If you are in a concrete cleaning business using a pressure washer or steam cleaner perhaps you have considered how you can get new clientele through advertising. It is a difficult business to advertise because you deal with business customers and direct mail generally does not work too well.
However if you can get a list of the facilities maintenance people for all the properties in your community you may find yourself with a list of perfect people to mail to. Where can you get such a list? Well, you can get such a list from the county tax assessor of all the business properties. You might also get a list from a local industry guide. It is not easy to get a hold of all the facilities maintenance people and the property management companies to create a mailing list. But once you have that list it is as good as gold for your concrete cleaning business.
There are some ways to advertise a concrete cleaning business and one way that I recommend is to put a flyer insert in the Chamber of Commerce monthly newsletter. It should be a half sheet of paper and a unique color and your phone number should be in bold on the top and under that it should read please call for estimates. Consider this in 2006.
Let’s start out with a caution for business, non-profit and
association managers: the premise of public relations
implies that the work you do BEFORE you use PR
tactics, such as press releases, brochures and broadcast
interviews, will determine the success of your public
relations effort.
Reason is, if you are one of those managers, the PR plan
that flows from that premise will call for achieving your
managerial objectives by altering perception leading to
changed behaviors among those important external
audiences that MOST affect your department, group,
division or subsidiary.
Here, read that public relations premise for yourself.
People act on their own perception of the facts before
them, which leads to predictable behaviors about which
something can be done. When we create, change or
reinforce that opinion by reaching, persuading and
moving-to-desired-action the very people whose
behaviors affect the organization the most, the public
relations mission is usually accomplished.
Of all the things the premise tells you about public
relations, the most basic may be that you need to do
some serious planning early-on about the behaviors
of those vital outside audiences rather than exploding
right out-of-the-gate with a tactical broadside.
For example, you don’t want to move prematurely into
press releases, talk show appearances, zippy publications
and fun-filled special events before you get answers to
questions like these: Who are you trying to reach?
What do you know about them? How do they perceive
your organization? If troublesome, how might we alter
their perceptions? And perhaps MOST important, what
behaviors do we want those perceptions to lead to?
That is a critical planning concern because the people
with whom you interact every day behave like everyone
else - they act upon their perceptions of the facts they
hear about you and your operation. And that means you
should deal effectively with those perceptions (and
their follow-on behaviors) by doing what is
necessary to reach and move those key external
audiences to action.
Once the preliminary public relations planning is
complete, you can look forward to PR results such as
rising membership applications; customers making
repeat purchases; new approaches by capital givers
and specifying sources; community leaders beginning
to seek you out; fresh proposals for strategic alliances
and joint ventures; prospects starting to do business
with you; welcome bounces in show room visits, not
to mention politicians and legislators viewing you as
a key member of the business, non-profit or association
communities.
But who will do this specialized kind of work? An
outside PR agency team? Folks assigned to your
operation? Your own public relations people?
Regardless of where they come from, they need to be
committed to you and your PR plan beginning with
key audience perception monitoring.
Are the folks assigned to you really serious about
knowing how your most important outside audiences
perceive your operations, products or services? Do they
really accept the truth that perceptions almost always
lead to behaviors that can help or hurt your operation?
Take the time to review with them in detail how you
plan to monitor and gather perceptions by questioning
members of your most important outside audiences. For
instance, how much do you know about our chief executive?
Have you had prior contact with us and were you pleased
with the interchange? How much do you know about our
services or products and employees? Have you experienced
problems with our people or procedures?
If there’s enough money in the PR budget, be sure to use
professional survey firms in the perception monitoring
phases of your program. If not, you’re still fortunate because
your PR people are also in the perception and behavior
business and can pursue the same objective: identify
untruths, false assumptions, unfounded rumors,
inaccuracies, misconceptions and any other negative
perception that might translate into hurtful behaviors.
It’s quite clear that setting just the right public relations
goal allows you to deal effectively with the most serious
problems you turned up during your key audience
perception monitoring. Your new goal could call for
straightening out that dangerous misconception, or
correcting that inaccuracy, or neutralizing that fateful
rumor.
At this point, take special care because you must now
identify the right strategy, one that tells you how to move
forward. Remember that there are just three strategic options
available to you when it comes to handling a perception
and opinion challenge. Change existing perception, create
perception where there may be none, or reinforce it. Since
the wrong strategy pick will taste like crumbled Gorganzola
cheese on your bread pudding, be certain the new strategy
fits comfortably with your new public relations goal. You
don’t want to select “change” when the facts dictate a
“reinforce” strategy.
Like it or not, a strong message is needed here, one aimed
at members of your target audience. There is no doubt that
crafting action-forcing language to persuade an audience
to your way of thinking is very hard work. Which is why
you need your strongest writer. S/he must create some very
special, corrective language. Words that are not only
compelling, persuasive and believable, but clear and
factual if they are to correct something and shift
perception/opinion towards your point of view leading to
the behaviors you are targeting.
How are you going to carry your message to the attention
of your target audience? With the communications tactics
most likely to reach that group of people, of course. After
you run the draft message by your PR people for impact
and persuasiveness, you can choose from among dozens
that are available to you. From speeches, facility tours,
emails and brochures to consumer briefings, media
interviews, newsletters, personal meetings and many
others. But be sure that the tactics you pick are known to
reach folks just like your audience members.
Because we know that message credibility can depend on
the credibility of the means used to deliver it, you may
want to try it out before smaller meetings and presentations
rather than using higher-profile news releases.
About now, talk of progress reports may be heard, and they
are a signal that it’s time for you and your PR team to begin
a second perception monitoring session with members of
your external audience. Many of the same questions used
used in thebenchmark session can be asked again. Now
however, you will be watching carefully for signs that
the problem perception is being altered in your direction.
Don’t forget that you can always speed up program
momentum by adding more communications tactics and
increasing their frequencies.
This template can be effective for most public relations
challenges you face. When you successfully alter the
perceptions of your key external stakeholders, in most
cases moving their behaviors in your direction, you should
soon enjoy the satisfaction of achieving your managerial
objectives.
Please feel free to publish this article and resource box
in your ezine, newsletter, offline publication or website.
A copy would be appreciated at bobkelly@TNI.net.
Word count is 1245 including guidelines and resource box.
Robert A. Kelly © 2005.
Bob Kelly counsels, writes and speaks to business, non-profit and
association managers about using the fundamental premise orelations to achieve their operating objectives. He has been DPR,
Pepsi-Cola Co.; AGM-PR, Texaco Inc.; VP-PR, Olin Corp.; VP-PR,
Newport News Shipbuilding & Drydock Co.; director of communi-
cations, U.S. Department of the Interior, and deputy assistant press
secretary, The White House. He holds a bachelor of science degree
from Columbia University, major in public relations.
mailto:bobkelly@TNI.net Visit:http://www.prcommentary.com
Most of us have been using spring mattresses for years and we have been accustomed to it. When it comes to changing the mattress we start thinking of buying a latex or memory foam mattress and start asking queries as to which one is the best.
Latex is a white liquid collected from rubber particles in the rubber making process. The liquid is then made into foam and is used to make mattresses. Latex is a natural product and provides the best support while sleeping in any position.
Latex mattresses are anti allergic and dust resistible. While you toss and turn at night, you will feel very comfortable and won’t feel any pressure when you turn to your right and left. The very important feature of latex is, it keeps a person warm in winter and cool in summer.
Latex is manufactured by beating the liquid rubber and converting it into foam and putting the liquid into a mold. Then CO2 is passed on to the rods in the mold and heat is also sent with the correct temperature to make good latex foam.
The memory foam mattresses are made with foam and while buying a memory foam mattress the first thing to be asked is about the density of the foam, (the higher the density the better the foam) whether it is anti allergic and anti microbial? Whether the company provides warranty and shipping or not. Memory foam mattress is very comfortable and people having neck and backache are very happy using this.
Though both latex and memory foam mattress are good it depends upon the person on which mattress to buy? Some like memory foam mattresses while some like latex mattresses.
Paul has been providing answers to lots of queries through his website on a wide variety of subjects ranging from satellite phones to acne. To learn more visit
http://www.askaquery.com/Answers/qn1515.html
You may be aware that in a basketball game the assistant coaches keep an almost unending list of personal statistics for each player. Rebounds, assists, points, minutes played, etc.
Why is that?
Because they know that these individual statistics all add up to the bottom line.
The final score.
If they can achieve even a small incremental improvement in these individual statistics for each player this will have a compound affect on the final score.
And of course, it helps them know which players to give the most playing time too.
In marketing your business you should be just as disciplined. Which products and which ads and which media should you give the most playing time? Do you know?
What’s the point of designing and implementing an advertising campaign if you don’t know if it worked or if it was better than the last one?
What a waste.
How do you know where the best place is to spend your advertising dollars?
By tracking everything.
Incoming calls, emails, walk-ins, website visitors, etc.
Train yourself and your staff to always ask these questions. Where did they come from? How did they hear about you? Which ad did they call on?
Here is an example: Let’s say you place a classified ad in the newspaper at a cost of $135.00 offering a free report on your product. You could track the incoming calls in many ways (for instance by directing them to a free recorded message with a unique extension number or simply by asking them where they heard about the offer when they call).
Let’s say you receive 12 calls on this ad and 2 of them end up as completed sales.
What is your cost per prospect?
(Cost of Ad) / (Number of Calls) = Cost Per Prospect
$135.00 / 12 = $11.25
Your cost per prospect is $11.25
What is your conversion rate of prospects to sold clients?
(Number of Sold Clients)/ (Number of Prospects) = Conversion Rate
2 / 12 = .17 (or 17%)
Your conversion rate of prospects to sold clients is 17%
What is your cost per sold client?
(Cost of Ad) / (Number of Sold Clients) = Cost Per Sale
$135.00 / 2 = $67.50
Your marketing cost per sale is $67.50.
Now let’s say you place a display ad in a large local corporate newsletter and it costs you $450. You get 27 calls which turn into 4 sales.
Which ad is performing better?
What is your cost per prospect for this ad?
(Cost of Ad) / (Number of Calls) = Cost Per Prospect
$450.00 / 27 = $16.67
Your cost per prospect is $16.67
What is your conversion rate of prospects to sold clients?
(Number of Sold Clients) / (Number of Prospects) = Conversion Rate
4 / 27 = .15 (or 15%)
Your conversion rate of prospects to sold clients is 15%
What is your cost per sold client?
(Cost of Ad )/ (Number of Sold Clients) = Cost Per Sale
$450.00 / 4 = $112.50
Your marketing cost per sale is $112.50.
Depending on your products and profit margin both of these ads may be performing well enough to merit continuation. However, based on this information we would want to look for other opportunities to expand our use of the classified ad first.
This may seem a little basic but this information is extremely valuable and often overlooked.
The outcome of most athletic contests is normally decided by a very small margin, sometimes by as little as tenths of an inch or hundredths of a second, missing that pass completion by half a step or missing one basket.
One would suspect that most winners and losers in business are also determined by very small margins.
Not giving that extra little bit of caring and customer service. Not having your presentation skills honed, not including testimonials with your sales information. Not having the most effective headline in your ad or not having a headline at all.
And worst of all, not knowing which ads are working and which should be put on the bench.
“If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again. Then quit. There’s no use being a damn fool about it.” - W.C. Fields
Shawn Meldrum has spent the last two decades marketing everything from almonds to landscape lighting. He currently specializes in marketing for mortgage brokers, loan officers and real estate agents. For free mortgage marketing articles and much more visit: http://www.MortgageMarketingTips.com/
There are many ways to tell the time, according to your preference! The most obvious way is through the simple wristwatch and, if you want to buy a lovely period piece, there are innumerable examples available at auction. For the connoisseur, the sale at Sotheby’s in New York on 5/6th December is well nigh impossible to miss with some fabulous - and fabulously expensive - wristwatches going under the hammer.
However, there are some great bargains to be found for the imaginative buyer on a smaller budget. Not every watch is necessarily designed to fit on your wrist and, if you’re smart, you can take full advantage by acquiring a fob watch at auction. A fob watch, in case you are wondering, is typically a watch on a chain, a style of timekeeping that reached its peak in the Victorian era. The legacy of this artistic and mechanical endeavour is a host of decorative and charming watches whose casings or covers are every bit as interesting as the main event.
The following examples give a glimpse of the range and variety of fob watches coming up for sale over the next week or so:
An early 20th century Swiss gold, enamel and diamond fob watch with a keyless bar cylinder movement, white dial with black Arabic numerals, the four piece hinged case polychrome enamelled with flowers on a blue guilloche ground (Estimate £400 - 600)
Dreweatt Neate - Donnington Priory, Berkshire
An enamel fob watch, with white and gilt enamel Roman dial, jewelled lever movement, the outer cuvette with foliate scroll engraved decoration and polychrome enamel scene depicting maiden playing harp, suspended by 9 ct gold bar brooch (Estimate £180 - 220) Neales, Nottingham
A Vacheron & Constantine minute - repeating gold fob watch with engine turned Arabic dial with stylised flower and leaf banding and bezel set with cabochon turquoises (Estimate £2,000 - 3,000) Gorringes, Bexhill
If perhaps you would prefer to pick up a mixed lot of timepieces at a very modest level, you would do well to consider
A gentleman’s gilt metal cased, keyless wind, hunting cased pocket watch by Elgin, a ladies silver cased, keywind, openfaced fob watch by JW Benson, London 1886 and two ladies wristwatches (Estimate £40 - 60) Billingshurst, West Sussex
As you can see, there is plenty to choose from, regardless of the depth of your pocket. Best of all, such gifts are immensely practical and enhance the appearance of both the casual and snappy dresser. The best general sources for this sort of material are Invaluable and eBay, for offline and online auctions respectively. Happy hunting!
Howard Lewis,
Chairman, Invaluable group of companies
http://www.invaluable.com
Only Invaluable gives you unrivalled access to pre-sale and post-sale information for auction houses and salerooms across the globe.
Find art, antiques, and collectables. Try our Keyword search, register at http://www.invaluable.com for a free 14 day trial.
Mortgage companies in U.S are facing huge competition and often have great difficulty to get new customers. Leads are the life line for mortgage companies. The situation is more difficult and hard for the agents to get new clients. The more clients they can bring, the more flourishing their business prospects become. To achieve success in bringing new customers, companies and agents need to focus on making their endeavor more time-bound.
In such a competitive market only one thing is the key to your success. And that is “innovation”. Either you are Mortgage Lead Generation company or an agent or broker you need to devise new ways to attract people in your offer. For this one should thoroughly research on where the mortgage industry stands at the moment and what problems people are facing to get mortgage from companies. Only then you can be able to make a plan to address the problems of people resulting getting the attention of customers and eventually lot more business than your competitors.
The other thing to do is to streamline your organization as far as its functional aspect is concerned. In doing so, most of the companies find themselves racing against time. Good time management can really help. Against this backdrop, good mortgage leads can boost their effort and are an integral part of the burgeoning mortgage business.
The most important thing is to establish a good channel to generate leads. Buying the leads can be an option but if you can generate leads on your own you will be saving thousands of dollars each month. An important lead channel can be created by telemarketing. It can be an appropriate tool to make a flow of leads. Also these leads will be of highly qualified contrary to leads bought from some lead company.
We have all played our share of bad super-hero games. Well, I want to start of by letting you know that the Incredible Hulk: Ultimate Destruction is not one of those. In fact it is polished and incredibly fun. There will be a ton of comparisons to the Grand Theft Auto franchise, but it would be more accurate to compare Ultimate Destruction to the recent Spiderman games. In this free roaming action smash-em-up, you play as the Incredible Hulk, and your job is to destroy pretty much everything (hence the name Ultimate Destruction).
You are given free reign of various areas, these are not based upon any actual cities like Spiderman 2 or GTA: San Andreas, but the areas feel alive and real. Unfortunately the areas are a little more limited than what you get in GTA: San Andreas or Spiderman 2. But to make up for it, just about everything is completely destructible. In your battles with the Hulk-Busters, Police, and the Military you can literally level the city.
Before I go too much into how much I love this game, I want to let you know about what’s holding it back from reaching the ultimate heights of excellence. Too start off I would have liked to see more super-villains, but instead your primary foes are the Hulk-Busters (for those not familiar with the story-arc from the 80’s, their a task force that uses exo-skeletons so they can go toe to toe with big ‘ol green but), the military, and the Police. Also the missions can get a little repetitive. You mostly have you standard destroy this, protect that missions. But when it came down to it, the world just didn’t feel big enough by the end of the game.
Now as I previously stated; I really enjoyed this game. This is the best Hulk game I’ve ever played. It takes the best parts from last years Hulk game, the Hulk, and just let loose. You start off with some basic moves, but you can upgrade them throughout the game. After a couple hours you are pretty much the unstoppable force you would expect the Incredible Hulk to be.
The Incredible Hulk: Ultimate Destruction is at its best when your just doing your own thing between missions. You feel like you are controlling the Hulk. You can jump over small buildings, and easily scale larger ones. You can swat helicopters out of the sky. And you can smash up various vehicles to make shields or metal gloves that give you the extra power to smash those puny tanks into scrap metal. To be honest, I never got tired of seeing how far I could throw the terrified civilians.
Speaking of the civilians, they act exactly as you would expect them to act when they see a giant green dude fall from the sky and smash a building to the ground; they run screaming in the opposite direction. You get a certain level of satisfaction being a one man wrecking ball, and bringing a city to its knees. The kind of satisfaction you just won’t get from Spiderman 2 or any of the games in the GTA series.
Now the missions, as I already said, are mostly destroy this or protect that. But the boss battles have that epic feel to them. I’m not going to give too much away, but going toe to toe with a giant Hulk-Buster was absolutely invigorating. It was also one of those moments when there wasn’t much of a city left when you finally dispatch of the monestrous mech.
The Incredible Hulk: Ultimate Destruction gives you exactly what it promises. You get solid graphics, authentic in game sound-bites and voice-overs, and you get the unprecedented ability to see exactly how it feels to be green. This is one time that you do want to see Mr. Banner angry, and you will be doing yourself a favor to give this game a shot. And just remember the best part of this game as our big green friend the Hulk would say “HULK SMASH!!!”.
Richard S. Stites
Heroes of Gaming: Video Game News
HeroesOfGaming.com
“Saving Good People From Bad Games”
Go to the site for cheats, screenshots and videos
http://www.heroesofgaming.com/games/xbox/i/inc_hulk_ud/inc_hulk_ud_rev.htm
Who me? Track?
Now I realize some turn a blind eye towards tracking results on their site. Either preferring to look the other way or perhaps asking Stevie Wonder to watch over it for them. Because apparently their attitude is if they’ve got money coming in, well, how bad can it be?
Dunno. And if you don’t want to maximize the cash flow from your site I suppose that’s between you and Stevie.
But if you’re not tracking what’s working on your site, you’re flying blind. Maybe even leaving serious money on the table. Because how can you improve if you have nothing to compare to?
Sorry for the heavy dose of reality. But remember this. You can have more traffic than Google but if it doesn’t convert what good is it?
Take for example that hot site that streams a hilarious cartoon poking fun at John Kerry and George W Bush. It was created by two brothers who happened to be on Jay Leno the other night.
They revealed to Jay they had had 20 million hits to their site.
The brothers also confessed their plan to accept donations to support their work generated all of, you ready for this, $1000!
You read that right. 20 million hits converted into all of $1000 in cold…hard…cash.
How much traffic did they waste? My guess? Tons. So as you can see traffic isn’t always the answer.
Now before I trip the Digression Alarm Buzzer, by tracking I mean monitoring various conversion rates for key pages on your site. In order of importance here’s what you want to track.
=====> Sales Pages
Since sales letters are where the rubber meets the road for sure you want stats for them. How many unique visitors hit such pages every day? Of those how many convert? Divide the second number by the first and you’ve got your conversion rate. Pretty simple right? Depending on your price point, anything less than 1% is probably unsatisfactory.
Watching the day to day conversion fluctuation isn’t necessarily the best use of your time. But monitoring that on a week to week basis might be. As any downward trend might indicate problems ahead.
=====> Affiliate Product Review Pages
Assuming you sell affiliate products, either as an add on or your primary profit producer, again you want to see which ones best convert to sales.
Those that are your best sellers, like your top 10 to be completely uncreative, you might feature prominently on your home page. Spend time optimizing their pages. Link t o them from other internal pages of your site to get each some PR and link rep to help it rank higher.
Products that don’t convert as well you can let ride, demote in terms of emphasis on your site or eliminate altogether.
=====> Special Pages
That might be your ezine sign up page. Maybe the auto responder course you offer in exchange for an email address page. Or any sort of activity that can lead to sale - THAT you want to track. For instance the page on my site that falls into this category is the quiz page that shows in the sig file below.
I like to see how many unique visitors stop by. I know how many took it. Again I calculate the percent of conversion. I continually try to make it as inviting as possible so as many as possible take it.
=====> Content Pages
No need for anything fancy here. You may just want to see which are the most popular pages on your site.
Why? Perhaps you can get clues for future products. Or two, you could always slip in a mention plus a link to your sales letter from the popularity contest winners. Might as well bring it up and suggest visitors stop by, no?
Now you can track a number of ways. There are some commercial programs that are quite robust.
But I use a $45 cgi script - Prolinkz. [http://prolinkz.com] And don’t worry it’s super simple to install.
So as not to be accused of flogging a product let me simply say all you do is stick a 1 by 1 pixel on the page you want track, set up a unique tracking code for that page and Prolinkz does the rest. No muss. No fuss.
Anyway, continuous improvement is the way to better than average success. Online or off. Tracking is how you get there. And if you don’t track? you risk perishing. Because how can you improve what you don’t measure?
John Gergye shares more ideas like this in his just updated eBook “Traffic From Google in 35 Days”. Find out more here: http://www.traffic-test-tube.com/j/tfg35cl.shtml/ Or test your search engine IQ by taking his seo quiz http://www.traffic-test-tube.com/search-engine-quiz.shtml/ and get the free special report “Coming Out On Top”.
