Getting data straight-up from the Information Highway can be like trying  to drink from a fire-hose. You're more likely to drown than get your thirst fully satisfied, so the SOP is to skim the first few results from Google search, then make your way from there.

As it is, for a consumer it's all you can do to keep your head above water when it comes to timely and relevant information, aside from filtering out junk mail and spam. As for managing the information you do consider important enough to keep -- there's an entire industry devoted to helping you do just that.

As an entrepreneur, however...you have heard the saying about the staggering growth of information in the world, right?

New stuff comes up all the time. YouTube has been reported to host 100 million video streams per day, and that's just one site. A New York Times book-review expounded on the glut of data, which has led people to entertain a "[...] sense of information that enables [them] to claim that a copy of the daily New York Times contains more information than the average 17th-century Englishman encountered in a lifetime." But even if the anecdote is apocryphal, you have to admit it paints a very vivid image. So where are you in all of this? What about your brain?

Stay with me.

Centuries ago, a hand-copied, leather-bound book was like a sports car. Only the rich had the wealth to buy books, and the measure of your fortune could be gauged by how many you had. A shelf of books was akin to having Jay Leno's garage. A library? You belonged to one of the elite families of the time, or were possibly a member of a religious order in charge of copying books by hand and keeping them safe. Even if you couldn't read them well, if you had books, you had power.

Now, you have technology, education, and access to both via the internet. You're reading this, aren't you? Stay with me, I'm setting it up. Here we go:

• If power is force applied to action, and "knowledge is power", then knowledge without application is data. Information, out of touch and out of context is useless. Trivial. What's the deciding factor?

Your brain. To be precise, how you use it to apply the information and stored experience you have to resolve specific issues. You learn, you can share what you've learned.

Here's a short marketing tip you might find helpful:

• Cost is what you pay to make stuff.
• Value is what the buyer believes your stuff will give him.
  
• Price is what you set for the stuff you're selling.

Longer version:

Cost is what you pay to make stuff.  Actual labor and service, time, brainpower, materials, and equipment are what you use up to make your product or service. Other costs can include advertising, marketing, research and other things that's covered by overhead. These costs are a given, but their price, on the other hand, varies.

Value is what the stuff brings to the person paying for it. Perception is a major part of the process of setting value to something.  Here are a few questions to get you thinking:

A vital aspect of making your business succeed is making sure your target audience knows who you are, what you can do for them, and how to find you. Enough has been written about advertising, marketing and SEO practices to give us hours of reading time, so this is just a short article on what happens behind the scenes of "getting known".

Building, creating or having an excellent product, or providing a service that the market needs, wants and would pay for is, of course, par for the course, as is having a talent (and the discipline to master it) that is in high demand. Think about the teams that gave us YouTube, or came up with Google Apps. And then think about the people and infrastructure that made it possible for the world to know about these services.

It's not just product and talent, it's letting people know of that product or talent. You have something to sell, you've got to know how to sell it. And how you set up your approach to making yourself known matters.

Just in case it slipped under your radar, we here at JROX.com have a lot of useful advice in our articles section to help you run your business  and meet your e-commerce goals.

When people decide to start and run their own business, they're opening themselves up to a whole new world of stress. It's like a circus act. Where the corporate world,  even with outsourcing, still usually offers a comparatively well-oiled machine with discrete units supporting each other - - for example, payroll, production, management, tech support, etc -- the entrepreneur, especially when starting out, is required to wear all the hats, juggle the duties and keep his eyes on the prize...and he has to do this to lead his business into sustainability, with no guarantees of success.

What adds to the stress is having to divide your attention on the many problems that pop up in the course your chosen path. We hope that for those of you thinking of starting out, these articles can help you decide where to place your bets, and improve your odds of success. And for those of you already on the way, these bits of advice can help refresh your memory and maybe add something new to your know-how.

--just to make the distinction clear. It's like the general confusion people get when they try to distinguish between "tactics" and "strategy".

Using Wiki-fu, we can break down the difference:

• Advertising "is a form of communication used to influence individuals to purchase products or services [...]."
• Marketing, on the other hand, is "an integrated process through which companies create value for customers and build strong customer relationships in order to capture value from customers in return." (Italics and emphasis added.)

So, you market your products and services by means of making them known through advertising. Marketing plans, advertising promotes. How else are the two different?

People who are most likely to express interest in your product or service make up your target market. The challenge of marketing lies in finding the people who are most likely to want what you're selling, and then getting them to buy.

Correctly targeting your market saves time, money and effort in your advertising. Using a common image, rather than spattering buckshot everywhere in the hopes of hitting your target, targeted marketing is like using a rifle: with repetition and focused adjustment, the odds of you hitting what you aim for are much higher. 

What follows are 5 ways you can refine your targets.

For many first-timers, their first giddy rush in internet marketing can be something akin to falling in love. The product is perfect, the possibilities are endless, and they don't need anything else.

At this point, they're dazzled by the images of sure-fire success -- and totally getting ahead of themselves. When the time comes that the thrill and the glitz wear off after the initial rush, the disappointment and pain of the event can settle like lead in the belly, and sour them for anything similar in the future. Like a kid jumping into the deep end of the pool, it's a recipe for disaster.

If you're not that strong or prepared yet, it's better to do some research first before wading in: all that glitters in not gold (or e-cash), and all that.

What follows are 3 common myths that continually crop up and break newbie hearts, and can trip up even the more experienced players.

If you want get and direct more traffic to your squeeze page, this segment will cover 2 ways you can do so: article and forum marketing. At the end our goal is to give you enough information to help you gain more visitors to your site, help your sales and boost the traffic to your squeeze page. And you can do this all with no money down.

Article marketing is the marketing method where you submit original articles, which as a rule are composed of 400-500 words, to article directories. It's a very good traffic-generating approach: aside from the fact that many excellent article directories are free, the more high-quality articles you write, the better your odds of getting attention because of the quality of your work, attention that then can be redirected to your site.

When people uses article marketing, the generally use it for promotional means: pushing an affiliate product, for example. As a secondary (and even better) side-effect, article marketing is excellent for list building, because readers (without having to commit anything) get free, useful content, which enhances click through to your site, and attract potential subscribers. Article marketing is one great method to attract subscribers to your squeeze page, but not the only free one.

In a previous article, How To Engage Your Newsletter Readers , we went over important factors to consider when you want to keep the people on your hard-earned mailing lists. In this installment, we'll share 5 of the basic bits of information you can share with them.

Aside from the worry about the time you need to invest in setting up and creating engaging content for your newsletter, even if you think you're gong to run out of things to share, there are very basic (some may say essential) subjects you can stick to that can help you greatly in keeping your readers reading, and save you work in plotting out what to say.

If you only share information that helps them, the scheduling can be adjusted to whenever you have useful information, like software updates, special offers and 'Coming Soon' events. You don't need to flood your mailing list with updates on everything you're doing (you can use Twitter for that) and there's less pressure on keeping to a hard schedule of 'publication'.

If you don't have the time to network the 'old-fashioned' way, what do you do?

To move in pace with our time-driven world, we're required to do so at one speed: faster. In this vein, you may already have heard the term 'speed networking'. It's a very popular and fast growing method of networking and growing your business, and fits your time-scarce needs perfectly.

How does speed networking work? It works exactly like speed dating plus musical chairs, only with none of the romantic expectations. And the cheesy music.

At a speed-networking even, participants are paired up and each one has 2-5 minutes to introduce themselves and share what they do. At the end of the period a whistle blows, the pair dissolves, and each person moves on to another person from another dissolved pair until everyone's had a chance to meet. It’s the modern-day solution for people who have little time to meet others,  and find networking difficult. It's also an ice-breaker and launch spot for any general networking which can follow after the initial meeting, getting around the habit of talking only to people you already know.

So you've booked your place in a networking meeting, but what can you do to get the most out of the session? As with all marketing for your business, preparation is vital.