Todd Taskey

An entrepreneurial business owner, Todd Taskey has more than 25 years of finance and investing experience. Prior to founding Potomac Business Capital, Todd was a founding investor, board member or management team member to five other business ventures. Armed with the insight from his past successes and failures — and ongoing conversations with growing business owners and entrepreneurs — Todd provides market strategy and finance advice via his Wrong Question blog and national public speaking tours.

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So, now what?

Your sales are down, the economy has people to nervous to spend and your advertising is not working.  Yellow Pages is dying (or dead), direct mail is more expensive and less effective, and “pay per click” advertising cost are increasing while results are slipping.  There is no longer a single, simple solution that reliably brings in a steady stream of new customers, it takes multiple sources.

Here’s a quick history of advertising:  It will place your current marketing into historical context and help you a better understanding of why all small business advertising is less effective in the new world we live in today.

Scholz & Friends from BUBBLECLOT on Vimeo.

Fortunately, there are a lot of smart people thinking about how to make the web effective for business owners without taking a lot of time or effort.  Bythezip.com is a great little company in Philly that allows business owners to be found online, develop customer loyalty, distribute coupons virtually for free and rank very well in organic Google search.  They are a turn key solution that becomes even more effective with more effort.

SMBLive is a Washington DC area company and lust launched their CloudProfile.com which helps small business owners become easily interactive online.  They automate the process to be found locally and on Google maps, allow for automatic interaction with your Twitter and Facebook accounts (if you don’t have them you need a cloud profile even more urgently)and make it easy for new clients to contact you directly.

Here is what I like about both of these programs; ease.

Cloudprofile.com is elegant, easy and effective.  You can sign up in about 10 minutes and for about $45 per month you’ll be much more effective and profitable on the web without any web or IT skills.  Bythezip.com will cost a bit more per month and will give you a lot more.

The important point is to recognize the shift that is occurring before your eyes.  It is affecting your business now and will have an even greater impact in the future.  Prepare now.