Here’s another gem from my friend, Mitch Mitchell. This time he’s giving information about something all business owners have to do to grow their business-market.

Take it away, Mitch…

As a sole proprietor, I can honestly tell you that I have tried every way I can think of to market my business. I’m sure you have also, but just in case you haven’t let me go through the different ways that you can try to market your small business.

1. Direct Mail. There are three ways that you can do direct mail. You can either create a sales brochure yourself or have someone create one for you and mail that. You can write a marketing letter, put it in a bunch of envelopes, and mail those out. Or you can go the postcard route, which can save you a lot of money, but doesn’t really give you enough room to tell anybody what you do. Now, if what you do is a general service such as lawn cleaning, making pizza, or fixing cars, you could probably get away with a short marketing pitch and an image. But if you do any complex services, a postcard won’t do you justice.

2. Email. Email offers you the ability to send out one letter to a bunch of people at once. Your marketing message doesn’t even have to be all that long in the letter. You can write one or two lines, add a link, and then send it out and hope people click on the link. If you use an autoresponder, you can even track who’s clicking on your links. The downfall is threefold. One, you have to find all those e-mail addresses and put them in individually. Two, if you sent out to many e-mails at once your host might think you’re spamming, and it’s a strong possibility that at least 25 to 50% of the people you send an e-mail to will either have your e-mails show up in a spam filter or be rejected as spam if you’ve never written those people before. Three, you could end up getting a whole lot of those e-mails back as either being rejected because of spam or because the e-mail address is no longer work.

3. Phone calling. Depending on what you do, picking up the phone and calling prospects might or might not be a good option. There are some professions are picking up the phone and making the calls yourself don’t look very professional. For instance, you wouldn’t expect lawyers to be making prospect calls. And, if you’re not a professional salesperson, you can get frustrated pretty easily when you keep getting a lot of answering machines, hangups, or people who keep saying no.

4. Social media. If you’re only marketing online, there are many outlets that you can try to market yourself through. You can add a blog to your website. You can try to advertise yourself on places such as Twitter or Facebook. You can join professional networking sites like LinkedIn. You can join online forums. If you go this route, you need to plan the time that you’re using these things, because it’s easy to lose track of time and waste your whole day.

In short, there is no one best way for making contacts for everybody. You have to choose what you believe works in your industry, and what your comfort level is in doing whatever it is you do.

Okay it’s me again.
Mitch gave some awesome advice concerning marketing your business. Try some of these tips and see which ones work for you.
If you want to hear more from Mitch, be sure to visit him at one of his blogs located at the following links:

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Here is a guest blog post by my good friend, Mitch Mitchell. In this post he gives some good reasons why you should have a business blog. Take it away, Mitch!

Sometimes I wonder just how far the computer age has gone. I say that because quite often I’m answering the same question over and over; why should I have a business blog. I’m going to give you a few reasons why you should have a business blog and how you can have a business blog.

The first reason you should have a business blog is to show your expertise in your field. Your website obviously should be the first place where you tell people what it is you do and try to give them as much information as possible. But a blog consistently allows people to see what you’re made of, and if there are any new changes in your industry you can reach your audience a lot faster.

The second reason you should have a business blog is because it helps to build up the prominence of your website if you have your blog affiliated with your website. Search engines love new content on websites, and your website will rank higher if someone is looking for your services in your area if your content is always fresh. All this basically means is if you wrote something on your blog even once a week, your website will benefit because something new has been added on some kind of consistent basis.

The third reason you should have a business blog is because it gives you an opportunity to show some personality and to interact with people who come to your website or your blog. Now this one is dicey if you’re someone who doesn’t write well or doesn’t have the time to keep up with the blog, let alone to respond to people who come to your blog and leave comments. It looks bad if you have a blog and no consistent content, or if you never respond to any comments.

This one can be addressed by hiring someone to write and manage your blog, which is a service I offer through one of my businesses. This may seem sneaky, but in actuality it allows you the freedom of having someone else researching your industry and keeping your blog up to date, responding to comments in your name, still allowing you to either respond to comments or write articles from time to time, and you may even learn some things about your own industry that you haven’t had time to keep up on.

I will say this however. If you decide this is something you want to do on your own, make sure you don’t define yourself so finitely bet you run out of things to say pretty quickly. There is nothing worse than a blog associated with your website or business that hasn’t had an update in three or more months. That can actually harm you more because people will think you don’t have enough imagination to take care of your own business, so why should they hire you to try to take care of their business.

Okay it’s me again…
If you want to get more information from Mitch, be sure to check out his two blogs at the following locations.

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If you’re using social networking for your business, you’ll want to watch this video. It gives 7 tips to help your social networking be more effective. Enjoy the video…

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Many people are using more things than text on their site these days. In fact there are lots of sites that use mostly video on their websites. While this might be fantastic for the user, this poses a challenge for website owners trying to get more organic traffic. This video explains how to overcome those challenges…

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I personally like DoFollow tags. I use DoFollow tags on my blogs because I feel like if someone wants to leave a useful comment they should get some page rank from leaving that comment. But alas I am not Google. The following video gives some insight into how Google views DoFollow Tags…

Now with that being said, does that change my personal opinion on DoFollow Tags? No not at all. I’m trying to build a community on my blog and comments are part of that. So I’m keeping my DoFollow tags in spite of the so called risks they may pose to my blog.

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As promised, here is the next term in my dictionary series–

account payable
 
–noun, plural accounts payable.
a liability to a creditor, carried on open account, usually for purchases of goods and services.

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I came across this blog post from one of my friends, Connie Ragen Green posted about people using twitter to harvest new affiliates. Instead of just leaving a comment, I decided to write my own blog post about the topic.

I honestly don’t see anything wrong with this. I wouldn’t let the first interaction I make with a potential affiliate be, hi, promote my product. That does seem kind of crass. Instead, I would develop a relationship with this person. Join their mailing list. Follow them on facebook. Buy their own products. This way you can see what they promote to their list and you can determine if your product is a good fit. Also always offer this person a review copy of the product. When people promote your product, they are putting their reputation on the line.
I personally would not object to someone that I had a relationship with asking me to promote their product. I would object if it were a complete and total stranger.

That’s my two cents on the issue. What do you think?

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I just received a copy of this book by Dr. Marshall Goldsmith called MOJO Tweet by Dr. Marshall Goldsmith. Before I get into the book review, let me share a little information with you about Dr. Goldsmith.

Marshall Goldsmith, is America’s preeminent executive coach. He is among a select few consultants who have been asked to work with more than sixty CEOs. His clients have included many of the world’s leading corporations. Goldsmith has helped to implement leadership development processes that have impacted more than one million people around the world.

He has a Ph.D. from UCLA and is on the faculty of the executive education programs for Dartmouth College and the University of Michigan. The American Management Association recently named him as one of fifty great thinkers and business leaders of the past eighty years. Read more in his new book, MOJO: How to Get It, How to Keep It, How to Get It Back if You Lose It.

Okay so that’s the information about the author. Here’s the review about the book.

I thought it was a very interesting book. It didn’t take me very long to read. Basically it’s full of snippets all about MOJO. It tells you what it is, how to get it, and what to do if you lose it. This is a must read for entrepreneurs because you definitely don’t want to lose your MOJO when you’re running a business. Here is where you can go to purchase your own copy of this book: http://marshallgoldsmithlibrary.com/

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I’ve added a forum to this blog! I had one over on ning, but I didn’t like the fact that I really didn’t have control over that forum. I mean if ning went away my forum would have been toast. Therefore, I decided to add a forum to this blog. It’s free to join and I welcome people of all levels of business to this forum. Whether you’re a newbie or a seasoned expert, you’re welcome! Everyone can contribute something! It’s brand new so get over there and start posting some content! To visit the forum go to http://www.learnsmallbusiness.com/forum

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Now that I’ve had the baby, I can go back to featuring shops from my EtsyTwitter friends. This week’s shop is Wellspring Creations. And as usual, I’m featuring some purple and red items from her shop. Here goes…

I simply love these earrings. I just wish my ears were pierced so I could wear them.

And here’s the matching necklace…

And since Valentine’s Day is coming up, here are some red items for you…

First some earrings…

…and here’s the matching ring

Stop by and pick up a thing or two! There’s something for everyone in this shop.

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