Archive for June, 2009
Social Bookmarking as a Business Tool
Posted by: | CommentsAlong with social networking sites, there are now a number of social bookmarking sites on the Internet. While social networking sites build upon relationships between members, social bookmarking sites create connections through the types of content generated by members. It is these connections that make social bookmarking such an effective business tool.
Maybe you have read a blog post or article on someone’s website. At the end of the article or blog post, you’ll see a host of different little pictures or characters. Run your cursor over them and names like Technorati, Digg, Reddit, and Delicious pop up.
Social Bookmarking Icons
What are these characters and what do the names mean?
These are links to social bookmarking sites. Social bookmarking is much like what you would do with an actual bookmark. Physical bookmarks are used to mark a page or a passage that you want to find again at some point. This goes for social bookmarking icons as well. If someone wants to find that particular article again or let others know about it, they can bookmark the address on a site and mark it with keywords for future reference.
Not all social bookmarking sites are the same. The principle is the same across the board, but some social bookmarking sites specialize in different media. Squidoo specializes in creating lenses that showcase an area of expertise of the lens owner. Flickr concentrates on photos. Some bookmarking sites deal with movie or music reviews in contrast.
Before choosing a bookmarking site, find one that caters to the content or type of business that you conduct. That will draw the most traffic to your business. If there is more than one, then join all that apply. One thing to remember is to create content that people will be interested in and use to track back to your business website. Remember that your site readers will mark your pages and posts on these sites because they find them informative and useful and think others will too.
Through quality content, a business owner can easily create a nice following of readers and possibly higher search engine rankings with the use of social bookmarking sites. For the purpose of content, look around the more popular bookmarking sites and see what others are viewing and find interesting and useful. That is the type of content you want to focus on with your websites. Investigating the more popular social bookmarking sites will make it easy to track down competitors and find out what your target market deems as useful information. Using these bookmarking sites will increase the visibility of your content and make it easier to market to your specific target customer or reader.
Value Your Intuition
Posted by: | CommentsEver wonder how animals know when to run for cover? They can seem to sense that danger is present. You have that sense as well. You won’t be running from a herd of buffalo but your intuition will benefit you in both business and life.
Intuition is essentially an instinct and comes from past experiences. As a child, you learned that a stove is hot when the burner glows red and then you stayed away from stoves when you noticed they were hot. That is a simplified explanation but the point is that experiences drive your intuition.
Another aspect of intuition is learned behavior. Here’s another simple explanation…think as though you were becominga public speaker. You can’t just go out and get speaking engagements, you need contacts who are looking for speakers and pointers from those who are successful at it. The lessons you learn as you go teach you how to hone in on the techniques that you never knew existed before.
With each new experience and learned behavior you acquire new skills. Now, every time you make a decision you don’t consciously run through everything that you know before you say “yea” or “nay.” But, that information gets processed unconsciously and results in a feeling.
You might not want to use your intuition because it seems to be just a feeling. But, although intuition may come across as a feeling, it is backed up by a lifetime of experience and learning. So, you really don’t just trust a feeling or a hunch.
With that said, intuition has to be practiced just like anything else. The hardest part of the practice will be recognizing it when you have it. Think about how you would feel walking down the street at night. You wouldn’t go down a dark alley or a dimly lit street. Why? You have learned that there is inherent danger in these places.
Use that same process to conduct your everyday life, your business planning and your goal setting. When you identify a goal you want to achieve, use your instinct to decide how best to achieve it. You can take suggestions from others and study the experts but only you know the best way to proceed for your business. If one path doesn’t pan out, your intuition will help you decide the next course of action.
Most of all don’t be afraid to trust your intuition. Not only can it save your life in certain situations, but it can also enhance your life and help you grow your business. One reason we don’t always achieve our goals or even pursue a goal in the first place is because we trust someone else’s intuition over our own. Spend some time listening to and following your intuition and see where it takes you
Sleep: A Lesson in Productivity
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There doesn’t seem to be enough hours in the day sometimes. As a solopreneur with your schedule, something always gets put off until tomorrow. In order to catch up, you might be tempted to work longer at night but that will have the opposite effect.
When your schedule runs long or you have a pressing project, the first thing that enters your mind is that you can do it early or stay up late to get it done. The problem with this idea is that the rest of your routine will suffer. There will be less, if any, time for your family, friends and activities. From the point that you steal time from one area to benefit another, you will be playing catch up.
Over time, your body will respond to the added demands. It won’t be pretty…stress of any kind that is prolonged can cause health problems. You are more likely to develop illnesses because of a depressed immune system. You won’t be your kind and cheery self anymore as you become short tempered and nit-picky.
What about your goals? Whether work-related or personal, your goals never seem to get met. The laws of nature are a funny thing. In our society, we have the idea that to get more done you have to speed up and sacrifice. While that may be true in some situations, the part that we choose to sacrifice makes a big difference.
To get ahead and get more done you need to slow down. Sleep is a part of your daily routine. It’s a part that we don’t pay much attention to. After all, if you are tired, you will eventually fall asleep, right? That’s not how sleep is supposed to work.
The human body is like a wonderful and complex machine. All machines need maintenance to continue working. The body does its repair jobs while you sleep. There are several sleep cycles. During the deepest sleep, the body can go about restoration and repair because you are not keeping it occupied with movement and thought. It’s sort of like a short hibernation period.
Unfortunately, many people don’t get enough restorative sleep for it to matter. You wake up tired and that leads to concentration problems. It’s hard to think of new ways to increase your productivity when you can’t keep your eyes open. Burning the candle at both ends will leave you with nothing.
Do yourself a favor. Get your 7-8 hours of sleep a night. As a result you will wake up refreshed and your focus will be clear. You’ll find you have more energy and get more accomplished in all areas of your life. There is less downtime needed during the day because you got all of the rest you needed when you slept.
Top 6 Tools to Streamline Your Twitter Usage
Posted by: | CommentsThe name sounds like what a bird’s wings do which is appropriate for Twitter. It is a micro-blogging website that has grown by leaps and bounds. Everyone who is anyone is now using Twitter. If you are interested in using it yourself, here are five tools that will help you make the most of your experience.
Twitter users can send short messages up to 140 characters that can be sent to anyone in any location. It’s just like text messaging only on your PC or MAC. Now that twitter has taken flight there are dozens of tools available in the Internet to help manage your tweets (the messages that you send and receive.)
1. TweetDeck – This application works on your PC desktop. It is a way for you to manage your Twitter account without having to visit the site each time. You can create groups for friends, business associates or anyone else you like with this application. Best of all, TweetDeck works in the background and also can be used offline at your leisure. Some cool things about TweetDeck to point out include:
- The ability to post your Facebook status and keep up with your friends within your TweetDeck window.
- You can group certain users together in one window so you don’t miss any tweets from them.
- You have a separate window for your @ replies, direct messages and your main stream.
- No need to refresh the page as it updates automatically for you and you can change the amount of time in between updates.
2. Twhirl – This handy feature works on the PC desktop as well. Instead of spending most of your day checking and rechecking your accounts, this handy tool notifies you when you have new messages. Also, it shrinks long URLs to more manageable shorter ones for anyone who wants to click on a link in your tweets. You can search tweets for interesting new subjects and there is a spell checker so you don’t send out illegible tweets.
3. Seesmic Desktop – With Seesmic, you can group your social contacts into lists like family, co-workers and best friends, easily and quickly share links, pictures and video with your friends and get live updates from your friends on Twitter and Facebook. Seesmic Desktop is a great tool if you have more than one Twitter account. With Seemic, you have the ability to monitor and tweet from numerous accounts, without having to go to the Twitter website to monitor each account.
4. TweetLater – Just like the name says it allows you to schedule your Twitter messages much like an email system. If you are using Twitter for business, it is helpful to schedule tweet delivery, create draft tweets to be used at a later date, set up alerts such as notification when certain users send tweets and tracking users you want to follow.
5. TweeTake – It is always important to backup files that you might need later. Computers can crash at any time. With this tool, you can backup your Twitter information. Us it to backup files, documents and photos. You can save a copy of Twitter account information as well as your tweets and group lists just in case your computer decides to give up the ghost.
6. Twitterment – Well, Twitter has its own search engine as well. Use Twitterment to search for tweets using keywords or phrases. It’s also a buzz tracker to see what’s hot and what’s not in the Twitter universe.
Twitter has caught on in a big way. If you are an avid Twitter user, the above six tools will help you manage your Twitter accounts without tying up your entire day.
Build A Buzz About Your Business Using Teleseminars and Webinars
Posted by: | CommentsBy now, you’ve probably heard the phrase “People have a thirst for knowledge.” It’s true. The Internet provides them with knowledge of all kinds in all sorts of topics. Internet surfers use online resources everyday to gain more knowledge on a topic or just to learn how to do something. Put simply it’s just another form of education.
We’re not talking about classes provided from a university or a community college. Many people don’t want to spend the time or money to take these classes just to learn more about a topic. They want to learn the quickest, easiest and most inexpensive way possible. The Internet gives them the avenue to do so. Why not take advantage of this thirst for knowledge for the benefit of your business?
Build a Buzz About Your Business
How Can It Be Done?
You can certainly provide your website visitors with eBooks, guides and informative articles, but even they need a little power boost. Give them some of the most popular informative tools available?
Teleseminars and Webinars
It’s human nature, people love to learn new things, but they also like to learn them in a variety of ways. eBooks and guides are great written material, but so many can get distracted and bored easily trying to read them.
Teleseminars give them the information they crave, using an entirely different media outlet. They can listen to the information given while they perform other tasks or they can actually watch how something works.
The Point?
You’ve grabbed their attention easily and can start to build credibility and trust with them. Your business name becomes easier to remember when they start to associate it with the topic you provided in your seminars.
By providing these media outlets to your target audience, you start to become known as an expert in that topic. They will want to keep coming back to see what else you have to quench their ‘thirst of knowledge’.
If you provide them with good informative seminars, your level of expertise in that topic can help persuade potential customers into buying from you when they need what you have to offer.
Give Them What They Want!
Your target audience is looking for information related to your business site. They would also like it to be given in various types of media to grab and keep their attention. If they learn something new you’ve appealed to their emotional side and just implanted your business name in their minds.
This means that you’ve given your potential customers what they wanted. Now that you’ve done so you’ve just built a whole slew of selling opportunities with them. A one-time client can then become a life-time client, which helps bring more income for you in the long run.
Teach your website visitors various things about the topic of your site using your expertise. Teleseminars and Webinars are great ways to educate your target audience in media outlets that are considered to be highly professional in the online marketing world.
