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In This Issue:

What Every Entrepreneur Should Know... 
About How To Promote Their Small Business

Run A City Directory For Your Canadian Hometown.
No Large upfront fees. keep 100% of profits
www.canadacityguide.com
 

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I'm back! I hope you have all had a great summer. As far as I am concerned, it's always too short. Kids are back at school now and leaves are changing colours, and I am ready for a new beginning. It's that time of year where one can re-focus and channel one's energies to either begin new projects or revisit old and neglected ones.

It's also a great time to step back and evaluate your existing marketing strategies to see what has worked and what hasn't. In this week's issue, Charlie Cook, through his article, "Is Your Marketing Full of Holes?", enables us look at what we are doing and what can be done to have a more effective campaign. Enjoy!
 

For reading this week's issue, I would like to offer the first three members who contact me, a free sponsor ad. The first will receive a free TOP Sponsor ad, the second member- the Middle Sponsor ad and the third member- the Bottom Sponsor ad. The winners will be announced in our next week's issue.

Lastly, be sure to support your fellow subscribers by
reviewing the offers and opportunities in this week's issue. They may be offering the services that you need to succeed in your own business.

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Canadian Internet Retailing Report
Electronic Commerce for Canadian Retailers
Internet Advertising Bureau of Canada
Canadian Institute of Marketing
GDSourcing - Research & Retrieval

Canadian Traffic Generators:

Canadian Business Exchange
NEW! Covers all exchange types: banner/traffic/start/exit/popup and more...

The Link Express-Canadian Startpage Exchange 
(10,000 free credits)
Finally an exchange program dedicated to Canadian websites.

Canadian Directories and Search Engines:

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Is Your Marketing Full of Holes?
By Charlie Cook

You wouldn't try to collect water in a bucket that leaked or
catch fish with a torn net, but that is what many service
professionals and small businesses do. They work hard to
attract clients and customers but too often their marketing
is full of holes.

The biggest holes in small businesses' marketing efforts are
in lead generation. For those that don't know it already,
identifying, attracting and building a steady stream of
prospects is the number one marketing task for growing a
service business. You need to know who is interested in
your products and services in order to market to them,
again and again.

Every small business has some sort of lead generation
strategy, whether its just handing out business cards,
sending out press releases, writing articles, asking for
referrals or, in more recent years, putting up a web site.
The problem is that many of these approaches are used
sporadically not systematically, and techniques aren't in
place to capture the contacts made.

Interested prospects are missed, or if contact is made,
are pushed away by your materials, web site or phone
system. The result is that hundreds and thousands of
potential prospects fall through cracks in your marketing
and you can't profit from their business. If your lead
generation strategy and systems aren't generating
dozens or hundreds of new leads each week then your
marketing strategy has a big gap in it.  Four common
holes in marketing are:

1. The Lack of Compelling Content
Whether it's the title of your web site and the description
shown in the search engines, or the title of your article
and the first paragraph, your content needs to pull in
prospects. Too often marketing materials are written from
the sellers' point of view instead of the prospects'.
Compelling content captures prospects' attention by
focusing on their problems. Without good copy prospects
won't be moved to become clients.

- Is your marketing content compelling from prospects'
perspective?

- Does it lead with information about prospects' problems
and concerns?

2. Limited Reach
If you could contact all the people who need and want your
services, you might want to.  Using advertising, direct mail or cold calling to do this is in most cases cost prohibitive. PR, writing articles and having a web site are some low cost ways of getting attention. The objective with any of these is to reach as many people as possible in order to find qualified leads.

Despite effort put into creating marketing materials, building web sites and writing articles, independent professionals rarely get the visibility they want. Articles are only read by a handful of people and web sites are hard to find.

To leverage the time and money you put into your marketing
materials, articles, and web sites, you need to do everything
you can to help people find them. This sounds obvious, but
most service professionals write an article and just post it on their web site or send it to a few clients. With hundreds of online ezines and offline publications looking for content, you could be putting an article in front of tens of thousands of people instead of just a few.

The same is true of search engine listings. Most people can't
even find their own sites in the search engines. Help the
search engines put your web site on the first page or two for
your keywords and you'll increase your exposure and reach
hundreds of new prospects each week. Depending on your
business, this is easier then most people realize and will
extend the reach of your marketing dramatically.

- How many people per week see the marketing copy or
articles that are meant to get them to make contact?

- What are you doing to increase this number?

3. Missing Motivators
Grabbing prospects' attention is the first step in lead
generation; moving them to make contact, visit your web site
or call your company and add themselves to your target list
is the next step. When you write an article or send out a
mailing, provide an incentive for prospects to take action.
Offer a workshop or free report.

- Does your marketing motivate prospects to come to you and
give you their contact information?

4. Malfunctioning or Non-Existent Systems
If your marketing is working, prospects will call your office
or stop by your web site. You want to make it is as easy as
possible for prospects to get in touch with you, and you
want to collect their contact information. Again, this sounds
obvious, but how many times have you been frustrated by
menu -driven answering systems that didn't list the item
you called about? (Or made you go through too many steps
to find it?) Or a web site with no name, email address or
phone number of a person who could answer your questions.
And many phone systems and web sites aren't set up to
capture visitors' contact information.

- Do you have automated systems that make it easy for
prospects to contact your company?

- Do you have automated systems that make it easy for
prospects to give you their contact information?

Marketing involves generating leads, converting them to clients and reselling to clients. If you're not attracting the number of customers and clients you want, make sure your marketing strategy isn't full of holes.

2003 © In Mind Communications, LLC. All rights reserved.


==============================================================
The author, Marketing Coach, Charlie Cook, helps
independent professionals and small business owners who
are struggling to attract more clients. To get a copy
of the free marketing guide, '7 Steps to Get More
Clients and Grow Your Business' visit
www.charliecook.net or write ccook@charliecook.net
==============================================================

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For most people, getting high-quality targeted visitors
to their site is probably one of the "hardest" things to
do ... unfortunately it's also the most important.

The reason it's difficult for most small businesses and
online marketers is that the majority of popular site
promotion strategies either take up A LOT of time, cost
a lot of money, or are too risky. Right?

Well, I want to let you know about a new, fully-automated traffic-generation system that can send 1000s of targeted prospects to your site, every single day, absolutely FREE!

http://www.trafficswarm.com

Would you believe that this new system is:

-> 100% Free! - Always has been, and always will be
-> Automated - 5 minutes to set it up, then forget it
-> Targeted - you'll get only real, targeted traffic
-> "Viral" - your traffic will increase exponentially

I thought it was too good to be true at first ... but
after testing it out, the results have been extremely
profitable. And the feedback so far has been great:

"Holy *#@% ... this is really amazing! I never thought
something free could bring so much traffic. Truthfully,
it seems to be working better than most of my paid ads."

Anyway, do us both a favor and check it out ASAP. It's
still pretty new and you will benefit even more if you
create your FREE account now before most people join.

http://www.trafficswarm.com

Give it a try and let me know what you think ...
 

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1.Outside a muffler shop: "No appointment necessary, we hear you coming."
2.In a veterinarians waiting room: "Be back in 5 minutes, Sit ! Stay!"
3.On the door of a computer store: "Out for a quick byte."
4.In a restaurant window: "Don't stand there and be hungry, come on in and get fed up."
5.In the front yard of a funeral home: "Drive carefully, we'll wait."

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"Another great ezine my dear friend! I wanna go sailing!!!! That is something I have NEVER done believe it or not. You write with such beauty that I could almost "feel" and "see" exactly what you did. (LOL)  You truly do have such a way with words. It must be that Canadian accent <giggle>"

EJ
Rainy Days Safelist
http://rainydays.bizzynews.com/  

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"Great new look for the ezine, love it and I like the article by C.J. and the Just for Laughs joke LOL."    

Lise Galipeau
Women's Corner Ezine
http://womenscorner.com

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Your opinions and comments about this ezine are always welcome. Did you learn something new in this issue? Is there a topic you would like to see covered? Do you see any improvements to be made? Sections dropped, others added? 
We want to know!!

Send them here:
editor@canadianbusinessmarketingezine.net

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Disclaimer: The Canadian$Business Marketing eZine
does not endorse and is not responsible for
advertisements submitted by subscribers.
We recommend placing only ads for programs
or products that you personally know and trust.

To submit your articles:
articles@canadianbusinessmarketingezine.net

To browse our ezine archives:
http://www.canadianbusinessmarketingezine.net/archives.html

Thank you for reading this issue of the
Canadian$Business Marketing eZine.

If you found it useful, why not send it to
three of your closest friends? Don't have friends?
How about your clients or business associates?
Recommend it by clicking here:
http://www.recommend-it.com/l.z.e?s=877012

If you have any questions or comments, please feel free
to contact me.
Until next time, have a successful week!

Warmest regards,

Marisa Ramondo - Editor & Publisher
editor@canadianbusinessmarketingezine.net
http://www.canadianbusinessmarketingezine.net

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