I’m in the process of completely rethinking my business model, and that will be my primary focus as I plan this year’s business retreat for myself. Your business model doesn’t have to be at all complex, but should provide the guiding force for all that you do, like guiding you to the opportunities to accept (and those to decline), the joint ventures and strategic alliances to pursue, and the new ideas you should retain and develop, as well as those to let go of.

Here’s are the 4 steps I’m following as I create the blueprint for my business model:

1. Make clients pay well for your most valuable commodity — your time. I see many service business owners tying themselves up with (and tying themselves down to) far too many 1:1 clients. You have only so many hours in the day, and at some point you’ll hit the wall and not be able to expand the number of 1:1 clients you see. Sure, you can hire and train additional staff to handle the overflow, but in many cases, you make less money in this model while tripling your headaches. Make your 1:1 time with clients your highest-fee service, charging a premium fee to dispense your expertise.

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The typical form of a newsletter is a one-way communication where you provide information to customers, such as product updates and announcements. Creating a successful newsletter can be extremely rewarding. Subscribers and customers respond with glowing feedback, online sales jump and your customer relationships and brand loyalty deepens. Here are some useful tips that might help in creating a successful newsletter.

Define Success

Ask yourself “What is the purpose of your newsletter?” A newsletter is a substantial investment of company resources in terms of time and energy, and you need to define in as tangible terms as possible the purpose of your Newsletter.

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I often get asked the question, “How do I get more followers on Twitter?” Many of my clients want to pay a sum of money for the latest scheme to get them 10,000 new followers in 24 hours or some such nonsense as that. As in all marketing strategies, it’s not the number that counts. Rather, it’s the quality in the numbers that really matters. So, 10,000 followers who are not members of your target market are fairly useless to you. Of much greater value would be a smaller list of 1000 followers who are all members of your target market.

All in all, online social networking is not that vastly different from face-to-face networking. Some basic networking principles still apply, regardless of the platform:

To be interesting, you have to be interested (in others). Try to be a resource and give first before asking for anything.

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Social media optimization is a way for organizations and individuals to generate publicity through social networking tools like Twitter and LinkedIn, online communities like Facebook, and automated tools like TwitterFeed and Ping.fm. The term “social media optimization” was originally coined by SEO consultant extraordinaire, Rohit Bhargava, the senior vice president of Ogilvy 360 Digital Influence and author of the Influential Marketing Blog. (Bhargava’s work was so groundbreaking, Jeremiah Owyang, another social media optimization expert, even dovetailed a few of his own rules to the original work.)

Social media optimization is basically a way to promote your blog, website, or even your company’s brand, through social media, without being obnoxious or overtly commercial. Sure, you can blanket sites like Twitter with “Want to lose weight? Download my free report, ‘19 Ways to Lose Weight Fast’” repeatedly, or brag about your latest affiliate paycheck, but that’s not going to get you any followers. At least none worth talking to.

Bhargava terms these people”Twankers” (people who use Twitter for one-way broadcasts about their own greatness) and “Twidiots” (people who only tweet insignificant things like their latest press release or what they had for breakfast). If you’re just having one-way conversations and telling people about the minor, mundane details of your company, you’re not providing any value, and your SMO efforts will be wasted.

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The concept of user experience, and the consideration of ideas that lend toward the optimization of that concept, have created a field of interest and study that is growing as a concrete and primary business model regarding the online world. The focus on user experience is defined through standards that involve multiple dynamics. A paramount is placed upon not only the user’s perception of a web site, but also the sites ability to efficiently serve the user’s needs while simultaneously reflecting the business operatives sought after by the owner of the site.

There are many standard sets, such as The Stanford Guidelines, which relate to the functional aspects of a web site, referring to credibility, updates, and other performance based ideals. However, evaluating and applying user experience principles involves a more complex and multifaceted mindset. When dealing with UX, (user experience) a web designer or programmer must incorporate concepts that exist independently, but also blend smoothly and work efficiently.

User Experience is about more than just building a website

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In SEO, link building is the practice of accumulating relevant links in order to build up site authority, and rank for certain keyword phrases on search engines. However, link building is often associated with questionable practices like link buying and link spamming. Too many businesses focus on buying sitewide static links, and building a specific number of links. Once they achieve that goal, they tend to forget about their link building efforts. What they have failed to discover is that a successful link building strategy is one that is natural, builds your web presence, and strengthens your brand.

In this day and age in the online world, there are a variety of effective ways to build your brand and links such as using video sharing websites, blogging, and participating in social media. The types of online brands with the most successful online strategies utilize all of these methods of brand building and link building. Sitewide links, or links that are placed on all pages of a website, have lost a lot of their value for the simple fact that they are unnatural. Sitewide links are the links in a template or sidebar under a section such as “friends,” “links,” or “resources.” Many websites get the majority of their inbound links from sitewide linking, but they must build a strong web presence first in order for those sitewide links to be credible and effective.

Tips for Building Your Web Presence

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I have to admit I’ve been slow to jump on board with the whole social marketing trend.

After so many years spent in marketing and frequently hearing about the “next big thing”, I’ve come to the decision that all these technologies are simply communication tools for building trusting relationships with prospective customers.

No one tool is going to make you a gazillion dollars.

But used with common sense and an understanding of where your customers hang out and what your customers are most wanting, I think social marketing technology is well worth learning to use.

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Wake Up – Your Clients Are Looking for You!

If you’re going to use the power of the Internet to try to find clients, you have to first understand how prospective clients are going to find you. You need to drop your preconceived notions about how you see your business, and start thinking about how potential clients are going to see your business. To do that, you need to try to put yourself in their shoes.

Understanding Web Searches

Let’s suppose, for example, your business is centered around providing consulting to customers who need help with back pain in New York. When you sit down to start designing your web strategy, you might hire a copywriter to create content with the keywords, “back pain consultant,” or “pain coaching.” However, those terms won’t likely bring you much in the way of good, solid traffic from potential clients.

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If you want to learn how to make money online the right way, with no hype and no false promises, then you will have to make the effort to ignore all these seemingly unbelievable offers that are being made to you. If you have recently lost your job, then you are vulnerable, and prey to every shark in the internet waters – and there are lots of them.

I know what it is like because I was like you. I lost my job, and tried to make it online but found it very hard. I spent a lot of money trying to learn how to make money online: one lump sum of $6,500 to be taught what I now know was elementary stuff. I was taken for a ride, and when I eventually found out that the Corey Rudl that I paid for this was one of the most well respected internet millionaires online, I was disillusioned.

These guys have no shame. They are still at it. I have just been offered an unbelievable opportunity, only about 40 slots left, to learn how to make $300 a day that can expand to many times that. The guy selling his ideas that made him so much money is doing it because he wants to ‘give something back’. Why do I find it difficult to believe that?

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Do you feel like you are spending a lot of money on PPC but that you are getting little in return? For small business owners and internet entrepreneurs, spending even a couple thousand dollars on PPC can feel like an incredible amount of money. To ensure that your ads actually bring your business results and to make the most out of your PPC investment, implement some of these money-saving tips.

1. Make sure your ads are geographically targeted. If you are a dry cleaner in Brooklyn, only place ads for people in your local area. This will help to lower ad impression, raise CTR, and give you better ROI and a higher quality score.
2. Use the negative keywords match feature to your advantage. When you use the negative keywords match feature, you can filter out keywords for which you do not want your ads to show. The words “free” and “cheap” are common elements of negative keyword phrases. For example, if you sell web templates, surely you don’t want people searching for “free web templates” to click on your ad. You will have to pay for those extra clicks and all of those unwanted impressions will lower your CTR. Use the negative keywords match feature to filter out such negative keywords. However, you may find that some negative keywords would be of benefit to your campaign. Go to the Google Adwords Keyword Tool, choose “negative” in the drop down menu under Match Type, and determine which negative keywords may serve you.
3. Create separate ad groups, ads, and landing pages. Rather than targeting a slew of keywords with one ad and one landing page, group similar keywords in individual ad groups, create individual ads for them, and then point them to your designated landing pages. By doing so, you can improve your CTR and conversion rates because the landing pages will be more relevant to the terms that users are searching for.
4. Use ad scheduling. Ad scheduling allows you to control the day and time that your ads appear. For example, if your business offers a special Tuesday deal, you can schedule your ad campaign so that your ads promoting the Tuesday deal only show on Tuesdays. Or if you are running your ads 24 hours a day, you might find that by running them only during a certain time frame of the day instead, you get better conversions. Let’s say you have a health website. You will probably get more clicks and conversions in the morning for keywords like, “morning after pill,” “morning sickness,” “morning headache,” and “hangover.”

Don’t use broad match. Many people are simply unaware of the different keyword match features that are available in Adwords. By default in an Adwords campaign, your keywords are set as a “broad match.” The problem with broad match is that your ads will show up when people search for different variations of your keywords, even if they are not on your keyword list. Google is likely to consider many words as relevant when they are really not. Use the “phrase” keyword match type to ensure that your ads only show up when people search for the exact keywords on your list.

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I was introduced to this new GDI recruitment system the other day by an online friend of mine..

Once I did my Due Diligence I saw that the system has been online the last 4 months (and I had not heard about it)

Next I found out it is ranking very well on Alexa..

Yesterday it was ranked 12,191th most popular website online!

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