An entrepreneur these days needs to be able to move. That means having the tools that they need to conduct their business with them at all times. If you are a business owner, then you need a Smartphone that allows you access to what you need in order to grow your business even when you are not in the office or at your computer.

Take your pick. Everyone has their favorite line of Smartphones, but you can choose the one that offers the memory, ease of use and speed that you desire. And, with the large market of applications available today, most are available to more than one line of phones.

So let’s explore the essential apps that you will need if you want to perform as many functions as possible while staying mobile.

Essential Apps for Your Smartphone

* Square – This app is free to use. It allows you to process credit card payments right from your phone. You don’t have to wait until you get to the office and your PC to do this anymore. Use the card reader to accept Visa, MasterCard, American Express and Discover.

* Evernote – They say that elephants never forget and neither does this app. Whenever you have an idea, capture it in picture, voice recording or words with this virtual memo system. With cloud computing, updates to your Evernote lists are synced across all of your electronic devices. This app is free to download.

* LinkedIn – This is by far the most popular social networking site for professionals. Just like with Facebook or Twitter, keep abreast of what fellow peers are doing using this app. Network, share information and update your profile – all from your phone. This app is free to download.

* Google Docs – Want to share information quickly with your team? You can update and send files back and forth with this application. Also, Google offers other cloud computing apps that allow you to talk with clients, invoice customers and create sync information across your devices and Google calendars. This app is free.

* Documents to Go – There is a cost for this app but it is well worth the payment. You can create MS Word documents, Excel spreadsheets and PowerPoint files – all from your Smartphone. Files can be transferred to your desktop also. Send completed files to clients quickly from any location. Now you don’t have to wait until you get back to the office.

* Dropbox or SugarSync – Now you can share files between computers and your phone with your team and clients. This app, which is free, allows you to make your information available to whoever needs it, when they need it.

As a business owner, it is important to have tools that make your business as mobile as you sometimes are. The apps above are examples of some of the more essential Smartphone tools.

Here are four smart ways of engaging potential customers online.

#1 Games/Applications

Many businesses are realizing the value of creating a useful application for a mobile device. They’re not charging for the application and by making it available for free they’re engaging new potential customers.

For example, an information site on coffee makers might create a mobile application that helps buyers buy the right coffee. A professional coach might create an application that helps users create their vision of the ideal business. These applications don’t have to cost much to create either.

#2 Quizzes and Questionnaires

For some reason we all love filling out questionnaires and taking quizzes. We like to share our opinion and we like to see where we rank against our peers. You can engage your potential customers online by publishing fun and/or interesting quizzes. There are many services that enable you to publish a quiz on your blog or website for free. You can also glean a lot of valuable information about your prospects from these quizzes and surveys.

And don’t forget about social networking. There are thousands of quizzes on Facebook and it’s easy to create your own.

#3 User Feedback

Whenever you get user feedback, comments, or interesting information from your prospects and customers, share it with your audience. For example, if you receive a comment from a customer on Facebook, thank them for the comment. Publish it on your blog, website and/or email newsletter.

You might also consider publishing an article or blog post that relates to the comment. When you embrace your feedback you begin to build a community. Your prospects feel as if you’re listening to them and responding. It’s quite powerful.

#4 Ask Questions

Start engaging your audience both on your blog and via social networking, but also ask questions. Ask them what their biggest problem is. Ask them what they think about the latest controversy. Ask them how you can help them live a better life? Ask what makes them feel happy and fulfilled.

Asking questions won’t guarantee that you always get an abundance of responses, but people will take notice. They will respond and you will engage. You’ll also learn a lot about your audience.

What Is Crowdsourcing?

As defined by Wired Magazine, “Crowdsourcing is the act of sourcing tasks traditionally performed by specific individuals to an undefined large group of people or community through an open call.”

A very simple example is to ask friends and followers on a social networking site to help you create a logo. You’ll have people working together to offer suggestions and solutions immediately.

Also, if you’ve participated on social networking sites you’ve probably had people ask you to like their Facebook page and to share it with others. Or you’ve had people ask you to retweet a link or post. This is an example of crowdsourcing. You’re asking the masses to help you grow your business.

So How Do You Grow Your Business with Crowdsourcing?

First, think about the various ways you can grow your business. These include:

* Marketing
* Content
* Fundraising
* Product development
* Website traffic
* Branding

Second, you’ll want to think about your crowdsourcing resources. As you can see from the earlier examples, social networking is often the key to success. That’s where you can reach large groups of people. It’s also the best place for any effort to pick up momentum quickly. Word can spread on Facebook across the country in a matter of minutes.

Do you have a large network of friends and followers? Are you currently active on social networking sites? It doesn’t have to be Facebook. Social sites like YouTube are very powerful too.

Third, consider your goals. What do you want to accomplish first? For example, do you need a lot of content for your website? Ask for submissions or guest blog posts from your friends and followers. Make it a contest and ask readers to vote on the best blog posts.

If you want to use the power of the crowd to develop a product, ask for input. Publish surveys, questionnaires or ask for beta testers.

The power of the crowd is immense. You can use it to grow your business in a number of ways. Instead of paying a product development team or hiring a focus group, you can now go directly to the source and ask your prospects to contribute. And it doesn’t cost a thing. Consider your goals and your resources, then take action.

What sets Google+ apart from other social networks? And how can it be used to build a business?

There are two main features that set Google+ apart from Facebook: Circles and Hangouts.

Circles: What They Are and How to Use Them

Circles are like friends groups. You choose what groups to put people in without them knowing what group you’ve placed them in.

You can then choose to share things with people in certain circles, without other people in other circles seeing it.

Let’s say you run two businesses, one for PPC coaching and one for SEO coaching.

You’ll be able to put all your students and contacts of each group into their respective groups. You’ll then be able to share course updates to one group without the other seeing.

Circles also solves another problem many professionals have had with Facebook. You want to be able to share photos and status updates with your friends, but not necessarily with your professional contacts.

Circles makes this very easy. You can share just about anything with whoever you want and hide it from whoever you want.

Hangouts for Video Conferencing

There are many video conferencing programs online. However, by and large every single one of them is paid and often quite expensive.

Google+ changes all that. Google+ makes video conferences completely free, backed by Google engineered technology.

You can have any number of people join a Google+ hangout. You can invite people one by one, or you can open a hangout to an entire group of people who can join at will.

You can share YouTube videos. You can type text into a chat box. The speed of the service doesn’t slow down no matter how many people you have on it.

In short, the Google+ Hangouts makes it easy to hold video webinars as well as video conferences with co-workers and business partners.

Is Google+ Here to Stay?

Of course, if you’re going to adopt a new social network, you want to use one that other people are actually on and one that’s going to be around for a while.

Will Google+ still be here a year or two down the line? There’s no way to know for sure. The uptake was much faster than any other social network in history, but users’ number one complaint today is still that there’s “nobody else on it.”

If your customers or co-workers are already on Google+, then you probably should get yourself on Google+. However, if nobody you know is on the network yet, you might want to wait for a short time first to see how it plays out.

Clients are the backbone of a business. They are the ones who search and find you and eventually convert from viewers to buyers. But, it takes a constant infusion of new clients to keep the business growing.

Ways to Find New Clients

Here are some tips to help you begin to make a change right now, today, that will benefit your business.

* Re-evaluate your marketing plan – Every few years it is necessary to take a look at your marketing plan with new eyes. For online businesses, you may want to re-evaluate each year. What are you doing now? How can you revamp those marketing tools and employ some new ones?

* Become a social networker – Twitter and Facebook are becoming valuable tools for those who want to take their business to the next level. Use your account in two ways. If you don’t have an account with either or both, now is the perfect time to get involved.

* Advertise your business on your personal Facebook page – Post links to new content on your website and other promotional links that friends and family can view and share. Also, create a fan page for your business. Encourage current clients to sign up and tune in for special information or offers that they won’t find anywhere else.

* Use offline tools – Just because you are operating an online business, doesn’t mean that your local market won’t also benefit. In fact, with local clients, you can give them a personal touch that online clients may not be able to take advantage of. Some offline tools include direct marketing, flyers and promotional items.

* Video marketing – People love to watch informative videos online. You can take what you know and turn it into a visual presentation that immediately gives new clients a picture of who you are and what you do.

* Create a press release – Are you about to offer a new service or product? Create a press release that will attract new clients to your business. Use a press release service and be sure that your content is SEO optimized.

* Create links throughout your website – There are always links on the first page because that is the one that every visitor is introduced to first. But, other pages are visited as well. Most people won’t navigate their way back to the homepage to click on a link they saw there. You can increase your client base by making it easier for them to take advantage of your offers.

Are you looking for new clients? Here are a few ways that you can get the ball rolling.

Share an Ad Space

Can’t quite afford a newspaper ad? Why not split it with a few partners instead?

Purchase a large ad spot in your local newspaper. Then, split the ad with your partners. You’ll often spend less money than if you bought a smaller ad.

You’ll also build relationships with potential partners and build a relationship with the advertiser, leaving room for more future deals to take place.

Try Postcard Marketing

Postcard marketing is one of the most cost-effective ways you could market your business. It costs just pennies per postcard and can often be extremely targeted.

If you run a local business, you can mail just the people within a few miles of where your business is located. You could even mail just certain people from certain lists who are near your area.

Because you can target people so specifically using such a wide range of options while spending just pennies per person, postcard marketing can be an incredibly effective marketing tool.

Facebook Pay Per Click

Facebook allows small businesses to target very specifically the people they want to market. Unlike data you get for postcard marketing or other kinds of marketing, Facebook data is submitted willingly by users and likely to be much more accurate.

You can expect to pay about 50 cents per click. You can target by age, location, gender, interests, marital status, income and a lot more.

Let’s say you own a local consulting business, catered towards helping small business owners get off the ground. How might you use Facebook to get new customers?

First, you might start with individuals earning $30,000 or more. You might target people between 25 and 50, whose interests include business.

Then you’d write an attention-catching and informative headline and advert, along with a photo that really jumps off the page.

Customer Loyalty Programs

Customer loyalty programs have traditionally been very successful for small businesses. For example, for every 10 slices of pizza someone buys, they get 1 slice free.

This creates the psychology of people who come back for more, especially as they get closer to getting their free slice. If there are three pizzerias with comparable pizzas in the area but only one has a loyalty program, they’re likely to go to that one instead.

These are just a few small business advertising ideas that can yield results quickly. Testing any of these ideas shouldn’t take more than a month or two and the results should be apparent almost immediately.

1. Forms and form builders – No internet marketing website is complete without a form. Form builders are easy to use and add to any website. First and foremost, consider a form to build an opt-in list. Generally, the form is placed on the upper right hand corner of a landing page. However, a form can be the landing page. This is also known as a squeeze page.

You can also use forms to collect data about your website visitors. For example, a “What’s your most pressing question?” form. Forms are used to facilitate contacting customer service too. Providing a number of forms on your website will help your customer get the information, products, and content they need.

2. Shopping carts – If you sell products or services then you most certainly need a shopping cart. Shopping cart technology has come a long way over the past few years. It’s easy to integrate into most website technology. When the shopping cart system is seamless, customers have a positive experience on your site. This experience sticks with them and they’ll return to your site. They’ll also likely share a positive customer experience with others, thus promoting word-of-mouth marketing.

3. Social networking feeds – Social networking has become the primary marketing tool for many online businesses. In order to maximize any social networking efforts, it’s important to cross promote. That means using any number of social networking feeds on your business website.

You can integrate your Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and social bookmarking feeds and features right onto your website. For example, if you use Twitter you can integrate it into your website so all Twitter comments are published on your website. This motivates your visitors to also connect with you on Twitter.

4. CMS – CMS, Content Management System, enables you to publish organized content. This helps boost your search engine optimization. Categories and articles can be organized by keywords. Additionally, a CMS can provide a much more streamlined user experience. The easier it is for your visitors to navigate your site, the more they’ll enjoy visiting and the more they’ll come back.

5. Blog – A blog is a great tool to enhance your brand. You can use a blog to drive traffic to your website, and to strengthen or add personality to your business. You can also use a blog to boost SEO for our business and to attract a wider audience.

6. Autoresponders – Autoresponders go hand in hand with your forms. You can use an autoresponder to build your email list and deliver content. It helps your customers receive instant gratification. It helps you connect with your opt-in list on a regular basis. Additionally, you can create autoresponders to answer your FAQs. This saves you time, energy and money. It also provides your prospects and customers with a quick and simple solution to many of their problems.

7. Advertisements – Finally, advertising technology can help you capture attention at just the right moment. Pop-up ads, pop-under ads and slide-over ads all help you time when your prospect sees your promotion. You control their experience.

Technology will continue to develop. As an internet marketer it’s important to stay abreast of new developments. If you’re not currently using these seven internet marketing tools on your website, investigate how you can use them to build your business.

The idea behind viral marketing is that if you can get the product up in multiple places on the web and in front of as many eyes as possible for as little money as possible, you are doing some really good marketing on a budget. Most of the companies behind this style of promotion are smaller businesses that just want to get the word out about their product but don’t have the money to hire a public relations firm or spend money on advertising.

One of the more effective methods of viral marketing is to form a Joint Venture with another business. While you have the product, your JV partner may bring his customer content list of thousands and his marketing skills to the project. In most cases a JV will benefit both parties involved with an equal split of the profits and possibly the work.

Another form of getting your product, to race around the internet world, is to set up an affiliate program with 100s of individuals and business promoting your product. The difference between a JV and an affiliate, is the affiliate will only get paid a percentage of each individual sale personally made by them.

If you want to get into the nitty-gritty of what is viral marketing, then you should realize that it is something anyone with a computer and a little bit of technological savvy can do.  First of all, using social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter or MySpace is a fairly ingenious way of getting your product or service out to the public. You can set up a site, get all of the relevant information listed on your homepage, and then add friends.

Theoretically, just adding whoever to your profile isn’t going to do you any good as they are likely looking to connect with friends and won’t be interested in your product.  The best way to market yourself is to look through the MySpace groups and find those with similar interests.  Say that you are a writer marketing a new book.  Adding other writers isn’t going to get you a whole lot of customers, but adding people who are fans of your genre, well, that’s a different story.

Some viral marketing ideas include sending out chain letters with information about your product buried within a story that urges people to continue resending the letter to all of their friends. This is a decent idea, but if you use the chain letter to try and collect money for something that doesn’t exist or run a scam for a business, then that is fraud and is a crime. You have to be careful and make sure that you aren’t breaking any laws.

Now that you have an answer to the question of what is viral marketing, you should also know that using viral marketing plans too much can cause some problems.  If people feel they are being slammed by the product, then you are going to find many of your potential clients turned off by your aggressiveness.

Just remember that you’re trying to get the word out and tell people about your idea without being too pushy and you should be just fine.

Anyone who uses Facebook has heard of Facebook Apps. Anyone who uses Facebook has been invited by a friend to install a Facebook app. Many of Facebook’s users have taken up that invitation. In fact, very many. So many that an entire small industry popped up that revolved around these applications. Companies were established that did nothing but create Facebook applications. Successful companies by the way.

These companies made millions and millions of dollars off of the successes of their Facebook applications and are still doing very well today. But just as fast as this micro industry was born, it’s more or less all but dead. Well dead at least for new comers.

When Facebook announced that it was going to open up its development platform so that outside developers could write applications that could be installed and used on the Facebook interface, the idea caught on extremely quickly, and if sheer numbers are any indication of success, did very, very well. Facebook application started to pop up all over the place, and like wildfire, many of the applications spread extremely quickly across the entire network.

Some of these applications ended up being installed by millions and millions of users and the companies that specialized in developing them exploded. Companies like RockYou and Slide Inc. (which was backed by the founder of PayPal), did so well that they’re now valued in the millions. RockYou now even has its own ad network that other Facebook developers can use to monetize their new apps.

The monetary potential of some of these applications was mind boggling considering they’re just widgets designed to work in another companies infrastructure. Now though, the money to be made through Facebook applications is all but gone. So what happened? Why did the revenue potential of the might app. go extinct?

Well firstly, there isn’t a lot of room for completion among Facebook applications. It tends to be a real first come, first serve kind of world. In the business world outside of Facebook, competition is always a threat and new entries have the potential to steal market share away from established mainstays.

On Facebook though, people tend to use what their friends use, and the adoption rate is so ridiculously fast, that first entries into any given niche tend to take hold and grow like weeds, choking out any possible competition. If you were the first guy to write a Facebook application that lets people post pictures of their dog’s butts on their friends’ walls, then you’re probably not particularly concerned about the second guy to write a dog’s butt application.

This can be seen by analyzing the most popular and most used applications. Almost none of them are duplicates of another concept among the list. Once one app. takes hold of a niche, it tends to keep hold.

Secondly, and likely most importantly, is that Facebook was initially very liberal on what it considered spam, and those days have changed. If you’re a Facebook user you probably remember the days when you’d log on each day only to find five more “invitations” from friends to install the newest widget that would allow you to send your best buds a digital booger or an e-fart or whatever.

You also might notice that now you receive much, much less of those invites. This is because initially, Facebook let applications be programmed so that users could invite as many people as they wanted to install. Naturally, Betty would install an application that she liked and in turn, with one click, she’d invite every one of the 1000 friends she’s attached to on Facebook.

The view was, it’s not really spam if it’s coming from your friends, and growth of the initial rounds of Facebook apps was lightning fast. Now though, Facebook has realized that people don’t enjoy being flooded with notices and invitations, and have severely limited the number of them that applications can send out. Invitations are now limited to 10, and notices are policed by users.

Too much negative reaction and your application will be labelled “spammy” and taken off the market. What this means for new entrants into the Facebook application arena is that growth is at a snail’s pace compared to the growth seen by the forefathers that paved the way. And that also means that the applications that established their major user bases are now essentially cruising along uncontested because the new limitations make it almost impossible for new competition to touch their massive user bases.

Still though, people flock to the Facebook developer platform in search of their fortune (the author isn’t innocent. I recently had an app. developed with fairly high hopes for its viral potential, only to realize the folly of my ways). It’s like a gold rush continuing on well after all the gold has been excavated. The vast majority will be disappointed, but some may actually do alright.

They won’t bring in millions like Slide and RockYou, but a respectable revenue stream is still not impossible. Just remember that if you are going to try and take on Facebook apps., you need to be prepared for slow growth, and under no circumstances should you try and compete with an established application. Overall though, the Facebook application directory is already super-saturated, and your time, effort and money could be spent much better focused on other projects.