My (virtual) million dollars

If you haven’t tried it yet head on over to UpDown.com and sign up for their free stock market game.  The trading simulation is extremely realistic and they give you $1 mee-lee-un dollars to play with.  It’s like fantasy football for stocks, and if that wasn’t incentive enough they have a monthly contest where the winners get a shot at $3,000 in real money for managing their virtual money well.

The rules are:

- Be on the site on or before the 7th of each month to be automatically entered,

- Perform better than the S&P 500 during the contest period (currently 4.93%), Read the rest of this entry »

2010 Jaguar XJ

I received an email from Mark in Gaborone, Botswana, last weekend asking for help developing an economical marketing strategy for selling the Jaguar XJ.  They’ve set a budget of about $10,000, have 5-6 Jaguars at the Volvo/Jaguar/Ford/Mazda/Volkswagen/Audi dealership at any given time, and sell about 2 each month.

I think a great way for Mark to reach out to his previous customers and attract new customers without blowing his budget would be to create a Jaguar owners’ club.  The dealership could organize monthly activities for members and their families, giving them an opportunity to socialize with fellow enthusiasts and show off their cars. The meetings could be held at different public place each month, like restaurants, shopping malls, etc., providing those locations with additional customers and a little free publicity.  This would also give the dealership an opportunity each month to show off their cars to potential new customers.  Read the rest of this entry »

Marketing on a shoe string budget

I just received an email from Aditya in Bombay, India asking for help marketing his  website design company.  He read my article “Small business marketing on a shoe string budget” and is looking for similar suggestions.

I think the most important thing Aditya and his co-workers need to do is demonstrate the value and importance of an excellent business website for their potential customers, not just a pretty-to-look-at website but one that is exceptionally functional.   A business’s website is often the first impression a potential customer will have of the business and its products and services, and you know what they say about first impressions.  If a business has an amateurish website, a flashy website that takes minutes to load and only works on the newest browsers, or a difficult to navigate website that makes it hard for customers to find what they are looking for the business runs the risk of losing customer before they ever set foot in their store.  Or worse yet, the business has no online presence and when customers are searching online for the business’s type of products or services they’ll miss out on the sale. Read the rest of this entry »

Where is the price of gold heading?

In one of the comments on my article How to profit from a weakening dollar I learned what appears to be the best way I’ve seen yet to invest in gold.  John from OnlineInvestingGuru.com told me about BullionVault, a way to invest in the professional gold market in New York, London, and Zurich.  Buying gold bullion directly on a gold exchange means you get better prices because you’re cutting out most of the middlemen, and the gold you purchase is stored in professional vaults in any one of the three market cities.  This way you get all the benefit of physically owning gold without any of the risk associated with storing gold.  I think this is actually a better investment idea than the SPDR Gold Shares gold ETF GLD because you’re actually purchasing a physical amount of gold without the management overhead of an ETF.  And one more big reason to use BullionVault – they give you 1 gram of gold free for signing up to help you learn how to trade.  As of Tuesday this amounted to a $38.15 gift. Read the rest of this entry »

My German micromini

When I was deployed to Germany after 9/11 I was given a Daimler-Benz Smart Car so I could commute from Sembach Air Base to Ramstein Air Base, about a 40 minute drive on the Autobahn. I thought this was extremely cool and was looking forward to tooling around in the microcar while the Toyota Yaris I was supposed to be driving was having routine maintenance.

The first few days were fun, there was plenty of room for my 6’ frame and the Smart Car was an attention grabber. I could also park it sideways in any parking spot – it was about as long as a parking spot is wide. Talk about making it easy to parallel park, you could literally park it nose in on the street without the rear end hanging out into traffic. Read the rest of this entry »

Write killer ad copy

To combat Internet-induced ADD in your website visitors you need to make sure your words pack a punch.  Follow these 10 tried-and-trued principles to create more interesting content and copy that sells:

Know your audience. Before you start writing take some time to figure out who you hope will respond to your copy.  Who stands to benefit the most?  If you’re writing copy for another company’s products or services talk to their marketing department about where they’ve had the best success marketing their product, which demographics responded more favorably, and ask about survey or questionnaire results and customer focus groups.

Read the rest of this entry »

How happy are your customers?

Your sales come from two groups of customers: new customers and existing customers.  It can cost you five times as much to attract a new customer as it does to maintain an existing customer relationship.  And it might cost sixteen times as much to bring the new customer to the same level of profitability as the lost customer.  So for you customer retention is more important than customer attraction.

How do you make this happen?  The first step is to ensure your entire organization is customer-focused, not just your sales staff and customer service people.  Everyone needs to be striving for high customer satisfaction – engineers, shipping and receiving, kitchen help, mechanics, bus boys, maintenance staff, delivery people, everyone.  Everybody is involved with taking care of the customer in some way; Read the rest of this entry »

Trade your dollars for gold

Its common knowledge the price of gold is inversely proportional to the value of the dollar – that is, when one goes up, the other goes down.  At least, it has ever since the Nixon Shock in August 1971when President Nixon changed the valuation of the dollar from gold to an open monetary exchange.  And we hear every day more evidence of the growing weakness of the US dollar – the yields on Treasuries go up, the cost of crude oil increases, concerns about inflation from the Fed.  So what do you do about the devaluation of the dollar?  You can’t hoard your cash because of inflation and devaluation, so you have to invest it in something.  Banks and bonds are yielding microscopic returns so that just leaves the stock market.  Here are four stocks to take advantage of: Read the rest of this entry »

Six recession-proof stocks are doing pretty well

All six recession-proof stocks I picked have since been mentioned on sites like Jim Cramer’s The Street, Zacks.com, MSN Money, and the Motley Fool.  Dollar Tree (DLTR) was picked as one of Jim Cramer’s Top 5 Value Stocks, Family Dollar (FDO) was picked as one of TheStreet.com Halloween Winners, Eli Lilly (LLY) was featured in MSN Money’s 3 Stocks for a Stock Picker’s Market, Monro Muffler (MNRO) was identified as one of TheStreet.com Top 5 Mid-Cap Stocks,  and the Motley Fool published an article yesterday about O’Reilly Auto Parts (ORLY) titled “3 Stocks That Blew the Market Away”. Read the rest of this entry »

Use your frequent flier miles

I used to travel frequently for my previous employer and racked up thousands of frequent flier miles on just about every airline.  The problem was I rarely flew the same airline twice and never racked up enough miles to earn a free ticket or even a first class upgrade.  Then I changed jobs a few years ago and only needed to travel a couple of times a year and watched helplessly as my miles expired with some airlines and languished with others.

When I received an offer in the mail to exchange frequent flier miles for magazine subscriptions I didn’t immediately throw it out with the rest of the junk mail but set it aside until I could figure out the catch.  Turns out there was no catch, they had worked out a deal to make money off of my frequent flier miles and there was no additional cost for the subscriptions.   Read the rest of this entry »