If, in fact, that thought has crossed your mind, you’re not alone. However, neglecting your marketing efforts is one of the biggest mistakes you can make as an entrepreneur.

You may be concerned with hundreds of business ownership details, but you still need marketing to achieve the visibility you require to get noticed in the marketplace. This visibility leads to more prospects converted, to more customers converted, to more profits-which is the formula for staying in business. So, by deduction, entrepreneurs need marketing to stay in business.

In the world of marketing, there’s a general rule of thumb that 60 percent of your marketing should be spent on current and past customers. After all, they represent your best prospects. These people already know you, trust you and, hopefully, have confidence in your company, products and services. They’ve already had a good experience with your business, which increases the probability they’ll buy from you, especially when compared to a new prospect who doesn’t know you and hasn’t yet had a positive experience with you.

The remaining 40 percent of your marketing budget should be split up this way: 30 percent should be spent on prospects, and 10 percent should be spent universally. And all this spending should happen simultaneously: You need to keep your prospect funnel full while continuing to convert prospects into paying customers. You can start by using marketing to:

1. Replace former customers with new ones. Customers come and customers go. Sometimes they leave because of us, sometimes because of them and sometimes because of factors beyond the control of either. This can’t always be predicted or forecasted. To safeguard against this, you must use marketing to replace former customers with new ones. Obviously, not everyone you market to will become a customer. But to increase your chances of getting those all-important new customers, you must continually put your message in places where they’ll see it.

2. Pay attention to your customers. Imagine for a moment that you’ve secured new business from more customers than you ever dreamed. The good news is, you’ll be busy fulfilling their every need. The bad news is that lack of attention is the number-one reason customers abandon a business. So if you get busy, how can you stay in touch with your most valuable customers on a regular basis? The answer is marketing. Different marketing vehicles can reach out to them and show that you’re paying attention to them. You can send thank-you cards, special offers, tips and techniques, newsletters and more. The type of marketing activities let you stay in touch without being there in person.

3. Keep customers informed. Now let’s say that your business is growing, and you’ve decided to introduce new services and products. Who will buy them? Current customers will, as well as new ones-but they won’t buy unless they know about your new offerings. Product announcements, press releases, newsletter ads and advertising are just a few of the marketing vehicles that can be used to alert prospects and customers to your new products and services. Marketing once again saves the day, pays attention to your customers, informs and educates them, and causes them to eventually empty their wallets into yours.

Effective use of these marketing tactics will let you keep your marketing costs down while increasing your return on the dollars you do spend.

As a website publisher, RSS offers a way to publish information on many websites, which in turns increases your reach on the Internet and the amount of traffic you receive to your website. You also receive more one way links back to their web site. These benefits result in an increase in your search engine ranking.

As a website owner, RSS allows you to receive up-to-date links to information on a regular basis that runs on auto pilot.  When the publishing site is updated, your website is also updated. The result of this is that your website is updated more regularly which also increases search engine ranking.

The other benefit the website owner receives from using RSS is that their information remains “fresh” which encourages their visitors to return on a regular basis.

Finally, as a consumer, you can use feed readers to subscribe to website RSS feeds and put them all in one place. For example, you can use Google Reader or Bloglines to put all your website feeds there for easy consumption without having to go to each individual website every time.

It is worthwhile looking seriously at RSS technology as it is an impressive tool to use to significantly benefit you in your Internet marketing and website exposure.

A: That is a question that has been asked by every business person who has ever launched a website. If I build it, will they come?

For those of you who didn’t get the “Field of Dreams” reference, let me put it this way: No, if you build it they will not come, at least not without some effort on your part.

Assuming that a website will automatically attract customers is the single biggest mistake that many business owners make. It is this mistake that eventually leads them to dismiss their website as a failure and abandon their online efforts.

As website owners, we mistakenly think that all you have to do is throw up a website and that business will automatically double overnight. And when nothing happens we blame it on everything in the world but our own lack of marketing efforts.

If you build it, will they come? That depends totally on you.

When it comes to attracting customers, opening an online business (or an online branch of an existing business) is no different from opening a traditional brick and mortar shop. Without a little fanfare and a well-devised marketing plan, chances are your website will become just another spot of roadkill on the Internet.

The first step in devising your marketing plan is to ask yourself this question: Who is my customer? Who is it that I want to attract to my website? Believe it or not, this is a question many entrepreneurs fail to ask. The identity of your customer is incredibly important because if you don’t know who your customer is, how can you expect to market to them?

The next question concerns the locality of your customer. Do you want to attract a local or global clientele to your website? If the answer is local, then you will gear your marketing efforts toward customers in your own backyard, which means incorporating your website launch with your offline marketing efforts.

If the website is the online branch of a brick and mortar business, include the website URL in all your print materials and advertising campaigns. Consider running ads in the local paper, on radio or TV announcing the launch of your site. Use direct mail or in-store posters to announce the site launch to your existing customer base.

In short, keep doing what you’re doing to attract customers to your physical store, just add your website address to the mix.

Just remember, it’s important to consider your website a branch of your brick and mortar business because that’s exactly what it is. A good business website will help you sell more products, widen your range of clientele, and increase your revenue without adding overhead. Don’t sell your website short. Make it work for you.

If you are seeking a global audience, your marketing efforts will be quite different. Attracting customers from around the world is a more difficult task than attracting customers from around the block. Fortunately, the task is not impossible. The Internet has leveled the playing field in many ways. Now every business, no matter how large or small, has the ability to do business internationally.

In the most basic sense, an online marketing campaign to attract global customers should include the following efforts.

Register With Search Engines

It is said that 95% of search engine traffic comes from Google, Yahoo! and BING, so start there. It’s also important to realize that just registering with search engines does not guarantee you traffic, but it certainly can’t hurt.

Pay-Per-Click

The three most popular pay-for-placement programs are Google Adwords, Microsoft Advertising and Facebook Ads.  Visit their respective websites for details on these programs. Be prepared to spend several hundred dollars at a minimum to get your site listed.

Exchange Links With Similar Sites

One free – and potentially effective – way to drive customers to your website is through link exchanges with sites of similar interest. Locate sites that make a good match to your own and contact the owner to ask if they will link to your site in exchange for you linking to theirs. If you sell golf balls on your website, set up a link exchange with another website that sells golf clubs. You post a link to them and they post a link to you.

Go To Where The Customers Are

…or another way to say it, “Fish where the fish are”. Depending on your product or service, eBay may be your marketplace. Maybe Facebook, Twitter or Craigslist is for you. You may need to get listed in Angie’s List or use a coupon service. Knowing your customer and being where they are will be important to your success.

We have just scratched the surface, but hopefully this is enough to get you started. I wish I could tell you that attracting customers to your website is easy, but the truth is, it’s anything but. It takes hard work, creativity and above all, perseverance.

1. Give your link text some length — at least two sentences. If all “link pages” consisted of a short paragraph or two instead of five or six words, these link pages would have “content” and be more valuable. Most website owners want substance (content) instead of one or two word descriptions. This will also make your listing stand out from the crowd.

2. Pack your link text with your most important keywords. You don’t have to “hype” you site. Just pack your description with your most important information. This is called creating a keyword-rich “context”.

3. Make sure your “anchor text” includes your most important keyword. The search engines considers this important because the text that is linked is an indicator of the theme of the site being pointed to. Each time a site is pointed to with a link that says “golden retrievers” that site’s importance as a “golden retriever” site is reinforced.

4. Create more than one version of this link text. A long one should be roughly 200 characters. A short one might be less than 100 characters. Having two or three different versions and lengths of your link text ready to go will make your life a lot easier when it comes to actually placing your links.

5. Mix up your anchor text. If you are doing some serious link work, trying to create hundreds of inbound links, don’t use the same anchor text all the time. The Search Engines may interpret repetition of the same link patterns as “unnatural” and manipulative. So use different versions of your anchor text and create different link text “contexts”.

Concentrate on building keyword-rich contexts in which your subject matter is clearly stated and your links can be clearly associated with the subject matter that is most “relevant” to your site. This is the best way to insure they will create an impact.

Navigation (and page titling and headlines) needs to tell visitors immediately:

• Where I am
• What is here
• Where I can go next

There are many ways of presenting navigation: down one side of the screen, along the top and bottom are typical locations.

1: It is important to allow instant access to the rest of your site from anywhere within it. Ideally, you should be able to go to any page in a maximum of two clicks and one is better. Motto: the less clicks the better.

2: Use the same navigation scheme and elements on all pages. Create a common navigational look to ensure that your users can use your site navigation effectively.

3: Wherever possible, use text navigation. Think about the tradeoff between text and graphics. Text based navigation works better than image based navigation because it enables users to understand the link destinations in detail. Too many sites have beautiful and fancy images for navigation that mean nothing to visitors. Research also shows that ‘breadcrumb trails’ positioned under the page title (at eye level and closer to other links on the page) are used more than breadcrumb trails positioned at the top of the page.

4: Keep navigation elements (elements meaning different navigation ‘lists’) in close proximity and help users to develop a mental model of your web site.

5: Use the right margin for your web site’s main index. Research shows that users are lazy and click on topics in the right margin more than topics placed on the left because they are located much closer to the scroll bar and they don’t have to move their mouse so far! This allows users to quickly move the pointer between the scroll bar and the index items. These benefits are particularly strong for laptops with those horrid fingertip based mouse controls.

6: Separate important items from housekeeping links. Housekeeping links are the things people may need to find from any page but that don’t need to be prominent. For example Privacy Policy, Site Map, FAQs and Contact Us can appear in the header or footer of the website.

7: Make links easy to find. Don’t expect visitors to mouse over every word on the page to discover if it is a link or not. Links don’t have to be underlined, but do make them a different color so that they stand out from surrounding body text and add a hover color to links so that users can see what they are about to click. Use new windows (pop ups) sparingly.

Keeping these guidelines in mind when designing or redesigning your website will result in happier visitors on your website. Happy visitors come back. Visitors that come back are more likely to buy or contact you.

There are many types of blogs available. The most common types are:

• Professional blogs: These blogs are focused on discussions about professions, job aspects and career building
• Personal blogs: These blogs take the form of an online diary and contains thoughts, poems, experiences, and other personal matters
• Topical blogs: These blogs focus on a certain topic or niche, discussing specific aspects of the chosen subject
• Business blogs: As its name suggests, these are discussions about business

Other types of blogs include but are not limited to science blogs, cultural blogs, educational blogs, and photo blogs.

In order to have a successful blog that attracts a lot of visitors and keep them coming back, you need to follow some simple guidelines.

Before you begin blogging, carefully consider what you are going to write about in your blog as there are lots of interesting topics out there, waiting to be discussed.  You can find them in every day life, in the media, in the news – anything that attracts attention and a loyal following is good. You can look for blog subjects in many places, the most important being the Internet of course.

Put quality content in your blog. If you have quality content people like to read, they will return to your blog and tell other people about it as well. Posting articles containing useful information on your blog is very beneficial for attracting more traffic. Make sure you add your URL address below your posted article! If other web site owners find your articles useful and decide to include them within the content of their web pages, the added link will contribute to increasing your popularity every time it is hyperlinked.

Update the blog on a regular basis. If you don’t do this, visitors will not return and they will move on to reading another blog that is updated more often. You should try to update your blog daily or weekly. Many newcomers have blogging fear, fearing their inability to update it daily or weekly.  If your blog is interesting enough, offer your readers the ability to keep it updated by posting their own personal thoughts and share stories so you won’t have to do all the updating work yourself.

Listen to what your readers have to say. Always pay attention to the readers’ suggestions and try to find out what people were actually searching for when they found your blog. Try to focus on that theme and even consider developing it by encouraging the visitors to discuss new aspects of that particular theme.

Keep it short and concise – You don’t need material that takes hours to read, people usually like to quickly skim a blog for quick tidbits of useful information and if you post materials that are difficult or take a long time to read, you will most likely drive them away.

You can also include some artistic work or pictures in the blog, to make it more visually appealing.

If your blog has interesting, original content, bloggers might decide to add links to it on their web sites and comment on your suggested topic. By gaining backlinks to your blog from other web sites, your web site will place higher within search engine queries, thus boosting your link popularity.

Announce the launch of any new blog with press releases.  Free publicity through press releases are powerful tools for increasing incoming traffic.  Search engines love press releases and it gives them a good reason to spider and to index your site quickly.

Include free downloadable viral reports on your blog to turbo-charge visitor traffic and build a subscriber/viewer base quickly.

In order to simplify the creating and updating process of a blog, take advantage of the many blogging tools and software readily available, a number of them are free.  Blogging software such as WordPress will help you update a blog easily.

Offer to inform readers of your blog with free email management services like Feedburner (if you don’t have an email list management solution) in addition to offering RSS feeds for subscription.  Readers and visitors can be kept updated of any new information being added to your blog without having to check the site constantly.

Utilize blog and ping to get sites indexed quickly by the search engines.  By notifying popular ping servers monitored by blog search services, you attract search engine spiders to a blog.  A blog can automatically be setup to ping certain web sites.  An easy method of doing this is by adding the Pingomatic service to the sites to ping in the blog software which pings many popular ping servers at once.

Finally, remember to submit to popular, high quality blog directories to boost your web traffic and link popularity.

If you respect these guidelines you will most likely have a successful blog, and you will be rewarded in the process.

That being said, here is a list of website design sins for your edification.  We highly recommend you make sure your website doesn’t commit them.

Website Sin # 1: Website does not have a crystal clear objective.  Why do you have or want to have a website in the first place?  What do you want it to do for your business?

Website Sin #2: No clear call to action.  This sin dovetails on the previous one.  Once you are clear on your website’s objective, make it real clear to your visitor what action you want them to take.  Clearly spell it out.  Trust me, leave no room for interpretation.

Website Sin #3: Website does not have a means to capture visitor’s contact information.  You are missing a tremendous opportunity to gather prospects who are clearly interested in what you have to offer: hence qualified prospects to market to going forward.

Website Sin #4: Website doesn’t give visitors a reason to come back.  Unless your website is a one-time sales website, you must keep it chock full of new and great content to keep it producing for you.

Website Sin #5: Website has no substance, all style.  Dovetailing on the previous sin, focus should be more on adding valuable content as opposed to having flashy animations.  Flashy animations may wow your visitors once (if you’re lucky), but great content starts building a relationship or dare I say a dependency on you.  Bottom line you’re adding value to your prospects.

Website Sin #6: Website has an “it’s all about me” mentality.  Keep the copy conversational in tone and focus clearly on what’s in it for your visitor.  Make them feel that it’s all about them — make them feel special.

Website Sin #7: Website is inconsistent with your “Brand”.  Your website does not have to be the best looking site out there.  It is far more critical to be consistent (same overall look, feel and design as your other marketing materials).

These next three sins are absolutely inexcusable and should not require much explanation.  Nothing will frustrate your visitor more and detract from your credibility faster.

Website Sin #8: Poor or inconsistent navigation.  Don’t make people think.  Make it real easy for visitors to find what they are looking for.

Website Sin #9: Dead links.  This is a credibility killer.  Always do what you say you’re going to do.  It is amazing what people can read into a dead link: the worst being that you simply don’t care enough about you visitor.

Website Sin #10: Slow website.  Speeding up websites is important — not just to site owners, but to all Internet users. Faster sites create happy users. Google actually takes site speed into account in their search rankings.

1. Have frequently updated, fresh content. People aren’t going to come back if your site stays the same all the time. If they’ve already got all the information they need from your site, why should they return? Make sure that the information is always new, fresh, and changing so that they have an incentive to return.

2. Your content must be valuable. Don’t talk “small talk” and fill your site up with gimmicks, bells and whistles, and other page fillers. Make the content on your site actually useful to someone. Use relevant articles to your topic, maybe have free tools or calculators or something that are relevant to your product, or even just keep the people up to date about what’s happening with your product or service.

3. Make your site easy to navigate. Especially if your site has got lots of competition on your product or service, maybe they’ll choose your site over your competitor’s site just by the sheer fact alone that they can get around your site easier! People want to get the information they need quickly and easily. Don’t make it a challenge for them or they’ll only become frustrated and click off of your site.

Using these easy and common sensical tips you can make your website “sticky” and watch the traffic increase!

Frequency You need to decide how often you are going to issue your newsletter. There are two primary considerations that need to make up the decision. The first is how often your customer base would engage you newsletter. If your sector is flooded with newsletters, you may conclude that there is an excess of reading material and that a quarterly newsletter is appropriate. Conversely, you may notice that there is both an absence of other newsletters and a hunger for information, leading you to conclude that a bi-weekly newsletter would provide you with an excellent opportunity. The second consideration is your internal capacity. You do not want to create an expectation for a newsletter that exceeds your production capacity. How many newsletters you are able to release each month needs to be the underlying driver to the decision how often your newsletter is released.

Design How your newsletter looks is crucial not only because it represents your company, but also because it could determine how people receive the newsletter and whether or not they are drawn to read it. A well designed newsletter includes a clear delineation of all areas of content, integrated, relevant images, and an identity that is consistent with your company’s identity. It is important that you view your newsletter as an extension of your company and that its personality is representative of the image you transmit to your sector.

Database Your database is the list of people to whom you send your newsletter. Your list should be extracted from your client/customer base, prospective clients/customers, and your sector influencers. You should make sure that everyone receiving your email newsletter either requested it or has a way to be removed from your list (clearly and easily marked in your email). Your newsletter can be sent via snail mail, but the costs of printing and postage make email a much more realistic and cost effective often. Using email, you are able to send your newsletter as HTML, text, or in PDF format. You should select your format based on customer preferences. You clients/customers may prefer a different format, but it should be noted that the content, design, and frequency are not influenced by format.

Marketing Your newsletter needs marketing support so that it can reach out to a wider audience and better serve your company as a marketing tool. The support it receives can be as simple as being listed on your website (with a sign-up option) to advertising and special attention.

Testing We recommend that you test your newsletter before you send it out to your widest audience so that you can benefit from the feedback of your test group and ultimately send out the best newsletter possible. Litmus: A great tool to test your email newsletter Your email newsletter is an excellent way to reach out to and become meaningful to your clients/customers.

Embark on an email newsletter only if you have the resources and commitment to sustain it. Done properly, it is a powerful and continuing tool for exposure and reinforcement of your expertise.