marketing is the key to success with any Business, online or traditional. You can have a website or business location. You can have a great product. However, if no one has heard about your Business or your product, you have NOTHING!

Marketing is everything you do to promote yourself and your Business. Without an aggressive marketing effort, your website is just one of EIGHT BILLION listed on Google. Without an aggressive marketing effort, your store better have a location next to Walmart and hope for their overflow. How do you stand out from the crowd?

There are seven (let's call them) commandments for your marketing efforts. Keep these in mind and you are well on your way to creating an effective marketing machine. Remember, there is only one way to score the effectiveness of your marketing efforts - sales!

Commandment #1. Use a Rifle NOT a Shotgun

Rifles leave a neat, clean hole where you point them. Shotguns scatter shot in the general direction you point them. Most failed marketing efforts are born in a scattered marketing message aimed at the world.

Let's say you were trying to sell a snowboard. To effectively sell a snowboard to a fifteen year old requires an entirely different conversation than selling the same item to his mother. Therefore, commandment #1 directs us to segment our possible customers into different groups who share common concerns. If your product could be sold to a fifteen year old or a 40 year old, you'd better decide who you are going to focus your marketing efforts upon for the greatest success.

Commandment #2. KNOW Thy Customer Like Thyself

Following commandment #1, we selected a targeted group of people for our marketing message. Now, we MUST understand that targeted market as well as we know ourselves. We must crawl within their mindset. We must understand what they think about our product, what they want from our product, and the alternatives they have to our product.

Customers buy for their reasons, not yours. If you want to sell them your product, you MUST sell to their concerns, not your own. Every piece of marketing copy must FOCUS upon them. If you don't speak their language, you don't get their money.

Commandment #3. Be PASSIONATE About Your Company & Your Product

Attitude is infectious. If we are around upset people, we begin to take on that attitude ourselves. If we are with positive people, the same phenomenon occurs. Most people like to associate with enthusiastic people. And, most of us like passionate people. If you aren't passionate about your company and your product, why should anyone else be? Commandment #3 means to show passion for your product by speaking and writing about it with enthusiasm. Talk about what your product can help people accomplish in their lives. If you can't work up enthusiasm for your own product or business, find another Business or product.

Commandment #4. Accept the fact that "NO" won't kill you

In the process of running a Business and selling a product, you will hear "no" more frequently than you hear "yes" (if you're doing it right). What? By "doing it right", we mean

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