The LA Fox Developer

The LA Fox Developer Newsletter

Eight Ways (Con't from page 4)

press. Think big. Sure, the media gets plenty of press releases every day. But if you make yours stand out — it will be used. Be sure to send news releases for your upcoming seminars and for all those free brochures.

Send a newsletter to all of your prospects and customers. (Why do you think you built that mailing list?) Use your newsletter to set yourself apart from your competition. A newsletter can be as short as one page or as long as you want to make it. The important thing is to send issues on a regular basis — at least once every six weeks. Your newsletter keeps your company’s name in front of your existing customers. And it gives your prospects another opportunity to think about you when it’s time to buy.

Produce your newsletter in-house with desktop publishing software. Contract with a design house or advertising firm to produce one. Or use a pre-printed newsletter, customized with your name and logo. The method you choose should fit well with your resources and abilities.

Without being obvious, your newsletter is the perfect vehicle for your sales message. (If you use a pre-printed newsletter, insert a sales letter or flyer.) Use your newsletter to announce your new products, the places and times of your upcoming seminars, and to highlight ways that your business can help your readers work smarter or save money.

Always provide your readers with useful information about computers and how to use computers in their business. The best newsletters are interesting, informative and entertaining. Remember, your newsletter is your primary communication tool — make the most of it!

These ideas have been used successfully by thousands of businesses. Use them wisely and they will work for your computer business, too. Select the promotion methods most appropriate to your own personal style and use them on a regular basis. Remember, the key to successful promotion is consistency over a long period of time.

[Copyright (C) 1994 by John Martin. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. Yes, John earns a living as a marketing consultant. John Martin has been an entrepreneur in Houston since 1979. As the owner of a computer parts

Out and About (Con't. from page 2) provide the information by signing in on the attendance sheets at the next meeting.

Mike Meer, LA Fox member and VP of Microcomputer Engineering Services, has an article appearing in the latest Pinter FoxPro Letter, titled “The Secrets of LOOKUPO”. It’s about the under-utilized and under- documented LOOKUPO function hidden in FoxPro 2.6. After a brief explanation of thefunction, he writes a UDF (user-defined function) that tests and compares the difference between LOOKUPO and SEEKO. Bottom line “LOOKUPO executes much faster than any code you could write yourself.”

Newsletter/Article Exchange Update. The newsletter article exchange, announced at OCFDG and LA Fox three months ago, is an unqualified success. For those of you who missed it, here’s how it works. Submit an article to the editor (me) for inclusion in either newsletter. (Editor reserves the right to edit or offer constructive comments concerning submitted articles and accepted articles shall be considered to be in the public domain.) Articles are then ZIP’d as individual Word documents and forwarded to user groups all over the country. Most recently, we added the Potomac Area Fox User Group, and the UK Fox Developers Group . Now anyone submitting an article to either newsletter (OC or LA) has pretty good chances of also being published in the Rocky Mountain States, the Midwest, the East Coast, or Great Britain. These articles can then be accessed by other newsletter editors for inclusion in their respective newsletters. It works sort of like a chain letter, but serves a much more useful purpose, in that each group’s newsletters stay “fresh”. If you’ll notice, several articles in this newsletter are from other groups.

Application Developers Training Company (ADTC) has announced their training schedule through July. Their VFP courses (Introduction, Intermediate, and Advanced) will be run in Los Angeles January 15-19, April 1-5, May 6-10, June 10-14, and July 15-19. Instructors include many of the luminaries within the Fox community:

David Anderson (1st President of OC Fox), John MIller (2nd President of OC Fox), Jim Booth, Eldor Gemst, Andy Griebel, and many others. Those interested can contact ADTC at 800/578-2062.

Data Warehousing, Costa Mesa, CA, January 18-19, 1996. Two-day interactive seminar, sponsored by Advanced Information Technologies. Cost of the seminar is