While companies of every category encourage people to click their Facebook Like buttons, the accountability questions continue to surface: "How much does liking a company influence a purchasing decision and increase loyalty to the business?"

The best way to determine if there's a relationship between fans who've actually liked and purchased is to directly ask your customers and clients, "Have you liked us on Facebook? Did that influence your purchasing decision?"

Target is tired of losing sales to shoppers who come in to their stores and see the products they like, only to purchase them at a lower price online. In a letter to their vendors, Target has suggested that suppliers create special products that would set it apart from competitors and shield it from the price comparisons found in various software programs. According to The Wall St. Journal, in a tersely worded letter, Target says, "What we aren't willing to do is let online-only retailers use our brick-and-mortar stores as a showroom for their products and undercut our prices without making investments as we do, to proudly display your brands." Watch for more major retailers to boldly take a stand and fight "showrooming" as it continues to undercut their sales and profits.

1. Focus On Selling High Profit Products And Services

Don't be deceived by success in percentages. Focus on selling products and services that have a high profit return in dollars, as opposed to a profit return in percentages.

There are just four powerful ways to increase your sales. Not 400, not 40... just four. If you focus on the tactics most applicable to your business, then your sales and profits will increase.

The baseball movie Moneyball, based on Michael Lewis’s book Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game, details the issues facing the Oakland A's - a major league baseball team that has a low budget and at the same time needs to field a championship level team in order to remain competitive and profitable.

It's a situation that many businesses in every single category face today: how do you compete against those companies that have larger budgets allocated for advertising and for recruiting the best talent?

There's a lot of bad information about best SEO practices out there. To help you sort through it here's some information straight from Google. 

If you are a new or experienced PPC advertiser, the key to getting a better response from your campaign is to get qualified clicks to your landing page through the use of negative keywords. A negative keyword works just like a regular keyword you used to set up your account, EXCEPT these keywords will filter out those searchers that don't measure up to