Inexpensive tips for marketing your small business

These days more small businesses are going to be tempted to slash their marketing budgets to help cover costs.  But then how do you reach potential new customers?  And how do you plan to keep the customers you already have?  Read on and I’ll give you my ideas on how to attract and retain customers and grow your business on a shoestring budget.

Attracting New Customers. In order for your business to thrive in this economy you’re going to have be smarter about how you reach new clientèle.  Before you shell out big bucks for an eyesore billboard or TV commercial that will probably get fast-forwarded in a DVR think about other ways you can get your message across to your customers.  Consumers are increasingly inundated with media messages so try to come up with something that your customers will appreciate, set you apart from your competition, and make your message stick.

We usually need to be exposed to a media message at least seven times before it gets stored in our long term memory, so put your brand on something your customers will use regularly or when they will be needing your service.

For example: Read the rest of this entry »

Are you gambling or investing?

Whether they admit it or not most people are speculators.  What’s the difference?

Speculators buy because a stock is going up and sell because a stock is going down.

Investors believe they are a becoming a part owner in a company when they purchase its stock and shop as carefully for securities as many people do for cars.

Speculators try to ride a stock price to the top and guess when to jump off, and bail as soon as they see the first signs of decline.

Investors are in it for the long haul and understand even though the stock price may fluctuate over time average net return is positive.

The chart below shows the Dow Jones Industrial Average over the last 100 years  If you zoom in and look the average over a shorter period of time it looks much scarier, but when you back up and look at how it’s performed over the last century you can see the average has grown exponentially. Read the rest of this entry »

Stocks for this economy - Part 3

In the first article we discussed how to use finance.yahoo.com to research market sectors, examined the financial ratios of a few interesting stocks, and used moneycentral.msn.com to do a quick technical analysis of six stocks.  We narrowed our search down to sectors that should be relatively safe during the economic downturn so we looked at Drug Stores, Discount Variety Stores, Consumer Services and Auto Parts Stores in the Services sector, and Major Drug Manufacturers in the Health Care Sector. Read the rest of this entry »

Give yourself a $1,500 gift

What if you could hop into the Delorean, fire up the flux capacitor, and go back to the future 10 years and give yourself $1,500?  Apart from the time travel this is entirely possible thanks to the power of compound interest.  Investing $50 each month and getting as little as 6% interest on your investments will net you $1,500 in 10 years time.  I put off investing for years because I had always heard I needed at least $10,000 to start my portfolio.  And needless to say whenever I would get close to my goal something would always get in the way, some home repair, medical bill, etc.  I knew what dollar cost averaging was but wasn’t disciplined enough to consistently put money away each month.  There were also commission fees to consider and $50 or $100 just didn’t seem like enough to invest and besides, there was always next month.

Read the rest of this entry »

Search engine listing made easy

Now that you have your new website you need to let the world know how to get there.  You can go to each search engine individually, pay for someone to do search engine optimization (SEO), or go to http://www.SelfPromotion.com and fill out a few forms and let the Tooter web submission tool do the hard work for you.

Robert Woodhead, the website’s creator (and also the programmer behind one of my all-time favorite games, Wizardry II), gladly accepts donations to support his website and all his hard work but you can try out Tooter for free. Read the rest of this entry »

6 stocks for this economy - Part 2

The purpose of this exercise is to highlight companies that should benefit from the current economic downturn, which is why our portfolio is heavy in the Services sector.  If this was a portfolio with real dollars I would weed out two or three of the less attractive stocks and replace them with something from the Basic Materials sector, like a gold or silver company or ETF, something from the Conglomerates sector like General Electric (GE), and a foreign ETF to take advantage of the international market (I’ve liked the South American ETF ILF for a number of years now).

The next company we’ll look at is Dollar Tree Inc. (DLTR).  Dollar Tree fits our profile of companies that should be attractive to thrifty consumers and has solid financials and an attractive stock chart.  Dollar Tree is the fourth largest company in this sector by market capitalization at $4.4B, they have the highest quarterly year-on-year revenue growth at 11.9%, the second highest quarterly year-on-year earnings growth at 51.8%, the PEG ratio is the lowest of the sector leaders at 1.02 meaning the stock is more undervalued than the others, and the P/E ratio is one of the lower in the group at 16.79 meaning it’s not overvalued. Read the rest of this entry »

To invest or not to invest

A little over a year ago the Dow Jones Industrial Average Index was over 10,300; now it’s below 9,500.  Not a good testimonial to the wealth building strategy of investing in companies whose stocks follow the DJIA.  But what if this were Ebay?  If you were following an auction that mysteriously became cheaper and could give you an opportunity to resell the product for a profit would you buy it?

Most of us would bid on the auction if we thought we were going to get a good deal, whether we actually wanted the thing or not.  Same thing with mall or discount store sales – how many times have you or your spouse came home and said “but it was on sale”?

Hedge fund managers and big investors are snatching up similar deals in the stock market while stocks are cheaper than they’ll ever be for a long time.  For example, if you had invested in a boring blue chip stock like Proctor and Gamble (PG) six months ago you would have made 17% on your investment – not bad, considering we’re in a recession and the stock market is the last place you should put your money.  There are simple strategies we can all follow that will ensure no matter what the market conditions are you can still make money in the long run. Read the rest of this entry »