Great stuff Zeke, thanks for sharing. Maybe you can offer a suggestion... all of this sounds great but it is very overwhelming. Where to start?

What are your recommendations for accomplishing an effective and thorough use of some/all of these social marketing platforms without spending 5 hours a day on it?

Also, I've heard that search engines may punish you for publishing duplicate content on multiple sites. I can't imagine writing a different version of each article. What do you think?

Great advice Zeke. I like how you gave specific examples for good tweets vs spam. That's helpful. One of my biggest hesitations for using Twitter is that I don't want to blatantly self-promote, so it your advice was helpful. No doubt, Twitter is here to stay.

I am unable to attend this time but please let me know when you are doing it again.

Thanks, Matt

Great work Dick! It's as if you were reading my mind during parts of your article.

It blows me away that so many companies have such terrible customer service. Being a business owner I realize that customer service is the absolute #1 key to success. By taking good care of your customers they will actually enjoy working with you and the recommendations will follow.

I asked the CEO of one of my clients if he had any suggestions to a young entrepreneur and he simply said, "Just do what you say you're going to do and you'll be way ahead of the competition." The more I think about this the truer it seems.

Sometimes I wonder how in the world huge companies can survive when their customer service totally sucks. Oh yeah, by jacking up their prices and outsourcing jobs. This is not a model that will last.

Love the use of quotes to bolster your points! Nicely done.

That's a great idea, well put.

Take it to the next level and start up your own "Insiders" group that meets monthly to discuss specific issues and challenges facing their business. This is a great way to share experience and to connect on a deeper level with local entrepreneurs.

Good calls Brody, especially the SEO aspect. It is a real pain to keep track of all these different profiles, but the investment is worth the time.

Great article Chris!

This is one of the biggest challenges I face in my website development business. It is especially challenging to do a fixed bid for a project when the client only provides you with a general outline of the application they are paying you to develop.

My solution to date has been to create an outline of the project scope, and use this to estimate my hours. This way I am able to ballpark a total cost figure to the client, while not screwing myself with a fixed bid (because it's practically a guarantee that there will be changes / updates to the scope during development).

Not perfect, I know, but this seems to be the best way to control the costs of the project in the clients' eyes, and gives them a good sense of value for their buck.