cristar - Profile

You've got a lot of good suggestions. Like someone stated before, just keep building backlinks and the PR will come. Here are few more suggestions:

• Keep you blog updated
• Do natural linkbuilding - don't just get do-follow links, a regular person would have all kinds of links. Get a variety of links, not just one kind. High pr links are the holy grail, and you want lots of them, but you also want to mix in there low pr links too. In other words, you want to look like a regular person with a website rather than a marketer who's trying to "game" the system.
• Create content other people want to link to (Top 5 Ways to...; The Top Ten...., etc..) also known as linkbaiting

Hope this helps you!

Corrisa

If you don't know how to do a press release go to PrWeb and see (study) how they do it. In the search bar on PrWeb type in your niche keyword(s) and look at how your competitors/people in your niche did their press releases.

See their "angle" and you WILL learn how do one yourself without having to pay a professional to do it for you. Another thing you can do is find someone on Fiverr to do one for you. Keep in mind they only charge $5 bucks and you will get what you pay for.

After your PR is done, you'll want to find newspapers (offliine, and online), trade papers, online press release sites to distribute your press release.

Articles and press releases should not take you days to write. You definitely need to make a marketing plan or you'll be all over the place trying to find out what works.

Corrisa

Just like a lot of people stated already, you want to find out the reasons they left.

Keep in mind that you will lose some customers from time (no longer need your products, found better service/products elsewhere, no longer interested etc..).
Anything above your normal attrition rate, you want to find out the reasons.

I'm assuming you have emails and addresses of your customers,therefore you should from time to time survey your customers for feedback and/or have one of those feedback scripts on your webpage so you know how your customers feel about your products, customer service, and your website.

Hope that helped some.

Corrisa

JV means join ventures. This is probably the fastest way to get traffic and affiliates for your products. You want to find people who can help you. This would be people in your niche, people who sell products in your niche that aren't direct competitors, etc.... In other words, you want to form alliances with other marketers/businesses.