Pulled from the Archives…

Saturday was a beautiful, abnormally warm March day in Southwest Virginia. The kids and I decided that we would plant some fruit, vegetables, and flowers. We decided on porch plants because I do not have a green thumb and we wanted to start with something small and idiot proof. I have yet to keep a plant alive, even the ones that people swore I couldn’t kill.

It’s not that I don’t like plants; I do. I think they are beautiful. I love to eat fresh fruit and vegetables. But for whatever reason, this whole watering thing baffles me, and I completely forget to water them.

We repotted Matthew’s third grade project, his over sized cabbage that will grow to be more than 40 pounds. We also planted strawberries, tomatoes, grape tomatoes, and sunflowers. But here is where I struggle. When I woke up this morning, there sat 7 pots that just had dirt in them – no buds, no blooms, and no sign of life.

As a society, we have come to expect things instantaneously. We have microwaves to cook meals faster, online banking to expedite money transfers, and email to eliminate the time it takes for a letter to make it through the Postal Service. As a whole, we want things now.

Our businesses are no different. We send out a direct mail piece and we want something from it immediately. We submit an article and expect the traffic soon thereafter. We submit our press release and expect some kind of coverage within a day or so. We hang out our open sign and become disappointed when we don’t have some sort of bite right away.

Here is what we fail to realize, and I’m just as guilty as the next guy. With our businesses, we must plant our seeds, nurture them, and provide them what they need to flourish before we will see the results – the fruits of our labor.

The next time you feel discouraged because you have put so much time and energy into your business and have nothing to show for it, stop and smell the roses. Then realize that they weren’t planted yesterday.

Let’s face it…people like free stuff. You probably know people who attend Home Shows and Expos and go from table to table with a bag and gather as many freebies as they possibly can.

Because we know that people like free stuff we often try to send our own products to them as a sample so they can see what we have to offer. Many times we even take it a step further and personalize it for them. We have the mindset that just because they like free stuff, it’s an automatic in. That pen or calendar we send will last a while and, in turn, our telephone will ring off the hook with their orders.

Your customers are no different. They come to you, the distributor, to purchase promotional items to give away because they too know that people like free stuff. The next time you are at an expo take notice of how many people walk by a booth because there are no goodies on the table. It’s just the nature of the beast.

But, as a business owner, you are aware of the amount of direct mail you get each month. What sets one company apart from another? Do you think it’s a pen or a calendar? With a pen, something we all have too many of, it goes into the drawer typically never to be seen by the recipient again. In my home, they are stolen by one of my children who seem to think pens are disposable after one use.

The calendars? How many calendars do you get around the first of the year? How many calendars does one person possibly need? What makes your calendar different from the one they got from their insurance agent, their realtor, or the local dry cleaner?

While these are both inexpensive products that you can give away to your existing and potential customers, what other items do you have in your arsenal that might have a longer shelf life? This can include items that people don’t realize they need but can’t seem to live without once they have them or items that you can never have enough of.

Items that people don’t realize they need but can’t live without once they have them

• Jar openers

Most everyone struggles at some point in time opening a jar lid. The average person does not know that there is a solution to the problem. So, when they go to the store, they are not looking for something to rectify the issue. They deal with it.

When they are introduced to the jar opener, they see they can easily open the lid with a flimsy piece of plastic. It becomes a necessity for them over time and when they lose it they truly realize the value in it. It becomes something they can’t live without.

• Travel Alarm Clocks

How many times have you traveled for business and were so afraid that you would oversleep and miss that important meeting in the morning? When you are away from home you often feel out of your comfort zone and typically the alarm clocks in the hotels are different from the one to which you’ve grown accustomed. Rather than lugging your own alarm clock across country, wouldn’t you rather have a personal travel alarm clock that you know how to operate and you know is going to wake you up in the morning?

• Zippy Letter Openers

A letter opener is a letter opener is a letter opener. Not necessarily. One of my clients recently discovered the Zippy letter openers after I recommended that she purchase them to give away at the conference she was attending with administrative professionals from all over the state.

It’s the little things that make people happy. I no sooner showed it to her and she began opening every envelope she could get her hands on. Shortly thereafter, that old point letter opener found its way to the trash can.

The average consumer would never make a special trip to the office supply store for a simple letter opener. It is one of those items that never seem to make it to the list of items needed. Before the Zippy letter opener was discovered I used my finger and oh how attractive those paper cuts were!

Items You Can Never Have Enough Of

• Sticky notes

Can you imagine your life without sticky notes? They have been around since 1977 and by 1990 Post-Its were one of the top five office supply products sold in the United States. We now have computerized versions and those annoying pop-ups while surfing the internet are starting to look like them as well.

You can never have enough sticky notes! How many creative messages can you send with your sticky notes to a potential customer? Perhaps it’s a note pad in the shape of a foot with a little note that says, “Just wanted to get my foot in the door.”

Sticky notes are not going to go in the trash or into an unused drawer and more often than not will be seen by many.

• Flashlights

How many times do you find yourself in need of just a little more light? There is always one place in your home, office, or vehicle that you wish you had a flashlight but always seem to forget to pick up an extra one.

For me, I wanted one in the office but never made it out to get one. When I need to plug something in to the back of the computer the extra light is always nice. A realtor gave me the one that I have now and I’ve had it for 4 years. It’s made 2 moves with me. The best part is I don’t have to traipse all over the house to find a flashlight when I need one. I’m now on a quest for a flashlight for my glove compartment.

We’re no different than anyone else. We like free things. As consumers, we are drawn to the word free. We all go to conferences and events only to slip away to see what everyone else is giving out. How many of us come home with promotional items that we didn’t bring with us? I normally come home with a big bag of goodies that I give to my children only after I’ve taken the cool gadgets out for me.

That’s right. The kids get the pens, pencils, plastic key chains and candy. Most of these items end up in the trash at some point in time. I keep the Zippy letter openers, sticky notes, travel mugs and jar openers.

Go through your inventory. Ask your friends. Determine what they use and ask them what promotional items they have in their home they just cannot live without. Make sure that what you give your potential customers will not find its way to the circular file or the bottom of a toy box.

About the Author:

Heather Jacobson is an expert in marketing and implements marketing campaigns for companies on a budget. Her favorite topic is frugal marketing, and her latest book, “Making Dollars Out of Cents: 101 Tips for the Frugal Marketer” demonstrates how to maximize your marketing budget. For more information visit www.HeatherJacobson.com

How much time do you spend maintaining your business instead of building your business? Are you spending all of your time working on administrative stuff instead of doing what you love; doing what prompted you to start your business in the first place? Have you thought about hiring help but think it’s too expensive?

Then a Virtual Assistant is the answer. Virtual Assistants (VAs) are entrepreneurs, just like you, who assist others with maintaining and building their businesses with services from general administrative work to web design and maintenance.

You may think hiring an in house assistant is cost prohibitive for you at this point in time, but a VA might be exactly what you need to propel your business to the next level.

Pay only for the time that you need

A survey conducted by Salary.com and America Online reports that the average employee wastes 2.09% of their 8-hour workday. That can add up day after day, week after week. VAs only charge you for the time that they spend on your project, therefore, if the project takes two hours, then you will be billed for two hours. You do not pay for long lunches or time spent surfing the ‘net. You also do not pay for vacation or sick time.

VAs come fully equipped

Hiring an in-house assistant means providing them with an office and all the standard office equipment. VAs work virtually and therefore have all the equipment they need to assist you with your projects.

No Taxes

VAs are business owners and they pay their own taxes and their own insurance. These are both expenses you would incur if you hired an in house assistant.

How much is a week of your time worth?

Spending two hours each day on the backend of your business equates to 10 hours each week and 40 hours each month. Can you put a price tag on 40 hours of your time? What could you do with an extra 40 hours each month? How many additional billable hours would you gain? How fast could you turn around that new product?

Partnering with a VA will help you catapult your business to the next level. If you would rather be out building your business, a VA can help put together your website or get your marketing pieces done and out the door or help with whatever you need. Isn’t it time you invested in yourself and your business?

About the Author:

Heather Jacobson is the owner of Valley Virtual Assistants, a VA business catering to solopreneurs who require assistance with their marketing efforts. She is also the author of Making Dollars Out of Cents: 101 Tips for the Frugal Marketer and co-founder of the Virtual Assistant Revolution, a low-cost alternative to coaching for VAs. For more information, please visit http://www.heatherjacobson.com

As an online newsletter publisher, I care about open rates and click-through rates. If I didn’t, there would be no point in publishing a newsletter. If people aren’t reading it, then why bother? It would be a waste of my time.

I keep up on current marketing trends, and studies have been conducted to determine the best day to send out a newsletter for a better click-through rate.

I’ve always heard that Monday was a bad day. Think about it. Most emails are read Monday through Friday because it’s the standard work week, and business emails are a large portion of the email world. When people come in to work on Monday morning they have a barrage of emails that have accumulated over the weekend that must be sifted through. Your email may be one that gets overlooked.

However, in the past week I have reviewed two different studies, one from Aweber (the service that I use) and the other by Exact Target, an email marketing company based in Indiana.

Exact Target’s white paper, “Myth Debunked: No Such Thing As A Best Day” by Morgan Stewart, was a result of seeing two studies with varying results. These results stated that Monday was the best day, but past studies led marketers to believe that Tuesday was the best day.

So what is the best day? The results of Exact Target’s study, which was comprised of 800 million emails in 160,000 email campaigns of 2000 companies, concluded that there really isn’t a “best” day to send an email. However, there are some interesting results of the study:

• 97% of all emails were sent Monday through Friday.
• The days that have the highest open rate do not have the best click-through rate. This means that you need to determine what is more important – opening the email or clicking on links.
• Industry publications may “jinx” your statistics. For example, as stated in Stewart’s report, the two previous studies were conducted in the second quarter of 2004. Since 2004, Mondays have been ranked the 5th best day to send an email.
• In the second half of 2004, studies showed that the latter part of the work week sees the highest open rates, with the highest being Friday. However, it was less than one percent higher than Wednesday or Thursday.
• If you’re looking for higher click-through rates, you’ll want to send your emails on the weekend, but remember that you won’t find the highest open rates at that time.

Based on Exact Target’s findings, at some point in time each day of the week was found to be the best day.

I do test and track open and click-through rates with my own newsletter, and here is what I’ve found. Sending emails on Tuesday between noon and 2pm Eastern Standard Time works the best for me. I have sent emails every other day of the week, as well as Tuesday at 8am, and none of them have a higher open rate than Tuesday afternoons. As far as click-through rates, I do send occasional special announcements out on the weekends, and they do have a higher click-through rate.

Let’s apply some logic to this. When you get an email campaign, they usually want you to buy something. When you’re in the middle of your work day, you usually can’t stop and whip out your credit card to make a purchase like you can when you’re at home. However, when you’re at home on the weekends, you’re probably not sitting in front of the computer because you’ve been sitting in front of one all week.

In all honesty, I think it’s 6 of one, half dozen of the other. Test to see what works for you and your subscriber base. Don’t take the word of the experts. Tuesday is still a really good day for me, but don’t be surprised if you occasionally receive my newsletter on a Thursday or Friday, or even a weekend. It’s just me, testing to see if I’ve still “got it”.

To view the Exact Target white paper in its entirety, you may download it at http://email.exacttarget.com/pdf/Best-Day.pdf
About the Author:

Heather Jacobson doesn’t pay for marketing if she doesn’t have to. Discover how she does it and claim 10 free marketing tips at http://www.10freetips.com

There’s a buzz floating around the internet about a new web design software called XSitePro. Its target market? Affiliate marketers.

While I dabble in affiliate marketing, it’s not my main focus, so at first glance, I didn’t think this program would be for me, however, my nine year old was working on developing his own site and I didn’t have the time to do the site for him nor did I have time to sit there and teach him the basics of FrontPage. He’s nine. I never thought this idea he had would come to fruition, but here he came with not only research, but excitement.

I looked in to ways that he could build a site on his own. I once used a really great sitebuilder through InterntBasedFamily.com however; the monthly fee was on the pricy side – more than I wanted to invest in my nine year’s old venture. For all I know, this site idea could be like last year’s wrestling. He was all geared up about it so I went out and invested all this money in a singlet, shoes, and head gear, and he never finished the season. It just wasn’t his thing and now we have all this wrestling gear that we’ll never use again.

I went back to look at XSitePro. I watched the 7 minute video and the program looked easy enough to use. I like the fact that you could use their templates or build your own. I liked that if you wanted to change the layout of the page, you did it in one place and it changed all your pages for you.

I downloaded the free trial and told Matthew to check it out. I printed out the users’ manual that included easy, step-by-step instructions and screen shots and let him play. Sure he had questions, but in the end, he had a nine page website built just by going through the tutorial. What’s even better? He had nine optimized pages. He doesn’t know about targeted keywords, but I can help him with that later on.

XSitePro is a very simple program to use. To add an article page, simply click on “Add Article” and a box pops up where you add your title, description, resource box, and any other additional information you have, click okay, copy and paste your article and voila! You have an article page. XSitePro even indexes them on your main page and automatically creates a site map for you as well.

The same is true for product pages – very simple forms to fill out and the page is created for you. No html or design skills required.

Matthew can even add Google Adsense to his pages with out copying and pasting code. He simply right clicks, selects “insert Google AdSense”, chooses the color scheme and size of his ads and hits okay.

After I saw how easy it was to use, and knowing that I could put this program to use if his online venture falls by the way side, I invested in XSitePro. Matthew works on his site every night and I tinkered with it and I put up a 45 page content based site in 3 hours.

There are two groups of people that I recommend XsitePro to: affiliate marketers and those who have little web design experience but would like to set up a site of their own. It’s half the cost of Dreamweaver and ten times easier to use. The best feature of this program? It comes with a 365 day money back guarantee. You have a whole year to decide if you’ve made a wise investment. I didn’t need a year, only a few hours and now I’m XSited about the future things I can do with this program.

And let’s be honest…if a nine year old can operate XSitePro, so can you!

About the Author:

Heather Jacobson doesn’t pay for marketing if she doesn’t have to. Discover how she does it and claim 10 free marketing tips at http://www.10freetips.com

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