This article originally appeared on the ACRBO site.

By Derek R. Iannelli-Smith, IT Strategist, Progressive Integrations, Inc., A+, Network+, Security+

Recently I have been watching our LinkedIn group and wondering. My wonderment has been about how folks are a part of the association but not participating in the preferred vendors. How do I know this? Because the marketing questions on the group have been about things that have already been addressed in seminars and through our vendors. I thought about creating a new forum topic called, “If I don’t shop from my own store, don’t take free training, and instead spend all my time on social networking sites asking dumb questions, will I grow my business?”

So Dan calmed me down and he said we could probably benefit from a ‘101 Marketing’ article. Let me first start by saying I am not going to be sharing anything original, and as a matter of fact one of the foundational principles of marketing that I have found is how good you are at R&D (robbing and duplicating). Do I have your interest yet?

Let’s start with some basics to get us started:

1. What is your business? What do you do? Can you explain it in 5 minutes or less? (break/fix, block hours, managed services, combo of all 3) What is your business tagline? What are your qualifications (I recently caved and got some certs, you may want to consider that)?

2. What is your demographic? (primarily home users, small business, enterprises)

3. Have you researched your competition? (I have only one in my area that could even compete with us) What are they doing? How is that working for them? What are their rates? What about the biggies (geek squad, staples, etc)?

4. What can you do every day to market your business? Do you have a logo? Are you branding? Do you have a web presence? Business cards? (all of these things can be done for little to no money by the way – been there done that, ask me how if you’re serious)

5. Who are you networking with? (Most business owner’s network with other broke business owners – and no the Chamber is NOT good stewardship of your time or money despite what they say). This is a shameless plug for ACRBO… there are guys in our network that are doing it and making it happen. BTW, they are not posting on LinkedIn every 5 minutes. I would highly recommend reading the Cashflow Quadrant and anything by Patrick Lencioni – these works rocked my world when it came to changing my thinking and who I spend my time with.

6. Go social (networking) without getting sucked into the wasted time it can be (Hootsuite is a great way to schedule your postings without sitting in front of a machine or using your smartphone keypad all day long). Postings don’t make you money, responses do.

7. Get free training and mentoring (you are not going to find it on LinkedIn or Facebook or your Twitter feed despite how fun it is. Some good sites for resources are:

a. http://www.sba.gov/content/marketing-101

b. http://www.entrepreneur.com/

c. http://www.score.org

d. http://www.inc.com/

8. Subscribe to newsletters of people in your industry. Some good ones are:

a. http://www.computerrepairblog.com/

b. http://www.technibble.com/

c. http://www.howtogeek.com/

d. http://www.techrepublic.com/

9. Find out who offers marketing for our industry:

a. http://www.technologymarketingtoolkit.com/

b. http://www.startacomputerrepairbusiness.net/ or http://www.marketmeit.com/

10. Don’t hoard knowledge – give back

a. Write articles for vendors

b. Provide solutions on tech boards (Microsoft, Expert Exchange, etc)

c. Give away services (from time to time and consistently)

d. Reward your referring customers

e. Give back to non-profits, schools, churches, give away scholarships

There is much more, but in realizing that most of us can only handle about 10 things on a list and about 5 questions, I have already overwhelmed you with a bunch of info. I was thinking about continuing this series and hitting on all 10 of these points in separate articles. Interested?