Discover the six deadly mistakes business owners make in growing their businesses and how you can avoid them. On this video, key strategies are provided to help you grow your business in each of the six important areas.

Marketing is one of the very important tool of a business may it be online or offline that’s why entrepreneurs tend to spend a lot for building their own marketing strategy to drive consumers to their products and services. However, they should also be careful in setting up proper marketing strategy since this is a very delicate part of the business. The following is a checklist of 5 mistakes commonly made in marketing:

1. Lack of Research and Testing
Starting a business usually takes a lot of trial and error but this makes it to the top learning from mistakes done. That’s why Research and testing is essential to check if there would be a need for improvement or change in marketing strategies.A due diligence must be imposed when trying out some new marketing ideas.

2. Improper Focus and Positioning
Approach Marketing to demand feedback from your prospective customers. Focus and proper positioning should be done to avoid this mistake.

3. Marketing without a USP
Your Unique Selling Proposition (USP) will determine you among other competitors. That should be used in every marketing material you sent out for your business. It might be your own philosophical foundation of your business.

4. Failing to Capture Repeat Customers
Bear in my that in a business, marketing 80% of your business comes from existing customers and 20% comes from new customers. Give importance to your existing customers by showing them your latest marketing.

5. Lack of Focus on Potential Customer’s Needs
Give importance to your potential customers by knowing their needs since they are already a part of your growing business. A lot of businesses neglect to focus on their customer’s needs. Focusing on customer’s needs makes you discover what is needed to improve on your services offered. The secret to avoiding this common error is to find a need you can fill and then fill that need better than anyone else.

Meta tags are considered by many to be the most important element of your page. Find ut how to edit them and make them more significant to search engine crawlers with this tutorial from TechSavvyMarketer.com.

A tag is defined as a relevant keyword or term used to describe or associate with an article, picture, or video clip. The purpose of every tag is to classify the article, picture, or video and help visitors and users find information in the same category. In a way, a tag works like a keyword or a category label.

Tags are very prevalent in blogs and social sites for this purpose. They can be displayed as navigation in what is commonly called a tag cloud. Tag clouds display each tag or keyword in different font sizes. This difference in font sizes implies the number of times the keyword or tag has been used. Tags that are used many times are larger than those not often used.

Clicking on a tag will lead a visitor onto a page where associated information is shown for the visitor to choose from. Usually, it is the most recent associated articles, pictures, or videos that are shown. Other social sites, however, opt to show information that are more relevant than the others first (e.g. Youtube).

Tags also come with their “related tags.” A tag is always shown with another tag that is related to it to give the visitors more options on what to search for.

Tagging For SEO

Tagging is not only useful for visitors. It is also used in search engine optimization.

Tagging allows a user to bring in more link flows to your site. The presence of tags and a tag cloud is very effective in terms of search engine optimization. This is because these tags are textual and keyword-rich. It brings in more structure to the keyword links in your site.

Through this, tagging can significantly increase a website’s traffic. Through the tags it can achieve visibility in a vast array of search terms. Choosing a relevant keyword as a tag for your content and it will gain you instant rankings.

Tag conjunction pages can also add some traffic to your site. Tag conjunction pages are automatically made when there are multiple posts with two tags in common. In displaying the links that are not just connected to the related tag pages but will also lead to conjunctions between related tags, more pages are shown to the search engine crawlers.

When Visitors Do the Tagging…

There are sites that allow tagging to be done by visitors. Social networking and bookmarking sites are the leaders in this category. While this is a good thing for the visitors, it may not always be a good thing for your site. Some disadvantages of having visitors do the tagging are the following:

Visitors sometimes use tags that only have relevance to themselves and not to other visitors. For example, a visitor puts in a tag “john’s party.” Obviously, this is only for the tagger’s use and not for anyone else’s.

The tags become inconsistent. They are misspelled, others have hyphens, and there are visitors who would tag a rather obscure synonym.

The visitors may not know how to choose the right keywords to tag.

There are sites, however, that still rises in the ranks even when it is the visitors who do the ranking. Amazon.com is a great example for this. This is because, despite the disadvantages, tagging still presents itself as a useful and competitive tool for both the users and search engine optimization.

Tim Knox a small business expert will show you tips on successful entrepreneuring. Learn these for free it will surely make you a better entrepreneur.

Successful entrepreneurs possesses the same qualities that made them put up a successful business. They put their ambitions and goals into action that drive them to reach what they target. All of them has the following qualities:

1. Inner Drive to Succeed
Being a successful business takes a lot of time and effort but for them its just easy because they stick to one goal that is to reach their targeted goals.

2. Strong Belief in themselves
A strong believer has a firm decision and an assertive personality. They always set what is planned. They are very determined with their business to achieve what they aim for and possesses a positive attitude towards their goals.

3. Search for New Ideas and Innovation
Entrepreneurs always desire to give all their best on their business an how to improve more for future purposes. New Ideas and innovation would always be a catch on your prospective customers. It’s always best to add some more twists on your products and services to be more inviting.

4. Openness to Change
If something not worth or needed a change, they entrepreneurs are always open for change either in their services or products offered to be on top of their industry. Being updated is what they always ensure to set the right trends,technology or techniques to the consumers.

5. Competitive by Nature
Successful entrepreneurs thrive on competition. The only way to reach their goals and live up to their self imposed high standards is to compete with other successful businesses.

6. Highly Motivated and Energetic
Entrepreneurs are always full of energy and highly motivated for them to set goals properly most especially to run the business very well. They set high standards and ambition.

7. Accepting of Constructive Criticism and Rejection
They learn to accept challenges in business world like criticism and rejection. They treat it as part of any leading business because those are just spices that could make room for improvement that will lead to success.

Source: Entrepreneur & Business Woman

Given the thin line between white hat SEO and black hat SEO, how do we know when our techniques are good or bad? This video gives some insight on when search engine optimization is white or black.

Black hat search engine optimization is not encouraged. That is the first thing you have to remember whenever black hat SEO is mentioned. And why is that? This is because black hat SEO is the use of unethical techniques in getting higher rankings among the search engines.

Many of the techniques used in black hat SEO actually used to be agreeable. But as many people went overboard with the techniques, the search engines and the general SEO community began to see the “black” effects it has to the online market. Black hat SEO is now characterized as breaking the rules and regulations of the search engines.

Black hat SEO is mainly concerned with the short-term goal of gaining high rankings. Because of the techniques used, it creates poor user experience, as the website was mainly created for the benefit of search engine spiders and not for the users and customers.

Here are main black hat SEO techniques to avoid, as is enumerated at Black Hat Search Engine Optimization, by Wendy Boswell:

Keyword stuffing: Packing long lists of keywords and nothing else onto your site will get you penalized eventually by search engines.

Invisible text: This is putting lists of keywords in white text on a white background in hopes of attracting more search engine spiders. Again, not a good way to attract searchers or search engine crawlers.

Doorway Pages: A doorway page is basically a “fake” page that the user will never see. It is purely for search engine spiders, and attempts to trick them into indexing the site higher.

Black hat SEO is certainly tempting. But these short-term unethical techniques will only actually hurt your websites in the long run. Search engines are now crawling around and looking out for these search engine rule breakers to penalize them. In the end, you’ll be on the losing side.

Video about a private invitation only Ad free website for reviewing online products and services. NO AdSense ads,Yahoo! ads,Affiliate Links (in reviews or on the site),In-Your-Face Marketing Gimmicks or Tricks,Upsells, No One Time Offer’s (OTO),Ads and Nothing to Buy Period, and it’s 100% free to join, but you can only gain access by invitation only.

1. Emphasize what your site offers that’s of value to users and how your services differ from those of key competitors
Compliance rate: 27%
One of the very essential issues in homepage but its the least that is being followed among these guidelines.Stating and empasizing your services offered is a very important factor for your targeted customers but instead, they hide what they offer in a so called “ generic marketese” that doesn’t even give much attention to their prospectives customers

2. Use a liquid layout that lets users adjust the homepage size
Compliance rate: 28%
This quidelines is very important too for customers for them to also be comfortable browsing on the site. Since not all of them has the same size of monitor oter may have only small sizes that’s why they need to resize.

3. Use color to distinguish visited and unvisited links
Compliance rate: 33%
Helping your customers and visitors of your site by showing them marks on how to distinguish the visited and unvisited links through colors. These feature could help a lot most especially the elderly users. Sites that are friendly users could benefit much our targeted customers.

4. Use graphics to show real content, not just to decorate your homepage
Compliance rate: 35%
People are naturally drawn to pictures; gratuitous graphics can distract users from critical content. Photos of your your product is the best art for your site to show your customers what they are looking for and to help them visualize and not just imagine what it looks like.

5. Include a tag line that explicitly summarizes what the site or company does
Compliance rate: 36%
Finding your prospected clients for your online business will be very easy if you have a very clear marketing strategy. One that could make them understand what your company is all about or what specific products and services you offer. That’s why a Tag line that recapitulates your sites mission and vision plus your products and services would serve best for your customers and visitors.

6. Make it easy to access anything recently featured on your homepage
Compliance rate: 37%
Your postings, sales, products or services that is recently featured on your site must be accessible for your customers or visitors. So they won’t have a hard time searching for what they need.

7. Include a short site description in the window title
Compliance rate: 39%
This is the main core of your site especially for the visibility on search engine and this would be the best marketing strategy and even less expensive one.

8. Don’t use a heading to label the search area; instead use a “Search” button to the right of the box
Compliance rate: 40%
There’s no reason to label the search box if there’s a “Search” button right next to it. Interaction design’s less is more principle tells us that extra elements in a dialogue distract users from the salient points and reduce their ability to understand an interface.

9. With stock quotes, give the percentage of change, not just the points gained or lost
Compliance rate: 40%
This guideline only applies to sites that provide consumers with the stock quotes. With these, the general perspective, is to help users understand the relative magnitude of a change, and its importance.

10. Don’t include an active link to the homepage on the homepage
Compliance rate: 41%
This applies to all websites or intranet pages: never have a link that points to the current page.
Active links to current pages cause three problems:
* If they click it, a link leading to the current page is an utter waste of users’ time.
* Worse, such links cause users to doubt whether they’re really at the location they think they’re at.
* Worst of all, if users do follow these no-op links they’ll be confused as to their new location, particularly if the page is scrolled back to the top.

Source: Homepage Guidelines