Media, the Internet, Yellow Pages, and Your Business

If you are reading this article, chances are you could use a little extra money. With the advent of the internet and the migration of advertising dollars from print to electronic (and this time, it's the real thing, I swear! Not one of those 1999 tech busts!...Seriously!) If you own a small business today, you look at many advertising mediums. The majority of these mediums lump themselves into 2 categories, creative or direct.

Creative has always been the crapshoot for the small business owner. A sales rep walks into your business, espousing the greater good of television or radio advertising, quickly moves past the ratings, viewers etc and into the sexiness of hearing your name at 6:57am Monday, Thursday and Saturday if you are watching station X or listening to station Y. If this product didn't work, a Super Bowl commercial price tag wouldn't make headlines every December (for how much Geico paid) or late February (to hear which is most memorable). The key with creative is frequency. If you have realistic budget for frequency, you can make the phone ring with a creative campaign. If you have that budget you probably aren't reading this article. Realistically speaking, you don't have a ton of money to risk on creative advertising effectiveness, haven't backed it up with a call to action, and you need, pound for pound, the least amount of advertising money possible, with the most phone calls?

Raising Funds For Your Nonprofit Using An Annual Direct Mail Program

A good annual direct mail solicitation program can produce unrestrictive operating funds for your nonprofit organization year after year. And such an annual direct mail program, if done right, should produce more funding for your organization each year.

There are very few nonprofit organizations that couldn't benefit from an effective, and ongoing direct mail solicitation program. If you're currently using annual direct mail solicitations and would like to use it more effectively, or if you're not using this form of fundraising but would like to set up such a program. Then here are some steps to help you do this much more successfully:

Heard A Good Radio Ad Lately? Neither Have We

To many ad agencies, radio is considered advertising's ugly stepchild. It's not sexy like television and is treated as a necessary evil with little effort put into it. Unfortunately, that's exactly what the listener ends up hearing.

What advertisers and their ad agencies have forgotten is that radio truly is a "theater for the mind". Anything you can dream up can be in a radio spot. Elephants doing the back stroke in your soup? No problem. Landing on planet Neptune and finding the alien of your dreams? Done. Recreating scenes like that on television would cost a fortune for the computer graphics alone, not to mention the animal trainer.