ADUTAINMENT: Advertising as Entertainment
JellyBasket.com - JELLY by the CASE or as a GIFT BASKET.

The New Connecticut Business Expo: Featuring Powerful Speakers, the Latest Technology Tools and Access to Business Building Programs
Hartford Business Journal and Event Management team up to present the 2008 Connecticut Business Expo. Still providing businesses with networking opportunities and educational programs, this year's Business Expo has been enhanced. The expo will run all day on Thursday, June 5, 2008 at the Connecticut Convention Center in Hartford starting at 7:30 a.m.

Marketing Research Tips: Gathering Requirements
I never gather requirements for a new product, but I always gather requirements by asking for feedback for an existing product that I am about to update.

Beware! A Big Contract Could Destroy Your Business If You Don't Avoid This Common Mistake
Beware! A Big Contract Could Destroy Your Business If You Don't Avoid This Common Mistake

How Affordable is an Adult Video DVD?
If you would make a comparison in terms of price range between an adult video DVD and a family video DVD, you would easily see that the former is much premium priced compared to the latter. That is very likely because it takes so much trouble for a film producer to make an adult film, for distributors to market the titles and for video shops to sell the items.

Affiliate Marketing : Highly Efficient And Profitable
Affiliate Marketing can be traced to the simple concept of revenue sharing, which has existed long before the internet even existed. However, in it's form today, Affiliate Marketing began just about four years after the internet was born, when CDNOW launched their ?BuyWeb? program. This was basically a way of doing click-through purchasing at independent storefronts. It was a very successful model and business venture, launching e-commerce into the business mainstream. In fact, e-commerce companies like Amazon.com owe their success to Affiliate Marketing, and many businesses today include it in their business plans.

MusicMatters Creates Ultimate Green Experience for Jack Johnson's 2008 World Tour; Pioneering Effect Marketing Firm Promotes Social Action, Drives R
From the first Concert for the Environment in the ?90s to the latest Jack Johnson world tour ? to significantly boosting revenues for an array of organic brands like Ben & Jerry's, Stonyfield and CLIF Bar ? MusicMatters is proving that green experiences generate dramatic results. The Minneapolis-based company creates strategic partnerships, innovative, action-oriented campaigns and memorable experiential online and onsite activities to raise awareness about critical environmental issues that move millions to take action. (See Media Kit case studies). In many ways, the Johnson tour, like the company?s work for recording artists that range from Gomez and the John Butler Trio to the Dave Matthews Band, The Police and others, is a culmination o...

Online Marketing and Social Networks: Free Webcast on Best Practices for Success
Social networking tools - and how to use them to maximize your company's online marketing success - are explored in this free webcast, featuring Search Engine Land's Features Editor, Vanessa Fox

Business Consultancy - An Overview
What is business consultancy anyway? To answer this let?s start with some common definitions of Consultancy on the Web:

Is Affiliate Marketing Right For You?
Affiliate marketing is achievable and lucrative for just about anyone. The internet today is a wealth of information, a resource rich environment, and a priceless tool helping people regardless of background or education level. Anyone that somewhat applies themselves in the affiliate sales avenue will see some degree of success. This is due to the support given by all the affiliate programs available today. It's simple to join a program, market with solo ads, paid ads, free ads, all of which will produce results. However, to become very successful, you must have a solid understanding of how it all works.

WAND Announces Launch of New Enterprise Taxonomy for Organizing and Searching Business Content
Pre-built corporate vocabulary helps improve enterprise search and improve employee efficiency by reducing time wasted looking for documents.

A Simple Suggestion to Improve Your Article Marketing
Article marketing is becoming more and more popular, especially as marketers begin to see the impact and influence they can have from one well-written, well-timed, and well-placed article.Some marketers use an article distribution service like the Phantom Writers or iSnare, or distribution software like Jason Potash's Article Announcer, but many marketers submit their articles manually, working from a list containing somewhere around 100 article sites they either created or were given.

Build Your Business Through Networking
Here's one of the most important success principles you'll ever learn. It is this: The more people you know and who know you in a favorable way, the more successful you will be in your business or profession.

Internet Marketing - 5 Ways to Add Human Touch to Your Business
Make your business personal. This is the credo of the more successful internet marketers. Nobody wants to make business with a robot! While you will be using automation and outsourcing techniques, this is not an excuse for you to let them do all of the work for you.

Selling Your Business Note
Before I go further, let me ask a question- if you won the lottery tomorrow, would you take the payout in a lump sum or in monthly payments?Most people would take a lump sum because even though it might be less than the total prize, they would have control over a large sum of money now and could let the time value of money go to work and increase their winnings.So why then would you opt to get paid on your business sale over several years rather than take a lump sum payout?The answer is probably because you didn't know that you could get cash for your business note.

BETA Records Partners With Kaltura To Provide Collaborative Music Video Creation Tools For Artists & Fans
BETA Records will partner with Kaltura to provide unsigned artists the ability to engage with their fans by creating collaborative music videos. Kaltura's platform will be embedded within BETA's upcoming new social community site allowing artists and fans to add the clips directly to their profile page.

Small Business Debt Collection Letter Writing

Writing a debt collection letter is one of the most important skills of any small business owner. Do you have what it takes to get the money youve earned?

I have a confession: I'm a business writer who's let clients get away with not paying me--a huge sign of failure of my writing abilities. You see, I never learned one of the most important writing skills for any self-employed person or small business owner: how to write a debt collection letter.

Debt collection letters--an overview

"Debt collection letter" in the singular may be an oxymoron, since unfortunately, one is rarely enough. You should have a series of letters to send to deadbeat clients, each one becoming a little more insistent. Here are some ideas for a five-letter series.

1. Dont make your first letter look like a collection letter at all. Make it a friendly note. Youre more likely to get money from someone who thinks of you as a partner than a dun.

2. If that first letter doesnt get a response--and usually it wont--send another the next week thats more urgent and directly asks for the money. Express your concern that you have not been able to contact the client. Ask if he or she is all right, and if he or she is having any trouble paying.

3. The next week, if you still have not gotten a response, send a letter referring to the payment terms in the agreement you and the client originally made (you did have some kind of written agreement, even if it was just on the back of your invoice, right?). Mention the effect this nonpayment is having on your cash flow, and that your businesss cash flow is just as important as theirs.

4. Still no response by the next week? State plainly that you are asking for the money for the final time before referring it to collections. Include a copy of the entire agreement between you and the client.

5. If you still have not heard back from the client, and are confident that you do not simply have a problem with their contact information, call a collection agencyin fact, you may have wanted to have gotten a collection agency from step one (more on that below).

More Tips for Successful Debt Collections

Tip: Dont wait to start asking for your money.

If its been a week since the payment deadline passed, its been a week too long. Send out that first reminder letter today. Dont hesitate to send these letters as little as a week apart from each other. The longer your bill goes unpaid, the less likely it is you will ever see that money again.

Tip: If youve been sending email, try sending paper.

For whatever reason, there are people who take a paper letter more seriously. Theres also the real chance that your emails really are not getting through reliably, or are ending up at the bottom of an overflowing Inbox.

If you do send email, make sure its digitally signed. A digital signature proves that you sent the email to the specific recipient. In fact, you might want to make sure all your emails to clients and prospects are digitally signed, to have solid documentation of everything you said, and everything they owe.

Unlike with regular emails, the date, time, to and from fields cant be forged, so the email has legal standing, even more than certified mail. While web-based email programs cannot send digitally signed email, there are third-party services that will let you send hundreds of digitally signed emails from a desktop email program for only a few dollars a month.

Tip: Follow up your debt collection letter with a telephone call.

As any collection agency will tell you, telephone calls are useful if your debtor has ignored the collection letters. But with caller ID, Caller Blocking and voice mail - if people don't want to take your calls it is hard to reach them. This technique could be especially effective in the case of someone with whom you know will answer their own phone.

Of course, your writing skills wont go to waste: you need to make sure you have scripted what you want to say. You should take the same attitude and touch on the same points as your letter. Whatever you do, dont let yourself get sidetracked, and dont be embarrassed. Theyre the ones who are putting you out.

Dont know your deadbeats telephone number? Try looking up the Whois record of the businesss website, which usually has the owners telephone number.

Does all this sound like too much work?

If youd rather be writing proposals than collection letters, there are small business collection agencies that will take on debts for as little as $20 each. After all, your client had enough sense to go to you rather than doing your specialty themselves. Shouldnt you have as much sense when it comes to your debt collection letters?

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