Marketing is one of the most important business factors. From my experience, I have just listed 10 effective marketing strategies that have helped my marketing development, and hope will help your business,too. Here are 10 secret and effective marketing strategies.

1. Create a directory of web sites on a specific topic. Give people the option of adding the directory to their web site by linking to it. Put your business advertisement at the top of the director’s home page. This technique will get lots of people to linkto your web site and give you free advertising.

2. Do you have a product or service that doesn’t sell good? Offer it as a free bonus for someone else’s product or service. Get free advertising by placing your web site or business ad on the product or in the product package.

3. Trade autoresponder ads with other businesses. If both of you send out information with auto-responders just exchange a small classified ad to put at the bottom or top of each other’s autoresponder message.

4. Start a free tip line. Offer a free daily, weekly, or monthly tip recorded on your voice mail. The tips should be related to your business. Include your ad for your web site or business at the beginning or end of your message.

5. Exchange content with other web sites and ezines. You could trade articles, top ten lists, etc. Both parties could include a resource box at the end of the content.

6. Offer to insert ads into your product package for other businesses. Just ask, in return that they do the same for your business. You should only trade insert ads with businesses that have the same target audience.

Next, you’ve got to figure out how to get it all done. Marketing’s not your regular job, but you could work at it full time, given all there is to do.

And don’t forget…how do you stay on track and motivated? Sure, it’s one thing to be inspired during a marketing workshop or by ideas from a book. But then the reality of execution sets in.

Believe me, I feel your pain. Working on some major, next-level projects of my own right now, it’s tempting to stick my head in the sand and say forget it. Since I’m writing from the beach this week, it literally would be that easy.

Instead, I’m taking it “bird by bird.”

Author and writing teacher, Anne Lamott, coined this term to encourage budding authors in her book, Bird by Bird. The phrase refers to a school report about wild birds that her younger brother had to write as a child. He put it off until the night before it was due. Sitting at the kitchen table, surrounded by piles of books, he was overwhelmed and frozen by the task at hand. His father, also a writer, told him to just take it bird by bird…first write about one bird. Then write about another bird. Then another. Before he knew it, his report would be done.

Faced with your own pile of marketing tasks? Here are some things you can do to take it bird by bird:

1. Don’t start with a whole bird. Start with some feathers. A beak. The feet. My point is, just start on one, tiny thing…like spend 15 minutes brainstorming your Positioning Statement (and if you don’t know what this is, email me!). Then stop. Come back to it tomorrow and spend 15 more minutes. Eventually, you’ll be done.

2. Be okay with lousy first drafts. Creativity experts know this. Famous authors count on it. Whether you’re working on your website, a client proposal, deciding where to network or writing an actual article, just get the ideas out of your head and onto paper. Don’t worry about complete sentences, clever themes or specifics. The point is to just start.

3. Invest by carving out the time. If you want to attract more clients for the long haul, you’ve got to carve out time to work on this stuff. It won’t happen by itself. Look at it as an investment in what matters most to you (your future? your sanity? your family? your freedom?). Then carve out the time to invest. Start small – 15 minutes of uninterrupted, honest-to-god-I’m-not-going-to-do-anything-else time every day – then expand to 30 minutes and more. I’ve found that the daily discipline is what makes this magic.

4. Protect and guard this commitment. Others will try to lure you away (that crucial client meeting…the latest staff crisis…family and friends), interrupt you, to make their needs more important. Don’t take the bait. Make your commitment to this investment more important. Julia Cameron shows us how to keep from being “blocked by falling in with other people’s plans for us,” in The Artist’s Way.

Let’s look at what the experts advise. By the way, while these tips sound bizarre — they’re real nuggets, so stay with me:

1. Be an authentic liar.

2. Be your own valentine.

3. Fight bull.

Here’s how these successful experts connect with the marketplace – and you can too:

Be an authentic liar. In his latest book, All Marketers Are Liars, Seth Godin explains “the power of telling authentic stories in a low-trust world.” Mildly unsettling at first, he makes the case that our buyers are actually the ones who are lying. To themselves. About why they want to buy from us.

Successful marketers are just providing the stories that our buyers choose to believe. But here’s the rub: you have to really live the story you’re telling. The second a potential buyer smells anything less than complete dedication to what you’re selling, you “cross the line from fib to fraud.” It’s simply not good enough to have a good story. You have to live up to it as well. If you’re a cobbler with no shoes, why should your clients take your advice?

Be a role model for what you sell, and nothing less. Then tell a good story about it, to buyers who want to believe.

Be your own valentine. In his hot little book, Little Red Book of Selling, Jeffrey Gitomer takes a tough-love approach to helping us be the best version of ourselves we can be.

My personal favorites are:

• No Whining (“Don’t whine to me that the customer won’t return your call. Study voicemail. Don’t whine to me that your boss is a jerk. Get a new one. Don’t whine to me that your company won’t give you a laptop. Go buy one.”)

• Kick Your Own Ass (“Ever have a bad day? Ever lost a sale you thought you had? Ever had someone say yes to you and three days later just evaporate? Wanna know what to do about it…? Kick your own ass. No one is going to hand you success…that’s something you have to do for yourself.”)

* Attend a networking event and expect it to generate business

* Invest thousands of dollars in direct mail and expect prospects to eagerly call about your services

* Treat your vendors poorly by not paying them on time or not communicating with them in a timely manner

* Misunderstand the differences between advertising, PR, and promotion – and what they can and cannot do for your professional service firm

* Underestimate how important it is for your to address your clients’ PERCEIVED need (i.e., what THEY think they need) vs. what you know they need

You’re playing chess when you…

* Understand that there are right clients and wrong clients for your firm, based on where you want your firm to be in one year, two years, five years – and that your definition of “right” will change over time

* Consider what the right kinds of clients look like for your firm and then carefully develop a roadmap for all marketing activities that align with your definition of “right”

* Use a combination of carefully crafted “touches” to move prospects through your relationship pipeline from Stranger, to Acquaintance, to Friend, to Lover, to Loyal Partner. Are looking six moves ahead, instead of at the next move. Whether it’s developing your website, deciding what committees or networking groups to join, if you should invest in a particular piece of marketing collateral, or where to publish your next article…chess players see the connections between today’s marketing decisions and their impact months and years ahead.For a game plan to avoid checkmate, try these things:

* Consider where you want to be in 6 months, 12 months, 18 months and 36 months. Identify the big steps to get you there. I organize my actions by “theme of the month.” For example, within 6 months, I want to be well into developing an online platform to launch subscription-based marketing tools. So January and February are Research Months. I’m attending two related conferences to quickly assess the latest approaches, make some good contacts, and scope the competition.