Inc. Technology Blog has an Article Posted on ways to montior when your company is mentioned online:

Listen Up! Tracking software and services can alert you to what customers are saying about your business on social networks, blogs, and other social media. These tracking techniques offer steps beyond Google Alerts to keep you informed.

A few weeks ago, a Twitter user tweeted that she was planning to try Zitune, a restaurant in Los Altos, Calif. David Auerbach, the restaurant’s co-owner got an e-mail alert from a Web-based service Trackle, calling his attention to the tweet. As he often does, he sent a response thanking her for visiting Zitune and asking how she’d liked it. Soon, they had a dialogue going. Then she asked if Zitune’s chef (and Auerbach’s brother-in-law) would like to be interviewed for her video blog.

As social networking sites grow in popularity it is becoming more and more crucial to monitor any online mentions of your brand. You can use these methods to take advantage of opportunities to connect with satisfied clients who can become advocates for your services and products (as in the above example). You can also connect with clients who are dissatisfied before negative publicity grows and damages the public’s perception of your brand. An excellent example of why this can be valuable is the massive amount of bad buzz and negative publicity caused by United Airline’s handling of one angry customer’s request for replacement of a broken guitar (story HERE).

The method you choose to monitor mentions of your company is less important than having a system in place that ensures you are aware of it when your company is being discussed online.

Steven G. Atkinson from Technology Tips for SMB’s has a post up on Bad Technology Habits:

It seems that sometimes when people are talking they forget where they are. Or they get so engrossed in the conversation that they don’t realize who may be near.

As new technology enters the mainstream it is easy to make it part of your life without thinking about the consequences of that new technology on interpersonal relationships. This is true for both business and personal relationships. Most of the tips are pretty common-sense but it’s never a bad thing to be reminded of how things we are not thinking about can influence our interactions with other people.

Stepcase Lifehack has a helpful article with 12 Tips for Better Business Writing:

If you’re one of the many people in business for whom writing has never been a major concern, you should know that a lack of writing skills is a greater and greater handicap with every passing year. Spending some time to improve your writing can result in a marked improvement in your hireability and promotional prospects.

At MyNewCompany we are always looking for ways to improve our communications skills. Whether we are responding to client email requests or live chats using our Support System, posting entries on Social Media Sites or creating new content for our site there is no such thing as “good enough” when it comes to communicating with our clients or potential clients. Constantly working towards improved communication methods is also a great step to include when developing your Marketing & Sales Strategy!

The OPEN Small Business Forum has an Article Posted on “7 Reasons Your Marketing Plan Doesn’t Work“.

Every business should operate with a set of plans – a plan for the business, a plan for cash, a plan for growth, and certainly a plan for marketing. Opening a business with no plan is kind of like driving somewhere you’ve probably never been without a map or GPS device.

The article is full of useful tips and tricks for adopting the best possible marketing plan, as well as pitfalls to avoid when developing your plan.

Before beginning the development of your Marketing Plan it is important to understand the difference between Marketing and Sales. We’ve made this easy! Just visit our page on Marketing & Sales. The page also lists helpful resources for developing an effective Marketing Plan and Sales Strategy.

Of course the first step when developing your Business Idea is to create a Business Plan. A properly written business plan will make it much easier to develop a marketing plan and implement your sales strategy.

The E-Myth Business Blog has an Article Posted on how you can make the personal touches that grew your business part of your system.

The initial step is to recognize the reality. What results do you achieve in your business? Yes, you created patterns of behavior (systems) that you’ve followed in order to achieve a degree of business success. You pride yourself on your abilities. You enjoy the fact that in your growing organization, nobody has the same personal touch with the customers that you have. I mentioned rainmaker status above, for often this is how this pride in the personal touch shows up; you feel recognized and special for your personal ability to achieve great results.

The trick is to create a system that allows replication of these personal touches even when you are not there to provide them. Once such a system is in place you can concentrate on the work of growing your business instead of getting bogged down in the day-to-day routine of client service.

At MyNewCompany we believe that the E-Myth System works! We provide our clients with a general overview of the process of Automating your Business so that they can free themselves up to grow the business, and can even take a real vacation without having to worry that their clients’ experience will suffer during their absence!

The E-Myth system works so well that we have made it our top pick on our Recommended Business Books & Software page.

Business Management ABCs has an Article Posted on the benefits of conducting an internal Business Audit:

Small Business Trends has an Article Posted with a link to a free .pdf download of 137 Small Business Twitter Tips submitted by their readers.

Over the course of several weeks, we accepted your tips via email, Twitter and in comments to the original post. We asked readers to simply answer one of the following 6 questions:
-Getting Started: How would you suggest other small businesses get started on Twitter?
-Smart Marketing: What’s the right way (or wrong way) to promote your business on Twitter?
-Observing Etiquette: What is your #1 Twitter etiquette tip for small business owners?
-Spreading Your Message: What is your best tip for getting re-tweeted?
-Time Management: How do you manage your time on Twitter?
-Advanced Strategies: What is your best kept secret (something not widely known) for using Twitter in business?

There are quite a few useful tips included in the list. The list is also a great introduction to the medium for those who are just getting started with Social Media (Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, etc.).

Promotion through Social Media is just one part of developing your overall Marketing Strategy. For a good overview of the Marketing process (including a definition of the difference between Sales and Marketing functions) you can check out Our Page on Marketing and Sales.

We don’t just blog about it – we are also active on Twitter and Facebook. To follow our Social Media feeds just use the links on This Page.

Seth Godin has a Post Up discussing how all staff whose functions affect the customer experience should be involved with customer service:

Every person who does marketing, sales, product design or any other job that influences customers directly should spend at least an hour a week answering the customer service lines, using the same tools your customer service people use. Out of sight is not so good, out of mind is inexcusable.

At MyNewCompany.com we completely agree with this philosophy! We always say that “everybody works for the sales department”. All of our staff answer sales and service calls regardless of title. The only way to provide outstanding customer service is to know what your customers experience is like.

Keeping engaged with the customer experience and making your services as consistent as possible are part of the process of Automating Your Business. The Franchise Model works!!

Forbes.com has an interesting Article posted listing 7 business ascensions and 7 business tumbles:

To lend some perspective, we assembled some of the most spectacular corporate ascensions and steepest tumbles across an array of industries

One of the best ways to position yourself to take full advantage of opportunities for fast growth is by Automating Your Business. This frees you up to work on business development rather than getting bogged down in the day-to-day operations of your business. MyNewCompany.com has a helpful Resource Page on this topic. Clients utilizing our Formation Services also get access to our New Corporation or New LLC Handbooks (as well as useful business forms) in the “My Account” section of our site, which contain all the information you need to set your company up properly so that you can concentrate on growing your business!

BusinessWeek.com has an Article Posted pointing out that now is a great time to be starting new advertising campaigns:

Prime-time TV slots are going for 25% less than they sold for just last year, says Steve Cox, spokesperson for the Better Business Bureau. “The playing field for TV advertising is becoming more level, and small business owners can now take advantage of steep discounts for prime slots, as well as cut rates from PR firms and productions companies,” he says.

Not only are ad rates down (not just for TV ads – radio and online advertising is also dropping in price), but new ads can be more effective because viewship is increasing:

In addition to more flexible rates, small businesses can get more bang for their ad bucks today because viewership is up, Hroncich says. “People aren’t going out as much; they’re staying home watching TV or looking at the Internet. So these venues are getting more impressions but they’re charging less money” for their ads, he says.

During a slow economy many businesses immediately reduce or eliminate advertising as a cost-cutting measure. This may seem sensible, but can actually be a missed opportunity to strengthen your market position while your competition remains stagnant.

MyNewCompany.com has a Free Tools & Resouces page, which includes a general overview and useful resources on the Sales & Marketing Process.

The Marketing Experiments Blog has a great article on 10 things you can do today to improve your internet marketing that includes:

• Build a new headline for a high traffic landing page.
• Add a new testimonial to a high volume landing page.
• Place an order on your own site.

These internet marketing ideas are great and many can be done quickly and today!

In a speech entitled “Your Business Is Dead and You Don’t Even Know It”, Justin Kitch, CEO of Homestead Technologies put it bluntly:

If you don’t have a website:

Of course, setting up a small business website is fairly simple and we advise anyone in business to do this important task ASAP.

 

 

 

From AllBusiness.com:

1. Press Releases. Write and distribute press releases that are newsworthy, and send them to newspapers, magazines, and television and radio stations.

2. Trade Shows. Renting space at a trade show can be expensive, but the best shows are a great way to build your business.

3. The Internet. Establishing a home page for your business is relatively inexpensive and can reach many people.

4. Direct Mail. Direct mail results depend largely upon how much you’re willing to spend on finding your target market and delivering quality materials to them.

5. Yellow Pages. Most ads get turned into fishwrap within days, but consumers hang onto the yellow pages all year.

Be sure to read our content on small business marketing & sales.

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.