If you are a looking for a marketing consultant in Seattle, or any other location for matter you will want to ask them a few very specific questions during your discovery process.

Here are some questions you should ask them:

1) Are they focused more on selling advertising than helping you create and execute a real marketing strategy?

2) Are they skilled at both offline marketing and online marketing? Specifically merging the two into one strategy for the maximum effectiveness of your marketing dollars.

3) Are they leveraging Social Media? Are they current will Social Media marketing.

4) Are they savvy with email marketing techniques? Are they using these practices in their business?

5) Are they a marketing consultant or a marketing coach for small businesses? Is their focus small businesses or any business?

The primary consideration is whether you really need a consultant or a coach. Let’s face it, we are all in the marketing business.

You may find you need a seattle marketing coach more than a consultant. This approach let’s you do the marketing yourself with expertise and accountability to actually get it done.

If you are the type of business owner that is always procrastinating and putting off marketing for “another day” this is usually a good fit. Just like an athelete needs a coach to hold them accountable, many small business owners need one as well to get the results they need and desire in their business.

Most times the expense is negligible compared to the money being left on the table by not executing a marketing strategy at all.

To success in 2010!

positiveenlightenment.co.uk

A website needs traffic and that traffic needs to convert into leads, sales, opt-ins or downloads if it is to be considered a worthwhile business asset. Unless your target customers can find you within the top 2 or 3 search engine results pages you may as well be sticking a post-it note on a tree somewhere in the Brazilian rain forest. 

If you are already aware that your website isn’t all that it could be, you might be considering employing a SEO Expert. Search engine optimisation, sometimes referred to as SEO, is a process that improves the visibility of your website by improving rankings on search engines like Google, MSN and Yahoo!  for keyword phrases related to your business. This in turn will generate more traffic to your website, but good SEO doesn’t stop there.

Why Most Small Businesses Say No to the SEO Expert

One of the most common reasons that small companies give for failing to take advantage of expert SEO help and advice is price. Yet most are losing more than the cost of SEO in missed sales and profitability over and over again. That’s profit which ultimately improves your competitor’s balance sheet.

Good SEO might is not cheap and usually requires a substantial deposit even though results may take months to achieve.  Add to this the fact that no Professional SEO will ever guarantee positions to a client and you can see why most small business owners view Search Engine Optimisation as a risky investment.

Pay For Performance SEO

The basis for Pay For Performance SEO is simple, at the beginning of any campaign the objectives are clearly defined and marked out and no payment is required until those objectives have been met.  This could represent front page rankings for your most important keyword phrases or to secure a predefined number of opt-ins to your newsletter.

Pay for Performance SEO won’t make SEO any cheaper or offer any guarantee but it does remove much of the risk element from the client’s perspective and places it fairly and squarely at the feet of the optimiser.  Where it should be!

“Voice over Internet Protocol” or VoIP is technology that lets you make and receive phone calls over the Internet through an online VOIP service. VoIP is often used abstractly to refer to the actual transmission of voice (rather than the protocol implementing it). VoIP is clearly identified as a Least Cost Routing (LCR) voice routing system, which is based on checking the destination of each telephone call as it is made, and then sending the call via the network that will cost the customer the least.

VoIP is widely employed by carriers, especially for international telephone calls. VoIP is a core technology that drives everything from voice-chat software loaded on a desktop PC to Mac full-blown IP-based telecommunications networks in large corporations. VoIP is gaining popularity among small business owners for good reasons: It costs less than conventional business phone service — often a lot less.

VOIP is now a mature proven technology that until now had only been implemented in large corporations and businesses where it has been deployed on their internal Networks. VOIP is presently the state of the art in business communications. VoIP is benefiting from consumer interest in bundled services from their cable companies as well.

VoIP is techspeak for “voice over Internet protocol,” but it could spell “saving big bucks” for your business. VoIP is especially popular with long-distance calls. Voip is significantly less expensive than typical telephone long distance packages, plus one high speed Internet connection can serve for multiple phone lines with no loss in functionality, reliability, or voice quality and VoIP is great for travelers.

The Best VOIP service for you really does depend on your needs and how you will use the telephone service. VoIP is no longer a technical novelty, but a real business for a growing number of for-profit organizations that sell and service and VoIP connectivity. VoIP is a revolutionary technology that has the potential to completely rework the world’s phone systems.

VOIP is less expensive because it unregulated and uses low-cost commodity networking, and the infrastructure is subsidized by cable TV and POTS subscribers who are paying too much. The primary reason for migrating to VoIP is cost, as it equalizes the costs of long distance calls, local calls, and e-mails to fractions of a penny per use. A key point to remember is that VoIP is built on already established equipment and applications. As an added bonus, it’s also cheaper, because VoIP is free of the endless government regulations and tariffs imposed upon phone companies.