Category Archive for Frugal Marketing

Does Visibility Marketing Ever Serve a Purpose? Part 2: Frugal/Green Marketing Tip, July 2010

Last month, we looked at the incredible effectiveness of visibility marketing in advancing social causes. Can it also advance a for-profit business, and do so without buying enormous amounts of expensive advertising? Can small businesses take advantage of this kind of messaging?

I’d give the answer a qualified yes. Branding/visibility campaigns can work for small businesses, especially those with a social and/or environmental message. And now that a branding campaign can drive traffic to a website that reveals the whole story, it’s easier to pull one off than it would have been 20 years ago.

A large-scale but very counterculture example is Read the rest of this entry »

Does Visibility Marketing Ever Serve a Purpose? Part 1: Frugal/Green Marketing Tip, June 2010

I used to be really scornful of “visibility advertising”: campaigns that had only a branding purpose, didn’t try to sell anything and in many cases didn’t even try to pass on a message. For most of my career, I thought this kind of marketing was only the province of corporate giants with unlimited budgets: companies like Coke, Nike, and McDonalds.

But ten years ago, I had an experience that caused me to change my mind. We were in the middle of a deep, multichannel campaign to block a particularly nasty housing development going all the way to the ridgeline of our local mountain (right next to a state park on the next mountain over, whose gorgeous view would be ruined). In addition to the press releases, the media campaign, the lobbying, the massive turnout at public hearings, and all the other tactics we were using, we did lawn signs and bumper stickers.They just said “Save the Mountain” (the name of our group) and gave our website. Of course, this was not only branding the organization, but also the idea that the mountain could actually be saved; our action mission was right there in the organization’s name.

One day, some of our canvassers were working a local farmers market when who should stroll by but the developer and his wife. And she turned to our people and said, Read the rest of this entry »

Two Strategies to Increase Advertising ROI: Frugal/Green Marketing Tip, May 2010

In advertising, you pay for every inch of space, every word, or every second of time. So how, in this very limited canvas, can you get your money’s worth? Here are two easy strategies you’ll really want to implement whenever you’re paying for an ad, and you probably want to include even on marketing pieces other than ads (such as press releases and brochures)—because they could increase your return by orders of magnitude, without significantly increasing your costs. Read the rest of this entry »

April 2010 Frugal/Green Marketing Tip

Leverage Your Public Speaking

Long-time readers of this column will know that I think speaking is one of the most powerful tools in the frugal and ethical marketing toolkit. One of the reasons is that it’s so easy to make other good things happen when you have a speaking gig set up.

Among the many possibilities, here are some that I’ve used to increase the impact of my speeches. Note that many of these need some advance preparation. Don’t expect to do all of this for every speech, but think about which ones make sense for a particular gig…

Click here to continue reading this tip

Hear and Meet
  • The live call with John Ritskowitz (Marketing Medic) and Jay Conrad Levinson (Guerrilla Marketing), originally scheduled for March, was rescheduled for medical reasons to Tuesday, April 6, 3pm ET/noon PT. John is actually coming up from his home an hour away (we’ve never met), and bringing some high end audio AND video equipment, so this may be a very high-fidelity call. It should be pretty exciting and I hope you’ll join us as we discuss Green Guerrilla Marketing. And there will be some extra excitement in the air, as it’s the last few hours of Passover, and I’ll be eagerly looking forward to Bread Day, which starts at sundown :-) To join the call sign up free at https://www.johnritz.com/blog/guerrilla-marketing-in-your-living-room/ We’ll be giving away autographed copies of the book and other goodies on the event, so don’t delay…
  • April 15, 9 pm ET/6 pm PT: Tweleseminar, “Communicate the Value in Your Values.” Justin Sachs, justin (at) justinsachscompanies.com
  • April 24, I’ll be exhibiting at the Sustainability Expo in downtown Amherst, MA: CiccarelloS (at) amherstma.gov
  • April 25, I’ll be speaking on collaborating with a co-author at the American Society of Journalists and Authors conference in New York. https://asja.org/wc/2010/ (using my new co-authored book, Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green, as a case study)April 29, 3 pm ET/noon PT, I’ll be presenting on Grassroots Book Marketing Strategies for Stephanie Chandler’s virtual Nonfiction Book Writers Conference: Contact janica (at) authoritypublishing.com
  • May 8, I’ll be speaking once again on book marketing at CAPA University in Hartford, CT: https://www.aboutcapa.com/capa_university_writers_conferen.htm
  • May 11, 8 pm ET/5 pm PT, I will once again be speaking on “Create Value from Your Values” for Hilton Johnson’s teleseminar series (and this means you will once again get a series of mailings from me about Hilton’s health coaching program and about the other calls he’s hosting in May).
  • May 14, 12 pm ET, I’ll be interviewed on Solo Talk with Donna Amos.  https://www.blogtalkradio.com/solotalk
  • June 9, I’ll be interviewed again for the Guerrilla Marketing Association’s weekly calls–this time by Alexandru Israil from Romania. Contact: alexandru.israil (at) gmail.com
  • June 15, I’ll be Linda MacKenzie’s guest on the Creative Health and Spirit Show, on HealthyLife.Net radio. Linda has interviewed me a few times in the past, and is actually the CEO of this Internet radio network.
  • It looks pretty likely that I’ll be speaking on Green Marketing at SolarFest, sometime the weekend of July 16-18, in Tinmouth, Vermont. This is a wonderful event; I attended several years ago, and you can read about it here: https://www.frugalfun.com/solarfest.html
  • September 19, I speak at Live Green! in Norwalk, CT. Contact: sweicker (at) sbweventsgroup.com
  • October 2, I’m speaking at the second annual Self-Publishing Book Expo in New York City, https://selfpubbookexpo.com/
  • October 12 at 7pm ET/4 pm PT: My third annual presentation to the MUSE Online Writers Conference. This time, Selling a Self-Published Book to a Traditional Publisher
Friends Who Want to Help
  • There’s no better way to get traditional press (a/k/a mainstream media) covering you than to answer inquiries from reporters looking for sources. I’ve used this strategy to be cited multiple times in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Entrepreneur, even Woman’s Day (among many, many others). I subscribe to every service I know about that connects journalists and sources. My old friend Steve Harrison from Radio TV Interview Report has just launched a new one, with no charge for leads. https://bit.ly/bD6WzG (affiliate link). Given how much it costs to advertise in RTIR, this is a real bargain, at zero cost.
  • There’s an extraordinary new book that has just been published, one that will show you exactly how the billionaires/superstars and geniuses of our world get the results that they get. An international bestseller within days of its release, The Leader Who Had No Title: A Modern Fable on Real Success in Business and in Life (Simon & Schuster) is the game-changing book by top leadership expert Robin Sharma, who’se books (Including The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari) have transformed the lives of millions of people worldwide. For the first time, Robin shares the proprietary success formula that he’s shared with his billionaire coaching clients and companies like NIKE, FedEx, IBM, Microsoft and GE. In “The Leader Who Had No Title”, you will discover exactly how to awaken your inner leader, play at wow in all you do, unleash massive amounts of excellence and productivity, get to world-class in your work, build an unbeatable mindset and really win in these turbulent times. This book will blow the doors off your past ways of thinking, performing and being. “If you want to operate at the level of WOW, be an exceptional leader and live full out-buy this book.” – Darren Hardy, publisher, SUCCESS magazine “The Leader Who Had No Title is a game-changing book…get ready for an AMAZING new life!” – Marci Shimoff, New York Times bestselling author of “Happy for No Reason” Buy this book April 6th (it’s less than $20!) and you’ll get over 100 incredible bonus gifts from bestselling authors (worth over $1,057) and a chance to win one of 24 iPods. To puchase, visit www.theleaderwhohadnotitle.com on April 6th.
  • Carolyn Howard-Johnson, award-winning novelist and author of the How to Do It Frugally series of how-to books for writers, is doing an October writing retreat in Rome!  Even this far out, she’s down to just a couple of spaces. Want more info? Write to her at hojonews (at) aol.com

-> New on the Sites, April 2010

-> Media Coverage of Shel

-> Which of Shel’s Books is Right for You?

-> Administrative Information

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Published monthly since May, 1997 by Shel Horowitz
16 Barstow Lane, Hadley, MA 01035 USA
413/586-2388

Leverage Your Public Speaking: Shel Horowitz’s Frugal Marketing Tip, April 2010

Long-time readers of this column will know that I think speaking is one of the most powerful tools in the frugal and ethical marketing toolkit. One of the reasons is that it’s so easy to make other good things happen when you have a speaking gig set up.

Among the many possibilities, here are some that I’ve used to increase the impact of my speeches. Note that many of these need some advance preparation. Don’t expect to do all of this for every speech, but think about which ones make sense for a particular gig: Read the rest of this entry »

Getting Lots of Other People to Sell Your New Product, Part 2

6. Create an Irresistible Product! Once again, these partners have only a limited number of products they can promote—so a smart thing to do is to make a product they’ll fall in love with. The more they personally think the product is fabulous, the more they’ll want to promote it. Your product should make people’s lives better when they use it! At least since my third book came out in 1993, my books have gotten extremely positive feedback from readers. People constantly praise their practicality, their approachable language, and their easy-to-implement yet radically different concepts. This newest book, in my opinion, is far and away the best book I’ve written yet. It has the potential to actually change the business culture in our society.

7. Sweeten the Appeal with Social Proof—and Let Others Spread It Not only does this book have the imprimatur of one of the country’s most successful publishers of business books, not only does it carry the name of the single most successful author in the field, but the book is also going to press with more than 50 endorsements, some of them quite prominent. Not to mention a foreword by another celebrity author, Stephen M.R. Covey, son of the 7 Habits guy (also named Stephen Covey) and author in his own right of the amazing (and relevant to my book) bestseller The Speed of Trust. In short, we’ve made it a no-brainer to believe that this is a book worth reading, because the experts have already certified it. And throughout the marketing, we have subtle little messages that it’s ok, even encouraged, to pass it on. For instance, the launch email invites recipients to pass it on.

8. Remember to Implement the Traditional Marketing Strategies While I expect to gain most of my sales through the power of endorsements from my partners, we’re also doing a lot of the lower-cost pieces of traditional marketing:

  • Notifications to the thousands of people who have bought one of my previous books directly from me, or from Jay
  • A teleseminar, publicized to both of our lists
  • Press releases sent directly to about 700 journalists and book reviewers, review copies to some of them, press releases also posted through a wire service and to several press release distribution sites
  • A launch event at a local bookstore, and hopefully one in New York later on
  • Announcements on various social media platforms and discussion groups
  • Postcards with the front cover on one side, a short marketing message and room for a personal note and/or mailing address on the other side
  • Public speaking
  • Media interviews
  • 9. Build the Buzz For months, I’ve been dropping hints (not repeating the exact same message, but creating different messages) about this book everywhere I can. I’ve even had a form up to collect e-mail addresses for advance notification. Since it often takes multiple contacts to move people to action, when they get the announcement that the book is finally out, I’m hoping for a lot of “oh, yeah, I’ve been hearing about this and I need it.”

    10. Have the Infrastructure In Place We set a week-long window for the partner mailings, so people could mail on their own schedules (and told them they could still mail even if they missed the window). We bought inexpensive, robust software for managing password-protected membership sites that include affiliate programs (yes, this is an affiliate link). We thoroughly tested the forms to capture bonuses and load them into the bonus package with minimal work from us (we see and approve it so nobody fills it with crap, and then off it goes). We put up two new websites, one for the book and one for the membership program. We talked to the charity partner ahead of time. Ideally, that phase would be a couple of months,but we had to compress it into a couple of weeks.

    Getting Lots of Other People to Sell Your New Product

    The secret to a successful online product launch is no secret at all: It’s to extend your reach well beyond your own network, by recruiting other people to get behind the launch and spread your offer around. This is the keystone of most Internet-millionaire fortunes, and a very different way of thinking from what’s typically found in the off-line world.

    Experts who run these campaigns or who sell how-to packages charge many thousands of dollars. I charge a whole lot less than that to tell you step by step the 10 steps I’m incorporating into my own launch campaign for my just-released eighth book, Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green: Winning Strategies to Improve Your Profits and Your Planet (co-authored with Jay Conrad Levinson) , which I’m hoping will reach five million people. Here we go: Read the rest of this entry »

    Blog Platforms for Stable Websites: Monthly Frugal Marketing Tip, December, 2009

    Reminder: This is the LAST free issue of this newsletter. Starting January, it will be by subscription only, and the archives will be available only to members of the Clean and Green Club or those who subscribe to both the newsletters and the archives. Sign up here for a subscription or a club membership: https://www.thecleanandgreenclub.com

    Should You Use a Blog to Host Your Non-Blog Website?

    Blogs have several advantages over traditional websites. To name a few:

    • They get into the search engines almost instantly (I once did a Google search for something I’d blogged about ten minutes earlier, and my blog post was there, on the first page of the results)
    • It’s easy to increase the reach of a blog by feeding it to your social networking profiles
    • You can set your blog to automatically ping Technorati and other blog content aggragators, as well as pretty much all of the major social networks (Facebook, Twitter,LinkedIn, Plaxo, and I believe MySpace) so people will find you quickly if you blog about something topical and hot
    • Blogs are incredibly easy to update; you don’t need to wait around for your webmaster to post content, just hit the “Publish” button
    • Most blogs include a comment feature, which can create interactive discussion and a much greagter profile for your blog (unfortunately, the spammers figured this one out–so you always have to moderate the comments, approving the relevant ones and ditching the junk–plug-ins such as Akismet make this much easier, though they’re far from foolproof)

    With all these advantages, why not use a blog to put up an ordinary non-blog website? WordPress, my favorite of the blog platforms, is available for free, updated regularly, and supported by a plethora of third-party add-ons. And you can host your WordPress site on your own domain, which I stongly recommend.

    For the last several sites I’ve put up, I’ve had my webmaster install WordPress on my domain’s server (from what I understand, a matter of only a couple of clicks anyway), select and customize one of the myriad “themes” (templates) available, and then, depending on the site, either I put up content or she does. Here are some examples of sites we’ve done in WordPress:

    In short, the WordPress blogging platform offers a great deal of flexibility in design, ease of use, interactivity, and good search engine “juice,” and is appropriate for lots of websites, not just blogs. Something to think about as you put up more sites (I think I have 14 right now).

    Another Recommended Book: Trust Agents, by Chris Brogan and Julien Smith

    Another Recommended Book: Trust Agents: Using the Web to Build Influence, Improve Reputation, and Earn Trust, by Chris Brogan and Julien Smith

    Of the dozen or so books I’ve read on Internet-based communities (and their application for marketing), Trust Agents stands head-and-shoulders above the rest. Normally when I review a book, I take a page of notes, maybe two. In the smallest handwriting I can still read, I had more than half a page by the time I got to the end of Chapter 1! By the time I was done, I had four full pages.

    A generation younger than me and a generation older than those who grew up with computers from the womb on, Brogan and Smith bring insights from Read the rest of this entry »

    Revisiting Postal Direct Mail, Part 2: Holding Down Costs: Frugal Marketing Tip, Nov. '09

    Postal direct mail isn’t cheap, and if you only have a two percent response (considered pretty good, believe it or not), that means a mailing that costs you one dollar per envelope costs you fifty dollars per sale! A one percent response costs $100 per sale. Big ouch!

    Here are a few ideas to bring down the costs of those mailings:

    • Organize your own Val-Pak-style co-op—get a few other businesses to share the cost, and postage drops dramatically (hint: Your response rate will be much higher if the offers are related in some way, and the list is targeted—so, for instance, a florist, caterer, and DJ could mail together to a list of couples that registered for an upcoming bridal show)
    • Use postcards instead of envelope-mailings, and give your URL prominently on the postcard (with a reason to visit)
    • Let your own computer do some of the postal processing (sorting, bar-coding, etc.) and take advantage of postal discounts
    • Enclose a flier when you’re mailing something else already (such as filling an order)
    • Partner with others to enclose your fliers when they mail, and vice versa
    • Trade lists with others who reach a similar customer profile

    By the way, I have an extensive section on how to implement these and other postal mailing cost-savers in my fifth book, Grassroots Marketing: Getting Noticed in a Noisy World (which was a Finalist for Foreword magazine’s Book of the Year Award)

    About the timing of this article

    In October, 2008, I devoted this newsletter to thinking strategically about when to use postal direct mail—and I promised a part 2, on reducing direct-mail costs. And then I guess I forgot to look at my notes the following month. I never lack for ideas, so I went on and wrote about a bunch of other things. Today, I went to the archives and saw that Part 1 staring at me, with no Part 2. But I try to keep my promises, so here, a year later, is the long-awaited article.