Angela Booth’s Creativity Factory

Many small business owners hate marketing, especially if they’re creative service providers like designers and writers. Unfortunately this attitude can cripple your business.

Here’s how to get inspired and start to LOVE marketing your business.

It’s All About Helping People

Somewhere along the line many of us were told not to toot our own horn, or heaven forbid - to brag, but marketing isn’t bragging. It’s sharing what you do with people, so that you can help them.

How Does Your Business Help People?

Make a list of how your business helps people. Be specific. Write down your last five clients, what you did for them, and how this helped them.

If you’re a designer, your latest Web site certainly helped the business - one designer friend told me that it’s not uncommon for businesses to go from zero online sales to million dollar sales in less than a year, simply because they’re now online with a professional site which works.

Imagine how many people she’s helped with a single site: the people who run the business, the staff and their families, and of course the people who’ve bought from the site.

Marketing is all about finding people you can help, by explaining HOW you can help.

If you hate the idea of a “hard sell,” relax. There’s never a need for that - once you show people how you can help them, they’re eager to hire you.

Your list of help that your business provides is important, because you can base all your advertising and promotions around it. It’s important in another way too - it will inspire you, and get you excited, because it will show you how much you’re needed.

Your Own Enthusiasm Is Your Biggest Marketing Asset

Now you’ve got your list, and you’re excited, you’re ready to market. Your enthusiasm is contagious: it will make you a magnet for customers. Everyone likes being around people who are filled with positive energy.

Keep your list handy - add to it whenever you can. Before you know it you’ll have changed your mindset: you now love marketing, because you know the “helping” secret.

Discover more secrets to marketing your services with Angela Booth’s video series and marketing ebook. Give your business a marketing boost today - you’ll be thrilled with the results.

Sell your Writing using Craigslist

Have you discovered Craiglist? This great online classifieds site is your key to an income from your writing. Make money from your writing now, when you discover how, when, where and why YOU should be using Craigslist. If you’re not advertisig on Craigslist you’re losing money.

Technorati Tags: Internet marketing, marketing, make money online

What do YOU want from your Web host?

Everyone wants something different. I want maximum uptime, security, and commonsense billing. And I want great service too.

Currently my sites are spread across three Web hosting companies. I won’t mention all three - just my favorite, which is HostGator.

Here’s why - the service. I’ve got many sites, and occasionally something weird happens. When the site’s on HostGator, it’s not a problem. They have 24 hour live chat, and my problem gets fixed fast.

That means peace of mind… and that’s why HostGator is my favorite hosting company.

Make money writing Web sites

If you can use a word processor, you can write Web sites.

Many writers shy away from creating Web sites… they imagine it’s too techy, too complex. It’s not. A small simple site can begin earning money for you very quickly. As a rule of thumb, if you’ve created a site in an area in which there are advertisers you can start earning five to ten dollars a day per site. Now $10 a day isn’t much. But what if you had ten sites all earning $10 day? That’s $100 a day, which is $36,500 a year, just from ten simple sites. What if you had 20 such sites, all earning you $10 a day - or even more - in fact, some sites will earn you $100 a day? “Super-Fast Money-Making Web Sites For Writers: Join The Web-Publishing Bonanza” shows you how.

Technorati Tags: hosting, Web hosting, Web sites

Google achieved search engine dominance by being both simple and fast, and new search engine Cuil (pronounced “cool”) seems to have taken the best of Google as a model.

Here’s Cuil’s search enquiry field - a straight copy of Google, including Google Suggestions:

But the search query results pages ARE different:

I’ll be trying Cuil out over the next week or two, but as a first impression, I like it.

Technorati Tags: search engines, SEO