Sharing content from 3rd party sources can be a powerful way to build credibility, increase your reach and spark conversations on social media. Your clients and prospects are looking for you to be a resource for their business. By passing along up-to-date information on local and industry news that effects their business or valuable and helpful advice that solves their problems, you become the filter, the trusted expert in your industry that they will turn to when they are in need of your product or service.

Over the last few months, I have had numerous conversations with people about why they should be sharing 3rd party content on social media that is relevant and valuable to their audience. But the “Why” is not really the problem, most people get it pretty quickly. The conversations then usually shifts to “How”.

How do I find good, relevant content?
How do I filter through it quickly?
How do I easily share it to my social media profiles?

It's no secret that the internet has drastically changed the way that people buy. Your potential customers no longer look to salespeople to provide the information they seek about a product or service they are in need of... in fact, many actively seek to avoid salespeople.

Television, radio and print advertising have been rendered almost totally ineffective due to the proliferation of technology such as DVRs, Satellite Radio and iPads. One survey reported that 86% of people skip TV ads. (Source: The Guardian, 2010)

Even highly targeted marketing methods such as direct mail and promotional email have seen sharp declines in recent years. Another survey reported that 44% of direct mail is never even opened. (Source: EPA.gov, 2010)

Why is this? Why do the tried-and-true marketing methods of the past continue to be less and less effective?

Over the past few years, MarketPath has focused on creating marketing campaigns that combined direct mail, email and the web to help businesses generate leads. During that time, we have worked with some awesome people, produced some fantastic results and learned a lot about what businesses want from a marketing provider.

Our vision has always been to help businesses grow and offer the marketing services that will give you the best Return-On-Investment (ROI). With that in mind, we are making some BIG changes at MarketPath and will now be focusing on helping you use Inbound Marketing to grow your business.

See those four buttons ^^up there^^? You've probably seen them a million times by now (well, at least the Like & Tweet buttons) on websites across the internet.

Does your website have all four of them? If not... this article is for you. (Or if you don't manage your own website content, share this with your web designer.)

Since nobody ever goes back and looks at past tweets, I like to compile all my tweets about a specific topic in an easy to digest format I call a Tweet Rewind.

This Tweet Rewind focuses on great articles I have tweeted about using LinkedIn for business.

LinkedIn is an invaluable tool for online networking, research, content discovery, recruiting, marketing and countless sales functions. If you are a business professional and you're not on LinkedIn, you need to be taken into a dark basement and forced to watch William Hung until you agree to set up your profile (which for most people, should only take a few minutes to give in).

Bing opened it's Business Portal Beta program today (replacing the exisiting Local Listing Center) with a slew of new features for small business to control the content of their business listings on the US's third ranked search engine. The standout feature that I noticed was enhanced control of a businesses mobile listings including the ability to genrate QR Codes for their listing and links to their special deals.

A few weeks ago MarketPath participated in the St. Louis Business Expo hosted by St. Louis Small Business Monthly. My friend and President of SBM, Ron Ameln, pulled me aside for a few minutes to ask a few questions about MarketPath and how we help small businesses. Here is the video...

Last Week I was invited to present "Combining Your Offline & Online Marketing Efforts" to The St. Louis Entrepreneurs Meetup Group by organizer Lori Bowers. It was a great group of people with a few familiar faces and many new ones.

Below is the presentation (via SlideShare), but due to the fact that I make my presentations graphics heavy with only a little bit of text, I am going to recap some of the key concepts I discussed below the embedded presentation. Enjoy!

That's not a picture of me, but I may look something like that by the end of the month.

There has been much ballyhoo recently about the success of email marketing, the death of direct mail, and the rise of Do It Yourself (DIY) marketing. Most DIY Marketers are small business people hoping to ride the wave of technology to brighter future... at a seemingly lower cost and with less risk.