Small business owners wear many hats. They have to be chief company officers, project managers, lead generators and much more. When budgets are tight, it can be hard to find the money to hire a quality copywriter. And if you’re going to promote your business, you need good copywriting. Many small businesses just slap some copy into an ad or brochure and call it good. But with the right copy, you can garner a lot more attention and sales for your business.
And that’s where Kick-ass Copywriting in 10 Easy Steps by Susan Gunelius comes in. Step-by-step, Gunelius shows you how …read more

Has the economy hit your business hard to where your brand is suffering? Are you looking for ways to extend your brand so that you can grow your business? Then lets look at ways you can extend your brand.
Brand extension is the process of using different avenue to promote your business. According to Wikipedia.org…
Brand extension or brand stretching is a marketing strategy in which a firm marketing a product with a well-developed image uses the same brand name in a different product category.
So let’s look at a few example of companies who have been successful in creating a brand extension:

Eddie Bauer: clothes, automobile …read more

One of the problems created by the whole “politically correct” movement (other than that whole pesky First Amendment thing) is that by continually crying “three little domesticated porcine agrarian animals’ oppressor” every time someone makes fun of a particular group, we tend to become insensitive to real-life examples of racism, sexism and hack ethnic comedy.
I was at home the other evening, lounging on the futon with my extremely liberated, psychology doctorate toting wife when an ad came on for a local carpet store.
Normally, we might have done a fast channel surf. I say “we” since I am so enlightened and …read more

Having good branding habits for your business is important. Good branding habits should be incorporated into your business to help communicate your brand message and increase brand awareness.
Being able to piece together how you will communicate your brand to your target customers is important. Just as the image to the right shows, every piece counts. In branding, good habits count and can help you successfully communicate your brand.
Below are a list of good branding habits that can help as you communicate your brand message.

Incorporate your brand message on all your promotional items.
Have a common message when communicating with others
In your …read more

Are you a business owner who decided to partner up with another business owner to create a business? Did you keep your original business or merge it into the new business? It’s interesting to hear the answers to these two questions because I have found that some business owners don’t keep a separate identity from the combined business.
What I mean by this is that when you develop a partnership by merging with another business owner that you should try to work into the agreement that you will keep some type of autonomy for your original business. You can view this as a …read more

I think it was some famous economist — either John Maynard Keynes or Ice-T — who once said, “I’ll never go broke, I got property.”
That may be true, but only if you haven’t leveraged your real estate and can afford the increasing taxes which are likely as state and local governments look to tap any revenue source they can find.
With record foreclosures, plummeting prices and an overhang of supply in the housing market, another real estate crisis also appears to be imminent.
Builders are warning a new financial catastrophe may be looming in the commercial real estate market.
If the story sounds …read more

If you sell a product in retail stores, then your packaging is a large part of your marketing. How you present your product to potential customers is extremely important. You want your first impression to be favorable. And the last thing you want to do is offend your potential customers.
Which is why, when I went to our local warehouse store, I stopped in my tracks when I saw a package for neck cream. In big letters — a font you could see from several feet away — was the product’s catch phrase:

Got turkey neck?
I was flabbergasted. I had to wonder …read more

Buddy Media Platform was recently launched and it has a lot of tools that could help marketers, advertising agencies and PR firms. The tools are scalable and make it easy to track social marketing needs of your clients.
“With the Buddy Media Platform,” explains Buddy Media’s CEO Michael Lazerow, “agencies can now provide a full suite of social marketing capabilities, including Facebook Pages and Twitter management, in a meaningful and measurable way that deepens client engagements.”
Buddy Media is a well-known name in the social media world. Many companies are jumping on the Buddy Media Platform including MDC Partners, Converseon, theKbuzz and …read more

I didn’t want to leave out a few posts that I came across recently, so I’m going ahead and posting these for you, even though they’re later in the day than normal. There was a lot of conversation over the weekend about the BlogWorld Expo, with some good information coming out of that. Try searching #bwe09 on Twitter if you missed it.
3 Ways for Businesses to Take Full Advantage of Facebook
Here’s a great listing of three different ways you can use Facebook for your business. John gives some good ideas on how to make the best of your Facebook experience.
Internet …read more

Once again there was quite a social media firestorm over the weekend as a woman’s story about her TSA (Transportation Security Administration) run-in went viral. The woman claimed that TSA authorities in Atlanta had taken her son from her sight during screening after something setting off the metal detectors.
The story spread all over Twitter and other parts of the web as concerned people retweeted the original story. Who wants to be separated from their child at the airport, confined to a security area? It hit an emotional nerve, especially with parents across the web.

Concerned about potential public relations damage, the …read more