Here is what you will discover during this information-packed webinar…

• How to define your contact types
• How to define your sales process
• How to work each step in your sales process

Reserve your seat for this month’s free webinar by completing the form below…

Simply putting up a website is not considered marketing. If you want to thrive, you have to do more a lot more than that. You need to identify your target market, determine how to appeal to them most effectively, and build your brand. You need to find opportunities to get the word out about your business, whether it's through free publicity or paid advertising. And you need to constantly evaluate your results to make sure things are moving in the right direction. It's all very important but it can also be very overwhelming.

Running a marketing campaign can be all-consuming if you let it, leaving little time for you to concentrate on the moneymaking aspects of your business. But if it's gotten that far, something is wrong. By finding out what the problem is, you can fix it and get more rewards for your marketing efforts. Here are some tips to help you do that.

• Look at your conversion rates. Do you have to reach hundreds of customers just to get one sale? If so, perhaps you're not targeting your marketing efforts well enough.
• Do some more research on your target market. Send out surveys to determine how they respond to your marketing efforts. This will allow you to reinforce and expand on what you're doing right and quit what you're doing wrong.
• Have a professional analyze your sales copy. There will be a fee, but if you're doing your own copywriting, it's worth it. A pro can point out things that could be hurting your sales that are not obvious to the average person.
• Make tracking your results as easy as possible. Give your customers incentives to tell you where they saw your ads, and add tracking codes to your URLs in online marketing. This will cut down on guesswork and help you market more effectively.

These steps can help you fix your marketing so it's more effective and less time-consuming. But what if it's not broken? What if you're getting plenty of prospects and conversions, but you're still feeling overwhelmed? You could cut back on your marketing efforts. But if things are going well, why not outsource some marketing tasks? This will allow you to continue doing what works and have time to concentrate on other business matters too.

Marketing is essential to any business, but it's important not to let it get out of hand. By taking the time to evaluate your efforts and make changes when necessary, you can spend less time, energy and money on marketing in the long run.

Learn how to implement smart tactics like this one to start, operate and promote your business each month when you join the Smart Tactics Inner Circle

"No" seems to be the hardest thing for us to say. It could be that we are afraid of hurting someone’s feelings or that it will negatively impact our business. But saying no is helpful to our business in many ways.

Earning more money at the expense of customer service is always a step backwards. Initially, your business may be able to accept a new client, but the initial contract is only the beginning. You must continue to provide a good product and answer any questions and concerns that crop up. This may get harder as you go along.

Consider your other clients. They have been with you for a while and have been loyal. Their quality of service could suffer as you try to find more hours in the day to accommodate them and the new clients you keep taking on. Don’t be fooled into thinking that they will forgive shoddy service so that you can make more money.

Refusing to take on clients is a turning point in your business. This can be the time for you to consider the idea of expansion and hiring employees or contractors. These additional people will allow you to expand the number of clients that you can accept. You will be free to delegate more tasks to others and handle the administrative or marketing duties of the business.

A client that wants to use your services will contact you about work. A polite response that you are not accepting any new clients at this moment but will be in the next few months is a signal to them that you are doing good business. To be on a waiting list for anything means that others are willing to wait for a good thing. That potential client will want to know more about you and may be willing to wait like the others until you can handle their business.

Growing your business is not only achieved by new clients but also by an increase in repeat business. A client may expand the work that they want done or will buy more products than they did before. Offering new services entices current clients to use you for more of their needs. In that way, your business is also growing.

Learn to say no when you have to. It may be time to expand so more clients can come on board. Waiting until you are ready will keep current and future customers happy.

Learn how to implement smart tactics like this one to start, operate and promote your business each month when you join the Smart Tactics Inner Circle

There are tons of tools that you can use to get your messages across and keep your sites at the top of the search engines. Here are five of those tools, all of which are free.

• Twitter - Twitter is a microblogging application that allows users to post short messages. These messages are displayed on the user's profile page and delivered to his followers via Web or text message to their cell phones. Twitter provides a great way to be heard in this age of short attention spans. You can announce specials, give out coupon codes, and more with it.
• FriendFeed - With all of the social networking and media sites out there, it can be difficult to keep up with all of our friends on them. Some former Google employees recognized this problem and developed FriendFeed, a social media aggregator that allows one to access friends' activity on dozens of sites in one place. Marketers can make use of FriendFeed to make it easier for their prospects and customers to keep up with them online.
• StumbleUpon - StumbleUpon is a bookmarking site that is primarily accessed via a browser toolbar. Users can view a website that is related to their interests with a click of the mouse, and they can rate each site just as easily. Sites shown are selected by user submissions and further featured based on ratings. This presents a wonderful opportunity to get traffic to your sites.
• Google AdWords Keyword Tool – You may or may not use Google AdWords, but its Keyword Tool is great for anyone who is trying to break into niche markets or get good rankings for a website. By simply entering a general keyword, you get a list of related keywords, along with the level of competition and search volume. This information can be very useful.
• SEO for Firefox - There are many factors that go into search engine rankings. We can better understand the importance of these factors by analyzing them on well-ranked sites. That's where SEO for Firefox comes in. This browser add-on displays information such as PageRank, age, incoming links and more for each page that comes up in Google or Yahoo search results.

Online business owners need to take advantage of every opportunity to get traffic and maintain good search engine rankings. These free tools can help us accomplish those goals and take our businesses to the next level.

Learn how to implement smart tactics like this one to start, operate and promote your business each month when you join the Smart Tactics Inner Circle

If you have been diligent in your work ethic and practices, there are still alternatives available to you even though you may experience a bump in the road during this economic downturn.

Learn how to implement smart tactics like this one to start, operate and promote your business each month when you join the Smart Tactics Inner Circle

Backup plans allow companies to absorb the shock an emergency brings by focusing on the structure that helped to create the company. A backup plan can be thought of as a living business plan. A top-down approach based on an organizational chart affords the company the ability to address the particular needs and concerns of each department while framing it in a big picture.

Transferring institutional knowledge from people to paper is the basis of the backup plan. Over years people amass a wealth of knowledge that often gets overlooked. Every office knows who to go to for to remedy certain issues. This approach will only work as long as guy or gal they want to go to isn't gone. Backup plans are an action-oriented approach to fostering knowledge transfer and creating department surrogates.

Knowing who the new "go to" person is immediately allows crisis management to start. Thus when a crisis rears its head, the company won’t be left wondering “what next?”; instead they will be able to consult a comprehensive plan that will guide them through the crisis. In turn, this will take some of the worry and stress off of an already potentially tense time for the company.

Backup plans don’t have to be limited to the general operations of a company. They can be broad enough to address any concerns that may arise. Keeping a list of client and third party contact information is another valuable way to make sure that the knowledge transfer of all information is stored in one place.

The owner of the plan can lead both its inception and maintenance. Storing the company’s backup plan on a shared drive allows easy accessibility for any member of the team that needs to access or update it. It is then necessary to make sure that this vital company document is backed up regularly as well.

Overall, backup plans can help alleviate the stressors associated with times of transition or times of unexpected events. The living document can be the differentiating factor in whether the company is flexible enough to handle the challenges that it will certainly face.

Documenting the key components of your business using the Smart Business Company Manual will ensure you've covered all bases and that nothing is left out.

• Directories – Directories are essentially libraries of websites. They’re generally organized by broad categories like sports and then by more specific categories like baseball which is then broken down into micro categories like amateur, youth, video games, instruction, movies and so on. The benefit to listing your website with a directory is they send traffic to your website and they help increase search engine ranking. The caveat is that there are literally thousands of website directories.
• Search engine submission – One of the first things many people do once they’ve created a business website is to submit it to the search engines. The obvious search engines to submit your site to are Google, MSN, and Yahoo however there are a number of smaller search engines for which it can benefit your business to become a part of. They include:
  • MetaCrawler
  • AltaVista
  • Live Search
  • Ask.com
  • About
  • MIVA
  • LookSmart
• Press and publicity – Press releases are a great way to spread the word about your business and the benefits your company offers. Online press release websites like prweb.com are an excellent resource. One well written press release can generate a ton of website traffic, increase awareness of your company and present you and your business with new opportunities.

Website promotion is a continual process and part of an ongoing marketing strategy.

Learn how to implement smart tactics like this one to start, operate and promote your business each month when you join the Smart Tactics Inner Circle

Small business owners often feel that they do not have the resources to promote their business, so they just set up shop and hope for the best. This is one of the reasons that so many small businesses fail. If no one knows that you exist, how are you going to make any money?

You don’t have to spend a lot of money for your marketing to be successful. If you’re willing to take promotion into your own hands, you can get good results without going broke. In fact, there are some marketing methods that do not cost a dime. Here are some cheap and free ways to get the word out about your business…

• Write and distribute press releases. There are websites where you can submit them for free for anyone to read, but it’s also important to send them directly to media outlets. This could get your business featured in a story in the paper or a magazine, or maybe even the television news.
• Write articles about your field of expertise and submit them to online article directories. You can add a resource box with a short bio and link to your website. Webmasters can access these articles and add them to their sites as
  long as they keep them as-is, so this will give you publicity and links to your website.
• Seek out joint ventures with other small businesses. This could be a good source of publicity, and you can split advertising costs.
• Try bartering for advertising. If you run a cleaning service, for example, see if the local newspaper will allow you to clean offices in exchange for ad space.
• Distribute lots and lots of business cards. Business cards are a staple for any businessperson, whether a offline business or an online business. Hand them out to anyone you discuss business with, leave them at local business that cater to clients who might be interested in your products or services, and drop them in any correspondence you send.
• Donate items for fundraising raffles and other types of giveaways. This is a nice gesture of goodwill, and your business name will be featured on tickets and promotional materials.

Marketing does not have to be expensive to be effective. There is room for some amount of marketing in any budget, because some methods come at no cost except your time. So there’s no reason that you can’t get the word out about your business, no matter how little you have to spend.

Kick-Start your business by getting access to smart tactics like this one each month. When you join the Smart Tactics Inner Circle

It’s a 4 week business building web-based training program that will do just what the title suggests; give you Foolproof Strategies to Build a Thriving Business in 2010.

You’ll learn…

• the latest and best tactics, techniques, and strategies to generate leads and find clients
• how to structure your business to leverage what you know to create passive streams of income
• sales ideas and suggestions to handle your consultations and get more signed contracts
• a few tweaks you can do to your website to attract your target market and entice them to do business with you
• the best technology and resources that will help leverage your time and income

So check out the Virtual Assistant Cafe ’s Foolproof Strategies to Build a Thriving Business in 2010. Both your business and income will thank you.

At least once a day I’m asked "how do I generate new leads?” so this month’s Smart Tactics Inner Circle call will provide a quick overview of marketing tactics that will generate leads that interested in buying what you are selling. During this Smart Tactics Inner Circle members only call I'm going to cover…

• Four things that should be done constantly to promote your business
• Three strategies to generate leads that are interested in buying what you are selling
• Five tactics to build your credibility and three ways each can be used to make the phone ring
• Four ways to make direct contact with your prospects and Four ways to use each effectively
• Three ideas to make your direct mail standout
• Three statements to use when following up so that you don’t sound like used car salesman

If you struggle with marketing and lead generation then be sure to join me Wednesday, November 11/09 at 1pm Central/2pm Eastern for this Smart Tactics Inner Circle Call.  If you aren’t a memberjoin the Smart Tactics Inner Circle now!