I wanted to share with you some good information and knowledge I have learned over the years. If you are in direct sales of any kind, I will provide you with a proven example of how powerful business cards can contribute to your sales figures. With over 20 years experience in real estate sales, I will be more comfortable giving you examples based on my expertise. However, you will see that this can apply to any and all types of direct or commission sales personnel.

If you are in regional sales you might find what I am about to say a little more challenging and creativity will have to play a part. It is still very realistic to make a ton of money with the marketing of your business cards. If you are not given leads by your company or you are an independent contractor, this is the cheapest and most productive way to market yourself.

So the question is, how does one generate sales or recognition especially when you are brand new in a sale position? I could not afford to advertise or market my services through publications, magazines, newspaper ads, etc. At the time the only item I was able to comfortably handle financially was the price of business cards.

About that time my wife and I had just won a Super Bowl lottery and received tickets to the big game for $75 a ticket. The day of the game we decided to go early and tail-gate. When we arrived at the stadium, we weren’t there for more than an hour and someone offered me $1000 per ticket. I couldn’t refuse.

Now that I had no tickets, I decided to get in my truck, pull out my box of 1000 business cards and started passing them out to the fans outside the stadium. Three hours later I was out of business cards and drove home to watch the game on TV.

The primary goal of sales is to create an established client base as our years of experience grows. Word of mouth and referrals are so powerful in the sales industry. The more people that know what business we are in and what services we offer, the more likely they will come to us in the future if the need arises.

The average real estate agent sells only 8 homes per year. In the above example, the conversion ratio was only .015% but my return on investment was over $100,000. Just think if you passed out 1000 business cards per quarter. That would be 4000 per year and 60 sales for the real estate professional. Wow! Pretty amazing.

Needless to say, this strategy worked and my client base increased exponentially over the years. Always carry business cards with you no matter what. Keep them in your wallet or purse and keep them stored in your car. Take every single opportunity to give your card to everyone you come in contact with. You can’t go through too many business cards. Make it a goal to pass out at least 1000 per quarter. You will be surprised to see how much business this will generate for you in the future.

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Ever hear the phrase “go back to the basics” when all else fails?  One marketing concept that has been around for years is “networking”.  With the Internet it is becoming more popular all the time. Some of the latest networking we have seen has been via the Internet.  ActiveRain, LinkedIn, MySpace, Facebook are just some of the more popular networking sites. With technology however, the face to face networking has been less convenient but it is still very important in today’s society.  It is a grand opportunity to obtain customers, business opportunities and share ideas and the like.

Organized networking groups are everywhere.  The Chamber of Commerce, Toastmasters, Business and Networking International, just to name a few, can be found in most major markets throughout the world.  With a little homework and minimal cost, you can join one or more groups in your local market and experience the potential of untapped prospects.

Keep in mind, you can always form your own networking group. You can organize specific dates, times and locations convenient for everyone. Be sure to invite a variety of knowledge and experience that are all related in some way shape or form. You have total control of the size of attendees and the like minded professionals that will be meeting.

Either option provides an opportunity to meet people and share ideas with folks who have the same goal in mind. Let’s face it; we all want more prospects, clients, customers or buyers. No matter what you have to offer, someone else needs what you have and the success of any business starts with getting in front of more people.

Don’t forget your business cards when participating in a social networking group. Hand out two to every person you’re introduced to, one for them and the other so they can pass it on to a colleague or friend. If you don’t give them something to remember you by, they will most likely forget you.

At each meeting, you will be given the opportunity to give a one to two minute commercial about yourself and your products or services. Rehearse what you are going to say. Then rehearse it again. The spotlight will be on you and you want to make your first impression your best impression.

When researching networking groups or starting your own, try to limit the number of professionals within your own industry. In other words, if you are in the Real Estate business you wouldn’t want seven other Realtors in your group. The same would hold true for Insurance Brokers, Doctors, Contractors or other professionals.

Social or group networking, a fantastic and inexpensive way to meet new people. If organized correctly, it will take a minimal amount of your time and increase your productivity in business. And think of it this way, the worst case scenario is you make a few friends.

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I wrote a comment yesterday in response to a couple of blog posts that attacked SEO and the SEO industry, attempting to illustrate to the author of the rants that search engine optimization brings a specialized skill set and a core group of knowledge that can help others, from small businesses with great ideas, to larger organizations that can benefit from an independent voice that has experience and knowledge about search engines.

Unfortunately, my comment went unpublished for whatever reason.

One of the underlying assertions of the post I responded to was that in the hands of a competent web developer, a site should rank well in search engines as long as the people behind the site created something great and beautiful, and told a couple of friends.  Another of the underpinnings behind the rants against SEO was that search engine optimization wasn’t a legitimate form of marketing. A third postulated that SEOs were the force behind such things as the botnets, blog spam, and scraped and autogenerated content that appears on the Web.

With the exception of striving to build something great, I couldn’t disagree more strongly.

The practice of SEO isn’t web development, though it sometimes requires that development problems on a site be addressed. Successful search engine optimization starts with a number of questions, such as:

Who is your audience? Who are your competitors? What makes you stand out from your competitors?

Some other important steps can include learning about the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities,and threats to a business, defining business goals, collaborating on defining metrics to measure success, and developing an SEO strategy to optimize a site for search engines and for visibility in other places on the Web.

The practice of SEO isn’t spamming the Web, with the creation and use of spyware, viruses, and scrapers that autogenerate web spam. Instead, it’s helping people make intelligent and creative decisions that help them reach an audience that is interested in what they have to offer.

In my response, I included 10 questions involving SEO and search engines which might be issues that search engine optimizers might come across, that I wouldn’t expect most developers to have spent much time thinking about. I’ve written about most of these here, and I thought it might be fun to share them.

1. What impacts might Microsoft’s VIPS, Yahoo’s Template Extraction, and Google’s Segmentation of Visual Gaps have upon a search engine’s weighing of links, document representation, shingles based duplicate content detection, and categorization of topics on a page, and how might a search engine determine which segment is the most important?

2. What steps should one take to try to get a site to rank well for a query in Google Maps, and how might something like location prominence and location sensitivity of that query term impact the range and rankings of sites that appear in a Google Maps listing?

3. What are some of the potential flaws that a search engineer might make when using a discounted cumulative gain approach to evaluating the relevancy of search results at different positions?

4.  How might image size, image resolution, image contrast, inclusion of a face in an image, use of images across multiple pages of a site, internal links on a site to images, and external links on a site to images impact the possible rankings of images in search results?

5.  What should be contained in a video XML sitemap to make it more likely that the videos included are crawled and indexed by Google?

6.  How might Google customize search results for a searcher based upon language and country preferences and past browsing history, even when a searcher isn’t even logged into their Google account and seeing personalized results?

7.  What types of user behavior data might the search engines be using to reorder search results besides simple clickthrough rates, and how might those kinds of signals be used in determining sitelinks or quicklinks that Google, Yahoo, and Bing may show in search results?

8. How might a search engine determine which kinds of results besides web pages to blend into search results, and how might that approach change when named entities are involved?

9. What kinds of ranking signals might make it more likely that a news source ranks well in Google’s news search, and why might the search engine choose one article over others when the stories are substantially similar?

10. How are search suggestions (query refinements) chosen by a search engine to include in search results, and why might a search engine show one type of search suggestion at the top of search results, and another type at the bottom of the results.

Fero Alenc know’s most of the best SEO tips, because he has been practising SEO for four years. For more information check Fero Alenc’s interesting SEO tips.