You know your product, but do you know your audience?

It's an important distinction. You can know your product inside and out, and pitch so well as to sell fire to the devil. That's all well and good; you know exactly what's good for your product.

But do you know what's good for your audience?

In today's marketplace, both online and off, you must have a website. Regardless of whether your business model even needs an online presence, you should have one. It doesn't necessarily have to be an expansive website, and I would argue it doesn't have to be the prettiest website (though it should).

But something should be there. When somebody searches for your company on Google, there's going to be websites in those search results.

And at least one of them had better be yours.

The surest sign of success is when you're too busy with more important matters to deal with the day-to-day minutia.

When you're occupied making business deals instead of worrying about SEO or publishing additional content, that usually indicates you've made good in-roads. The website has been found, it's making transactions, and hopefully making money.

It's no longer a matter of writing articles every day, or tweaking keywords. Now it's about filling orders, tapping into new markets, dealing with manufacturers, and finding more distributors. Continuing to make sure that the business makes money is important.

But so are those other things.

It's at this point that sometimes being too hands on can be a bad thing.