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al shape. Offer a business tip or special offer on the back. Include your photo on the card – this makes it more personal, easier to remember you and harder to throw away!

4.The internet is an amazing market place to promote your business – but it’s easy to feel lost or insignificant. Join specialist forums and exchange links with complimentary websites. To reach a targeted audience, join Affinity Trading Network – an active online network for small businesses. You get a full web profile about you and your business, and access to the Trading Boards, providing an effective way to increase your online exposure.

5.Newsletters are a great way to build up a following, sign up potential customers and provide people with a regular reminder about your services. Write a simple one page resource of news, advice and latest offers each month. Run a competition or poll. Promote your customers or suppliers. Use it to build your reputation as a useful hub of up-to-date information. Encourage feedback, keep it enjoyable and personal.

6.Testimonials support your credibility. It’s good practice to ask clients for regular feedback either verbally or in a quick customer satisfaction survey. When you have a happy customer – ask whether you could get a quote from them. Be clear as to how you will use the testimonial – on your website, in your newsletter or letterhead etc. Make sure you accredit the quote explicitly with the name of the client – anonymous testimonials don’t hold much punch. After all, testimonials can also give your clients good publicity.

7.Cold calling can send shivers down your spine! However, it is a highly targeted way to promote your business. Don’t expect to close a deal over the phone – again this is about finding out information as much as selling. Use phone calls as the first step to getting to know your prospective clients better. Don’t make a full pitch but arrange an appointment or ask permission to send on further materials about your business. And remember to speak s-l-o-w-l-y! For a Cold Calling Crash course to get you over your fears and anxieties, take a look at Do Your Own PR.

8.Referrals are a valuable and inexpensive way to find new clients. It’s not about being pushy, it’s about building long term business relationships based on trust. Start by asking each of your clients or suppliers for three contacts of other people who might like to find out more about your business. You could offer to reciprocate and provide three useful contacts in return. Make it a regular habit to give referrals as well as ask for them.

9.Press releases must be targeted. There is little point sending round a generic press release to hundreds of newspapers. Start by focusing on five publications ideal for your target market. Read back editions thoroughly – understand what kind of stories they like to publish and the style of language they use. Find a relevant news hook and tailor your press release specifically for each publication. The first paragraph is key and must provide the who, what, where, when and why of your story.

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10. Patience and persistence are the most important tools to promote your small businesses! If you try each of the strategies above and build them into a regular marketing plan, you will certainly boost your profile, without a doubt!

VENTURE CAPITAL FIRMS

Damian Sofsian

While the terms and conditions of venture capital are not standardized, there are some salient features of venture capital arrangements. The venture capital firm is inclined to assume a high degree of risk in the expectation of earning a high rate of return.

The venture capital firm, in addition to providing funds, takes an active interest in guiding the assisted firm. The financial burden for the assisted firm tends to be negligible in the first few years. The venture capital firm normally plans to liquidate its investment in the assisted firm after 3 to 5 years. Typically, the promoter of the assisted firm is given the first option to acquire the equity investment held by the venture capital firm.

Venture capital firms can raise funds from different sources. The important long-term sources of finance are issue of equity shares and preference shares, issue of debentures of different types, rising of term loans from financial institutions and generation of reserves. Venture capital firms may use different combinations of these sources by considering their relative cost and availability and their impact on the value of the firm. Accordingly, a company can have patterns of capital structure such as equity shares only, equity shares and preference shares, equity shares and debentures, equity shares and preference shares reserves, equity shares and preference shares debentures, equity shares and preference shares/debentures reserves.

The capital structure of venture capital firms is influenced by number of factors such as trading on equity, growth and stability of sales. Trading on equity means the use of long-term, fixed interest bearing sources of finance along with equity capital. Adopting trading on equity can increase the return on equity. However, this is possible only when the return on investment is more than the cost of finance.

YOU CAN HAVE FUN WITH PLASTIC

Jeff Lakie, Homeowner Loan Guide

A few generations ago, no one would have thought much about a society that did the bulk of its transactions with a little plastic card. Today, few would think about using cash for most purchases as credit cards and now debit cards have taken the world by storm. Like it or not, plastic is an important part of to-

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day’s society with billions of dollars in transactions being accomplished every hour.

Did you know you can have fun with your plastic? Yes, read on and we’ll take a look at how you can make a little piece of plastic work to your advantage.

To get the most out of a credit card, use it to your full advantage. Don’t run up balances you cannot pay but do take advantage of the rewards that come with your card. What, no rewards are offered? Well, then time for you to search for a card that pays you to use it.

Much of the fun with plastic comes in the form of the card’s many different rewards. No card is worth it to you if they don’t give you at least one point for every dollar spent. Better yet is the card that automatically rewards you with thousands of points upon your first purchase.

With a rewards card you can:

Choose to eat out at a variety of restaurants from famous name fast food stores to well-known chains of sit down restaurants.

Take in a movie with the family and have your tickets paid for. You’ll still have to spring for the popcorn and soda but you can save $40 bucks on theatre tickets.

Stay one night or more at a luxury hotel. Accumulate enough points and one or more nights at a highbrow hotel could come to you courtesy your credit card.

Accumulate enough points and a four day getaway to a luxury resort could be yours for no charge!

Fly anywhere in the USA for free or get one free companion ticket and take your wife along at no charge thanks to the points accumulated via plastic.

Purchase fun gifts such as an HDTV, a state of the art stereo system, a china pattern, printer, you name it.

Most rewards cards come with a trusty little booklet outlining all of the different rewards you can work toward. Sift through the book, plan your spending, and start accumulating points toward some truly nifty prizes.

Who said you can’t have fun with plastic? Use your rewards card today and start heading down the road to great prizes!

THE SWEET AROMA

OF HIGHLY EFFECTIVE MARKETING

Jeremy Cohen

Highly effective marketing is accomplished when your marketing materials and marketing strategy work together to reliably move your prospects through your sales process.

Have you ever caught a whiff of a tantalizing aroma wafting through the air as you walked down the street? With your senses suddenly alerted to some-

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thing tasty nearby you notice the bakery on the corner. As you draw closer you see the storekeeper handing out free samples of the cake you smell. You happily try the sample and before you know it your standing on line waiting to buy a whole cake.

How did this happen? How did you go from going about your business to buying a cake you had no intention of buying when you left your house? The fact that you ended up waiting on a line to buy a cake is no accident. The proprietor of the bakery from which you bought your cake knows something about highly effective marketing.

Just what does he know?

He knows that he first needs to get his prospects attention to draw them to his shop. He accomplishes this step with particularly strong exhaust fans he uses to permeate the local air with the tantalizing aromas of his pastries. Once he has his prospects’ attention he demonstrates the value of his goods by giving away yummy free samples and offering a buy one get one free deal. It’s no wonder unsuspecting people wind up on line waiting to buy from him.

You can enjoy the same success marketing your business even if your product or service doesn’t have a wonderful odor you can use to generate interest in what you do.

Instead, you can use your own version of the “smell, taste, buy” sales process to get the results you want. Attract Your Prospects’ Attention (Smell) If you sell motorcycles or provide legal services chances are you’re not going to attract too much attention to yourself with any particularly pleasing odor. Instead you can use an outstanding marketing message to get yourself noticed. A well written marketing message delivered to an appropriate target audience will help your business stand out in a crowd and draw your prospects to you.

A great marketing message will speak directly to your target market and identify the problems you solve and the results you provide. You can use your marketing message anywhere you advertise, including: search engines, newspapers, magazines, Ezines and newsletters.

When you use your marketing message make sure you include along with it a call to action. Once you have your prospects’ attention you want to be sure you tell them what you want them to do: visit your web site, stop by your store or request your catalog, for instance.

Remember, you don’t need a great smelling product or service to get noticed by those most likely to buy from you.

You need a compelling marketing message. Demonstrate Value If your product or service doesn’t have a wonderful smell it probably doesn’t taste too good either so you’d be well advised not to have your prospects take a bite of your top selling motorcycle or the latest legal brief you’ve written.

Instead, you can demonstrate value to your prospects by offering a test ride or providing a helpful and informative guide about a specific topic of particular interest to your target market. By giving something away for free you

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demonstrate the quality of your product or the usefulness of your service. Be sure to get your prospects’ contact information in exchange for anything you may give away as your goal is to consistently demonstrate your expertise to your prospects over time, with their permission.

In so doing, you will win their trust and position yourself in their minds in such a way that they will think of you when they decide it is time to solve an ongoing or newly created problem. Make a Remarkable Offer. Once you’ve grabbed your prospects’ attention and have demonstrated your value to them you want to make a remarkable offer. The decision to buy from you should be a no-brainer. Your offer should include benefits that far supersede the cost of your product or service. Your offer should be a knock-out punch.

In order to make a remarkable offer you must truly understand your prospects wants or needs.

What are some questions you can ask your prospects to better understand their needs? Once you have these answers you can use them to custom mold your offer to any prospect. Move Your Marketing Forward. It doesn’t matter if you are the most talented person in your field or you have the best product in the world if nobody knows you can help them. The sales process described above begins by attracting attention with an outstanding marketing message. If you are not effectively using an outstanding marketing message you can improve your ability to generate interest in what you do by developing one and broadly incorporating it into your marketing strategy.

Making the decision to improve or use a marketing message is one of the strongest moves you can make as a small business owner to improve your ability to market yourself. Bake your cake and buy some fans.

THE IMPORTANCE OF A LOGO AND

MARKETING MATERIALS

By Erin Ferree

The initial lack of customers and cash flow often causes new small business owners to put off designing a logo and marketing materials professionally “until they get a few clients” or “until they get started”. Unfortunately, designing their own marketing materials when they launch their businesses instead of having them professionally created will make getting those initial clients more difficult and may result in a business. That will not succeed.

Many entrepreneurs choose to design their own marketing materials when they launch their businesses, especially by creating their first business card. Or sometimes they will have an amateur designer, friend, or relative create the design. There are several reasons why this is not the best idea.

How Much Does a Brand Cost? An amateur logo design and business card can make your business more likely to fail for a number of reasons.

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Your business will not look stable. It will appear to be more likely to fold or to fail. Clients will not have confidence in doing business with you. Would you do business with someone who seems to be on unstable footing and who might not be in business by the end of your project or after you have purchased an item?

You will look like a very small business. Large, successful businesses would never consider doing business without professional, originally designed marketing materials. Using materials that are not professionally designed (i.e., Microsoft or Vistaprint templates) makes your business appear even smaller and can possibly indicate that you cannot perform to or meet the standards required. Read more on Why Your Company Needs a Brand.

You will look unpolished and rough. Not having a professional

“look and feel”can make it appear as though your business does not matter to you. Customers may get the impression that you do not care about the way your business presents itself, which might indicate that you would not care about the quality of your work or the way that your work reflects upon their business.

You will look unfocused. Unprofessional, uncoordinated marketing materials can make your business look “jumbled” or confused. If you have a business card with one look and feel and a Web site with another, this creates a confused – and confusing – look and feel for your business. This can also cause an identity crisis for a small business. When looking at your differently designed materials, potential clients may be fooled into thinking that they are looking at materials that represent different companies.

About half of all businesses fail within their first few years. One source of failure that is commonly cited by experts is sloppy or ineffective marketing. If your marketing materials do not stand out from those of your competitors, your sales will suffer.

When you start a business, you need to create the quickest possible route to business success. A logo helps to create this by contributing to your business’s visibility, credibility, and memorability – three factors that will help your business to grow and achieve success. So, while putting off your logo development may seem like a prudent idea from a cash-flow point of view, it could result in your business never getting off the ground. It can also lead to your business folding when it would otherwise succeed.

If you think that you can’t afford to design a logo when starting your business, consider the outcomes – how can you afford not to?

Erin Ferree is a logo, print, and Web designer who has been making it easy for small businesses to stand out and to be visible, credible, and memorable for the past nine years.

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MAGNETS FOR MONEY

Sep 13th 2015

From The Economist print edition

The late Middle Ages were a golden age for city-states. Merchant guilds created a network of them that dominated trading along the Baltic and North seas for centuries. Cities such as Lübeck, Hamburg and Bergen flourished in this early form of globalisation.

In time, the early 21st century may come to be seen as a golden era for a different sort of globalised city-state. Its protagonists are found in London’s Mayfair, lower Manhattan and Hong Kong’s central business district. Rather than loading ships, they spend their days (and many nights) in front of computer screens, moving zillions of dollars, pounds, euros and yen around the globe at the flick of a key.

Technology, some predicted, would end this sort of clustering in city centres. Why would financiers want to live and work in pricey, jam-packed urban jungles? Armed with broadband, mobile phones and BlackBerries, they could work from almost anywhere. Yet as this summer’s market turmoil showed, a BlackBerry operated from a beach is not always enough. Besides, those urban jungles have their compensations. So rather than dying out, financial centres are proliferating.

Today’s financial centres – the cities where big financial transactions are done and a dizzying array of financial products are traded – include not only long-established places such as New York, London and Tokyo, but also a growing number of newer financial hubs in Asia, the Middle East and beyond. As Dubai has shown, following in Singapore’s earlier footsteps, a determined government can build an international financial centre from scratch.

Unlike the walled medieval city-states, today’s financial centres are increasingly dependent on their connections to one another. Technology, the mobility of capital and the spread of deregulation around the globe have created a vibrant and growing network. When one city is asleep, another is wide awake, so trading goes on round the clock. The number of transactions between financial centres has surged recently as investors have diversified across regions and asset types.

Yet interconnectedness has a cost. In an era of greater volatility, the latest market news spreads from one continent to another in an instant, as financiers have recently been reminded; and knock-on effects on things like bonuses and property prices soon follow.

New York and London have firmly established themselves at the top, but not even the biggest centers can afford to be complacent. New York, still number one in global financial terms by many measures (see chart 1), has recently acknowledged the competition it faces from other centers. London has surged on a wave of new money and talent, but needs to resolve problems of its own.

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Some cities that once aspired to global status have lost their edge, and new ones are starting up.

Michael Klein of Citigroup cites two big changes that have encouraged the proliferation of financial centers around the globe: the shift of economic activity and jobs towards China, India and other developing countries, and growing demand for natural resources from the Middle East, Russia and parts of Latin America. The resulting shift in liquidity is “one of the greatest transfers of economic activity and wealth in the past 100 years,” says Mr Klein. With barriers to trade falling in many developing countries, the cost of capital has also fallen dramatically.

These changes have made governments in emerging countries more conscious of the benefits of a strong financial sector. More capital and more jobs are good for social and economic stability, so countries that used to rely for capital on banks, the rich or the state are allowing new capital providers into their markets. Money that used to be routed through the world’s biggest hubs now often

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goes through non-traditional capital markets, or directly between emerging markets.

Although financial hubs have proliferated, few of them can claim to be truly global. Many members of the financial community feel that only New York City and London deserve this title. Both are one-stop shops for a full range of financial services. Any big financial organization has to be represented there. From investment banking to insurance, stocks to derivatives, everything can be found in the world’s two pre-eminent financial hubs.

What do they have that others don’t? They score well on a package of key criteria that global financial firms are looking for: plenty of skilled people, ready access to capital, good infrastructure, attractive regulatory and tax environments and low levels of corruption. Location and the use of English, the language of global finance, are also important. Based on those measures, a survey by Z/Yen, a consultancy, picks London, New York and Hong Kong as the world’s top three financial centres.

Finding and retaining good people has become an ever more important factor. Steven Kaplan and Joshua Rauh, a pair of economists at the University of Chicago, reckon that capital deployed per employee (the amount of money firms have invested divided by the number of staff) at the top 50 American securities firms surged from an average of $ 136,000 in 1994 to $ 1,79m in 2004. For many skilled professionals who can pick and choose their place of work, quality of life matters a lot.

Although New York and London are pre-eminent, other big cities play important international roles of their own. Some have prospered as the financial capitals of big national markets (Tokyo and Sydney) or the gateways to emerging regions (Hong Kong, Singapore and Dubai). Others have found success in niches. These include Geneva (private banking), Zurich and Bermuda (insurance and reinsurance), Chicago (futures and options), Qatar (infrastructure finance) and Bahrain (Islamic finance). Yet many of these, too, are trying to diversify.

Governments are paying more attention than ever to wooing and keeping financial firms because of the benefits they bring with them, such as highly paid jobs, large tax revenues and international connections. In New York and Hong Kong the financial sector accounts for more than one-third of total city tax revenues. In smaller centres it often makes up a large chunk of total employment.

Aside from the political and economic gains to the host countries, economists and investment bankers point to two wider benefits from having a range of financial centres around the world. One is the increase in overall liquidity as new countries and regions become integrated into the global financial system. The second is increased efficiency as competition between centres drives down the cost of trading and other financial transactions. New and developing financial centres are knocking down protectionist barriers and emulating the regulatory practices of the more established hubs.

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Making connections

The city-states that dominate today’s financial world are connected not only by mobile capital and people, but increasingly by exchanges too. Exchanges have traditionally been at the heart of important financial cities. They grew up serving mainly national markets, but have changed fundamentally in recent years. A growing number are now publicly owned, which has forced them to shed their clubby ways and compete more openly.

Now they are teaming up across national borders. The first ever transatlantic merger between exchanges took place earlier this year when the New York Stock Exchange bought Euronext, a pan-European exchange group. The deal is being closely watched as a precursor to further cross-border consolidation. The London Stock Exchange is merging with Borsa Italiana, Italy’s main market.

Deutsche Börse is teaming up with the International Securities Exchange in New York. The big exchanges in Western countries are linking up with counterparts farther east as well, from the Dubai Mercantile Exchange to the Tokyo Stock Exchange.

This consolidation raises questions about the future relationship between exchanges and global financial centres. Exchange listing fees and affiliated services are a big source of income for host cities. Exchanges are also seen as important political prizes. But the rapid growth in cross-border trading has made life more difficult for national regulators.

This special report will examine the factors that create and sustain global financial centres and explain why physical financial hubs – teeming with banks and exchanges but also with legal, accountancy and public-relations firms and consultancies – continue to matter so much. It will also consider what their rise means for the global financial system, and how it is changing the cities that are home to these clusters.

HOW TO SUGGESTIVE SELL YOUR GIFT CERTIFICATES

Ron Wilkinson

Gift Certificates can be a great revenue producer during the entire year, but your purchases will really increase around Birthdays and Holidays especially prior to Christmas. It is a great idea to feature this gift certificate sale right after Thanksgiving.

December can be the busiest month of the year if you effectively handle gift certificates. Let me tell you about a good promotion.

If you purchase a minimum increment of a $100.00 in gift certificates between Thanksgiving and the first of the year, you will receive a $ 2000

“Bonus” Guest Certificate FREE. This twenty dollar bonus is a great way to

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