Seth Godin provides his Top 10 Secrets to Marketing:

1. Don’t run out of money. It always takes longer and costs more than you expect to spread your idea. You can budget for it or you can fail.

2. You won’t get it right the first time. Your campaign will need to be reinvented, adjusted or scrapped. Count on it.

3. Convenient choices are not often the best choices. Just because an agency, an asset or a bizdev deal are easy to do doesn’t mean that they are your best choice.

4. Irrational, strongly held beliefs of close advisors should be ignored. It doesn’t matter if they don’t like your logo.

5. If it makes you nervous, it’s probably a good idea. If you’re sure you’re right, you probably aren’t.

6. Focusing obsessively on one niche, one feature and one market is almost always a better idea than trying to satisfy everyone.

7. At some point, you’re either going to have to stick to your convictions or do what the market tells you. It’s hard to do both.

8. Compromise in marketing is almost always a bad idea. Extreme A could work. Extreme B could work. The average of A and B will almost never work.

9. Test, measure and optimize. Figure out what’s working and do it more.

10. Read and learn. There are a million clues, case studies, books and proven tactics out there. You can’t profitably ignore them until you know them, and you don’t have the time or the money to make the same mistake someone else made last week. It’s cheaper and faster to read about it than it is to do it.

Need traffic to your website? Here are the 12 best solutions, click here for the whole article:

1. Pay Per Click. The Fastest way to get exposure online in world is by advertising with PPC (Pay Per Click) programs. Ads start running within minutes after you submit your billing information. You bid on relevant keywords and pay the bid amount each time someone clicks on the link through to your site.

2. Traditional Website Optimization. The factors that you must know for getting the top rankings: title of the page, description META tag, keyword META tag, in your headline, use HTML Tag, your first line of text, once or twice per paragraph, once/twice in bold, in the text of a link.

3. Weblog Optimization. Blogs are short for weblogs which is just an online journal where you can post articles, news and just comment on anything you want. You can set blogs up for free by using blogger which is also run by Google.

4. Article Marketing. Search engines love content, and it’s that very content that let’s you invite traffic from search engines. Here are double benefits from using this method: drive direct targeted visitors from hundreds of high traffic sites and increase your page rank and link popularity.

5. Press Release. A press release is news about your business. It is not an ad. Focus on telling your potential customers something about your business. Remember the who, what, when, where, why, and how of journalism.

6 Link Exchange. A good link exchange is when you exchange links with a site that is relevant to yours and complements yours because it is on the same or similar topic. This methods can increase your PR website.

7. Blog & RSS Directories. Blog and Ping is a service that you can use to let the blog and RSS directories know that you have updated your blog.

8. Autoresponder system. Once you run online advertising to drive traffic to your landing pages, so that you can collect subscribers. Many internet marketers neglect to build their own mailing list, and are losing out in a big way. Don’t be one of them. Top internet marketers ALL build their own mailing lists.

9. Ezine Marketing. There are thousands upon thousands of ezines published on the Internet, and chances are excellent that there are many ezines published on a topic relevant to your site.

10. Viral Marketing. Viral Marketing allows you to build up your own opt-in list. These types of systems are usually based on some type of viral matrix, smiliar to a multi level marketing set up.

11. Auction. The system that ruthlessly convert visitors to bidders to finding wholesale suppliers and drop shippers all over the world for any product you want.

12. Traffic Exchange. Some systems require you to log-in to a “start page” and start surfing across other member’s web pages. Each page you view earns you credit towards increased display of your own site.

From DuctTape Marketing, the best places to advertise for cheap in your town:

• Church bulletins
• Public Library bulletin boards
• Coffee shop bulletin boards
• Grocery store bulletin boards
• School sports programs
• Delivery service ride along flyers
• Hotel rack brochure boxes
• Pizza boxes

Click here to read user submitted favorites and more….

In addition to our resource page on naming your business, we also offer the following advice from Anthony Cerminaro:

“There’s a lot of room for personal and professional creativity when choosing a business name, but there are three main considerations to keep in mind:

Will your business name receive trademark protection?

Is your proposed business name available?

If your business will have a website, is a similar domain name available?”

Forbes:  

1. Infrastructure (utilities, phone service, housekeeping services, landscaping) Run-of-the-mill homeowners and renters can’t deduct these expenses, but at-home entrepreneurs can.

2. Home mortgage interest and property taxes. U.S. taxpayers can deduct these anyway, but as a small business owner, you can save even more by applying a percentage of mortgage interest and property taxes to the home-office section of your tax form.

3. Travel expenses. You can’t deduct fuel expenses if you commute to work each day, but if you work from home, you can deduct the costs of traveling away from your home for any business-related activity.

4. One-time office equipment purchases. Section 179 of the tax code says you can take a one-time deduction–up to $105,000–for the purchase of office equipment, as long as you don’t purchase more than $400,000 of equipment in a calendar year.

5. Family affair. Sole proprietors with children under 18 who work for them can deduct their children’s “wages.”

(via Biz Opps)

Via Entrepreneur Magazine:

No marketing budget? No problem, with these 10 creative techniques for bringing in business.

1. Instead of putting a 39-cent stamp on an envelope, put 39 1-cent stamps on the front of an envelope. One of the principles of direct mail is to stand out to get the attention of the receiver so your mail isn’t thrown away or ignored.

2. Every month, give customers a chance to win a free lunch, compliments of your business. Everyone likes a chance to win things.

3. Make a donation to charity for every purchase made during a particular month. If your orders average more than $100 each, donate $10 per order.

4. Use lottery tickets as incentives for referrals. You could market your giveaway as a chance to win a million dollars (or whatever the grand prize is for the lottery in your area) for all referrals received during a particular period of time.

5. Hold a contest for prospects and customers. How about “Guess the serial number on a $10 bill and it’s yours”? It’s not a lot of money, but people who stop by your place of business will have fun and will remember the contest.

6. If there’s still penny candy available, $10 will buy 1,000 pieces. If not, you can still get quite a bit for a small investment. Including candy in your invoices makes companies remember you.

7. For $10, you can hire a student, a niece or nephew, or a friend’s teen to picket your business with a sign protesting something positive. It may sound silly, but having a picketer outside your place of business with a sign that reads something like, “We’re protesting good customer service at this location!” or “This place is full of nice people,” will get you noticed.

8. On a toll road, pay the toll for the car behind you, and ask the toll collector to give your business card to the car’s driver and tell him or her you paid the toll.

9. Show up in person with a cookie for the receptionist at a client or prospect’s office. The thing is, customers and prospects love attention. Drop in and visit a few of your customers and just say you’re stopping by to brighten their day.

10. Advertise using fliers. At an average cost of 2 cents each, $10 will buy 500 printed fliers. You can use them to canvass a targeted area, include them in packaging and delivered orders, hand them to walk-in customers or mail them to a targeted list.
(via Biz Opps)

Our offices will be closed Monday, October 9th, 2006 for Columbus Day!  We will open promptly at 9am on Tuesday October 10th.