Delegate, delegate, delegate when possible. Work on detailing your game plan to take you to the next level, don’t get wrapped up on doing every single task to save a buck.

Partnerships are very important, and more often than not, others want to partner with you if you offer a quality brand-able product or service

Work smart, not hard. Don’t reinvent the wheel, instead look for missing gaps and future creativity jumps instead of reinventing the same widget.

Let’s add listening. While the internet is still underutilized as a listening tool (not for music but for customer understanding)there are some examples of how listening to understand the needs and wants of customers can lead to success.

When you do keyword/phrase research, you are listening to what people want.

When you review web analytics data, you are listening to the customers.

When you join the conversation in the social media space, you better listen before talking.

When it comes to successful small business marketing and sales, listen to understand then execute.

I couldn’t agree more that persistance matters most in SEO, which is also the biggest barrier for SEOers.

Friendly genuine communication breeds trust for any business. For an industry of which is based on future results, the pay-off for the personal touch if often reciprocated by strong referrals before results are even complete.

Great post!

Thanks to the previous commenters on this one, too.

I would add this one: Persistence matters, and it matters a lot. Unfortunately we live in a world of instant gratification. Building a business, though, is not about instant anything.

You have to stick with it over time. If you do that, eventually your growth (and visibility online and off) will explode exponentially. But you have to be prepared to go through some lean, lonely times for the first year or so, until growth kicks in.

Take this simple example: Start with a brand new website with just 500 visitors a month, and set a goal to double your visitors each month for the first nine months. Just run the numbers and see where you end up. What started out as an insignificant number starts looking impressive given the benefit of time. Extrapolate out to 12 months, and the numbers are even more impressive.

You can’t keep doubling numbers forever but once you have a substantial base, even a 5 percent monthly increase adds up dramatically over the course of a year. And then the next year it increases even more. And the next after that it increases still further.

My point is that time is your friend, but only if you have persistence.

Whether it’s site traffic or number of customers or revenues or subscribers or whatever you are measuring, you have to stick with it and not give up.

Anita