Yesterday I had an interesting, but short, conversation on Twitter where I said, “The key to a successful small business - find a highly specific, targeted niche and dominate it!” And I meant every word. I work with business owners all the time who aren’t sure about what they want, what they’re doing or where they’re [...]

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How do you define success in your business? It’s a question I ask every client - and most of the prospects I ever speak with. The interesting thing for me is how often the people I speak with don’t have a specific answer. Sure, we can come up with just about anything on the fly. Yet [...]

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One thing you have to say about blogging is that it’s a great way of generating traffic to your website. You write a blog post and promote it a bit. Your posts goes out to your feed subscribers and can gets picked up by social services. With a little effort, your blog can generate gobs [...]

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There are a number of questions I get asked often by my clients about developing and growing their business using their websites. But I’d say one question is asked more than any other - “how do I get (more) traffic to my website?” Since I seem to seldom lack for ideas, I thought I’d start writing them [...]

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It’s funny to me that people are still asking whether social media is viable for business. Obviously, the advertising industry picked up on blogs and social media pretty early on and revenue streams based on advertising has matured quite rapidly. And like with anything on the web, the internet marketing crowd, with their usual approach, moved [...]

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Niche market is one of those buzz terms that gets thrown around a lot. Just about any marketing book, article or blog post worth its weight talks about niche marketing. It’s so prevalent that most small business owners would say they’ve heard the term. But just knowing about the term niche marketing doesn’t mean you know [...]

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If you’re paying attention to the media you know that we’re are headlong into some hard economic times. Banks are failing, investment firms are in financial trouble and the housing markets across the nation are suffering. Things are so bad here in Michigan, the state with the worst economy in the nation, that General Motors is [...]

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Let me guess, when it comes to your small business, you hate selling. Just the idea of it makes your stomach turn a bit. It seems dishonest and dirty. And you’ve convinced yourself that it’s pretty much unnecessary to sell. Somehow you can get more clients and customers without having to deal with all that selling [...]

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George Bernard Shaw once said:“The reasonable man adapts himself to the conditions that surround him… The unreasonable man adapts surrounding conditions to himself… All progress depends on the unreasonable man.” If Mr. Shaw is correct (and I think he is) then all progress - hence all success - happens when you adapt your surrounding conditions to [...]

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As small business owners, we tend to make things so much more complex than they need to be. Think about it. If you run a small business, where do you usually put the majority of your focus? Marketing? generating revenue? Your work with you clients? Things like this? So often the question you have about your small [...]

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Want to learn how to write with confidence? Well my friend and fellow blogger, Joanna Young, is back! Where’d she go? Well, first she moved her blog from TypePad to WordPress - a move that I fully support and applaud her for. Then, she took a week off from writing to move into her new home. [...]

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Running is a small business is as much an art as it is a skill - perhaps even more so. Certainly you can approach your business as though it’s a set of skills you learn and then implement. Yet I’ve found, for myself at least, that running my business like this has no life. You can [...]

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I’ve always been a do-it-yourselfer. I’ve taught myself a great many things by taking this attitude. When I bought my first house, I completely gutted it - down to the timbers in most rooms. In other places, we removed and moved walls. For instance, I created a large, walk-in closet in our huge bedroom where there [...]

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Is it really possible to create a viral marketing effect? Sure, it’s possible to create a viral marketing strategy. And it’s certainly possible to know what viral marketing is and, theoretically, how to use it. But can you just simply create a viral response in some formulated or calculated way? Or is viral marketing something that happens [...]

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We all want to talk about success in our small business, don’t we? How we overcame this obstacle to come out the other end successful. Or how we fought for our vision to create the business we want. The media is filled with stories of how ‘one man (or woman) beat the odds and became [...]

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Let’s face it, our economy here in the U.S. is in trouble. As a nation, and as individuals, we’ve out-spent our means and overextended our lives while saving less than ever before in history. And after decades of being inflated, it appears our economy is entering a readjustment period. This isn’t, necessarily, a bad thing. [...]

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Is it wise to use your business to hurt people? You’d probably agree with me that it’s certainly not wise to hurt your customers or potential customers. That seems pretty clear, doesn’t it? But what about the people you work with or who work for you? Is it okay - is it appropriate - to hurt, abuse [...]

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Susan is a life coach. She’s been working with clients ever since she received her certification. First with a few friends and later with the referrals her friends sent her. Of course one of those referrals taught her about marketing and helped her get a website up. Everything seemed to be going great. Now, three years [...]

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Most of the the small business owners I work focus an abundant of time on their marketing. They put tons of effort into crafting their marketing message, polishing their marketing funnel and fine-tuning how they generate leads. And often, they do so before any of this produces new clients. Marketing your business is a really good [...]

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The internet is almost magical.  Think about it…you put up a few pages of text on a website and you have the potential for a business. People can view your site, read your copy and decide if they want to work with you. And blogs make it even more magical. You can easily write more content [...]

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