I have decided this year to begin workshops to promote my services and my business. I moved my office here to Greeley at the beginning of the year and am excited to be here, close to home. It is a new beginning for me and I look forward to the challenge.
I am focusing on college funding planning and have a system that teaches parents how to pay for college for their children that are going off to college in the next year or two. I like it because it is an immediate need for the market, and that is one of the things that is essential for a business to have – "a starving crowd".
So I marketed it at the beginning of the year and planned on having my first workshop the 17th of January at the Centennial Park Branch library here in Greeley. I was a little nervous about filling the seats and was concerned that I wouldn’t have anyone attend or show interest. I decided that I was going to invest a little money and cover my bases with marketing, so I planned carefully and strategically.
The first thing that I planned on doing was mailing out a flyer to the list of high school juniors and seniors. I spent about $340 on the list and then about $100 to print up the flyer’s, buy the envelopes and an address stamp. Then I spent $585 on stamps and about a week stuffing the envelopes. Before I tell the results, I will make a reporting of other things that I did.
The next marketing that I did was an ad in the Greeley Tribune newspaper that ran three times in the week and a half before the event. For that I spent $350 and did nothing else.
I also sent out press releases to a lot of the local media outlets and that didn’t cost me anything, but I am not sure that I got any one to pay any attention to the press releases.
Now the results:
Flyer’s got about 8-9 people to respond.
The newspaper got about 27 people to respond.
Press releases – I am not sure that I got any papers or media outlets to run the story, so that didn’t return anyone.
When all was said and done, I spent about $1130 or so to host the event. I ended up having a waiting list of people that wanted to attend. It was a great turn out. I was all of a sudden worried about running the workshop more than about filling the workshop.
I had about 28 families that attended the event. It was a pretty shaky, but about what I expected for the first time. Now my goal is to continue promoting and presenting them. I had 15 people that wanted to meet with me after it was over and have met with three of them. I have a busy week this week and am looking forward to keeping up the momentum.
The next one that I am going to promote is going to be a teleseminar, which I believe will draw the same results as far as attendance goes, but maybe a better return on the amount of appointments that I generate. I’m interested to see the results and track everything.
Well, business is good and moving in the right direction, so there is a little bit of hope. We are still in debt and trying desperately to get out. This is one of my ways and I have a few other ideas to continue to build wealth and get out of debt.
I have a few goals in the works and one of the next posts will be a listing of my short term and long term goals. Well, life continues to offer challenges as well as blessings.
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