Big global companies usually have a social media department but medium and small companies usually add this job for some marketing or PR manager in addition to his area of responsibility or hire some cheap employee or intern — with negative results.  So how should a small business with limited resources realistically approach social media marketing?

The time and resources needed to be effective in social media is certainly a problem for companies big and small. I think we can burst the bubble by now  — social media is NOT free. In fact, large brands are devoting a significant part of their marketing budget into these efforts.

There seems to be no choice — most companies must develop some competency in this channel. In addition to the obvious reason that social media has become a preferred method of communication (and complaining) for many demographic groups, other marketing channels are drying up.

The transition to a social marketing mindset is difficult for companies of any size!  One huge consumer goods company laid-off 1,500 marketers last month because they didn’t have the right skillset to move into the future. Another global brand I work with has literally tested the digital competency of every marketing person in their company. Low scorers are going through mandatory training, medium scorers are going through advanced training and even high scorers are going through a series of “TED talk”-like seminars.

These represent two strategies toward this transition — jettison ineffective resources or aggressively re-train them.

But let’s get back to the original question, what if you’re a small business and have very few resources to begin with?  How do you make this transition?

The big difference is, as a small business owner, you have less room for error.  You probably don’t have the luxury of hiring a new team to create a social media effort.  So here are some ways to minimize the risk during this transition:

1) Do a reality check. Before committing to a new plan, conduct a simple survey or get out and talk to your customers. Where are they spending their time?  What are your competitors doing?  Keep in mind that there is probably a first-movers advantage for many businesses so don’t overlook the fact that creating a competency in social media marketing could be a source of competitive advantage.

2) Learn. To move ahead with social media for your business, you don’t have to be an expert, but you do have to learn enough to at least ask the right questions.  If you’re just starting out, here is a video series that can help get you quickly up to speed on the basics:  Social Media From Scratch.

3) Set real goals. What are your company’s critical needs right now? How can some of these new social media opportunities specifically align with your goals? Don’t get caught up in the hype. Your budget probably does not have much room for “extra,” so think through how this activity will best move the needle for your business.

4) Get professional help. 95% of the companies I see engaging in social media are simply checking a box and not getting much out of the effort. In other words, they had somebody’s cousin create the company Facebook page.  For the first six months, it usually makes sense to invest in a marketing professional to give you some guidance and speed you through the learning curve.

It’s like strapping yourself to an instructor the first time you skydive. After a couple trips, you’re ready to go it alone. When seeking expert help, ask this question: What previous marketing experience do you have and can you show me measurable results of your social media efforts? That will weed out most self-proclaimed “gurus!”

5) Don’t view social media as an “add on.” Before you hire a new social media team, I would first look at where you are spending your current budget and resources – is it time to simply re-adjust?  For example, spending on newspaper advertising has declined by 75% in the US (down to 1950s levels).  If you have been spending much of your time on traditional forms of advertising, it might be time to move those resources to something else. You have to go where your customers are.  Should you re-allocate?  If you just pile more work on to existing employees this will probably fail.

6) Re-frame the opportunity. Here is some good news. Ten years ago, you would take out an ad and wait for something to happen. Today, literally every employee can be involved in “marketing” as a beacon for your company on the social web. It’s a new way of thinking, isn’t it? How can you capture employee incremental time or down time? How can you involve and engage the many networks of your employees, customers, and other stakeholders?

Another way to re-frame the opportunity is that marketing through the social web can possibly be a great equalizer for small businesses. For a little bit of time and effort, you can potentially have a very powerful impact and possibly reach vast new audiences.

7) Realistic expectations.  For many small companies, the result from social media marketing is more like the long-term benefits of networking at a chamber of commerce meeting than the short-term benefits of issuing a coupon in the newspaper. Don’t get me wrong — short-term benefits are certainly possible — but in general, aim for long-term benefits such as increasing customer loyalty.

I’ve worked with many small businesses and start-ups so I know how painful and risky these marketing decisions can be.  I’d love to hear from you. What additional recommendations would you give a small business trying to make begin a social media marketing program?

Comments

1. You need to focus on increasing the value of your work

We live in an age where someone can go to Google and in a few minutes, find providers in your industry, claiming to offer what you offer, for less money. You don’t want to have to compete by being cheapest, so the alternative is to focus on value.

If you pump enough value into what you do and lift your service is head and shoulders above the average providers in your industry, you are no longer competing with them. Prices or fees are no longer the same factor they were.

For example, the most expensive restaurant in your city isn’t competing with the local fast food joints on price. The reason people will pay hundreds for a meal in a top restaurant, is that they are not paying for the calories. They can buy the calories at Burger King for pennies!

They are paying for the experience. They are paying for the value.

The answer? I suggest you stop doing what 99% of your competitors do. Instead, be different. Not different just for the sake of it, but different because you are offering a uniquely valuable experience. The starting point for me and many others I know, came when we stopped doing work that paid and started doing work that mattered.

2. You need to focus on marketing your value

You don’t want your business to be the best kept secret in town. For your business to succeed, you need your marketing to attract the attention of the right people and show them just how great you are.

Earning people’s attention is harder today than ever before, because your prospective clients have never had so much information to navigate through every day. Your marketing is trying to get noticed, in a non-stop deluge of messages. Your prospective clients are being bombarded with everything from radio / TV commercials, email marketing, text messages and social media updates, to direct mail, websites, cold callers and newspaper ads. It’s non-stop and somehow, you need to get noticed.

The answer? If you are serious about getting your message heard above all those other people trying to do the same, you need to be significantly better then they are, at earning the attention of your marketplace. Some of those guys are very good, others are good and others are just very noisy. A great place to start, is to understand that the more you pester people, the less likely it is that they will listen to you. People hate being pestered or pursued.

Small business marketing 2012 style

The kind of marketing you need, is marketing that earns people’s attention and then earns their consideration. This blog post is a great example. You are reading this now, because you either subscribe to the blog or visited the blog and read it. Below this free information, there’s a short note letting people know that if they want me to show them how to get great marketing results, they just need to get in touch. This week, around a hundred thousand people will see that message below my posts, without me needing to pay for ads, attend networking events or pester anyone.

Some free help

I’ve just updated my Top Marketing Tips. It’s now a few thousand words long and contains dozens of practical ideas, tips and suggestions, to help you massively improve your marketing.

Of course, if you’d like me to work with you and show you exactly what you need to do, read the message below.

Comments

I know that should seem obvious, but if more people truly appreciated this fact, they would go about their business in an entirely different manner.

Most businesses are started by people who think they know how to do something or think they want to sell something. In other words, most businesses are started with the business in mind.

But, if we actually understood that the only thing that mattered was an abundant volume of profitable customers, we would surely start with the customer in mind, right?

Customer focus vs. business focus

Another way of saying this is that instead of starting a business and then going out and finding customers that want to buy what you sell, you should go out and find customers and then build a business around what they want to buy.

In this model you really only have two jobs to master. First, you must come to understand precisely what your market will pay for and then you must build a repeatable sales system that allows you to profitably get it to them.

Get customer discovery and sales right and you can’t fail.

No matter if you’re an accountant, consultant, plumber or jeweler, your main job is to get out there into some segment of the market you hope to serve and ask them what they want, what they don’t have and what they are willing to pay for, even if what they want isn’t what you want to sell – or maybe especially if that’s the case.

Until you fully appreciate this idea your business is a crapshoot at best.

Now, I’m not saying that you’re going to base every decision, every feature, every twist and turn on customer feedback, but I am saying that you need to stay very close to customers and prospects as you think about your offerings and test everything with them until you land on a value proposition that gains traction.

Test and evolve

Before you launch a business or product test your assumptions – test your packaging, pricing, bundling, message, products, services, branding, revenue streams and business model with some segment of your market and pay attention. So often, what seems crystal clear to us makes no sense when unleashed into the wild.

This is not the same as research really – this is more like constant, real-time feedback and it involves constant testing, including what the customer experience is like after they buy, why they might buy more and what it would take to get them to refer you.

Build a sales action process

This is a process and the aim of this process is to figure out how to create profitable customers before you commit to what your business actually does and offers.

Once you do this, you can move to building and scaling a marketing action plan that turns this process into consistent and predictable results.

Then and only then, will you build a business that cannot fail.

Comments

Yes there are what amounts to cosmetic changes to your page that make sense and yes there are lots of people that still want to sell you products and apps and services to enhance your new page, but for most of you there’s still only one that that matters.

See, the thing that many people don’t understand is that few people actually go to your page to bounce around and see all that good stuff you’ve added. Most people interact with their friends and pages through the news feed only. Think about your own use, do you go visit every page of content for the things you like, share and comment on?

Of course not, you interact right there in your news feed and so does everyone else.

So, what does this really mean? There are some really basic things you should change on your pages, like placing a killer brand friendly cover image, but the real focus should be on upping your sharing of lots of great content directly on your wall. Make sure you share directly – share blog posts, videos, eBooks, images and great finds, and place as many as possible directly in your status updates without the use of a 3rd party tool.

Facebook loves to show what I would call direct content, stuff you place directly in your status updates, over that placed by apps like StumbleUpon, Buffer or Tweetdeck.

Bottom line – if you want more traffic, engagement and value out of Facebook, focus on the wall first and worry about the cool apps and Timeline changes second.
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1. Real world limitations.
2. Self imposed limitations.

If you are 80 years old, you’re not going to win the Olympic 100 meters final.  This is a real world limitation.

However, if you find yourself saying you will never make a million or never become a best-selling author, this is a self-imposed limitation. Countless people have gone from being penniless to wealthy.  Harry Potter author JK Rowling, went from nowhere to a string of international best selling books AND went from living on social security, to a personal fortune in the hundreds of millions.

From hard to impossible

There’s a huge difference between something that’s hard to do and something that’s impossible.  The challenge here, is that if we erroneously believe something to be impossible for us, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.  We either don’t get started or we start off, believing we can’t do it – both of which lead to the prophecy becoming real.

Many things that are hard or difficult, are mistakenly filed in our minds as impossible.  Each time we do this, we place a false limitation on that area and set a very low ceiling on our potential there too.  This is why we need to ensure that we are clear, regarding those things we believe to be impossible and those which are challenging, but achievable.  Otherwise, we risk doing work that pays, rather than work that matters, because it’s less challenging.

Reality check

It’s wise to take a look at the limitations we have placed on our business and determine how many of them are real world limitations and how many are self imposed limitations.

The biggest stumbling block to our success is usually the person staring at us in the mirror!

Comments

There are many possibilities for small companies to use the crowd. As specialized platforms, services and features are build to tend to the needs of diverse companies alike, it becomes easier (and easier) for smaller companies to reach that crowd. Here, I’ve laid out five ways your small business can take advantage of the crowdsourcing wave.

1. Product Development, Ideas and Brainstorming

Crowdsourcing can help you determine what the public thinks of your product and ideas. You can involve potential customers in the process of developing a new product or service, showing them your aim is to meet their needs. Crowdsourcing serves your Customer Relationship Management purposes as much as it does your Marketing and Product Development.

The biggest problem for small businesses is their “crowd” is not yet developed. Since reaching a crowd is the main issue with crowdsourcing for small businesses, it is best to first start on platforms that have existing crowds – and are not yet overcrowded.

One example of such a platform is ideavibes (www.ideavibes.com), which allows you to post a project or question and have the ideavibes crowd vote on ideas, give suggestions, and spread the word about your question.

If you are searching to look at your ideas from a new angle you can use a brainstorming platform, such as Atizo (https://www.atizo.com/), where you can find inspiration for new products and solutions.

2. Microtasking

Especially in small businesses, often a situation arises where you have tedious tasks to be done but not the capacity to get them done within your company. In this case, you can use a platform (such as Amazon Mechanical Turk (www.mturk.com) or Clickworker (www.clickworker.com)) to post tasks and have the crowd work on them. Typical tasks for these kind of platforms are sorting pictures into categories, researching addresses, translating or writing small texts. Most of the tasks put out on these platforms are small, but they are posted in large numbers and crowdworkers get paid by the number they fulfill.

3. Outsourcing

For tasks in which your smaller business might not have the exact specialized knowledge or skills, there are platforms where you can find the right person to get the job done.

If you need new designs for logos, flyers or business cards, post the task on a special design platform (ex.99Designs (www.99designs.com) or Design Crowd (www.designcrowd.com)). On these platforms, you set the task at a fixed price and designers can submit design suggestions. You are able to give feedback to get better results. In the end, you choose one of the suggested designs and close the deal directly on the platform.

The advantages of these platforms are that you know beforehand how much the design will cost and you can choose from a variety of suggestions. The disadvantage is, as many people try to get a design at a low budget, designs can lack in quality. To achieve better results, offer higher wages – and you will get more offers. As there are no quality measures except your own, you have to work your way through all design offers.

There are also platforms where you can find freelancers (www.freelancer.com) for diverse tasks, such as IT-projects and marketing texts. You propose a task, get offers and seal the contract directly on the platform. As you have no real chance of getting to know the people offering before sealing the contract, you should be cautious with significant projects. These outsourcing platforms are excellent for managing small tasks, with a variety of offers to choose from.

4. Innovation-platforms:

If you wish to get in contact with people on a deeper level, use a project-board such as within the professional, social media platform exploreB2B (www.exploreB2B.com). Since the network revolves around users with personal profiles who submit articles relating to their industry interests and needs, the relationship with the ‘outsourcer’ is often already established.

Should you need a particular project completed, there is a space within the platform to post a project with a suggest price range. You can work directly on the platform or distribute the project request throughout other social media sites with the goal of reaching a large crowd through networking with the right connections.

On other platforms (such as Innocentive (www.innocentive.com) or Hypios (www.hypios.com)) ‘solvers’ try to give an answer for a set price on the platform. The posted questions are challenging with the answer not at hand. Accordingly, the prices can reach fairly impressive sums. If the answer cannot be found by one person, the solvers find online projectrooms were they can work together. These provide a great opportunity for companies of all sizes to start innovating.

5. Crowdfunding:

Crowds can also be used to fund projects. Platforms like indiegogo (www.indiegogo.com) give the opportunity to gather money from the crowd. As the crowd always needs a trigger to begin contributing, think carefully about the kind of project you want the crowd to fund and the story you will tell to get them interested enough to give money. Always a good idea are projects that help our environment, children or pets. But other ideas might get funding too – you just have to tell the story right and spread the word.

Crowdsourcing is not only for the big players. There are many opportunities for small companies to gain influence through the crowd. The point? If you have a task or a question you want to put to the crowd, there are a multitude of ways to reach the crowd; the crowd has a lot of power you can tap into for your own business.

Comments

1. It might work out just how you wanted, right out the box!
2. It might work later, after you make a few adjustments. By putting an idea into action, you attract feedback. Feedback allows you to tweak and improve.
3. It might flop. If it does, you get to learn from it and invest that learning in future opportunities. This is how most true progress is made.

Feedback is your friend

When you truly understand the value of feedback, it becomes a lot easier to take action with your ideas and insights. Looking at the 3 possible scenarios above, you will have noticed that it’s impossible for you to fail – UNLESS you fail to take action.

One of the great paradoxes in life, is that the best way to succeed more often, is to increase your (so called) failure rate. The challenge here, is that many business owners have not yet figured this out. They avoid taking action on their ideas, unless they are convinced, in advance, the idea will work out exactly how they want it to.

Take action. Give your ideas the opportunity to fly and give yourself the opportunity to learn. Increase your failure rate by 500% over the next 12 months and I’m telling you, you will make more progress than you can imagine.

Comments

As we approach the end of the first month of the year how are you progressing with your objectives and goals? The chances are you started off the year with great expectations of all the things you wanted to achieve in the first quarter of the year, but one or two things have not gone to plan.

Many of us find ourselves in the situation where we want and need to be more productive – in fact I don’t think I have met anyone in the last 3 years who has not remarked that they have to achieve more with fewer resources.

One of the people I know is constantly researching and applying tips to be more productive is Keith Bohanna. We met several years ago and while we don’t see each other often, I know that this is a passion for him.

Late last year I noted Keith was offering ‘taster workshop’ on the subject of productivity – something he does along side his consulting assignments and his postion as Chair of the Irish Internet Association.

So I thought who better to share with us tips to ensure that we keep the achievement of our goals on track by increasing our productivity. Here are the questions I asked Keith and his responses.

Krishna: One of the challenges many of us have is the issue of email overload. Can you share with us tips to manage or email inbox more effectively?

Keith: Here are four actions you can take immediately.

1. Close your email client and only check from hourly to twice a day. It’s not urgent, no one will notice. Except you – because you will become a lot more focused on your work.

2. Create ‘rules’ for your email folders. If you are in a corporate environment consider an inbox rule which automatically moves into a folder all emails in which you ar receiving copies of emails (where you are included as a ‘cc’). Follow this tip for a month and see if you miss anything important to getting your job done.

3. Use an alternative tool to email. Consider introducing a tool such as Chatter (from Salesforce) or Yammer. They are highly effective for the non-urgent, random, “water cooler” and group list emails from others within your business or organisation. For smaller groups or sole traders you could use these tools for projects that you collaborate on with others.

4. Read each email once and immediately decide what to do with it. That means actually reading it. Slowly. Not skimming over it and hoping the contents get magically “absorbed” into your head. The decision should be:
a) it needs action – move the email into your project/to-do system
b) no action required – delete or archive the email
c) reference – move the email into your reference system.

Krishna: With many people using social media as part of their communications tool kit, what recommendations do you have to ensure that people manage their time effectively in these chanels?

Keith: Social media platforms can be managed effectively and here are three recommendations for you.

1. Make good use of your smart phone. Take the opportunity to install social media applications on your phone and use the periods you have ‘down time’ for the casual interactions.

2. Use tools to manage online mentions. Be methodical around monitoring mentions of your business or brand by using free tools (for example Tweetdeck and Hootsuite are two popular tools) and do so two or three times a day. Once you are happy you have set the search terms, this will save you time.

3. Establish your social media goals. Have clear objectives for your use of social media (unless it is purely personal or useed for peer to peer contact). Record those measures and track them weekly and monthly.

Krishna: Many people communte to work or travel a lot for business meetings. Can you share with us tips to stay productive when travelling?

Keith: I travel for business and and I find these tips help.

1. Use Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP) email and not Post Office Protocol (POP). With POP you may read and sort all your new mail on your mobile device, but when you log back into your computer you will be presented with a full inbox of unread messages that you have to re-read and re-organise. This can be very frustrating. You will need to speak to your IT department (or if you are a solo preneur speak to your IT savvy friends) to put this into practice. If you use Gmail you can find out more details here.

2. Get in sync. You need all of your contacts, calendar and key documents to be identical or able to be accessed on every working device you have. Evernote and Dropbox lead the field here with their ability to keep everything you need accessible to you everywhere and without thinking or active effort – thats the important bit here!

3. Make use of your ‘down time’. Whether you are travelling by train, plane or car, you can take the opportunity to do tasks which you do not need to be in the office to undertake. For example, doing a review of your projects is perfect for a train or plane where you have minimal interruptions and a chance to focus. In your car listen to podcast materials relevant to your work or of interest to you.

Krishna: Can you recommended resources or applications to help us be more productive?

Keith: There are a large number of apps and services which can help you – which you choose will depend on your personal circumstances.

1. For Outlook users consider Getting Things Done® Outlook® Add-In by Netcentrics – it layers GTD functionality over the usual Outlook interface. Getting Things Done (or GTD) is a productivity approach pioneered by David Allen.

2. For Gmail users I recommend you try Active Inbox – it is a free plugin that installs into Chrome and Firefox, which helps you manage your email tasks and projects supporting the Getting Things Done appoach.

3. For a tool independent of your email client check out Remember The Milk. It is a free task manager application and a firm favorite in the ‘ThinkProductive’ office and runs across apps on all platforms for example Apple, Android and Blackberry.

Krishna: You have shared thirteen great tipsso perhaps you can share a fourteenth tip for those readers who prefer even numbers! Can you share a bonus tip of something that you are working on to help you be even more productive in 2012?

Keith: My final tip is all about Focus. It is not about ‘doing stuff’ (and definitely not about compiling lists of things to do).

The secret to making 2012 great for us all is to ‘pull up’ out of the day-to-day and give ourselves time to get clear on the key projects that will make a real difference.

Once you have identified those projects, then you can start to shift your ‘day-to-day activities’ to favour those projects. Even if you cannot do so immediately, you should make significant progress over a couple of months.

I do hope these tips help you be more productive in 2012. Thank you Krishna for the invitation to share these tips with you and hope they go some way to making 2012 more enjoyable for your readers!

A SPECIAL OFFER TO HELP YOU BE MORE PRODUCTIVE IN GETTING THINGS DONE IN 2012

If you want to learn more about beoming more productive and explore the setting-up of a personal productivity system, I highly recommed that you check out the forthcoming workshop that Keith will be facilitating for ThinkProductive, “How to Get Things Done”. It takes place in Dublin on 7 February 2012.

You can find out more details on the Think Productive website and Keith has generously offered a 15 percent discount to anyone who books using the code Krishna15 when booking your place.

Note – this is not an affiliate programme so I don’t get a referral fee – it’s a kind offer from Keith tmy Biz Growth Community.

I wrote recently about how to find your point of differentiation by seeking clarity and you may find that post a perfect compliment to what I am going to share today.

To me getting clear about strategy is the most important challenge business owners face and I’m going to challenge them first to look inward. I’m going to ask them to choose a marketing strategy that is infused with who they, why they do what they do and how to use that story to attract opportunities and clients.

But then I’m going to give them a very specific set of tactics to put their strategy into action and on display.

Every industry group feels that their business, their needs, their way of marketing is unique – that they are the only ones that must rely on word of mouth or referrals. While every industry has a unique set of clients, a unique language, maybe even an unusual distribution model, the way that customers come to know, like and trust them is fundamentally the same.

Today, specifically, I am going to introduce this group to a core set of practices that every business can use to communicate their simple, clear, marketing strategy.

Build and tell stories – You must develop a set of core stories that you use in your business building. The stories that help people understand how your business is different, not because of what it does so much, but because of what it cares about or doesn’t do.

These stories must radiate from you, your staff, and your community and will ultimately make up the foundation of your brand promise.

Sell by teaching – You must commit to using education as your primary means of influence. This is one of the most powerful ways to differentiate your business in the eyes of those that come to work for you as well as those that comes to experience your unique point of view through exposure to your teaching.

When you embrace teaching in everything you do, your staff begins to understand that the company is their first customer.

Become a platform – It’s no longer enough to think in terms of building a product or service. In fact, it’s no longer enough to simply build a community of prospects, users and buyers.

In order to truly differentiate you must begin to think of your business as a platform for others to get what they need. You must expand your thinking from business to marketplace.

Can you create opportunity for strategic partners? Can you teach others how to launch businesses from your business? Can you mentor employees and become a hub for their personal growth?

These are questions that will take you far beyond the typical business building mindset, but the answers may become the higher purpose for your business.

Reverse the experience – Finally, I’m going to suggest that the greatest way to deliver a remarkable marketing strategy is to deliver a remarkable marketing experience before, during and after a customer is a customer.

I’ve shared my concept of the Marketing Hourglass now with tens of thousands of small business owners, but only recently have I determined that the best way to construct any product or service experience with this tool is to do it in reverse.

To borrow from a well-worn bit of wisdom, if you want to deliver an exceptional experience you must start with the end in mind. You must begin the entire process by considering what you will do 90 or 180 days after you make a sale and then work backwards to the point where you first meet.

To some these ideas may feel foreign and not at all like a substantial way of doing business, but to others they will ring true and real and perhaps for the first time they will be able to differentiate their business with perfect clarity.

Comments

1. Show them what you know

In business, anyone can claim to be an expert. Look at the profile of any businessperson on a social network, even the most inept ones, and you will see them claiming to be anything from an expert or thought leader to a guru or ninja!

Use your blog, newsletter or social media accounts to demonstrate what you know. This is one of the finest ways to attract the interest of genuine, prospective clients. I get email inquiries for my services via this blog daily, with almost all of them telling me that the reason they want me to work with them, is they value my approach to marketing and business development. How do they know what my approach is? They see it here on the blog.

You know you are great at what you do. Your clients know it too.

Now, show the rest of your marketplace and blow the lid off your potential!

2. Walk more

Something almost magical happens when we walk. Not only do we get some extremely valuable health benefits, it seems to have a massive impact on how we feel. I have already written about this in detail here.

However, I really want to share the following video with you. It’s from Dr Mike Evans, and is all about the many medical and fitness benefits of walking, even for just 30 minutes a day.

If you can’t see the video, you can watch it here.

3. Fire any clients that make you unhappy

You can not run a successful business, working with people who make you miserable or pay you late or speak to you like you’re a fool. This is one of the first things I work on with new clients and the difference it makes to their businesses and quality of life, is enormous. Seth Godin said this was a key reason for his success.

4. Start blogging

If you already have a blog, start taking blogging seriously. Blogging is the single most powerful marketing tool I have ever found. Every day, thousands of business owners read this blog and share it with their friends. In 2011, this site generated over £145,000 for my business in client fees, sales and consulting work. If you are not sure where to start, relax. I have another blog, dedicated to it and all the information is free. Click here.

5. Become super selective who you listen to

There are many different voices you can tune into these days. Some will make you healthier happier and wealthier. Some will do the opposite. Listen to people with the knowledge and experience to help you.

6. Be yourself

The single most valuable lesson I have learned from my 25 years in marketing, is this: Be yourself.

The world is filled to bursting point with people, who simply copy what others say or do. For a 16 year old child who has little confidence and wants to avoid standing out, this is an effective strategy until they grow up. For a business owner seeking to gain visibility, it’s total insanity. I call this process embracing your inner freak. You can read all about it here.

7. Understand that there is often, more than one truth

You can make the coming year (and years), a lot less stressful with this basic mindset adjustment.

One of the reasons people get so frustrated, is that they know they are right, yet the other person simply doesn’t get their point or the other person is wrong and won’t admit it!

Here’s an alternative approach, which may make your future a lot less stressful and make YOU a lot more attractive to others. It’s about understanding that often, in business and in life generally, there is more than one truth.

For example, I love the taste of oranges. You may dislike them with a passion. If a third person asked each of us what oranges taste like, we would give completely opposite answers, yet both of us would be telling the truth, or to be more exact, we would be telling our truth.  When you get your head around this concept and learn to respect the opinions of others, you will be amazed what it does for you in just about every area of your life.

8. Go deeper

One of the most common mistakes people make with their marketing, is that they build large, shallow networks online. In other words, they may have hundreds or thousands of Twitter followers or Facebook friends yet find it’s of little real benefit to their business.

I suggest you try a different approach. I suggest you focus on building a deeper relationship, with a far smaller, more focused group. Why? Because if you focus on attracting just 10 passionate advocates, they will each bring you another 10. That 10 will then do the same and before you know it, you will have a massively more targeted network. It’s all about shifting the focus from building numbers, to building quality.

I explain how it works in detail, in this post.

9. Answer this powerful question

There is a question, which every business owner should answer and then get to work on. The question is this:

“If my business were perfect in every way, what would it look like?”

A few things to consider, may include:

• How many hours would you work?
• What would you earn?
• Which causes would your business support?
• Where would you work?
• What kind of clients or customers, would you work with?
• What kind of systems would you have in place?
• What would you charge?
• What would your business’ image be?
• Which business specialists would you hire as consultants?
• How many people, if any, would you employ?
• What would be your unique twist, the thing that set you apart from the competition?

One of the reasons many business owners fail to grow a business that inspires them, is that they never took the time to decide what THEIR ideal business looked like. Getting clear on exactly what you want, makes it a lot easier to achieve. Its easy to take a wrong turn, when you’re not sure what your destination is!

Finally, I hope the next 12 months are the best ever for you, your family and your business. Thank you for your support over the past year!

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