To kick-start the *official* Grand Opening of the Sweet Spot Training Centre in Pickering, ON, we are offering FREE workshops on 2 of our award winning courses. From Tuesday, August 4th through to Friday, August 7th, Sweet Spot Training has set up some scheduled courses that are absolutely complimentary. HURRY, this is a limited time offer!
Discover Your Sweet Spot – $99 value
This fun, interative workshop that will help you to identify your natural talents and abilities, then show you how you can use them to guide you towards the ideal job, career, education, and more! WARNING!!! Students, don't pay $50,000 in tuition until you've spent a couple fun hours with us to ensure that you're on the right track! Ideal for:
- senior highschool, college and unversity students
- adults considering a career change, promotion, or anyone who has been laid off
Discover Your Personality Type – $99 value
Ever wonder why your boss is such a stickler for a level of detail that you find utterly useless? Want to improve your relationships with others, improve communication with your family and co-workers, or build a better, more productive team? Discover the 4 main personality types and identify where you fit in. Then learn how you can improve your communication with other personalities. This fun workshop will leave you feeling empowered, as it minimizes stress and builds confidence. A must for anyone who does not live life as a hermit.
Why is Sweet Spot Training offering these FREE courses?
Sweet Spot is offering some of our workshops TOTALLY FREE , as our way to introduce ourselves to the neighbourhood and celebrate our Grand Opening. By inviting others into our centre, they will know that we've arrived…and after taking our workshops (did I mention they were FREE) we're confident they'll want to share the experience with friends and family. Is there a catch? There is no catch! The classes that are marked as FREE are totally FREE. All we ask is that at the end of the session, you take 3 minutes to provide us with your feedback. This will help us to understand the type of training people are looking for, so we can continue to serve our community to the best of our ability. For those who enjoy being in front of the camera, video testimonies are also encouraged and welcome! For more information on these and other courses, visit the Sweet Spot Training Centre
New Documentary on the Antarctic Crisis Spreads like Wild Fire around the world.
The Antarctica Challenge – A Global Warning is the only film of it's kind to emerge out of the International Polar Year (2007-2009); the call to the world's scientific community to study the climate change in the world's Polar regions. While much has been written about the social scientific research done in the Arctic, there has been nothing to date that illustrates with such wonderous beauty, the criticality of the Antarctic region. That is, until Polar Cap Productions! This is the only film of it's kind to report these new discoveries.
"Mark Terry has made a beautiful and important film." - Bruce Cowley of CBC. The exceptional cinematography makes for a stunning backdrop to an amazing story about recent climate change in Antarctica." – Ken Linton, Rogers Television "Better than most documentaries (of this kind) on TV today." – Phil Groves, IMAX
YOU can help to make a difference! Log onto to: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1306953/ and cast your vote for the film. Thanks for your support!
For more information, visit their website at: http://polarcapproductions.com
New film uncovers the findings from International Polar Year; a world-wide scientific program focused on the Arctic and the Antarctic.
Polar Cap Productions is launching a new film with a mandate to tell entertaining and educational stories about our environment and in particular, reveal the increasingly fragile state of our polar ice caps in the Arctic and the Antarctic. "Climate change has registered significant change to the caps and these changes have a profound environmental effect on all of us. According to the Environmental Protection Agency in the United States, the earth has experienced a rise in global temperature of about half a degree Celsius over the past 100 years." said Mark Terry, President of Polar Cap Productions and Film Director/Producer. "Although that doesn't sound like much, this apparently modest increase is responsible for a rise in the world’s sea level of six to eight inches over the past century." But why should you care? What does it really mean to you and me? Here's a clip from an interview with Mark Terry, regarding Polar Cap Productions' up and coming films: (please bear with the humm for the first 20 seconds – you know those television guys!)
Polar Cap Productions is working with Launch NOW! Strategic Marketing to promote their series of films. Promotional plans include International Film festivals, Sponsorship opportunities, and online marketing of their films and products to name but a few.
After viewing one of the films myself, I can honestly tell you that not only will you want to see these films but you will want your family and children to watch them too. We can no longer sit silently and watch our world crumble beneath us. Launch NOW! is excited to be a part of this important project that impacts us all. For more information on Polar Cap Productions and to view show times and locations, please visit their website at: http://polarcapproductions.com
Launch Now! Strategic Marketing Solutions has partnered with the Fairytale Palace in Pickering-Ajax to make 2 children's dreams of becoming a Singing STAR come true!
The event will feature 6 open auditions, every Tuesday from July 7th through to August 11th. Children 18 years and younger are invited to sing a song karaoke-style, where they are then rated by a panel of professional judges.
The purpose of this event is three-fold:
-
to formally introduce Queen Patti O’Connor and her Fairytale Place to the Pickering Village neighbourhood;
-
to provide a fun experience to children in the community over the summer, and
-
to raise awareness and funds for the Wonky Noggin’ foundation; a newly formed organization who’s mission is to ‘reshape the lives of babies suffering from Plagiocephaly’.
Here are some highlights from the first audition, held last week. This video features the 6 young singers who qualified to sing at the Semi-finals, later in August.
To register, you can either download a Registration form from our *official* website at: http://thinkyoucansing.ca or simply drop into the Palace. Registration is open at 6 pm. ** Plese note that due to the age of our contestants, signed parental consent is required. Further details, including Rules, and our Privacy Policy, can be found on our website.
Question: Hi Sally. Thanks so much for allowing people to write in with questions – I have a doozy! Everyone told me that I should have a website because it would bring me more business. Well I now have a website but I don’t seem to be getting any hits and it has not increased my business. Am I doing something wrong?
Answer: Hi back and thanks for writing. I wouldn’t say that you were doing anything wrong, per say. What I would say is that you probably haven’t done enough - yet. If you think about your website, it’s much like a business card or a flyer that is advertising your business. The only difference is that flyers and business cards are on paper whereas a web site is in an electronic format, on the internet. So let’s look at a flyer as an example of an advertising marketing tool.
Flyers are used by many companies to advertise and can bring in new customers. You get them in the mail, you see them posted on shop windows, inserted in newspapers, so you decide to spend the time and money to get some printed for your business. But just having those flyers made and sitting on your dining room table will not bring you more business. You can even hang one on your front door but unless people just happen to walk by or you give them your address, they won’t even know it’s there so chances are, it will not be seen by many and probably won’t bring you any new business. Your next step would be to market those flyers – get them into people’s hands; you could post them on hydro poles, in supermarkets, send them out via mail, and where ever you think prospects might see them. You could also pay one of those services to market them for you, by including your flyer in with all the other flyers they stuff into envelopes and deliver directly to people’s homes. The point is, people won’t come to the flyers – you have to take the flyers to the people. Your website is very much like that. You can build a website and it can be the best website in the world but if people don’t know how or where to find it, then they won’t find you. So your question really becomes, how do people find my website?
As explained in the example above with the flyer, simply building a website is not enough to bring you new business. There are literally millions of websites out there in the world wide web, all competing for the same customers. If you want your website to act like a static business card, then simply build it and tell your friends, family and existing customers the URL (that’s the WWW web address) so they can find it. But if you want your website to actually work FOR you, to draw people to you and bring you new business, then you need to market it. This is what’s commonly known as “Internet Marketing”.
Unfortunately, there is no 1 true way to bring more customers to you. There are many strategies for marketing a website and most successful companies use a variety of these strategies to drive more traffic (people) to their site. There is a ton of both FREE and paid information available if you want to learn to do-it-yourself, or you can pay a company (much like the company who stuffs your flyer into envelopes with all the other flyers and delivers them house to house), who will market your site for you. Launch Now! is unique in that we specialize in developing strategic marketing strategy plans that you can either:
- take and implement yourself (simply follow the plan and do all the work yourself, saving you money) or
- contract us to implement the plan for you (we’ll do the work)
Either way, Lauch Now! works with small and mid-sized businesses -most with modest budgets, to help them get the most out of their internet presence and make the site work for them by driving new business (sales!) to them.
In the near future, I and a colleague will be teaching Strategic Internet Marketing and Internet Marketing for Beginners Courses, both on-line and in person at the Sweet Spot Training Centre in Pickering. If you live within driving distance to Pickering, I strongly encourage you to take a few hours out of your day to attend one of these sessions in person. The information you will learn will be of great value to you and your buiness. You cannot afford NOT to attend!
In the meantime, something you can do right now (and for free) is get your URL out there! Here are some examples of what you can do right now to increase your website traffic:
- Comment on people’s blogs (be sincere
and include your URL - join social networking groups like Facebook, My Space, Digg, Twitter, and others, and include your URL
- post your web address in any emails you send out (create a signature that includes your url, so you won’t forget to include it in your outgoing messages)
- Keep track of where you post it, so you can include those pages with the links back on to your site.
For example, I placed a link to http://launchnow.ca on my Twitter account. I then added my Twitter link http://twitter.com/iamzelda to my website. This is what’s known as a *link back* (because it goes both ways) and is a good marketing strategy you can start with.
* One word of caution with link backs, be sure that the sites you are linking to and the sites that are linking back to you are respectable websites. Being linked to spamming sites can actually harm you!
Good luck with your site and let me know if I can be of any further assistance.
