The Muse Who Helps Move Your Small Business Forward
A marketing plan gives you a basic guide for your marketing for the year.
By looking at your marketing 12 months at a time you can plan for seasonal and holiday promotions, work to combat any traditionally slower times for your company, and keep your business supported by always having at least one or two forms of marketing working for you.
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Woo! My blog has a new look. I’ve updated the layout a bit and reworked the sidebars. My favorite update is the cool new Lifestream widget (bottom right corner of every page). Get yours at http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/lifestream/ It’s the same plugin I used a few weeks ago to set up Lisa’s #SendLove stream.
I’ve also moved all my content from The Muses Guide site over here to The Small Business Muse to streamline and make it easier to keep everything up to date.
Another bit of news is that I’m going to actually be “blogging” soon and not just posting my newsletter articles online. Exciting.
Leave me a comment and let me know what you think of the new look.
There are so many options for marketing your business.
Should you write articles? Publish an ezine? Blog? Get on Twitter? Facebook? LinkedIn? Distribute flyers? Mail out postcards? Hold workshops? Present workshops or speeches? Do in person networking? Network online? Do joint ventures? Radio ads? Contests? Teleclasses? Work with charities? Write a magazine column?
It’s important to know yourself and to acknowledge who you are and what you enjoy when you create your marketing plan.
First, let’s start with a definition. What is Marketing? Marketing is the process of defining, understanding, and then systematically promoting yourself and your products to your target market in a way that converts into sales of your products or services.
Um… yeah… in English? :) Marketing is how you reach the people that you can help, then share with them how you can help them and give them the opportunity to allow you to help. See, that’s not scary at all. When you define it this way it actually sounds good, right? You want to help people by providing products or services that solve their problems!
You wouldn’t start a road trip across the country without a map. Or, you probably shouldn’t unless you don’t care where you end up. So even if you’re a care-free, by the seat of your pants type of woman, a business is best run with at least some basic goals in mind.
Note from Michelle: this article is a great overview of how to get started publishing your articles online!
Have you ever visited a website or blog and discovered the owner had published an article written by another business owner, along with a short biography of the author and a link to his or her website? You might have wondered how you could have someone publish an article you wrote and advertise your business like that for you.
It’s actually very easy to publish your articles on the Internet, and it’s free to do. If you’ve been sending articles out in your monthly newsletters or keeping them hidden in a folder on your computer, it might be time for you to consider publishing them on the Internet.
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 Shape Up Your Website |
 Getting Started with Twitter |
 Traffic Tactics |
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 Article Marketing |
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 Marketing Brainstorm Workshop |
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In addition to all the great articles on my blog...
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