Hi I work for a small Dry Cleaning business in New York and we are trying to do some advertising. We have two locations, and there are probably 4 other dry cleaners in our town. I was wondering if anyone has any advice on what kind of advertising we should do. We currently have a website and a myspace page, we do advertising in the yellow pages and penny saver, we hand out fliers and give lots of coupons. We also offer discounts to teachers, students, police, fire, etc. We have also sponsored a local cheerleading team.

Most of our customers are repeat customers, and we are trying to bring in NEW customers.

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A name which is very appropriate for the visuals, designing, arts…etc. I want “Lights and Shades” but it is already taken. Pls give me another one. Thnks guys

Advertising and marketing for a small business takes effort and a plan to be successful. Many small business owners become discouraged too quickly because they do not receive the windfall of customers that they expected after they ran their initial advertising campaigns. You must keep at it. Advertising is a art that takes constant monitoring and refinement and a long term plan that will lead to your success. The main reason you want to spend the time to develop a plan is that it significantly reduces costs. Running ads inconsistently and not in line with your plan is expensive because you can not get good long term rates from publications and you will not reach your customers as well as you would if they consistently seee your message. Here are three things that small business owners can do in to increase their chance of success in their advertising campaign.

1. Be Committed To Your Long Term Plan – This strategies assumes you have a long term plan. If you do not, then you need one, fast. Just like planning to open your business needed a business plan, your advertising needs a plan. This helps you to meet deadlines for publications and lay out different messages that you want to to get in front of your customers at different parts of the year. You should at a minimum have a six month advertising plan, but really it should be a year. This will help to establish longer term contracts with advertisers which helps to bring the price down of each advertisement.

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I would offer many different options for business owners to choose. printing and distributing flyers or corner signs, running ads in the newspaper and online websites or radio. Pretty much anything to do with advertising/ promoting for local businesses owned by individuals (like lawn care, roofing, restraunt, hair salon etc.) What should I do to start my business and is this a stupid idea?

I have interesting hypotheses that I probably shouldn’t share with you, but I will because I like you.

It is my belief that Bing users are primarily buyers, while Google users are mostly researchers (and sometimes buyers). So, what does this mean if you’re a small business? It means you could be wasting a lot of time and money on programs like AdWords. I never thought I’d say this, but maybe you should be putting your money towards Microsoft Advertising Center. Why?

It’s clear: Bing users are shopping, so that is where you need to be.

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• Get in on the ground floor of this amazing opportunity!
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Picture this: you have a small business. You need to advertise on a small budget. You’ve done the print ads, radio, television and online advertising and still have a little bit left in your budget. So, instead of using what you’ve already been doing, you decide to get some promotional items of their moving led signs. Ok, so what do you get and how do you get them out?

Pens

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I am involved with a small new business. Getting new customers is not easy. Newspaper ads are expensive. Are there any small business people who could give me some ideas on getting the word out there? any ideas on how to get people to try a new place?

Online advertising has become a staple for many small businesses. Because no other form of advertising has been able to provide a more complete strategy for marketing a small business than a well defined advertising campaign using online strategies. Many small companies start with pay per click advertising campaigns such as Google’s Adwords, but often find themselves either unimpressed with the results or dramatically over budget on their initial campaign, and rarely make the attempt to try again.

Many times however, the fault lies with the small business owner, too many keywords, no strategy and no research are the typical culprits in a failed pay per click advertising campaign. But the business owner can’t take all the blame; he has a business to run. He has never had to be as intimately involved in his advertising before.

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Thinking of copying local pizza shop and droping clear plastic sandwich bags with a treat, business card and flyer by peoples mailbox on the ground.
If so, what kind of trouble for soliciting and/or litering?