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You’ve probably heard the famous saying “I know that half of the money I spend on advertising is wasted: if only I could figure out which half it is!” Well, now you can. By eliminating the common mistakes many businesses make with their advertising programs, it’s easy.

Here’s a checklist of mistakes many companies make with their advertising:

1) Not focusing enough time and effort on their advertising

Most business owners spend far more time and effort on mundane things that don’t really affect their bottom line than on advertising. This is the first huge mistake. Without effective advertising, almost all businesses will fail.

If you feel you don’t have the time or desire to handle the advertising for your business, consider hiring a consultant or agency – but with caution. It’s almost more difficult to find an ad agency that knows what is effective than it is to study it yourself. Many agencies are far more focused on winning awards than creating profits for their clients.

If you do feel you need to hire an agency, find one that will work on a results compensation basis vs. a straight commission for all the media they buy. This gives them an incentive to provide results and not pad the budget to justify a larger commission for the agency.

2) Relying on advice from friends and relatives

If business owners do handle their own advertising, many times they let their friends/wives/husbands or other various employees who have no idea whether or not advertising is effective make the decisions about their advertising plan.

Would you ask your dentist for advice about fixing your car engine? Of course not – that’s not their expertise. So why in the world would you base something as important as decisions about your advertising on a relative who has no idea what he’s talking about?

3) Being led by pushy or aggressive media sales people

The reason media companies pay their sales people big bucks is because they can influence you to buy space, air or time (in the newspaper, radio or television) and give you no guarantees if it doesn’t work. Sounds kind of crazy, doesn’t it? Your customers probably wouldn’t buy from you and not expect the product or service to perform the way it should. But ad sales reps do it all the time.

Now sometimes they really mean well, and they have lots of experience and some fluke event or problem comes up. But for the most part, ad sales reps will do virtually anything they can do to get the sale.

If you feel like you’re being bullied by an ad sales rep or that they really aren’t looking out for your best interest, but really feel you want to work with that station/newspaper, etc., then ask for a new rep. They want your business and you’re the one calling the shots, so if they want your business, they need to find someone you’re comfortable working with.

4) Allowing your creative delivery to be ineffective

You can buy the best media schedule in the world that reaches 100% of your market 100 times, but if your message is not well created, it won’t bring you the results you want. Most companies rely on either their ad agency or the media company themselves create the ads for them. This is a very difficult thing because most companies acting on your behalf don’t take the time to learn about your business, your customers and what makes you different in your market.

To be effective, your commercial or ad must give the potential customer a compelling reason to buy your product or service. That means you have to come up with a better slogan than “we have the best service and we’ve been in business for 112 years.”

No one really cares….well they do, but they don’t believe you. If that’s what you want to convey to your market, then give them a story that tells them that you have the best service. Make your company stand out.

You also have to include some sort of call to action. If you have a wonderful warm and fuzzy commercial that makes people 1) notice the ad, 2) actually read or watch it without being distracted by one of a million other things going on in their lives, and 3) become compelled and engaged by the message to have a positive feeling about your company and don’t ask them to do something as a result of that – you’re wasting your time and money. This is something that many ad agency creative types don’t get.

If you don’t ask them to do something specific within a certain time period, there’s no way to measure the response. You may say that you can compare last year’s sales for the same time period with this year’s, etc., but that doesn’t take into account a myriad of other possible reasons that your sales went up or down.

By giving your ad viewers/listeners/readers a specific action to take, you know that the reason they did that is because they were motivated to do so by your ad.

5) Always doing the same old thing because that’s what you’ve always done.

If you’re not growing, you’re dying – and the same goes for your business. If you’re happy with the same old returns on your advertising (assuming that you’re measuring it in some way), then continue to do the same thing. Most business owners aren’t though, so it’s important to try new things.

The way society changes the way it uses media and as quickly as those changes happen, you need to keep up or lose out. Many business owners are afraid to try something new because it takes them out of their comfort zone – especially if no one in their industry has ever tried the new idea. This is a huge mistake and robs them of potentially huge profits.

6) Falling into the price trap.

This is another huge one! Unless you’re Wal-Mart and can guarantee that no other business can sell for a lower price, don’t use that as your main selling point. Once you start down that path, it’s virtually impossible to stop.

If you can’t come up with another reason for your potential customers to choose you instead of your competitor, you really need to find one (or more)!

7) Not using publicity or events in their advertising plan

It’s amazing how few businesses even try to use publicity or special events in their advertising. It’s often the best advertising you can get – not only because it’s free, but because it cuts through the clutter. If the newspaper runs a story or a TV station is covering something during their newscast, it has automatic credibility that you just can’t buy.

Of course you can’t control the message 100%, but if you learn solid techniques of creating your publicity or press event, you can have a great deal of influence about how a story is covered.

If you can eliminate only 1 or 2 of these mistakes (assuming you’re making them all), you’ll wonder why you didn’t do so earlier! In business, if there are enough of the right customers buying your products and services, many of your problems seem to disappear.

Copyright (c) 2008 Donald Jones

One form of Internet marketing that has kind of gotten a black eye in the past is e-mail marketing. Many Internet marketers do not even bother trying to run an email marketing campaign today and that is a mistake.

Here are three of the most common questions about email marketing and we will explain the answers in a way that will help you want to get started using this profitable form of marketing your business online.

1. What is email marketing and why should I do it? Very simply put email marketing is a way to promote your business on the Internet through someone’s email address. There are many ways to market on the Internet and email marketing has been around since the very beginning.The primary reason that you should do it is because it works when done correctly. Like anything on the Internet you will need to learn the proper methods of doing email marketing.

2. What is the best way to do email marketing? Building your own opt in list is the best way to do email marketing. An opt in list means that your subscriber has given you permission to send email to them. This takes away all spam complaints and helps you build a quality list.You can build your own list by adding a sign up form to your web pages or by creating a landing page with a sign up form on it. You will also need an autoresponder to store the names and email addresses of your subscribers.

3. How expensive is it to build an email list? Building an email list is not expensive to do at all. If you want to speed the process up you can purchase co-registration leads from lead companies and let them build your list for you. Otherwise you can promote landing pages and drive traffic to your list that way. You can also add a sign-up form to all of your webpages and blog posts to build a list as well.We also want to mention that a list is an asset that no one can take away from you. As your list grows so will your income. It is not uncommon for people to earn a dollar per subscriber every month from their email marketing list. Therefore you can see that a large list can be worth several thousand dollars to you a monthly basis. This right here is a very good reason to do email marketing as part of any Internet marketing program.

A home based business is a great way a person can make an extra income on the side or just get out of the normal grind on the average 9 to 5 job. Millions of people in this country already have an at home at one level or another and are generating billions into the economy. It is no wonder why thousands more a day are getting into the home based business game using informative sites such as happilyhomebased.com

However not everyone is success full at home based business than others. Sites like happily home based makes getting stated easy, but it still up to each individual owner to ensure their own success. Studies have found a few key mistakes that first time home based business owners make. A few of them are the following:

Never get into a home based business on a mere compulsion

Do your research. Make good use of at home business finders like Happily Home Based

Choose a starter business that you can easily understand. If you have little or business experience choose a home business that is cheap to start and easy control to begin with.

Happily Home Based has a wide selection of Home Based Business Opportunities at many different levels of budget and commitment.

If you feel hesitant to take on a home business all by yourself find a partner, a friend, family member, colleague, whatever, to help spread the risk and responsibility out.

Don’t bite off more than you can chew, sums it up.

Don’t give up so soon. Creating home based business from scratch takes time, and you may not get a return on your investment in a matter of weeks. You have to build up reputation and the cliental and money will eventually come in.

There’s nothing wrong with buying an existing business or franchise that can be based at home, in fact, there may be less risk involved if it already has a track record of being successful.

However, it can be hard to track down those for sale that can be done from home, if that’s where your heart is, that’s why websites like Home Based Business for Sale are useful. This is one of the most popular directory sites of its type, featuring home franchise and other home business listings; while providing advice, resources and tools for fledging entrepreneurs.

And finally… Yes unfortunately some business will fail. Always remember that a home based business is a business NOT a hobby, and if you treat it so you will lose money. However, if you do it properly, research your business at sites like happilyhomebased.com, and you will join the millions of American cashing in on at home businesses.

Internet marketing for a small business may be easy to handle, you may say, but it is not that much different for internet marketing in a big company. Small businesses can be easily contained and this may be the reason why it is easier to handle internet marketing problems at this scale. Even for small business internet marketing, mistakes cannot be avoided and knowing about them can be a means to prepare for them. This way, you can plan ahead on what to do once they happen and how to best battle them when they do. Having the knowledge about the things that can go wrong about your business can strengthen your chances of achieving your business goals and attaining success.

One of the most common mistakes in small business internet marketing is lack of focus. Sometimes, because of your excitement to apply certain marketing strategies for your business, you forget that everything has to be relevant to it. In order to avoid this mistake, do not rush any projects. Make sure that you have thought of every aspect regarding a certain strategy or a method that you would like to use in order to achieve your goals. Take time to check everything before putting it to work. You could also try by testing a strategy first before employing it to make sure that it can help. Another mistake that you could encounter is using a media that does not work for your business. In any business, it is important to be able to reach your potential clients, much more on an internet marketing business. If you will use a media that does not work, you might suffer because you will not be able to reach the clients that you want to attract. What you have to do is to analyze the media that you are planning to use before making the decision on whether or not to use it. Another mistake that you may encounter along the way is ignoring the possible shortcomings that your business might experience. No business is perfect. You have to prepare yourself from the good as well as the bad things that may happen to it. If you will ignore the potential problems that the business may go through along the way, then you will be in for big trouble. You have to arm yourself from these problems before they happen. Project them and list them down if you can. Afterwards, think of your game plan so that you can instantly create a solution in the event that they happen. You also need to have a personal involvement to your business if you want to know how to handle the problems that may arise from its operations. By knowing exactly how your business works, you can easily devise a plan in order for it to survive the mishaps that it may experience along the way.

Knowing the mistakes that most people go through in small business internet marketing is one way of preparing yourself. Be informed and make the right decisions in order to achieve your goals and ensure growth.