It looks obnoxious and reduces legibility, diminishing the effectiveness of your marketing so stop doing it! If your message isn’t compelling, trying to be louder won’t make it more compelling.

While we’re on the subject, the same goes for bold and italicized text. The point of either is to emphasize a point. You can’t make every other sentence bold and expect it to have any effect other than annoying your readers.

There is really no one answer in determining the right time to hire a marketing company. For some, it may be during the start-up phase, ensuring that your products are the right fit for your target audience and the correct price points are set. For others, it may be when it’s time to move up re-brand your company and reposition yourself in your industry. However, there really are a limitless set of circumstances for each company.

The bottom line is to determine what you want to accomplish, and then determine if you are capable of achieving that on your own in a cost effective and timely manner. If handling your own marketing takes you away from your area of expertise, it has a negative impact on your overall business and you should hire a marketing company. Doing so allows you to focus on your area of expertise while continuing to grow your business.

Businesses will become more transparent.

More companies will begin to participate in open dialogue on a variety of business issues, such as pricing, innovation and service. Forward thinking business owners and managers are realizing that they can not hide from their competitors. Take a look at the insurance industry for example. When you visit the websites of most major insurance companies today, you can find not only their rates, but also the rates of competing companies. This transparency also extends to problems. The days of a few upset or dissatisfied customers being able to cause a finite amount of negative buzz about your company are long gone as the internet has given them the tools to destroy a brand in less time than it took you to build it. DreamHost knew this and took a proactive approach when pretty much everything that could go wrong, did go wrong by letting their customers know what exactly what was happening and what they were doing to correct it. Rather than trying to shift blame, they took responsibility and were very public about it and this helped them to turn a potentially crippling situation into a situation where they could show their customers that they really cared and would put forth the effort needed to fix their problems.

Businesses will become more focused

Niche businesses will become more common, and more importantly, more profitable than ever before. This is largely due to the power of the internet, allowing consumers the ability to find unusual products, as depicted in the latest Ask.com television commercials. In the past, businesses were forced to offer a wide variety of products because they could only serve a specific geographic range based on their retail location. Additional sales had to be generated via direct mail, radio or television advertising, each of which required a significant investment. Now you can have a website developed, implement a modest internet marketing campaign and reach the consumers most interested in what you have to offer all over the world through the major search engines. This intense focus allows you to get started with a smaller investment, reach a more passionate prospect who is more likely to convert to a customer and earn a larger market share more easily. It also make it easier to analyze your industry, your results and new trends so that you can make more effective business decisions.

Cross media marketing will become critical

No man is an island. Likewise, no single marketing channel is the answer to your marketing needs. All of the television advertising in the world will only do so much for your business because over time, people will become numb to it. The same goes for any medium. For example, most outdoor advertising companies will recommend their clients to move their billboard ads to different locations after several months because over time, people will become accustomed to seeing the ad and will begin to block it out. This isn’t the only factor in play here though. The other reason you need to utilize a blend of marketing channels to promote your business is because we live in a time-fragmented world today. With cell phones, email, TiVo and incredibly busy lives, prospects can’t be effectively reached in the same ways that used to be possible. On top of that, your competitors (as well a millions of other unrelated companies) are constantly bombarding the same prospects with their marketing messages, so you need to stay at the forefront of their mind – which means being everywhere. Ideally, you should utilize at least three to six channels to reach your prospects. For example, you could develop a campaign consisting of organic search engine optimization, online advertising, email marketing, direct mail marketing, and radio advertising, which would allow you to reach your prospects on their way to and from work, when they visit their favorite websites, when they check their email, use a search engine and even when they arrive at home.

Pricing models will change dramatically

Two distinct pricing models will thrive; extremely exclusive pricing and extremely competitive pricing. Consumers will look for one of two things, either something which they will gladly pay a premium for (Starbucks has done an outstanding job at this) or something that they view as a commodity and want the lowest possible price (E-Trade, for example). The middle ground will become no man’s land. The businesses that succeed will be those that determine where they stand and position themselves accordingly. If you need help deciding exactly how to position your company, you should read Blue Ocean Strategy and Trading Up.

There has been a lot of talk about the economy lately. Many pundits feel that it’s a dismal picture and getting progressively worse, while others point to statistics that show the economy doing better than ever before. The problem is that perception is reality and with the tremendous amount of negativity surrounding the economy, it’s only a matter of time before it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Much of the uncertainty hinges on the unstable housing market and mortgage meltdown. For business owners, it works like this; as the number of foreclosures increases and banks begin to take greater losses, they reduce the amount of capital available to provide loans to small businesses. This obviously results in less operating capital for small business, who then in turn must reduce overhead and often, put any expansion on hold. Often, these small businesses are also forced to lay off employees. As this effect multiplies exponentially, less revenue goes into the economy because more people are uncertain about their income, or worse yet, no longer have income, which results in less revenue for businesses, and the cycle continues.

Fortunately, there are some things you can do to reduce the impact that this will have on your business:

• Offer more value for the same, or a lower price than your competitors

• Maintain or increase your advertising budget

• Utilize technology to reduce costs while increasing productivity

• Develop products/services that utilize recurring billing, such as those on a membership basis

• Innovate your industry (usually easier said than done)

• Become a resource by providing information and tools that your prospects need

The time to prepare is now, while you have the time and resources to do so, not after the economy has taken a rapid decline. Get started today and get the jump on your competitors.

We communicate through a variety of mediums today, each time, painting a picture of who we are. Sometimes it’s accurate, sometimes it’s not. If you’re going to take the time to communicate with someone, regardless of whether they are an employer, employee, client, prospect or any other type of contact, be sure to take the time to communicate effectively and professionally. I can’t tell you how many times each day I see an email with no regard for spelling, grammar or punctuation, and each time, my reaction is the same. If someone isn’t willing to put in the effort to compose a proper email, what on earth would make me think that they would put any more effort into anything else? Nothing, so I move on.

What does your communication say about you?

It’s recently come to my attention that Network Solutions is engaging is some pretty unethical business practice, and they’re using your time and work to profit from it! It works like this. You visit Network Solutions to see if a domain name that you’re interested in buying is available, and as luck would have it, the name you want is. So you’re about to register it but you then find out that there are companies like Go Daddy who offer the exact same product at about one third of the price, so you hop over to their website to buy the domain, only to find out that it’s no longer available. Why? Because when you entered the domain search at Network Solutions, they registered it for themselves so that you would be forced to buy it from them rather than another, more ethical domain registrar.

You may ask yourself why a company would resort to these types of extortion tactics. The answer is quite simple - they are selling the same exact thing as their competitors at three times the price. Congratulations Network Solutions, you’ve won the dirtiest registrar ever award!

Time and time again, we see endless so-called “marketing experts” claiming that their breakthrough product, training boot camp, or proprietary technique will enable you to effortlessly make millions almost overnight, in your spare time from your bedroom. They are liars. Simply put, they are preying on the masses of lazy people who will give it a shot and then quickly give up.

Marketing is not easy. It requires an objective point of view, foresight, innovation, and lots and lots of consistent, hard work. There is just no way around it. Don’t buy into the misconception that the internet takes the work out of marketing. There are millions of people competing on the internet. It requires just as much work, if not more than ever before because people are bombarded with a marketing message just about everywhere they turn, so they are less receptive than ever.

My point is for you to understand that marketing is going to be difficult. It’s going to be a lot of work. It’s going to take time. If you know that going in, you’ll have realistic expectations and you’ll be less likely to give up.

Everyone talks a good game when it comes to their products or services, but how many companies actually prove it?

For many business owners, search engine optimization may seem like some sort of arcane magic. Some changes are made to the pages within your website and over time it begins to appear at the top of the results when someone searches for specific keyword phrases. To add to the apparent confusion, many of these changes may not even be visible to visitors since they occur only in the HTML code. When these factors are combined with the steep bell-curve associated with achieving organic SEO results and the abundance of misinformation out there, it can seem like the type of service that you should outsource to a firm that specializes in it, and in many instances, this is a good choice because it allows you to focus on your area of expertise. The challenge then is to choose the right company to handle your search engine optimization.

It’s tempting to favor one company over another based on some sort of guarantee; however it’s important to note that it is pretty much meaningless because no company has the ability to directly influence any of the major search engines. Anyone that says otherwise is simply lying and you should stay far away from them. Most often, a search engine optimization firm’s guarantee will cover non-sense keyword phrases. These phrases may be relevant to your industry, but will deliver little to no traffic to your website, and therefore are of no value to you. The guarantee will be worded stating that they will enable your website to rank for these keyword phrases, and they will because since the phrases drive little to no traffic, no one else is competing for them. The same goes for your company name. It is relatively easy to rank for your own company name in most cases, but it will usually do little to drive significant traffic to your website. You should also be wary of any guarantee that promises to drive a specific amount of traffic to your website as this can easily be manipulated to artificially boost the volume, and in the event that actual live visitors are driven to your website, they will usually be extremely untargeted, resulting in a poor return on investment.

So what is a business owner to do? Simply choose a search engine optimization firm based of the results that they’ve delivered for their previous and existing clients.