Yesterday I had an interesting, but short, conversation on Twitter where I said, “The key to a successful small business – find a highly specific, targeted niche and dominate it!” And I meant every word.

I work with business owners all the time who aren’t sure about what they want, what they’re doing or where they’re going. Nothing wrong with that at all. After all, unless your expertise is in small business development or marketing, there’s little reason to think you’d have a solid understanding of how to structure and grow a business.

Yet one thing that thatseems to set successful small business owners apart from those who aren’t is their mindset.

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How do you define success in your business? It’s a question I ask every client – and most of the prospects I ever speak with.

The interesting thing for me is how often the people I speak with don’t have a specific answer. Sure, we can come up with just about anything on the fly. Yet it’s not difficult to tell the difference between established, well-thought-through business goals and those that we sort of find when we need to talk about such things.

Having a way to measure the success of your business, however, is one of the most vital parts of running a business.

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One thing you have to say about blogging is that it’s a great way of generating traffic to your website. You write a blog post and promote it a bit. Your posts goes out to your feed subscribers and can gets picked up by social services. With a little effort, your blog can generate gobs more traffic for your website than your old, static website ever could.

As a blogger, you learn pretty quick how to look at your traffic stats. You see that your traffic goes up the days you write and down the days you don’t. You look at your referring sites regularly to see where all the traffic is coming from and spend more time on the sites that are driving you the most traffic. And hitting the motherload of website traffic is getting to the front page of Digg, Reddit or del.icio.us.

But do your traffic stats mislead you? Is your goal just to get gobs and gobs of traffic to your website?

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There are a number of questions I get asked often by my clients about developing and growing their business using their websites.

But I’d say one question is asked more than any other – “how do I get (more) traffic to my website?”

Since I seem to seldom lack for ideas, I thought I’d start writing them down. Next thing I knew I had a list of nearly 100 ways to drive traffic to your website. Since all of these are things I’ve done at one time or another I knew they worked.

But I didn’t stop there. I started brainstorming even more ways to drive traffic. Then I had a few close colleagues take a look at my list and they added a few. Now the list is over 180 viable methods for driving traffic to your website.

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It’s funny to me that people are still asking whether social media is viable for business.

Obviously, the advertising industry picked up on blogs and social media pretty early on and revenue streams based on advertising has matured quite rapidly. And like with anything on the web, the internet marketing crowd, with their usual approach, moved into the social media space.

But for the most part businesses that offer services are only beginning to scratch the surface of how to use social media to create a space in the market and grow their business. And with the constant growth and massive potential blogging and social networking provide, it’s pretty obvious that social marketing is anything but a fad.

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Niche market is one of those buzz terms that gets thrown around a lot. Just about any marketing book, article or blog post worth its weight talks about niche marketing. It’s so prevalent that most small business owners would say they’ve heard the term.

But just knowing about the term niche marketing doesn’t mean you know what niche marketing really is. Or how it applies to your business.

Most service-based business professionals I work with and talk to have some idea of niche market. Often, they think of it as the group of people their business serves or the market they target their services for. And while it’s true that your market is who you sell your products and services too, it doesn’t mean you’re selling to a niche market.

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If you’re paying attention to the media you know that we’re are headlong into some hard economic times. Banks are failing, investment firms are in financial trouble and the housing markets across the nation are suffering.

Things are so bad here in Michigan, the state with the worst economy in the nation, that General Motors is talking about buying Chrysler – the Big Three become the Big Two.

So are these such terrible time economically? For some, yes. For others, and I’m not talking about the extremely wealthy, no. But that’s not how it’s being talked about. If you just pay attention to all the Henny Pennys writing for newspapers, magazine and the web and listen to their banter on TV and radio, our economic sky is falling.

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