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Contact Name: Tina Westbrook

Company Name: Journey Church

Website: http://www.journeychurchtx.com

Email: blakew@journeychurchtx.com

Journey Church is announcing New Facilities Grand Opening at 1015 N US 183 Liberty Hill, Texas on Sunday 01.17.10 starting @ 10:00. We will be serving Duncan Donuts Coffee & Round Rock Donuts, 10:30 In Worship Center, a country/rock style music lead by worship leader Caleb Westbrook & Pastor Blake will introduce a new series CRAZY LOVE afterward we will have free food, door prizes, gifts, music, and lots more!

Google, the leader in web searching, can literally direct people to your new location.  Do not rely on people driving by your store to find you.  Listing your business on Google Maps is a great way to increase a stores exposure. With the popularity of portable in-car GPS and mobile phone GPS application technology becoming affordable, it becomes vital that you register your company in these devices.

Since portable GPS technology is becoming cheaper and easier to use, people are relying on these devices to help them find products and services they acquire.   Google offers companies the ability to display photos of your business, its hours of operation, contact numbers and consumer reviews. Simply go to Google’s Local Business Center and entering your business details.

Google typically scans the Yellow Page to obtain business information. However, Google does allow business owners to enter their business information free of charge using the Google Local Business Center.

All you need to do this is have a Google Account.  Sign in with your username and password and follow the simple instructions to create a listing. You can enter details including business name, address, contact numbers, Web site, e-mail address and a 200-word description of your business.

Once you have submitted this information, Google will verify it before it publishes your information. You will receive by regular mail, a confirmation notice sent to your business address. First then will Google publish your business information on all the company’s relevant applications once verified. Google claims the entire process should take “a few weeks”.

If you need to edit your business listing, simply use the editing tools inside the Google Business Center. The edited information is only displayed after the verification process is completed. Every time you change your business listing, Google will need to verify it before displaying the new changes.

Once listed in the Google directory, customers will be able to get directions to and from your business along with searching for nearby points of interest (POIs).  Included is the capability to view your business using Google Street View along with adding comments and reviews, which in turn helps generate a Web presents. Business owners can use Google Local Business Center to contact customers with Google profiles, which allows businesses to contact these individuals to ask follow up questions or request feedback on services or sales.

Conveniently, Google allows new business owners to take over a listing in the event of a change of ownership, preventing the need of relisting the business.

This is a free service offered by Google.  All instructions are straightforward and takes minutes to complete. To add your business to Google Maps, simply visit the Google Local Business Center.

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This post was submitted by Dale Obrochta.

I am finding many business entrepreneurs have great insight about their new business, but lack the marketing skills required to have a successful grand opening.  With that said, I put together a list of 35 Creative Tips for having a Successful Grand Opening.  These tips are in no particular order and are just that, tips or ideas. Each item can be expanded and built upon, but are designed to get you to think hard about your grand opening celebration.

Now, I am sure there are more ideas and concepts not addressed in this document, but this is a starting point in your thought process to learn 35 tips on how to have a successful grand opening.

Enjoy these ideas and if you have any question or comments please stop out at and leave me a message.

Click here for ebook: 35 Creative Tips for having a Successful Grand Opening

Artistic rendering of e-book if printed in 72 point font.

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This post was submitted by Dale Obrochta.

Advertise – In the weeks before your grand opening, get your name out there as much as possible. Check out local newspapers, and websites like Craigslist to advertise the details of your grand opening.

Budget it – It can often be a good idea to put together a special budget just for your grand opening. After all, this is more than just a store opening-it has huge marketing potential as well. Make sure to include the costs of prizes, extra staff, food, and any other non-regular expense. As long as you keep yourself in check, your grand opening will be well worth its cost.

Extend your Hours -Open your store a couple hours early and stay open later to allow for more people to see what you have to offer. Boasting extended hours on your grand opening ads will help get more interested patrons in your door and observing your services.

Prizes – Nothing says come to our grand opening like free stuff! Having a contest, raffle, or door prize system set up is a great way to attract customers to your celebration. It is also a good idea to use prizes that involve your product or services, like coupons for discounted tax preparation services!

Staff Up – Because you are not sure how many people will be stopping by on your opening day, it might be a good idea to have all your staff working or available to come in. This extra help will help make the whole day run more smoothly and easily.

Know your Neighbors – Visit other businesses close to your store and present them with coupons and flyers for your opening. It is a great way to meet your neighbors and you could even offer to cross promote your stores with coupons or advertisements.

Provide a Service – Another great way to attract business is by including a charitable cause in your grand opening. You could offer to donate a certain amount of proceeds from your opening week to the community or setup a bin to accept canned food donations.

Invite Local Entertainment – If you are looking to save on costs, you could even invite a local high school band, Girl Scout troop, church choir, etc., to provide entertainment. This can be a get way to support your community, and will also provide entertainment to your customers.

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This post was submitted by Roni.

Congratulations! After months, even years of planning, the building is built, the fixtures are in place and you’re ready to plan your official Grand Opening event!

Grand Opening Balloon Décor generates excitement, and carries with it the message of fun and happiness.  By touching the subconscious heartstrings of your potential customers, you are getting an instant warm fuzzy feeling.  Balloon décor offers highly visibility, totally customizable and a great cost effective way to get more décor coverage for your money.

There are 3 types of grand opening balloon décor:

• Attention getting décor to be seen from far away
• Attention getting décor to be seen from parking lot to bring people into store
• Ambient décor inside store to generate excitement and drive impulse buys

Outdoor Balloon Décor

The key to outdoor décor is to plan with weather conditions in mind.  Anchor balloons to something that is fixed in the ground whenever possible, for example, a sign post, or a light.  Remember that balloons are susceptible to wind, even as little as 4 miles an hour can destroy your balloon décor. For columns and arches, make sure that you have a strong internal framework and a solid base with a large footprint.  The rule of physics is, the taller your décor, the bigger the footprint.  Professional decorators use 150 lb steel base plates with a 2′ footprint for outdoor columns and arches.  Even with that, we sometimes need to add weight to stabilize against the wind.

Don’ts of Outdoor Balloon Décor

• Don’t use dark colors, like black, blue, green or purple as they absorb heat and could pop on hot days.
• I don’t recommend using bouquets of balloons outdoors, as they tend to tangle, but instead would go for topiary kites or clusters of balloons where there is a single anchor point.   Look to wide ribbons to add that extra rhythm and movement.

One last thing about outdoor balloon décor, even if you’re not in California, it’s a good idea to follow the California balloon laws.  These are the strictest balloon regulations that requires every Mylar balloon must be individually weighted, and no balloons can be attached to any type of electrically conducive material.  Following these guidelines makes for a better environmental impact along with making your grand opening balloon décor meet all state requirements.  Note:  latex balloons are completely biodegradable, but none-the-less should be properly handled.

Want to see more examples of Grand Opening Décor, click here to go to Balloon Utopia’s website to see some examples of grand openings in San Diego.

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This post was submitted by Sandi Masori.

In the 20^th century, people are now connecting through social networks. Facebook, being the leader in industry, is connecting people, colleagues, reuniting classmates and business associates using the Internet. Let’s use this social network to announce to people who have a personal interest, business relationship or similar interests that your business is having a grand opening. Considering many businesses are started by people who are leaving one industry to reinvent themselves in another, the wealth of resources, connection and personal relations built over these years of business interaction are severed instantly once the individual boxes up their office cubical. Many of these connections would like you to succeed in your new business venture and would be willing spread the word through their network of your grand opening.

Make it an Activity

Facebook allows users to post what they are doing right now! Let people know that you are stocking shelves for the grand opening, booking grand opening entertainment, creating a press release, talking to local news agencies and businesses about the grand opening.  Keep the post current and build to the grand opening date.   Making announcement days before is less effective because the social networking is not fully developed. Allow the anticipation to build.  Pretty soon, friends will be contact you and asking “Are you ready for your big grand opening?”

Start the Networking

Facebook.com, is the most popular, free social networking environment, and is one of the easiest to find and acquire contacts or in social networking terms, friends.  First, create an account making sure you use your real name, unlike Internet forums or bulletin boards, where fake names are common.  The power behind Facebook is its ability to connect people by schools, companies, interests, hobbies and relies on you to recognizing individuals by name.

Second, enter your personal information.  Personal information is the key to complete social networking.  The more information supplied in these areas allows you and others to seek out individuals with the same desires and interests.  For example, if you are leaving the aviation field and opening up a hobby shop, include in your personal information that your hobby is fling.  Facebook will link you automatically to other individuals (friends) who share the same interest.  This link to new “friends” will allow you to build a social network that you can announce your grand opening celebrations.

Connect with past classmates and colleagues in the same manner.  Once you fill-out the school information, Facebook will search its database of schools and classmates in your graduating year.  Many of these people will quickly seek you out and want to know what is happening in your life.  Inform them about your grand opening and invite them to come see you at the grand opening.

Expand Social Networking through the Company

Encourage employees to create a Facebook page.  Once created, ask them to make an announcement in their network of friends about the grand opening.  The goal is to use the network to spread the word about the grand opening.  Pictures can be uploaded; announcement can be posted along with a shout out of how the progress and development of the grand opening is going.  Lastly, make sure you follow up with pictures of people who come from the network of friends.  People who can’t attend that day will be interesting in seeing the pictures and will participate in the grand opening through your pictures.

Don’t put the Camera Away

Keep the digital camera ready after the grand opening, you may find many network friends will show up late in the week and you can capture the moment and share it with the network of friends who help make your grand opening a success.  It will take a little work and time to build the social network of friends, but that work will make your grand opening and business stronger.

Network with Dale on his Facebook

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Many franchises will leave the grand opening up to the franchisee to develop a grand opening extravaganza. Typically, marketing support falls short by the franchise; their concern is the store opens on time and follows franchise protocol.

Successful franchises have or hire a creative marketing team to develop the grand opening marketing. The franchise helps the franchisee with advertising, securing vendor promotions, and provides marketing support through its other franchise locations.

The ability of the franchise to support its franchise is critical for both parties success. Too often franchiser is more interested in expansion and overlooks the simple support that they can provide to a new franchisee.  New franchisees should request:

• Advertising support for the grand opening
• Announcements in all franchise locations
• Support in securing vendor participation
• Press release announcing new location
• Web support highlighting grand opening location
• Support in TV, radio, print and Internet advertising
• Support team to help run and develop a successful grand opening

The franchise needs to show from the beginning, that they are committed to the new franchisee and are willing to work together to develop a strong grand opening celebration.

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Grand openings and ribbon cuttings don’t have to be limited to businesses that have retail locations. If your “real estate” is your website and you work out of your home, this great public relations opportunity is available to you as well, although you will have to plan it a bit differently than someone with a brick and mortal location. A few years ago I attended a “ribbon cutting” for a client’s new website and had a great time meeting people all over the country on a teleconference bridge line.

Since I’m only a few months away from a new website myself, I wondered how to powerfully take advantage of this wonderful promotional opportunity. I made some posts to some discussion lists to which I belong, and the ideas listed in this article are the results of my information requests.

Here are some ideas to spice up your virtual grand opening/ribbon cutting:

Technology

At a minimum you’ll need a teleconference bridge line. My favorite one at the moment is Live Free Conferencing, http://freeconferencing.liveoffice.com/, because you can record the call at no extra charge, the bridgeline holds up to 250 callers, the moderator can mute the entire call if needed, and they offer the ability for muted callers to ask a question via their webcontrol panel.

If you’d like more interaction with your visitors, you will want to use webconferencing/virtual conference room software. There are a number of these services out there, so I recommend that you do a search and try and few before deciding on your provider.

If you’d like to invite a group of people to your event, you can use an invitation service like Evite.com, or sent out an HTML invitation to your contact list through your email broadcast service like aWeber.com, EzineDirector.com, ConstantContact.com or an audio postcard through a service like AudioAcrobat.com. In order to have your attendees register for this event, you will need to create a contact form on your website that feeds into your shopping cart or autoresponder service.

Event Activities

1. Virtual ribbon cutting. You can do this via a web cam and actually cut a ribbon that’s draped over your monitor which is displaying the home page of your new site and show it via your webinar service/virtual conference room service. Or, you might find an animated graphic of a ribbon cutting and show that via your virtual conference room instead.
2. Have people register for your event and give out door prizes. You can spotlight your business colleagues by requesting door prizes for them. Electronic info products are the easiest door prize to award, as you don’t have to mail a physical package to the winner. If some of your door prizes do require mailing, however, you need to request a mailing address from everyone who registers for your event.
3. Hold a teleseminar during the grand opening that’s partially educational, partially promotional. You can make a special offer to all those who attend the live call.
4. Give a virtual tour of your new website via webinar/virtual conference room software.
5. Host a roundtable session at your event that permits attendees to give a 30 second commercial of their businesses. Schedule this at the end of your event so that it doesn’t detract from your offerings.
6. Hold a scavenger hunt on your site during your grand opening. This hunt creates a reason to have people visit the site and visit multiple pages. Create a 3-5 page report or something that’s easy to compile that showcases your expertise and is of value to your visitor for the prize. You might use roll-over images to give clues or find a funny graphic or and hide it in various places throughout your site in obvious and not-so-obvious locations. You could also place audio snippets around your site as well and put clues in those audio files.
7. Sponsor a message board and/or chat room on your site. At specific times post a series of questions, polls, etc. that will make your visitors interact. Ensure that the questions are relevant and of interest to your target market. This will instantly create popularity for your website, as well, for keywords pertinent to your target market.
8. Give away prizes every hour (or every 10-15 minutes for shorter events) and tell your visitors that they have to be present in the webinar room/on the teleconference line to win. Between giveaways, talk about your experience, your offerings, and offer free on-the-spot help for a problem faced by your target market.

Online Publicity/Promotion

1. Post the date and time of opening of your event on CraigsList.com, on the boards for your city/area and surrounding areas.
2. Send out invitations through Evite or though your email broadcast service.
3. If permitted, post the particulars about your event on various lists/discussion groups to which you belong.
4. Send out press release regarding event through online press release services.
5. Create a post about your grand opening/ribbon cutting on your blog and invite attendees to post their comments on your blog

Offline Marketing

1. Join your local Chamber of Commerce and they will offer to hold a ribbon-cutting for you. For virtual/at home businesses, most chambers will do this in their office rather than your home. Many times a photo or article about the riboon cutting will appear in the local press and in the chamber newsletter.
2. Plan a couple of local talks and/or book or product signings to coincide with your grand opening
3. Send out postcards inviting people to your new website and grand opening and offer them a free gift for dropping by.
4. Send out press releases to your local media regarding any “in-person” events you sponsor during this grand opening time

Grand openings are held to generate good will and begin relationships with business colleagues, current clients, and prospective customers. Now, as the owner of a virtual business, you can foster that same good will by sponsoring a virtual grand opening for your new business or new website and get your new venture in gear.

Online Business Resource Queen (TM) and Online Business Coach Donna Gunter helps self-employed service professionals learn how to automate their businesses, leverage their expertise on the Internet, and get more clients online. To sign up for more FREE tips like these and claim your FREE gift, TurboCharge Your Online Marketing Toolkit, visit her site at Get More Clients Online.

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This post was submitted by Donna Gunter.

If you are starting a new franchise and you want it to be a success from the beginning you are on the right track. And if you want to effectively get the community and people aware of your new franchise, a grand opening is a must! A grand opening is a great way for you to attract people to your new franchise and get business started right away. It is a great way to get your franchise going faster and stronger than if you didn’t have one.

Tips to conduct a successful grand opening for your franchise:

1. Pick a time and date that will benefit you the most. Since you will want as many people as possible it should be during a time when most people can attend. So, Sunday at 10am is not good since a majority of people may be in church. During the week is better and during a high traffic time.
2. Invite people in the community such as the mayor, city council or other government officials. This will not only get them there but others who respect those you invited.
3. Make it look like something is happening. You may have many great things planned inside for your grand opening, but if nothing is out of the ordinary on the outside how will people know. You should have grand opening signs or banners, balloons, ribbons, and things of that nature. That way you will attract those who may have heard and those who are simply passing by.
4. Plan a great opening day with giveaways, door prizes, games and refreshments. You may even have a ribbon cutting ceremony, guest speakers, D.J’s or other forms of entertainments for all. Have something for everyone, something for the adults and also something for the kids! You want to make the day memorable. That way people will want to come back and they will also tell their friends about. Word of mouth can really boost your business!
5. You may even be able to get a little more publicity if you ask for it. You can contact newspapers, television stations and other means and invite them to your grand opening. If they do attend chances are they will add it to their feature in the news or newspaper, this is a great promoter for business. For the best response you should invite these individuals two to three weeks in advance and then call them a few days before the event to remind them.
6. Plan your grand opening event for about a month after you actually open. This is a good idea that way your franchise is running and you will have worked through any glitches of problems before you invite everyone to “check you out”. You will also have a well trained staff that can cater to the customer’s needs. Customer service will be key to your success!
7. Don’t forget to invite your personal support group. Invite your friends, family and previous influential contacts. Not only will they provide support for you but the community likes to see that you are human.

Give your franchise the best grand opening by following these simple tips!

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This post was submitted by Samantha Mccartney.

While there are no firm statistics, professionals have noticed that the majority of businesses that close within the first two years did not have an official grand opening event. Those same pros continue to surmise that if you create a successful grand opening, you’ll set the pace for the weeks and months ahead. This has never been truer than it is today, as we see company after company closing its doors or downsizing. But what can be done for your particular business? Which types of grand opening ideas can draw the attention of customers as well as the media?

Bring in the Big Guns… or Cups or Tacos or Puppies or…

Here’s a phenomenal grand opening idea: Create a giant inflatable balloon of your product or logo and place it on the rooftop of your business. For instance, a Mexican restaurant could place a giant, inflatable taco on its roof with a banner that reads, “Now Open.” A local veterinary clinic could put a massive, inflatable puppy or kitten on their rooftop with signage declaring, “Grand Opening!”

Why giant inflatable balloons? Because they attract attention of all sorts. People busily going about their routines don’t even notice most of the advertising that comes their way. According to the Newspaper Association of America, Texas A&M University and the Journal of Concerned Scientists, Americans are exposed to well over 3,000 advertising messages each day from a variety of sources. Our senses are on overload and, therefore, most of the ads we view are blocked out.

However, place a 30-foot-tall giant taco up on the roof (higher than most of the other clutter like billboards, storefront banners, etc.) and drivers down your street suddenly wake up and smell the guacamole.

Gain Press Coverage

Your business can make good use of this second grand opening idea: Use inflatables to bring the press to your location. Inflatables are an exceptional way to garner media coverage. While yet another Mexican restaurant grand opening might not be considered news, a restaurant with a giant taco on its roof that drew in massive crowds is. Likewise, while a photo of a restaurant storefront isn’t an overly exciting picture, that massive taco is definitely a photo opp just waiting to happen.

Bring the Crowd Inside

Unless you’re hosting a sidewalk sale, having a crowd of customers outside your
door won’t do you much good. You have to bring the people inside your business. Grand opening idea number three is to use smaller, sealed inflatables as giveaways.

For example, sticking with the same Mexican restaurant theme, you might say the first 100 customers get a free, miniature, inflatable taco. You could create practically anything you want: inflatable mariachi singers, inflatable sombreros… the list is endless. Because everybody loves to get something free – and because they can be branded with your business name and address – sealed inflatables make the perfect giveaways.

As a business, you can’t neglect the importance of your grand opening. Use ideas that create a buzz in your community and that will attract the press. When you do it right, you’ll find that word-of-mouth advertising kicks in and the business just keeps on coming!

Stephanie Meacham is Vice President of Landmark Creations who has designed and manufactured custom inflatables since 1986. Looking for business grand opening ideas? Visit Landmark at http://www.landmarkcreations.com today.

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This post was submitted by Stephanie Meacham .