Chances are that you didn’t invest thousands of dollars in your company’s web site for a tax write off. You also didn’t invest your marketing budget to drive traffic to it just for your visitors to “ooh” and “ahh” and then move on to another one of the millions?of business web sites online today. You did all of this to generate sales.

That being the case, how would you like to really make an impact on the web? I’m talking about the kind of impact that keeps your existing clients coming back on a regular basis, produces new prospects on a regular basis and gets people talking about your company. You can accomplish all of this by simply consistently maintaining contact with your clients and prospects through a variety of channels online.

1. Make your web site a resource. Blog on a regular basis, but offer your own opinions?on events and changes?in your?industry rather than simply reposing the same information that everyone else is. Offer free tips that your?visitors will find useful.?Provide tools that your visitors can use to make their jobs easier, more efficient or even just more fun.
2. Utilize an RSS feed. It’s a streamlined way to communicate with your clients and prospects through their preferred medium and if you’re blogging, it’s built right in so it doesn’t require any extra work. Plus, it helps support your search engine optimization campaign.
3. Send an email newsletter on a regular basis. It’s true that some of your email will end up in spam folders or even?be deleted without being read, but it’s still one of the most cost effective ways to reach a large number of people.
4. Advertise on relevant web sites. Be where your prospects are, and if you really want to make a powerful impression, take advantage of flash or video ads, but be careful not to over do it with obnoxious ads.
5. Publish your articles, case studies and white papers on other relevant web sites with a link back to your web site. Aside from the additional traffic that you can generate from this, you will also be establishing credibility.
6. Produce an e-book. If your material is useful to others, you can bet that they will forward it to even more people. It won’t take long before you have reached a tremendous number of people from just a? few hours of work.

It’s an easy process really. Just stick to what everyone else is doing and never take any chances. However, while your marketing won’t fail, the same can not be said for your business, because in doing so, you will also ensure that it never stands out.

Major success comes from taking risks. Calculated risks, but risks non the less. You can walk because as a child, you fell down numerous times before you developed the coordination needed to take a few steps. You can ride a bike because you risked crashing until you finally got it. You can swim because you took a risk of sinking. Your marketing is no different. Anything worth doing is worth doing poorly until you become good at it, and if you want to become good at doing your own marketing, you’re generally going to have to fail at it first.

If you want your marketing to really set you apart from your competitors, get on the edge, take some risks and be different. If you’re unwilling to do that, then be prepared to spend a lot of money on conventional marketing.

What makes a great marketing strategy? Is it driving a tremendous budget across multiple marketing channels? Is it being louder or more visible than your competitors? Is it commanding a powerful sales staff that can respond at a moment’s notice?

In reality, it can be almost anything, but one thing it has to be is something that your competitors aren’t doing.

Do your competitors have a massive nationwide sales force? Take advantage of that by dominating the internet. It will take some time, but as your search engine ranking begins to climb, you will benefit from the efforts of your competitor’s sales force. If your competitors are industry leaders because of their print media campaigns, get out there face to face with your prospects. Business is built on relationships and if you can cultivate that, you’ll be more than a few steps ahead of the larger companies that simply launch a massive advertising campaign and wait for the phone to ring. Do things that allow you to leverage your time and resources. Blogs and email marketing are both great tools for this, as is networking.

The bottom line is to be where your competitors aren’t. Take advantage of any marketing channel that isn’t being used by, or is being poorly used by your competitors, and avoid the channels that they clearly dominate.

It would seem so. A recent initiative by GM dealers allows potential car buyers to compare and even test drive competing cars, much in the way that many web sites show detailed comparisons of their products vs. the products of their competitors.

“In that side-by-side comparison, we come out really well,” said Mark LaNeve, head of North American sales and marketing for General Motors.

As transparency becomes more common in today’s technology influenced world, giving your prospects all of the information they need to make an informed buying decision can mean the difference between your company being average or succeeding.

I recently saw a sign that said “Free Quotes” and I had to wonder if anyone has ever actually charged (or paid for) a quote. I doubt it, but then it got me thinking about some of the things I’ve seen on signage, ads and packaging over the years. The phrase “New and Improved” is a perfect example. It’s improved? Really? How is that possible if it’s new? If you’re going to make a statement, make sure it’s relevant, but more importantly, that it’s necessary.

If something goes without saying, let it.

Many business owners have a lot in common. We can usually find a way to get just about anything done. Most of us have the tough skin it takes to make it through the challenges we face as entrepreneurs. Quite a few of us are even pretty good at delegating responsibility to our employees. What separates those of us that move on to the next level is knowing when to bring in outside professionals so they can free us up so we can focus on our business. While many business owners eventually realize that they must turn to a legal or accounting firm to avoid a sticky situation or get out of one, many never make this realization when it comes to graphic design companies.

It may make sense to try to do everything yourself at first, especially when revenue is tight. The thing to remember though is that what you know isn’t what matters most, it’s what you don’t know that matters most. If you know everything about building a house except how to properly pour a foundation, how long do you think your house will last? The same goes for graphic design. You can design your own marketing materials, but unless you have a strong marketing background you’re probably not going to get the results you’re looking for.

A professional graphic designer knows what works and what doesn’t. They know what emotions certain colors provoke and what colors work well together. They know how to properly utilize contrast or size, shape and color to draw attention to various elements. They know which images will most effectively motivate your target market. Utilizing a professional designer will actually save you money (and then make you money) because they can produce a more effective marketing materials that will deliver results without a lot of trial and error. Keep in mind, they are more than just a Photoshop jockey.? Professional graphic designers have spent years honing their skills and the software they use is nothing more than a tool. Simply owning a copy of Photoshop doesn’t make someone a graphic designer any more than owning a set of Matco socket wrenches makes them a mechanic.

?So, to answer the question, what can a graphic design company do for your business?

• They can produce marketing materials that will present a more powerful message
• They can save you both time and money
• They can increase your revenue by providing you with more effective marketing materials
• They can help you get the most from your marketing budget

If you’re ready to take your business to the next level, spend some time talking to some graphic design companies to see which one would be the best fit for your company. While you’re at it, check out this article on choosing the right graphic designer.

It can be tempting to craft a marketing strategy based on delivering immediate results, especially when business is slow. The problem is that doing so can and usually will have a detrimental effect on your return on investment and the overall success of your business.

Think about it like this. You can hold a sale when business gets slow, and you’ll probably produce an immediate increase in your revenue that you wouldn’t have otherwise produced during this time period. Unfortunately, you will have done so at a lower profit margin. Over time you will also make your customers expect a sale and when you aren’t having one, they’ll simply wait until you do. It can put you in a bad situation pretty quickly. This is exactly what happened to SEARS quite a while ago.

Instead of trying to generate new business today, focus on generating new business tomorrow and every day there after. Make your company a resource to your prospects and clients by providing information and tools that they can use to improve their own businesses. Create new ways to reach your prospects. Look at needs that aren’t filled and find ways to fill them. Partner with related, but non-competing companies to provide a greater value. Ask your clients and prospects what they need, what they want, and probably more important, what gets them excited in their business, and then provide exactly that.

Successfully marketing your company can be one of the most difficult aspects or one of the easiest aspects of business. It?s up to you. If you work smarter than your competitors, you won?t have to work as hard. If you try to do the same thing they are, you?ll need to work around the clock. I know what my choice is, what?s yours?

The internet has been a tremendous source of revenue for small businesses since the early 1990s and as search engines have evolved, many companies have become dependant on organic search engine traffic. While this has given a lot of opportunity to a lot of businesses, it has also made it easier for them to ignore traditional marketing channels, which is a dangerous decision to make.

Google?s agorithm change is coming

As with many of their other major algorithm changes, if you?re not ready, you will almost certainly see devastating results. This particular change will have a more powerful effect though, because their engineers are working hard to eliminate the benefit that irrelevant links provide in ranking. This is a good goal, but unfortunately it will hurt many of the legitimate web sites in addition to the illegitimate ones along the way. Those sites that have few inbound links, especially links from unrelated web sites will suffer the most.

Focus on developing quality content for your web site and inbound links from relevant web sites and you will be able to weather the storm and come out ahead, but you?re going to need to get started today. Remember, it takes a considerable amount of time before the benefits of a search engine optimization campaign begin to materialize. More importantly, don?t rely on Google. The traffic that you get from them should be viewed as a bonus ? not something expected. Promote your business with a diverse mix of marketing channels, such as direct sales, internet advertising, email, or guerrilla marketing.

Is my enemy?s enemy my friend?

Microsoft and Yahoo have been battling the now monopolistic Google for many years with little to show for it. The battle may be changing course soon however because of talks of a merger or partnership agreement between Microsoft and Yahoo in regards to search. This could potentially bring the two companies (collectively) near the same search volume as Google, taking away some of their dominance and effectively leveling the playing field.

Aside from the issue of market share, there will potentially be a lot of innovation as a result of this partnership. By bringing the best and brightest minds from Microsoft and Yahoo together a creative synergy will be developed and new products and services will be created. In order for Google to stay on track, they will have to follow suit and come out with their own new products and services.

Local search is changing how we do business online

There once was a time that you would pick up a giant yellow book and flip through it when you needed to find a business. Then the internet came along and this handy old tool fell by the wayside. There were limitations to this new technology though. After all, what good was it to find ten pages of search results for plumbers if none of them we in your state? On the flip side of the coin, is there any value to you as a business owner to have prospects that you are unable to server calling you? Enter local search, which provides you with a way to find businesses that offer what you?re looking for in your city. Now, if you have the type of business that has a physical location, you can reach even more prospects, highly targeted prospects at that.

Anyone that has any sort of experience with organic search engine optimization knows that links from other web sites are a large part of what causes one site to rank higher than another. For several years now, web site owners have been trying to increase the number of links pointing to their own web sites to improve their ranking. However, Google is now trying to put an end to this by devaluing all forms of paid links.

The benefit to this is that it has the potential to make the playing field more level again. On the other hand, it also has the potential to let your competitors squash your ranking by reporting you for paying for links ? whether or not you actually do.

Google probably won’t be making any major changes to their algorithm right away because it will still require a lot of testing before it can even come close to separating paid links from natural links, but it is definitely coming. When it does, you can expect a pretty heavy shake up with a lot of unhappy web site owners who have to scramble to compensate for lost traffic. So how can you avoid becoming one of them? Well, you can start by making sure that the majority of your inbound links are natural. By providing useful and relevant content or tools on your web site, other web site owners will link to yours and your natural links will grow over time. You can also work on becoming newsworthy. Media web sites, such as newspapers or television stations are typically considered authority sites, so a link from them can carry a lot of weight.

Like any other form of marketing, internet marketing, more specifically, search engine optimization requires a diversified approach. When you put all of your eggs in one basket you?re taking a huge gamble with the success of your business.