PR Through Competitions

Last year, the Queensland tourist board attracted literally millions of pounds worth of free advertising and PR through its Best Job In The World competition. In theory, they were looking for an individual to be caretaker of a beautiful island for 6 months, and record his thoughts in a blog. The real purpose of course was to garner publicity for local tourism.

The idea has been much copied. For example, The Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago recently launched a competition to find someone to live and work in their museum for 30 days, and write about their experience along the way. The competition , with a prize of $10,000, generated over 1,500 applications. More importantly, it generated a host of free publicity for the museum.

Competitions work so well because the media are all-too willing to publicise them – provided of course that the concept is interesting and the prize is worth having. So can you come up with an interesting competition linked to your business? If you can, you may well find yourself on the receiving end of  more publicity than you could ever afford to buy by regular methods.

Simple Money-Maker

This tip’s just come in and we’ve not yet had a chance to test it – but it sounds very promising! There’s a website,  http://pages.videojug.com/, where you can share your know-how and earn money from it.

Here’s what the site says, we all have areas of expertise ranging from how to remove a wine stain from a carpet to researching a family tree. Publish your tip on VideoJugPages and you share any advertising revenues from that contribution.

VideoJug sells adverts around your pages and then pays 50 per cent of the revenue to you. We’re going to test it. Why don’t you do the same – and let us know how much money you make from it?
 

Home Insurance Check

If you’d emptied my pockets when I took the dog for a walk this morning, you’d have found half a packet of polo mints, 27 pence in loose change and a screwed-up carrier bag. Apparently, I’m far from normal.
 
According to new research from Zurich Insurance, the typical adult carried £972’s worth of belongings with them when they are out and about. Zurich pose a useful question – does your home insurance cover the cost of these belongings (mobile phone, i-pod etc) when you are out and about? It’s worth checking.

Try Something New Today

Following on from our Tesco share tip, it is interesting to note that MoneyWeek has been describing the performance of Britain’s biggest grocers as ‘nice and steady’ – ‘year after year, they produce the goods…these are classic defensive stocks’.
 
They go on, ‘We reckon defensive sectors like food retailing are the best area of the market to be in. Food inflation is climbing, which is good for the sector's profits. If you can find a defensive stock that's growing nicely, that's even better.’
 
They prefer Sainsbury to Tesco because ‘it's now selling on a p/e multiple that's actually 10 per cent higher than Tesco.’ So, to quote their own slogan, if you want to try something new today, try Sainsbury.

Tax Rebate Alert

I’ve been receiving emails from tax reclaim companies who will chase up tax rebates for you from HMRC. All, of course, for a fee of abut 18 per cent plus vat on average. And, interestingly, one has a website address that is very similar to Inland Revenue. Another charges a whopping 40 per cent of any money reclaimed.
 
Now these sites are not doing anything wrong so far as I know and they are entitled to charge for their services; although 40 per cent is astonishingly high. But the fact is, you don’t need to use sites. It’s really very easy to go it alone.    
 
Simply contact the HMRC office stated on any HMRC paperwork you’ve received, say that you think you are due a tax rebate and ask them to look at the figures again. You can also telephone as this will give you a faster response. I can tell you for a fact that this works. My wife queried her figures and, within four weeks, received a four-figure tax rebate.