A small business owner friend and I had an interesting conversation the other day: Which was the best marketing tool for his business, a postcard mailing first class rate or an oversize card (self-mailer) mailing at the standard class rate?

Like so many other choices in marketing, the correct answer is: “It depends on your goals”.

For example, if you mail to consumers (B to C) and timing is an issue, then you can saturate an area quite effectively using a good lettershop, pre-sort, and trucking facilities. If you have sufficient mail volume, you can control the delivery of your piece to the customer’s door nearly as effectively using Standard Class mail, properly sorted, as you could with First Class mail. Please note here, the qualifier “sufficient volume”. If you are not blanketing a neighborhood with your mail, then you can still achieve great postal discounts with Standard Class, but you must work carefully with your lettershop or mailhouse to make sure you arrive in-home the day you want to.

Although your Standard Class mail will be a fraction of the cost, if you are co-ordinating your in-home date with a retail event, such as a store opening, and you arrive in-home after the event is over, then the cost of the Standard Class piece was, in fact, infinitely more than if you had mailed First-Class presort.

But what if you are mailing to businesses (B to B), and you need to control your timing of the delivery of the message? Here you will probably want to mail out a First-Class postcard or, if you have enough pieces, a First-Class presorted mailpiece. The advantage of First-Class in this case is again in the timing. You are going to pay the post office to make sure your mailpiece arrives as quickly as possible.

If timing is not an issue in your B to B mailing, and you have enough pieces to qualify, then I recommend you use Standard Class. The money you’ll save will drop straight to your bottom line.

But what about tests that show First-Class vs. Standard Class improves response rate? Feel free to do your own head-to-head tests, but most consumers aren’t sophisticated enough to pay attention to the difference. If you really think it’s that big of a deal, use a precancelled stamp on your Standard Class mailing.

Many novice mailers spend all their time with the graphic artist designing the piece, but only a few minutes talking with their mail consultants or lettershops. Make sure you ask the hard questions of these suppliers, beyond the “what’s the cost per piece?” standard questions that most people ask. Don’t be afraid to probe and ask questions regarding alternative delivery methods such as trucking to a different postal facility, or questions related to timing of the in-home date.

Article marketing for traffic can be a great way to get your website or blog some exposure and hopefully make some sales! My question to you is where do you send the people that read your articles? I know many article marketers send people directly to a sales page, and I am here to tell you that is one of the most common mistakes I see with article marketing.

Anyone who has read the hundreds of articles that I have written knows that I am a straight shooter and do not believe in much hype. However article marketing and list building is a powerful combination that I believe can lead you to massive profits in a short period of time.

The reason I ask where do you send your traffic is that I really recommend you send people to what is called a squeeze page or opt-in page. This is where someone can give your a name and email address in exchange for something such as a free report. When using article marketing for traffic this is the top place that I send my traffic.

I think for some reason if you are not ready to build a list that you should still send people to a review page instead of directly to a sales page. The reason for this is that if people see a positive review of a product right before seeing the sales page they are three times more likely to buy the product in my experience.

The moral of this article is that you should not send people directly to a sales page. Instead when article marketing for traffic send your article viewers either to a squeeze page or a review site to get the most out of each potential prospect.

The perfect business marketing strategy to increase business profits is probably one of the most pressing questions for business owners, large and small, especially in the current economic climate where an increase in business profits, especially your bottom line, would be more than a welcoming reward.

So, as a business marketing strategy how could you increase profits without ‘breaking the bank’; without spending any more on advertising or without having to create more products or services?

Quite simple really. By implementing strategic alliances with reputable companies that, although may have similar products or services to yours, are not in direct competition with your company.

Companies who offer excellent products or services to their customer database can literally increase business profits by a minimum of 30%, even as much as 100% in a matter of days just by letting their in-house marketing team get a little creative and start implementing strategic alliances.

Increasing business profits by implementing strategic alliances isn’t a new concept but still very much under-utilized by a large percentage of small to medium-sized companies, even large corporations, who would like to start using some highly-effective marketing strategies, but simply don’t know how to put a successful campaign, from concept to fruition, into action.

Let me give you some quick examples of time-proven marketing strategies that would work extremely well with companies that have a customer database of at least 5000 customers:

1. Reactivation of past customers that were sold any type of service subscription

2. Implementation of an opt-in subscriber form to gain new customers

3. Implementation of an automatic sales funnel using a targeted email campaign

4. Cross-selling by promoting non-competitive products to your customers or clients using profit-pulling copy via direct mail.

5. Endorsements of additional non-competitive products to your customer database

I’ve seen large organizations have a lackluster approach in looking after their customers and clients. Focusing on making your customers feel like royalty and maintaining their longevity is key.

While carrying out some typical research to find out if businesses could do any more with their websites to increase business profits, I was quite horrified at my results.

Researching 10 various business sectors, with the top ten results in each sector (100 business website home pages), a mere 5% had implemented an opt-in form for the visitor to request more information about that company, albeit a better job could have been done with the copy, but nonetheless, a device was in place.

That means, the 95 remaining companies had nothing in place to ask the visitor if they wanted to receive further information via a company newsletter, free business report, free trial, free book chapter etc. Sad but true.

Just because a new client or customer comes on board and you’ve take their money, does not mean it ends there. Clients like to be rewarded; made a fuss over and continually looked after with additional follow-ups; products and services that you recommend and endorse, even although these products may be produced by someone else.

Not only do your clients expect this, but it’s also the perfect way to increase business profits [http://www.Marketing-Online-Trends.com] by implementing strategic alliances with other reputable businesses, while continually building trust and customer-bonding over the lifetime of their existence within your company, and all other companies associated with the promotional strategic alliance.

More often than not, you only have to look within your own company and you’ll find there are multiple ways to increase business profits without having to do much more than send your existing customers an email or a direct mail letter.

Forming strategic alliances can not only be highly lucrative, but can continually bring in an additional increase in business profits for all parties involved, even though the majority of the work involved to see it through to fruition, can mainly be outsourced.

Companies who are new to setting up these strategic alliances can often try to implement these strategies themselves. Unless experienced using any form of business marketing strategy, and know how to set it up correctly, it can easily backfire, cause tremendous grief and can even damage customer loyalty and longevity.

I hope this article has given you an insight into a business marketing strategy that can be implemented by any online enterprise wishing to increase their business profits while forming profitable strategic alliances.

Do you have an online business opportunity you are looking to get the word out on? One way to promote your business that continues to work is direct mail!

Here are a few postcard marketing tips to keep in mind that continue to work for successful business owners.

Today so much emphasis is put on using the Internet to promote a business opportunity that sometimes people forget about the United States Postal System.

This is one advantage that you have right away. The competition is not as heavy when using postcards to market your business.

However you do need to view this as a long term strategy and not a shot in the dark approach to building your business. What we mean by that is consider mailing postcards over a period of time to see the best results.

There is old advertising strategy known as top of mind awareness. What this means is you continue to promote over and over until people get used to seeing you.

Then when the time is right for them, they will choose your business opportunity because they are comfortable with you. You have earned this because of the consistency you have put in on your postcard marketing campaign.

Postcard marketing offers you an opportunity to brand your business. Therefore if you do not have one already you should develop a logo and include it on every mailing that you do.

This is another postcard marketing tip that will pay off for you over a period of time if you stick with it.

Bill Bettler

Money On Command

Bill Bettler has been in sales and marketing for over 13 years. He currently makes a Full Time Living as Owner of Money On Command, an Internet Marketing and Direct Sales Company. He brings a fresh and innovative approach that’s based on the principle of “Attraction Based Marketing”. Born and raised in New York, Bill was previously co-owner of a Mortgage Lending company. Visit At: