Tips from Wednesday, May 5, 2009 The Small Business tips today will be about direct mail: an immediate response media – people either respond or trash immediately. To succeed w/ direct mail advertising, you will have to be aggressive. Don’t forget you have to sell. List benefits, ask for the sale. Be aggressive with descriptive writing. Be graphic. Be visual. Biggest benefit you offer that makes you different from competition: unique selling position. Make it stand out so that YOU stand out. The REAL key to success: testing. Test each part until you find the best possible combination that achieves the highest profit. Daily Overview: The only thing that counts with direct mail advertising in the end is the response rate. Sell. Test. Test. Sell. [Read Full Article]

Tips from Wednesday, April 22, 2009 The Small Business tips today will be about print advertising. It’s still a valuable means to promote your business! Newspaper advertisements are a great way to target a local population. Write a letter to your newspaper editor. A personal story or recommendation is your best newspaper advertisement. Direct mail is still effective if you're clear, concise and offer a respectable incentive along with it. Try yellow pages and magazines for promotions planned well in advance.  Daily Overview: Use the old, tried but true methods of print marketing in a way that addresses this instant-results society. [Read Full Article]

Sure, we all know that with the threats it poses, the way it slows down networks and the scams that are often involved, spam is, if not entirely evil, at least heavily shadowed by the Dark Side. We also know that thanks to the stand-up folks at two major ISPs, we are enjoying a pretty profound break in the amount of spam being crammed into our inboxes. Where my Gmail spam filters used to catch over 100 unwanted emails a day, that number is now down to a dozen or so. That is pretty dramatic and thinking about it begs the question: Should the same thing be done with snail-mail and phone solicitation? Mailman Steve, a Human Spam Filter The question arises because of a story that came over the transom today. Steve Padgett was a mail carrier living in Raleigh, North Carolina. For a number of health-related reasons, the 58-year old Padgett could not keep up with the demands of the job and so cut corners by not sorting or delivering third-class mail. In fact, postal inspectors... [Read Full Article]

Politics and Government Obama Ought to Look at the Effect of Entrepreneurial Immigrants According to U.S. News & World Report's Matt Bandyk, immigration will be an important small business issue for the next administration. Immigrants are 30% more likely to start businesses and they make up 16.7% of all new business owners in the country. Democrats at Work to Tap Bailout for AutomakersWASHINGTON (AP) - Congressional Democrats are marshaling support for a rescue package to pump $25 billion in emergency loans to U.S. automakers in exchange for a government ownership stake in Detroit's car companies. Economics and Labor Issues [Read Full Article]