Business Loan Options Blog

You’ve heard the saying: “Toot your own horn, no one else will.” Those that understand the art of self-promotion might be the ones to get more business loan options as they can attract investors and convince banks to lend to them. However, the same type of sales pitch that you use to get funding can fail miserably if you are on a social network or if the self-promotion is for another purpose, other than to get funds. In that case, a more casual approach is necessary to keep your sales target from feeling assaulted or people closing down due to the commercial nature of your pitch.
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It is no secret that in recent years more and more companies have tried their hand at creating a box to marry internet video with large screens. In fact, there are millions of Americans who use Bin and Usenet search to find downloads of their favorite television shows in order to save money. Money savings is really where it is all about for consumers, even those that are not as technologically savvy as others. Anyone with a small understanding of computers, TV, and TV boxes can set up their television to receive streaming video from a number of sites. The question is not really what technology is used or even about the new Boxee that is the newest Internet TV to hit the market. It is more about how such items are changing the current business models.
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Traffic is just one measure of success for an online retailer, but you have to convert that traffic into sales if you want to keep your online doors open. You don’t want to be in a position where you can’t even get last option business loans because despite the number of people who visit your site, few of them actually buy. In order to convince investors and lenders that you have a viable business, you have to show that you are able to convert that traffic to sales on a frequent and repeated basis. Here are some strategies to convert a visitor to a customer in no time flat.

Grab the Email

Most visitors to your site will be anonymous until they choose to self-identify by providing you with a valid email. However, people won’t generally do that these days unless they’re convinced they’re going to get some really good deals from doing so. In the past, you might have been able to coax an email address by promising a free newsletter, but with so many online vendors flooding emails with spam, that’s not an attractive offer anymore. When you are looking to trying to get people to subscribe to your email lists, make sure your first offer is very good, includes discounts, coupons, and something of value to the visitor. Infoproducts are a great giveaway, especially if they also help the visitor to make money.
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The race is on for the consumers holiday dollars and it’s even started before Thanksgiving this year. Some businesses have gone out whole hog, remodeling their business operations with the help of a merchant online loan. Places like Wal-Mart and Target are looking to drop prices heavily to compete for the frugal shopper. However, one thing that has every retailer troubled is the trend towards last-minute holiday shopping. To counteract that possibility, stores are taking unusual measures to make sure this year, consumers buy early and more. Read the rest of this entry »

Email marketing is still the most inexpensive way to reach millions of people with your offerings. A successful email campaign does not require a business advance,  just some savvy planning. You do have to make sure you have permission to market someone via email before sending the email out. However, after that, you need to concentrate on making the pitch something so irresistible that people will be clamoring to buy your products or services. Here are a few good elements of a successful email marketing campaign.
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Advertising and good marketing are key to the development and progress of any business. It is important that as a business owner you do a good job promoting your product or service. Without this good promotion you will not be able to attract your audience into coming to you for their needs. Remember that you need to put your product/service in the public eye in order to get business. You can see this advertising and marketing process work by simply turning on the TV and observing how many things your child suddenly “has to have”. Learning about new and old advertising techniques is a great way for your small business to get exposure.

One way to advertise your business is by promotion. Promotions are a good way to slowly increase your sales by giving people a little more benefit out of purchasing your product. These benefits are viewed as incentives to buy the product. For example, buy one, get one free deals are considered incentives to purchase the product. Other promotions include coupons such as those found in grocery stores. These promotions give people reason to test out your product; and if they are already users of your product, it will give them reason to buy more. This will naturally boost sales if your promotion can make your customers believe they need more of what they already have.

Other advertising techniques are done through the media. This is the time to begin developing a media plan. Although advertising through the media can sometimes be an expensive task, it is very beneficial to the exposure of your business. Your plan will allow you to better manage the money you are going to spend on things such as radio air time, television commercials, ad space in newspapers, magazines and even your local yellow page. Your media plan can be easily stored in a ring binder and separated into sections labeled media outlets, goals, audience, strategy, budget and calendar. Keep in mind that media advertising should be approached in a very strategic manner so that you ultimately place your advertisements in the most beneficial areas.

As a business owner, you should keep in mind some tips when it comes to advertising for your company. For example, as a small business you should not advertise like a big business because you simply cannot afford it. Make sure your advertisements are focused more on selling your product/service than it is to create immediate name recognition. Things such as name recognition will come in due time. For now, keep your focus on selling.

Also, make sure you focus on what is important to your audience. Sometimes we as business owners get lost in the power of being able to make the decisions for ourselves. Don’t let it cloud your vision. You are trying to sell your product or service ,therefore, you should pay attention to what your audience wants. If you are thinking about placing an ad in a magazine, do not put the ad in a magazine that you enjoy. Instead, put the ad in a magazine that is most likely read by individuals who would be interested in your product.

It is important to keep in mind the importance of good advertising and marketing. It can help give your business the exposure it needs to ultimately increase sales. Make sure that you utilize promotions as well as the media. Remember that a media plan is necessary in order to approach your advertisements in a strategic manner. Make sure your advertisements complement the size of your business. If you own a small business, advertise accordingly and make sure you reach out directly to your audience.

With the high cost of snail mail and the need to generate more interest in your products and services, it pays to move into online email campaigns for your business. Loans are available to help you ramp up your advertising and marketing efforts, but there’s no reason you can’t do it on a shoestring also. Well run email campaigns can do a lot to boost your business success. They can help convert visitors to customers, identify new customers, and help to generate loyalty amongst your existing customer base. They’re not that difficult to implement and you can even outsource your email campaigns for very little money.

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T’is the season to be jolly, yet it can also be a stressful time for people who are worried about job losses and the economy. During the Great Depression, Proctor and Gamble managed to gain huge market share by sponsoring theater on the radio, and getting the characters to include small promotions within them for their soap products, and thus the term “soap opera” was born. It gave people during those tough times the ability to switch on the radio, and be entertained and forget their troubles for a while. After the depression, those people still remained loyal to Proctor and Gamble products because the brand became a household name. The same can be accomplished by anyone these days, if they just take advantage of the Internet to entertain and delight their customers this holiday season.

Financing A Fun Holiday Campaign

You may need some additional monies to start a fun holiday campaign, but the costs are far less if you implement it online, than if you put it on television. If you already have merchant funding services to cover small cash flow gaps, odds are you have enough to start right now. It really only takes some ingenuity, a fun idea, and a bit of social networking to entertain people. You don’t need to buy too much special equipment, maybe a web cam and a few copywriters.

Think You Tube

Every day people are entertained on YouTube by other average, ordinary, people. You can create your own YouTube video and market it online on your website and social networking sites to create buzz and interest for your holiday offerings. You can even create your own “soap opera” but use YouTube, instead of the radio, as the medium. YouTube offers a link back to the sponsor of the site, so whether you create your own, or pay someone else to be their sponsor, you are offering up entertainment that is associated with your business name.

Create Contests For Fun!

Why not create a contest that offers a nice price for the best holiday video? One company does this for the Super bowl commercials and it can quickly become a crowd favorite. There is something folksy about having your next door neighbors ads get promoted by a large company. It adds to the general appeal, and people are inspired to try to join the contest the following year in the hopes of winning too.  Set up rules for the contest that prohibit any type of content that could get you in trouble, like pirated copyright content (whether video or copyrighted music playing in the background). Make sure the contest entrants are aware of what they can and can’t use to create their videos. This way, they won’t be surprised if they’re the most popular video, but you can’t award them the prize because they’ve used copyrighted content. Find out what the proper guidelines are and advertise them on your site.

Share The Fun!

It’s not as hard to share your YouTube creations that are meant to entertain as the ones that are meant to sell someone something. There are still links and advertisements that will point people back to your site or advertise your brick-and-mortar store, but that’s not the main message of the videos. This makes it far easier to share with friends, who can instantly cause it to go viral, if the message is funny enough. Humor, especially in a recession, sells itself.

YouTube videos are easily sharable, can be commented on, and are rated too. The more you can get people involved with the video, the more likely it will start to be passed along to other people, gaining steam and exposure on social networks. You can also embed videos into popular sites like Facebook profiles, link updates, and websites. You can tweet about the video on Twitter and let those friends now that it’s online.

When you hold a contest, in general, you want to give out instructions on having people share their videos too. That way, you aren’t just publicizing one, but many videos and the one that becomes the most popular is the one that wins the prize. The popularity can be assessed by the number of subscribers, the visitors, the comments, and the ratings left behind. You should make sure you get the rights to the video that wins, so that if it is a viral video, you will have a powerful marketing tool at your disposal for a long time to come.

When you’ve been in business for a while, you probably understand the value of promoting your business offline. However, have you got the necessary knowledge to know how to do it online? It’s a whole different world, and not understanding what works and what doesn’t can be the difference between attracting customers and scaring them off, especially on social networking sites. You can set aside monies from small business loans to hire help and get things outsourced, but will you know what you need? If you have a website and are hoping that just word of mouth will lead customers to your online presence, it may surprise you to know that there are actual steps you can take to make traffic happen without relying on other people to bring their friends to your doors. It’s just a question of finding the right place to advertise online, with people in your chosen demographic, and then gently nudging them back to your site via a link.

Press Releases

Just like you would do a press release in mainstream media, you can do them online. There are websites that allow you to publish your press release and include all your contact information, not just your website URL. Many search engines place these documents higher in their search engine results period, at least when they are first released, since they are more timely information for people searching the web. You can write one press release and expose it to many different press release sites, so that you gather interest from all corners of the web without too much work.

Social Networks

You can also expose your business more by joining social networks like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. All this may take too much time to learn, so if you just want to start building a presence now, hire a social media expert to help you set up a presence on these sites, while you take care of the offline business marketing. The big thing is just getting started and once you tell your social media expert who you want to attract back to your site, they can customize your profile and get you involved with just the right people and groups to make a steady stream of people link back to you. You can post information about yourself and what you’re doing within your business in the status updates and let people know what’s going on offline through social networking.

Build A Blog

A blog is different than a website in that content is updated more frequently. It has a casual, conversational, tone and you can use it to network with other bloggers within your niche. This will help you tap into existing traffic with some credibility. People typically frequent blogs much more than websites, and they enjoy commenting on them too. This builds a community and online word of mouth, that is difficult to duplicate with just a website. It provides interactivity between visitors online and your business. You can get feedback on promotions and build excitement for your products and services by having contests promoted through the blog. List the blog with Technorati and index all your postings so that they are easily searched and found. A search box is also highly recommended, along with categories, to make it easy for people visiting to find topics of interest to them.

Outsource What You Can

Content creation for blogs, building profiles, and interacting with customers can take much time out of your day. That’s why you should seek to outsource as many of those activities as possible. You can hire ghostwriters to write blog content and press releases. These are different than social media experts who generally will set up marketing campaigns and avoid writing content. You will also need to get social media experts to set up multiple profiles to help you get started on social networking and integrate your offline sales activities with online campaigns. If you haven’t the money to fund these types of contract or freelance hires, you can get a loan to cover these temporary costs until you can move these tasks in-house, once you understand what it takes to pull off promotions online and feel comfortable taking on that role in-house. You can have an employee respond to questions on the blog or social networking sites a few times a week. Just make sure you remain active and available for people and learn how to use these types of activities to grab traffic from these areas and steer it back to your site and offers.

Online businesses are a great place to learn the art of the back end offer. Unlike a regular brick-and-mortar store, there is no friendly sales associate following up on customers to see if they can sell them more. Instead, a visitor to your site is likely to come with an idea of what they want to purchase, and whether they find what they want or not, the moment the order form completes, they’re off to another site – unless you have a planned back end offer in place.

Why Back End Offers Work

Back end offers work due to the state of mind the buyer is in when they’ve already made the decision to buy. If they’re already pushing the button to buy, they are very susceptible, at that moment, to adding more to their cart, or upgrading their offer to something even better. At that point, the money is less important, they’re not even concerned whether they’ll need a business loan later. The resistance to purchase has already been overcome. They are indicating their willingness to trust your company, when they click on that “Buy Now” button, and that also tells you that’s when they want to be presented with more offers. Just like the candy and magazines placed near the front of the cash registers at grocery stores, once a buyer is in a purchasing mood, they will be more likely to spend more without thinking about it too much.

The Up Sell and Cross Sell Online

Since you don’t have a sales associate online watching when someone places an order and is checking out, you have to place automated messages to up sell and cross sell your buyers. That means that you have to plan your lines of inventory, typically with three tiers – one low end, one mid range, and another high income range. If they buyer chooses a low end product to buy, they should be told that other similar products with more features exist, before they finalize the sale. After all, they’re not standing in a store where they can look at multiple items at once on a shelf. They usually type in what they want in a search engine on your site, and it pulls up that item. If you don’t tell them other offers exist, then they won’t know. If they would have liked the upgrade, but just didn’t know it existed, are you’ve lost a valuable opportunity to increase your bottom line because you weren’t prepared properly for the sales event.

Another way to make money is by offering compatible items upon check out, with a promotional or limited time offer. For instance, if someone buys a pair of shoes off your site, why not offer them three sets of socks for a special deal, just for adding them at that time to their cart? It doesn’t take special insight to figure out people who are buying shoes want socks. However, without an automated message that allows them to click and add socks upon checkout, they would have to go into your site again and specifically pick that item. Instead, have that option available upon your electronic checkout for specific products and their compatible partners.

The Limited Time Offer

This back end offer works well on a thank you page, after a person has bought something, checked out, and is receiving confirmation on their order. To thank them for patronizing your online store, you can offer them an exceptional limited time offer that is only valid until they move off the thank you page. Let them know that once they navigate away from the thank you page, the offer will no longer be available the price will go back to whatever it was regularly. If it’s matched to the items that have been purchased and can help the visitor in some way, you’ll make more money this way, just by programming a limited time back end offer on your thank you page.

It’s Not What You Sell, But How Much

Back end offers don’t require special merchandise to work. They don’t require special knowledge to implement. They do require attention to your demographics buying habits and a bit of awareness to ask for the sale at the right time. The key here is not about inventory, it’s about increasing your sales from that one person who is already buying. Let’s face it, it’s much easier to get someone who has previously made the decision to buy from you, to buy again. New customers are far more resistant to making purchases, as they don’t have any reason to trust you. That’s why back end offers work to market people who are already more likely to buy and increase your sales from purchases at the point of check out.