Category Shirts

By Anton Cheranev

Everyone loves to get something for free. This is true of almost everyone who frequently surfs the web as well. Website operators are constantly looking not only for ways to attract new visitors, but also ways to keep them coming back. If you are looking for a way to increase website traffic, consider using a tactic such as the Give Away. By giving away free stuff on your site, you will likely attract many more visitors. You can also keep these visitors coming back frequently by offering new free stuff each month. If you are interested in see the results of your website traffic improve, then consider using these five ways to give away free stuff.

Donated Goods

You may be interested in trying to give away free stuff on your website, but you may not be willing to spend your own money in doing so. If this is the case, there are options for you. You can always network with other companies who will essentially give you their products to showcase and give away from your site. Local businesses are the first place to look, as they usually are very willing to help fellow town citizens. You can also go to larger corporations if you know exactly who to contact and make sure they realize that they too would be receiving free advertising from allowing you to showcase their products. Usually you wont get enough products each month to offer to every visitor, so make sure you mention that only the first 30 (or the equivalent of products you have) visitors who sign up will receive the products.

Monthly Contests

Website visitors love contests and many of them are willing to visit the same sites each day just to enter to win something free. Therefore, by offering free stuff through a contest, you are likely to get visitors to return on a daily basis. Set the rules to state that each visitor can only enter once a day if you like. Purchase a good prize or get one donated and give it away to the random name drawn from the entries. This is a great way to get the attention of many consumers, especially if your prizes are extra interesting and worthy.

Personalized Items

One interesting tactic is to give away merchandise with your websites name or your businesss name on them. Items such as shirts, hats, towels, cups, and key chains are perfect for this task. The idea is to keep people coming to your site for free stuff as well as to look around. The extra perk with this strategy however, is to allow them to be your advertisers as well. If they wear one of these items out in public, there are likely thousands of people who will be exposed to your business passively. This is a great idea and can be done through many methods including contests or loyal customer incentives.

Referral Prizes

If you really want to spread the word on your website and get more traffic than ever, you should consider giving referral prizes. You can set your system up to allow each visitor to send an automated email from your site asking him or her to visit. If the visitor is willing to offer up 10 or 20 valid email addresses, then you can offer them a free prize. The prize can be as small or large as you wish. This is the perfect way to get more traffic while also rewarding those that are helping you along the way.

Reminder Emails

After you choose the method of how you plan to give your free stuff away, consider offering reminder emails to those who love to participate. You can offer initial free stuff to those that sign up, like a key chain. This is a great way to get that traffic to continue after the visitors initial visit. You can remind them monthly that there are new things to see at your site and they will likely visit more often. You can also use this not only to remind them of free stuff being given away but also to tell them about deals or other offers you have for them as well. They are likely to forward these emails on to friends they think might be interested as well.

About the Author: Question #1: Are You an Internet Marketer? Question #2: Are You an Ezine/Newsletter Publisher? Question #3: Do You Use Email to Send Messages to Your Subscribers, Prospects and Clients? If Yes, Check Out Here:

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By Ezra Bar

Generally speaking, economies of scale is about the benefits gained by the production of large volume of a product, while economies of scope is linked to benefits gained by producing a wide variety of products by efficiently utilising the same Operations. Each of these business strategies, their strengths and weaknesses, will be discussed in details in this paper.

‘Economies of scale’ has been known for long time as a major factor in increasing profitability and contributing to a firm’s other financial and operational ratios. Mass production of a mature, standardised product can apply the most efficient line-flow process and standard inputs for reducing the manufacturing cost (per unit). Mass manufacturing is also associated with a significant market-share, and a tight supply-chain management (up to vertical integration with suppliers and retailers). To maintain the market-share, the market leader should come with continuous product improvements, so to sustain demand and avoid its dropping, following the product’s maturity in the Product Life-Cycle (PLC).

‘Economies of scope’ is relatively a new approach to business strategy, and is heavily based on the development of high technology. Economies of scope, as defined by using same processes for producing similar products, can fit the batch-flow or group-technology processes; nevertheless, for best results the flexible-manufacturing should be adopted. Computer Integrated Manufacturing (CIM) allows lowering the setup-time and required tuning between products, so to be economically efficient for small batches of non-standardised products. In other words, companies can compete on product customisation and short lead-time.

A case study at GM shows that new competition can reduce firm’s market share and its benefits from economies of scale (Howell, 2003). The author argues that the main problem was the neglect of innovation, as a side-effect of GM’s strategy (until the Japanese cars entered the US market, in the late 1970s). Cachon and Harker (2002) found that scale economies are so powerful that to provide a strong motivation for outsourcing, too; even though the outsourcing contractors are not allowed reaching the same scale as the outsourcer. Dobson and Yano’s (2002) article is an in-dept scholarly analysis of the factors associated with economies (and diseconomies) of scale and economies (and diseconomies) of scope. The authors argue that mass-customisation, which means broader product lines, ‘may help to increase market share and may allow higher prices to be charged, but they also cause challenges associated with diseconomies of scope’ such as setup time.

Ang and Lin (2001) bring a case study from the financial industry, and the ways economies of scope and economies of scale work for mutual fund offerings. At Fidelity, an example of economies of scope at work, investors had the option for high diversified portfolio at the same institution. But aiming at cost reduction (which is of interest to clients and investors), the economies of scope did not provide the desired objectives, while economies of scale did, in the case of mutual funds. Trying to find the ideal conditions for economies of scale and economies of scope, the authors say that a single-product firm should pursue the economies of scale. However, economies of scope for a two-product firm is said to exist ‘if the cost of producing the two products jointly is less than producing the same products separately’. When it comes to three or more products, the number of production combinations increases, so evaluation of the economies of scope becomes more complicated and requires more data to analyse.

Advocating for a different view of the economies of scope and scale, Peppers and Rogers (1995) put the customers under the spotlight. They argue that market share can be seen as share of customer, pursuing customer differentiation rather than product differentiation, managing customers and not only products and more emphasis on economies of scope at the expense of scale.

As expected, between these two approaches there is a ‘grey area’, in which firms found a way to enjoy both worlds of economies of scale and scope. Mass-customisation, I believe, provides few similar customised products (the concept behind economies of scope) along with operating mass-production and controlling large market-share for each of these products.

REFERENCES

Ang, J.S. & Lin, J.W. (2001, May). A fundamental approach to estimating economies of scale and scope of financial products: The case of mutual funds. Review of Quantitative Finance and Accounting, 16(3), 205-221.

Cachon, G.P. & Harker, P.T. (2002, October). Competition and outsourcing with scale economies. Management Science, 48(10), 1314-1333.

Dobson, G., & Yano, C. A. (2002, Fall). Product offering, pricing, and make-to-stock/make-to-order decisions with shared capacity. Production and Operations Management, 11(3), 293-312.

Howell, H.J. (2003, May/June). Adapting GM research to a new corporate strategy. Research Technology Management, 46(3), 14-20.

Peppers, D., & Rogers, M. (1995). A new marketing paradigm: Share of customer, not market share. Managing Service Quality, 5(3), 48-51.

About the Author: Ezra Bar, MBA, PhD Student, is a Business Process Reengineering Consultant and Academic Mentor for MBA and Engineering Students, operating from Toronto. Find many other Academic and Business Articles and paper at

Ez-B-Process.Com/Resources.htm Visit Ez-B-Process.Com/PhD.htm

for Academic Mentoring.

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