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Believe it or not, your small business has an edge. No, you might not be as well-funded, well-connected or even as well-established as the big guys. But something convinced you to go out on your own. Something convinced you that you could compete. You are smaller, more agile, more adaptable than your larger competitors. And maybe more imaginative too. Don’t miss any opportunity to hone that edge. Or any tool that can help you do it.

Referrals

The best way to get new customers. It costs less and yet is probably more reliable than any other method imaginable as a tool to grow your business, especially in the beginning. So why do so few small businesses do it well? In this interview with John Jantch of Duct Tape Marketing we learn more about the technique that, more than anything else, will change the way you do business. The Rise To The Top

Teaching your business to market itself. “If we all know that referrals are the best, most cost-effective marketing strategy, then WHY OH WHY do we continue to leave referrals up to fate or some happy coincidence?” asks Ivana Taylor in the lead of her review of John Jantch’s new book The Referral Engine also discussed in the interview above. Small Business Trends

Startup

Think you can’t start a small business? Read this inspiring interview with Weldon Long and think again. After 20 years, as Long describes, “broke, homeless and drunk” including a 13 year stint in prison, he turned his life around to build an Inc.5000 company with more than $20,000,000 in sales. Entrepreneurship Interviews

From ex-felons to entrepreneurs. Business owner Todd Pemberton has a unique approach to rehabilitation. When ex-cons Pemberton has worked with get out of the clink, they often become small business owners of their own. He’s also hired some paroled ex-felons motivated by a very different kind of investment. Read his story. Inc.com

Social Media

What one tool should your small business consider using today? If asked, Becky McCray would answer social media, adding that, rather than being overwhelmed by the many possible channels out there, small business owners should focus on just one. And that one should be Facebook. Listen to the full podcast discussion. Bigg Success

Want to know the real power of social media to help small business? How about the story of how the 20 something Hampton, Iowa, entrepreneur of a shop known as Orange Possum who won a $5,000 small business grant just because supporters nominated her in an online contest and encouraged others to vote via Facebook. What could you do with social media to boost your small business? Need A Little Advice?

Marketing

Putting your eggs in one basket. In addition to e-mail and traditional marketing, there are many other solutions out there including guerrilla marketing and social media marketing. The success or failure of each will vary with the type of business you run and the market you are trying to reach. So be informed about your decisions. Prisma Graphic Blog

The secret to NoFollow marketing. With increased emphasis on preventing simple link building SEO strategies with use of NoFollow tags on YouTube and other social networks, don’t make the assumption these platforms are now not particularly helpful when planning your online marketing strategy. Business consultant Paul Rudo makes this recommendation when approaching at least one kind of NoFollow marketing. Small Business CEO

Policy

Progress in the movement to set limits on credit card interchange fees? On Thursday, the U.S. Senate passed a bill giving the Federal Reserve the authority to regulate interchange fees. But the bill must be reconciled with proposed legislation in the U.S. House before becoming law. Vantage Viewpoint

From Small Business Trends

photo credit: Tormod Sandtorv

Web 3.0 from Kate Ray on Vimeo.

A story about the Semantic Web

Interviews with:
Tim Berners-Lee
Clay Shirky
Chris Dixon
David Weinberger
Nova Spivack
Jason Shellen
Lee Feigenbaum
John Hebeler
Alon Halevy
David Karger
Abraham Bernstein

These Twitter Video Tutorials Will Teach You How To Make Money Using Twitter. You Also Get Resell Rights To These Videos And You Keep 100% Of The Profits. Start Making Money On Twitter Today! Twitter Video Tutorials.

DES PLAINES, IL – Live support, online videos, detailed FAQs and social media have always been integral parts of advertiser education offered by 7Search. A more detailed program now gives first-time 7Search advertisers the hands-on attention they need to understand pay-per-click and how to optimize a 7Search campaign for maximum return on their investment.

“The 7Search New Advertiser Training (NAT) program is the most comprehensive resource available for online marketers to learn how to best use their pay-per-click (ppc) budget and maximize the return on investment for their campaigns,” said Gemma Piscotti, 7Search Director of Marketing and Operations. “During the first two weeks a customer registers with 7Search, our NAT reps contact new advertisers to offer a customized campaign set-up. Once the campaign is live, NAT reps monitor its success and then make further suggestions and changes to the campaign to further improve the ROI for each advertiser. Once the client is happy with the results, a permanent account representative is assigned to the account in order to assist customers in any way for the duration of their 7Search ppc campaign.”

7Search account representatives are available 11 hours each day by phone, live chat or e-mail. This allows clients to have more access to professional account strategists who can answer questions about specific campaigns and how to bid successfully on keywords in 7Search’s Partner Network.

In addition, using social media outlets, 7Search takes a proactive approach to inform clients of new account tools and services, industry articles or important news via Facebook posts, blogs and Twitter.

“Online business people want campaign advice immediately and wherever they are at the time. We utilize various outlets to keep our customers armed with information they can use that same day for their business,” explained Piscotti. “We even started an AskPPC forum which gives clients and non-clients alike a direct portal to our account strategists to answer any questions they may have about pay-per-click advertising in general. The goal of the New Advertiser Training program is to educate our new clients immediately on how to maximize the return on investment for each of their ppc campaigns so dollars are not wasted due to poor execution. This program has been very effective in doing that.”

About 7Search.com: 7Search.com has been a leading pay per click search engine advertising and affiliate network since our inception in 1999 and is dedicated to providing value and service for online businesses. Continually recognized as a premier online advertising solution and a respected Web partner network, 7Search has provided thousands of Web businesses with an economical and measurable opportunity to obtain Internet traffic and generate revenue through their online presence. For more information, please visit www.7Search.com.

Written by: Simon Slade, Guest Blogger

Those of us in the affiliate marketing world work hard to get visitors to our pages, so it’s disappointing when they turn on their heels and walk out without even clicking a HopLink. The disappointment is intensified if you actually paid for the traffic using PPC advertising.

What can you do about this? Is it possible to still get value from visitors who are leaving your site? Do you just let them walk away, or can you still convert them into potential customers without requiring them to buy right then?

A lot of smart Internet marketers realize that every visitor to their site has value, and they maximize that value by realizing that even though not every visitor will hand over money, they can part with something that may prove just as valuable – their email address. Having a list of qualified, opted-in visitors can be very valuable to your marketing efforts, allowing you to re-market to these visitors later (just follow all CAN-SPAM guidelines), and can be a powerful bargaining chip when negotiating joint ventures with other Internet marketers.

Studies indicate that the majority of site visitors leave within 8 seconds of visiting a site. Another significant percentage leaves after reviewing the landing page and deciding the content is either not relevant, or not compelling enough for them. A mere 3% will actually make a purchase, on average. Interestingly enough, though, approximately 30% of visitors will sign up for a newsletter.

If you’re not getting many email addresses from visitors right now, and you’re feeling frustrated by all the traffic just walking away, then I strongly encourage you to try the following methods to improve your signup conversion rate.

• Popover – A popover is a small overlay containing newsletter signup information that can be set to appear on every visitor’s screen shortly after they arrive at your site. Unlike popups, browser blockers do not affect popovers. They can’t be missed either. They appear in an overlay that sits over the top of the page and can be as detailed as you like, listing the reasons why they should sign up and fields for their name and email address. You can see an example of this on SaleHoo’s main landing page (give it a few seconds to show up). You can style them any way you like and include as much or as little text as you want. To maximize your chances of a signup, make it clear what’s in it for them and make sure the whole process is easy and works smoothly!Testing indicates that delaying the popover for about 20 seconds gives visitors a chance to get familiar with your site so they’ll be more inclined to sign up.

• Sidebar signup – If you run a WordPress site, then adding a sidebar widget is something you can probably do in your sleep. Signup form code can be pasted into a standard text/HTML widget. With your signup form appearing on every page of your site, it increases the chances of it being seen and capturing an email lead before they exit, regardless of the entrance page.

Give them a reason to give you their email

Asking for an email address outright doesn’t generally work. The novelty of getting emails wore off about 10 years ago, so there needs to be a good reason for someone to part with their email address these days!

The secret to getting a visitor’s email address is to think about what they want. It sounds obvious but it’s often ignored. You get them what they want and they’ll give you what you want. Simple.

Think about what you have of value that you can offer in exchange for an email address.

• A free eBook
• A free 7-part mini-course
• A free trial membership
• A free SEO report on the visitor’s website (using an SEO tool like Traffic Travis)

Obviously free is a good start, but make it relevant and you’ll be on to a sure thing. For example, if you have a site about dog training, then offer a 7-part course on house training a puppy. Or, if your site is focused on Internet marketing, tempt them with a “Beginners Guide to PPC” eBook.

Give visitors two options: Buy or leave their email address

If you’re only focusing on making sales you’re ignoring around 97% of your visitors. That’s not good business practice. If you put as much effort into capturing email addresses as you do trying to make a sale then you can look forward to a far more successful online business in the future, with an email list that can potentially earn you a lot of extra dollars in the months to come.

Do you try to capture email addresses? What works for you?

About the author

Simon Slade is the CEO of Affilorama, an affiliate marketing training portal that offers free video training, education, and affiliate tools to both beginning and advanced affiliate marketers. You can follow them on Twitter.

Small business owners may have more of a need than most to be able to access their chosen suite of productivity tools from more than one computer or platform. As a business or startup owner you may have occasion to bring your work home with you, or require frequent access to your to-do lists, notes and documents on the go.

Choosing primarily online tools for your productivity workflow is a great way to address the issue of source agnostic accessibility. It’s also a convenient method to ensure you have a backup of your important day-to-day items and files in case a particular computer or device fails. One other not insignificant factor in selecting cloud-based tools to keep you and your business on track is cost: the online equivalents of once desktop-bound applications are often much cheaper in both raw cost and maintenance cost, as tool upgrades usually happen behind the scenes and don’t require an in-house IT staff to keep up and running.

With the tools on this list, you should be able to check in on your current workflow stack regardless of which machine you happen to be in front of, what operating system it uses, and what browser it’s running. Plus, if you have a smartphone as your trusty mobile companion, chances are you’ll be able to access your tools from there as well. Check out our previous guide to mobile productivity tools as a logical companion to this piece, and consider your phone platform and setup and how well it may integrate with particular tools as you build out your productivity arsenal.

To-do Lists

One of the favorite and often-mentioned entrants in the to-do list category among productivity geeks is Remember the Milk. Featuring a robust reminder system via your choices of SMS, IM, or email, offline task management, integration with Google Calendar, and tight integration with several mobile platforms, Remember the Milk also has a clean and easy to use interface that Gettings Things Done aficionados swoon over. It also integrates with a number of other web services and third parties including Netvibes and iGoogle, Google maps, Twitter, Jott, the Mac and Linux desktop, and more.

Far from being the only game in town, however, Remember the Milk has a number of online to-do list peers worth checking out. Toodledo is a popular newcomer with a full-featured slate of ways to enter, organize, and sort your tasks. Featuring a tiered freemium service model, Toodledo also has great mobile integration and offers a handy comparison chart on how it stacks up against other popular web-based to-do apps.

If your to-do tastes run on the simpler and less cluttered side of the spectrum, there are several options worth looking into. TeuxDeux bills itself as a “simple, designy, free, browser-based to-do app” and embraces a minimalist interface accordingly. Task.fm is another interesting option in the minimalist category, with a source agnostic and natural language approach to getting items in and back out to you at just the right time with various reminder options. Ta-da List is a product from 37signals, makers of other popular web project management tools like Basecamp, Backpack, and Campfire — so if your small business already uses any 37signals tools you might find Ta-da List an excellent companion. Last but not least, the former Gmail Labs project Gmail Tasks is a simple to-do list that integrates right into Gmail, making it a nice and lightweight option for businesses that already use Gmail and/or Google Apps for email.

Note-Taking

It’s difficult to write about cloud-based note-taking without mentioning Evernote. You can get notes into Evernote in any number of ways, from email to browser bookmarklet to desktop or mobile app, as well as via the web-based interface and even via Twitter. You can also leave voice notes, plus have Evernote use optical character recognition to scan photos of business cards and other documents, converting printed material into searchable text. On the organizational side, you can create multiple notebooks, tag individual entries, and set up saved searches for frequently accessed collections. Evernote’s freemium business model offers a generous amount of monthly usage in the free version and a reasonable $5 per month/$45 per year premium version with a higher usage limit and other pro features.

Two other good choices for cloud-based notebooks that integrate well with their full-featured office suite counterparts are Google Notebook and Zoho Notebook. Both feature a typical web-based WYSIWYG note-taking environment as well as sharing and collaboration options for your notes and documents that need to be socialized. If you already routinely use either Google Docs or Zoho Office in your business to manage documents, it might make sense to adopt their notebook counterparts for your outboard brain workflow needs.

A couple of online note-taking options based on wiki technology include Springnote and Luminotes. They feature easy methods of linking pages and concepts together, and if you’re already familiar with the wiki concept and looking for a lightweight notebook that uses similar concepts you may want to check out these two. Springnote also promotes collaboration via notebook sharing as well.

Information and News Gathering

When it comes to staying on top of developments in your industry and trends that might affect your business, it can seem daunting to make sure what’s most important crosses your desk and your eyeballs. Several related categories of online tools can help sift through the noise and help you pull out the signal, plus safely store information and concepts you may need to retrieve later.

In an earlier article we covered how to choose a news reader for keeping tabs on your industry, and by far the most popular web-based offering in that category is Google Reader. And if you prefer a cleaner, more magazine-like view of your Reader feeds over Google’s native interface, Firefox users should definitely give Feedly a try. But simply employing an RSS reader doesn’t always solve the problem of having too much incoming information to stay on top of, which doesn’t always come in at the most convenient time for you to absorb it.

A couple of tools can help with the latter problem of specifically storing an article and helping you remember to read it later, perhaps when other duties and tasks have quieted down and you find yourself with some spare moments to catch up on the things you knew you should make time to read at some point. Both Instapaper and Read It Later allow you to create a stack of items set aside for later reading, with a simple and uncluttered interface allowing you to check off or archive items after you’ve gotten around to reading them. Both integrate with various other tools in your online arsenal, with browser bookmarklet entry and iPhone integration. Instapaper also integrates with Feedly so you can send items directly to it from your feed reading experience, while Read It Later offers a Firefox extension that brings your “to read” stack closely into your browser. Instapaper also allows you to easily generate a printable version of your on deck items, or even download them in Kindle or ePub formats for reading on the go.

For longer-term storage of important articles, social bookmarking tools come in handy for preventing your bookmarks from being “trapped” in a single browser on a single machine. One of the original pioneering web services, delicious.com, is still flourishing (and now owned by Yahoo). Using a browser bookmarklet you can send articles and web pages you want to refer back to later to your delicious account, plus a short personal note and topic tags. The net effect of collecting many users’ individual bookmarks also creates a valuable discovery engine that can turn you on to even more relevant material in your business’s industry or niche. Two other options worth checking out include Diigo, a relative newcomer that offers integration with your delicious collection and allows you to highlight and annotate portions of pages, and Clipmarks, which focuses on saving and sharing just the parts of web pages you find most useful.

Going Further

The above are just a few of the productivity categories in which online tools can help your current workflow stack stay accessible from almost anywhere. Other web-based tools can help with mobile office needs from calendaring to document collaboration, file-sharing to collaborative presentations, from start pages to contact management and more. Other tools, like Jott Assistant, are out there to help you tie those tools together and access them via other applications you use regularly.

It’s helpful to keep a flexible and open attitude towards your workflow and the tools you use, and occasionally take stock of what’s working, what’s not working as well as it should, and areas where your productivity seems to suffer. If you’re willing to spend even a modest amount of time being periodically adventurous with new tools, you could open workflow channels you weren’t even aware were blocked, and even infuse your day-to-day and your business with new ideas and new energy.

photo credit: Elsie esq.

In this promising year of 2010, the revised and updated online course is soon to be available. Complete and for free. If you had previously signed up for the course, you will be notified with your access information. If you would like to receive access to the course, simply join the vaultis.com newsletter list by entering your email address on the right side of our home page at vaultis.com.

Assuming you are already into an affiliate program, what would be the next thing you would want to do? Double, or even triple, your commissions?

Here are some powerful tips on how to boost your affiliate program commissions:

1. Know the best program and products to promote. Obviously, you would want to promote a program that will enable you to achieve the greatest profits in the shortest possible time.

There are several factors to consider in selecting such a program. Choose the ones that have a generous commission structure. Have products that fit in with your target audience or niche. And that has a solid track record of paying their affiliate easily and on time. If you cannot increase your investment, drop that program and keep looking for better ones.

There are thousands of affiliate programs online to choose from. This gives you the reason to be picky. You may want to select the best to avoid losing your advertising dollars. Remember, competition is vital. One easy way to see if there is competition, is to do a search for the product name. By clicking on the paid ads for that product, you can see what is working for others. Sending prospective buyers directly to the seller’s sale page (direct linking) is not always the best method. Having your own sales page through your own domain name, gives you the advantage of being able to collect email addresses before sending the prospective buyers to the vendor’s website.

Create free reports or short ebooks to distribute from your website. There is a great opportunity that you are competing with other affiliates that are promoting the same program. If you start writing short report related to the product you are promoting, you will be able to distinguish yourself from the other affiliates.

In the reports, provide some valuable information for free. When possible, add some recommendations about the products. With ebooks, you get credibility. Customers will see that in you and they will be enticed to try out what you are offering.

2. Collecting the email addresses of those who download your free ebooks. It is a known fact that people do not make a purchase on the first solicitation. You may want to send out your message more than six times to make a sale.

This is the simple reason why you should collect the contact information of those who downloaded your reports and ebooks. You can follow-up with these contacts to remind them to make a purchase from you.

When you get their names, you can always send other marketing messages to them to be able to earn an ongoing commission instead of a one-time sale only.

Publish an online newsletter or E-zine. It is always best to recommend a product to someone you know than to sell to a stranger. This is the purpose behind publishing your own newsletter. This also allows you to develop a relationship based on trust with your subscribers.

This strategy is a delicate balance between providing useful information with a sales pitch. If you continue to write informative editorials you will be able to build a sense of trust in your readers that may lead them to support you by buying your products.

3. Ask for higher than normal commission from merchants. If you are already successful with a particular promotion, you should try and approach the merchant and negotiate a percentage commission for your sales.

If the merchant is smart, he or she will likely grant your request rather than lose a valuable asset in you. Keep in mind that you are a zero-risk investment to your merchant; so do not be shy about requesting for addition in your commissions. Just try to be reasonable about it.

Write strong pay Per Click ads. PPC search engine is the most effective means of advertising online. As an affiliate, you can make a small income just by managing PPC campaigns such as Google AdWords and Microsoft adCenter. Then you should try and monitor them to see which ads are more effective and which ones to dispose of.

Implement these strategies and see the difference it can make to your commission checks.