Article Automation can drastically increase the amount of inbound links your website receives in a very short period of time. In my experience you can gain several thousand links to your page from a wide array of websites with just a few hours of work. It is without a doubt one of the most valuable tools, to the online entrepreneur.

Article Automation is possibly the easiest way of increasing your organic search traffic. But first you must first understand the basics of SEO, to really gain the benefit. If you have not already done so I recommend you read my earlier article on Search Engine Optimization. Most of the time people who are submitting articles do not appropriately develop their SEO strategy, and consequently their use of Article Automation ends up being a waste of effort. Don’t make the same mistake. Make every effort count.

What is Article Automation?

In my Online Marketing Basics article I gave the following description of this topic:

Article Automation – This is a service that takes your content and distributes it to a wide range of other websites. You write an article, submit it, and other websites, potentially thousands of them, post it to their site.

Simple enough, right? Can’t be… there must be more to it than that. Don’t over-think, it really is as simple as that. Write an article, submit it and if it is approved it will posted onto tens, hundreds or even thousands of websites. Easy, Breezy.

However, to have a shot at actually getting your article approved there are quite a few considerations you must take into account when using an article automation service.

5 Fast and Easy Rules of Article Automation

1. Google does not like duplicate content as much as it does unique information – Don’t post the article on your own website.
2. Most of the submission sites only allow 2-3 links – Only have 2 links that point to your website in your submission.
3. Article Automation systems dislike both too long and too short articles – Write articles that are 350-750 words long.
4. Include both a long tail and a fat belly keyword in the article.
   
5. Article Automation sites post to a wide variety of websites, that are broken down by category. – Make sure you pick categories when submitting that are actually relevant to your article.

My Article Automation Plan

I always start with research. I try to find a few keywords, related to my website, that have either very low or very weak competition. I could go into a whole other post on just making this specific determination. basically look for keywords/terms that have search results that don’t seem to actually relate to your search directly. This often ends up giving you Long Tail terms.

More often than not, these terms are the exact topic that I will write my article about. Being that my site is all about the topic and due to the fact that the keywords are directly relevant to my site, I am an obviously an expert in the topic and therefore my article will end up totally amazing and the definitive source for said topic… Right? It was worth a shot.

So, I write an outline. This starts as quick bullet points that touch on the all the important aspects of the subject that I am going to cover. With the outline in hand I flesh it out. It is common to realize in this process that I will be covering enough information to make several articles. GREAT, that is exactly what you want. My finished article should end up being at least a thousand words.

As you probably noticed from rule #3 above, this is too long for consideration on almost all Article Automation sites. Do not fret, all of this hard work will be worth it and you will not be editing it down to nothing. Just make sure you get everything down. It should end up as a very comprehensive document.

Editing is next. I clean up the mega post, fix errors, and add even more detail. This can often increase the word count considerably.

It is important that this article is quite thorough and very well thought out. It should also, where relevant, have links pointing to other parts of your website, and even outside content.

Regarding the links, I typically treat it them in the following way: if it points to an internal page I make sure the link text is a good keyword related to the referenced page. If the link is to an outside website I will make the link text the name of the website I am referring to.

Once this article is solid, and worthy of posting, I put it on my own website… That’s right, this Uber Article is content for my site. It is the most exhaustive and well thought out article on the topic that i can produce. it is valuable content that I have poured my soul into, why would I give that away? These articles become what I call “Pillar Content”. They are the structure that my entire SEO plan will be based around. This article in no way will be put on anyone else’s site. The idea is to create the most valuable resource for the topic, and I want it on MY website.

So what about the Article Automation submissions? What will I send them? Glad you asked.

I  strip down my pillar content into a summary or primer. I take the time to rewrite the whole thing and I often find it best to break it up into several smaller articles. I also now include the two links, both of them pointing back to the Uber article that now resides on my website.

The reason for all of this comes down to how Google looks at the various links and articles. Your article automation post resides on hundreds of other websites with basically identical content. Because of that each individual post will not SEO all that well, even though you did an awesome job making sure the post is intelligent and useful. However all of them link back to your well SEO’d  “One of a Kind” article that is full of detail and valuable content. Further more your pillar content points to more information on your website and increases the importance of those posts as well as itself. Google loves all of this. Many keyword links, coming into the page that are directly relevant to the content on the page. If done right you should be able to get your Uber article/pillar content in the top 3 places of the google first page for the long tail and at least the first or second page for the fat belly within a few weeks.

The power of Article Automation is only as useful as your overall SEO strategy and implementation. Use it wisely and it will gain you organic traffic by the thousands. Abuse it and, well… expect to be slapped by Google.

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Online Marketing Basics

Here at Success U we talk incessantly about the importance of online marketing. As experts who have been involved with Online Marketing for the last 15 years, we have an almost intuitive understanding of the industry. This knowledge feels natural, like everyone should have it, and that is the danger we face. Familiarity breeds complacency. Staying on top of the ever changing and constantly evolving industry can be a challenge. The opposite is also true; we had the advantage of adapting as the industry grew up. We were able to adapt.

I see the online marketing wars as similar to an arms race. If you are early to the battle and have a stone hammer you can control your competition as long as they are unarmed. However when they show up with a flint tipped spear you are now at a serious disadvantage. As long as you keep up with the little adaptations you can absorb the technological shifts as they occur. We often find that our clients were involved in online marketing in its infancy and are armed with just a rock and now the industry is using muskets. Or worse they are only getting started today and are completely unarmed. This concept really hit home with me over the weekend.

I was sitting in a consultation meeting with a brand new client. They have been using online marketing since 1999, and thus they saw the industry in the stone age. Innovocus has been hired to fix a disturbing trend they have been dealing with for the last five years. Our client has had their online sales erode consistently over time. They are noticeably frustrated by this trend; after all they are doing exactly what they have always done.

Warning bells should be wringing. Online Marketing changes so rapidly, that what made an effective campaign 6 months ago, might not work today. Expecting 10 year old techniques to succeed is akin to fighting the British empire of the 1700’s with rocks and sticks. You can win, but the cost will be enormous. The battle field and the weapons are more complex now, and you need use different tactics than you once did.

Online Marketing History

Fifteen years ago, to be successful online, your really only needed to build a good website. There was very little or no competition in most markets. If you took the time to build a good site, customers would magically find you. It was easy, you were the only one offering a product or service online. No competition. If people wanted your product or service, you were successful.
This was only true for a few years. Starting roughly ten years ago the concept of Search Engine Optimization began to take center stage. This was a major new weapon in the growing online market. Every day there was a new competitor and hundreds of new websites. The internet was beginning to become too complex for any person to know all the important websites. Search engines such as Google allowed a user to find what they wanted. It became paramount that these search engines knew about your website. So the industry as a whole began to focus on SEO.

Over the years a wide array of new technologies and trends emerged. Most have become important tools in the development of a successful online marketing campaign. Our toolbox has grown substantially.

When you are only absorbing little bits of new information it is easy enough. However when you have to try and master a wide range of foreign concepts, ideas and tools it can be quite daunting. Imagine you are an amazon tribesman who stumbles across a modern laptop computer. Could you even understand what this new device does? How would you learn to use it? For those of us that have the benefit of growing up in a modern society we can at least recognize the laptop for what it is. For us we only have to learn the particular OS or some of the software. It is simple because we only have a small amount of new information to add to the our memory banks.

So there I was, talking with our new clients and listening to their current online marketing efforts, when it struck me. They did not even know the basics of online marketing. The next three hours were a marathon question and answer session. I would give them a tool or technique and then they asked for a complete description of why and how. For them it was a tremendous amount of information to absorb. For me it was an eye opening experience. As a consequence of this meeting I have decided to write this comprehensive guide to online marketing in a series of posts here at Success U.

Online Marketing Definitions

Before getting into the details it is important that we are all speaking the same language. If we see words as meaning different things then we will never come to the same understanding, as such here is our definition of the most important terms in online marketing:

SEO – Search Engine Optimization. This term is often misused and is almost universally misunderstood. Simply put SEO is getting the search engines such as Google to rank you site highly. There are many “Black Hat” methods. However as Google has become more advanced most of these “black hat” methods have been rendered obsolete and can actually get your site de-listed from Google.

What is “Black Hat” SEO? Any technique that tries to trick the search engines into ranking your website higher than it should for a particular keyword. Google’s goal is to give the user a list of websites that offer valuable content related to the keywords they are searching. As such they spend a considerable amount of time trying to find ways to return pages that have great content. Their “Algorithm” is constantly evolving, making most black hat methods short lived and rarely worth the effort.

In a future article of this series I will go into great detail over the “do’s and don’ts” regarding SEO. For now it is important to understand that your goal is to create great content that is valuable to the end consumer.

Article Automation – This is a service that takes your content and distributes it to a wide range of other websites. You write an article, submit it, and other websites, potentially thousands of them, post it to their site.

RSS and Feeds – Really Simple Syndication is a method for distributing the content of a blog, podcast or website that allows other websites and online services to share the content. There are many ways an RSS feed can be consumed. It is a way to syndicate your content to other websites and interested consumers via subscription. A great example is our Online Marketing RSS Feed. The difference between RSS and Article automation is that an RSS feed gives an excerpt that points back to your website where as in article automation the full content is displayed on outside websites.

Press Release – Closely related to Article Automation, when it comes to online press releases you are usually writing a brief description of why a news service or blog would care to write about you, your website, service or product. It is a teaser article meant to grab their attention. Most major news agencies accept Press Releases and there are many online services to distribute them widely.

Blog – Any website with regular updates in the form of a post that is centered on a topic. With a business based website these posts can be product release announcements, interesting facts and frequently asked questions. Most Blogs are little more than daily updates into some persons life, unless the person is famous or leads an otherwise interesting life, they have very few readers. Success U is a Blog, we choose to focus on helping our readers learn to be successful online.

Social Media – There are so many Social Media outlets it is hard to grasp the full width of this industry. The most important two are Twitter and Facebook. Social Media is any site or service that encourages interaction between all users. Most have the concept of a “friends” or “followers”. The idea behind social media is to use people as the ultimate filter for the value of content. If a friend recommends a particular website, then it might be interesting, if all my friends recommend it, then I know it is interesting.

CPC – Cost per Click. Google Adsense is probably the most widely known CPC system. You bid on a particular keyword where your advertisement will appear. You pay only when a user clicks on your ad.

CPA – Cost Per Action. This is an online marketing, pay per performance type of advertising system where you only pay when a certain action occurs. CPC is one type of CPA. Other types of actions include user registration, product purchase or a download.

CPM – Cost Per M or cost per thousand viewers. Rather than paying every time a person does a particular action you are paying for a certain number of viewers to see your advertisement. Banner Advertisements are often done on a CPM basis.

Banner Ad – There are in fact a wide variety of banner Ad formats. Typically it is meant to reference an advertisement that is placed in the “header’ or top of a website.

Landing Page – This is the specific page you have your online marketing efforts link to. Whether it is from a banner ad or a CPC campaign this is the URL your potential customer will first see when they come to your site. Ideally it is optimized to convert them into a customer and is directly relevant to the ad that drew them in. it is also wise to develop individual landing pages for your keywords.

Conversion Rate – Your conversion rate is the percentage of people who visit your site that complete the desired action. If you are trying to sell a product on a page, it is the percentage of people that go to the page and actually buy the product.

Keywords – The specific words or phrases that a person would type into a search engine and would find your website relevant. There are really two types of keywords, Fat Belly and Long Tail.

Search Volume – The number of times in a given month that a particular word or phrase is used in one of the major search engines.

Fat Belly – These are keywords that have a high search volume. They are often very short, one or two words, and highly competitive.

Long Tail – More often than not Long Tail keywords are longer phrases. They have a very small search volume and rarely have much competition.

Viral Marketing – An Online Marketing technique where you try to get your customers to spread the word. The most successful viral marketing campaigns encourage and help people share it with their friends. It can be as simple as a funny video. Social Media is often an integral component to viral marketing.

Vlog – A video blog. These are still pretty rare but are gaining in popularity. Rather than writing a post the Vlogger creates a video about their topic on regularly scheduled intervals.

Podcast – There are two types of podcasts, video and audio. A Vlog is actually just a video podcast. An audio podcast is a regularly scheduled audio show distributed via a blog or other online service such as iTunes. You should already know of our Online Marketing Podcast.

Affiliate Marketing – This type of online marketing uses affiliates to promote your site or product. These affiliates are paid only on commission, so you only pay them when a sale occurs. There are many affiliate marketing programs out there with Commission Junction being the most well known. Affiliate Marketing is often referred to as “Revenue Sharing”.

Mobile Marketing – Online marketing that is focused on cell phone and “smart phone” users. A Smart phone is any cell phone with web access, the most popular being the iPhone. Mobile marketing has many components and can be most simply thought of as simplified online marketing. The simplification is due to the limited bandwidth of the network and the size of the display.

Help Me Help You!

I am breaking this topic into digestible chunks for those of you who are just getting into online marketing. For those of you with some experience, did I miss anything? As part of Success U, I hope you will help me help you. For some of you this post is very remedial and for others it might be a lot of information to absorb. Either way if you have read this far, let me know what you think.
In the next article I will talk in great detail about SEO, what you should and should not do. Hopefully by the end of this series you will be an expert in all aspects of online marketing.

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In part one of this Online Marketing series I touched briefly on SEO. I actually touched briefly on a great many subjects, and most of them are directly related to Search Engine Optimization. In this article I am going to try and explain the details of SEO that you need to know to be successful online.

In the Online Marketing the Whole Enchilada article, I gave you this short and somewhat cryptic explanation of SEO:

SEO – Search Engine Optimization. This term is often misused and is almost universally misunderstood. Simply put SEO is getting the search engines such as Google to rank you site highly. There are many “Black Hat” methods. However as Google has become more advanced most of these “black hat” methods have been rendered obsolete and can actually get your site de-listed from Google.

Black Hat SEO

I made a point of talking, briefly, about “Black Hat SEO” methods. Nothing that would be considered a cheat or a hack that is meant to trick the search engine’s into ranking your site higher than the content dictates, are truly SEO. Eventually, and in the case of Google, quite rapidly, the black hat methods are discovered and circumvented. In fact many of the “Black Hat SEO” methods can get your site blacklisted by Google. I recommend you avoid any hacks or “tricks” to artificially rank you site higher in Google.

Google, Yahoo and the other search engines are predicated on their ability to find the valuable content that their users are looking for. So if you offer content that is relevant to the key words that you are optimizing for, you should rank high. Why this is not universally true is often due to poor SEO by the web site owner. This issue based on the fact that search engines use an algorithm to determine web pages relevance. Most people do not know how to show their content in a way that Google, Yahoo and the other major search engines can understand. The companies that have developed the search engines do not share their algorithm with the general public for good reason. Allowing wide access to them would allow mischievous folk to find loopholes and cheat the system. Not to mention that the algorithms are the most valuable Intellectual Property of the Search Engines.

The Algorithms are constantly changing, as they are made more effective daily. Google has a team of terribly smart individuals finding ways to make their searches more relevant and to bust the cheats. This evolution has created a sort of arms race between the black hatters and the search engines. In the end the search engines always win, they have more resources and ultimately a site ranked artificially high offers less value to a searcher and thus they won’t return to the site anyway.

Your goal when trying to SEO a site, then cannot be to try and circumvent or cheat the search engines. You cannot win this battle long term. You must focus your efforts on creating valuable content that a user would seek out, and then displaying it in a way that Google finds relevant to your keywords. Now that I’ve gotten that out of the way, let’s get to the true nitty gritty.

On page SEO

All SEO starts with the URL. As far as the search engines are concerned a page related to “Non Celebrity Endorsement” is more valuable to the user if the URL contains the term. So NonCelebrityEndorsement.com will naturally have a higher score for the term than something on SuccessU.com. However, by using appropriate Permalinks we can overcome this.

What is a Permalink? It is the full URL to your specific post or page. If I create a post here on Success U with the Title “Non Celebrity Endorsement”, the permalink would be something like http://www.succesu.com/non-celebrity-endorsement/. As you can see the full URL contains the term. This is due to the fact that we use the title in our permalinks. Given that Google takes into account the location of the term in the URL, a site with the term earlier in the URL will have a higher value in terms of SEO. So with our example and all other things being equal, the site http://www.noncelebrityendorsement.com will outrank a post here with the url http://www.succesu.com/non-celebrity-endorsement/ for the term “Non Celebrity Endorsement”. Logically this makes sense, an entire site devoted to a topic should rank higher than a page at a more broadly based site.

I already mentioned it, but now let us discuss the page title as it relates to SEO. For our sites the permalink contains the title, so having the title optimized is a double whammy. I highly recommend using your page titles in your Permalinks. The title tag is just another way the search engines determine what the heck your page is talking about. In the same way that a reference book needs to have the subject in the title, so that a viewer can know what it is all about, your page needs a title that represents the content. More importantly the search engines want this info, so you should give it to them. Simply put, good on page SEO, uses a title that includes your keyword phrase.

Header Tags in SEO

The Header tags (<h1>, <h2>, <h3> etc.) are a series, with h1 being the largest and h6 the smallest, of tags used to define a portion of text and act as a topic header. If your page was a book then the H1 might be the chapter heading while H6 might only represent the header of a quote within a block of text. If you imagine the header tags as the various chapter and section titles of your page then it should be clear to you why they are important to SEO. Each of these tags represents a “title” for the content that follows them.

The most important on page SEO tactics rely on the effective use of Header tags. I always recommend using your keyword in at least the h1-h3 tags. On this very page you will see the “Header Tags in SEO” used above is an h2 tag. I also recommend only using the h1 tag once per page. If your content requires any additional h1 tags you should split the additional information into a separate page.

Keywords in your Content

Keyword stuffing is a big “no-no”. Don’t do it. If the natural flow of the content does not include your keyword don’t try to force it in. Google only looks for the keyword to be on a particular page in 3-7% of the total on page content. That is a pretty low threshold so there is no need to push the keyword in any more than is natural.

You should include the keyword or phrase in your first and last sentence. If you are actually writing about the subject that your keyword is relevant to, then this should be really easy. As we all learned in high school English, when writing about a topic you want to begin and end with a brief explanation of the subject. Of course we all learned later in life to disregard that rule. With regards to on page SEO it is a great rule to follow.

Images and Media in Effective SEO

With the rise of podcasts and online video Google had to determine a way to value the content of a wide range of media for search results. What they learned in the process, is that video, audio, animation and even images are a great way of sharing information. Consequently they tend to give a higher rank to pages that contain media that is relevant to the search phrase.

Just like text based content the search engines cannot really know the subject without some help from us. The search engines cannot listen to podcasts or watch a video and make an effective judgment as to the value of the content. So what should you do to effectively SEO your media? Include title and alt tags that contain your keyword or phrase. I always encourage people to use at least one image related to the subject. It is of course better if it in some way illustrates the topic rather than being a total non sequitur.

Tune in to the Correct Frequency

The more you discuss a topic the more you obviously know about it. Whether true or not, this is the perception of the online community. As far as Google is concerned, this is all that matters. This is why I tend to suggest a blog for most clients. I said most, and I mean it. Many companies, in fact have no value to add to the world with a blog, but they are in the minority. The important task when setting up a blog for a business is understanding what valuable information they can share with their clients. For some I have recommended telling the funny stories they have, related to the work they do. For some it is only new features about their products. Others add value by telling the inside story on a campaign. Always ask “What is the compelling interest in this post?” Yes the search engines will rank your site higher if you post more often, but a bad post is far more damaging than just not posting. You cannot rescind bad content, so make it valuable.

Internal Links

Once you have a well written page with valuable content, you need to start telling the world about it. The first and often best place to start is on your own site. Start building links to your pages from your other pages. Every time you mention a topic that you have already covered create a link to it. The text of the link needs to be your keywords. A common mistake is doing something like ‘click here” rather than just creating a link out of the text itself.  A good link related to online marketing. A bad link about online marketing. Click Here. The same is true for links coming from other websites; you want the link text to contain your keywords. If the link is an image then make sure the title and alt tags contain your keywords.

Off-Site SEO

Now we are about to jump into a subject that is related to many of the future articles in this series. Off-Site SEO encompasses a broad swath of topics and techniques and is the part of SEO that is mostly out of your hands. I mentioned a great many of these techniques in “Online Marketing the Whole Enchilada”. Ideas like Article Automation and Link exchanges are two examples. Each of these techniques will require its own article, so I will not get into the details now. Instead I want to cover the ideas and general rules associated with off-site SEO.

Off Site SEO is primarily focused on creating valuable in bound links to your site. There is nearly a limitless array of ways to accomplish this goal. Broadly speaking this is online marketing. Whether a link comes from Adsense, a banner ad or a link from within page content, it will affect your search engine ranking.

The higher the site sending the link, the more value associated by the search engines for the link. This is actually compounding. A website with a high Google page rank sending a link to your site boosts your rank; it also generates some traffic to your site. This traffic also boosts your page rank. The more links the better. We tend to think of links in the thousands, not individually. However, a single link coming from a very popular site can be worth hundreds of links from low ranking sites.

Google gives a Page Rank (PR) of 0-10 to every page it has indexed. This is the value that Google associates with a link from that page. A PR1 is twice as valuable as a PR 0. A PR2 is twice as valuable as a PR1, etc. Thus a single link from a PR10 page is equivalent to 1024 links from a PR0 link. Obviously what you really want are many links from high PR sites. All of the online marketing techniques that I will talk about in future articles are devoted to doing exactly that.

Social Media and SEO

Social Media such as Twitter and Facebook utilizes a broad and active community to generate a tremendous amount of content. Most of it is worthless, but using these tools can add a huge amount of in-bound links and traffic to your page. What you should understand is that social media sites are no different than any other in regards to your SEO efforts. All you really want from them is links and traffic. The devil is in making that happen effectively.

When sitting down to write this article It was very difficult for me to decide which of the SEO strategies to talk about first. One that I really wanted to lead off with is the tactic of creating a unique page or post for every keyword or phrase you want your site to rank for. However it was necessary to talk about many other issues to fully give the value of this particular aspect of on page SEO.

Looking at the many things I covered in this article; try to imagine doing each of these things for a whole slew of keywords. Not only would the page be obscenely large, it would be hard to read. For this reason alone you should always create a unique page or post for each keyword/phrase you want your site to rank for.

Rather than leading off with it, I decided to end with this note to keep it fresh in your mind. Build each of the pages with all the other bits of advice and tactics I mentioned. Link back to each of these pages from within the others. If you do your research, and follow all of this advice, your pages and thus your site will rank higher for your keywords. This is all you really need to know about SEO.

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• Content is King Take the time to create value with your content. Optimizing your content to provide the maximum value will have many positive long term effects, and is well worth the effort put forth. Keep readers coming back by giving them a reason to. Post quality over quantity. It still amazes......

• SEO Tips for Blog Traffic Generation While it may be true to say content is king when it comes to blog publishing, the truth is that writing your blog content is not by far the only thing that you should be focusing on when it comes to attracting a readership following. Quality SEO, or search engine......
• SEO Keys to Search Engine Visibility SEO – Search Engine Optimization is the process of optimizing a website to offer it enhanced Search Engine Visibility. Some even used to say it as the art of optimizing or creating a quality site for expected Search Engine ranking. Experts use the term natural search engine rankings to......
• "professional Search Engine Marketing Is Dedicated To Successfully Surrendering High Quality Search Engine Marketing Results "Professional SEO is devoted to delivering quality SEO results in your website. It uses only Google approved approaches to web site optimization and never tries to cheat the various search engines like those making use of Black hat SEO technique. You can place your trust in "Professional SEO on your......
• Seo Services-Best Ethical methods in Search Engines / SE Optimization    (submitted 2011-09-14) Search engines define some rules and regulations with guidelines for the promotion of websites. They use some algorithms for indexing websites and provide rank in searches for the search queries put by the visitors. Two types of services use by......
• Corporate Blogging Link Building Strategies An important part of promoting your corporate blog is making sure that you have plenty of good inbound links coming into your site. This can help increase your overall popularity, as well as how search engines rank your site. While there are some methods of building links that promise the......

Online Marketing Tips for the Entrepreneur

Over the years I have compiled a wide and varied list of marketing tips. Online marketing is a challenging and ever changing business that can often feel overwhelming for the lone entrepreneur. For this reason alone I usually recommend that you outsource much of this work. Being a serial entrepreneur myself, I know that even with this advice most of you won’t listen With that knowledge I will now divulge some of the most important online marketing tips you need to know and implement if you want to have any chance at success via the internet.

Here are a few of my favorite Marketing Tips

Online Marketing Tip 1) Social media is your “friend”. Never forget that Social Media is about person-to-person activity. You are not speaking as “the company”, but as a person. In any conversation it is important to pay attention in Social Media it is equally important to be a good listener. All companies say they listen to their customers, most actually don’t. Let people know that you are listening by engaging them in conversation and responding.  Be patient. It takes a long time to develop strong relationships transforming your company, one person at a time. Be opportunistic. Start small with the people who are most passionate about your business by building relationships with existing customers. Be flexible. You never know what’s going to happen so you have to constantly adjust. Be collaborative. Most importantly, be humble. Remember that you are not as powerful as the community at large. If you ever forget this, they will let you know. This sounds more like PR than a marketing tip, and in a sense it is, but online these two things are closely related.

Online Marketing Tip 2) SEO is not just one and done, it is a long term commitment. Search Engine Journal has a great article with 55 SEO tips, read this article now. Here are a few of the easy to remember SEO tips. Be bold. Use the <b> </b> tags around some of your keywords on each page. Do NOT use them everywhere the keyword appears. Once or twice is plenty. Multiple domains. If you have several topics that could each support their own website, it might be worth having multiple domains. Why? First, search engines usually list only one page per domain for any given search, and you might warrant two. Second, directories usually accept only home pages, so you can get more directory listings this way. Titles for links. Links can get titles, too. Not only does this help visually impaired surfers know where you are sending them, but some search engines figure this into their relevancy for a page. Deep linking. Make sure you have links coming in to as many pages as possible. What does it tell a search engine when other web sites are linking to different pages on your site? That you obviously have lots of worthwhile content. What does it tell a search engine that all your links are coming in to the home page? That you have a shallow site of little value, or that your links were generated by automation rather than by the value of your site. One of the greatest marketing tips I ever received was to SEO every page as if it was your only one.

Online Marketing Tip 3) Article Marketing is free PR with the potential to create thousands of inbound links to your website. Article exchanges. You’ve heard of link exchanges, useless as they generally are. Article exchanges are like link exchanges, only much more useful. You publish someone else’s article on your site with a link back to their site. They publish your article on their site, with a link back to your site. You both have content. You both get high quality links. As simple as this sounds it is one of the more powerful online marketing tips you will find, but it can also be very time consuming to create all of the content for the articles. Article marketing as a concept is quite simple; You write articles. Your articles include a link to your website or to an affiliate page. You submit articles to free online article directories. Other site owners publish YOUR article on their site. People read your articles online and click the link to visit your website.

Online Marketing Tip 4) Give away value with no strings attached. Giving something of value away for free is a great way to attract website visitors. Thanks to the web, distributing freebies is in itself, free. You don’t have to spend a dime to pass out freebies left and right. By creating value and giving it away freely you give your audience a reason to share you with their friends and colleagues. Go “viral” with your freebies. Viral strategies allow you to multiply your marketing efforts without actually doing more work. Take that example above. You offer a great freebie like an ebook or tutorial. Now, let others give it away for free at their site too, as an incentive, bonus or just for the heck of it. Why not? It adds value to their offering and it creates more visitors to your site as your freebie spreads. This site is a venue for Innovocus to give away tremendous value with articles and podcasts like this one with all these great Online Marketing tips.

Online Marketing Tip 5) Offer an affiliate program. If the product or service you are promoting is your own, adding an affiliate program to your site is a great “pay for performance only” method of increasing website traffic and in turn sales. It’s no wonder that thousands of websites now offer to “share the profits” with their customers. Having a generous affiliate program is one of the fastest ways to increase your online sales with very little or no upfront costs. It is like getting a whole slew of sales people and endorsements without spending a dime. This one marketing tip alone can be the basis for your entire online sales strategy.

I could probably write an entire book full of nothing but online marketing tips. It is a wide and varied topic, much like any other media. In my experience spending you energy on any one area is energy well spent, and will pay off in the end but there is a base from which you must start. No tricks or marketing tips will guarantee success, and some rely on others to work. For example using affiliate marketing or article marketing will matter not in the least if you do not take the time to SEO your landing pages and site thoroughly first. Take the time to research and plan your online marketing endeavours.

Other Online Marketing Tips and Resources

Marketing Tip – Knowing Your Ideal Client
Unique Positioning – Standing out From the Competition – Marketing Tips

25 Must Read Social Media Marketing Tips

Weekly Online Marketing Tips

“Website or Blog: 10 Fast and Easy Tips & Tricks That Massively Increase Sales and Profits…”

Viral Loop: From Facebook to Twitter, How Today’s Smartest Businesses Grow Themselves

Social Media 101: Tactics and Tips to Develop Your Business Online

Hopefully you find these online marketing tips useful, and please, if you have your own tips or advice to share, leave a comment.

• First Success U Podcast Our first in what will hopefully become a long line of podcasts, in which we discuss and explain all the myriad of tools and techniques to get your business noticed online.We will also discuss starting a business and how to be successful. If you have a question you'd like......
• Common Myths About SEO To Watch Out For SEO is considered to be one of the most reliable and oldest methods to drive traffic to your site. Due to your site properly targeting its audience, visitors will come to your website and take action. The fact that it doesn't cost you even a dollar to send this traffic......
• Search Engine Optimization - SEO All You Need to Know SEO All You Need to Know In part one of this Online Marketing series I touched briefly on SEO. I actually touched briefly on a great many subjects, and most of them are directly related to Search Engine Optimization. In this article I am going to try and explain the......
• Unique Positioning - Standing out From the Competition - Marketing Tips Marketing Tips - Unique Positioning One of the best marketing tips, is the concept of developing unique positioning for your product or service. In this podcast Murray Smith and I talk about the creation of your corporate marketing plan by defining your unique positioning in the marketplace. Defining your......
• Marketing Tip - Knowing Your Ideal Clients... Where are They? Another top Marketing Tip In this Success U podcast we discuss another very important marketing tip, or more specifically part of the marketing process that Murray Smith decided to share with us. One of the biggest mistakes many of us entrepreneurs and online marketers make is misunderstanding our clients.......

• The Advantages Of Joining The Best Paid Affiliate Marketing Site Affiliate marketing programs, like social media marketing and video marketing, offer excellent possibilities to make money from sales made by people you recommend to several different offers. Normally it is done through links from your website to the sales pages of the business having the offers. But making possible income......
• Professional Blogging Roundup - Twitter Tools and More Welcome, welcome. Here's another roundup of what's going on around the blogosphere on blogging. Lots of Twitter tools and tips in this edition, be sure to check them out. Corporate Here are some Blogging Tips For Business Owners over at Best News Small Business Today. CIO Insight presents Robert Scoble......
• What You Should Know About Social Bookmarking Traffic Social bookmarking are a valuable traffic generating tool used by Internet marketers. It is valuable for finding a large variety of visitors from all over the web. Now you can’t just do this piecemeal. Mapping out your strategy before you begin is essential to attracting the most targeted traffic. You......
• Increase Your Video Marketing Success With These Tips http://www.prointernetmarketing.org/game-changer-dna/ , http://www.prointernetmarketing.org/commission-underground/ Succeeding with video marketing is not just about understanding your target audience, but it's about going beyond that point to ensure that you're giving consistent value. There are lots of video marketers who have made names for themselves by working hard, doing the right things at the......
• How To Create Backlinks To Your Blog If you were online marketing your mlm business and you have got a blog, it is extremely crucial that you understand how to create backlinks to your internet site. This will not only help boost your ranking on Google, it'll also help you drive more traffic for your page and......

Entrepreneur, Success can be Hard

Success as an Entrepreneur can be it’s own challenge, and we are hitting those challenges today. We are working on a great many new things for Success U, tools that will help you succeed. But using these tools ourselves, we have been flooded with, opportunity and this has taken our eyes and time away from you. It has been so busy around here that I have been unable to even get out another podcast, that is already recorded. I am taking a half hour break for the first time in two weeks, just to give everyone an update.

Innovocus and Success U have had many irons in the fire for some time. You need to have a constantly full pipeline with new opportunities, because not all deals will close. So we have had many, many projects lined up.

Several of them came through at the same time. I am currently sitting in a fortune 100 clients conference room at their World HQ, where I will be for several months, Ben has taken up residence in another clients office for the foreseeable future. After the normal 9-5 we both go to our home offices and work on other client projects… Then there are all of the internal projects, such as IplayedThat.com and several others in the skunk works that we work on over the weekends. Right now things would be chaotic if not for our shared understanding and experience with these types of situations.

Entrepreneur Marketing Tips Podcast

The Success U Entrepreneur podcast will resume next week, but will only be once a week on Wednesday’s for the next few months and the format will change a bit. We are going to focus on online marketing in all forms, and open up the opportunity for our listeners to ask questions or talk about their product in our podcast. With these changes we we will also be adding new features and a few products to Success U that should help you in your quest to succeed as an Entrepreneur.

Tools for the Entrepreneur

I am creating a series of daily tasks and tutorials that should allow you to radically increase the traffic to your website, legally, ethically and sustainably. Each day will take a couple of hours, and after 90 days you should sit on top of your keywords in google, long term. Most of these tasks you can outsource for about $5 a day but they are easy enough that you can do it yourself.

We are creating how-to video’s and daily tips and tricks tutorials that will get the traffic flowing to your website. We are starting to heavily focus on mobile and location based advertising and will show you how to maximize your results for the least cost. We are creating a traffic exchange system that will help all of our members gain a huge amount if inbound links. We are creating a referral network for all our members to raise all ships on a rising tide of success. Our goal is to create a huge, valuable resource for the Entrepreneur who wants to make money online and doesn’t want to spend every waking moment doing SEO. We want to make it simple for you to find your success, and allow you to focus on your business.

Books for the Serious Entrepreneur

The Art of the Start: The Time-Tested, Battle-Hardened Guide for Anyone Starting Anything

How to Change the World: Social Entrepreneurs and the Power of New Ideas, Updated Edition

Remember the difference between a successful entrepreneur and a failure is often only determination and focus.

• Life Lessons - Example of a Success Plan Life Lessons - Develop a Success Plan One of the more important life lessons I have discovered as an entrepreneur is to develop a success plan. Rich Harshaw from MyMEssentials.com gives a great example of a Success Plan in his post World's Greatest Car Salesman. The steps he identifies,......
• The Blues Keep Success Away Letting the negative things in your life interfere with your potential will stop you from reaching your potential. In other words, stay positive. Let nothing bring you down. It is imperative that you look for the good in all situations. Easier said than done, right? Well in truth whatever......
• Unique Positioning - Standing out From the Competition - Marketing Tips Marketing Tips - Unique Positioning One of the best marketing tips, is the concept of developing unique positioning for your product or service. In this podcast Murray Smith and I talk about the creation of your corporate marketing plan by defining your unique positioning in the marketplace. Defining your......
• Building a Strong Customer Relationship Strong Customer Relationship Determining who is your ideal client is the first step on the long road to developing a strong customer relationship. Murray Smith, best selling author ("The Answer: Grow Any Business, Achieve Financial Freedom, and Live an Extraordinary Life") and super successful Serial Entrepreneur joins us on......
• Entrepreneur, Work Smart, with Murray Smith How to Work Smart as an Entrepreneur Serial entrepreneur Murray Smith co-author of "The Answer: Grow Any Business, Achieve Financial Freedom, and Live an Extraordinary Life" shares the secrets to his success in this Success U podcast. His book is a best seller and  Stephen R. Covey says it......

• Would You Spend $50 To Gain 1,000+ Subscribers? - Internet Marketing [/caption] There's only one way you can do that in this competitive, yet scammer filled world of Internet Marketing, and that's through PPC. But how does an Internet Marketing person beat the Google Police? Advertising Policies have become so strict at Google that promoting an Internet Marketing product or......
• Things You Should Know To Help Write Your Persuasive Ad Copy Writing persuasive ad copy is more about injecting clarity and action oriented text into your content and trying to persuade the reader to buy your product, hire you or take the action you want them to take and not just putting a few random paragraphs together. It's important to work......
• Popular Beginner Woodworking Tips There are a number of woodworking tips, that when they are followed correctly, can really and truly enhance the quality of all of the finished woodwork that you create. These woodworking tips are designed to benefit not only novices but also expert woodworkers as well. Here are some of the......
• How To Extract The Greatest Value Of Your Virtual Team I am positive that if you are visiting this page, you will be interested in Blue Host. If you run an online business, you will soon discover that it requires work, especially if you want to succeed, which goes against the popular idea that you can kick back on a......
• Developing a Budget that is Successful In general there is no way to overcome major financial problems without going to a budget. Even if you do not like the idea of budgeting, a good budget is like a trail boss who knows the entire forest like the back of his hand. Your budget will also prove......

Thinking Like a Successful Entrepreneur

Murray Smith joins me on another Success U podcast, and shares with us some of the life lessons this very successful entrepreneur has found the hard way. These lessons are hard learned, and often painful and expensive to experience.

One of the simplest to understand is that by thinking positively, positive things begin to happen, though many entrepreneurs struggle with this their whole careers. It takes a subconscious shift and restructuring of your thought patterns to succeed in this simple act. As an entrepreneur things fail, problems arise, and disasters occur. Spending time and thought dwelling on the negative aspects will not get you closer to solving the problem, and in fact will make you less likely to notice the solution, even if it is staring you in the face. It is your subconscious mind that will hear the conversation in a crowded room, with the answers to your problems and it is the subcopnscious that will work to make complex connections, but only if you train yourself, and it starts by always looking for the positive out of anything. But Murray goes into great depth about this in his book The Answer.

Find a Mentor Entrepreneur

Having someone you trust, that has been down the long road of being an entrepreneur, is more valuable than you think. Not only can this person be a great resource in helping you avoid mistakes, and connecting you to the right people, they also help keep you motivated, and on the path, if for no other reason than you can see their success.

Surround Yourself with Positive Thinkers

I like to surround myself with people who challenge me, and who look for solutions not problems. If all they can see is sorrow, trouble and heartache, then how will they help me find the solution? I look for people who like to build up, not tear down. The best place to find people like that is in other entrepreneurs.

Additional Entrepreneur resources

Here are some of the direct links that Murray has referenced during the many podcasts we recorded with him; The free PDF’s downloads (see below), links to the business growth makeover contest with millions in prizes, and Get the Answer site that references more about Murray and the business growth system he built called Attract more Clients. This system is the summation of 30 years of his life’s work and everything he learned about growing business put together in a simple, user friendly format.

- http://gettheanswer.com

- http://www.businessgrowthmakeover.com

- http://accessmainstreet.com

- The Test your EQ button on the Mainstreet website has the following Free PDF Downloads for all Success U listeners:

• Unique Selling Proposition Examples from many industries
• Client Profile – Match what you want with what your clients want
• 3 Ways to make money in business
• Map the Gap – Helping business owners map the distance from where they are to where they want to be
• How to think like a Business Millionaire – Vision, Focus and Action

The Answer: Grow Any Business, Achieve Financial Freedom, and Live an Extraordinary Life

Remember to be a successful Entrepreneur it helps to think like one.

• Read, Listen or Die! I'm back, home after spending the last week out of town and away from "the studio". During that week I had a chance to catch up on my reading and listening list. While going through all of the vast array of articles, podcasts and books it struck me that......
• Life Lessons - Example of a Success Plan Life Lessons - Develop a Success Plan One of the more important life lessons I have discovered as an entrepreneur is to develop a success plan. Rich Harshaw from MyMEssentials.com gives a great example of a Success Plan in his post World's Greatest Car Salesman. The steps he identifies,......
• First Success U Podcast Our first in what will hopefully become a long line of podcasts, in which we discuss and explain all the myriad of tools and techniques to get your business noticed online.We will also discuss starting a business and how to be successful. If you have a question you'd like......
• Entrepreneur - Tapping into your Hidden Reserves You the Entrepreneur The life of an entrepreneur, is the tale of many triumphs and long hard work. Knowing how to push past the negativity and find your hidden reserve of strength is a valuable tool in your struggles for success. We as entrepreneurs are a unique breed. We......
• Visualize Success To become and act successful often the first person we must convince is ourselves. I have not yet met an entrepreneur who reached a high level of accomplishment without first being confident in what they were doing and what they were capable of. It is often amazing how much......

• Self Improvement for Business - Finding the Energy to Do the Hard Work Believe it or not, but home based business ideas has impacted the everyday life of untold numbers of people. We see so many cases in our every day lives, and it can serve as an important reminder. Nonetheless, there is far more to consider and seriously weigh in your mind.......
• "Seven Tricks Of World Wide Web Millionaires" World wide web the big doggs don’t obtain their particular wealth and achievements by means of chance with the pull.  They be aware of techniques to success.  These strategies are so useful when you put into action all of them, you might achieve your own Internet business.  There are......
• Network Marketing - Fixing Problems From The Ground Up A good majority of people don't really understand network marketing it is like they love the comp plan but they never fully understand what it takes to make  massive success happen in their lives.  I have seen it happen so many times its scary.  A person joins a business all......
• 4 Commonest Affiliate Marketing Mistakes Discovering what the commonest mistakes affiliates make can maybe dispel the gloom about legends surrounding affiliate marketing by correcting some wrong concepts about it. It'd also be well placed to make those concerned understand that like any other business, there are dos and donts concerned in this one if they......
• Self Improvement - The Most Powerful Business Weapon When you really think of it, car service is something that can have a tremendous impact depending on the circumstance. So it is not uncommon to find yourself doing a lot of investigation and decision making. You never really realize what can happen should you ignore certain details, criteria and......

Another top Marketing Tip

In this Success U podcast we discuss another very important marketing tip, or more specifically part of the marketing process that Murray Smith decided to share with us. One of the biggest mistakes many of us entrepreneurs and online marketers make is misunderstanding our clients. We don’t know who they are, where  they are and most importantly their actual value to us as a customer.

So what is the Marketing Tip?

Listen to the podcast… seriously This discussion flows around making sure you know the value your ideal client actual represents to you in hard dollars. With this bit of knowledge you can determine your budget for acquiring new customers. You better know your distribution channels, according to Murray there are only 7 of them in the world, and 23 strategies to get new customers. Far more detail is available at Access Main Street.

What, Why and How, this is the meat of the knowledge you must determine with your clients. So the marketing tip is really learning how to find this information.

Another Marketing Tip – Collaboration

Collaboration with seeming competitors is a great way to increase your client pool. We like to partner with other businesses. It is a strong part of our marketing for Innovocus. Find businesses that parallel your own, partners who strengthen your offering, and sell their services or products and encourage them to sell yours.

Quite Marketing to Fear

Hope, collaboration and working with each other is the future of all small business. In a rising tide all boats are floated. Try to build up not tear down. You can not stand alone especially in a global marketplace. main street cannot compete with Wall Street if we compete head on. It is only by joining forces, working together that we can compete.

Here are some of the direct links that Murray has referenced during the many podcasts we recorded with him; The free PDF’s downloads (see below), links to the business growth makeover contest with millions in prizes, and Get the Answer site that references more about Murray and the business growth system he built called Attract more Clients. This system is the summation of 30 years of his life’s work and everything he learned about growing business put together in a simple, user friendly format.

- http://gettheanswer.com

- http://www.businessgrowthmakeover.com

- http://accessmainstreet.com

- The Test your EQ button on the Mainstreet website has the following Free PDF Downloads for all Success U listeners:

• Unique Selling Proposition Examples from many industries
• Client Profile – Match what you want with what your clients want
• 3 Ways to make money in business
• Map the Gap – Helping business owners map the distance from where they are to where they want to be
• How to think like a Business Millionaire – Vision, Focus and Action

Additional Marketing tips and resources

ADVANCE DIRECT MARKETING: Tips, Tricks, & Techniques

Do-It-Yourself Secrets for Creating a Profitable Website or Blog

55 Twitter Tips – How to Maximize the Benefits of Using Twitter!

Facebook Marketing: An Hour a Day

25 tips For Marketing Your Blog

Online Marketing Blog Tips

Unique Positioning

• Online Marketing Tips for the Entrepreneur Online Marketing Tips for the Entrepreneur Over the years I have compiled a wide and varied list of marketing tips. Online marketing is a challenging and ever changing business that can often feel overwhelming for the lone entrepreneur. For this reason alone I usually recommend that you outsource much......
• First Success U Podcast Our first in what will hopefully become a long line of podcasts, in which we discuss and explain all the myriad of tools and techniques to get your business noticed online.We will also discuss starting a business and how to be successful. If you have a question you'd like......
• Mobile Marketing Tips To Gain The Upper Hand Mobile marketing is the hot new trend these days and many Internet marketers are realizing its potential. The IM marketer who pays attention and realizes the chance to expand business into this industry is the one who will reap the greatest rewards. Plus the ever-growing numbers of people who love......
• Entrepreneur - Tapping into your Hidden Reserves You the Entrepreneur The life of an entrepreneur, is the tale of many triumphs and long hard work. Knowing how to push past the negativity and find your hidden reserve of strength is a valuable tool in your struggles for success. We as entrepreneurs are a unique breed. We......
• Life Lessons of a Successful Entrepreneur Thinking Like a Successful Entrepreneur Murray Smith joins me on another Success U podcast, and shares with us some of the life lessons this very successful entrepreneur has found the hard way. These lessons are hard learned, and often painful and expensive to experience. One of the simplest to......

• Online Business-3 Common Sense Ideas To Creating Your Own Product Funnel Creating a product funnel is something more Internet marketers should be doing if they want to make extra money online with their own online business. Doing this is probably the best thing you can do in growing your ebusiness exponentially. Don’t worry as this marketing tool is easy to use......
• Looking for a tip on tipping? Tonight on the way home, my wife and I were discussing how a lot of people are ungrateful for the things that they have. We both agreed that many people no longer feel the need to take care of themselves and expect someone else to clean up after them. "remember......
• How To Get Free MLM Leads Image by markhillary via Flickr Using A Blog To Get Free MLM Leads While there are many ways to get MLM leads to your business, my favorite is through blogging.  It seems that blogs represent you and your business more naturally. Blogging is a softer sell. MLM is hard......
• Basic Info About Internet Marketing Business Just tell me off the top of your head – are you delighted with your job and place? Are you delighted with your salary? In case you can not answer I suppose you are not. In case you want to know ways to get money but you still do not......
• Making Additional Dollars For Your Internet Business Growing any kind of a business on the Internet requires you to be committed to your goals, and at the same time be flexible enough to expand to new horizons, experiment with new strategies and be ready to take risks. Many different components come together to form a successful online......

Marketing Tips – Unique Positioning

One of the best marketing tips, is the concept of developing unique positioning for your product or service. In this podcast Murray Smith and I talk about the creation of your corporate marketing plan by defining your unique positioning in the marketplace. Defining your unique aspects is a very important part of the sales process, and is a great online marketing tip.

Marketing Tip – Differentiate

Without the ability to easily and quickly differentiate yourself from the competition you diminish the ability of the prospective customer to understand your value.

Here are some of the direct links that Murray had referenced during the many podcasts we recorded with him;  The free PDF’s downloads (see below), links to the business growth makeover contest with millions in prizes, and Get the Answer site that references more about Murray and the business growth system he built called Attract more Clients. This system is the summation of 30 years of his life’s work and everything he learned about growing business put together in a simple, user friendly format.

-       http://gettheanswer.com

-       http://www.businessgrowthmakeover.com

-       http://accessmainstreet.com

-       The Test your EQ button on the Mainstreet website has the following Free PDF Downloads for all Success U listeners:

• Unique Selling Proposition Examples from many industries
• Client Profile – Match what you want with what your clients want
• 3 Ways to make money in business
• Map the Gap – Helping business owners map the distance from where they are to where they want to be
• How to think like a Business Millionaire – Vision, Focus and Action

Additional Marketing tips resources

ADVANCE DIRECT MARKETING: Tips, Tricks, & Techniques

Do-It-Yourself Secrets for Creating a Profitable Website or Blog

55 Twitter Tips – How to Maximize the Benefits of Using Twitter!

Facebook Marketing: An Hour a Day

25 tips For Marketing Your Blog

Online Marketing Blog Tips

• Marketing Tip - Knowing Your Ideal Clients... Where are They? Another top Marketing Tip In this Success U podcast we discuss another very important marketing tip, or more specifically part of the marketing process that Murray Smith decided to share with us. One of the biggest mistakes many of us entrepreneurs and online marketers make is misunderstanding our clients.......
• Know Your Faults Tanah Lot from Crestock Photos I hate to be put into a box. Being categorized, labeled and predefined , not my thing. Which is precisely what every personality profile I have ever taken says. I thrive on change, and solving problems. I love to look at products and try......
• Life Lessons - Example of a Success Plan Life Lessons - Develop a Success Plan One of the more important life lessons I have discovered as an entrepreneur is to develop a success plan. Rich Harshaw from MyMEssentials.com gives a great example of a Success Plan in his post World's Greatest Car Salesman. The steps he identifies,......
• Using Facebook To Promote Your Business An integral part of any business's online marketing strategy today must include Facebook. There are so many benefits of which you can take advantage when it comes to using the world's largest social network. How you leverage this brilliant network is what matters the most when it comes to the......
• Building a Strong Customer Relationship Strong Customer Relationship Determining who is your ideal client is the first step on the long road to developing a strong customer relationship. Murray Smith, best selling author ("The Answer: Grow Any Business, Achieve Financial Freedom, and Live an Extraordinary Life") and super successful Serial Entrepreneur joins us on......

• 3 Proven Internet Marketing Tips Made Especially For Beginners Internet marketing can be any kind of web based business that involves marketing something online. The following internet marketing strategies have been proven to work, so read and apply them to your own marketing efforts. Whether or not you intend to target a specific niche market such as making money......
• The Best Way To Carry Out Online Marketing When you have any battling web business, you may be dealing with the actual trial of how to attract website visitors to your website at a cost you can pay for. Certainly, Internet Marketing is a obstacle, also it takes many years of perseverance. There are numerous cost-effective techniques......
• Marketing A Local Business-Write Better Blog Articles Marketing a local business is taking on new forms today. For example, you can promote your local business everyday by writing short useful blog articles that relate to the theme of your small business. We are not talking about writing Pulitzer Prize quality articles either. Just short, to the point......
• Blogging Help Roundup - Learn More About Blogging Hello and good evening. This is Buildify's first roundup of the how-to blog and blogging blogosphere. Sounds like a tongue twister - can you say it five times fast? The following links are several good posts on improving your blog and will add some great skills to your blogging toolbox.......
• The Function Of A Funded Proposal Funded Proposal - Whats The Point? [/caption] Online network marketers listen up!  Without a funded proposal in place you aren't going to last in a network marketing business.  It takes time to pre-qualify people and build a solid network marketing team.  Because this is a truth, you need to have......

Strong Customer Relationship

Determining who is your ideal client is the first step on the long road to developing a strong customer relationship. Murray Smith, best selling author (“The Answer: Grow Any Business, Achieve Financial Freedom, and Live an Extraordinary Life“) and super successful Serial Entrepreneur joins us on this podcast to explain how he identifies your ideal customer. Murray gives us a great example of how the perception of who our clientele is, and who they really are might not coincide.

If you are struggling to find your clients, or marketing with poor results this podcast will likely give you some insight into the problems you currently face. The biggest mistake we entrepreneurs make is often overconfidence in our understanding of the market, and a need to compete that stops us from asking for help when we need it. This also tends to sometimes we neglect to develop a strong customer relationship with our ideal clients, who are more than willing to help us improve our business.

Throughout our lives we have had parents, teachers, bosses and friends who gladly mentor us. But the moment we enter into a new enterprise we stop asking for that advice.Ask your customers how they found you, ask them what they are looking for, ask them if they found it. Ask, ask ask questions. Have a friend who is a gifted artist, ask for help with design. We do not stand alone and the myth of the self made man is just a myth. Every great success is a team effort.

Strengthening Our Customer Relationship

Recently Innovocus has made a focus on this aspect. When we approach a new client the first thing we do is contact their customers with a survey. But there is more to understanding your clients wants than just asking questions.

Here is the link to Murray’s book on Amazon.com:

The Answer: Grow Any Business, Achieve Financial Freedom, and Live an Extraordinary Life

Here are some of the direct links that Murray had referenced during the many podcasts we recorded with him;  The free PDF’s downloads (see below), links to the business growth makeover contest with millions in prizes, and Get the Answer site that references more about Murray and the business growth system he built called Attract more Clients. This system is the summation of 30 years of his life’s work and everything he learned about growing business put together in a simple, user friendly format.

-       http://gettheanswer.com

-       http://www.businessgrowthmakeover.com

-       http://accessmainstreet.com

-       The Test your EQ button on the Mainstreet website has the following Free PDF Downloads for all Success U listeners:

• Unique Selling Proposition Examples from many industries
• Client Profile – Match what you want with what your clients want
• 3 Ways to make money in business
• Map the Gap – Helping business owners map the distance from where they are to where they want to be
• How to think like a Business Millionaire – Vision, Focus and Action

Resources for Building a Strong Customer Relationship

Building Customer Relationships – Successful Selling [VHS]

Recipe for Disaster

Creating Customers for Life – Relationship Management and Sales Training DVD Video

Model Sales & Marketing Letters

Engage: The Complete Guide for Brands and Businesses to Build, Cultivate, and Measure Success in the New Web

Permission Marketing: Turning Strangers Into Friends And Friends Into Customers

The Experience Economy: Work Is Theater & Every Business a Stage

• Entrepreneur, Work Smart, with Murray Smith How to Work Smart as an Entrepreneur Serial entrepreneur Murray Smith co-author of "The Answer: Grow Any Business, Achieve Financial Freedom, and Live an Extraordinary Life" shares the secrets to his success in this Success U podcast. His book is a best seller and  Stephen R. Covey says it......
• Social Media Marketing Sucks Tools such as Twitter, Digg, and Facebook are Horrible sales vehicles. In fact using them poorly can do more to hurt your brand than help it. Social Media as a tool for business is much more useful to your PR group than it is to your sales team. At best......
• Entrepreneur - Tapping into your Hidden Reserves You the Entrepreneur The life of an entrepreneur, is the tale of many triumphs and long hard work. Knowing how to push past the negativity and find your hidden reserve of strength is a valuable tool in your struggles for success. We as entrepreneurs are a unique breed. We......
• Online Marketing Tips for the Entrepreneur Online Marketing Tips for the Entrepreneur Over the years I have compiled a wide and varied list of marketing tips. Online marketing is a challenging and ever changing business that can often feel overwhelming for the lone entrepreneur. For this reason alone I usually recommend that you outsource much......
• Get More Facebook Likes: Basic Essential Knowledge Facebook is among the top visited web sites in the world and is indisputably one of the most favorite social media web-site online. The accomplishment of Facebook has led to a multitude of various features around the web-site which include the characteristic to like a page or a human being......

• What Are The Disadvantages Of Email Selling? Do you think email is the best way to sell your product or service?  Some sales people seem to think it is. Here's the simple truth: Many times relying upon email to sell isn't your best approach. It is not a good idea to replace calls with emails when contacting......
• Is Thesis Premium WordPress Theme Really Worth All The Fuss? I am positive that if you are visiting this page, you will be interested in thesistheme. If you have even a tenuous connection with the blogosphere, by now you have likely heard about the Thesis Theme for WordPress. Properly, I bought into the hype and purchased Thesis for my blogs.......
• Enhancing your Business with Blogging Blogging has become an extremely popular activity for businesses, and it also has created a very important impact in other circles as well, including an activity for the political scene as well as for ordinary individuals as well. Google purchased Blogger in 2003, and ever since, blogging has continued to......
• To Insure Proper Service This afternoon, after a quick trip to the men’s room, I was walking through my office, next to the desks of members of our customer service team. Owing to the geography of this area of the office, I was able to hear the conversation of one CSR (customer service representative)......
• Some Keys To Success Into Your Online Business. You know how should you work online and gain money? High education, some great skills – are not so important for you. The best feature, which will help you most of all is your positive thoughts and desire to get success. The fact is that there are thousand people all......

You the Entrepreneur

The life of an entrepreneur, is the tale of many triumphs and long hard work. Knowing how to push past the negativity and find your hidden reserve of strength is a valuable tool in your struggles for success.

We as entrepreneurs are a unique breed. We thrive in challenging situations and we seek out the difficult. This can often put us in a place seemingly impossible to succeed. Pushing past your own limits to find greater heights is often the only way out, well that or giving up, but you wouldn’t be a true entrepreneur if you seriously considered that.

In this podcast I talk with serial entrepreneur Murray Smith. This is Part 2 of the Podcasts series with Murray Smith co-author of “the Answer”. Which you can win a copy of my joining Success U for free:

The Answer: Grow Any Business, Achieve Financial Freedom, and Live an Extraordinary Life

Here are some of the direct links that Murray had referenced during the many podcasts we recorded with him;  The free PDF’s downloads (see below), links to the business growth makeover contest with millions in prizes, and Get the Answer site that references more about Murray and the business growth system he built called Attract more Clients. This system is the summation of 30 years of his life’s work and everything he learned about growing business put together in a simple, user friendly format.

-       http://gettheanswer.com

-       http://www.businessgrowthmakeover.com

-       http://accessmainstreet.com

-       The Test your EQ button on the Mainstreet website will have the following Free PDF Downloads for your listeners:

• Unique Selling Proposition Examples from many industries
• Client Profile – Match what you want with what your clients want
• 3 Ways to make money in business
• Map the Gap – Helping business owners map the distance from where they are to where they want to be
• How to think like a Business Millionaire – Vision, Focus and Action

More Resources for you the entrepreneur

Small Business For Dummies

The Art of the Start: The Time-Tested, Battle-Hardened Guide for Anyone Starting Anything

More Entrepreneur Podcasts

Entrepreneur.com Podcast Directory

• Entrepreneur, Work Smart, with Murray Smith How to Work Smart as an Entrepreneur Serial entrepreneur Murray Smith co-author of "The Answer: Grow Any Business, Achieve Financial Freedom, and Live an Extraordinary Life" shares the secrets to his success in this Success U podcast. His book is a best seller and  Stephen R. Covey says it......
• Unique Positioning - Standing out From the Competition - Marketing Tips Marketing Tips - Unique Positioning One of the best marketing tips, is the concept of developing unique positioning for your product or service. In this podcast Murray Smith and I talk about the creation of your corporate marketing plan by defining your unique positioning in the marketplace. Defining your......
• First Success U Podcast Our first in what will hopefully become a long line of podcasts, in which we discuss and explain all the myriad of tools and techniques to get your business noticed online.We will also discuss starting a business and how to be successful. If you have a question you'd like......
• Know Your Faults Tanah Lot from Crestock Photos I hate to be put into a box. Being categorized, labeled and predefined , not my thing. Which is precisely what every personality profile I have ever taken says. I thrive on change, and solving problems. I love to look at products and try......
• Marketing Tip - Knowing Your Ideal Clients... Where are They? Another top Marketing Tip In this Success U podcast we discuss another very important marketing tip, or more specifically part of the marketing process that Murray Smith decided to share with us. One of the biggest mistakes many of us entrepreneurs and online marketers make is misunderstanding our clients.......

• Some Good Corporate Blogs It has become popular for businesses and companies of all types to express interest in creating a business blog so that they can better communicate with other companies, their customers, and a variety of other target markets out there. By looking at what corporate blogs are doing it right, and......
• Flu Shots and the Small Business Entrepreneur Yes - "flu shots" and "entrepreneur" are related. Just stay with me for a short post and I will explain. I just returned from the second floor lobby of our office building where I (and many others who work in this building) received an H1N1 flu shot. Yes, the flu......
• Home Based Business - 2011 predictions Home Based Business - A New Year Approaches Image via Wikipedia As we get ready to celebrate the new year, it is also a time to reflect on what has happened the previous year.  The economy is still less than stellar. This opens up a world of opportunity for home......
• 10 Best Motivational Podcasts for Entrepreneurs Both seasoned and aspiring entrepreneurs have a wealth of online motivational material available to them. Podcasts are quickly becoming a popular medium with which to get inspired when it comes to running one's own business. Leaving the traditional world of employment in order to start a business can seem overwhelming......
• Massive List of Web Design Resources   There are TONS of resources online for Web Design, but many of these resources are scattered all around the Internet. Here I've made an effort to combine and list all of the resources, tutorials, and tips I've used, stumbled via StumbleUpon, or found on twitter or various other sites.......