Into The Limelight

To stand out in a cluttered world, become a recognized expert There are millions of small businesses vying for our attention. Yet, because marketplace is more discriminating and skeptical, it's hard to get noticed. To enjoy greatest return on your marketing efforts, you need to rise above crowd. You need an edge over competition. In short, you need to become slightly famous by establishing an expert reputation. Not so long ago, expertise was equated with number of years you were in business or college diploma that hung on your wall. That has changed as people have come to be more interested in results. If you can deliver, people will be interested in you no matter how brief your business experience or how bare your walls are of diplomas. Experts are sought after. They get more business with less effort and command higher fees. Journalists come to them for information. They are asked to speak at conferences. They out-position their competitors and break out of anonymity trap because they know more and are recognized as knowing more. Becoming an expert can help you achieve "top of mind" awareness among members of your target market. By packaging your knowledge into articles, speeches, and workshops your name can immediately come to mind or be first one mentioned when members of your target market turn to others to find what they need. Publish Publishing articles, columns and books are powerful techniques to establish your expertise. Publishing pre-sells others of your abilities and exposes you to thousands of prospects. And reprints of published articles make excellent, low cost sales literature, easily replacing expensive brochures, mailers, and newsletters. Kimberly Stansell says publishing created tremendous name recognition for Research Done Write, her Los Angeles-based consulting and training firm. Her syndicated column "Bootstrapper's Success Secrets" appears in dozens of entrepreneurial publications, association newsletters and business web sites. "The name recognition my column has given me is tremendous," says Stansell. "I get invitations to participate in events and other business opportunities. And I can automatically charge higher fees because people assume I'm expensive." There are endless opportunities to publish your expertise. Thousands of business, trade and Internet publications covering every imaginable industry and audience are fairly easy to break into, even for beginners. If you have a good idea, tailored to a specific readership, there are thousands of publications hungry for articles from business professionals. Find A Podium When Robert Middleton moved his marketing consulting practice a few years ago, he had to find ways to generate new clients. He immediately contacted local chambers of commerce, business groups, and organizations likely to be interested in his three-hour marketing workshop. Within months, Middleton not only had plenty of clients but also made a name for himself in Silicon Valley as a marketing expert for professional firms.

Keyword Effectiveness

When you submit a web site to a search engine you will be instructed to list keywords for site. These keywords are used by search engine in their ranking algorithm, and will take into account keywords specified in meta tags and density of keywords found within normal sentence constructs of your content. Indexers will look for a high degree of relevance between keywords you specify and appearance of keywords in your content to insure that they work in harmony. If keywords do not reveal themselves in high enough density then your ranking will be penalized. Using techniques to hide keywords or spam engine will also result in ranking penalties.