It’s January – Ready to do some business building?

Did you make any New Year’s resolutions? How’s it going so far? Recession got you daunted? Here’s aquote for you and some ideas to get you moving forward.

Is this you? ” Ability is what you’re capable of doing. Motivation determines what you do. Attitude determines how well you do it.” Lou Holtz

If you’re in business for yorself, there’s a couple of things you really need to have. If you haven’t got them, let’s get started now.

If you’re in business, doesn’t matter if you’re selling widgits or on site massage, YOU NEED A WEBSITE! You need to create an online presence. Folks don’t go hunting through the yellow pages any more to find you. They Google you. If you don’t have a web presence, you won’t get found, your competitors will.

There’s 3 ways to get online. The most costly is to have a site built for you. The more affordable way is to do it yourself & the 3 way is free, say a blog either here at WordPress or Blogger. Now there are other free ways to get online say Facebook, but it’s more professional to start with either a website and/or a blog. It doesn’t have to be a big complicted site with lots of flash etc. It can be a very basic one page affair that tells folks what you have to offer & how to contact you. I’ll get into all the ins & outs of building a website in another post.

By the way, once you create an online presence for your business you become an online or internat marketer. I know online/internet marketing has gotten some bad press. There are folks out there who will sell you a bunch of vitually useless stuff  if you let them. So if you’re new to all this internet stuff, go hide your credit card in another room. I’ll wait… Back?

Basically there’s 2 types of businesses, those that sell tangile goods like widgets & those that sell intangible ones like massage or coaching. In either case most of the strategies I’ll share with you are equally effective for both. There’s some really cool FREE stuff online that will help you build your business. So you don’t have to spend any money (well just a little like registering your domain name & gettiing a webhost & stuff like that. But in general you don’t need to spend big bucks.

There’s a ton of blogs, according to Technorati.com there’s something like 15.5 million active blogs with something like 1.3 – 1.5 million posts made every day.  You couldn’t possibly read all of them I’m going to share a couple I’ve found really useful. Go check out the guys over at StomperBlog.com  StomperNet teaches online businesses how to get more traffic, and how to convert more traffic into paying customers. It’s valuable information, & much of it is free, including the instructional videos, BUT you do need to register. It does help if you know a little about what happens online, but most of what they have to offer is brain dead simple.