Great Marketing Tips by Joel Sussmand, Part 2

Marketing Tip #5: Dispel distrust. Gain customer confidence and overcome potential feelings of distrust by offering written guarantees of satisfaction whenever possible, customer testimonials, references, and by joining respected and well-known professional organizations, such as the Better Business Bureau, Chambers of Commerce, and industry associations.
Marketing Tip #6: Impose a deadline. Counteract one of the biggest obstacles to closing a sale known to mankind: procrastination. To overcome the natural human tendancy to deliberate, postpone, and delay, it's often necessary to inject a sense of urgency into your ads, sales presentations, and marketing messages. Marketing Tip: Whether supplies are limited or prices are going up at the end of the month, some prospects need to have a deadline or an incentive to motivate them to take action now.
Marketing Tip #7: Create a small business marketing plan to identify and capitalize on your strengths and opportunities. Your marketing strategies should also take into account factors such as your weaknesses (and possible remedies), external threats (competition, economic factors, etc.), your marketing mix strategy (products/services, promotional goals, pricing strategy, and distribution decisions), media strategy, sales and expense budgets, target market analysis (know your customers), and readily available marketing tools, as well as marketing strategies and tools that you need to research or acquire.
Marketing Tips #8: Embrace Web marketing, because it's powerful, it can be very effective, and it's here to stay! If you already have a web site, make sure it's "optimized" for keywords that your prospects are actually looking for. You can find out what keywords your customers are searching for and how much competition you're up against for those particular keywords by subscribing to a service, such as Wordtracker . Another vital aspect of raising your visibility on Google (and your sales potential) is to get other sites to link to your site. It's generally referred to as getting backlinks or incoming links. This technqiue will bring you the optimal benefit when the sites linking to you are well-established, have a similar theme to your site, or are considered an "authority site". (The ultimate authority sites from which to get links are government sites (dot-gov), educational institutions (dot-edu), and organizations (dot-org). Web sites that have gained quality incoming links from other sites tend to be ranked much higher by Google than those that don't. All things being equal, more traffic usually translates into more sales and profits -- and, of course, that's the reason most people go into business.