If you are already in a small business and looking for another inexpensive way to market or advertise, perhaps you want to try direct marketing or direct mail? Have you already done some direct-mail marketing using those coupon packages that are sent out by various companies to certain ZIP codes in your community?

The only problem with this is sometimes they only send them out about once per month and you want your customers to come in more often to shop with you. Let me tell you about a strategy that I learned in my 27 years in business and my superior efforts for our franchise company in grassroots marketing in the communities that we serviced. Our company a franchise company sold franchises that do on-site outdoor cleaning service.

We found that we could often piggyback our fliers that explain our services and put these advertisements into the invoices of other companies who would send them out of their customers and in trade we would take their fliers and put them in the invoices to our customers and it worked great.

You have to make sure that they are not competing against you and in their services and that the services are indeed complementary; let me explain. You see we did on-site truck washing and another company did on-site oil and lube. The fleet owners needed both services and therefore it made sense to co-op our advertising and each of us were sending out our invoices anyway it did not cost either of us to put the other persons flyer in the envelope. I want to consider this in 2006; is this a possible strategy for your small business?

Lance Winslow

Currently Lance is retired at age 40 and is running an Online Think Tank Forum while traveling North America. Perhaps considering something extremely challenging to do that will exercise his mind and utilize all his experiences, observations and skills. Any ideas?