Smart business people are leveraging the power of Internet marketing strategies to attract more qualified customers to their small business. Small Businesses that you would not expect to find on the Internet are now using online marketing to draw in customers like a magnet. Traditional small business marketing methods are expensive and the results are not measurable. Positioning yourself as the expert in your field and providing valuable information to your potential customers will magically attract qualified prospects to you. This article will provide valuable small business marketing ideas to help you develop marketing strategies for your small business.My time is limited, and I have found that using the search engines is a great way to find products and services that meet my needs. The information available on the Internet lets me compare products and services and get reviews from other customers who have purchased the products I am looking for. Last week I purchased a generator for my home through the Internet, and I needed to find a local electrician to install it.   I hate calling people from the yellow pages, so I decided to search the Internet for someone who could help me. I found three different electricians. Electrician A had very good information on their website about some simple electrical jobs and things to watch out for when picking an electrician.   Electricians B and C simply had a “yellow page” website with a phone number and address. Because Electrician A had shared valuable information with me first, I already trusted him more, but I wanted to get three bids to make sure I paid a reasonable amount of money for my job.I sent all three electricians an email asking for a bid on my job. Then I spoke with each of them on the phone to answer their questions and give them directions to my property.Electrician B bid on the job sight unseen. Electrician A and C both made time to come out to my property and look over the job before bidding.Electrician A made a couple of good suggestions that actually saved me money and helped me avoid a costly mistake. Electrician C bid almost twice what the other two electricians did. After getting all of the bids, I chose Electrician A because he took the time to come out and look over my job, and actually helped me save money, even though he did not have the cheapest overall bid. Electrician B, who bid on my job sight unseen, had the lowest bid, but would have actually cost me more money because of the issues that Electrician A had pointed out when he took the time to come out to my property to see the job before bidding on it. Electrician C looked over the same job site as electrician A, but did not give me a lot of confidence when he did not point out the same issues that Electrician A had.  The combination of a website with valuable information to help build my confidence coupled with free advice to help me save money actually won this electrician my business. This is an example of how effective marketing a small business using the Internet coupled with a consultative sales approach can help attract and win customers for your business. Because of their power to attract customers, I have implemented these Internet marketing strategies in my own small business. I have a website that has valuable information available to the prospective customers who search for my services. Because of this useful information, the customers who find me already trust what I have to say. They know something about me before we even speak with each other. This helps filter out the tire kickers and helps me leverage my time to work with only those customers who truly have an interest in my services as a small business Internet marketing coach.By reading this article you’ll learn why it is important to market your small business on the Internet. You will learn small business marketing ideas that will attract more customers to you who are already interested in what you have to offer. You will learn how to gain the trust of these customers allowing you to win more business and make more money.Why it is so important to market your small business on the InternetMore than ever, people start their search for information about products and services on the Internet. In fact, as a business medium, the Internet is growing while many other sectors of the economy are declining. Your customers are looking for you on the Internet…trust me I know this. The question is “are they going to find you when they search?” and if they do, “will they learn enough about you to trust you and contact you to do business?”  Many people no longer think of the yellow pages when they are searching for information about a product or service. The major search engines are the most accessed websites on the Internet. Google has over 91 million searches per day, and Yahoo has over 60 million searches per day, together they represent 151 million searches per day. Now the population of the United States is just over 304 million and the population of the whole world is just over 6 billion (Wikipedia – Jul 2008). One out of every two people in the United States could be searching for something or one out of every 40 people in the world could be doing the same. This is a staggering number of searches every day, which reinforces the fact that people are relying on the Internet to search for and find quality information. You can see why, more than ever before, it is important to have an Internet marketing strategy for your small business.How to attract more customers to you who are already interested in what you offerOk…so now we can agree that your business should be on the Internet, but how can you be sure that your business will be found out of all of the others out there? How can you effectively market your small business on the Internet? Probably not the way you would think. Hype-based or hard selling techniques no longer work. The way to attract customers to you is to offer valuable free information to the people who find you.   They will find you because you will use the same words that people are searching for when describing your products or services. This is called search engine optimization (SEO) and all it means is that when you write the content for your website or blog, you use the words that people are typing into the search engines so that they can find you when they search. If you are using a replicated website, it is very likely that it has not been optimized to be found by the search engines. Search engines hate replicated websites.Your small business marketing strategy should include writing articles about topics that are interesting to your customers. To do this, you have to figure out who your target customer is, and what they are interested in. This is probably the hardest part of your small business marketing strategy. This is the essence of attraction marketing and is how you will build an audience for your information, which in turn will draw customers to you like magic. Then it is just a matter of placing your content all over the Internet so that it is found when your customers search. If you are a local business, there are ways to localize your content, so that customers in your geographic area can find you first before you competitors when they search.How the value you provide helps you gain the trust of your customersOnce your customer types in the search words at the search engine and your content comes up, you have started building trust and credibility in their minds. The more valuable the content you offer for free, the more trust you will build. The more frequently your content comes up, the more credibility you will gain. Securing the trust of your customers is the hardest step in making the sale. Using these small business Internet marketing strategies does this hard step for you, so that when your customers come to you, they are ready to learn what you have to offer. If the valuable free content that you offer is perceived to be more valuable than that of your competitors, you will differentiate yourself in the eyes of your prospective customer. If your content comes up first on the search engines, you are guaranteed that your customer will see what you have to offer. If what you offer is of value, you have just won a customer.You too can leverage these ideas for marketing your small business on the Internet There are many tools that you can leverage today for your small business marketing strategies. Some of these include websites, blogs, articles, images, Google maps, videos, etc.  In addition to these, there are many social media options to help build your reputation with your customers. These include such things as Face book, MySpace, Squidoo, and Twitter.For example, my small business has a website which I use as the hub of my business activities. I have written articles, such as the one you are reading, which are found by the search engines when my target customers type in certain search words. My articles then link back to my website for my customers to find more information about my services. In addition to my articles, I have Squidoo lenses, and a Face book page which also link back to my website. My offline marketing also has the link to my website. Again, the target of all of my marketing is to drive prospective customers to my website where they can prequalify themselves by learning more about my business and requesting more information if they are interested. Notice, I am not chasing customers, nor am I wasting my money on the yellow pages. Instead, I am attracting customers to me through the valuable information that I provide. You can easily implement these same marketing strategies for your small business also.If winning more business and making more money is important to you…If all of this information is a bit overwhelming to you, or you just don’t know how to get started, I suggest that you find someone who can guide you through developing and implementing the Internet marketing strategies for your small business. Find someone who can show you the ropes and teach you what you need to know to be self-sufficient.Don’t just sign up with anyone who claims to build or host websites, though. Not everyone knows the secret of attraction marketing like I have described for you here. Find someone who understands these concepts and has demonstrated their ability to apply them the way that I have demonstrated it to you when you found this article. When you do find someone, the more they know the more costly their time will be.  Look for someone who knows just a little more than you but who isn’t so good at it they charge you a fortune. They can show you how to set up your small business marketing strategies on the Internet, or if you don’t have the time to do it, they can do it for you. Now you know how to easily win more business and make more money. Leveraging an Internet marketing strategy will help you with the hardest part of establishing any business relationship. It will help you gain the trust of your potential customers before you have even spoken with them yet. You will be able to attract more customers to you, and the ones you attract are already interested in what you have to offer. After that, all you have to do is offer great service and close the sale. These great small business marketing ideas can give you a leg up on your competitors, and help you grow your small business.   Now you know why it is so important for you develop an Internet marketing strategy for your small business. As a customer, I have found that small businesses who provide valuable information to me when I am searching for products or services are much more likely to get my initial inquiry about their products or services.  Businesses who are not on the Internet or who have a replicated brochure website are usually not in the running at all. In fact, I usually forget to even look in the yellow pages. My first stop to search is now the search engines like Google or yahoo. I have implemented these small business marketing strategies in my own consulting business. Now I have customers calling me, instead of me trying to chase them or spending thousands of dollars on ads that don’t bring in anyone. Give me a call or shoot me an email and I’d be happy to spend 20 minutes on a free consultation with you to get you started on the right track.

Technology has come a long way in the past fifty years. So if I told you something about all the great technology in the past fifty years I could go on forever!But instead lets just focus on some of the great technology we’ve enjoyed for the past fifty years, but has unfortunately disappeared much too soon due to the replacement of even newer technology.Let’s begin back around the late 1960′s, and into the 1970′s with the development of the simple 8 track cassette which was the new technology for listening to music at the time. In order to listen to the 8 Track Cassette you just had to have an 8 Track Player, and if you did you were all set to enjoy some music.Now personally I’m old enough to have been around during that great period of time to have seen the success, and the fall of the 8 Track player. Can you believe that I actually still have some of my old 8 Tracks from back at that time, but I’m not able to play them due to no longer having an 8 Track Player to actually play them on.But besides 8 Tracks there were also the 4 Track Cassettes which at the time was actually developed just prior to the 8 Track, but had a short life primarily because it had only two tracks, meaning that when you actually wanted to listen to a different song you would have to push a button on the player to change the track. But with the 8 Track you actually had four tracks which gave you a better selection of songs to choose from which was much more popular with people who bought them.As time proceeded much smaller Cassettes were on the market also for listening to music, but these cassettes were much more compact than the 8 Track Cassettes were. So now we had both the 8 Track Cassettes as well as the compact smaller Cassettes to enjoy listening to music, but as time continued on before you could say “8 Track Cassettes” they we’re gone! Leaving us with only the smaller Cassettes to listen to and to enjoy.So the only other format to listen to music at that time was the standard Photograph Record Player which of course had been around for many years. But as time passed by once again soon the Cassettes were no longer available as well. So now you would no longer have to worry about tapes breaking, or coming out of the cartridges with either the 8 Tracks, or the Cassettes alike, so now both Cassettes are gone. While we still had the Photograph Record Player to enjoy listening to music however it may just be until the next big technology came along, and so just what and when would that be?So that next big technology that allowed us to listen to music that sounded better than ever was the Compact Disc (CD), and this format was no longer a tape, but a disc. I personally can still remember the time when the local record store took all of the photograph records off their selves, and replaced them all with Compact Disc’s (CD) that was impressive for me because that was a major change from the Records that I grew up with, and had enjoyed playing for years, but were no longer available at what was one time called the “record store” as it had all changed now to the CD’s.Now for changing the players from the standard Record Player to the CD Player, and to enjoy listening to music was probably one of the biggest changes ever for the listening of music. This technology change from records to CD’s was a much better sound which eliminated the “pops” that records typically would have. So today we still have CD’s available, but with all the other means that people have to enjoy music on the internet, and elsewhere the CD’s are just not as popular as in the past, and perhaps the day may just not be too far off before it also becomes difficult to find them as well.Now what about the technology that brought us the Video Cassette Recorder (VCR)? Well first with the Video Cassette Recorder basically there were two different types of tapes that were available to use on your VCR. First there was the Beta Cassette, and latter there was the VHS Cassette. You can still purchase the VHS Cassette even though it may be very difficult to do so, but as for the Beta you can no longer find it due to the simple fact that the Beta Cassette was much smaller than the VHS Cassette was, and so as a result less storage space to record was available.The Video Cassette Recorder (VCR) was nice because you could record your favorite TV Show at any time, and then play it back to watch it at your convenience anytime you choose to do so. I personally recorded, and purchased many different Cassette’s that soon had grown into a large Video Cassette Library that I still in fact have. But are you aware that Beta, and VHS were both tapes as were the 8 Tracks, and the small Cassettes, and now that’s all old technology, and you may recall what happened to them. YES… they were replaced with the new technology just as the Video Cassette Recorder was.Now what new technology was going to be next? What great technology replaced the Video Cassette Recorder? The answer is the DVD Player! and it is still a current technology enjoyed today, but again has no tape because its simply a disc. Does this sound familiar? Of course the 8 Track Tape technology which changed to CD’s, and now with Video Tapes on the VCR changing the technology to DVD’s.So when you set down to enjoy music as well as watching movies all this technology may only be the beginning. And to fairly discuss all technology advances would require something short of writing a book. So I have focused only on the technology in which I have discussed in part due to it actually being a big part of my life as I grew up. So no matter if you personally experienced this technology or not I sincerely hope that you will find it all as fascinating as I did, and you will follow the continuous changes of technology as it is related to music, and movie entertainment.So now we can only wait for the next great technology change that gives us something we’ve never experienced before, in the mean time continue to follow the forever changes in technology.