It’s tough out there. The competition is fierce. So if you are a small business owner, you need to leverage everything you can to get a leg up. If you are not currently leveraging technology to get the word out about your business, it’s time to start. It doesn’t require a lot of money and doesn’t take a lot of effort to get stared if you take it one step at a time. Here are three steps to get you started.

1.  Build your Online Network by Connecting to Everyone you Know
Friend old acquaintances and everyone you know on Facebook. Follow people on Twitter. Connect on LinkedIn. Each of these networks provides a different way to communicate with your connections and you’ll find different acquaintances on each.

If you are overwhelmed by the idea of publishing to each of these, there are many social publishing tools that will allow you to easily create one update and publish to multiple accounts, which can save you a lot of time. One example is Ping.fm where you can update your social networking universe by simply sending one message to your Ping.fm account via an email, a text message, or a Web form.

So why is building your network so important for your business? We all know that it’s often about who you know. And who you know that knows someone you want to get to know. Think about Six Degrees of Separation. Which brings me to connection tools like MashedIn, which was launched in late January. It’s an application that allows you to identify mutual connections across multiple social networks.  Here’s my MashedIn profile.

2. Monitor Online Mentions
Someone comes into your business, they love your product and send out a tweet. More and more, people are sharing their experiences online with their networks via posts, tweets and more. You need to know what’s being said. And the only way you know is to monitor. Plus, it’s good karma to thank people for nice comments and they’ll be impressed you’re listening.

You also need to know about negative comments so that you can respond. A positive, helpful and humble response will go a long way to turning a potential negative into a positive in the eyes of other readers. There are a lot of tools out there for monitoring. Some are free. And some are paid services. Just this week, Trackur launched a free version of its service, which is a good fit for small businesses. Trackur is a two year old tool, pretty well established and used by thousands of companies. It was previously only available as a paid option.

3.  Ask for Recommendations
If you are like a lot of business owners, you may be hesitant to ask directly for recommendations.  And to some degree the old “testimonial” format issued by the company meets with skepticism from consumers. But consumer generated reviews provide another opportunity. In a late 2008 study of 2,445 US online consumers (by NATRO), 82% considered user-generated reviews “extremely valuable or valuable”.  Further, EConsultancy showed that 90% of people trust recommendations from people they know.  So reviews and recommendations from places like Facebook Fan pages, LinkedIn or even Twitter are hugely valuable. And it’s a bit easier to ask your own network.

Go for it.