When you offer a seminar or workshop on a topic related to your expertise, you give people the chance to get to know you and find out about your business. And the people who attend your classes will spread the word about you and your business to others.

But another promotional benefit of giving a seminar or workshop that you may not have thought of is how offering a short course can lead to other promotional opportunities, such as free advertising. In this week's tip, Andrea Swinton tells how well this worked for her retail antiques business. - Susan Ward, Ed.

My husband Martin and I operate Take-A-Boo Emporium, an antiques business in Toronto. We have had great success with offering seminars. Right now, for instance, we are scheduled to provide seminars with the Learning Annex here in Toronto through to July, 2002, two nights a month. One of our seminars is on "Furniture Restoration" and the other is about "How to Shop for Antiques".

I sent in these two seminar ideas to the Learning Annex. While they were on the Program Director's desk, she happened to catch an appearance by Martin on Canadian Living Television. The Program Director called the same afternoon to book the courses. For the next six months, we'll be featured in the Learning Annex monthly papers and on their Web site.

The opportunity to have our name "out there" just continues to build name recognition and credibility which are crucial to a small business that does not have a large marketing budget. Plus, the best part is that it doesn't cost us a thing.

Contributed by:

Andrea Swinton
Take-A-Boo Emporium
Telephone: 416-785-4555
Email: swinton@takeaboo.com
Web site: http://www.takeaboo.com

You can read more about Martin and Andrea's business on this site in "Take-A-Boo Emporium: True Teamwork", a Canadian Small Business of The Month feature.

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