The best business advice

If you’ve been following the b5 media Business Channel’s recent Apprentice-style contest, you already know about Kay, but if not, please read all about her and my team (The Pros) answers over here.

But for more times than I can count, the Pros lost again to the Aces, so now the rules have changed and individual blogs, including this one, need to come up with the best business advice for Kay. So here goes:

Market yourself everyday. It isn’t enough to make a great product or service. You need to tell others about its existence. Make marketing an essential and ongoing activity for the life of your business. Most experts say to dedicate 20% of your time and profits into marketing tactics.

I even made that mistake when I started out. (Yup, me – a professional marketer.) When things were going well, I stopped marketing myself. And you know what happened? When all the business stopped, I was back at the beginning marketing all over again. So today, I make sure I schedule 6 hours a week (I work abouts 30 hours) focusing on marketing myself through blogging, press releases, article marketing, websites, email and more.