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.

Success is something almost everyone has the desire to achieve. But in order to achieve success we need to first be able to define what success is. If we do not define what success is then how can we know if we are successful?

Success means different things to different people. To one person being successful could mean having $1,000,000 in the bank, to another person being successful could mean getting out of bed each day. To my grandfather success meant being happy, and to him family and serving the Lord made him happy, thus he was a very successful man in his own eyes.

I have come to a kind of crossroads in my life at the moment. I have discovered that the Make Money Online/Internet Marketing niche is not the place I want to be because it does not fulfill me. So I am currently looking for something to do next.

I want to be successful just like any other average joe. I have just one problem…I don’t know what success looks like. I don’t know what I need to be successful.

Sure you could say that I need a whole bunch of money and a great job to be successful, but that might not be what I consider successful in my own life. I don’t know what I consider to be successful, and this lack of knowledge has put me in a standstill.

I want to move forward and to try new things and learn and grow. But I don’t just want to jump on any bus, train or plane. I want to get on the bus, train or plane that is going to lead me towards success. There is no point getting on one that will lead me away from success, so at the moment I am just waiting at the bus stop.

Being rich is not necessarily being successful, because your life does not just revolve around finances. Life is made up of many different areas and being successful in one area but poor in another means you will not be successful. To be truly successful you will want to have success in all the different areas of life. I have listed the main areas of life below for reference:

Marriage
Family
Spiritual
Social
Work/Career
Financial
Physical
Mental
Emotional
Fun

More importantly to me, being successful means living a life of purpose. What is my purpose? I have no idea. But I know that I am trying my hardest to find out what it is and to find out what I want out of life.

Very early in my career, I had a boss and mentor who loved to use ‘one-liners’ to make his points. One in particular always stuck with me and I’m certain many of you have heard it too. Simply put, ‘If you fail to plan, you plan to fail’. He could have said ‘Joan, you need to set measurable goals, develop specific strategies and tasks to help you get there and track your progress along the way’ but those nine little words made a much bigger impact. After all, none of us plan to fail, we just fail to plan!

There is a lot of research and many books written on the power of written goals. We all know that goals are important and provide clarity and focus to keep us on track and moving forward. But you need to plan for your success and take action (do) to make it happen.

Tips To Plan For Your Success

Plan Annually and Review Quarterly. You need an annual plan and goals with the tasks and strategies you need to do to achieve them. But don’t let your plan collect dust on the shelf — review your plan at least every 90 days so you can make adjustments. Assumptions you made earlier may no longer be valid. Competitors and suppliers make adjustments. Economic conditions change. Staff and customers’ needs may change. Your plans need to reflect this.

An Action Plan vs. A Business Plan. While a business plan has its purposes (bank financing among them), a concise action-oriented plan will serve most business owner’s needs. It is for your use – your road map to success. Keep it simple and short (5-7 pages at most). Don’t strive for perfection. Lay out your goals and the actions (tasks) you need to do along with time-frames for completion. Don’t forget to incorporate ownership for critical tasks and measurements to evaluate success. When it comes to planning, consider the words of General George Patton, ‘A weak plan that is executed will deliver better results than a great plan never executed.’ Sometimes simple is sophisticated.

Look Back Before You Plan Ahead. Know where you are today before you start planning where you want to go. Look at your numbers. How do they compare against your last year goals and your industry? Then take a few minutes to write down your accomplishments (big and small) for the previous twelve months or last quarter. It’s important that you recognize the things you also did well. Finally, make a short list of the things you didn’t accomplish and ask yourself what held you back and what lessons did you learn. Don’t dwell on these, but apply lessons learned as you move forward.

Chunk, Chunk, Chunk. Big goals are nothing more than a series of much smaller ones. If a goal you want appears too big to conquer or takes a long time to accomplish, chunk it up into smaller ones over shorter time periods. For example, a business sets a goal to reduce employee turnover by a certain percentage within twelve months. To accomplish this, they may have 5-10 tactics they will employ, including communicating business goals, implementing monthly team meetings, creating effective job descriptions, developing a team incentive or performance bonus program, creating a strong recruiting and hiring process, etc. These smaller ‘tasks’ are much easier to handle and together will move them to the bigger goal. Remember, ‘By the yard, goals are hard; but by the inch, they’re a cinch’.

Think Big. It pays to think big when setting goals. The old saying ’shoot for the stars and if you fall short you will hit the moon’ explains why. Often we set ’safe’ goals because we fear failure or simply can’t figure out how we can get there. Sure it’s safe to set a 5% growth or improvement goal — but what if you chose instead a 30% improvement and asked for advice on how. Employees, alliances, suppliers, other business owners and yes a business coach are all great sources for new ideas, but you need to ask. What if you fall a little short and only grow 20%? You are still better off than you would have been with a 5% improvement! So think big and believe you can.

Measure, Measure, Measure. Would you ever play a round of golf and not keep score? Not likely, because you want to know if you improved or beat your previous best. The same is true in business. If we don’t link measurements to our goals, we have no way to evaluate how we are doing. What we measure, we can improve. So what types of things should you measure and track? Revenue, gross profit margins, fixed expenses and net profit are obvious and most owners track these. Most businesses have other factors that drive their success. Depending on your goals, industry and type of business, these will vary. Here are a few examples of some common Key Performance Indicators: # of leads, sales conversion rate, average $ sale, A/R days outstanding, on-time delivery, customer and employee satisfaction ratings and labor as a % of sales.

So now you have the recipe. Start taking the steps you need to plan and achieve the success you want – in business and in life.