Your Small Business Needs A Website Now! If you’re reading this, then you use the Internet.  The fact is, so do the vast majority of your customers.  They use the Internet for entertainment, email, keeping up with friends and family and getting their news.  And increasingly, they use it to research their buying decisions before making them. In today’s economy, if you aren’t online, you aren’t in the game.  People rely more and...

A Good Marketing Plan is the Roadmap to Success No one dreams of failing when starting their business, but the fact is that more than half of all business owners call it quits by the end of their second year and a full 80% before the end of their fifth year.  While there are a number of reasons for these stats, by far the biggest reason these businesses fail is that they lack a solid marketing plan. Too many small business owners believe...

The Secrets of Getting Your Clients To Refer You Boatloads of New Business According to guerrilla marketing guru Jay Conrad Levinson, it costs you 6 times more to sell something to a new customer than to an existing customer.  Regardless of your business, continuing to rely on new customers to support you is an extremely expensive endeavor, one you don’t even need to take part in.  There truly is a better way, one which not only saves...

A Marketing Review of The 2010 Super Bowl Commercials Each year, companies spend millions of dollars per minute to promote their goods during the Super Bowl, the single largest annual event in the United States.  Some of these commercials are memorable, others not so much.  While I enjoy the ads for their entertainment value as much as the next guy, typically I’m far more interested in the marketing behind the madness. ...

Ten Steps To Creating A Website That Surpasses Your Goals I remember when I built my first website.  I had not a clue in the world, which made it fun, but not necessarily effective.  The internet seemed so much more carefree back in those days, when eBay was king and Yahoo the crown prince. One thing I’ve realized over the years is that the internet is growing up right before our very eyes.  It must be nearing puberty because the good...

SLO Web Design Challenge Final Results In the SEO world, there are some keyword terms that are easier to obtain than others and other keyword terms that are practically impossible to breach.  In simple terms, there are keyword terms that command $20-$100 or more for the sponsored results listings that appear on the front page of Google when a search is made, and there are others that cost only a nickel. Here in San Luis Obispo, the...

Make More Money From Each Of Your Ad Dollars If you’re like most small businesses, you’re spending quite a bit of money on display ads, direct mail and/or PPC and possibly even relying on these ads and sales letters for all or most of your leads.  For maximum profits, small businesses should build and implement multiple streams of lead generation, but if the majority of your marketing budget is tied up in ads, it’s still possible...

Facebook Can Help You Build Your Brand No matter what type of business you are in, it’s virtually impossible to go a day without hearing something about social networking in general and the largest social network of them all, Facebook, specifically.  A big reason Facebook has become so commonplace is that small businesses just like yours have jumped on the social networking bandwagon and are now actively spending time and money on...

Build Your Business Following on Facebook As you can see from the graph above, Facebook continues to skyrocket in popularity.  What does this mean for your small business?  It means that your customers, vendors and industry connections are probably on Facebook and you need to be too.  To help you get people following your business on Facebook and start building your business following, we’ve put together these great tips that will...

Set Up An Account & Grow Your Small Business On The Largest Social Network In The World While MySpace is credited for helping social networking go mainstream, Facebook broke the mold and turned the medium into a viable business model for internet and local small businesses alike.  In fact, Facebook’s growth has been so phenomenal over the past couple of years that it’s even been mentioned as a legitimate competitor to almighty...