Winners in business play rough and don’t apologize for it.

Toyota has steadily attacked the Big Three where their will to defend was weakest, moving up the line from compact cars to mid- and full-size vehicles and on to Detroit’s last remaining profit centers, light trucks and SUVs. All the while, Toyota has dared its rivals to duplicate a production system that gives the company unmatchable productivity and quality.

Dell is similarly relentless, and ruthless, in dealing with competitors. Last summer, the day after Hewlett-Packard announced weak results because of price competition in PCs, Dell announced a further across-the-board cut – delivering a swift kick to a tough rival when it was down.

Wal-Mart is well known for its uncompromising stance toward suppliers. In 1996, Rubbermaid, a $2 billion business that a few years earlier had been Fortune’s most admired company, ventured to contest Wal-Mart’s pressure on suppliers to lower their prices – and Wal-Mart simply cut Rubbermaid off. (Newell acquired a struggling Rubbermaid in 1999.) Wal-Mart doesn’t pull punches with competitors, either. In recent years, as Kmart floundered in bankruptcy proceedings, Wal-Mart rolled out a knockoff of Kmart’s Martha Stewart product line, putting pressure on one of the tottering retailer’s few areas of success.

Hardly anyone would dispute that Toyota, Dell, and Wal-Mart have epitomized corporate success over the past decade. But the raised eyebrows they provoke – recent BusinessWeek cover articles have included “Can Anything Stop Toyota?” “Is Wal-Mart Too Powerful?” and “What You Don’t Know About Dell” – suggest there’s something not quite kosher about the way they achieve that success.

That’s because Toyota, Dell, and Wal-Mart play hardball. What do we mean by this? Hardball players pursue with a single-minded focus competitive advantage and the benefits it offers – leading market share, great margins, rapid growth, and all the intangibles of being in command. They pick their shots, seek out competitive encounters, set the pace of innovation, test the edges of the possible. They play to win. And they do.

Softball players, by contrast, may look good – they may report decent earnings and even get favorable ink in the business press – but they aren’t intensely serious about winning. They don’t accept that you sometimes must hurt your rivals, and risk being hurt yourself, to get what you want. Instead of running smart and hard, they seem almost to be standing around and watching. They play to play. And though they may not end up out-and-out losers, they certainly don’t win.

This may reflect the recent emphasis of management science, which itself has gone soft. Indeed, the discourse around a constellation of squishy issues – leadership, corporate culture, customer care, knowledge management, talent management, employee empowerment, and the like – has encouraged the making of softball players.

“Hardball”, George Stalk, Jr. and Rob Lachenauer, Harvard Business Review, April 2004.

Melih Oztalay
http://www.articlesbase.com/management-articles/business-growth-examining-five-killer-strategies-for-trouncing-the-competition-120617.html

When you begin building traffic to your Home Business website, first you will want to focus on gaining link popularity via reciprical and one way links with other related websites.

Complimentary but non-competing websites are the best because some search engines consider them more relevent and give you a higher ranking in their respective algorithms. One way to build up the link popularity of your Home Business site is to do link exchanges.

Another important way is to submit your website to the major directories such as Yahoo and Open Directory and niche directories relating to the subject matter of your home business site. Another effective way is to simply write articles and submit them them to sites which provide content to other sites.

You can add your “resource box” at the end of the article and any site or ezine which posts your article must also post your resource box which includes your websites URL.

This will not only increase traffic to your website directly but will also increase your all important “link popularity”. This will improve the ranking of your website for given keywords on all the search engines.

Writing articles is a superb linking strategy! Here is the process and how it works:

1. Send out articles that you’ve written.
2. Articles are then reprinted in newsletters or on websites.
3. People then read the articles.
4. They then click on the link to your site at the end of the article.
5. Suddenly you have traffic coming in!

You recieve free advertising and webmasters recieve free content, this creates a win-win situation all the way around! That is the magic of writing articles!

Additional strategies

Tools are one of the most popular techniques used to gain links. Examine some of the popular tools in your industry that have attracted high-quality links before. Then have a programmer create a mash-up of those tools. That way, users can find the answers to all their questions in one location.

Creating compelling content is only part of the job. The next aspect is the promotion. This can be incorporated into your traditional media campaigns, such as print and radio. You can also take advantage of social media outlets such as Netscape and Digg. Below are three promotional methods that can help you spread the word.

1. Bloggers – Find the influential bloggers for your industry and get them to write about your new content. Think like a politician in how you approach the bloggers. Some might be seduced with flattery, while others expect a kickback.

2. Newsletters and Ezines – Often, sponsoring newsletters is fairly inexpensive, making it easy to run ads in several ezines at a time. This can help to promote buzz by getting in front of a targeted audience.

3. Pay-Per-Click – Purchase inexpensive keywords related to your new content. This can be especially beneficial for helping to increase traction for the sites that do not rank well.

In addition, the branding and exposure from the PPC campaign will be beneficial. People are more likely to link to sites they are familiar with or have seen before. It is all about trust.

There are many other ways to promote the content, particularly for those who are good at guerrilla marketing. It is also important to keep the buzz up as the campaign progresses. If things seem to be slowing down, it might be time to contact a few more bloggers or have a radio personality put in a few more plugs.

Take full advantage of all the linking possibilities with great content. It can lead to some great backlinks and new customers at the same time.

Shawn Culver
http://www.articlesbase.com/marketing-articles/effective-linking-strategies-to-promote-your-home-business-website-699411.html