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Over the past 35 years, I have observed many professional service firms struggle with their marketing efforts. Time after time I would witness a firm spending large sums of money doing the wrong type of marketing to the wrong market segment with the wrong marketing message and with the wrong marketer. And to see failed after failed attempt at marketing. On the other hand, I also got to see some very smart marketing done for the right reasons, to the right markets, with the right message and with the right marketer with very solid results.

Too many professionals continue to think that everyone is a potential client, rather than selecting a targeted market and niche. The very successful professionals think strategically and use some smart marketing strategies. Here are six smart marketing strategies for professional service firms from your strategic thinking coach.

1. Select a highly targeted market or niche for your professional services. Focus on one target or niche at a time.

2. Develop a compelling and memorable marketing message. Determine your USP Unique Selling Proposition and integrate it into your marketing messages.

3. Identify the frustration that someone has doing business with professional service firms and then develop your way of taking away that frustration of the client by having them do business with your firm.

4. Establish yourself or someone in your firm as an authority or expert on various issues and subjects. After you or someone else in your firm is established, then key influencers and decision makers will come to you when they need help.

5. Develop a list of your 100 Most Desired Clients. Then create a message, a method of message delivery, timing of the message delivery, a follow-up process to each contact with an effective contact management system and an evaluation system for measuring the effectiveness of your marketing strategies and efforts.

6. Develop and implement a networking strategy and an effective referral system to achieve Top Of Mind Awareness of your professional services firm and to keep your target market alive and well!

These six smart strategies are really simple and have awesome power to produce significant results for any professional service firm.

Glenn Ebersole, Jr. is a multi-faceted professional, who is recognized as a visionary, guide and facilitator in the fields of business coaching, marketing, public relations, management, strategic planning and engineering. Glenn is the Founder and Chief Executive of two Lancaster, PA based consulting practices: The Renaissance Group, a creative marketing, public relations, strategic planning and business development consulting firm and J. G. Ebersole Associates, an independent professional engineering, marketing, and management consulting firm. He is a Certified Facilitator and serves as a business coach and a strategic planning facilitator and consultant to a diverse list of clients. Glenn is also the author of a monthly newsletter, Glenns Guiding Lines Thoughts From Your Strategic Thinking Business Coach and has published more than 250 articles on business.

To find out more about the benefits & rewards of effectively working with a strategic thinking business coach, please contact Glenn Ebersole through his web site at http://www.businesscoach4u.com or jgecoach@aol.com

There are a lot of operators (commands you can enter in the Google search box to return specific results) you can plug into Google in order to find what you want. For webmasters and website owners, however, a few particular operators can be especially useful. Operators can be used to locate potential link partners, evaluate current inbound links, and determine what pages of your website still need to be added to the index. Here are the operators we think you should know:

link:

Simply enter this operator followed by your full url (including http://) with no space. Ex: link:http://www.googleadvisor.org

This operator is one of the most popular and widely used. It simply shows you what (and how many) webpages within the index have a link to your url.

Using this operator, you can also plug in the url of your competitor(s) to see what sites link to them. These websites may be a good place to start in your search for link exchanges (or even one-way links).

site:

This operator will restrict all results to webpages within the domain or website you enter. For example, if you enter site:googleadvisor.org you will find all of the webpages of this site that are listed on Google. This a good operator to use if you want to see just how many webpages of your site Google has indexed, and likewise, how many pages are not listed - the ones you may want to submit, or resubmit, to Google.

allintitle:

Here you enter the operator and some keyword that you are interested in. The results will show you websites and webpages that have that keyword(s) in their title. For example, intitle:google will return all sites that have google in their title, including Google Advisor. This may be used to once again find link partners within your subject area, and to evaluate possible competitors.

Similarly, you can also use intitle: if you want to do a similar search, but open your results to those webpages with the keywords in their content as well . For instance, intitle:google advisor would give you all sites with google in the title and advisor somewhere on the webpage.

info:

This operator is not terribly useful, but its interesting to see what you find. Simply place your url in front of the operator like info:www.googleadvisor.org to get a Google page with your website title and desciption. The page will also contain links to your website's cache, related websites (you can also use the related: operator for this), and more. If your website is new to the index, and you are not appearing for any keywords yet, this is an easy way to find your website and confirm that it is indeed listed. Note: some operators like related: will not work for new websites.

To obtain the full list of operators, visit: http://www.google.com/help/operators.html.

We hope these few operators mentioned above will be of the most use to you as a webmaster or website owner.

Bradley James is the Webmaster of GoogleAdvisor.org [http://www.googleadvisor.org], an informational site providing free information to casual searchers and Webmasters about the Google search engine.

One of the great uses of article marketing is that of creating credibility. You see, when you write articles and submit them to multiple article directories online, they not only are posted on the article directories themselves, but are also posted on the many niche web sites that use articles as content.

Ask yourself this: if you were thinking about hiring one of two people to do work for you, or to learn from, and you were to google their name, and one of the people showed over 10,000 results, mostly articles and reviews about that person, and the other person showed less than 100 references to their name or site, which would you feel is more credible?

If you are like me, you probably would rather work with the person who has over 10,000 web sites referencing him or her, than work with the person with less than 100.

One of the great things about article marketing is that it can very quickly build up massive numbers of links and references to you and your web site, giving you the quick advantage of perceived credibility.

So how do you do it?

Here is my 3 step plan for building credibility online:

1) Write articles on your niche topic

2) Put links in your articles that go back to your web site

3) Submit the articles to as many article directories as possible (I currently submit my articles to a list of about 150 article directories).

By following this 3 step system, you will very quickly gain credibility online, and position yourself to receive some of the business your competitors are currently receiving.

Do you want to learn more about how I do it? I have just completed my brand new guide to article marketing success, Your Article Writing and Promotion Guide

Download it free here: Secrets of Article Promotion

Sean Mize is a full time internet marketer who has written over 1574 articles in print and 11 published ebooks.

Let's face it people. Your articles title means everything. Why? It helps you get a higher page ranking. It's what gets your viewers to view your content. Most people who search something on the internet, look at the title, not the teaser copy, or the summary. Viewers base their clicks on titles! So how do you write a good title for your article?

Your title needs to have some sort of catch. So here is a list on how you can get your articles title to catch your viewers to read it

1. Put your article's keyword into your article. This tells the reader that your article actually has something about the subject they're searching on. Also, if you put your keyword into your title, search engines give you a higher page ranking. So use your keyword in all of your articles titles!

2. Adding a number to your articles title can be very powerful. Numbers make an article look more fast paced and straight to the point. When people look at your article, they will tend to click on the article that has a number on it.

3. You can shock your audience with your title. This can be done by saying, Your Marketing Tactics Suck! People will click on your article more because it catches their attention.

4. Put your articles keyword in the first 3 words of your title. Search engines love it!

That's all there is to creating an article title that will get your readers attention, and get your articles clicked on. Just follow this guideline, and your article marketing will soon skyrocket to success and beyond!

Looking for some new internet marketing tactics? Don't worry, I have tons. Check out my website at http://www.marketingentity.com

Meta tags used to be the big, bad beasts of search engine optimization. If you manipulated them just right, you could get high rankings. Those days are gone, but they still are important.

The meta title is a very important for a number of reasons. From the perspective of getting rankings, it is helpful in identifying what is on the page in question. This, of course, means you better have a meta title that actually describes what is on the page in question.

Assuming you do, the meta title is very valuable for a reason many don't really think about. How so? Well, it actually can be used to bring in clicks from people reviewing the search engine page results. Consider the following example.

Assume I am looking to buy a construction invoice software program. I do a search for the phrase on Google, Yahoo, MSN or whatever. Ten results are kicked out and I start reading the titles. The meta titles appear as the first bold and underlined phrase for each listing.

Now, what result am I most likely to click? Most studies reveal that I'll click one of the first three. There is, however, more to the story. I am also more likely to click the result that uses the exact phrase I have searched for. In this case, I am more likely to click the listing that has the title that says "construction invoice software program" because that is what I search for.

This also raises a secondary issue regarding the meta title. Simply put, how many keywords should you put in it? There are different philosophies. Some people try to stick to one keyword phrase while others shoot for multiple phrases. Personally, I tend to go with one keyword phrase so long as it equates to at least three words in the phrase.

At the end of the day, the meta title does not play the role it used to years ago when meta tags were king. It does, however, still have a decent effect on rankings and a strong impact on getting people to click through to your site.

Sam Alucard is with AlucardSEOServices.com - providers of SEO Services.

The process of writing and publishing articles online is currently the most profitable way to make money over the World Wide Web. This effective promotional tool, which is commonly referred to as article marketing, is proven to easily augment website's traffic and help marketers earn the trust of their potential customers as they can showcase their expertise through their article content.

Here are the 4 amazing secrets to breakthrough with article marketing:

1. Use effective titles. Your titles can either make or break your article marketing campaign. If they are well-written and attention-grabbing, your articles will surely get the exposure they need as they will be more likely to be opened, read, and widely republished.

2. Your articles must be informative. Make your readers happy by filling up your articles with valuable information that are targeted to their needs and demands. Never leave any stone unturned and strive to dig deeper so you can give your potential clients more in-depth side of your stories.

3. Lay down your objectives. When you know your goals in writing and distributing your articles online, adjusting your marketing efforts and techniques will become a lot easier. For instance, if you would like to drive more traffic to your website you must be willing to multiply the number of your articles to increase your inbound links.

4. Make your resource box compelling. I can't still believe that there are marketers who are not taking their time in creating their resource box. Some of them are just leaving their websites' URL. If you aim to improve your conversation rate, this is not the way to go. You must make your resource box enticing and interesting to compel more people to check on your website.

To learn more, download my free guide, "How to Generate $15,000 Per Month Online" here: "How to Generate $15,000 Per Month Online"

Sean Mize is an internet marketing mentor who teaches people to generate over $15,000 per month online via automated systems and product funnels.

Marketing is the lifeblood of any business. Marketing builds awareness. Awareness lets potential customers find out about your product or service. Just as with a bricks and mortar business, marketing is essential in order to let people know your business offer exists.

Although the World Wide Web can be thought of as a media channel where prospects will see your copy day after day, the truth is that unless you attract those prospects to your website first then your efforts are in vain.

The term 'World Wide Web' should really have a fourth word, 'Wilderness', because that's where any website begins and stays if no efforts are made to attract visitors.

Any business that builds a store, for example, must make efforts to attract custom in order to succeed. The very same principle applies online and just as in the offline world, the amount of benefits reaped is proportional to the amount of effort put in.

In order to maintain any kind of competitive advantage, sustained efforts must be made with a long term plan in mind.

Compared to traditional offline methods of marketing, one of the distinct advantages of marketing online is the speed at which new marketing strategies can be put to test. For example, a pay per click campaign could be launched and the results analysed all in a single day. Such campaigns can promote the smallest businesses amongst the largest industry relevant websites viewed by thousands of qualified prospects.

One of the greatest Internet marketing fallacies is those services offering automated submission to hundreds of search engines as an effective means of search engine promotion. When 80% of all search engine usage is carried out using the three largest search engines (Google, Yahoo! and MSN), the only others worth being included in are those that are highly relevant and/or localised. This means that automated submission services such as these can offer limited benefit and then only to those websites that don't already appear in a search engine's listings.

The effectiveness of these types of automated and unspecific services quickly becomes diluted when they are made readily available to all.

For an effective Internet marketing that delivers significant and measurable results, there is no substitute for a well-structured, customised approach making the best possible use of the technologies available.

Building a successful Internet business starts with building a website and continues with effective marketing.

William Lee is the proprietor of Liverpool based Internet marketing consultancy, Web Star Creations, and the administrator of Business Mix forum for business networking in Liverpool. Republishing of this article is freely permitted provided that this resource box is included and that all hyperlinks within it and the article itself remain active. RSStoBlog is an effective tool for syndicating content.