• Are you effectively reaching your target market?
• Is your site easy to navigate and understand?
• Do your visitors find it informative?

These questions address critical web site issues that affect your ability to make money on the Internet. If your target audience doesn't find your site compelling enough, they'll leave and chances are they will never return.

Our critiques judge your site on:

• Ease of navigation and usability
• Appearance and visual style
• Written copy and content
• HTML correctness
• Search engine accessibility

Let us critique your web site for ease of navigation, appearance, written copy and content, HTML correctness, search engine accessibility your ability to effectively reach your target market.

In many instances, small changes to your site, can significantly increase your ability to reach your target market. Web appraisals start at $199, and include detailed reports on potential problems and include solutions.

For more information on our services or to have your site critiqued, call 800-575-5369 or email concept@marketingsource.com

I read once that something like 30 percent of all drinkable water gets wasted on the way to the consumer by leaky pipes. Likewise, your business may be letting potential revenue drip away, to be lost forever, all over the place. Use this checklist to make sure you are taking best advantage of all the opportunities for earnings that would be arriving safely if you only plugged up those holes.

1. Improve your followup. According to the National Sales Executive Association, only about two percent of sales occur on the first contact. Eighty percent of sales require at least five contacts before the transaction occurs. That means that if you put out your sales message just once or twice, you're barely out of the gate. Those who might eventually buy are hardly even beginning to pay attention. You must repeat that message again and again before it wakes up busy people to what you are offering.

2. Put your marketing activities on schedule with a plan. I see a lot of businesses bedeviled by the "feast or famine" syndrome, where they stop marketing when times are good and therefore have no pipeline in place bringing them new leads when the economy slows down. They get busy marketing, but there's a time lag before new business comes in, and when it does, they stop marketing once more, keeping the cycle going. Instead, invest time or money in creating a marketing plan that tells you what to do each week or month to keep business continually flowing in. If it's too much for you to handle, hire assistants or outsource it to hungry but competent colleagues.

3. Increase your personal productivity by working at your most creative times. Once I incited a firestorm of criticism on CompuServe's PR Forum by revealing that I hardly ever spend more than one hour writing a press release. Other PR professionals opined that I couldn't possibly create decent work that quickly. Well, I do, and here's my secret: following a process that creativity researchers will tell you is used by top scientists and inventors, I absorb all the facts and define the challenge for myself, then go to sleep, take a walk or step into the shower. Within a day, my unconscious mind brings me a "Eureka" experience with a terrific headline. The rest of the press release pours out right after the headline. Had I sat down to try, try, try to write that document, it would take triple the time and not reach the same quality.

4. Stop unproductive marketing activities, boosting your profits. Advertising pros know that most advertising doesn't work, but they continue to spend like crazy because part of it does. If you can identify which marketing efforts of yours are not giving you a return, and stop spending money and energy on those, you'll be earning more from what you spend. Admittedly, it can be difficult sometimes to pinpoint what actually brings in customers and clients. However, if you begin asking each new buyer how they heard about you and keep track of the answers, patterns almost always emerge. One graphic artist learned through this kind of research that nearly all her clientele came from word of mouth and none from her ads in the local business journal. Of course, the opposite discovery could have happened, too. Don't assume, find out!

5. Market more often to your customer base - much more often. Hardly anyone stays in touch with existing and past customers often enough. They think they might be "bothering" their clientele by letting them know about new products, opportunities to buy before a price increase, success stories of other customers like them, and so on. Nope, it's not so. On the contrary, staying in touch ensures that you stay in the awareness of people who have done business with you before, so that when they need you again, they come to you rather than go to your competitors.

6. Hire help for mechanical tasks or a virtual assistant to help manage communications. Feeling overwhelmed? If you can make, let's say, $100 an hour doing what you do best, you should not be spending too much energy on routine things like stuffing envelopes, doing errands like going to the bank and the copy shop or putting together slides for your upcoming lecture. Instead, pay someone $25 an hour to get those to-do's accomplished and free you up to get more high-paid work accomplished. An exception to this principle is when you do the repetitive tasks as a break or rest from money-making activities that tire you out.

Increasing your productivity means increasing the income from your business without spending more hours working. Get started on at least one of the above today!

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Marcia Yudkin <marcia@yudkin.com> is the author of 6 Steps to Free Publicity and 10 other books. She runs a private member site, MarketingforMore.com, which supports business owners who are growing their businesses. Learn how to avoid the most common pricing mistakes in her free report, "Charge More & Get It," available from http://www.marketingformore.com/survey.htm .

Associations and non-profits are a powerful resource for building and expanding networking and business opportunities, finding jobs, evaluating goods and services, and researching trends or publications.

The Directory of Associations is a comprehensive source of information on associations and professional societies including business and trade associations, 501c non-profit organizations, chambers of commerce, and other charity and community associations.

For more information or to order, call 800-575-5369 or go to http://www.maketingsource.com/associations.

Are you attracting a large number of prospective customers at the lowest possible cost ...and converting the maximum number of them into paying customers? It's not very difficult if you follow these 3 simple steps.

Step 1: Control Your Advertising Expense

Look for ways to keep your sales volume growing without increasing your advertising expense. For example:

* Negotiate Price With Advertisers
Many advertisers are willing to negotiate a special discount to keep your business - or to get it away from their competitors. Take the initiative when you're placing an ad. Ask for a discount ...or a bigger discount than the one already offered.

* Trim Your Ads
Reduce the size of your ads so you can run more ads without increasing your total cost. Don't be surprised if some of your short ads generate a bigger response than your long ads. The most effective ad I ever used had only 11 words.

Step 2: Generate Some Unpaid Publicity

Publicity is what you get when someone else promotes (or you get them to promote) your business. It establishes more credibility with prospective customers than advertising ...and it generates sales at a much lower cost.

Start a publicity program for your business - or expand the one you already have. Here are 3 simple ways you can use publicity to generate business:

(1) Find something newsworthy about your business. Write about it in a news release and distribute it to publishers.

(2) Contact non-competing businesses serving customers in your market. Offer to publicize their products or services to your customers in exchange for their publicizing your services to their customers.

(3) Write a short "how to" article to help customers in your targeted market. Promote a product or service related to the topic of the article in a short byline at the end. Distribute your article to ezine publishers, web sites and trade magazines serving your targeted market. Give them permission to publish it at no cost.

Caution: Don't expect unpaid publicity to replace the results you get with advertising. Use it to supplement your advertising. You control where and when your advertising appears. You cannot control where or when you get publicity ...or if you get any at all.

Step 3: Improve Your Selling Propositions

Most prospects who take the time to consider your product or service would like to buy from you. But they decided that other things they want are either more important or more urgent.

You can capture many of these sales by dramatically improving your offer. Create a "good deal" that's so enticing it becomes their first choice.

You don't have to reduce your price to improve your offer. Instead, simply load your offer with bonuses. Make sure your bonuses have a high perceived value to your customers ...even if they cost you little or nothing.

Always include an expiration date for your offer. Give prospects the choice to either accept your proposition within a short time or forfeit it. This will motivate many prospects to delay some other purchase so they can buy your product or service now.

Tip: To create an absolutely irresistible offer - include a special discount price AND a set of valuable bonuses in your offer.

Controlling your advertising expense and getting unpaid publicity will attract potential customers at the lowest cost. Improving your selling propositions will convert the maximum number of those prospects into paying customers. Together, these 3 steps are what I call "smart marketing".

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Bob Leduc spent 20 years helping businesses like yours find new customers and increase sales. He just released a New Edition of his manual, How To Build Your Small Business Fast With Simple Postcards and several other publications to help small businesses grow and prosper. For more information: Email: BobLeduc@aol.com Subject: "Postcards" or call: 702-658-1707 After 10 AM Pacific Time/Las Vegas, NV