Generally, all businesses fall under one or both categories; offer a product or service. Looking at business as a whole, thousands of companies are in the product business and thousands of companies are in the service business. So…what type of business works better?

First off, if you’re deciding to start a business but don’t know exactly what to offer…you may want to consider a service based business. Why? Simple – usually much less upfront cost, less development time, less operating costs, and no inventory. As a start up you will probably find that managing inventory is a boat load of work and additionally when you’re having trouble moving (selling) that inventory, it’s even more of a headache since your revenue is directly related to selling those products.

Now this is not to say having a business that is product based would be a bad idea but you’ll want to weigh the options. If you’re operating a start-up with little capital (or maybe none at all) and are managing the business by yourself, a service based business may help keep the work load lighter. Heck, maybe you’re ready for the challenge!

One of the bigger cost factors of a product based business, generally speaking, comes down to storage space. You’ll need the retail or product storage space in order to hold the products you’re selling. Chances are this will lead to leasing building space such as a retail store. A retail store space could easily cost you hundreds if not a couple thousand dollars a month (to start) in rent – make sure you plan ahead.

If you’re interested in starting a business, I say go with a service based business or an online business (again usually a service). Less to maintain, organize, spend up front, and in my experience, running a business can be quite time consuming even without products to worry about.

Make sure to do your research into what your laws permit, taxes, the location of the business, and so on.

Most marketers are aware that social networks have tremendous value in growing their business, at least most businesses. More social networks scatter the internet like a severe plague – there are several dozen social networks you could join right now. However, doing so might be a bit counter-productive.

The two most popular social networks and social media sites are Myspace (existed first) and Facebook (newer to the market). Both networks have huge followings with millions of users but the user interface for each is quite different.

Now, Facebook allows you to create “Fan pages” which are perfect for companies who want to broaden their internet traffic and presence. Corporate companies are beginning to take advantage of this which is a good move to keep up with internet trends. Additionally these pages can be indexed by Google and allow you to post website links, articles, videos, etc. – it’s like having your own web page, kind of.

One of the best benefits to using Facebook is that your “Fan page” or even profile can become viral. I was talking to someone from a company who created a Fan page, started off with about 35 “Fans” (people) who were all employees at the company, and their popularity grew to over 600 “Fans” within a few months…yet they don’t actually know 95% of those fans. Additionally, it has increased their website traffic which you probably know is always a plus.

Did I mention Facebook is free to the user?

• Make it a part of your daily marketing efforts.
• Take advantage of the networking tools.
• Create a profile as a marketer
• Connect with other marketers be being their “friend”
• Have fun and be creative!

In case you don’t know, “SEO” (Search Engine Optimization) means more than putting some keywords, description, and title into your meta information on a specific webpage or website. Those three elements are the very basics that are generally the starting points in regards to having a search engine friendly webpage/website.

Lately I’ve talked/chatted with people in several type of conversations where SEO has been a topic. For whatever reason the term SEO has taken on a life of its own. When optimizing a website or applying SEO to your website, it involves more than the three elements of meta information that I previously mentioned. Yes, you can have do some basic SEO but in reality, that should already be the case when building any webpage/website now.

Looking beyond those basics, you want to apply image tagging, link tagging, inbound links, outbound links, internal link tagging, linked keywords, copy writing with keywords, specifically targeting less generic keywords for each page to start…and so on. Don’t think it’s impossible to learn some more than basic approaches but realize real “SEO” is more involved than choosing 12 generic keywords, writing a description, and applying a title for your meta information – remember, there are companies that specifically offer SEO services so if you think you’re doing SEO like you should be doing, you may want to investigate further.

Let me remind you that if you have a website that you want to get traffic to, adding new content weekly or even daily is a good practice. Along with that, make sure you’re applying new keywords, descriptions, and titles to that content, like what you would typically do on a blog. This will drastically help search engine ranking…

Keep on building!

When you do any marketing, you have to decide when and where to spend money and what type of marketing you’ll do for free (or maybe you only want to do one of those). Two of the areas of internet marketing that can yield good results is in Organic and Paid Search.

Organic Search is that which Google, Yahoo, MSN, & other search engines show you when you perform a search. For example, if you do a search for “Dog House” using Google’s search engine, you see a list of results in the left hand side which are not in the “sponsored links” area. These results are considered Organic Search because they are not paying Google for the search and show up based on criteria that search engine spiders look for in order to rank the page based on the keyword – in this case it’s “Dog House”.

Paid Search also shows up when you do a search in Google for “Dog House” but the results are based on how much an advertiser is willing to pay to show up as a search result. In the right hand side of the page and above the Organic Search results you’ll see some sites listed. These sites are paying Google to show up there but do not necessarily meet your searched terms.

The difference here is that you, as an advertiser/marketer, would rather show in Organic Searches as you don’t pay for each search, clicks, or impressions. You could have 2,000 clicks on your website and never have to pay a dime for those clicks from the Organic Search results but if you had 2,000 clicks and using Paid Search, that would be a very different story…and likely paying a few thousand dollars.

Here’s the challenge – showing up first in Google, Yahoo, and MSN within the Organic Search results for your most relative keywords. If you can do that, you’re on the right path and will save tons of cash. To do so you’ll need to know the many important ways of implementing SEO into your website. No, it’s not impossible but can take some time to do it right and includes copy writing that is targeted to your keywords.