As authors Chris Brogan and Julien Smith have discovered, the Web’s best business communicators are people with a knack for building relationships. They offer these niche marketing tips for earning trust online:

What you do — and what you don’t do — affects how others see you. When trying to build your credibility, author Sandy Allgeier asserts, there are certain things you should try to avoid:

“What gets repeated, gets rewarded,” the old cliché states. That’s especially true for a well-thought-out value proposition.

Few people would dispute that treating customers well is essential to business success. “The customer is the reason you have a job,” asserts Renee Evenson, author of Award Winning Customer Service. Evenson offers these tips for good customer service:

Mickie Kennedy, founder and CEO of eReleases, cites four strengths of press releases, a tool that should be in any company’s recession survival kit for building brand awareness:

We present a case study on how one smart owner of a growing business boosted his company’s search engine rankings — and its customer base — by investing in a search engine optimization copywriting course.

In a world where consumers divide their time among ever increasing media options, finding the right customers for your business presents constant challenges. Here are the five areas where growing businesses most often trip up in their marketing efforts:

In their new book, Let’s Get Real or Let’s Not Play: Transforming the Buyer/Seller Relationship, Mahan Khalsa and Randy Illig offer many salient points on customer relationship building. Here are 10 worth heeding:

Instead of networking with potential customers, consider networking with other businesses that can help you succeed, suggests Alan Bayham, president of Bayham Consulting, LLC. With this approach, the companies within your circle of influence refer customers to each other and also share skills and expertise to enhance their own business. Bayham offers these tips to make your sales lead generation endeavors with other businesses succeed:

Unfortunately, some authors and “sales experts” continue to perpetuate age-old myths about selling that need to be dispelled, says Douglas Smith, founder of Douglas Smith & Associates. Here are three of the biggest myths:

Keeping employees productive is hard work, especially if the workplace is stressful or personnel feel undervalued. To improve productivity, you need to keep your people engaged and motivated in their work. Here’s how to go about it:

Here are five niche marketing tips to consider:

Futurist Richard Laermer believes the cultural trend toward mistrusting large companies will only grow. Growing businesses can capitalize on this trend, Laermer contends, by avoiding these mistakes:

Faced with a challenging economy, growing companies have to work even harder and smarter on their brand-building efforts to attract customers and prospects. Here are two ways to go about it:

Your appearance doesn’t matter when selling over the phone. But when speaking to a prospect over the phone, there are some important things to watch out for: