Let’s say you want to target teenagers because your store sells the latest clothes and fashion accessories for teenagers. So, of course you especially want to reach that age group. What’s the best way to reach teens? It may not be enough just to have a website. An internet marketing company can help you to do a lot more and expand your business.

How to Reach Your Audience

For example, teens spend a lot of time on their cell phones and mobile devices. They chat and check for messages every chance they get. They use mobile apps and visit Facebook all the time. In fact, these days many of them are more comfortable going online than they are communicating other people in person.

On the other hand, if you are trying to reach a professional audience, you can still target Facebook, which is used by the general public, but you should also spread the word via the members of a social platform, such as LinkedIn, which many professionals subscribe to. You need to go where your audience is, and your Search Engine Optimization strategy should be planned accordingly. A reputable internet marketing company will offer several SEO packages to choose from and will often tailor their packages to your unique needs.

Website Features   

Once visitors find your website, it’s not enough for it just to be pretty. It ought to be easy for people to use, and of course, its content should be tailored to your audience. Obviously, the copy posted on a website for teens will not be the same as on one intended for senior citizens, for example.

You may also want to include what’s called a sitemap on your website. This is designed to help visitors navigate and find what they want more quickly, especially if there are a lot of links or pages on the site. A website that is poorly designed or difficult to understand will discourage visitors, no matter who your desired audience is.

Another feature SEO marketers employ on a website is blogging, either by the same individual or different contributors writing to express their opinions about products, services, or various issues related to your business. Another common method is to get other websites to link to your site.

As another part of your SEO strategy, it may make sense to have your website reviewed regularly to make any needed changes and to keep the information up to date. You want to make sure that visitors can find your website no matter what kind of device they’re using, whether it’s a cell phone, PC, laptop, or tablet.

This post brought to you by guest blogger Michelle, who enjoys blogging about how an experienced internet marketing company offering the right SEO plans can mean more business for your site.

5 ways to grow a small business

Here are the top 5 strategies that can be used to grow a small business:

• Cater only to your target market: As a business owner who wants to grow his business, catering to a small portion of the market is something that no one wants to do. After all, how does it make sense to remove yourself from part of a potential market that can bring you major sales? However, it is not possible for a small business to cater to the entire market. Instead, if you could identify your niche market that could be your most profitable segment and concentrate all your sales and marketing efforts on this niche market, you will see your sales soar.

• Try and offer new products: A great way to grow a small business is to offer new products or services to your target market. Try and identify an area of need and then try to fulfill that need with a new product. You could also reinvent an old product that was a best-selling one and sell it in its modern avatar to your customers.

• Get rid of the competition: An easy way to get rid of your competition is to partner with them. Small business owners are often open to setting up partnerships with other small business owners that can be mutually beneficial. Therefore, look for a competitor in the same field who offers services or products that are complementary to yours. By offering a better product to the consumer, both you and your competitor can grow your business simultaneously.

• Find new markets: As a small business owner, you are already catering to your target market and have a loyal clientele in this market. In order to ensure growth of your business, you need to now look for newer prospects in different markets. No, selling to the masses is definitely not the answer. Instead, what you need to do is find newer niches in which you can do business.

• Increase production capacity: One of the simplest ways to grow a small business is to increase production capacity. If the demand for your product is greater than the supply, you should think about increasing your production capacity to meet this growing demand. Yes, you will need some capital investment to do so, but it will pay off in terms of increased sales.

Esther is a business journalist and blogger, who covers everything from investing in stocks to contractor tax and from mortgages to how to set up an umbrella company.

So what should your viral ebook be about? Well, if you want to bring “targeted” traffic to your blog, your viral ebook needs to be related to the subject of your blog. And if you actually want the ebook to go viral, it needs to be BOTH bizarre and extremely useful. In order for the ebook to be bizarre, it needs to somehow tie in with a subject that some people believe to be taboo while still staying on-topic. In order for it to be extremely useful, it needs to be somewhat of a black book with information that most people don’t know about. Combine the two together and you could have a winner. Some people might say that extremely useful would be good enough. In some cases it would be. But it’s really hard to get people to talk about your viral ebook if it doesn’t fall into those two categories.

Once you have your concept down, you’re half finished so pat yourself on the back. All that’s left is the actual writing of the ebook. Don’t worry. You don’t need expensive software to create your viral ebook. In fact, most viral ebooks are nothing more than a simple PDF file. The best software to create a PDF-style ebook can be downloaded at www.OpenOffice.org. After you install this application on your computer, you’re going to need to open the Open Office Writer. This program works in the exact same way as any other word processor. Write your ebook and once you’re finished, click on the PDF icon which is on the top of the page. Wallah! You’re finished and your ebook is ready to be distributed.

But what if you want a much nicer ebook? Simple. All you have to do is find somebody who can create an ebook cover for you. Prices vary but most designers will create a professionally-designed cover for $50 or less. Not all designers are created equal so take your time. When the cover is finished, add an image of the cover within your ebook on the first page and save it as a PDF file. Now your ebook has a face that more people will notice.

Now it’s time to distribute your viral ebook. While there are many ways to do this, the first way I would suggest you promote it is by contacting other blog owners with related blogs. If they like it, they’ll blog about. And if other people follow their blogs, they’ll blog about it too. Let’s not forget all the social bookmarks you’ll get from the people who visit those blogs. If you’re lucky, you’ll get lots of people talking about your ebook and your ebook might even be mentioned in some book one day on how viral marketing should be done. Wouldn’t that be something!

This was Guest Post submitted by Greg Davidson.  Check out his site at Script Package.

The site is called Do Follow Movement and it is a PR 3 – hand edited blog directory that features only blogs that are do follow.

Take a look and let me know what you think about design.  It is pretty simple but that is what I was after.  Luckily, Nick at Elegant Themes recently designed a theme called Elist that helps transform WordPress into a directory.

This is your invitation to add your do follow blog to the directory.  To help eliminate spam I have set the price to $1 for submission.  For my readers I will wave that fee and you can simply leave your information in the comments and I will submit the link for you.  Please use this format:

Name of Blog – (your real blog name -  no keyword stuffing)

Description -

Link -

The anticipation of new can be so motivating. Why else do we hold such store by making New Year’s resolutions and bucket lists?

But of course those resolutions soon fall by the way side and, as summer approaches, it can be all too easy to write off this year and look forward to the next. I hear that the summer is traditionally a really quiet time here online. Maybe this lack of new is the reason why?

Well I have some good news for you. This year is only half over. The glass is half full. July 1st is our latest ‘new’ to relish and take encouragement from.

Because here’s the magic secret of the day – there is no best new time to be awesome!

Even if you’ve just stumbled over here and are as green as the lovely Welsh grass outside my window, getting your stuff together right now and deciding that today is the day you’re going to take action makes today your awesome.

You might like to write the first half of the year off as your time for learning and research. You maybe took the time to build a rather wonderful looking online home. Did you start connecting with people via Twitter or LinkedIn and as such, have built trust and recognition for your brand?

All of those things are valid and wonderful. They’re a great foundation for this second half of the year.

But unless you put yourself out there, show the little corner of your world exactly what it is you’re about and what you have to offer, all of that ground work will soon get grown over with weeds and you’ll waste a huge chunk of next year getting your daisies straight again.

“Enough with the gardening analogy already, what do you want us to do?!”

Your 10 minute task, if you choose to accept it, is to make a list of all the little things that you could be doing that will make a difference to you and your business. We’re not looking for epic stuff right now. This is about the little things that you never seem to have time left for at the end of a busy day.

Maybe it’s the customer you promise yourself you’ll follow up with. Or it could be the emails that left unanswered because you’re a one person operation and you just haven’t got to it yet. Did you promise yourself you’d get more structured with how you hung out on twitter but you didn’t yet devise a plan? Or maybe you just need to ask for the sale?

Whatever it is that you keep putting off doing, add it to the list. And sure, I cheated, just a little, because this list might take a little longer than 10 minutes to put together. But once you have it you’re good to go.

Here’s how: Every day for the next 30 days (or until you genuinely can’t find another thing to add to your list!) choose one thing off your list and do it. First. Before anything else.

And then feel to come back here at the end of the 30 days and tell me I’m an idiot if your business hasn’t grown in some measurable way as a result.

The journey of a thousand miles might start with a single step* but it’s the one after that and the one after that and the one after that that gets you there.

What are you doing today to make the second half of 2011 brilliant?

*Lao-Tzu

Image: Salvatore Vuono / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

P.S. If you need some help cranking it up a notch, I’m delighted to tell you about a summer time business building extravaganza that I’m involved with. It’s totally free and you can enter for as many or as few of the 12 freebies as you’d like. To find out more please click here.

But how much time have you spent delighting your customers today? Or if you’re a blogger, have you thought about how you can make the world a brighter place for your readers right now?

Because if the answer can be counted on the digits of one hand, there’s a good chance you’re making your customers miserable, right now, and you don’t even realise it.

Introducing 3 awesome ways to really upset your customer!

Underwhelm them

Anyone can teach you to write a fabulous sales page. You could even throw cash at it and hire one of the great guns of the web to do it for you. Full of emotionally compelling language and highly charged awesome sauce that gets people plotting how they can sell a spare kidney to buy from you.

That’s great and all but what if the thing you’re selling just plain sucks?!

Maybe you’ll get lucky? Throw enough eyeballs at your emotionally compelling stuff and people will buy it. Make it cheap enough and maybe they won’t ask for a refund when it’s over-hyped garbage. Maybe they’ll just chalk it up to experience and move on and you’ll be none the wiser.

That’s one sure-fire way to really wind up your customers!

Make them beg to give you cash!

Or maybe you’re the opposite of Mr ‘All Talk and No Substance’ over there? If someone comes to your site at 3am when you’re tucked up dreaming sweetly, what do you want them to do? Subscribe? Read? Comment?

What if they love what you do and they really want to buy a piece of you? How easy do you make it for people to buy off you right now?

Naomi Dunford calls this The Golden Minute. (And seriously, please do click that link and read her post. It’s great. We won’t wait for you but the magic that is the Inter-web means we’ll be here when you get back.)

Look at your site through the eyes of your customer. What can they do right now that will get them a piece of you?

Bleed them dry

Has this ever happened to you …

You make a carefully considered decision to buy something online. You click to ‘buy now’ but before you can login to Paypal they hit you with ‘oh, well seeing as you want to buy this amazing stuff from me, maybe you’d like to buy this thing that costs ten times the price but get it for fifty bucks, but only this one time.’

And you sigh. And your tummy does that thing that the person who wrote the amazing one time offer knows it will do because that’s the emotion they were playing on when they wrote it, but you know your budget and click ‘no thanks’. You’re mentally willing them to just take you to Paypal so you can get the deed done but wait for it, there’s more …

‘You don’t want that? Well how about this much cheaper but just as life transforming thing that I put together for just such an eventuality as this’?

Gah!

I understand that one time offers work.

I know that they’re popular.

I know they earn people a lot of money.

But please … do we really have to bash our customers over the head with them, time after time after time after time after … you catch my drift?

Takeout time:

• Make sure your stuff is worth the sales page flogging it. Instead of wasting hours tinkering with your widgets and fonts, pour that energy into creating something awesome that will have your customers falling over themselves to tell their friends to buy from you.
• Look again at your site and see what you can offer new fans during the golden minute.
• Create epic stuff and use that as reason enough to be compelling instead of walloping your unsuspecting customers with yet another ‘one time offer.’

And now it’s your turn. What have you done to really upset your customers this week? Confess all in the comments. We promise to be kind.

image: C@rlijones

It’s exciting and inspring to watch but, if we’re honest, just a little bit daunting too.

Because, what about the little guy? The hardworking, new to the game entrepreneur?

Maybe that’s you?

What would it take for you to believe that you could create awesome in just a few hours?

In the last 22 hours I’ve watched that awesome unfold. Regular readers may have heard the news last week about an exciting project I’ve been involved with. 22 hours ago that project went live.

And as you may have guessed from the headline, in the last 22 hours that project has raised a little over $3840.

But here’s the kicker – the blog and team behind the project is just 6 months old and made up of relative newcomers.

No A-list blogging celebrities. No millionaire spouses with PR firms. No half-naked photo shoots. (Phew )

Just a handful of hardworking bloggers with a fire in their belly and the hard work and belief that anything was possible.

And if we can do it, so can you. But before I tell you the 5 secrets of our success, why not click here and check out what we’ve been up to. Go ahead. Click here. I’ll wait.

That simple page, at the time of writing, has raised $3849.50 Here’s what made it possible:

1. Belief

At risk of sounding all woo-woo and tree hugging, this one will get. Without belief in what you are doing, why you are doing it and your ability to do it, you will fail. Every. Single. Time. Don’t get me wrong, we all have wobbly days and times when we doubt ourselves but ultimately, you need to believe you’re going to nail it.

Believing you can do it is different to knowing you can do it. There are no guarantees in this life. You might give it your all and still fall flat on your face. But without the belief you can do it, you won’t even get the chance to try.

2. An irresistible offer

Did you see the sales page for that project? (If you skipped it, click here to look now.) We made the decision to donate a total no-brainer. If someone visited that page and had the money to give, they gave. The bundle of goodies on offer is huge (and with the promise of a choice of high-value bonus items, the whole deal became time sensitive. Wait until later and your bonus of choice may have already been snagged.)

You can do the same with your next big thing. Offer your readers something so awesome, they know they will kick themselves if they say no. Think outside the box about how it works for you and your blog (and if you want to dig in deeper, read Goddess Leonie’s Problogger post How to Create an Instant Yes)

3. Team work

It doesn’t matter if you think you’ve learned all the tricks of the trade and have bootstraps worthy of Seth Godin fame, if you want to nail this in style you need to get help. The customer love fundraiser was made up of copy writers, marketing experts, visionaries, strategists and wordpress geeks. All playing to their strengths and with the ability to defer to the better judgement of others.

Even if you’re running a solo adventure, you can still get advice and input from others. If there are things you know you’d be better served delegating, don’t be afraid to outsource.

Have no budget to hire outside help? We’ve all been there baby.

Think creatively about how you approach people. I’m not suggesting you contact a firm of $5000 a time web designers and try and talk your way into a deal. At best they’ll probably just ignore you. However, find an up and coming hot new thing and offer to partner with them, a share of the profits and the chance for excellent exposure and suddenly you’re back in the game.

4. Plans, plans and more plans

I really shouldn’t be sat here writing this, 23 hours into the launch. Emails to people donating products asking them to contact their lists shouldn’t have been sent several hours after we went live. The reason why the big guns come out the gates strong is their planning. It’s called pre-launch for a reason.

This is one of those ‘secrets of success’ where I know we could have done better. To be fair, we organised this whole shebang in just a couple of weeks, responding quickly and decisively to a very real need. But that speed has its drawbacks.

If you want your next big thing to be a rip-roaring success, you’ve got to get the planning in place. And yes, I know it can be boring and just a little bit dull, but get all the pieces of the jigsaw in place and that win you’re after is looking much more like a reality.

5. Expecting the unexpected

Yes, this seems to fly in the face of planning. Why bother planning at all if the unexpected is standing by to hurl itself at you at will? Expecting the unexpected is about flexibility and building time into your launch to put out fires.

Stuff will crop up. You will hit publish on a sales page and forget to paste in the code for the ‘buy now’ button. You will mis-spell one of your contributors names. You will have links that don’t work and others that open in the same window (thereby sending your precious buyers away from your page.) It happens.

It’s how you deal with the unexpected that will make or break your launch.

And now it’s your turn. Have you launched something special recently? What did you learn from the experience?

P.S. Seeing as 100% of the money is going to direct to the relief effort in Japan, it would seem remiss of me not to give you one more sneaky peek of that sales page. Click here to get involved.

P.P.S. Scroll right to the bottom of that page to check out other ways you can help us spread the word. Thank you.

Don’t worry he says. I’ll go and get us something. I need to pop in and get some more beers anyway.

Half an hour later your hunter-gatherer returns. You sniff the air. No pizza.

Fear not! He tells you of a special deal on frozen pizza. It’s called The Ultimate Takeaway Pizza and it was a fraction of the cost of Dominos. Sorted!

Yes, it means you’ll have to put the oven on but still, it’s a bargain.

So you do your thing and make a little side salad as the pizza slowly cooks. You hear your tummy rumble and wish it would cook quicker but at last, it’s ready and you serve it on a large wooden board.

You carefully carry The Ultimate Takeaway Pizza (complete with packaging that’s designed to look just like an actual takeaway box) and prepare to enjoy this feast with your hungry loved one.

You both take a slice and as you bite into it you notice that the tomato sauce has a rather peculiar spicy tang to it. That’s not what a tomato sauce is meant to taste like. But you don’t say anything, after all, this is meant to be The Ultimate Takeaway Pizza. Perhaps your taste-buds are having a siesta?

You put a brave face on and chase the pizza round the plate with a piece of limp lettuce but it’s no good you decide. This pizza is not nice! Worse still, it definitely isn’t the ultimate pizza, takeaway or otherwise. Next time you’ll be going to Dominos. Mr Goodfella has lost you.

The moral of the story? If you’re going to promise the earth, you’d better make sure you can deliver.

Stop wasting words on telling your customer how fantastic you are. Show them! Do it! Be the brilliant, awesome, talented small business owner that you are. Dazzle by being you but please, please, please, no more hype. Ditch the descriptive passages. There are no awards for this sugar. If you let your customer down they won’t be coming back.

Craft your compelling offer, describe it, introduce your customer to other happy customers. And then deliver.

And then? Rinse and repeat. You’re only as awesome as your last customer.

In addition to this blog, I own a career advice blog and I just purchased an investment blog so my time is very limited.  I have been thinking of ways that I can maximize the content that I am producing on my blogs.  I am sure you all are already doing the basics after you publish a post.  If your routine is anything like mine you probably send a tweet, add to Facebook and Amplify.  You may take it one step further and add your link to some social bookmarking sites like Blog Engage or Digg.   In this post I want to highlight some additional ways to leverage and utilize your blog content in an effort to drive more traffic to your blog. Here are five ways that I have been using my content beyond just publishing it on my own blog.

Leverage your blog content

Article Marketing- Almost everytime I write a blog post, I will rewrite the content in original articles and submit to several article marketing sites.  Ezine Articles is now in the top 10 reffering sites for two of my blogs.  When I am finished writing this post, I will repurpose the content and create at least 2 new articles to submit to EA.

Guest Post- Similar to article marketing I have been trying to use existing content from recent posts as a foundation for writing article for guest posting on offer blogs.  It is essential to make sure the guest posts are original and not too similar to the content on your own blog.  For example, after I am finished writing this post I will start writing a guest post on this theme but with a different spin.  I am thinking about something like, “Top 5 Content Syndication Sites for Bloggers”.  

Linkedin Discussions – Linkedin Groups has been awesome source of targeted traffic for my blogs for about a year now.  Last month it got even better as Linkedin as made their Groups “open” and are now indexed by search engines.  When I am done with this post, I will start a discussion on several blogging Groups that I am a part of and include a link back to my blog.  I will start the discussion by asking what other people do to leverage their existing content.

Alternate forms of Media – A simple and effective way to maximize your content is to convert your written words into audio podcasts and videos.  I am in the process of creating a series of videos on interviewing tips on my career blog.

Document Sharing Sites – This is an area that I recently discovered and seems to be a valuable resource for bloggers.  Take a look at Yudu - the leading self publishing system that will help get your content noticed and drive traffic back to your site.

Let’s learn together – What are you doing to maximize your blog content and drive traffic to your blog beyond just Twitter and Facebook?

Twitter is great for building an audience for your business. If you want your customers to adore you, you’ve got to be on Twitter.

“Twitter is to 2009 what Facebook was to 2007.” Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But it’s 2011 already. Twitter is flooded with people trying persuade other people to buy into them in just 140 characters.

And you wonder, is it really still possible to stand out from the crowd? Can you be heard above the noise and even if you can, is that really what it’s all about?

Or are you just another idiot who’s bought into a dream?

Are you really talking to future customers or is it all just recycled money? One guy peddling how-to stuff to a would-be marketer who, in turn, sells it to his mate?

Here’s the truth: Yes and no. How’s that for transparancy?!

Twitter is an awesome way to talk to new people, to get to know your audience and build that much cited ‘brand awareness’. But you’ve gotta stop tweeting like an idiot!

Here are my personal top 5 pet peeves (let’s call them tweeves, go on, I dare you!) Come and share yours in the comments.

1. Send a link in a conversational tweet

You know what it’s like. You’re busy. You don’t have time to always follow everything. So you have a quick glance at your replies to see who’s been kind enough to re-tweet your stuff.

You might have a few virtual high-fives from some friends, a question from someone who knows you’re the go-to guy or gal and then, slap bang in the middle of it all … a random question from a follower with a link at the end.

What’s that about?! So you click it, only to find yourself on some lame affiliate promotion or other. Did that improve your day? Or maybe it made you feel all warm and fuzzy about the person who sent you on that random goose chase?

No, I didn’t think so!

2. Gatecrash a conversation by asking a stupid question

We’ve all done it. We’ve read a conversation between two well known tweeters and then, because we wanted to get our name under their radar, we’ve joined in the conversation by asking a question.

Conversation is awesome. One of the best tips I heard about @replies was from Mark Davidson. He suggested including the @ at the end of the sentence instead of the start to encourage more people to join in.

That’s a fabulous idea. I’m all in favour of talking instead of blasting ads at people. But. Join in a conversation halfway with a really stupid question and you know what, you’ll just look like a twit!

(I felt Tim Brownson breathing down my neck as I wrote that. He said that there are no stupid questions. If you’d seen what I saw in my Twitter stream three days ago Tim, even you’d be disagreeing with yourself right now!)

3. Don’t reply to a tweet (or take 6 days!)

Twitter’s about page will tell you it’s about sharing information. And who am I to argue with Twitter?!

But if every one of the 95 million bits of information let loose on the platform every day are just links and headlines then it becomes nothing more than a glorified self-updating free paper.

Twitter is about conversation. If it weren’t then they wouldn’t have invented that rather nifty @ function. But this isn’t the nineteenth century. There’s a reason why the post brought by your mailman is known as ‘snail mail’ on the ‘net. Send someone an @ reply on Twitter and, unless you’re super famous, people will kinda expect you to reply,

I’m not suggesting that you live in your Twitter feed but replying to an @ tweet several days after it was sent just isn’t cool. Ignore people’s messages to you and you’ll just look like an idiot!

4. Link your twitter account to YouTube and then ‘favourite’ 15 videos an hour

Twitter linked to Facebook linked to You Tube linked to the moon linked to …

Yes, you need to be seen to be everywhere and being able to link accounts to different places is excellent.

But.

You really must be aware of what you’re linking where. I’m not suggesting you keep a list or anything but be aware of what gets tweeted automatically on your behalf when you take action somewhere else.

Did you know that every time you favourite a video on You Tube, you’ll tell your whole Twitter stream what you’re up to? Link your Facebook account up and your status will be updated too. That might not ordinarily be a problem but if you go on a You Tube fest (like one person I follow on Twitter did recently) take it from me, your followers will not thank you for it.

No one will care that you’re a rock star blogger. Send out tweets via YouTube at the rate of 15 an hour and you will look like an idiot too!

5. Send automatic direct messages

Love them or loathe them, everyone has an opinion about the much maligned automatic direct message. Personally I think they’re a slur on human kind but maybe that’s just me? Worse though is receiving an auto DM from someone who isn’t following you back.

This happened to me earlier in the week. One of my friends (who shall remain nameless) has two twitter accounts. I started following his business one and received a very friendly (but obviously automatically sent) DM. So I fit reply and prepared to tease him mercilessly. Except. My DM wouldn’t send because he wasn’t following me back yet.

Cue major frustration from me. I didn’t unfollow him. He’s a mate. But just wait til I next get him on the phone!

Seriously though, automatic DMs are the bane of the earth. I’m yet to read one that doesn’t make me want to stick my fingers in my own eyes just so I don’t have to look at it! Please, please, please, don’t do it!

Because honestly, if you were stood at the bus stop and saw someone interesting looking, would you walk up to them, give them a copy of your latest free ebook and ask them to sign your diary? I didn’t think so.

Just because this is online baby doesn’t mean it’s any less real. Those creatures you call followers? You’re not the leader of a cult. Those are human beings. Real people with real thoughts, feelings and opinions.

There’s no online life and offline life, it’s all Life. It’s all real.

So how about we start fighting for real relationships in this real life of ours? How about we start using Twitter to build relationships, to nurture respect and to allow people to be heard and feel valued?

How about we all just get real?

If you are looking for more Twitter followers – I personally recommend TweetAdder – click on the banner below to learn more: