I just received what is probably the first of many Valentine’s Day promotion. It came in the form of an email from Apple to my iPhone. The promotion’s subject line is “Show the Love. Give iPod Nano this Valentine’s Day“

The email offers me free engraving of an iPod, gives me links to a Valentine’s Gift List from the Apple Shop and explains why an iPod as a gift will bring me adoration from the recipient.

I’m telling you all this, not because of any promotion of Apple, but because the email reminded me that all big businesses will have decided on their Valentine’s Day promotions month’s ago… and you’ll start seeing them rolled out them over the next four weeks or so.

The question is, have you got a Valentine’s Day promotion planned?

If you’re quick you might still have time to get on the bandwagon, to your advantage. Ask yourself…

• How can I associate my product or service with the concept of Love?
• What about associations with Giving?
• Can I come up with a zany connection with Valentine’s Day

Gift Certificates, 2 for 1 Offers (one for you and one for your loved one), Bonus product/discount from now until Valentine’s Day – just because we love you all spring to mind. But, with a bit of thought, I’m sure that you’ll be able to come up with an idea relevant to your business which will positively impact your bottom line in the coming weeks.

Don’t just think in terms of additional sales (although in these times more sales are not to be sneezed at), but also think about taking this opportunity to gathering new prospects for future sales when times get even tougher. Think also in terms of showing some love to your most important asset, your existing clients.

And, if your business does not fit well into the pink, feel-good February 14th, or if you simply won’t have time to implement a promotion on such short notice, why not look a bit further ahead and start planning now for an Easter Promotion.

Above all, there is an adage that I always try to remember if I am tempted to summarily discard a suggestion for change…

If I keep doing the same as before … I’ll keep getting more of the same results.

Or …

If you want to change the outcomes, change the inputs!

A colleague shared this link with me earlier today. Apart from the fact that the page lists what would have to be close to all on-line Newspapers in Australia, it struck me that if you wanted to target a particular region for any reason, this page would be a good starting point!

The same site actually lists Newspapers from around the world (on-line versions)… See the full list here.

I can assure you from personal experience that Impact Web Audio is the easiest way to add Professional sounding audio to your web sites.

The software does exactly what it claims and is dead easy to use. Until I found this software I wasted hundreds of dollars on Web based “services” which were always difficult to use and required constant attention to make sure they were working. In fact, they were so costly and prone to problems that I stopped adding audio to my sites, even though my testing showed that adding audio increased my sales!

Adding professional grade streaming audio to your site is virtually guaranteed to grab the attention of your visitors and greatly improve the number of those visitors who will take the action that you are seeking.

Read the full story about Impact Web Audio

It is often useful to find other sites which are related to one which is of interest to you. In particular, you should be aware of what sites are considered to be related to your own site(s). If you know what sites are related to yours you’ll have an understanding of the types of sites which are linking to your site.

You can easily find related sites by using Google. For example, to find sites related to this site, I would enter related:www.ebiz4results.com as a Google search phrase.

Armed with this information you can refine your development of inbound links, and gain a greater understanding of the nature or context, of your visitors.

To get indexed on the search engines, and to improve your search engine ranking your site needs links from external sites to your pages. While you can just hope that other site owners will link to your pages, the results are unpredictable, and may never happen.

But this problem can be solved extremely easily.

How can you get easy, fast links to your site? Go to LinkMetro.com and either sign up for a free account and manually exchange links with over 20,000 other websites listed in very tightly themed categories OR upgrade to an Advanced membership where you can get links even quicker and easier.

Start now my exchanging links to existing pages and whenever you add new content, add “linking” to your checklist. If you would like help with this, give me a call, or use the Contact Us page.