Many small business owners know they need to establish more of an online presence with their products or services, but just simply do not have the time, knowledge, or skills required to do so. Listen, you call a professional to put a pool in, you call a professional to build your house, why would you not call on a professional small business internet consulting firm to make your business grow and stand out?

It really does make sense to invest in small business internet consulting if you want to take your business to the next level. Here are just a few ways that an online marketing consultant can help your business:

A good online business consultant will show you where you currently are, and outline a plan to get you where you want to be. Sure, you can write general goals such as “double my sales with internet advertising,” but how are you going to get there? An online marketing consultant can help you lay out a specific plan.

Website analysis. Do you have a website, and is that website doing everything possible to promote your products or services. Right off of the top of my head I can tell you two things that most small business internet consulting professionals will try to do to improve your website, and they work like a charm.

If your website is nice, clean, and effective, how are you going to get visitors to your website? Getting visitors to your website is known as “website traffic” and increasing this traffic is just one of the many ways that small business internet consulting professionals can help your business.

Getting into internet marketing consulting is one of the most inexpensive online businesses to set up. It is something that you can do part-time initially, but always approach it as a business.

Consultants are able to run their businesses from home, working the hours they want. It is a profession that does not discriminate on age, sex or race, and it does not require a college degree. (Indeed formal educational institutions cannot offer such training because the need to be up to date defeats their tutors’ ability to keep up!)

So how attractive would it be for you to work from home, avoid the rat-race, traffic gridlock, not have a boss breathing down your neck – being your own boss? Does the thought of working for as many hours as you choose, having time to take your kids to and from school and helping other businesses profit appeal to you?

What is involved?

The simple answer to this question is: as much or as little as you like. You see, you can choose to offer whatever services you like. If you don’t know how to do a particular task, you outsource it. If you only want to offer one service, e.g. search engine optimization, PPC management, or content writing, then that’s all you need to do.

Residual income

One of the most lucrative aspects of internet marketing consulting is that you earn ongoing fees from your clients. Of course, you can bring a business online and leave them to it if you choose. However, the money is in managing the sites on an ongoing basis, for a monthly fee. This will usually include providing the hosting service, content and adjustments to their search engine optimization.

What you charge per month will be relative to the size of the business (what they can afford basically!) and the amount of time you will need to spend on it each month (it’s usually hours rather than days).

The best part is these ongoing services can be outsourced, with others doing the work and you simply collecting a commission for managing the project.

Find your customers

This is the easiest part – walk down your high street or through your shopping mall. Take note of all of the bricks and mortar businesses that would benefit by having a wider customer base. Could your lumber yard, lawyer or realtor do with more business? They will certainly get it by having an online presence.

Get good training

Perhaps the only expense in setting up your consulting business will be the investment in training – and good training will pay for itself with your first client. So find from someone with proven internet marketing consulting success, and follow their lead.

As a top solutions provider, the last thing you may be thinking of is hiring and working with a consultant yourself. But maybe you should move that item up higher on your priority list. Even though you’re the professional who works with your customers and vendors day in and day out, you can find value in some fresh insight.

If you are going to grow and prosper as a Super VAR, you must constantly replenish your own well of knowledge. Take the steps to learn from others – like sales strategists, marketing consultants, and business development professionals – and then apply that knowledge to creating and delivering innovative solutions for your customers. If you continue to offer the same ideas over and over again, eventually your customers are going to realize you don’t have much else to offer – the one-trick pony – and they will find someone who will.

Continuing to learn and stay at the forefront of ideas is key to continued success, and turning to some of the consultants you use on a regular basis is a great way to check the pulse of the economy and the world outside of your inner circle. You can begin a conversation about marketing ideas with a consultant and turn the conversation to his business. Wouldn’t it be interesting to find out what a marketing consultant is doing to grow his own business? What else could business and marketing consultants provide you? Do they give you great ideas that you don’t implement? If so, why not? Is it lack of time or resources? Or aren’t you buying into those ideas with the conviction you need to take the next step?

In today’s economy, most small business owners are splashing about in uncharted waters. They don’t have the ability to look at past successes and failures and then mirror future plans and strategies based on them. But what they do have is each other – and the knowledge from outside resources. What you may learn from one consultant could be tailored to work for your customers as well. Knowledge is power. Here are a few things to think about as you work with your own consultants and partners, in order to develop new ideas and solutions for your customers:

- Learn from professionals outside of your industry. Ask these pros what they’re doing to create new business and find new clients. For example, a marketing pro tells you she hosts a monthly breakfast for both her existing customers and then requests each one of those customers was to bring along a colleague. At the end of the breakfast – where she discusses a timely topic of interest to this group – she offers a white paper to the attendees which discusses the findings in-depth. In order to obtain this information, attendees must give their contact information, so they also become a part of the marketing pro’s growing list of leads on her e-newsletter permission-based subscription list. How can you do that with your customers? This one idea that came from someone outside of your industry can easily be applied to your world as well, allowing you to capture new leads and new business as the economy begins to recover.

- If someone gives you sound advice, take it and use it. Advice and ideas that come from someone outside of your world are sometimes even better than from within it. They offer a fresh view or different approach to a sometimes common problem. However, if a consultant is showing you multiple PowerPoint presentations and preaching to you why you should or could be doing something differently, ask for proof as to why it worked. Do they have first-hand knowledge with results to support the idea’s ROI? If a marketing person is recommending that you invest in a website, blog, and Facebook page, but doesn’t have one herself, you might want to find someone with more experience to guide you. On the other hand, if she is the king of social media, and has the platform to prove it, then listen closely and use the knowledge to your benefit!

In order to stay ahead of the competition today, you must continue to look for new ideas to build your business and your customer relationships. One way to do that is by tapping into the thought process of other business leaders and consultants who work outside of your field, and then applying that knowledge to your own constituency. Being a knowledge expert is extremely important. You must find ways to keep your bucket of knowledge full at all times.

Ideas are at the core of your business. It is what drives profits and enable you to build the foundation of your company from. The resurgence of home businesses today has enabled lots of budding entrepreneurs generate their own income even when staying at home. But this process is not as glamorous as it seems because this actually involves a lot of work. There are several instances wherein a home business owner will contemplate into hiring a small business marketing consultant. But is it really worth it? Or will it be an unnecessary business expense?

Home business owners look into various options to generate ideas or motivate them to get their business to the next level. Some even attend workshops in order to figure out new ideas. At the start, most business owners do just fine working on their own. But over time, they will struggle to look for fresh ideas to maintain their business performance. This is true with coming up with marketing strategies for small business because you need to think of ways to keep up with larger businesses.

The one-on-one mentoring of a small business consultant can help you overcome these minor but critical challenges. When you are working alone, you can be so engrossed or too busy with handling various aspects of your business that you do not notice it when ideas pass you by. Hence, you are losing out on an opportunity to explore a new way of looking at your business so your loyal consumer base will continue to do business with you.

A business consultant will not only help you with building marketing strategies for small business. They can also help you organize cost cutting ideas, managing your website design and features, building relationship with clients, tax handling issues, among other components needed for your business operation. A consultant is also emotionally detached from your business. Thus, you can leverage their objective point of view to make accurate assessment of your business’ current status and whatever steps it need to take in order to achieve your goals.

Another reason to get a consultant for your business is when you are trying to explore a new direction. Most home business owners rely too much on their ability to run their business and keep the operation smooth. But after a long time, it will require some sort of motivation and that extra drive to take that next big step. You can therefore consult various ideas with them while leveraging the consultant’s expertise in the business industry to understand which will promise better results. Additionally, they can help you cope with the day-to-day operation and analyzing the system you have in place.

The final reason why a home business owner should hire a small business marketing consultant is to stay abreast on latest marketing trends. It is up to you to decide if you want to quicken your business’ ability to see results, or if you just want to incorporate new ideas for running your business. The expertise of a professional consultant will provide you with additional motivation for success, especially with unique challenges that are involved with running a home business.

Many people fantasize about having a large consulting firm specializing in consulting in international markets where millions are made in transitional consulting. What many do not realize is for your firm to stand out and gain clients you will need not only superior consulting skills but also some of the top networking and marketing skills in the market.

When providing consulting in emerging and established markets you need to be aware and make your clients aware of the cultural differences between markets first as one awkward moment between foreign business partners can cause months of problems. Many consulting companies do not take into effect the cultural differences in advertising which is causing many major marketing and branding problems. When doing an advertising and public relations campaign you must completely change your plans depending on which side you are promoting to. For instance besides the language differences you would not want to run the same message campaign to those in the United States as you would in India just because the ways that people take jokes, phrases, and body language is drastically different in certain cases.

These things should already be known by those providing consulting in markets internationally as most of the time these consultancies are centered on providing a smooth transition from one market to the other. Other foreign consultant firms work in various industries such as outsourcing management, international shipping, translation, security, and more. The industry of consulting in emerging markets is a very lucrative venture if done correctly but at the same time is not for everyone including those who can already speak both languages and know both cultures. In this business industry it takes a certain type of person and business owner to succeed as you are not just dealing with one region or country but instead are dealing with social, political, language, and economic barriers which all have their own sets of problems within each category. Overall there is much to learn about starting an international consulting firm before you take that leap, but if you are a daring entrepreneur who has a unique skill set then there is an unlimited potential to be made consulting in foreign markets.

Technological change is accelerating at an exponential rate. Whereas it used to take decades for major shifts to occur, today’s big developments often come about in mere months. Read on to discover the IT outsourcing trends in 2012.

1. The Big Switch: Cloud Computing

Companies are gathering, analyzing, and storing more data than ever before. Cloud computing offers a convenient, cost-effective way to manage data, so it’s not wonder that increasing numbers of organizations are switching from costly on-site servers to remote servers. Typically, a firm can experience increased bandwidth with a cloud storage solution – meaning that the “big data” that today’s organizations demand can be more easily accessed.

The switch to cloud storage began in earnest last year, and it will continue through 2012, and indeed the rest of the decade. Information technology consulting firms will be busy building secure cloud-based networks. Forrester Research’s Holger Kisker has forecasted the cloud computing market to grow to $61 billion by year’s end. Kisker also highlights the fact that public cloud expenditures are growing four times faster than other IT spending.

If you contract with an IT outsourcing firm, be sure to ask what benefits you could see from switching to a cloud storage setup. Chances are that joining the cloud computing revolution would offer many advantages for your organization.

2. Tools to Facilitate Remote Teamwork

With access to company data via The Cloud, employees no longer need to access a local server, so they can work anywhere with secure Internet access. The challenge here is to monitor employee productivity remotely. To meet this growing need, IT consulting firms will be on the lookout for remote collaboration and project management tools.

3. Virtualization + Cloud Technology = Lowered Data Storage Expenses

The marriage of two of 2011′s stickiest IT outsourcing buzzwords – virtualization and cloud – will allow companies to further reduce their data storage budgets. Virtualization involves creating multiple virtual servers on the same actual machine. Information technology consulting experts say 2012 will be the year when virtualization and cloud storage will be used concurrently. Organizations will access virtualized servers through the cloud, thereby enjoying low costs and high efficiency.

4. IT Outsourcing Gains Popularity

As cloud technology moves data operations offsite, IT outsourcing will become an increasingly easy and attractive proposition. According to leading IT consulting firms, 2012 will feature growth for outsourcing groups such as Guru, oDesk, and Elance.

5. The Move to Mobile

Information technology consulting guru Maryfran Johnson is the Editor-in-Chief of CIO magazine. Her research with IDC and Gartner predicts that, by 2015, nearly as many tablets will be sold each year as PCs. Our future includes growing numbers of smartphones and tablets, in other words.

To keep up with the demand for these devices, information technology consulting firms will be employed to create mobile software applications. From analytics to file retrieval, companies will soon expect everything to be easily accessed via mobile devices – and software must be created to fulfill that demand. Additionally, groups that provide comprehensive IT outsourcing services will spend plenty of time in 2012 expanding security networks to include mobile devices.

Overall, cloud computing will drive IT outsourcing trends in 2012. Indeed, information technology consulting authorities have named 2012 “The Year of the Cloud.” Cloud technology will alter how organizations store data this year and for decades to come.

Getting accepted into the college of your choice is a tricky thing to do at times but by using a college admissions consultant you can greatly increase your chances of getting accepted into the first college on your list. Really in this competitive day and age having a good college admissions consultant makes all the difference.

These consultants are people who specialize in getting people just like you into the college of their dreams and know all the ins and outs of the college admissions game. Here are some of the ways that a college admissions consultant can make a difference in your college admissions quest:

o Help finding schools: Perhaps you have no idea where you want to go to college and only have a vague notion as to where it is you would like to go. Your college admissions consultant can give you many ideas as to which schools would be a good fit for you and you can then go from there.

o Help with applications: College admissions consultants know exactly what schools do and do not want to see on applications. They will be able to review your application before it is sent off to the college you are applying to and be able to tell you if there is anything that needs to be added or taken away. Beyond that they will also let you know what, if any, accompanying paperwork must be sent off with the application. Imagine how terrible it would be to get excluded from the college of your choice simply because you neglected to send in a form that you didn’t even know about.

o Help with student loans: It may be necessary for you to obtain student loans in order to attend the college of your choice. Do you have any idea where to begin your search? Your admissions consultant will know exactly where to look and can even help you determine what type of aid you will be able to qualify for. In some instances they can even give you some ideas of specific scholarships that you may qualify for that you may not have otherwise found out about. While it is true that it costs money to hire a college admissions consultant, if they can provide you with ideas for scholarships that you never have to pay back it is sort of like they will be paying for themselves.

Getting into college is hard enough. Yes you can do it by yourself but why would you want to put yourself through all that aggravation? What if you leave something out in the application process? What if you miss a section on your financial aid form? The point is there are too many variables to have your college career left to chance and once you hire a college admissions consultant you will see that they make all the difference in the world. You are only going to go to college once, make the most of it and get into the school you want with these consultants help.