Archive for March, 2010
Fear of Marketing – Is it Holding Your Business Back?
Posted by: | CommentsNothing slows down the growth of your business like a lack of attention to marketing and often that hesitation or lack of attention is due to fear.
*** Fear of marketing is rampant in the business world. *** 
And it often looks like something else…
Procrastination…..
Simple Avoidance…..
Perfectionism…
Not wanting to be “salesy”…
They’re all really about Fear of Marketing!
Get past those barriers and begin marketing success!
Join this call to learn the symptoms of fear of marketing and how you can shift your thinking to experience more ease with your marketing program. Discover the secrets to more comfortably marketing your business and achieve greater success, more customers and more income.
You’ll learn
- The four symptoms of Fear of Marketing
- The hidden problem
- How to learn to love marketing
- Tips for getting the best of fear
- Tools to have more marketing success
Teleseminar details:
Date: Thursday, April 1, 2010
Time: 7:00- 8:00pm ET (New York time)
Registration: Click here.
Recording: Available to all registrants.
Don’t miss this opportunity to shift your own thinking about marketing. You know your business needs this – don’t hesitate, procrastinate or try to do it perfectly – just register right now and then join the call on April 1st to start getting more marketing success for YOUR business.
3 Tips for Cutting Down on Computer Screen Glare
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Are headaches becoming a daily part of your life? It could be the screen. If you suspect that the screen may be causing your head to pound, here are some suggestions to cut down on the blinding glare.
For a long time, people didn’t think about the computer screen. When the screen is brighter it is easier to see, especially when the surrounding light is low. But, if you have ever looked at someone sitting in a dark room looking at a computer screen, what does it remind you of? Someone watching television of course. The only difference is that we are taught not to sit that close up to a television screen.
It’s no wonder that the screen affects so many of us. For home business owners, the computer is a necessity. Whether it is a laptop or a PC, you rely on it to conduct your business. So, what can you do to stop the strain?
Tip #1 – Unplug your laptop. When your laptop is plugged in it runs on AC power. The computer screen is brighter while you work. A good laptop battery can run free of AC power for six or eight hours. Even a four-hour battery will serve you well. So, simply unplug. The screen is now dimmed since it is using the battery. Work in four hour periods and then recharge the battery while you do something else.
Tip #2 – Use lamps and overhead lighting to compensate. If your monitor allows you to adjust the settings, turn them down. A desk lamp can compensate for the low light and help reduce the eyestrain.
Tip #3 – Invest in a glare filter. For PCs the filter is made into a bracket that fits over the monitor screen. For long hours spent on the computer, your eyes won’t become strained and cause headaches. Using the filter all the time will benefit everyone who uses the computer.
For laptops, glare filters fit on the edges of the screen frame or directly on the screen. They can be removed when you are done working. Some glare filters even incorporate privacy filters so that no one can see what you are doing on your laptop unless they are directly in front of the screen.
Track Your Tweets
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Twitter has become not only a great site for connecting with people around the world, it’s become a favorite tool of solopreneurs because:
You can offer tidbits of valuable information to a huge audience.
You can connect with prospects and customers on a personal level.
You can glean market and industry information from tweets.
The trick is to know if your tweets are having a direct effect on your profits. The best way to do this is to track your tweets. Fortunately, because developers know how important Twitter is to marketers, they’ve developed several tools to track your tweets. Here are just a few ways to track your tweets:
1. A standard calendar and an analytics program
The most basic way to track tweets is to record when and what you tweet on a calendar. You can of course use a print calendar however, you can also track them on a calendar like Outlook or Google. Once a week, compare your tweets to your analytics data to see which tweets generated traffic. This way you can determine to a reasonable degree, which tweets make the biggest impact and what days or times of the day are more effective. You can also link to unique web pages in your tweets to make sure you’re evaluating the right information.
2. Twistory
Puts your twitter feed into a calendar so you can see your twitter history. It essentially automates what you’re doing in #1.
3. TweetEffect
Tracks what tweets gain followers for you and what tweets essentially cost you followers.
4. Tweetie
An iPhone application that lets you track your tweets. You can view and respond to the tweets you follow, post your own tweets, and search for tweets by keyword just like you would from your computer only better because you can do it on the go.
5. Twitoaster
A service that monitors twitter conversations. It works by simply aggregating the conversations and publishing relevant statistics.
6. Viralheat
Viralheat is a paid service with membership levels based on your needs. Starting at $9.99 a month,“Viralheat allows you to monitor, analyze and glean insights at blazing speeds.”
Of course there are dozens of other twitter tracking services including sites like Social Oomph/TweetLater and HootSuite that let you schedule posts and track mentions and followers.
Finding the service or software that’s right for you may take a little trial and error. Of course, if you’re looking to simply track your tweets and the positive effect they have on your business, the five mentioned above are a good place to start.
Must Haves For Your Blog
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Blogs are a great way to connect and build relationships with your potential clients. Depending on what you talk about, they can help you reach a completely new audience and they give your audience a way to get to know you and your brand, and to participate in your community. All of these are important for both growing your business and growing your blog following. Often, however, even the biggest blogs make little mistakes. They forget or overlook some important features. Here are seven features to implement on your blog:
Subscribe or RSS feed. There’s nothing more frustrating, as a visitor, than finding a blog you enjoy and not being able to subscribe to it. People are busy, too busy to remember to visit your blog on a daily or weekly basis. Cut them a break, and yourself, and offer an option to subscribe to your blog so each new post is delivered via email, sent to a reader or shows up on their iGoogle page.
Contact/About information. Have you ever visited a blog and thought, “I wonder who this blog belongs to? Where are they? Who are they?” Trust me, readers think this and they want to know. If they can’t find out a bit about you, determine your credibility or make some sort of connection, they’ll move along. Retain your visitors by sharing a bit of information about yourself including a means by which they can contact you.
Comments. Some blogs intentionally do not allow comments and while they have their reasons, most people like to be able to leave a comment if they have something to say. If you’re considering not allowing commenting because you want to avoid spam, then check out a few of the spam blockers like Askimet, which is available for WordPress blogs. If you’re avoiding allowing comments because you don’t want to respond to them, consider outsourcing the job and having someone moderate your posts, or just set ten minutes aside at the end of each day to respond. People like the interaction and it draws more readers.
Archives, popular posts, popular comments, tags and other associated identifiers. People search and read blogs differently. Some simply read the most recent post and move on while others search by category or tag. Some people will want to read the most popular posts and others will want to sift through your archives post by post. Provide a number of options for your visitors to search by.
SEO plug-ins. One of the wonderful features about a blog is that it’s welcomed by the search engines due to frequent and easily indexed content. That being said, there are an abundance of quality search engine plug-ins, particularly for WordPress, which make optimizing your posts for the search engines quick and easy.
Social networking and bookmarking features. With Twitter, Facebook, Digg, Reddit, and other social networking and bookmarking sites growing in popularity, it pays to include options on your blog. You can ask people to tweet your posts, post or link to them on Facebook, Digg them and so on. It’ll draw traffic and subscribers.
Google Analytics. You want to know how many people are visiting your blog, where they’re coming from, how many posts they read and how long they stay on your site, right? Google analytics will tell you all that and more. To make good decisions about how to grow your blog, it pays to have the kind of information an analytics tool can provide.
Blogging is extremely popular and useful, and along with this popularity comes a bevy of useful tools. Take advantage of these tools and resources to grow your subscribers, profits and business.
