In my experience a business will grow its revenues, profits or customer base, but the three do not always go hand in hand. Increasing customer base can mean discounting, hitting revenues and profits; revenues may come at the expense of profits and customers; profits may come without increasing the customer base or revenues with some sensible cost reductions.

My suggestion is, therefore, simply that this year your target should be to grow your business. Whether that means customer base, profits or revenues (or to which extent you balance the three) should be a thought out business decision.

Definitely all your suggestions are very good. I do have some groups, but through blogging I have the feeling I’ll be able to reach more people.

Thanks, Mike! I appreciate your help!

But if your target market is “parents” there must tons of groups (e.g. LinkedIn, Google, Yahoo, etc.) catering to parents, where you can become involved in their discussions. That is what I would suggest.

Maybe you can help me figure out something. I write a lot about chess and education. My purpose is many-fold. One thing is that I’m trying to actually make a change in our culture, to get parents teaching their children chess at a young age in America (like they do in other countries).

I have discovered that you can actually start at age 2. It is a different lesson than at age 4 or age 6, but you can actually teach the game.

So, for me I just started writing about this to get the ball rolling, as I researched an exact technique for teaching any parent to teach their young child.

I shared my articles and was astonished to discover that when you started typing my name in Google, “Laura Sherman Chess” actually came up as an option to click on. There was one about harp too.

This maintained for months and then disappeared. Now if you type my name, you’ll see a few entries for “Laura Sherman” on the first page (which is cool), but there is no suggestion of “Laura Sherman chess”. You have to type that phrase to see all my articles.

Was it the duplication that caused it to disappear? I did it all by accident. I just wanted to get articles out to parents and brand myself a bit, gearing up for the book I’m writing. It was a nice side effect.

And being the greedy girl I am, I want it back! Any advice?

Thanks!

On the one hand, if your article is posted on several sites with a link back to your blog, you may generate a little traffic from this link. However, if the article tells the entire story there is not need to go to your blog for anything. Therefore you may be read, but not followed because they are not following YOUR blog.

On the other hand, it is important to understand how most search engines treat “duplicate copy”. Generally speaking they downgrade all of the “duplicate copy.” By downgrading all pages with “duplicate copy”, they also downgrade the validity of the links back to your blog. There is a lot of discussion about this topic and SEOs do not all agree.

I play it safe because about 40% of traffic to this blog comes from search engines. I work with those that wish to copy my articles and here is example of how I like it done, so there is not a problem with search engines:

My initial post: http://bestbizpractices.org/2010/01/03/why-many-small-business-are-still-struggling/

Copy of my post: http://www.ccassociates.com/blog/?p=504

You will note that the topic is the same, but the copy is abbreviated with a link back to read the entire article. The title is different. Their title is sexier, while mine is more search engine friendly. The content that is there has been reworded so it is not “duplicate copy.” In this case, the copier got what they wanted, I received additional exposure and traffic and we did not create a “duplicate copy” issue.

I leave it in your hands to decide.

I am focused on tip #2. Low budget (no budget) marketing. It is fun and you must be creative to really take part in this one.

One idea, something I wrote about on my blog just today coincidentally, is writing articles about your profession. Tips that folks can use on an immediate basis.

Then you GIVE these articles away for free. Make sure they are valuable and not hype and people will post them on their site and blog.

For instance I am a chess coach (as well as a freelance writer). So I write a lot of articles about how to teach very young children to play chess.

There aren’t a lot of articles about this on the net, so people are eager to scoop them up. I have learned to tell them that they are free (or else they assume I want money).

It is all part of the “pay it forward” mentality of social networking. People really respond to it and business will come as a result.

SCORE would be face to face where you have an opportunity to look the individual in the eye and ask about their experience so you can determine how much trust you wish to put into their recommendation.

With LinkedIn it is virtual which for me, would make it more difficult to determine whether or not I felt I could trust the advice. Yet, I can assure you if you get the right person on LinkedIn, they will have as good advice as a SCORE counselor.

Having said this, I personally would prefer a face to face meeting if it were me. I might also ask for advice in a LinkedIn group and then see which advice made the most sense to me.

Either source is free. So what do you have to lose?

Thanks for reading my blog Ellen and good luck with your business.