I had an email today from my friend Rob Warlow, about his marketing tips ebook
"How To Market Your Business For Next To Nothing: 119 Ideas and Tips On How To Market A Small Business On A Small Budget"
First I was reminded what a great title which cuts right to the core of the problem.
Most small businesses are sold advertising and marketing by media salespeople and it doesn't work - or at least not as well as they hoped. So marketing is seen as an expensive but necessary evil.
Second I went to take another look at the free copy of "How To Market Your Business For Next To Nothing" that Rob sent me and I'd forgotten just how good this book is.
It does what it says on the cover.
Some of the tips are free and some of them cost a bit of money to put into action. Yes you can do some good things for free and especially if you use your imagination but money certain helps to win the marketing game.
"How To Market Your Business For Next To Nothing" is a book every start-up business owner should read before they start talking to printers for the business card and stationery, the website designer and certainly before the Yellow Pages and newspaper advertising reps.
Tips Included in How To Market Your Business For Next To Nothing
This 117 page ebook is packed with practical stuff including:
- How to get referrals from your customers for free
- Why marketing yourself is just as important as marketing your business
- How to get the most out of networking
- Why you must keep a profile of all your customers and how to use it to boost your sales
- How to get to the most out of your local newspaper so you can get free publicity worth thousands of pounds
- The secrets of writing adverts that will have people banging on your door!
- How to make cold-calling a little more inviting with a clear step-by-step guide!
The danger with this kind of practical, common-sense marketing book is that you read it and think "I know that" and "I know that as well"...
But if you think that then you will miss the point of the book.
It's not about what you know but about what you do and what you don't do.
You need to stop spending time, energy and money on marketing that doesn't work and start focusing more on low cost, effective techniques for attracting customers.
My advice is to read through the book the first time with a pen and for each of the 117 tips rate yourself on the question "Do you use this technique regularly and effectively?"
Perhaps you use A, B and C or Always, Sometimes, Never.
Then read through the book again and rate the tips on how effective you think they can be in your market and how much you want to do them. For example you may rate "cold calling" as potentially effective but you don't want to do it.
Go back through the book for the third time and look at the items that you are not doing or not doing regularly enough that offer good potential and you want to do.
Those are your priorities so put the in some kind of order and give yourself a goal to start one a week (or even one a day if you need to create customer leads urgently).
If you don't have enough that you want to do, you need to look at the ideas with high potential that you don't want to do. Then try to challenge your underlying beliefs to see why you don't want to do it.
For example on cold calling which many people will rates as a "don't want to do", the underlying beliefs may be:
1 - I don't want the rejection that comes from most people
2 - It gives the impression that I am not busy and that I need the work
That's two good reasons for you not to do cold calling but it is a method that generates many leads for thousands, maybe even millions of businesses each day around the world.
So break the constraint by getting someone else to make the cold calls on your behalf.
To get the best out of "How To Market Your Business For Next To Nothing", you need to move into action.
How To Get Your Copy of "How To Market Your Business For Next To Nothing"
You can get your copy of the book from
How To Market Your Business For Next To Nothing - affiliate link
You have the choice of buying the ebook - the price is small compared the cost of a marketing campaign that doesn't work or signing up to Rob's free 7 part mini course.
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