Casual Articles - Business

Mortgage Broker Franchise
A look at a UK mortgage broker franchise and the UK mortgage indutry.Many people thinking of entering the UK Financial Services Industry as mortgage advisers think that the way forward is to look for UK mortgage broker franchises with a view to buying into a mortgage broker franchise of some kind. In my opinion, the reality of all this is that most UK mortgage franchises either offer bad value for money or they have just not evolved yet to the required standards.With the Financial Services Authority (FSA) now regulating the mortgage industry, it have become an extremely expensive franchise to both set up, train individuals and to maintain the standards set out by the FSA. As a consequence of this the market is either shrinking or at best standing still. With the expansion of Networks springing up in the UK, a lot of experienced advisers have scurried under their umbrella and newly qualified advisers continu

To do so, you
must answer the two questions he has: "Is the claim made in the
pitch legitimate?" and "Is there enough material here for me to
do a story?"

Your pitch letter (based on your clincher) made a claim of some
sort about you, your company or your product. You’re the
fastest, the most advanced, the hottest-selling, the most civic-
minded, etc. Now you have to back up your claim. Your
backgrounder is where this happens. Provide proof, by giving
concrete examples, third party observations, study results, etc.
to support your pitch. If you’re claiming that there’s a trend
taking place, here’s where you provide the statistics to back it
up. If you’ve claimed that you’ve won more awards that anyone
else in town, here’s where you describe them. Don’t stray from
your purpose -- to reel in the journalist by convincing him that
your claim is legit.

The backgrounder also must d

The Extraordinary Power of Information in a Downsizing World
As Chris Crouch stated so well in The Contented Achiever, many companies are experiencing a cutback in workforce, but not in workload! For the employees left behind to pick up the pieces, accessing valuable company information becomes increasingly complex -- whether it’s a password, the name of a vendor for a product purchased years ago, or vital information about an important client or prospect.The computer, while originally touted as the ultimate organization tool, has in reality increased our ability to create a faster mess! Being disorganized creates inefficiency. Inefficiency costs money, causes unnecessary stress, precipitates poor customer service, and ultimate loss of sales.Here are five essential questions to ask about the information in your business:1) What information do we need to do business? 2) Who in the organization needs access to that information? 3) In what form should the information be

Considering how fundamental they are to the publicist’s trade,
it’s always amazed me how lousy almost all press kits truly are.
Your typical press kit is a bloated folder filled with puffery,
hype, irrelevant information and worse. The vast majority of
these monstrosities do little besides kill trees and clog
newsroom trash baskets.

The good news is that creating a press kit that actually works
really isn’t that hard. Let's look at the elements of a winning
press kit, and help you avoid some common pitfalls.

The Psychology of a Press Kit

There are two fundamental rules to creating a good press kit:

1. The press kit exists to make the journalist’s life easier, not
for you to present sales messages and hype. Good publicists are
journalist-centric -- that is, they think from the perspective of
the recipient, not the sender. They take the time to learn what
journalists need and then they give it to them in as simple,
straightforward and user-friendly a manner as possible.
Remember, publicity is not about you -- it’s about giving
journalists what they need to create a strong story.

2. Everything in the press kit goes to support your clincher.
Everything else gets yanked out. (A refresher: a "clincher" is
my term for the one or two line distillation of your publicity
message. It’s the publicist’s version of the Universal Selling
Proposition that marketers use to boil a product’s marketing
message down to its essence.) You lay out your clincher in the
pitch letter that gets clipped to the cover of the press kit, and
the press kit serves to flesh out and support your clincher.
That’s it. If your clincher is that you’ve brought a radical new
way of thinking to your market segment, then a backgrounder about
your "old fashioned commitment to excellence" not only doesn’t
support your clincher, it may actually contradict it.

The Elements of a Press Kit

The Cover: In my twenty years as a publicist, I have never
encountered a single journalist who told me the cover a press kit
had the slightest impact on their decision whether to run a
story. Yet, businesses still spend thousands on glossy, four
color folder covers. Don’t bother. A simple colored folder with
your business name imprinted upon it will work just fine.

Some businesses choose to get stickers printed up with their logo
and place them on blank folders, which is fine too, as long as
the stickers are neatly applied. Either way, don’t obsess over
it -- it’s what’s inside that counts.

Letterhead: The first page of each press kit element should be
on your letterhead. Some folks prefer to get special "News from
(name of company)" letterhead printed, although, again, I doubt
it really matters.

The Lead Release: If your press kit is going out in support of
an announcement, an event, a trend story or for another specific
purpose, the release that lays out the news should be the first
thing a journalist sees upon opening the folder. This "lead
release" should be positioned at the front of the right side of
the folder.

Backgrounder: This is the element of your kit that provides,
well, the background information to support your pitch. It’s
written in the fashion of a standard news feature (i.e. in third
person, objective tone). This is typically the longest element
in a press kit, often going 2 or 3 pages. As you’re crafting
this, keep something important in mind: if a journalist is
reading your backgrounder, chances are he’s already interested in
your pitch. If he wasn’t, he wouldn’t bother with it. You’ve
hooked him and the backgrounder can reel him in. To do so, you
must answer the two questions he has: "Is the claim made in the
pitch legitimate?" and "Is there enough material here for me to
do a story?"

The backgrounder also must d

Social Responsibility Of Job Sites - Internet Search Portal Calls For More Collaboration
Dublin, Ireland, April 23, 2007 – Facing the increasing competition between job sites, the recently started Internet search portal better-job-offers.com criticises sites that do not show any interest in sharing their results. Due to their advertising deals, most sites try to lure job seekers on their virtual premises, which can increase disorientation between users.As announced by better-job-offers.com marketing manager Robert Koch, the site’s search engine experts do not approve that some providers are not willing to share their results. “Being such an important topic to society in general, we cannot understand why some sites refuse collaboration. Of course, the economic side of our portal matters to us. But making business within this sector means to accept one’s social responsibility,” he added.The increasing number of new job sites had led job seekers to experience disorientation, as shown by the first user feedbacks. The p

nd then they give it to them in as simple,
straightforward and user-friendly a manner as possible.
Remember, publicity is not about you -- it’s about giving
journalists what they need to create a strong story.

The Elements of a Press Kit

The backgrounder also must d

Business Plan
A business plan can make or break your hope and dreams of having a business. If everyone knew how to write a business plan, then everyone would have their on business and be their own boss. In this article I will give you every thing you need in your business plan to be taken seriously by the biggest and best corporations and companies in the United States.The first thing you will need is an executive summary. In your executive summary you will put why your company is needed, and what type of services are offered. You must have a board. Then you will put your board members' names and their schooling, and work history. You will also need to identify in what type of location you would place your business. For example, would you want to be in a mall, private store, or inside a suprestore. Last but not least, you will need to show in detail what will make your business stand out from your competitors.The next step will be

n’t
support your clincher, it may actually contradict it.

The Elements of a Press Kit

The backgrounder also must d

Don't Throw Your New Managers to the Wolves -- Train Them!
TECHNIQUES TO TRAIN NEW MANAGERSBusinesses are notorious for throwing its newly appointed managers to the wolves, many times failing to provide even the most basic management training. When this is the case, organizational productivity is certain to suffer.Perhaps the shortest and easiest to read high quality management book ever written is The One-Minute Manager by Kenneth Blanchard and Spencer Johnson. While this little management book was first published in 1981, it is still available from your local bookstore.The authors provide two basic management principles that I believe every new manager should understand and be prepared to practice -- the One Minute Praising and the One Minute Reprimand.The One-Minute PraisingThe One-Minute Praising enables managers to help their people realize their full potential by catching them doing something right. The One Minute Praising works really well when you:1.

really matters.

The backgrounder also must d

How to Choose Your Ideal Career
They say that most people do complete and total career changes at least once often twice in their lifetimes. Very few people chose the ideal perfect career for themselves when they're in high school and blissfully happily work those same jobs for the rest of their lives. With the way that technology and everything else changes so fast, I think it's ridiculous to expect to stay in one job from the time you leave school until you retire. Even staying in the same company can be a huge challenge. So how will you pick your first career? Your next major career change?The first thing I want you to look at is what kinds of things do you enjoy doing and what you are naturally good at. Imagine that you just won the lottery and you will never have to work again for another day of your life. How would you spend your time? After the shopping sprees and traveling and such grows old, you're going to have to fill your days up doing something

To do so, you
must answer the two questions he has: "Is the claim made in the
pitch legitimate?" and "Is there enough material here for me to
do a story?"

The backgrounder also must demonstrate that enough material
exists to support the claim - and that it will be easy for the
journalist to access this information. Journalists don’t have
time to do extended investigation on every piece. Provides leads
to websites, trade journals, experts and other resources to back
up your claim and help the journalist complete the story, you’ll
have a big edge.

To write a backgrounder, do some role playing. You’re a
reporter. Your editor has handed you a pitch letter and said
"write this up". In this case, of course, the pitch letter is
your own. While you’re writing it, try to forget that the piece
is, essentially, about you. Pretend you’re an objective
reporter. Track down resources, dig up stats, interview
experts. Try to see if you can create a credible piece that
proves the pitch’s claim to be valid and interesting to the
reader. If you can, you’ve got a great backgrounder. If you
can’t, it may be time to come up with a new pitch!

Bio: Only include bios of people who are relevant to the pitch.
A bio of your sales manager in a press kit designed to support a
claim of technological superiority is pointless. A bio of your
head of R&D is valid. Keep bios short (three paragraphs at the
most) and include only information relevant to the pitch. The
fact your head of R&D spent twenty years at NASA is relevant,
that she loves golf and has two cats isn’t. The point of a bio:
to show the legitimacy of those quoted in your release or being
offered for interview, and to help the reporter craft a short
description of the person when writing the piece.

Fact Sheet: The fact sheet should distill the entire press kit
into an "at a glance" document. Keep it short, use bullet points
and bold headings. For example, I might start with the heading
The Story: and include a bullet point repeating the pitch. The
next heading might be Why It’s Important: followed by some
bullet points putting the pitch into a broader industry-wide (or
perhaps even worldwide) context. Finally, I might use the
heading Why (name of my company) is at the Heart of this Vital
Story: and run some bullet points taken from the backgrounder
giving support to my claim. Put this fact sheet at the front of
the left side of the folder, just across from the lead release.
This sort of fact sheet is amazingly powerful and almost never
crafted in the fashion I just laid out. I’ve sold countless
stories because of this style of fact sheet and you can too.

Other Stuff: Filling out the kit with a company brochure and a
photo or two is reasonable, but don’t get carried away. Keep your
kit simple, stick to your clincher and think like a journalist,
not a marketer, and you’ll have crafted a first class press kit!

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Scheduling time wisely is one of the keys to succeeding in business. If you spent too much time in meetings, or too much time answering email, the result is the same - slow progress.

A long copy sales letter is the kingpin of your marketing campaign, but it does not perform on its own. By itself it is not strong enough to get the cash flowing for your business. There is also support copy that is often ignored in the copywriting process yet it is just as critical to the overall success of the sales letter.

Business runs at a fast pace. You need to consider ways in which you can comfortably slow down and de-stress. Because slowing down is good for you and ultimately your business performance too...

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