On one hand I would love to have her do the traditional way – high school, great college for four years, and find a job. Yet in reality, I know most kids that opt for that lifestyle will find anything but success. It’s just not in the cards any more because we’ve changed as a society over the past decade.

And what is facing today’s high school and college students is also facing adults too.

If you plan on working at a company for years, doing one job until you retire, and then planning on a nice retirement for the rest of your life – well, you really are in for a surprise.

So like many people, you decide to start a side business, and hope it turns into something more. Something that will help you build a comfortable income now and well into the future.

Yet if you read anything on marketing, its very old school and very traditional. Five years ago, Facebook didn’t exist, and social media meant something entirely different than it does today.

If you receive an email, a postcard, or even a newspaper at home today, chances are you barely give it a second glance when it comes to finding people to do business with. Why rely on a business telling you how great they are, when you can find “friends” online that will gladly recommend someone they’ve had an excellent record with?

So how do you market a new business? How do you find relevant information that will help you build a business for the future?

It’s really not as hard as it sounds.

Traditional marketing teaches you the fundamentals. The fundamentals will always be relevant – it’s just the tools that change. Here are 4 essential steps to put in place anytime you are building a new business.

Create a great product or service

The first step is the most obvious. Whatever product or service you have, find a way to make it the best possible for you and for your clients. Change it as you get feedback from your clientele. Add to it along the way. Refine it. And do it all over again with every product or service you create.

Be comfortable with how to sell it

Having a great product or service is mandatory. And believing in it and being able to sell it without selling it at all is essential. The more comfortable you are with your product or service, the more you will be able to talk about it, anticipate people’s needs before they ask, and showcase why they should choose you over your competition. But remember, it should never be about selling. Selling today means to build a relationship, tell stories, and showcase your product and services without having to become a “hard sell”.

Build a system that connects with prospects and customers

This is the most important step, and one that most people ignore, forget, or simply never put into place. There are many steps an average business takes to move someone from initial contact, to the sale, to follow through throughout the life of your relationship with a client. It involves many steps, and many tools. That is your system. That is what brings you success. And that is what separates a successful business from a fledging or failing one.

This is also where your tools will change. The plan never changes; only the tools change. Twenty years ago, you may have had five ways of bringing in clients through advertising, including a magazine ad, the yellow pages, and a newspaper. Today those tools may have changed to Facebook, Google and banner ads on a complimentary website. The plan is still the same. They system is still in place. Only the tools have changed.

Work the system every day

Marketing is a never-ending process. You have to work it today, tomorrow, next month, and next year. If your business is to stay in business, you have to work the system. That may mean putting a time on your calendar where you work on your system every day. Or it may mean hiring help – a virtual assistant, a marketing team, or an office manager – to do the work for you.

However you choose to do it, realize it has to be done. And then do it. You’ll be amazed at what you can achieve when you set your mind to it.

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3. The 7 Steps I’ll Be Using In 2010 For My Social Marketing Strategy

I get spam almost daily from SEO companies offering me top placement in Google.

And we met with a past client the other day who had his son doing some work for his site. His son took dozens of keywords, put them at the bottom of his site, and made the text color the same as the background color to “hide” the keywords, giving him more keywords for better search rankings. Guess what – Google knows that trick and you can easily be banned from Google’s rankings by doing that type of work.

The benefits of SEO are clear – do a good job with it and you’ll be high in the search engine rankings in all the places your clients are looking. But how do you know what’s good – and what’s bad?

Tip #1 – Never trick the search engines

If it seems a little tricky and a little sneaky, it is. While it may seem like the Internet is still fairly new, in reality its been around long enough to weed out the good and the bad. Google likes quality. It rewards sites that provide quality content, in a quality way. That’s why they are constantly rewriting their algorithms to bring in only quality work. If you do something to try and “trick” your way into better placement, you’ll lose. The only way to the top is hard work, consistency, and quality content.

Tip #2 – Don’t use the same keywords again and again

Want to know how to rank well in Google? Focus. Each page has a specific purpose, and should be keyworded accordingly. Unfortunately that’s rarely the case in the SEO world. For most people, they work with a web designer who asks them what they think their keywords. They give the designer a laundry list of keywords based on their limited knowledge, and the designer plugs them into every page.

There are two problems with that line of thinking. First, as a company owner, you are too close to your own subject matter. A plastic surgeon will give you the keyword “rhinoplasty” while the average person will type in “nose job”. It’s great to be listed high under a search term – unless no one is there searching for you. Second, Google likes focus. If you create a page with SEO strategies focused on one keyword, you’ll rank much better than one generic page with 100 keywords. Google simply won’t know where to rank you, so you’ll fall way down into oblivion.

Tip #3 – Do it once and they will come

I’ve worked with many people who are under the spell of “do it once and they will come”. They want the quick fix today so they can come up high in the search engines, and have all the clients they need to start calling immediately. They want to pay someone to do a little SEO magic, and have their site forever come up high in the search engines. In reality that will never happen.  Here’s why.

Let’s say you are in the gold industry, and you sell a golf putter. Your goal is to be in the search engines under the term “golf putter” and find all of your clients through that search. So you pay an SEO company to go through your site and get you results. What happens six months from now? How about a year? If you’ve SEO’d your site today and leave it sit, I guarantee you other companies will be out there tomorrow trying to move ahead of your in the search engines. And so will the next competitor. Until eventually you are moved off that first page of search results, and are so far down you’ll never be found.

Like any type of marketing, the online world is a moving environment. You can’t pay once and expect results for life. You have to work at it today, tomorrow, the next day, and so on. If you mail postcards, you have to mail them today, tomorrow, the next day, and so on. That’s the way marketing works.

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So is there a magic formula to success? Is there some secret that a successful business has that they could simply pass along to everyone else?

Actually, the answer is yes.

1. Do a little research. In today’s world, you can’t hide your road to success. So spend a little time looking around, and discover how a successful company is marketing their business. Are they online? How do they advertise (i.e. magazines, newspapers, radio, direct mail)? What message are they sharing?

2. Talk with the company owner. Every industry has its own internal structure. Look for organizations, tradeshows and associations within your industry. Attend the major events and make sure you get the latest publications. Study up on the industry leaders and find out what they are doing.

3. Find mentors and vendors that can help you emulate the success. If you know an industry leader is getting 50 percent of his business through the Internet, find someone to help you create a dynamic web presence. Discover how to use social networking more effectively. And begin studying up on online marketing techniques.

Then don’t stop. The reason why the majority of small business marketing methods fail is because the business owner doesn’t give them enough time to work. Commit to a handful of ideas, and see them through to success.

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Studies show that as of today, 90 percent of all email sent is SPAM related. Scary. Yet can you imagine not having an email address? When you meet someone, isn’t your email address almost as important as a phone number?

Email still works today. But what about tomorrow?

Colleges are shutting down their email programs because students never check email. When professors or administration would send out notices to students, most of their email goes unanswered. Why? Because students use social media and smart technology way more than adults do. Why bother with something that predominately has things you have no desire to receive, read, or use?

What should you use instead? Go with the masses. Which means Facebook.

Facebook is the second largest search engine, has well over 300 million active users, and has more time spent on average by a user than any other site. When someone receives a notice in their Facebook account, via wall, “email” or through groups, they read and take notice.

How about other technology?

Let’s talk Kindle and Nook and iPad – they allow you to instantly receive new subscriptions to the information you truly want. It’s easy to set up a Kindle subscription to your blog posts (take a look at mine for my photography niche), or create an app for the iPad very easily.

Have a podcast, either video or audio, in which you promote your business by handing out tips? ITunes allows you to have instant access to podcasts – and people will gladly use iTunes to sort and house the information they truly use.

If you send RSS through your blog, you can instantly feed into an RSS reader on whatever the tool of choice is – mobile device, Smart phone, iPad, or whatever comes up in the future.

Does that mean email is dead today? No. But be aware that it’s changing. You need to build your list today in a variety of ways. As one goes away, implement another. Always give choices to your customers, and realize they are at all levels of the spectrum. One may truly love your on Kindle – the other barely understands email. Your goal isn’t to force a client into a particular method; its to allow them to receive information in the manner they prefer.

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1. 3 Reasons To Stop Sending Email
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The key to small business success is getting results. Having a pretty site is nice, but if you aren’t attracting new leads and new clients all the time, what’s the point? While many people have head of WordPress and may think of it as a simple blogging site, WordPress has morphed into so much more over the last few months. Here are 7 reasons to use a WordPress website for your small business.

1. Gives you the control over your content. What’s the number one frustration with small business owners and their websites? Control over their content. Small business owners are great at coming up with ideas – sometimes late on a Saturday night, ready for action in the coming week. If you rely on a traditional web designer, you have to email your changes, and sit back and wait until he or she has time to make the changes, sometimes waiting a week or more for the results. So much for quick thinking. With a WordPress website, no more waiting. You have an idea, you login to your account, and you make the change. Up and running in a matter of minutes.

2. Is it a website, or is it a blog? With WordPress websites, you have the convenience of both. By controlling your pages and your posts, the two are integrated together – your clients and readers won’t know the difference. You gain the traffic from having the blog side, and the formalities of having your information in a static location, available whenever anyone chooses to view it.

3. Plugins and widgets made easy. One of the reasons WordPress is so powerful are the many plugins available to make your site even better. The All In One SEO Pack is a powerful plugin that makes SEO a snap. Want to put your most popular posts upfront for people to view – there is a plugin for that. Want people to view your Flickr stream, or be able to easily join your Facebook fan page? There are widgets for that. And with the ease of technology, you can copy and paste most anything right where you want it to be.

4. Add photos and videos. The search engines and your viewers want more than text – they love looking through your photos and videos too. Why not take advantage of using other sites like Flickr and YouTube to build your presence on other popular sites – and connect them back to your website too?

5. Are you mobile ready? By 2020, the prediction is most people will be using mobile devices for their internet access. Desktops will become a thing of the past as we migrate towards mobile technology, that can allow us to be connected anywhere, anytime. Haivng a mobile ready website is at the top of the list in importance as we migrate to this – and WordPress makes that possible.

6. You save time. Because your site is controlled through online technology, you can control your website anywhere. Whether you use your mobile phone on the road, check in at a clients location in another state, or sit down at your own desktop, you always have capabilities to make a change.

7. You save money. Ultimately its about easy access and how much you make as a business. If you’re not spending money on a designer every month, you have more to invest back into your marketing for your company. It should always be about helping your bring in more business.

[Want help designing your WordPress website? We've helped dozens of small business owners take charge of their online presence - give us a call.]

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If you’ve been considering or using yellow page advertising, it might be time to ask yourself several questions:

• Is your client using the yellow pages to find services?
• Can you find similar or better quality clients in other ways?
• Is this the best use of your marketing dollar for future growth?

Many service businesses advertise in the yellow pages because they always have, and they still get calls from their ad. But how much are you making from these clients? Is it enough to cover your monthly phone bill? And is your client list growing or shrinking by using this form of marketing?

In many households across the country, the phonebooks move from the front doorstep to the recycle bin, without even opening the bag they come in. (I’ve been doing that for more than 10 years now.) If I can’t perform a search and find you in Google, then you aren’t the business for me.

Overall, an online customer is more affluent, better educated, and more savvy in finding the perfect business to suit their needs. They are willing to build a relationship with a company that can provide the service they are looking for.

Online marketing is:

• Less expensive – many tools are available at no or low cost
• Permanent – it’s not pay or delete like the yellow pages – once you implement a technique, it exists online forever
• The way of the future – if someone has a problem or needs a service, they search online and Google it. And with mobile technology growing in leaps and bounds, being findable and mobile ready is just as important.

It’s not about doing what you’ve always done. It’s about going where your clients are. And where you can build a strong, lucrative future.

[Are you a small business looking to trade in your yellow page advertising for online marketing? Our new local business search program may be just what you're looking for. Contact us today.]

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1. Have a video introduction on the main page of your site.
Why not place a video to greet people when they visit the first time? Place it along the side or in your header, and make it clickable for people to watch if and when they prefer. Always give people the option to watch a video – if they’ve visited your site before, they may have a specific purpose for being back. Making them watch a video, or hunt for a way to turn it off can be frustrating. If people desire to watch it, they will find a way.

2. Add video testimonials to your sales pages.
Reading a testimonial is the first step to finding a new client. From there, give your testimonials more authority. Including a photograph and a link to a corresponding website will offer a stronger believability factor. And by taking the next step and actually recording a client giving a testimonial gives you the highest recommendation. If someone is willing to talk directly to you about a company – that’s believability.

3. Give away free video tutorials.
Do you have a product where training is a part of your service? Why not build a few video tutorials to show how easy your product is to use. The great thing about building a few promotional video tutorials is you can use them in many ways. Share them on YouTube, and they may go viral. Put them on your blog and they become a permanent part of your content.

4. Interview an expert.
Who is an expert in your industry? It may be someone in your company, yourself or your spouse, or a mentor you’ve been following for years. What can they add to your site to give your product or service more credibility, and make people want to do business with you? Remember, you don’t have make this a sales pitch – just information that your readers will find useful. A wedding photographer could interview the editor of a local wedding magazine, and get 10 tips to creating a beautiful wedding. It builds up your credibility because you personally had contact with another expert. And it adds to your content by showcasing ideas for weddings in a great way.

5. Create a video with how to advice, tips, or information.
These are the easiest to do. Head to a quiet room in your home or office. Set up your Flip Video or Bloggie Camera on a tripod and start shooting. Remember to keep it short and to the point. YouTube videos can be no longer than 10 minutes, and anything longer than that would lose interest anyway. Have a few ideas in mind, be sincere, and start sharing.

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YouTube announced the most popular videos of 2009. The top 5 had a combined total of over 250 million views this year, with the top video taking almost half of that.

Number One – Susan Boyle on Britain’s Got Talent
(The original video that achieved over 120 million views did not allow embedding – this is one from the finals.)

 

Number Two – David After Dentist

Number Three – JK Wedding Entrance Dance

Number Four – New Moon Movie Trailer

Number Five Evian Roller Babies

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It’s pretty easy to understand that if you open up a retail store, you have to place it in a location that will attract customers. You have to make it warm and inviting, giving people a reason to step through your front door. You also have to have many forms of advertising to move people from their cars into the parking lot, and into your store.

What’s not so easy is understanding the same philosophy works online as well. Your blog is your “store”. People may window shop – look at various posts and read what you have to say. But in order for them to eventually become “customers”, you have to push them off the fence and help them decide to take the next step.

And that’s where ebooks come into play.

An ebook is simply an electronic book. It doesn’t cost you anything out of pocket to produce (unless you have someone create it for you); just your time to write up the ebook. But the power of your ebook can help increase your business tenfold if you create the right ebook.

Let’s look at five things you need to create a dynamic ebook.

1. An eye-catching headline.
People like things that are intriguing; something that makes them take a step back and start wondering if they truly know the answer. A title of, “How To Make Cupcakes” isn’t very appealing. Anyone can make cupcakes if given half the chance. But what about, “Ten Tips That Can Make Your Cupcakes Lighter, Fluffier, And More Beautiful Than A Professional Cake Decorator”. Hmmm…  All of a sudden you took a common topic, and made it a whole lot more interesting. You also raised awareness and intrigue, and gave people a reason to want the information.

2. Relevant content.
If people sign up for your ebook, they want the information you promised. If they signed up for, “Ten Tips That Can Make Your Cupcakes Lighter, Fluffier, And More Beautiful Than A Professional Cake Decorator”, they want ten tips that will help them improve the taste and look of their cupcakes. Don’t fill it with information that’s off topic, or worse, a sales pitch for products and services. You want this initial contact to be pleasant for the reader. You want to build trust. If you deliver what you promise, they will be back.

3. True tips and advice.
The worst kind of ebook is one that provides hints and teasers on what it promises, but makes you purchase something to get the true answer. If you promise “Ten Tips That Can Make Your Cupcakes Lighter, Fluffier, And More Beautiful Than A Professional Cake Decorator”, deliver on that promise and give ten actual tips they can use immediately. Make them easy to understand, easy to implement.

4. Questions for the future.
Once you have delivered what you promise, then its okay to open up new topics. At the end of your ebook on cupcakes, for example, it’s okay to mention your book, “101 Recipes and Tips For The Best Cupcakes Ever”. The ebook holder already has an interest, has possibly tried some of your tips, and may be interested in taking the next step. Your ebook sets up a potential sale by giving quality information up front, and providing more information for a fee second.

5. Provide direction.
Every ebook should be written with a goal. If you are giving away an ebook from your blog, what is the ultimate purpose? If 100 people download that ebook today, what would be your ultimate goal for each of those 100 people? It may be simply to get them on to your list for future promotion. It may be to get them to buy a small product or service from you. Or maybe it’s to introduce a larger product, service or training program that occurs sometime in the future. Whatever that goal is, make sure you incorporate it into your ebook. Provide a short bio in the back describing who you are, and inviting them to take the next step. Don’t deceive people on what you are truly selling. Be upfront and honest the whole way through, and you’ll start building a list of incredible potential.

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According to B to B’s 2010 Outlook survey, 87 percent of all businesses will be keeping their current marketing budgets steady or increasing them in the coming year. But where they will be spending that money will vary greatly.

The highest area of decreased spending is in the print category and in attending events, both at 63 percent.

The highest area of increased spending is in the online category, with over 80 percent anticipating increasing within this category.

So where are the best places to increase spending online? Email campaigns, search campaigns, social media and website development were the top categories – pretty much as expected.

We all know the struggle traditional media sources are having right now. Just today we went hunting for a story on a local media site, and found it as a current release. However when we did a Google search for the same story, we found it in online sources from several days ago.

You can’t stay in traditional sources because you’ve always been there. If your clients are moving on, you need to as well.

Shifts happen quickly now. Where it took years for new technology to penetrate the main population even a few short years ago, now technology can affect the majority in a matter of months.

If you’re not learning something new, it will have an impact on your business.

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