Free Web Sites Free Email Free e-Business
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Free Web Sites Free Email Free e-Business
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SECRETS OF GETTING FREE ADVERTISINGThe opportunities for getting free advertising for your product or services are limited only by your own imagination and energy. There are so many proven ways of promoting your own objectives without cost that it literally boggles the mind to think of listing them. One method is to write an article relative to your particular expertise and submit it to all the publications and media dealing in the dissemination of related information. In other words, become your own publicity and sales promotion writer. Get the word out. Establish yourself as an expert in your field, and tag everything you write with a quick note listing your address and offer for a free catalog, dealership opportunity, or more information. Another excellent way of gaining free publicity is by becoming a guest on as many of the radio and television talk shows as possible. With the tremendous growth in the number of radio stations featuring a talk format, your chances of gaining access to this monumentally large audience are very good. Now, with the development of cable television stations also dedicated to talk-only formats, your chances are even greater. It is actually much easier to become a guest than most people realize. Write a letter to the producer of the programs you have in mind, and then follow up with a personal visit or telephone call. Your initial contact should emphasize that your product or service would be of interest to the listeners or viewers of the program, perhaps even saving them time or money. Other ways of getting free or very inexpensive exposure include the posting of advertising circulars on all the free bulletin boards in your area, especially the coin-operated laundries, grocery stores, and beauty or barber shops. Don't discount the idea of handing out circulars to all the shoppers in busy shopping centers and malls, especially on weekends. You can also enlist the aid of high school students in your area to hand out circulars door-to-door. Some of the more routine methods of inexpensive advertising include having a small promotional blurb relative to your product or service printed on the front or back of your envelopes at the time you have them imprinted with your return address. Also, be sure to check all the publications that carry the kind of advertising you need. Many mail order publications just getting started offer unusually low rates to first-time advertisers, a free-of-charge insertion of your ad when you pay for an order to run three issues or more, or special seasonal ad space at greatly reduced rates. There are also a number of publications that will give you Per Inquiry (PI) space. PI advertising is an arrangement by which all orders come directly to the publication and they take a percentage commission from each order, forwarding the orders on to you for fulfillment. Many publications will give you a contract for stand-by advertising space. Such a contract requires that you send the publisher your ad, and they hold it until they have unsold space available. Then at a price that's always one third or less than the regular price for the space you need, the publisher inserts your ad. Be sure to check in with the suburban and neighborhood newspapers for such an arrangement as well. Many big-city newspapers will include a neighborhood section with the daily paper, and insert it for newspapers being sold only in that section of town. Ad rates in neighborhood sections are often less expensive than placing an ad that will appear in a section delivered to the entire readership of the city. If you send out or publish any kind of catalog or ad sheet, get in touch with all the other publishers and inquire about the possibilities of exchange advertising. Other publishers will run your ad in their publication in exchange for your running an ad for them of comparable size in yours. This is a popular form of advertising, and time has proven that it works well. Finally, there's nothing in the world that beats the low cost and tremendous exposure you get when you advertise a free offer. Simply run an ad offering a free report of interest to most people. Ask for a self-addressed, stamped envelope, and depending on the appeal of your report and the circulation of the publication in which your ad appears, you could easily be inundated with responses! As the responses come in, send them each a copy of your simple one-page report. Include a full page advertisement for your book or other product on the backside of the report. The trick here, of course, is to convert a large percentage of these responses into sales. This is done via the tag-line at the end of the report offering an invitation to the reader to send for more information, by the full page ad printed on the back of the report, and the other offers you include in the complete information package you return. The methods of gaining free or low cost advertising for your business or product are
limited only by your imagination. Unleash your creative powers. By combining the myriad of
ideas available to you with the dedication to make yourself a success, you will easily
reach the goals that you have established for yourself and your business. Make your dreams
a reality. Do it today! |
