Archive for the ‘marketing’ Category

It starts tomorrow, December 1st!

My Birthday is December 23rd and this year I’m giving YOU the gifts!  Each day beginning on December 1st, I will be giving away gifts.  Some days I’ll give links to great gifts and other days I will select one lucky winner from everyone who has registered for my Blogging Birthday Bash through the special pop-up box on this page to receive a special gift.

On the 23rd, I will select 1 lucky winner who will receive a fully customized Facebook Fan Page designed by me!  So be sure you register and get your name in the drawings.  Then visit my blog each day to see what great gift I’m giving away for the day!

Tell all your online friends to join the party too!  I love a crowd!

Hey,

If you didn’t have a chance to hear my friend Perry Lawrence talk about Direct-to-Web TV Shows and Podcasting… You missed it.

BUT Perry is allowing me to share the replay link with you.

Direct-toWeb TV Shows and Prodcasting

Go now and listen to a great webinar on how you can create a web series that sets you apart in your niche or industry.

Perry really delivered the goods and this webinar has already created a stir. Search twitter using #directtoweb to see the buzz.

So go watch the replay here and learn how easy it is to become the authentic authority in your niche.

As most online business owners, I produce my newsletters through email.  I specifically use Constant Contact to produce my newsletters and manage my contacts, open and bounce rates and now for all my events.

As a business partner with Constant Contact, I am privy to early information and I just learned that Constant Contact has an iPhone app called QuickView.

It’s the iPhone app built specifically for Constant Contact® Email Marketing. QuickView lets you:

• Check the status of your email campaigns
• See who clicked, opened, forwarded, bounced, and unsubscribed
• Create a new email list on the go — you’ll see it when you’re back at your computer
• Add a new contact while you’re out networking — your account updates automatically
• Search your contact database
• Update any contact’s individual record — your changes will save to your account

All you need is an iPhone or iPod Touch and your Constant Contact username and password. It couldn’t be easier or more convenient.  I just downloaded the app to my iPhone and have added some new contacts and checked the status of my most recent email open-rate.  I love it!

Email Marketing by Constant Contact® is the easy, effective, and highly affordable way to get your message out to your customers, clients, or members—and build strong, successful, and lasting relationships with them. You’ll create high-impact email newsletters and promotions in minutes, no technical expertise necessary. With more than 300 easily-customized templates, a simple point-and-click tool, and award-winning free customer support, you can create professional, compelling messages your audience will act on. And it’s easy for you to manage your contact lists, sign up website visitors, track your clicks and open rates, and send automated communications to new subscribers.  You can even try it Free for 60 days!  Click this link Free 60 Day Trial to get started.

My friends Vic and Lisa Johnson are doing this crazy marketing test where they’re giving away Napoleon Hill’s “Think & Grow Rich.”

I’m helping them with their big giveaway and wanted to make sure you got your copy before they take this offer down.

Get the details here:

Feel free to pass this on to friends. They can get one too if they act right away.

This is one of my favorite books.  I know you’ll love it!

I have just returned from an incredible trip to San Diego with a business associate of mine, Sue Painter of  The Confident Marketer and some other friends where we learned some amazing Internet Marketing secrets to really explode our businesses. (and yours!)

We were at the Paid For Life conference in San Diego with Mike Koenigs and Brenden Bouchard and a host of other speakers such as Russell Brunson, James Malinchak, Paul Colligan, John Carlton and others.  These thought leaders shared massive amounts of information with the participants on ways to grow your online business and the one recurring theme was Video.

With Google’s recent purchase of YouTube, it stands to reason that video is a SEO booster.  We came away from the conference with a passion for making videos of just about everything we do.  Trainings, speaking opportunities, how-to videos, video testimonials from clients and more.

If you haven’t started using video for your online marketing – now is the time!  You can easily get started for less than $100 with a Flip Camera.  Carry it with you everywhere.  You never know when a marketing opportunity will present itself for you and your business.  Point – Click – Record!

As you know, the business of blogs has grown and evolved significantly over the last 24 months. A quote from the WordPress.com site puts it best…

“Blogging is growing both in the US and especially internationally. Tens of thousands of new WordPress blogs are created every day – by regular bloggers, companies, large media publishers, and many others. In addition, we seeing a trend that’s potentially even bigger than blogging: Publishers are starting to use WordPress as a platform to create all kinds of sites beyond blogs – large and small company sites, online magazines, social networks, travel sites, scrapbooking sites, contact managers, startups, multimedia archives, video sites, sports sites.”

Isn’t this cool? Ten of thousands of blogs being created DAILY! Businesses are using blogging technology to create company websites, social networks, video sites, membership sites and so much more.

The sad reality is that a good portion of these blog sites won’t last more than a year as they are lacking some key success strategies for optimizing and marketing their blogs.

Well now there is a great remedy for that problem….

VAClassroom.com has recently launched a new 2-week mini-course titled, “Blog Marketing Tips, Tools & Tactics”

As I have reviewed the course, I see two valuable reasons for taking this program:

1.  This blog marketing mini-course will give you some advanced and current marketing and optimization skills that you can offer as a high value and “in-demand” service to a fast growing base of blog site owners.

2.  Many of you may currently be using a Wordpress blogsite as your primary online business presence, which is very smart! This two-week training program will essentially provide you with a blog marketing tune-up and blueprint for your site, so that you can increase your targeted traffic, business visibility and new client leads.

This two-fold purpose will have a strong impact on both your business visibility as well as new income opportunities!

The two-week training program is scheduled to begin on August 10, 2009 and will finish up on August 24th. The program includes both self-paced and live components.

The registration doors are officially OPEN NOW and seats are going fast. They have 60 seats available for this training program.

To get all the details on this important new training program, just click on the link below:

Blog Marketing Mini Course

Also, take advantage of this $10 discount off an already very reasonable price. Here is the discount coupon code: VABLOG

Prior to starting my Online Business Management company, I owned a Professional Organizing Service, called Completely Organized.  I have always had a knack for sorting, stacking, and putting like things together, so it came quite easy for me to share my natural gifts with others through a business.  The unfortunate part was that this was prior to Social Networking and my market was local, and they weren’t ready to pay someone to get them organized.

But I still have those skills and I use them in my business today.  Now I have to be honest.  I’m not always good at doing them, I know what to do and I talk a good game, but sometimes I just don’t manage to stay as organized as I would like.  So in honor of  “Organize Your Home Office Day”,  here are a few things that will keep you organized and start and end each day with a clean desk.

• Start your day by reviewing your To-Do List (more about this further down)
• Tackle your priority tasks first
• Set times throughout the day to check email and respond.  Close it down when you have finished
• Make phone calls in bundles (except for urgent calls)
• When working on projects, let the calls go to voice mail and return them when finished with the project
• Keep current files in a stack-file on your desk or nearby for easy retrieval
• When working with documents make a decision to only handle once – file, follow-up,  or shred
• Keep all your tools handy, but tucked away, not on your desktop
• At the end of the day, review your To-Do list again.  Congratulate yourself on your successes and progress.  Start a new one with the top three priorities of the next day.  These are the three things, that will make the biggest impact on your business if you didn’t get them completed.

Well, that’s my list.  Hope you found something useful to help you get more organized.  What are some of the things you do daily to stay organized?

Just when I was getting good at setting up Fan Pages for my client’s businesses and services, Facebook has gone and changed the design!   At first I really freaked out and panicked.  But as I begin to see what they have done and downloaded the February 2009 edition of “Facebook Pages” I was pleasantly surprised.   All they have done is make the Fan Page look like your User Profile. 

Some of the features include:

• Easier Publishing through an Enhanced Wall
• Update and Share with statuses
• Tabbed Structure similar to your Profile
• Additional tracking of visitors through Insights

When designing your Facebook Page, here are some key elements you should consider:

• Select a name and category.  These can’t be changed.  If you find you don’t like them later, all you can do is delete the page and start a new one.  So be sure before you set them up.
• Upload a picture or logo
• Enter a short statement about your business, product, band, etc.
• Select the Tabs you would like on your Page.  The default is Wall, Info and Boxes.  You can have six tabs on your Page
• Then decide which applications you would like under your Boxes Tab.  There are many to choose from or you can develop your own.

I have gotten my Page and one client Page re-structured, and it wasn’t too bad.  Facebook is giving us a heads-up that we need to go ahead and work on the re-design before they pull the trigger for the switch-over.  So if you need help, just let us know.

All of this information was compiled from the Facebook Pages Guide.

I had the opportunity to attend a teleseminar this morning by L. Drew Gerber CEO & Partner of PressKit 24/7.  It was part of the Big Fish Nation program I am a member of.  Big Fish empowers women entrepreneur’s to take their business to the next level through hard core business skills with a spiritual approach to success.  Today’s teleseminar focused on Online Press Releases.

Drew shared with us that he defines PR as, Your Relationship with the Public and that you should begin using PR from the onset of your business.  It will increase brand recognition, and boost your sales of  products and services.  90 percent of reporters are getting their information from the Internet, so an Online Press Kit is essential to your Online Business Success!

As part of his company, PressKit 24/7 he has established a source to bring potential media opportunities right into your Inbox.  PitchRate.com is the name of this site and it’s completely free!  You can register, include a profile, select your area of expertise, along with subcategories and daily you will receive a digest of media opportunities.  You can also search on the site for keywords relative to your business.

Drew loves games, and so do I!  So he has offered the participants of today’s teleseminar an incredible prize for the person that gets the most people to sign up for PitchRate.  That’s where I need your help!  If you would like to get daily feeds of media opportunities and grow your business through online press release marketing, please sign up for this free service.  And then send me a quick email to (terri.avirtualbiz@gmail.com) and put your name in the subject line.  And of course, I’d love to get your feedback to share with Drew.

It’s very important that you send me an email, otherwise, I won’t know that you signed up and can’t count you in my group.  I’ll follow up and let you know if YOU helped me win!

How do I link all my social media sites, my blog and website together? That is a frequent question that clients ask.

Do you have profiles on several sites and would like to have them connected.

Well, I found just the tool for doing that.

Retaggr

What is Retaggr about?

* Unifying your online profiles. Bring all your profiles on all your services into one place, so the world can find out who you are, and connect with you.
* They”re not another social network. They help consolidate your identity.
* And they give you a bunch of tools to do it.  Retaggr widgets, badges, an email signature, the Add Me Button, and of course, your rich, interactive Profile Card.
* For quick demo of some of the features, click here.

It’s quite easy and helps you keep track of all the sites you have joined.  Give it a try!