Guest post on marketing a small business

/ Consulting / By
Linda Morton, a PR consultant, offers today’s guest post. While in public relations, Linda designed newspapers, advertisements and a full range of branding and marketing publications. She also had an academic career — she taught publication design for 15 years and researched publication design, publishing articles and presenting research papers on the topic. I’m pleased to share the following article she wrote on small business marketing.

According to the Small Business Administration, a half million new business are started every year. Many fail in the first year, and most fail in the first five years.

The major cause of failing is negative cash flow. Many fail just as their businesses are on the verge of making a profit. Having already spent their start-up money, the owners don’t have enough left to carry them until they realize the profits.

Save Money – Do Your Own Marketing and Branding
To survive, new business owners must save much of their start-up funds for these negative cash flow times. Yet many spend much of their start-up money outsourcing marketing and branding activities, such as establishing a name, developing identity symbols, publications, and advertising.

New business owners can learn to provide their own effective identity symbols, publications and advertising. They can save these start-up expenses for those negative cash flow times.

Try sourcing free marketing templates

BestBooksPlus.com offers free pdf templates of logos, business cards, letterheads, flyers and posters, newsletters, brochures and pamphlets, booklets, magazines
and annual reports. The templates can be downloaded at:
http://www.BestBooksPlus.com/BusinessBranding.html

The templates provide samples for different types of small businesses, and instruction explaining the design choices for each.

Free templates and aids, like those available at www.BestBooksPlus.com, can help new business owners learn to do their own marketing and business branding. Then, instead of spending money outsourcing these activities, they can keep their start-up money for new business opportunities and to survive during times of negative cash flow.