Some people think of marketing as advertising and promotional specials. Others see marketing as high-level planning and strategy. So, to get started, let’s talk briefly about what marketing is.

When I talk about “marketing”, I am referring to any and all activities that help you plan and deliver your message to your audience. Marketing is what helps your potential customer understand who you are, what you do, what you might be able to do for them and why they should consider doing business with you.

Marketing is about understanding why you are in business. It’s about knowing what your strengths are and how you are better than your competitors. It helps you determine what you can do for people (your customers). Marketing helps you discover who needs and wants what you can do and who will place a high value on what you do. It helps you create a message that these people will respond to so they take the first step toward becoming your customer or client. Finally, marketing helps you deliver your message effectively to your potential customers, within your budget, so you meet or exceed your goals.

Marketing goes to the very heart of your organization because it’s all about why your organization exists.

The Smart Marketing System is a series of five steps that all marketing plans and campaigns should include. It gives you a conceptual framework to help you get better results from all your marketing.

Here is our five-step Smart Marketing System:

A. Understand your GOALS or the objectives you want to accomplish.
B. Know the MARKET you want to reach based on what you can do for them.
C. Create a MESSAGE to deliver to your market that they will respond to.
D. Commit MONEY to spend to deliver your message to your market.
E. Select the MEDIA you will use to deliver your message effectively and within your budget.

By doing this you’ll find you are able to get better results from your marketing without necessarily spending more money. You will learn to increase revenue and profits. Your business will become healthier, more valuable and more fun.

You’ll become a practitioner of Smart Marketing!

Kevin Stirtz is a successful entrepreneur, writer, trainer and speaker. He is a published author of over 200 business articles and he has been featured in local, regional, national and international business publications. He currently writes a marketing column for AllBusiness.com and he is writing his second book, which is due to be published in May of 2006. He can be reached at 1-952-212-4681 or http://www.KevinStirtz.com.

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We spend a great deal of time trying to spot stocks heading in the right trend, or direction. Careful attention needs to be given to the support and resistance lines. These lines are also called trend lines. Here are seven reasons why the trend can be your friend in investing:

1. These lines draw the general trend, or direction, the stock is heading. They’re not used for daily tracking, they’re more of a longer-term direction that the stock, mutual fund or commodity is heading. If you are using a longer term approach, the trend is what you really want to know, not necessarily the day to day wiggles in a stock.

2. Often times, the trend line will give you guidance in a stock for years, not just weeks or months. But these support and resistance lines are often bumpers, or guardrails, along the way. Stocks often drift toward their support or resistance lines and then bounce back in the opposite direction.

3. If you can pick off a stock you find attractive as it is bounces off the support line, it could be a terrific time to buy. The reason is you have a strong, logical place for your stop point…just under the support line, which is really close by. This helps minimize the amount you have at risk.

4. Some of the best winners come from stocks that are purchased just as the stock breaks through overhead resistance and forms new patterns. Holding the stock until it breaks support line (which might be possibly many months, or even years later) can really help your overall performance!

5. The reasons behind why a stock jumps through a brick wall are often not clearly visible. The reasons for the move may emerge days or weeks (or even a year!) down the road. But when a stock or a mutual fund breaks through the trend line, either up or down, it’s important news.

6. If a stock or mutual fund we are following breaks through it’s overhead resistance, we have a high level of confidence that the stock will continue to climb upward.

7. Lastly, if the support line of your mutual fund or your stock is broken, beware! This is a very clear signal we should consider selling a portion (or maybe even the entire) position. Breaking the support line is the ultimate sign that supply is now clearly in command. Your principal is now at risk.

Thomas P. Mullooly, President of Mullooly Asset Management, LLC (http://www.mullooly.net) has spent over twenty years in the investment industry, as a broker and as an investment advisor. Feel free to contact us to check out the relative strength of your portfolio by sending an email to tom@mullooly.net or visiting http://www.mullooly.net/403b-plan.html or sign up to receive the market report and tips on how you can soundly invest your money at http://www.mullooly.net.

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Financial services companies usually offer retirement planning services. More often than not, they charge fees for this purpose. When opting for these retirement planning services, make sure that they have experience in investment management and financial/retirement planning. In addition, they should specialize in a personal engaging approach offering long-range planning of financial sources and guidance for retirement.

According to experts, when planning for retirement one should ensure that they don’t have to pay any mortgage or loans after retirement, because you will be deprived of your regular salary after retirement and sources of income will be very few except for your pension. But if you are planning to run some sort of business after retirement and have arranged all the necessary funds to run the business efficiently, then you can pay your pending loans quite easily. This can be easily understood by the fact that there is a regular source of income attached. Your business, if run efficiently, can give a much-needed fillip to your income and enable you to pay any loans due.

Investing is an activity that fascinates people from all walks of life, regardless of their occupation, economic status and education. This is especially true in the case of people who are planning to retire. Unlike an ordinary investor, who invests primarily for profit making, the people who are planning to retire focus mainly on the security and safety of their money while investing. They want their money safe because if they lose it, they are left with nothing. In an economy that fluctuates every second, it is important for people who are planning to retire to invest in safe and secure stocks after taking the advice of their financial services companies.

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