1. Plan, Plan, Plan!
The most common reason meetings tend to go south is for the simple fact that not enough time is devoted to planning. It’s normally overlooked because it seems tedious and boring and can easily be skipped, but the productivity of the meeting is normally impacted.

Here are a few simple questions to get you on the right track. After you review these questions, don’t forget to come up with a simple agenda!

• Where does this meeting fit into our overall goals?
• Why are we meeting?
• What is the purpose of the meeting?
• Who should attend the meeting?
• What is our budget?

2. Remember the Details
When planning big meetings or functions, it can be easy to forget details that need to be remembered. While you may think of yourself as being detail oriented, having a system to remember all that’s necessary is a foolproof way to make sure everything gets done. Checklists are the best way to remember all the vital tasks that are essential. Review your last few projects and see what went right and what went wrong. Make a checklist from that and keep moving forward. As you keep adding to your checklists they’ll be a sure-fire way to get everything done, and they may even improve your productivity as well!

3. Be Time Conscious
A major drag in a meeting is when someone monopolizes the meeting’s schedule and steals time from other agenda items. On effective way to handle this situation if you’re the meeting’s moderator is to simply interrupt the person, thank them for their input and ask them to hold the rest of their comments for the open forum item on the agenda (which is normally last on the schedule).

4. Get on a First Name Basis
Have you ever sat been in a networking function or meeting at a table full of strangers? Everyone hates those awkward moments! One thing you can do to make everyone at ease is to have everyone go around the room and introduce each other and speak about themselves. If the function is bigger than 15-20 people, you can break everyone into groups and have everyone perform a team building exercise. This will help everyone bond together towards a common goal, and hopefully make everyone’s network grow a bit stronger by the end of your meeting.

5. Meet Effectively Every Time
Make sure every meeting you hold follows a structure, has an agenda, and leaves it’s invitees feeling like they accomplished a task or resolved a problem. When people don’t know if your meeting will be effective or not (and even worse if they know it won’t!) they will have a very short attention span that may not even make it until the meeting starts. When people know you mean business, business can get done.

2. Focusing on small details in your ad copy can increase your profits dramatically. Improving seemingly small details like text size, color, or graphics can really make a positive difference and can increase conversion rates.

3. Make your offers flexible so you don’t reject customers! Be creative: if you sell a product or service at a set price, try offering a payment plan for people that may not be able to afford it otherwise.

4. Offer bonuses to provide your customers more value for their dollar. You can package a 15 or 30 minute consultation with every sale to add value to your products/services.

5. Make your customers feel like you value them as a person. Personalize every email or text message with their name. This ensures the message gets read, and it also grabs their attention above all the other important messages they get through the day.

6. Keep your marketing messages on topic. You don’t want customers to get confused. If you sell apples, don’t have pictures of oranges on your website! Use pictures of apples on your website, letterhead, and business cards! Make your customers hungry for your product or service.

7. Attract additional customers to your website by offering free software, whitepapers, downloads, case studies and anything else that’s related to your business. Remember rule number 6!

8. If it makes sense, sell advertising on your blog. This will help provide your customers with services that they may be interested in and provide you with an alternate income stream. Most businesses will want to skip this one, but certain niches will find this invaluable.

9. Tell your customers what to do! Tell your customers what your business does, how it does it, and tell them to contact you today! Don’t just tell them how to contact you, command them to pick up the phone or send in an email right now!

9.5. You wouldn’t drive across the country without a map, so you shouldn’t start advertising your business without a marketing plan! Find places, business, and websites where your customers go, and put your message right where they can see it!

There are a few different options you may come across when searching for an agency to help with your online marketing.

Mass Mailers – Beware of companies that promise sending your message to millions of people for tens of dollars. It may seem like a good deal at the time, but they are just taking your money. Most of them are emailing your message to harvested email accounts, or being posted as spam comments on reputable websites. You not only don’t want your business to be advertised via spam for legal reasons, but it also casts a negative shadow on your reputable products or services. Also, there is no way to be able to verify the actual number of messages that got sent to customers.

Individual Search Engine Ads – Placing unique and targeted ads using services such as Google ® Adwords is one of the most effective (and cost effective!) methods of attracting customers that are already interested in your product or service. Making sure your ad is targeted is vitally important. It’s the key between getting a page view, and making a sale.

Hiring a Marketing Firm – Hiring a marketing consulting firm can be one of the best ways to maximize your marketing dollars. Be warned though, not every company is reputable! You have to do your homework to find a good company that provides verifiable results. One measure of a company’s success rate is the company they keep.
If a company says they’ll make your business X number of dollars in 30, 60, or 90 days, then they should be willing to back that up with a guarantee, that way they’re invested in the deal as well (in the business, we call this having “skin in the game”).

If you’ve made it this far, you should know the basics of online marketing, but if you don’t remember anything else, commit this to memory: research your advertising options thoroughly! Never sign up for something that seems too good to be true expecting to get instant riches. If you lose sight of your long term goals in the search for short term riches, you probably won’t get either.