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The opportunities for getting free advertising for your product
or services are limited only by your own imagination and
energies. There are so many proven ways of promoting your
objectives without cost that it literally boggles the mind just
to think of listing them.
One way is to write an article relative to your particular
expertise and submit it to all the publications and media dealing
in the dissemination of related information. In other words,
become your own publicity and sales promotions writer. Get the
word out; establish yourself as an expert in your field, and
"tag-along" everything you write with a quick note listing your
address for a catalog, dealership opportunity, or more
information.
Another really good way is by becoming a guest on as many of the
radio and television talk shows or interview type programs as
possible. Actually, this is much easier to bring about than most
people realize. Write a letter to the producer of these programs,
then follow up an in-person visit or telephone call. Your initial
contact should emphasize that your product or service would be of
interest to the listeners or viewers of the program--perhaps even
saving them time and money.
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Other ways of getting free or very inexpensive exposure include
the posting of advertising circulars on all free bulletin boards
in your area, especially the coin-operated laundries, grocery
stores, and beauty and barber shops. Don't discount the idea of
handing out circulars to all the shoppers in busy shopping
centers and malls, especially on weekend. You can also enlist the
aid of the middle school students in your area to had out
circulars door-to-door.
Some of the more routine methods include having a promotional ad
relative to your product or service printed on the front or back
of your envelopes at the time you have them printed with your
return address.
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Be sure to check all the publications that carry the kind of
advertising you need. Many mail order publications just getting
started offer unusually low rates to first-time advertisers; a
free-of-charge insertion of your ad when you pay for an order to
run three issues or more; or special seasonal ad space at greatly
reduced rates. And there are a number of publications that will
give you Per Inquiry (PI) space--arrangement where all orders
come in to the publication, they take a commission from each
order, and then forward the orders on to you for fulfillment.
Many publications will give you a contract for "" space. In this
arrangement you send them your ad, and they hold it until they
have unsold space, and then at a price that's always one third or
less the regular price for the space need, insert your ad. Along
these lines, be sure to check in with the suburban neighborhood
newspapers.
If you send out or publish any kind of catalog or ad sheet, get
in touch will all the other publishers and inquire about the
possibilities of exchange advertising. They run your ad in their
publication in exchange for your running an ad for them of
comparable size in yours.
Finally, there's nothing in the world that beats the low cost and
tremendous exposure you get when you advertise a free offer.
Simply run an ad offering a free report of interest to most
people--- a simple one page report with a "tag-line" inviting the
readers to send money for more information, with a full page
advertisement for your book or other product on the backside. Ask
for a self-addressed stamped envelope, and depending on the
appeal for your report and circulation of the publication in
which your ad appears, you could easily be inundated with
responses!
The trick here, of course, is to convert all these responses, or
a large percentage of them, into sales. This is done via the
"tag-line," which issues an invitation to the reader to send for
more information, and the full page ad on the back of the report,
and other offers you include with the complete package you send
back to them. As mentioned at the beginning of this report, it's
just a matter of unleashing your imagination. Do that, and you
have a powerful force working for you that can help you reach
your goals.
It all started about six months ago when I realized that the book sitting on top my toilet, an introductory text to TCP/IP, was wet following a shower. So, for that matter, were the items on the counter surrounding my sink. I made a mental note to check my shower head the next time I was in there, and the following morning, I looked up and saw great streams of water spraying everywhere from the connection to the arm. I unscrewed this and left it to sit on the edge of the sink. After drying off and dressing, I got my tool kit and a roll of Teflon tape, wrapped it around the threads, and re-seated the shower head. Problem solved, or so I thought. The leak disappeared for a while, but then came back with a vengeance, this time leaking out of the head itself as well as the threads. There comes a time when Teflon tape simply will not solve problems anymore, and so with that knowledge in my heart, I set out to find a new shower head.
The task and requirements seem simple: find an object that takes a high-pressure stream of water and breaks it up into dozens of smaller streams at a similar or lower pressure, spraying it all over someone who is attempting to get clean. And if you think about it, a shower head is not an engineering marvel: nearly everybody has one or needs one, and so logically, there would be shelves full of them at most stores.
Logic can go hunt for a shower head before it has any right to say anything about it.
Over the space of two weeks, I visited every high pressure shower head bathroom store in Victoria that sold shower accessories -- there aren't many of them, maybe only ten or so, but it feels like a lot -- and many hardware stores in search of the elusive shower head. I discovered that shower heads range in price from $11 to $850 (!), and are sold in three major styles, and the stores that carry them are reflective of the quality of their merchandise.
The first kind of shower head usually comes in and is made out of plastic. They're sold by stores that do not do bathrooms as part of their major business function, and by discount remodeling stores. Brand names such as WaterPik and advertisements on TV for these products are common. You can see inside the package and look at the shower head you are about to buy, which is almost certainly white, with lots of cute icons on it and maybe one of those super cool flexible tubes. The problem with this particular style of shower head, for starters, is that I already had a $14.95 shower head, and it exploded on me. And I don't want a shower head on a longer tube -- I'm six feet tall, and I'm fortunate in that my shower, the head doesn't bang me in the back of the neck while I'm trying to wash my hair, a common problem I encounter in hotels where the showers seem to be designed for midgets. With a longer tube, I imagine that I'd have to get down on my knees to rinse Herbal Essences shampoo out of my hair.
So cheap heads are out.
If you poke around in the yellow pages enough, you'll eventually encounter an ad for a store that shows an elegant Victorian bathtub -- the kind with little feet -- and waxes expansive about its product line. If you drop by, you find an elaborate show room with faucets and shower heads sticking out of the wall, as well as several gorgeous bathtubs with whirlpool jets built into the side of a kind I really want but can't justify. These places may or may not have a marble tile floor, and their salespeople are always impeccably dressed. They sell produces made by companies like Moen, Broan, and American Standard, that come in a cardboard box (albeit a rather plain brown one), wrapped in a plastic. The items themselves may or may not be made out of plastic, and they want to charge you $30 to $45 for anything in their store, at a minimum, and that includes the rubber washers they sell by the truckload. There's nothing specifically wrong with a Moen shower head, but the ones I saw didn't particularly fire my imagination. And I couldn't figure out whether they could be disassembled for cleaning. I know it's stupid, buying a shower head based on looks, but their products were ugly.
The medium heads were thus out, too.
The expensive stores come in two flavors -- one that is basically the medium-grade store on crack cocaine, and one that lives in a two-storey building and features product shoehorned into various corners of the store. We have one of each in Victoria: Cantu is our retailer on crack, and Victoria Specialty Hardware is our small one. I went to Cantu and was less than impressed by their selection, so at a quarter to five one rainy afternoon, I drove to Victoria Specialty Hardware and illegally parked in the residential area in which it is located. The shower heads are tucked away, in a small room upstairs, with a few understated designs mounted on attractive wall board with some product literature displays hanging around. The manufacturer of these fine products? A German firm by the name of Hansgrohe.
I know all about the psychology of advertising, and the Hansgrohe marketing guys nailed it dead on with their product literature and displays: stick wet, naked people on stuff, and consumers will fork over the cash. There's no good reason for this, but it works, and I don't blame them. The people in the product shots looked far too happy to be showering, but there was an indescribable allure to them: I bet showering with this thing feels really good.
A guy with a thin beard and a beige sweater came upstairs to see if I needed anything while I gazed longingly at the literature for Hansgrohe's Shower Temple -- a masterful combination of overhead and body sprays, with a fogger and steam generator -- displayed in an enclosure the size of a standard bathroom. "I need a shower head," I squeaked.
He began to explain the various benefits of the types of Hansgrohe products. "This one here, is $359.95." My eyes popped out of my head. I dared to enquire about the large, 8" diameter sized head with 80, luxurious-looking nozzles. "Oh, you mean the Aktiva. It's $850." And the Shower Temple, for which I lusted so badly? "$4000. Figure on $8000 if you want the electronics and stuff."
It has electronics?
In the end, I confessed that I did not want to spend $360 on a shower head, though he seemed perfectly willing to take my money and the naked people were enticing me. He pointed towards a rather pedestrian-looking display case featuring a lonely white box with some European lettering on the side and a photo of a woman endowed with either bad implants or tightly wound ligaments. "This is the Selectra. We sell a lot of these. It's $90."
Bad-implant woman won out. We galumphed down the stairs, and I forked over the MasterCard, much as the Hansgrohe marketing people would have hoped. As he was putting a dent in my account balance, he opened the box and peered inside. "Oh," he said, breaking the shower head down into smaller parts. "You see this white thing in here?" I did. "When you get home, take this out. Trust me, you'll like it much better." This, I was to learn, is the flow limiter, which keeps the water usage down to below 2.5 gallons per minute. I later called various other manufacturers of low- flow shower heads to see if the limiter could be removed as in Hansgrohe's products; the unanimous response was no. I guess you have to pay $90 for the privilege of deciding whether you want to be environmentally irresponsible.
Saving the planet aside, I was anxious to take a shower without having to clean up after Hurricane Mike in the bathroom, so I rushed home and unpacked my new wonder shower head. Like most European or Asian products, the English in the instructions is not the best, and contains some amusing errors. But, Teflon tape and wrench in hand, I set about installing my new bathroom fixture.
It is extremely classy. The important parts are made out of metal, and the rest is either a very heavy plastic or a very light alloy of some kind I can't tell. There are little green pins that come down to poke out any calcification that occurs in the holes every time you switch from massage to normal or back again. (Fancier models of Hansgrohe products have pins that are driven by water and rotate around in the shower head automatically.) It even comes with a little rubber skirt around the fitting so that water leaks do not go spraying everywhere, but rather drip gently out under gravity's power, not that of the water company's pumping station. Physically, it is a very attractive chrome object with a grey nozzle surface and a large control dial that seems a bit sticky and hard to turn. People with small hands might have problems with it, but I don't.
With the 2.5 GPM limiter in place, a satisfying stream of water emerged from the shower head. I got under it, and had a fairly nice shower, though the pressure wasn't what I was used to. (My old head spewed water out at the same pressure as it was delivered from the pumping station, and it kind of hurt sometimes.) I then grabbed my pair of pliers, unscrewed the head, and, using a pair of artery forceps, I pulled out the little white tab. Teflon tape around the screw threads on the arm, the rubber skirt in place, I set myself up for another shower as I bolted it back in. I turned on the water, diverted it to the shower head, and immediately found myself in heaven.
The pressure was back up, but nowhere near as high as with my old one. Still, satisfyingly strong; you know you're taking a strong shower with this as opposed to standing in the rain and trying to wash your hair. The massage setting is very strong, however, and some people might not like it while racked all the way over; Hansgrohe is smart and has set it up so that you can have varying degrees of strength.
I like this shower head. Far more than I think I have a right to like an object as utilitarian as this. My significant other tried it out. "Very nice," she said, having complained about the strength of the other one. For alternative views, I invited a friend over to try it out. "Can I move in?" she asked. That made it official -- I could justify keeping it, protestations from various people aside: "You paid $90 for a shower head?"
Shutting these people up usually only requires a visit to my shower and a towel.
We've all heard the cultural stereotype about Europeans -- they don't bathe, they smell bad, they don't take personal hygiene seriously. If this is true, then the people at Hansgrohe are mutants. I am firmly convinced they hired someone to explain the emotions and the physical sensations of showering to them, and that they understand more about bathrooms and their place in the home than all the American manufacturers put together. It is obvious from the workmanship that this product is German, and the design reflects a certain amount of continental common sense too. This is not something that was made strictly to spray water on you -- that might have been a secondary design goal. Rather, this was a product designed to make getting up in the morning something to look forward to, not dread, and to make showering a... well, a pleasurable experience. I can't say that the Shower Temples look unattractive, and this time, the naked people are emphatically not responsible for how I feel about them.
Hansgrohe's Web site features some "dream bathrooms," and after having looked at all of them and read the information on the Bathroom Museum (charting the history of that most hallowed of household rooms), I've concluded two things: First, my next vacation will be to Germany. Second, if I win the lottery, I will buy a house, pay someone to wreck my master bathroom, and then pay the guys at Hansgrohe a lot of money to rebuild it.
But let's be honest -- is a shower head worth $90? Why am I acting like a prototypical yuppie by spending that much when most people are perfectly happy with a shower head that cost at the very most half what I paid? The answers are absolutely, and I have no idea, in that order. I enjoy being warm and wet, and anything that makes it a more fun process is certainly worthwhile; this is not an isolated feeling. (Think back to how you felt when you encounter bubble baths for the first time, and tell me it isn't true.) We like to be comfortable and want to enjoy the daily cleansing rituals, and Hansgrohe, I think, understands this. The Europeans know more about this intuitively than we do, and they tend to show it in their products with more class than American firms.
On the other hand, all of this might be a rationalization on my part, trying to justify the purchase of a horrendously expensive pedestrian piece of household equipment when I know full-well that I could have been happy with a $20 wonder. But even if that is the case, I still have naked people on the box, bad implants or no. High pressure shower head