BusinessWeek’s Rachael King specializes in helping small businesses understand technology. Her latest article looks at the online reputation management industry and includes lots of great advice–including some from yours truly.

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You’re a public relations professional or agency. How are you monitoring your brand and those of your clients?

You are actually monitoring, right?

I ask on the back of an interesting story regarding Michigan-based PR firm Tanner Friedman and their current lawsuit regarding a fake Twitter account.

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Lots of entrepreneurs struggle when it comes to making sales. Though there are many possible reasons for this, I’ve found one mistake in particular that small business owners make time and again. This is something that kills sales—especially sales of higher priced items—like nothing else. Luckily it is also fairly easy to avoid.

So what is this big mistake?

Asking for the sale too soon!

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If you are a small or medium business (SMB) owner or marketer you are at a crossroads. Regarding Internet marketing I can just about guarantee that one or more of the following apply to you and your efforts right at this very minute.

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Economics is often linked with a rationale of understanding the flow of money. This can be considered analogous to amateurs linking open source paradigm to free software! Both economics and open source software have a wider horizon.

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It wasn’t all that long ago that people in my industry had to convince business owners of the value of going online. For the most part those days are past. I think the value of the web has proven itself more than we can possible realize. Today I can pay bills, stream movies, schedule and even watch my DVR from anywhere in the world, so long as I have internet access. Getting your business online isn’t just about making money–it’s about accessibility.

Even if your business as little commercial viability online, having an accessible website allows people to learn more about you, your products or services, what types of things you do, what you believe in and care about, and how to contact you if needed. It’s about allowing people to come to you instead of pushing yourself on to them that is typical of most forms of advertising.

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By far the hardest part of publishing content on the web is coming up with unique ideas or things to talk about. You would think that by now everything has been explained or resourced to death on the web and it probably has. We all know that what sets blogs and websites apart…how useful and informative they are. Right? So if everything has been talked about already then why bother to publisher content online, LOL?

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Whether you’re self-employed or run a small business, it’s easy to get so busy you can’t remember the last time you came up for air. Do this long enough and you can get pretty lost in it…Certainly to the point where you no longer see the forest for the trees.

When I was running my last business full bore, it seemed like days would pass without me leaving the house—let alone talking to another human being besides my hubby (Poor guy. He really got an earful when he got home at night.).

It didn’t take me long to discover this was unhealthy for both me and my business. Because I never got any fresh ideas for how to run, market or grow my business. I didn’t have anyone to turn to for support or guidance. And I sure didn’t have time to take a break and get some exercise or hang with friends.

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It seems everyone at the moment is offering discounts on their products or services. Why not? It’s a great way to get new customers for your business, especially in these tough economic times. You need the customers in order for your business to survive and customers are looking for the “best priced” products or services, to reduce the strain on their hip pocket.

If you have an AdWords campaign then Google has made it even easier to offer discounts to your target audience.

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Loads of business owners are frustrated these days. Reason being that their businesses in Google Maps are labeled as closed, while they are still working in a perfect manner!

One webmaster at the Google webmaster forum states that:

The search result from Google shows our office as closed (the exact phrase shown is “place closed”)
Can someone please point me how I can get this corrected? Our office is not closed.

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