What you can learn from this ebook

Tip #1: Don’t Take Notes From Big Business

Is your marketing not yielding results justifying the investment? Before you react, consider your view of marketing itself. There’s a tendency for small business owners to consider marketing in the way big businesses practice it.

To illustrate the point, think of five advertisements. Now, compare your marketing budget to theirs. Do they compare?

Celebrity endorsements, television commercials and billboard ads are expressions of marketing that typically come to mind. It’s natural. We’re a product of our environment and we’re constantly saturated with corporate messaging.

How businesses have marketed over the past 80 years is a result of mass production. Large-scale output led to mass marketing and created mass media. Like its products, companies found that packaging and delivering marketing content was also an efficient business practice.

Businesses wanted their messages to be seen by the most people possible. The bigger, the better philosophy worked because demand exceeded supply. “Market” evolved into a verb. It became something that producers did to customers.

Plus five more tips…

What you can learn from this booklet

Eight Tips for Effective Brand Positioning
Online Tools that Build the Brand Power of Your Business
Use Promotional Products to Enhance Your Brand and Build your Bottom Line
Turn Pennies into Profit with Affordable Promotional Products
Cartoon Logos, Mascots, Grab Attention and Build Your Brand
The Top Ten Internet Brands: Learn from their Success Strategies
Differentiate Your Business and Rise Above the Competition
Compelling Design + Smart Placement = Successful Banner Ad Strategy
Creative Networking and Brand Building with Business Cards
Use Guerrilla Marketing Tactics to Make Your Small Business Perform Like a Giant
Join the Network! Using Social Websites to Build a Powerful Brand
Building a Buzz with Word of Mouth Marketing
BONUS: Effective Logo Design
Brand Your Way To Success

Have you ever been running your online business when all of a sudden your domain name went up for sale and you were unable to re-register it because you had forgotten or simply forgotten where you registered it?

Thousands of webmasters lose their domain names a year because of these reasons. They are able to not lose their domain names because of the 30 day redemption period that was put into place by ICANN. People who register domain names and run their businesses on them need to understand how important the name is and to keep it up to date with contact information. When your email address changes or you move, that information needs to be updated with the registrar.

How do you find out who your registrar is if you have forgotten? If you do a WHOIS inquiry, it will tell you everything the registrar knows about the domain including contact email, phone and fax numbers, and last known address. Luckily for the person needing to know where their domain is registered, the WHOIS inquiry also gives the name of the current registrar, DNS servers, and the creation and expiration dates of the domain name.

You can check your domain name through this website (Just replace yahoo.com with your domain name)

http://www.dnsstuff.com/tools/whois.ch?ip=yahoo.com

There’s always more than one way to lose your domain. Sometimes hosting companies with less than a clean ethical record, other webmasters, and people who have an interest in your failure may be able to hold domain names in the name of a small business simply because the webmaster didn’t signup or re-register the domain when the time came.

You can avoid the situation or at least reduce your chances of losing your domain by registering it for 10 years, the maximum time allowed currently. In that time, make sure to extend it every year to the 10th year and always keep administrative email and physical addresses up to date through WHOIS.