Since many entrepreneurs do not have enough money to finance a massive awareness campaign, using viral or word-of-mouth marketing tactics prove to be very valuable. In fact, a powerful word-of-mouth marketing can turn your customers into your own sales force.

We already covered how video marketing works; this time you might want to consider contests as your awareness tool. Holding a contest is a classic tactic used way back before the internet era. Given the wider reach of the internet, it has evolved as a deadly weapon for many online businesses.

The key here is to make the contest related to the nature of your business. A good example is the IKEA Small Business Big Dreams contest. Entrepreneurs can submit the three-minute video about their business and its impact to the community. The winner will receive $5,000 cash and $50,000 makeover for his or her business.

The first thing you need to do is find an exciting contest relevant to your business. In our case, a logo design contest is very appropriate. (See our free blog logo campaign.) To ensure that this will build awareness and garner referrals, ask every contestant to refer their friends and family members who might also be interested to join. In case you plan to have an online contest, make sure that every contestant will provide their e-mail address and give at least 3 referrals.

If delighting your customers builds loyalty, prospecting is essential to expanding your business. This is the part of selling wherein you will be looking for hot leads or new customers to increase your sales and boost your profitability.

Often referred to as cold calls, these potential customers may come from customer referrals and your marketing campaigns, such as direct mails and online newsletters. Before you embark in this very challenging process, here some things you should know:

Rejection is Part of the Game

Don’t feel discouraged even if you are rejected 8 out of 10 times. Even the best salespeople in your industry cannot avoid rejections. Keep this mind at all times, to maintain the same passion in every conversation.

Act Now

Referrals are often compared to perishable products because you only have limited time to utilize them. Otherwise, your friendly competitor could snatch them away. Once you get a referral, stop contemplating and start talking with them. Every passing day might decrease the probability of closing a deal.

Use a Script

It would greatly help if you have a well-written script that you and your salespeople can follow. This will help you organize your thoughts, improve your presentation, and develop a professional image. Key success factors are your acting skills and your ability to converse naturally while recalling the script from memory. Role playing is a great exercise for improving selling skills.

If you want to know more about prospecting, visit Marketing Proof to learn the different personality types of sales prospects.

Establishing a good and lasting relationship with your customers is the key to the long-term growth of your business ventures. According to a new manifesto by entrepreneur and author, Rajesh Setty, the best way to forge a relationship is to be a piece in many puzzles:

Everybody is solving one or more puzzles at any part of their lives. The problem is they have too little time to gather all the puzzle pieces and complete the puzzle within a reasonable amount of time. If you want to truly add value to others in a very short time, try and become a piece of their puzzle and help them complete the puzzle in a time shorter than what it would have taken them to complete it without YOU.

There are some basic things you can apply to your business:

• Take time to listen to customer complaints and suggestions. Minimize talking and focus on what your company can do to solve their problems or how you can accommodate their suggestions.
• Improve your customer service to encourage repeat purchase and word-of-mouth advertising.
• We all love freebies, so offer rewards to your loyal customers in the form of discounts or free goods.

Setting up an online business is relatively easy and affordable. However, these same advantages turn the Internet into a very challenging and hyper-competitive market.

According to PowerHomeBiz, failure to understand how to convert visitors to buyers is one of the most difficult aspects of starting an online business for small entrepreneurs. Luckily, there are many proven ways to convert visitors to buyers. Some of these tips are:

Collect E-mail Addresses

Getting a visitor’s email address must be your top priority. This will allow you to follow up and fully promote your products or services. To make your effort more effective, you must offer something in exchange of their e-mails.

Usually, you can offer a “free newsletter upon sign up” to your visitors. Others give free white papers, webinars, discounts, rebates, and even consultations. You must thoroughly understand your target market first before you can develop a good bait. Be sure to follow CAN-SPAM regulations and ensure that signees can opt out at any time without explanation.

Use Captivating Headlines

Many Internet users do not stay too long on one website, leaving you far less than a minute - some experts say mere seconds - to capture their attention. You can do this by using strong headlines to quickly seduce them to read more. For some great tips, check Copyblogger’s 10 sure-fire headline formulas that work.

Advertising is such a dreaded word for many starting entrepreneurs. After all, tapping television, radio, and newspapers require heavy spending. The reality is you need advertise your products one way or the other. You need to get noticed otherwise you will compromise the entire business. Good thing there are some creative and cost-effective alternatives for entrepreneurs like us.

T-shirt Advertising

Placing your company or brand logo on t-shirts and giving it to your regular customers will help increase brand awareness. Use bright colors to easily catch attention. Asking your employees to use these t-shirts on their way to office is a good alternative of this approach. Better yet, make this your official employee uniform!

Windshield Wiper Flyers

Some people might find it annoying but putting flyers under windshield wipers easily attracts customers to try your products. However, this is not applicable to all products, so be very careful when using this approach.

Video Sharing

Sharing business tips or how-to video clips to top video sharing Websites like YouTube, Dailymotion, and Metacafe has become very popular these days. You just need to have a simple video camera, a bit of software (much of it free), and an Internet connection.

Before you think of using these approaches, visit Marketing & Strategy Innovation Blog to know the 12 types of ads you can use to your campaign.

Having a catchy name for your startup business is very crucial to attract customers and establish presence in the market. Unfortunately, some aspiring entrepreneurs do not have any guidelines about naming a company or a product.

To help solve this startup problem, consider the following tips as your guideline:

1. Among the 10 naming tips for companies and brands shared by The Name Inspector, the idea of using visual images as a starting point for coming up relevant names is very interesting.
2. Entrepreneur.com says there are 8 mistakes to avoid when naming your business. One of them is about using business names that are too obscure or too hard to spell or pronounce.
3. Small Business Notes encourages small business owners to check names of competitors first before brainstorming for a good name for your company.
4. Capture Planning recommends that you list all the characteristics of your business, find synonyms, and play with combinations.
5. Small Business Bible suggests 3 essential steps for choosing a brand or business name.

Inc. com reports that the Internet ranks as the most important marketing tool today among entrepreneurs, outpacing traditional marketing tools like radio and print advertising, public relations, and even networking.

Still, the use of different Internet marketing tools is still in its infancy stage since most small business owners use Internet primarily only to check daily their e-mails and find practical business solutions.

Business owners are making efforts to increase their Internet presence. Forty-four percent say they plan on spending more on Internet tools this year compared to 2006, while 27 percent plan to spend the same amount as last year. The amount small businesses will shell out for their Web activities varies, with the largest group (45 percent) spending less than $2,500.

The need to go online is now unavoidable regardless of your products or services. While this marketing tool is relatively cheaper than other tools available, you need devote ample time to make it work. As an alternative, you can also hire professionals to handle this part of your business.

Aside from upsides and downsides of promoting your company online, Small Business UnMarketing underscores the importance of using blogs to promote your business while Internet Marketing 4 Noobs identifies 5 common ways Net marketing newbies got “fooled”.

Promoting your business online offers many benefits and few drawbacks. If used optimally, you can reduce your overall promotional budget. What you cannot afford now, you can bootstrap towards, when revenue allows. Here are just a few of the benefits, and some drawbacks.

If you’re still heavily dependent on the brick-and-mortar side of your business, this is the time to consider going online to expand your customer base and increase profitability. This might also be the perfect time to reboot your brand or even reposition your entire business.

Based in the article from New York Times, Forrester Research estimates that about 45% of the projected $26 billion sales from Internet retailers will go to small online retailers. This percentage is up by 3 points compared last year.

According to eBay, nearly 650,000 small businesses in the United States have an online presence, a sizable figure but a tiny fraction of the 7.5 million companies that the Kelsey Group estimates market most of their goods directly to consumers. Many of the holdouts have resisted the Web because they deem the transition to be too difficult, too expensive or both. But now, Yahoo Stores, ProStores from eBay, NetSuite and other companies that help businesses operate online hope to change the minds of the hesitant with software and services that are cheaper and easier to use.

Another major factor is the growing preference of consumers to search for products or services using local elements like name of the city or state. For instance, search engine searches shifted from “pet shops” to “pet shops Alhambra”.

Look beyond your current business practices and embrace new technologies to enhance your competitiveness and marketing relevance to your target market.

Via DM News

Do you have a weblog for your SMB (small to medium business)? Want a no-cost, effective way to promote your weblog and thus your business? Do you have a couple of hours per week to spend doing a bit of promotion?

The answer is Blog Carnivals, and you can utilize them in two effective ways:

1. Submitting articles to get exposure at “host” weblogs.
2. Hosting a carnival, which draws web traffic and hyperlinks from other weblogs.

Here are some of the benefits of participating in blog carnivals:

1. Have an inexpensive (as in free) way to promote your weblog, website and business.
2. Gain exposure to other like-minded bloggers and possibly business owners.
3. Gain exposure to readers of other link-minded bloggers’ blogs.
4. Get links back to your weblog, which builds both reader traffic and authority in the search engines.
5. Gain authority about a certain topic, either by submitting quality articles, or by choosing quality submissions for your own carnival. (There’s no rule that says you must accept everything, but be diplomatic about it. Or simply don’t mention anything that’s been left out.)

You do not necessarily need to start a new carnival. Search the massive list at the Blog Carnival website. Find a dozen or so suitable carnivals, preferably weekly, and try to submit your best article of the week to your list.

Note: Many carnival hosts do not like multiple submissions from one blogger for the same edition. Err on the side of caution and only submit one per week, if a carnival is weekly. Some are bi-weekly or longer between editions. So if you start submitting to a lot of carnivals, track submissions in a spreadsheet. I like to use Google Docs and Spreadsheets because you can click on an URL and have a browser window open to that page. Everything stays in a browser framework. This makes it far easier track and submit articles each week, especially if you use a multi-tabbed web browser such as Mozilla/ Firefox, Netscape or Opera.

If you want to host a carnival, check existing ones. Hosts will often state that they’re looking for rotating hosts. If you don’t find anything suitable, you can consider starting your own carnival. However, before you do, consider a few things:

1. Build a bit of authority for your blog first, possibly by submitting to carnivals for a few weeks.
2. It takes time to look over entries. You could cheat and let every submission in. The Blog Carnival has a new feature where they automatically generate the HTML code for a carnival edition based on all pending submissions. It takes 5 seconds instead of a an hour or more to read entries. But if you do this, without filtering entries, you may end up with some poor quality articles and thus lose any authority your blog has gained.
3. Don’t be afraid to reject a submission if it does not seem relevant or is just an article trying to sell something via an affiliate link. People make mistakes or just don’t followed instructions about what type of articles a carnival is looking for. One oddity taking place is use of software that chops up a real article and rearranges it into what appears to a new article. And then someone will submit this to a carnival You do not want to publish links to this sort of garbage.

It takes a bit of effort and organization, but if you utilize blog carnivals on a regular basis, it can be a powerful way to build up your weblog and business.