Most women entrepreneurs would love to double their income, but when they think about going from where they are now to their new goal they either think too small, panic or go blank.

It’s as if the gap between their current reality and their goal number is just too big of a leap to make all in one jump. These women entrepreneurs quickly become discouraged, and time goes by without seeing any real change in how much they’re making.

I, too, used to struggle with this until I created a simple solution that has resulted in helping nearly triple my income into the high six-figures in just one year (and be on track to reach seven-figures this year).

The small business marketing system I created is called your “Bold Money Goal.” The concept is simple and has worked for hundreds of women entrepreneurs who happily see their monthly income skyrocket!

Here are four marketing strategies you can use right now to leverage this powerful tool:

Small Business Marketing Strategy #1: Choose a short time frame.Short time frames give you focus and create momentum. Plus, they’re fun and exciting! I prefer a 30 – 90 day Bold Money Goal time frame to get you to stretch your thinking and spark your creativity as to how you’re going to reach your Bold Money Goal. Short time frames are also powerful because they cause you to take big, measurable action rather than procrastinating because your small business marketing goal seems fuzzy or out of reach.

Small Business Marketing Strategy #2: Pick the right new amount to bring in.Aim too low and you’re unlikely to make any significant changes or progress with your woman-owned business. But aim too high and the amount can feel so far out of reach that it doesn’t feel “real”. I recommend that women entrepreneurs choose an amount they want to make that is anywhere from 40 – 50 percent more than they currently bring in.

Small Business Marketing Strategy #3: Go for the low-hanging fruit.You don’t have to suddenly add entirely new services or products to your woman-owned business to reach your Bold Money Goal. In fact, I advise to look for the low-hanging fruit that’s just waiting for you to pluck it off of the ‘Money Tree’.

Low-hanging fruit are typically services and products you already have that can be dusted off, re-launched, re-titled or expanded. Try also offering a teleseminar, program, a group or a private service focused on a single topic with which your clients commonly struggle. One of my Platinum clients did this and within a few short days had nearly 400 people signed up for one teleseminar!

Small Business Marketing Strategy #4: Be open to new approaches for achieving your goal.The power of the Bold Money Goal isn’t just to bring in the bucks – although that IS important! It’s to help you make a big leap forward in expanding what’s possible for you and your woman-owned business. Be open to doing something in a new way, a bigger way and certainly, in a bolder way so that the rewards of achieving your Bold Money Goal continue to grow.

Creating and achieving a Bold Money Goal every 30 – 90 days will help you “chunk down” your ideal income in a way that will help you reach it faster and easier than you’ve every thought possible!

Small business owners can have a hard time finding the right ways to market their product or service. There are plenty of right ways to do things, and plenty of wrong ways. Here is a brief overview of some of the mistakes to avoid when marketing your small business:

Mistake #1: Not researching your product need
Many people have a wonderful idea of a product that is needed in the market, and then spend all their money to create it. You need to research the market first to make sure there isn’t already a similar product out there, and whether there is even a need for your product.

Conduct market research, hold focus groups and only make a small run of your product – a few hundred or so – to test your target market with. This can save you a lot of money and heartache in the long run.

Mistake #2: Thinking that the product will market itself
Many small business owners think their product is so great that they don’t need to do any marketing at all – people will flock to you. That’s just not true, and I can’t think of one example of where it was true. Everyone thinks it’s because the “right product” just hasn’t been invented yet, but unfortunately, that’s not the case. It just won’t work that way. How can people flock to something they’ve never heard of?

You must consistently market your product, which means you need to create a marketing plan. You must define your target market, your unique selling point that distinguishes you from your competition; you must develop a marketing action plan and decide on a marketing budget. These are just the bare-bones basics of a marketing plan. You need some kind of plan to be successful. If you don’t know how to create a marketing plan, just Google “marketing plan” or “marketing agency” – many agencies are hired to just create marketing plans.

Mistake #3: Preparing and then not taking action
Many business owners have a fear of failing. Actually, who doesn’t have this fear? But instead of trying to prevent it, you need to follow your marketing plan (see Mistake #2) and forge ahead. It’s hard at first, no one will tell you it’s not, but you have to sell one product in order to sell a million. If you fail, evaluate what went wrong, try to fix it and try again. Repeat as needed!

Mistake #4: Constantly changing your marketing campaign
It happens a lot – the business owner and employees see their marketing materials every day and get tired of them. The same old poster printing images, the same old brochure copy…who wants to see that after six months of it being around? Your potential customers do, that’s who.
Just because you’ve seen your logo a million times, doesn’t mean everyone has. If your marketing campaign is working just fine, don’t change it for the sake of change. A million people haven’t seen your logo at all. Don’t change your marketing campaign until it stops bringing in customers.

Mistake #5: Don’t play monkey-see, monkey-do with your competitors
You should know what your competitors are doing, but you shouldn’t copy it just because it works for them.

If a competitor is known as a “low price leader,” don’t try to beat him out of that title – choose another like “high quality leader.” Find an important quality that your competitors aren’t giving to your shared target.

The capability of determining how effective are the activities involved in marketing and to prove that value to the bottom line of the company is more important than ever before for professionals in the field of marketing. Marketing personnel must be able to place quantification markers on the effectiveness of existing programs and to trace and judge the return on the investment made in marketing over a period of time in order to be able to document that the budgets for the department or group are worthwhile.

In perhaps no other area of business activities, marketing personnel must have quantification so they will know whether the investment is providing expected and anticipated returns. Marketing definitely is a business activity that requires tracking in real time.

As with many of the performance metrics developed by a company, it’s important that all levels of management be aware of the role of marketing in the business before attempting to set metrics which reflect how well the marketing group is meeting the satisfaction of the goals.

In order for the business marketing group to be successful, they must improve the return on investment and must be able to prove that their methods are working.

One of the measures of accomplishment of any campaign is the use of a survey. This can be tied effectively as one of the measurement devices for determining whether or not the customer has found and is using the marketing information which has been developed by the company.

Obviously marketing is related to the bottom line revenue figures but to wait until an entire campaign is finished before checking to see if it worked or not makes it difficult to respond early in the campaign to tweak something which is not working as well as it could be.

Instead of measuring the success of the marketing campaign by how many sales have been made, use metric on increasing the sales list through such methods as a direct marketing email list. If the marketing group is effectively reaching and developing leads then having people joining an email list of some sort would be an effective way of determining whether or not you are reaching for target audience.

You can determine the success rate of the marketing campaign by measuring the number of people who are responding to an email request for free information. As your marketing group learns more about the potential customer, the products which you offer are more tailored to the people who are most likely to respond to that particular offer.

The assumption is always that the more contacts a certain individual has with your organization, the more likely he is to purchase from you. So if you are measuring various factors and features which together make up an effective marketing plan, you can use metrics such as the growth of your email distribution list as one very effective metric. As your mailing list grows, it is almost inevitable that your customer list will grow as well.