan, but really it should be a year. This will help to establish longer term contracts with advertisers which helps to bring the price down of each advertisement.

2. Add Shock Value - As a small business you are competing with major corporations for your customers. You have to be different. Speak to what your customer needs and how you can provide, but you have to make a scene. Just being average and boring when competing with small and large businesses will be very frustrating as you will not get the returns from your advertising that you expect. By being different you have a great opportunity to acquire those customers who usually would not have paid you much attention. If you think of many of the people who have been really successful at building the brand of their business, you will see that most of them were able to create a small hysteria about their product and service that set them apart from others in their market. This does not mean do something that is demeaning or causes you to compromise your morals and ethical beliefs. Just out of the box thinking that triggers a response from your customers.

3. Take Advantage Of Free Services - The most common free service that small businesses fail to take advantage of is press releases. If you have a new product or service or just an interesting tidbit about your industry that you think your customers should know about, write a press release. A quick Google search will give you dozens of free press release services. You can also send them to your local papers individually. There is no guarantee that they will be printed, but if they do, this is a lot of free advertising that only cost you a little bit of your time. Something to consider: How long will it take you to write a 250-300 word article about your business? Not long I bet. This should done right away.

One of the exercises that I have many clients do is list out all the successes they've had in life. I ask them to start with early childhood and list everything they can remember being successful at. One of my clients recently gave the assignment to his girlfriend. She asked me afterwards what the point was. She hadn't found it very useful.

What I told her is that that I've found that this exercise serves two important services. First, it's a self esteem booster. Most people don't realize how many successes they've had in their lives until they write them down. Some express surprise and sometimes some modesty when sharing their successes. I'd recommend this exercise just for this boost alone, but the second reason for doing this is even more valuable. Success leaves clues behind.

When I ask a client to list their successes, it's usually because they are stuck in some area of their business. They've tried several strategies to get unstuck and nothing has worked. When we take some of their major successes and analyze them, we find patterns. I ask them how they accomplished major tasks. What methodology did they use?

What we typically find is that they have a natural success style. For some people this is setting a goal and creating a detailed plan to meet that goal. For others it's just jumping in and doing whatever it takes to make it work. Others might just go with the flow and do what appears easy or exciting. One client set a small goal and met it. Then he set higher and higher goals meeting each one before he moved on to the next. It ended with four consecutive world championships.

So if you are finding yourself stuck in trying to accomplish a task in your business, stop right now and list out your successes. Start from being born'it?s not easy to get out and start breathing. Move through your entire life and write down every success you can remember. You might have things like starring in a school play, completing a century on your bicycle, getting an A in a difficult subject. Make sure you cover graduations, college degrees, advanced trainings. Don't limit it to just work related or school related successes. Make sure you include the things you most enjoyed succeeding at.

Once you have the list, go through and pick two or three major ones and analyze them. What did you do to succeed? How did you feel? Were you afraid beforehand? If you were, how did you cope with or minimize the fear? Did you do a lot of planning? Did you jump right in? Were you alone or did you have help? Find the reasons you succeeded.

Now look for a pattern. I did this recently because I was really struggling to get my business going strongly. The exercise revealed that many of my successes came when I had a structured environment with a lot of creative activities. I realized that I needed more structure in my business. I had plenty of creative time. So I found a friend that I can do weekly check-ins with that holds me accountable for my actions. Each week I share with him my goals or homework for the next week. Then when we meet I share how well I met the goal. This is making a huge difference in the success of my business. Try mapping your past successes and watch as it makes a huge difference in your current success.

Article Source : How To Make Money Advertising

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Both Brian May & Michael Clark 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.

Brian May has sinced written about articles on various topics from Dental Practice, Computers and The Internet and Marketing. This article was written by Brian May of Small Business Local. Small Business Local focuses on and. Brian May's top article generates over 9900 views. to your Favourites.

Michael Clark has sinced written about articles on various topics from Small Business, The Internet and Cosmetic Surgery. Business expert Michael Clark has been helping businesses including Fortune 500 companies such as IBM and Cellular One succeed for over 20 years. Michael is an authority on getting business owners out of overwhem and getting the most out of their business. Michael Clark's top article generates over 246000 views. to your Favourites.