Be Rebellious

In order to get consumers (whether they are retail or service customers or business-to-business audiences) to notice an advertising message, many companies resort to loudness and one-upmanship. Neither of these tactics works in the long run.

If your competition is talking loudly and you decide to yell louder, what do you think they will do? Yep. They’ll start to scream. Nobody wins a shouting match when it comes to advertising. And usually you’ll find you even lose a few customers in the process because they can’t stand the noise.

It’s the same with one-upmanship. If you have to compete on more and better coupons or more and better discounts, giveaways or incentives unrelated to your core product, your revenue per sale decreases as well as your number of sales.

Customers see these types of games as gimmicky, fake and disingenuous; and they leave. The ones who do stay now view you and your competitors as commodities with no difference except your price. That is a dangerous place for a company to find itself.

The answer to clutter is not more clutter; it’s finding who wants to hear you and speaking to them. So how do you compete if you can’t out shout or out discount your competition? You get rebellious and radical with your advertising.

Do those words scare you? That’s okay. Remember, you’re being courageous now. You can handle it. Besides, rebellious and radical aren’t dirty words. They will help you draw attention away from your competition without resorting to screaming and insulting your customers.

It’s not about being outrageous just to get attention; it’s about being remarkable. An advertising campaign with a strong rebellious strategy is, by its very nature, different from anything your audience will find from your competitors’ marketing efforts. It’s unexpected. It’s surprising. It’s effective.

There are two keys to creating a successfully rebellious advertising campaign. The first is the big idea. This idea comes from a strategy that is derived directly from your customers and their relationship with your brand. You arrive at this idea through a discipline called account planning. We’ll get into the details of both the big idea and account planning in later articles.

The second key to a successfully rebellious advertising campaign is attention. You can’t gain attention if you don’t learn to identify and then steer clear of the norm. It doesn’t matter how great your product or service is or how large your potential market, if your target audience doesn’t pay attention to your message, your ad budget has been wasted.

Think about these two keys while you flip through the newspaper or a magazine. Ponder them while you watch TV. You should notice something almost immediately. Most ads today don’t seem to be based on any big idea. Many are so boring that you flip right past them without noticing them. Others get your attention but the ads don’t have much to do with the product so you quickly forget the brand the ad was supposed to sell you. What an opportunity for your brand!

Now, there is a caveat to being rebellious. Your ads should never be different just for difference sake. The difference should be derived from your brand’s uniqueness.•

This article introduced the second of twelve steps. Challenge yourself, your staff and your ad agency to revolutionize your advertising program. If you missed the first step, contact the author for a complimentary copy. And, remember, every revolution begins with just one step.

Be Imaginative

What’s the easiest way to kill a great ad campaign before it even begins? Take it too seriously. Advertising is not rocket science. You shouldn’t need a degree in the physical sciences to create or understand an ad.

And you should never, ever, under any circumstances, kill an ad because it is not literal enough. On the contrary, if you find your ads are too literal, you should destroy them all and start fresh.

Are Volkswagens flawed pieces of junk? No, but an ad with the headline “Lemon” gets your attention, doesn’t it? It makes you want to read the story, which goes on to explain how the particular car shown in the ad would never be driven because VW cares so much it weeds out the lemons so you never get a bad car. Think what an opportunity would have been missed if the folks at Volkswagen had taken that headline too literally.

Think about it from this angle. Why do people read an ad or watch a commercial? The majority do so because they find them entertaining and informative. If your ads are all information and no entertainment, you’ve wasted your budget.

This is not to say that an ad should be created purely for entertainment purposes. Again, a great ad is both entertaining and informative. The entertainment value should be derived from a feature of your product or brand. In other words, what you’re selling should be the star of the show. Sounds simple enough, but it is often hard to strike the right balance. That’s what makes advertising so fun.

How much information does your audience really need? What kind of story will they find entertaining? These are questions that should be asked and answered early on so that when you finally are presented with an ad or a campaign, you can judge the work according to these preordained guidelines.

A good campaign will reach your target audience and talk to them on a personal level. This has a valuable effect on your sales and reputation. A great advertising campaign will do more than that. It will create a buzz outside of your target audience.

Apple Computer’s “1984” commercial ran only once. But it is still one of the most talked about commercials because it was rebroadcast on every major news show and written about in every major newspaper for weeks and months. And none of this cost Apple anything more than a single TV buy.

It’s worth noting that Apple’s Super Bowl commercial helped make the company a household name and created unbelievable demand for the new Macintosh computer-yet the ad never showed the product or explained any details about it.

BMW’s Mini Cooper was one of the first cars to be introduced in the United States with no TV advertising. Blasphemy! Instead, they bolted the Minis to the roofs of SUVs and drove them around major cities. They created tongue-in-cheek billboards, interactive print ads and great guerrilla promotions. Most importantly, they created a waiting list of customers who couldn’t wait to get a Mini.

Companies that think bigger become bigger. It’s a self-fulfilling cycle. If you just think like a local operation, you might miss the opportunity to expand regionally, nationally, or even internationally. Your advertising campaign should reflect the direction of your companyЧeven if you’re not yet there.

Challenge yourself and your agency to think bigger.

Be Courageous

For such a simple statement, this is one of the hardest things for people to do. It goes back to that damn survival instinct each of us is born with. If an animal draws attention to itself in the wild, it might soon find itself the main course of a larger animal’s next meal. That fear of being chewed up and spit out has survived all our millions of years of evolution and is alive and well in today’s business environment.

Fight or flight is another instinct many of us haven’t yet learned to manipulate. It’s easier to run away from a new idea than it is to stay and fight for it. With today’s leadership-by-committee mentality and intense public scrutiny, the easiest solution is unfortunately the most popular. Companies today often miss the forest through the trees. They tend to concentrate so much on short-term profit that they fail to make investments or take advantages of opportunities that promise long-term profit simply because they require a short-term loss.

It may also be argued that fighting for a new idea—whether that means pushing for the development of a new product, staving off competitors or supporting a slumping brand rather than letting it die—is usually undesirable because of such costs.

Certainly that might be true in the short term, but in the long run, giving up too soon my actually cost your company far more in lost revenues, public outrage or shrinking market share. It requires a different way of thinking. Advertising and promoting your business is an investment in your business’ future. Investments are not mere costs. They come with a benefit.

Let’s get one thing straight from the very beginning. No company ever dominated its industry by operating with a philosophy of fear. And, ultimately, no company can survive if it doesn’t learn to conquer its fear and take chances, make changes.

It is the ability to see past any short-term problems to the bigger, long-term picture that has fueled the meteoric rise of the world’s most successful companies. Nobody knew what Apple was before its history making 1985 Super Bowl commercial.

Apple paid to run that commercial only once, but it ran again hundreds of times around the country and the world during local and national news broadcasts. Stories about Apple and its commercial were front-page news for weeks.

When it comes to advertising, you might wonder what kinds of changes are needed. After all, it’s just advertising. If your ads look like your competitors’ ads, if your messages are strikingly similar, if you talk to yourself instead of your customers, if you worry more about your logo being large enough than the message being attention-getting enough, you need to change.

Now this is just the first step, so we won’t get into any more detail here. The object of this step is to let you know that you need to screw up your courage and prepare to make some changes in your advertising that will have a profound effect on your bottom line.

Fear is the greatest motivator. However, instead of motivating people to act, it usually causes people to freeze or retreat. It takes courage to make the kinds of changes that are needed to survive in today’s crowded, complicated and competitive business environment.

Conquer your fear. Be courageous.•

This article introduced the first of Jeff Berney’s “Twelve Steps to Creating Breakthrough Advertising Campaigns: A creative philosophy to help companies recover from years of playing it safe.” Challenge yourself, your staff and your advertising agency to make a revolutionary transformation of your advertising program. And, remember, even the largest revolution begins with just one step—the first.

Be an Independent Nurse Contractor and Start your own Successful Nursing Agency

How To Start A Nursing Agency Business Guide Books are flooding the internet. Most of these manuals are extracts from articles found on the world wide web. Because individuals seeking to start their own nursing agency buy information guides that do not have all the contents and key tools for success, a good number of these agencies either fail within their first year of business or simply never get to launch their new business.Thats many business man today want to build their own nursing agency.

Entrepreneurs have made lucrative business in nursing agency, nursing registry, homecare business, medical recruiter recruiting, or as independent nurse contractor in their own field.The time is now for entrepreneurs to start a nursing agency,nursing registry business, operate a homecare business, or as a medical recruiter or just become an independent healthcare contractor. By being an independent healthcare contractor, you are bypassing the agency and are self employed. Healthcare facilities are the clients. Homecare are regulated by all levels of goverment from local to fedeal level. Homecare levels of regulations depends on the category of service provided to clients. Homecare services ranges from providing just companions or the more medically needed clients such as terminally ill clients. Homecare services can be in the form of social service, non-medical, and medical services.
Nurses now a days wake up and take advantage of this extraordinary opportunity. Are you tired of having no input in your career, little money in the bank, lack of respect for your profession and little compensation for the long hours and years of dedication? Starting a nursing agency business or becoming an Independent RN Contractor is a great way to renew your interest and rejuvenate your nursing career. An Independent contractor can contract his or her nursing services directly with a healthcare facility or with a patient and continue bedside practice.

You don’t have to be a nurse or a doctor to start your own Nursing Agency. All you need is our packages and the desire to be self employed. This is the only industry where there will always be a shortage. 2007 Professional Edition of “How To Start A Nursing Agency” covers all 50 states and is jam packed with new additional products and services, making it the most comprehensive guide offered on the internet today! And NEW Searchable Database of over 22,000 Hospitals and Nursing Homes.

Banner Stands: Your Key To Product Promotion Success

Successful advertising depends on getting details of your product or service in front of potential customers in any eye-catching way. And whether at exhibitions, festivals, road shows, press conferences, trade shows, fairs or in your own showroom, you need a way to present your goods to their best advantage. This is where the banner stand comes in. The banner stand is a modern tool designed to maximise the ease and effectiveness of promoting your products.

First, let’s look at what banner stands are. In a sense they are miniature, highly sophisticated billboards. A banner stand is essentially a lightweight stand made of aluminium which serves as a frame for you advertising message. This message appears in the form of graphics printed in high resolution on graphic films which are laminated for durability. The best materials for graphic printing is sandtex-laminated polyester. This ensures vibrant colours that won’t fade.

Banner stands are available in a wide variety of styles including single and double sided banner styles, cassette rollers, telescopic, tension, rigid, motorised and spring. They can be retractable, roll up, or pull up. A variety of lighting options is also available.

Roller banner stands are especially convenient as the graphic panel winds into a tensioned cartridge in the base. Cartridge banner stands feature a swappable cartridge allowing the advertising graphics to be changed in an instant. This is great for when you need to tailor your message to suit local requirements. They are also perfect for when you need to promote a range of different products or if you attend many events and need to switch between products efficiently.

Motorised banner stands present long messages via a steadily rotating panel. These can communicate long texts effectively.

For outdoor exhibitions, special outdoor banner stands are available. For these you need to fill their bases with sand or water to ensure their stability.

One great thing about banner stands is their versatility. They can be positioned individually or tiled for extra impact. If you need a large display, you can arrange a group of stands to best suit your needs. Banner stands can work alone or be used together with other promotional methods such as a trade show display. You could for example set one up in the lobby or meeting hall at an exhibition. Or you could put one up at the end of an aisle to attract visitors to your booth. And they’re convenient too. They simply retract into their base for easy and secure transportation. Assembly and disassembly is a snap.

If you need to get your product before as many eyes as possible with efficiency, versatility and at a low cost, look into using banner stands. Not only are they visually attractive but their portability and ease of setup makes your job so much easier. Their durability means that they can be used over and over again. And of course they’re a great way to generate interest in your product or service.

Banner Stand Exhibits

Banner Stands are a high impact, inexpensive and attractive medium of advertisement. They are usually found at exhibitions, trade shows, retail stores – just about anywhere the potential customer can be attracted by high wattage graphics.

The attractive thing about banner stands is that they are portable, flexible and easy to set up. There are different kinds of banner stands like retractable or rollup, pole, telescopic and others. The technology that enables the high quality of graphics and photos has added to the beauty of banners.

While organizing banner stands for exhibitions, there are many choices to deliberate on. For a portable trade show, the choice is between a fully customized exhibition and a portable exhibit.

The general opinion is that a portable is much better than a customized banner stand. For one, portable systems cost a fraction of a custom built one. The exhibition center built by portable is ready in a jiffy compared to the custom built systems.

Another advantage is that you can handle and test the system before using. It is flexible and can be used again and again. Also, portable systems are ready to pack and easy to transport.

Choosing the right banner stand may be considered care fully. Banner Stands can be divided into indoor and outdoor. Indoor exhibition banner stands are used for retail exhibitions and trade show conferences, indoor events and sales promotion. This category can be further divided into retractable and pole banner stands. Pole stands are cheap and strong. Roll up or retractable are easy to set up, with safe casing for graphics, and are easily portable.

Outdoor exhibition banner stands are suitable for outside use. They are weather proof, wind resistant and need outdoor resistant graphics.

Exhibition selling and advertising can energize the dullest of products with colorful and attractive banner stands. Banner stands exhibits are crucial for attracting potential customers.

Aim High, Fly High with Flyers

Making use of marketing tool like the flyers is an effective way of getting customers attention. An advertising flyer does not simply inform people of your businesses current deals and up coming events but rather it carries your companies name into people’s minds and homes. And thus in designing them, you have to make them attractive for it can be a powerful marketing tool. And with this, a flyer printing company can be your best buddy to work on with your flyer printing projects. The knowledge and expertise that the company has will help you materialize your printing projects.

Flyers are developed and produced using high quality materials and high-tech printing equipments. A full color printing jobs can make them more attractive and compelling that would lead in gaining the attention that you want for your business. A custom design work for your companies’ identity will make your business stand out and highly recognized. Custom printing of flyers gives businesses the chance to create a design of their own and add up special features that they think will make the material more memorable and attractive. Compelling, informative and crisp text contents can lead to persuade your customers. In making a description of your business try to think of a sentence or a phrase that will make your customers’ remember.

Some businesses may spend too much for their campaigns but yet a simple flyer print can valuably spread the message about businesses upcoming events or services. Seeking for a professional help from a flyer printing company to deal with your flyer printing needs is imperative. For this company has the capability to work on with the specified printing requirement you had given. With the right tools and quality material utilized for sure they can come up with what you are expecting.

Why worry about your flyer printing jobs while there is a flyer printing company that can give you the satisfaction you are in need of. Deal with them and for sure you will be able to achieve better results. With flyers as your marketing tool you can aim high and dream high.

Agriculture Directory is an Essential Aid in Modern World

An online agriculture directory is an excellent aid that can support modern day farming. These days, agriculture resembles an industrial activity, very different from the farming practices of our forefathers.

Today’s cultivator needs equipment like tractors and harvesters, input materials like seeds, pesticides and weedicides, services like soil analysis and expert consultancy on different matters.

The term agriculture today includes more than cultivating the land for grains. It also means horticulture, grazing, vineyards, timber growing, dairy farming, poultry farming and fish farming, for example. Considering this wider meaning, the materials, services and information needs of the modern day agriculturist is wide-ranging.

An online directory that provides instant access to sources of supplies and information is indeed a great support facility for the agriculturist.

Topics Covered by an Agriculture Directory

The topics covered by an agriculture directory these days are wide-ranging. Extracts from the main categories of a major agriculture directory illustrates the variety:

• Bees and Honey
• Cattle
• Horse
• Insurance & Financing
• Import Export
• Rabbits
• Barns & Structures
• Arts & Crafts
• Seed Companies
• Equestrian Sport
• Agritourism
• Equipment Dealers
• Government
• Fencing
• Sustainable Agriculture
• Plant Diseases
• Education
• Forestry
• Veterinary Medicine
• Rural Sociology

The above is only a sample meant to illustrate the variety of topics relevant to agriculturists.

Basic Functions of Agriculture Directories

Serving the needs of agriculturists is a prime function of the directories. Agriculturists need seeds, fertilizers, pesticides, weedicides, tractors, harvesters, soil analysis services; best practices case histories and other inputs for their agricultural activities. They also need marketing support in the forms of information on markets, lists of marketing agencies, government support programs and so on. A good agriculture directory provides links to relevant resources for meeting these requirements.

Agriculture is not just cultivation and today’s agriculture directories also include links to such resources as horse racing, farm tourism, government regulations, rural arts and crafts and so on.

Promoting the agricultural activities in a country is another objective served by national agriculture directories that focus on the suppliers in one particular country. . Exporters in the country would be supported by information about export possibilities, lists of overseas importers, details of government support programs and so on. Importers in other countries would be better able to source their requirements with the help of such regional directories

Different Kinds of Agriculture Directories

Considering the many areas covered or touched by agriculture, it offers scope for many niche directories. We look at a few and their significance below.

EQUINE WEB SITES: Includes links to horse breeders, riding stables, horse racing and such equine topic related web sites.

REGIONAL DIRECTORIES: National directories listing agricultural suppliers located in a country are quite common.

AGRICULTURAL RESOURCES: With links to universities, publications, weather, news and other resources of value to agriculturists and related businesses.

Here again, we have only touched upon the variety. If you look around, you would find a resource that caters to your particular agriculture related niche.

Conclusion

Agriculture is not confined to cultivating the land. In today’s context, it includes even such apparently different activities as equine sports, farm tourism and rural arts, in addition to conventional resources like seeds, fertilizers, pesticides, tractors, harvesters, etc required by cultivators. The agriculture directory of today will also include links to resources needed by animal, poultry and fish farmers, horticulturists, forestry and other activities covered by the term agriculture.

Agriculture directory resources will also cover support activities like insurance, finance, marketing, education and news. Agriculture today is more like an industry that needs information and technology, in addition to conventional inputs outlined earlier.

Adwords Keyword Research for Beginners

When you embark on your first PPC journey, you need to keep a small number of keywords at first. Keyword lists that are thousands of words long should be left to the more experienced PPC marketer. Ideally, a beginner should use around 100 targeted keywords, anything more will probably prove too cumbersome for you to manipulate. If you can’t harness the power of large keyword campaigns, they will suck your bank accounts dry. There are some very simple free techniques that you can use to find targeted keys words with low competition. One process of finding low competition niche keywords utilizes Google and excel. More specifically you want to use Google’s keyword tool, just type this into Google, and it will appear in the search results.

Upon landing on the main Google keyword tool page, you will find a white box(field) where you want to enter your particular keyword(s). Enter one keyword for now to get an idea of how this works, and press enter. After pressing enter, you will be directed to a page of keywords that will be closely related to the keyword that you entered. For the purposes of what we want to do, you will need to scroll to the middle of the page where the text Add all 150 is highlighted in blue bold text. Below these words you will see the words download all keywords with text,.csv(for excel) and .csv. You want to click on .csv(for excel). By doing this, you will export this data into an excel spreadsheet. The data, which only appears as green bars on the main Google page, will be transformed into numeric data that has much more value for you.

Once the data is in the excel spread sheet, you can begin some simple analysis on it that will benefit your PPC campaign a great deal. In the excel spreadsheet, there are going to be columns of data, A-D. The columns are going to be, from A-D, Keywords, Advertiser competition, the previous month’s search volume, and the average search volume.The two columns we are interested in are the advertiser competition and the Average search volume. What we want to do is merge the data from these two columns to give us a number that we can work with. So what we need to do is take a generalized average of these two to get a number which we will compare to a predetermined benchmark. Sounds a little odd, let me explain a bit more completely, and hopefully you will understand. All of these numbers are in decimals on a scale ranging from .00 to 1. The higher the number, the more competition there is(as expressed by the advertiser competition numbers) and the higher the search volume(as expressed by the average search volume). Ideally, we want low competition with a decent search volume to target lower cost high converting keywords. So, to find these keywords we use a general benchmark number that will determine their competition and volume level. If the keywords exceed the benchmark, we leave them be, if they hit right around the benchmark, or fall below it, we want to capture them and include them in our PPC campaign.

To get our figures, which we are going to compare to a predetermined benchmark, we are going to take an average of the advertiser competition column and the average search volume column. We want to do this for all the keywords that have been exported to the excel file. And the way we do this is by typing in a simple command in excel and copying the command down throughout the related boxes. So to start, we find box E2 which should be blank, this is the first box to the right of the first value in the avg. search volume box. So, within this blank box you want to type=average(D2,B2). This will automatically give you an average of those two numbers in this E column row when you close that last ).Now, to get all the averages for every keyword you simply want to click on that box(E2) and pull down on the box while you hold in right click. The boxes should fill in with color when you drag down to the last box(nothing will be in them yet). Then, when you have filled in the boxes with color up to the last box you want to lift your finger off the right click. When you do this all the averages will appear in the boxes. You basically just copied the function down through the boxes. So now we have all these averages. What do we do with them, what do they tell us?

Well, a good benchmark average is around .50. This will give us a reasonable competition level with good search volume. So we compare these averages to anything that falls around .50 and below. Anything that goes above .60 we want to avoid to start out with, because it will probably be too expensive to bid on. So now compare all the averages in column E to the predetermined benchmark of .50. Whatever falls below .50 or, .55(to possibly get some more data) we want to keep. Take all the keywords that meet this criteria and copy them into a notepad .txt file. (There are faster ways to do this but they take some learning of excel functions that you may not know yet.)

So now we want to take these keywords that fell below or right around the benchmark and plug these back into the Google keyword tool and hit enter. Now go back through the entire process that we just did to get the keywords we just plugged into the Google keyword tool. You are going to want to take the average again of the two columns mentioned above, then get all the averages of all the keywords by draggin the first box down, and then compare again to a benchmark of .50 or .55. But now, because we found some more targeted keywords to work with(as a result of the first exporting of data to excel, and taking the averages to compare against the benchmark) we should have more keywords that hit right around the benchmark and below it. This is because we are working with more targeted and hopefully lower competition keywords. We are finding yet more targeted keywords related to the first set we found. This should produce a larger list of keywords that meet our benchmark. So now we can take the words that meet the benchmark here, and we can use these in our targeted PPC campaign. You will want to sort through this list of course, and make sure the keywords are well suited for the particular items that you are selling. This method will get you headed in the right direction for your PPC campaign.

Advertisers Embrace ‘Rich Media’ Format

From ads that dance or sing to MTV-like commercials, online advertisers are now using a new type of technology called “rich media” to attract consumers.

U.S. Internet advertising revenue will have reached about $12 billion last year, up $3 billion from 2004. Of this, advertisers spent about $1 billion on rich media, up from $800 million in 2003, according to the Interactive Advertising Bureau.

So what exactly is rich media? By definition, it is an online advertising technique that combines graphics with audio technologies, giving Internet users an interactive experience.

And with more than half of American households connected online and using high-speed connections like broadband and DSL, it means a potentially lucrative way for online advertisers to get consumers’ attention.

One company taking online advertising to a different level is Centale Inc. (OTCBB: CNTL), based in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. The online marketing and technology firm offers cutting-edge technology solutions to its clients.

Centale’s premier application, the Catalyst EV, is a software platform that allows companies to communicate directly to the desktop of their audience in rich media format.

The software also functions independent of e-mail. To date, studies have shown that e-mail campaigns may be decreasing in effectiveness because as the amount of e-mail increases, the likelihood of success of the solicitation or advertisement tends to decrease.

One reason that advertisers are embracing rich media is that it typically entertains and is compelling enough to capture the interest of consumers. It also allows a user a modicum of control by either stopping the ad entirely, or participating in it and clicking through to an advertiser’s Web site to get more information.

While rich media may not endear advertising to online consumers, most users are finding it less intrusive than traditional pop-up, banner and text-based ads. Centale says there is a favorable market for its product, as the industry shifts away from traditional advertising such as print and radio in favor of online advertising.