School’s Out: A Real World Guide to Marketing Your Business from A to Z, by Jeremy L. Knauff, is a step-by-step marketing toolbox for small and mid-sized businesses at all stages of growth, from the under-funded start-ups running out of a spare bedroom to the family company that’s been handed down through three generations. In it you’ll find valuable information on marketing and advertising fundamentals while receiving a personal education in many of the newest, most effective marketing tactics and mediums available today. You’ll also get a healthy dose of real world examples that have been used successfully to increase business for a number of companies. What you’re getting here is first hand information from the trenches written by an entrepreneur who has faced the same challenges you’re going through and succeeded.

School’s Out is available through Amazon.com and other select retailers.

If you already own a domain name, you probably know how difficult it can be to find just the right one. Between the millions of businesses online and the domain speculators who purchase thousands of domains with the intent of reselling them at a profit, it can be almost impossible.

If you’re already in business, you’re going to have to acquire a domain name that is the best fit for your company name. This will require either searching for the closest possible match, or buying a domain from whoever has the one you’re looking for. On the other hand, if you are just getting ready to start your company, you have an advantage because you can find an easy-to-remember and catchy domain name and then base your company name on that. It may seem backwards to choose your domain name before naming your company, but it can really make a tremendous difference in the effectiveness of your marketing.

When your domain name is different than your company name, your marketing investment will have less impact because you have to remind your prospects that the domain and your company are one in the same. As Seth Godin mentioned, “The internet has taught people what to do when they see a domain. It’s not just an address, it’s the first bit of marketing.” For example, when a visitor arrives at www.datementor.com, they are going to know exactly what the site is for. Had Brad used www.bradfinsilver.com instead, chances are that many of the visitors would leave before putting in the effort to figure it out.

Obviously, you’ll want to choose a .com domain rather than a .net domain, and you should avoid the other extensions, such as .biz, .info, or .us like the plague. Also, be sure to register it for at least five years. This ensures that you don’t forget to renew it, plus, it can help improve your search engine ranking to a small degree.

The internet has given businesses of all sizes a tremendous amount of leverage in terms of efficiency, productivity and exposure, but the fundamentals of business still and always will apply.

Despite the stories you may have heard from some of the latest internet marketing gurus, you simply can’t invest a few hundred dollars to start an affiliate marketing or drop shipping program, and then sit on the beach while your web site rakes in the cash for you. Business on the internet is like any other business. There is no easy way to get rich overnight because a successful business is built by providing value to people.

The internet can be a powerful tool for any business as long as you have realistic expectations about what it can do for you. For example, we recently received a phone call from an individual wanting us to market an affiliate program for them, with the expectation of generating $6,000 dollars per month right away. Had this individual put together a business plan, like any potential entrepreneur should do, he would have realized that $6,000 in monthly revenue from an affiliate program paying three percent would require a sales volume of $200,000 per month! Oh, and he wanted to do this for an investment of $1,500. There is simply no industry where a $1,500 investment will produce a return of $2.4 million – especially in a start-up company.

In order to successfully market your company, you need to understand that your success will be based on steady, cumulative efforts over time.

During our first few days of kindergarten, we were quickly learned the embarrassment of being wrong. Standing in front of a room full of our peers who were eagerly waiting for an answer that we didn’t have, we realized that not taking chances often means avoiding the embarrassment of being wrong. For many of us, this became solidly reinforced over the next several years of school, and then followed us into our careers. Today, many of us are still paralyzed by this fear, caused by a tragic flaw in our school system.

What most people don’t realize is not only is being wrong not a bad thing, it can actually be a good thing because it enables us to learn new things. Leonardo DaVinci, Albert Einstein and George Washington Carver didn’t become prolific inventors by playing it safe. They pushed the limits of conventional wisdom and even of their own minds. They made mistakes and achieved their goals through a long, often laborious process of trial and error.

This applies to marketing your company as well. No company ever became an industry leader by simply following what everyone else was doing. Your marketing should push the edge, create buzz, maybe even controversy, enabling you to stand out from our competitors. Henry Ford became one of the riches men in the world by throwing conventional wisdom to the wind and taking his marketing in a completely different direction than his competitors. While all of the other auto manufacturers were battling other over market share to sell a product that was priced at five times the annual salary of the average American, he developed a way to reduce the cost of an automobile to be competitive with the horse-drawn carriages. This made the existing automobile manufacturers as well as the horse-drawn carriage manufacturers almost completely irrelevant to the consumer. Bath and Body Works eschewed the traditional marketing approach followed by just about every other company in their industry at the time by avoiding the glitzy packaging and air-brushed models in favor of a natural, average image that just about anyone can relate to.

Is it time for you to be wrong every now and then? If you want to become ultra successful, the answer is an obvious yes!

It amazes me how much money some companies will spend on marketing, and then design their web site with no contact information what so ever. Their misguided thinking assumes that they will save money by not having to talk to all those “pesky customers.” They honestly believe they will then simply dig around online until they find the answers they’re looking for. In reality, these visitors will be frustrated and leave your web site to spend their hard-earned dollars with one of your competitors.

If you want to start increasing your web site’s conversions dramatically, make your contact information prominent and include it on every page.

When your customers have a problem with their order, do you have a strict set of rules that dictate how you can solve their problem? Or do you go above and beyond to ensure that they get what they want, how they want it? Do you take the extra steps to ensure that they know you care and appreciate their business? If not, you could learn a lesson from Zappos on doing customer service right.

There once was a time that simply adding relevant content to your web site would ensure high-ranking for applicable keyword phrases. The battle cry for SEO specialists and internet marketing gurus everywhere became “Content is king!” As more and more people rushed to add relevant content to their web sites to earn that coveted search engine traffic, content began to hold less importance in the algorithms that search engines use to rank a web page. Today, on-site content is just a factor, one that in and of itself carries little weight. But when taken into account with a host of other factors, such as the age of the domain and the number and relevance of inbound links, content is an important factor.

Unfortunately, like anything else, more than a few people have attempted to use this to promote their own web sites without actually doing any real work. Every single day, we find articles written by our staff posted on spam blogs by ill-informed SEO specialists who are attempting to promote their own pharmacy or gambling related web sites. They apparently have the idea that by simply copying content from our web site and other web sites, that they will earn tons of traffic overnight and their pockets will be stuffed with cash. In reality, it doesn’t work that way. The search engines are smarter than that.

Fresh, relevant content is a valuable asset because it encourages your visitors to stay longer and come back more frequently, and often, even link to your web site. It also encourages the search engines to rank your web site higher for relevant terms. The key here is fresh, relevant content. Simply copying someone else’s content is not going to help you improve your ranking, nor is adding large amounts of irrelevant content. Your focus should be on producing quality content on a regular basis, and over time your web site will begin to reap the rewards of your hard work.

Flash intros were all the rage during the dot com bubble of the 1990s, but most web site designers with any sense have long since abandoned them because of the multiple problems they caused. For example, most SEO savvy designers today know that search engines can not access the content in a flash file so a website with a flash intro will appear to be nothing more than a blank page. Another problem is that research (according to a MarketingSherpa survey) has shown that over 80% of visitors hate flash intros — note the abnormally strong emotion! Remember, your visitors came to your web site for a reason, and I would bet any amount of money that it wasn’t so that they could have your commercial forced on them.

Any internet marketing company or your own in-house marketing team can run a web analytics program to determine the number of visitors that quickly hit the back button when faced with your intro. When you take that number along with your conversion rate and profit margin, you can figure out how much revenue it’s costing you each month. Is it a number you’re comfortable throwing away?

You rarely see anything simple these days, especially when it comes to graphic design and web site design. More often than not, it’s a matter of someone trying to out-do the other guy. Before long, you’ve got an ostentatious use of rotating 3-d menus, flashing lights, streaming video and obnoxious music, adding nothing to the visitor experience. Most people don’t start with this scenario in mind though. Quite often, they start off with a decent design but then see something that they want to add to their design, continuing to do so until the end result resembles a patchwork of various design styles and technologies that really don’t belong together.

What’s the solution? If you’re not ready to hire a graphic designer and you’ll be doing your own design, start with the end in mind. Decide what you want to accomplish and work towards that goal. Remember - your goal is to convert your prospects into paying clients. By making your marketing message, whether in print or online, as clear and compelling as possible, that is more likely to happen.

Simply put, keep it simple.

Graphic design may seem like a pretty simple, straight forward task. Rip open the shrink-wrap sealed copy of Photoshop, install it on your computer and jump into designing your own web sites, business cards and ads. Just to be sure, once you’re done, you run your new designs by a few friends or family members, who as it turns out, just happen to love them.

So now you’ve got a brand new web site and business cards that you designed all on your own, saving yourself a boatload of money by not hiring any graphic design companies to produce them, and now you’re ready for the orders to start flowing in. But they don’t. Days turn into weeks, then months and you can’t figure out what went wrong. Simple put, effective graphic design is far more complex than it seems.

On the surface, it may appear that graphic design is just playing with images, text and colors until you get the look that you want. In reality, there is a tremendous amount of though that goes into an effective design. Plus, your personal taste in art has very little to do with the image of your company. After all, you are trying to appeal to your target market, not your own ego.

Simply having access to a particular piece of software and going through the motions does not make one a professional graphic designer, nor does it make the finished work graphic design, any more than running on the same track with Olympic athletes makes you an Olympic athlete.

While many small business owners have handled their own graphic design successfully, a majority of them have experienceda completely different outcome. Unlike many of the other professions, such as law or accounting, were an unsuccessful approach can be immediately devastating to a business, graphic design appears to be a field where an unsuccessful approach can go unnoticed for quite some time. Nothing could be further from the truth. Poorly executed graphic design will not land your company in hot water with the IRS, nor is it likely to expose your company to any significant legal risks. But it will present a poor image to your prospects, who will in turn, choose your competitors over your company. The effects may not be apparent for quite some time, because unlike a situation such as a lawsuit, which is an active consequence, poor graphic design, which motivates your prospects to do business elsewhere, is an inactive consequence.

Another potential challenge in handling your own graphic design is that it often will take longer than turning it over to a professional designer. A professional has the knowledge and experience, along with the ability to utilize the necessary tools, quickly and efficiently, so you can generate revenue sooner.

You have to determine the value of your time. If you’re starting a business out of your spare bedroom with a few hundred dollars from your savings, then you’ll probably need to design your own marketing materials. On the other hand, if you’re running a business, chances are that you time is better spent focusing on running the business instead of trying to do everything yourself. If you’re the expert in your field, don’t you deserve a chance to get in front of your prospects so that you can help meet their needs while earning a profit? A professional graphic design company can help you present the image that will let you earn that chance.