Hurry, because a small baking business, a home-based shoe business, and an aquatic rehab facility for dogs are already in the running. Enter your own business, or vote for your favorite entry.

Check it out here: tinyurl.com/3dn76cm

If you’re already a Success Circle Member, I want to give you a sneak preview of the information that you will be receiving shortly in your mailbox.

http://www.successcirclemonthly.com

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Guerrilla Marketing: How to Make Big Profits From Your Small Business

with Jay Conrad Levinson

Here’s some of what you’ll learn inside your June 2010 SUCCESS CIRCLE interview:

- What Guerrilla Marketing is… and what it isn’t

- The 11 things Guerrilla marketers do that non-Guerrillas don’t do

- A critical weapon for your Guerrilla arsenal (and it only takes 5 minutes to create!)

- Surefire strategies for determining the right Guerrilla Marketing tools for your business

- Jay’s favorite Guerrilla Marketing weapons, and how to implement them today!  

- How to balance the demands of Guerrilla Marketing with the joys of life outside of work 

Recently, I interviewed Jay Conrad Levinson. Jay Conrad Levinson is the father of Guerrilla Marketing and the author of the Guerrilla Marketing series of books.

Guerrilla Marketing is the best-known marketing brand in history and has been named one of the 100 best business books ever written, with over 21 million copies sold.

His Guerrilla Marketing concepts have influenced marketing so much that his books appear in 62 languages and are required reading in MBA programs worldwide.

A winner of first prizes in all the media, Jay has been part of the creative teams for such brands as the Marlboro Man, the Pillsbury Dough Boy, Tony the Tiger, the Jolly Green Giant and many others.

Additionally, Entrepreneur Magazine calls Jay Conrad Levinson “one of the foremost business marketing experts in the world.”  

Here’s an excerpt from my interview with Jay Conrad Levinson:

“It’s very simple because a Guerilla Marketing calendar, first of all, it prevents emergencies.  Secondly, it motivates planning.  And thirdly, it’s very simple and it’s free to do.  In order to create a Guerilla Marketing calendar, all you really need is one piece of paper and a pen and maybe it will be help if you had a ruler to draw straight lines with.  When you create a marketing calendar, you draw 12 lines, because there’s only 12 months in a year.  Then you have five columns, so it becomes a grid, 12 rows and five columns.  And the first column is called month, which is very easy.  Starting now, you’d say April, May, June, July, and so on.  That’s very easy. 

The second column is called thrust.  What was the thrust of your marketing that month?  What was the message you were putting forth?  Were you talking about a new innovation?  Were you talking about a new service?  Were you talking about a special price you’re now offering?  What is the thrust of your marketing that month?

The third column is called media.  What media did you use that month?  Did you happen to be, did you have a special promotion and market it on your Web site on a landing page?  Did you put an ad in the newspaper?  Maybe you ran an ad on cable TV.  Maybe you put something up on Google.  What media did you use that month?  That’s the third column. 

The fourth column is where you draw a dollar sign.  And that column says how much did you invest in marketing that month.  And the final column is when you magically transform yourself into a college professor.  And that month gets a grade, gets an A, B, C, D or F.   At the end of the year, and this is where the Guerillas are separated from the non-Guerillas, at the end of the year, you change everything in your marketing calendar that didn’t result in an A or B for you.  At the end of the second year, you get rid of the things that didn’t get an A for you.  So you’re left by the third year with things you’ve proved in action for your company that only got an A.”

Click here to join Success Circle now:

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INSIDE YOUR AUGUST 2009 SUCCESS CIRCLE INTERVIEW:

How to Achieve RockStar Status in Your Industry, with Craig Duswalt

Recently, I interviewed Craig Duswalt. Craig is a professional speaker and the creator of RockStar System for Success: How to Achieve RockStar Status in Your Industry. Craig’s background includes touring with the band Guns N’ Roses as Axl Rose’s personal manager and Air Supply as the band’s personal assistant.  

Craig was also an award-winning copywriter, working as a senior copywriter for a Los Angeles based ad agency until opening up his own ad agency, Green Room Design & Advertising, which was recently named Small Business of the Year by the Santa Clarita Valley Chamber of Commerce. Craig combines his backgrounds in both music and marketing, and he teaches numerous ways to save a ton of money on marketing and advertising, and also, how to become perceived as a celebrity and an expert in your business, where potential clients will come to you instead of you having to go after them.  

This interview provides a great opportunity to learn the secrets of promotion from a former insider in the multi-billion-dollar music industry, and how to apply them to your business. Watch your mailbox, because your package will be arriving soon.

Here’s some of what you’ll learn:

- What it takes to create RockStar status in your business

- How to use the power of social networking to generate tons of business

- Why having a “title” is the key to self-promotion

- The one thing you must do to establish yourself as an expert…and how to do it in the next 30 days!

- Why you don’t need business cards any more…and what replaces them

- How to increase your fan base by using a little known RockStar secret!

- Why RockStars always do encores…and how you can, too

Here’s an excerpt from our interview:

Guns N’ Roses, let’s just say if this were to happen on the road, I’m not saying this happened with Guns N’ Roses, but for example, say we’re playing a show in Denver, Colorado, and the next night we’re playing a show in Kansas City, Missouri.  And Kansas City’s ticket sales are low, and we need to promote the show.  Now the band doesn’t specifically promote a show.  The promoters do.  But we can certainly do something to spark an interest in Guns N’ Roses again.  Or, I’m not saying this happened with Guns N’ Roses, but if it were to happen with a band like this.

Anyway, you’re in a hotel in Denver, Colorado, and Kansas City is the next night, and ticket sales are….  So you could always trash a room.  You can throw the TVs out the hotel room window into the pool, like you hear all the time, all the stories about stuff that that’s happened is very, very true.  And it happens because they get in the news.  They’re in the news that night in the local town.  And it usually gets onto CNN that, oh my, God, Guns N’ Roses did something bad again.  They’re in the news.  And then what happens the next city, all of a sudden, the ticket sales go through the roof because they’ve been in the news for something that they did.

Now they were known as the bad boys of rock-n-roll, so the worst they did, the better their attendance was.  When Axl went off and did something bad, the next show would sell out.  I mean, every show would sell out within a week of what happened because everyone – you know, they say Howard Stern, 50% of the people in this world listen to him because they love him, and 50% of the people in this world listen to him because they hate him.  You know, people want to – if they’re bad boys, they want to be – they just want to see what’s going to happen.

How does a business use something like this?  Well, do something in your community that stands out from the rest, whether it’s a charity event.  Chairing charity events, I do that all the time.  I help with charity events, and you always get in the news, and the name of your business gets in the news as well.  Anything local, if you’re a local company doing things local with your Chamber and doing things local with a lot of associations in your town can help you get into the press.  Obviously you’re not going to trash hotel rooms because not only will you get in the press, but you’ll probably get arrested, whereas we can avoid that being bands, you know, big bands.  

But it’s a lot of just, you know, just standing out from the rest.  Do something different than everyone else does, and that’s what rockstars do.  Their albums, every time they put out a new album, you know, Queen was famous for this.  They always put out a new album with a whole different genre of music, and they’d get a whole new audience.  

Duets, I talk about this all the time.  Rockstars do duets with other bands, and the reason why they do that is, yes, they’re fans of the other people, but they get to tap into their database.  Look at David Bowie and Bing Crosby, I mean, two totally different people.  But David Bowie, now, the people that listen to Bing Crosby are all going to say, who is this David Bowie guy?  Oh, look, he’s kind of normal.  We could buy this album, so they’re using each other’s database.  The same thing with joint ventures with businesses.  Partner with other people that have, like, a common interest with what you do, and then you get to bank off of each other’s databases.  So joint ventures is a big thing that I teach because working with other people, you get double the database.  

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Not yet a Success Circle Member?

Not receiving the Success Circle Interview Series in your mailbox each month?

That’s easy to fix. And you can even test drive two FREE months…starting with the Craig Duswalt interview!

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Did you know that 20% of your customers want to buy more from you?

You might be leaving money on the table if you’re not offering additional items, add-ons or accessories. It’s called upselling, and you probably experience it every week. If you play your cards right, you can increase transaction size, and double or triple your profits!

If you’ve ever been in a McDonald’s, then you’ve experienced upselling through one of two questions:

1. Would you like fries with that?

It’s a simple phrase. Just ask your customers to buy one more item.

Think of the impact this has on revenue (and profit) at McDonald’s. The company operates over 31,000 restaurants, and serves nearly 47 million customers each day. They ask the upsell question 47 million times a day. Now I’m not sure how many people say yes, or how much more profit McDonald’s earns because they ask the question. But they wouldn’t be doing it if it didn’t work. It DOES work.

2. Would you like to supersize that?

Another great question. The idea behind this promotion is that, for an extra 39 cents, a customer could dramatically increase the size of the meal. And McDonald’s could incrementally increase the size of its profit on that transaction.

McDonald’s isn’t the only company to have figured this out. In fact, you probably experience upselling on a regular basis. I went into Nordstrom to buy a suit, and left with four shirts and seven ties that I hadn’t planned to buy. I purchased an iPod Touch at Best Buy for my daughter, and was offered an extended warranty. In each case, I was encouraged to add on to the purchase I was making.

Are you asking YOUR customers to add on to the purchase they’re making?

Maybe when a customer buys one item at the regular price, they are able to get a second at half price. Maybe you offer them a complimentary item related to the original purchase, like a warranty, accessories, or something else that adds to what the customer is buying. Maybe you create a package that contains every item you sell.

You have to figure out what works best for your business. Write out three or four ways you could upsell to your customers or clients.

Upselling is an easy way to increase revenue, and to double or even triple your profit per transaction profit. Try it out, and see what happens. You’ll be glad you did!