It's a good bet, your answer is yes. You have a web site, are advertising on Television, Radio or Newspaper and your opportunities for new business just seem to get harder and harder to find.

But wait! What happens if we look at doing things the old school way and then apply some of the new technology to our efforts? Old school way? Word of Mouth! Referrals, repeat customers and the value of dealing with your business. This can be done. What we all miss, as we throw our limited dollars at the problem, is that it can be done for very little investment.

Try a few of these tricks. They are used by large corporations and small business alike to achieve remarkable results. Best of all, they can be done in many cases for no money out of pocket!

First sit down with your management staff and have each department head start blogging. Regardless of the number of departments you have (it may be you are sole proprietor) publish a blog once a week. Make sure the content of the blog is beneficial and relevant to your clients and prospects. If you're a landscaper give simple tips that can help make a garden wonderful. If you're an Auto dealer, how to keep your trade value high or easy ways to prep it for winter may be what they want. The idea is to deliver content that may be valuable enough to forward or to repost.

Next create social media pages for your business and for your employees. Employees should use the pages to prospect. You will enable these prospecting efforts by linking your blog posts to these sites, link your web page to these sites and interact on the pages yourself once a day. If your company does something charitable, make sure there is a link for that as well. Anything your business is doing for the community should be documented on the social media pages. Facebook , Linkedin and Twitter are free and there is most likely a social media site that caters to your type of business as well. Great places for fresh ideas as you move forward. (You should be the creator of your employees social sites. You can control the message this way and eliminate employees that leave with the push of a button, but not lose the prospects.)

At least once a week, post a video. Funny, informative or a product highlight. Post them on You - tube and link them to your social sites as well. These three efforts are incredibly powerful and will move your business up the ladder in the search engines generically.

Now if you want to really accelerate your prospecting and maximize your digital footprint in your market area. For about the same price as a business card sized ad in a newspaper for one day, you can market your business on line for a month. Hundreds of Web pages will host your banners, thousands of directories will feature your information and you will have first page placement on Google in just a few days. We do this every day and our list of satisfied clients grows every day, Nationwide! I have a video here.

If you follow any of this advice, in a very short time your answer to the question, "Is it tough out there?" will be a big, "No! There is plenty of business and they are looking for me."