Remember when you were young your parents would tell you to always look neat and smart? Even at a young age, you were beginning to learn some basic lessons in marketing yourself. Back then, your parents were teaching you that looking neat and smart creates a positive first impression so vital to your success.

However, as you grew older and wiser, and life became a lot more complicated, looking neat and smart, while still vital, is no longer adequate. Whether applying for a job, meeting with a business client, winning the heart of that very special someone, or running for public office, you need to be effective in marketing yourself to win.

Here are five effective tips you may find helpful in marketing yourself:

1. Always look neat and smart:
As a tribute to parents who have always worked hard for your success, looking neat and smart will always be on top of this list. People will always gravitate towards a winner. If you look like a winner and smell like a winner, people will treat you like a winner. And you yourself will certainly start feeling like a winner. High profile politicians and business icons who have the money even hire the services of an image consultant just so they would have that winning advantage.

2. Appear bigger than you actually are:
Oftentimes, size does matter. Again, this boils down to people wanting to be with or work with winners. There seems to be this accepted mindset, actually a misconception, that winners should be big. This is why you see small local businesses adopting fancy multinational-sounding business names to make their small business appear globally big. Or they would have their business stationery printed with the flags of several countries to imply they have multinational affiliates. Maybe they do. Maybe they don’t. But they certainly look big. Having a virtual office “staff” makes you look big, too, even though your “staff” could be just your mother, sister or your wife. In Rich Dad, Poor Dad, Robert Kiyosaki refers to his cat as his “business partner” whenever he has to enter into a contract subject to the approval of his “business partner”. Business Process Outsourcing and Contact Centers are there to create an impression that you have a big business. A business website is a very effective platform for marketing yourself as your website exposes your small business to a global market.

3. Highlight your achievements:
So what if you don’t have a Ph.D. on your resume? Or if you are just a start up business with very little credentials to show off? Do not dwell on what you do not have. Instead, focus on the benefits you can offer with what you do have and highlight these benefits when marketing yourself. Remember that almost all big industry players started out small at some point in time and were given the opportunity to grow.

4. Be a wide reader, research a lot:
Saying the right things at the right time leaves a very positive impression when marketing yourself in front of your business clients or when applying for a job. Reading and researching on a wide variety of topics gives you a wealth of information that you will find tremendously helpful during business negotiations or job interviews. Sometimes, just one brilliant remark can be all it takes to break the ice or seal the deal. In election debates, the candidate who gives the more intelligent, more relevant answers usually gets the votes. When marketing yourself, it is not enough to just look smart, you also have to talk smart.

5. Be multi-lingual and multi-cultural:
In today’s global economy, marketing yourself often requires the ability to speak several languages and be sensitive to diversities in cultures and traditions. Showing your clients you have taken extra efforts to learn about their language and culture earns you their respect and that all-important positive first impression. You can also get a lot of referrals from these clients as they usually are clannish and closely-knit.

A bounty of opportunities await you if you are effective in marketing yourself. You need to constantly keep your best foot forward, highlight your achievements, be sensitive to your markets’ needs, and always have that winning positive first impression.

Which one would You spend:

* To have your dreams come true?
* To become an overnight success?
* To have, be or do whatever you desire?

The main reason people don’t have what they want is, they don’t have enough, either time or money, to invest. Do you believe that? Most people you meet are willing to invest maybe one or the other… but not both. But the most successful people in the world, do invest BOTH…TIME AND MONEY!

They continually study, learn, grow, buy programs, hire coaches, seek out mentors and invest in their personal development and education to become who they want to be and the best they can be,… entering the world of their dreams, armed with a breadth of knowledge, practical application and a “never give up” determination and passion to achieve exceptional results.

If you wanted to achieve any physical goal, whether it be get in shape, playing a sport, trekking through Peru! What would you do? Doesn’t it make sense to follow a structured training program and practicing daily, to continually improve your skills and performance? Wouldn’t it make sense to hire a coach or a trainer, to “fine tune” your skills and to bring out and develop your natural talents and abilities?

If you wanted to learn a musical instrument, wouldn’t you would want to hire the best teacher and even then, you would still need to practice the skill and evolve your natural abilities, long before you would feel ready to perform as a musician. Yet these days we are lead to believe that it is natural and normal to do a little and get a lot. Start something new and then receive immediate overnight success.

Unless you have innate natural talent and abilities, like very few people, you will need to develop and grow your skills. Tiger Woods has natural and innate abilities, but he still gets the best coaching and spends the time to stay “on top of his game.” Mozart was a child prodigy, but it still took time and focus to develop his talents.

Who do you know that became an overnight success without a history of development? You will find anyone who has achieved any level of expertise has invested both time and money to develop their skills. Even the “overnight success” stories, usually have up to 10 years of solid learning and skill building prior to their “instant success.”

If you have limited time, then you can invest your money to get the best training programs and personal coaches to fast track your success. There are many people already proficient in so many areas, you can probably find experts who have worked out the quickest and most efficient methods to achieve mastery in an area.

If you have limited money, then you can invest in a home study training program and spend the time going through the proven exercises that are provided for you. There is a saying the “practice makes perfect.” IT IS NOT REALLY TRUE. Practice makes permanent. It is only “perfect” practice that makes perfect. Get a proven, home study program that has been designed to fast track you. Either way if YOU choose a path and stick to it – you will succeed beyond your expectations.

“Your thoughts determine what you want, your actions determine what you get.” Take action today… hire yourself a qualified personal coach to fast track your developments and success, or purchase, at a much lower cost, a proven self study program and invest your time, to become who you want to be and achieve your dreams! Either way you will get what you want – all it takes is your commitment and your focused, continued actions.

“If you don’t believe and invest in you – Who will?” “If not Now – When?”

Local search is one of the biggest things on Internet marketing in the past year. The Internet is now available in most homes and being used to look up local services. In a time when competition is at its peak and businesses are fighting for every potential costumer, getting into the first page of the search results could mean a huge increase in business for local services.

Many local services business are not yet aware of this change in consumer behavior is taking place, they are still in an age where a regular business listings in “the book” got you all the clients you wanted, and when a billboard ad outside of town made the business known in the area. When a traditional local service manager or owner gets to negotiate Internet promotion they could be in for a considerable surprise in terms of costs and time it would take to starting seeing some return.

What should local businesses expect from local Internet search clients? In short, they could expect everything, a local service could grow its client base considerably by ranking for their services on line, the business could also offer deals and special promotions through its Internet site, pushing one particular product to the public, creating value to the client and to the business.

Top local listings will result in emails and contact us forms, telephones and on line quote requests, but this will take time to happen, it does not happen overnight, and expecting it to have an immediate effect might lead to frustration and anger. It is the responsibility of the SEO expert to explain that planning the search engine optimization process and executing it can take up to two months, and one that is done it might take another 5 months for solid ranking and consistent stream of visitors to the site.

This issue is even more complex if the local business does not have a web site, or has one page of text that has no contact information or services list. In most cases it is possible to set up a quick blog to serve as the main page for the services and contact information of the business, but both search engine optimizers and business owners should aspire to have an individual site, with a domain name and a unique design, otherwise promotion might waste energy on pushing a temporary page.

Once a site is built and running the next goal will be to take over some market share and create a web name for the services of that local business, the target is to get as high up as possible in the natural search engine results so that potential clients could see and visit the site from the very page they ran the tern query on. Achieving first page ranking for a local business could mean much more than just that ego boost for its workers and mangers, having a site rank high for its natural services names, or for its products combined with the name of the location it is in makes a serious combination of branding and market power.

For example one of the businesses we have worked with in the past managers had told us a little story that explains how powerful it could be to rank well on the big search engines, after the business had finishing building its website and optimized its pages for search the general manager asked all the workers to stop using their business cards and tell anyone who asked them what is their number or contact info that they could be found by typing the name of the service plus the name of the town, and that it would show up on the first spot, this manager told us his website generated more business than they made through the phone in just 6 months.