Social Networking: Myspace

Myspace is an online community where friends, family, acquaintances, business owners, colleagues, and co-workers keep in touch and network with one another all online and all for FREE! Anyone can create a profile and you can customize it to suit your own personal style.

Here's how it works..

First you create a profile.

Then you find people to be your "friends." Now this doesn't necessary mean your gonna meet over coffee with strangers, it simple means theses people are in your network and you're in theirs. You can now comment on their page and post bulletins that they can read. Only your friends can read your bulletins, so having lots of friends is beneficial for business owners like yourself because when you post a sale lots of people will see that bulletin......only if they are your friend. Have I made myself clear?

When you have a lot of friends, you post bulletins. This could be something like.. "Sale on Saturday.. Shop online at our site and receive 50% off... visit www.mywebsite.com for more info"

Again, when you have friends you can invite them to events. Let's say you were having a wine tasting or open house for your new business location... well invite all your myspace friends to gain more customers.

And don't forget to customize your page to excude your brand identity or individual style. Sites like MySpaceorYours.net, KillerKiwi.com, or MyPimpSpace.com.

And if your still lost... here's a good video to walk your through things.....

A New Advertising Era

Today marks the beginning of several blogs I will post regarding social networking and marketing your business online.

Let's face it people.. this economy ain't pretty. But, tomorrow is another day and it's business as usual. You have two choices... either close up shop or choose to advertise your business a more cost effective way. That's where I come in.

There are a handful of ways you can advertise your business online and many are free. The most popular are Myspace, Facebook, Twitter, and Squidoo just to name a few. I will spend the next couple weeks explaining how you can use each.

Stay tuned for lots of useful info coming your way.

What are people saying about your business?

I've been meaning to tell everyone about this for a while... Google Alerts. This fabulous tool will make you quite the little media darling staying right on top of what everyone is saying about you business. Sign up for Google Alerts here. It's Free. Select the keywords you want to track... i.e. your name or your business name and you'll be updated by emails from Google each time their lil bots come across your keywords.

Who are your clients and where are they coming from?

When you have a website, this is a question you should always be asking yourself....especially if you are doing any online advertising. Tracking referrals, site visits and time spent on your site are all things you can easily monitor with Google Webmaster Tools -- like your crystal ball of sorts...that looks into the past. You don't have to be a rocket scientist to set up it, and you'll be glad you did.

With Google Webmaster Tools you'll be able to.....
Get Google's view of your site and diagnose problems See how Google crawls and indexes your site and learn about specific problems we're having accessing it. Discover your link and query traffic View, classify, and download comprehensive data about internal and external links to your site with new link reporting tools. Find out which Google search queries drive traffic to your site, and see exactly how users arrive there. Share information about your site Tell Google about your pages with Sitemaps: which ones are the most important to you and how often they change. You can also let them know how you would like the URLs we index to appear.

So now when your clients don't remember how they found you or referred to your site, you can find out for yourself.....

Happy Business Building!!!

FREE Tools to help your business grow

Seems people are really paying attention to the power of small businesses lately.

I met a woman from IBM at a networking breakfast this morning and she had an interesting product to share. IBM has recently come out with a FREE website for small business owners and people thinking about starting a small business of their own to guide them during the process, offer free advice and tools, etc. You've got to check it out at http://us.smetoolkit.org/us/en.


Lots of great info like how to write a business plan, ways to go green, accounting info, and even info on minority owned businesses.

And even more interesting, you can login, create a profile and post your business in their directly. Every link helps!

An Unconventional Business Booster

I have a confession.....I took a nap at 3:30 in the afternoon today. I slept until 7pm! Now your probably asking WTF does this have to do with "boosting your business"? I'll admit -- nothing directly, but indirectly.....shutting my brain off for a period of time gave me just the right amount of clarity, REST and a tad bit of rejuvenation that I needed to tackle some tough issues.....

Not to sound like a commerical for a SPA or anything but, a break might just be the thing you need to come up with the next brilliant plan for your business. When your time is not spent racking your brain over the troubling issues being a business owner can bring, you allow yourself time to enjoy the clear blue sky that we were blessed with today and I'll bet your subconscious will somehow make things seem a bit clearer.

If most of you business owners are like me, weekends and working dream days from 9am-5pm DO NOT EXIST! So my challenge for you this weekend -- push yourself away from the desk and look outside of the task at hand. You just might find what your looking for and you'll come back to work on Monday morning with a full tank of gas... metaphorically of course!

The 90's called.....they want their website back.

Here's the thing....I originally hadn't planned on writing about this, but you should have seen some of the websites I ran across today while surfing the internet.

What I have to say might....well hurt some of your egos, but listen up - it's 2008...you are no longer allowed to boast that you have a website if it looks like you made it in 1994 and haven't changed it since. That would be the equivalent of bragging about your Ford Tempo that you've never changed the oil and is sitting in your driveway with a spare tire on it. You just wouldn't do that.

It's simple...marketing your business in 2008 is not what it was in 1998...times change, TECHNOLOGY CHANGES, and your customers change and it's your job as a savvy business owner to keep up with it or your gonna get run over......or worse, someone else it going to get your business. From now on I challenge you to look into the "impression" your current website is giving to your potential customers. Think of it as this.....Your website is like your company's bright and shiny digital billboard on the interstate of life. You hold the key to what it says, looks like, etc and you can change the message with every sunset if you wish.....so why wouldn't you keep it fresh, new and current. Just like you updated your hairstyle when the 80's went bye-bye, you should do the same with your website.

Stay tuned for more info and options about updating it soon...... And for those of you who don't even have one.....don't even get me started!

Here I go...Blogging

I remember a time when I thought.... "who the heck would actually take the time to read what I write?" I'll admit, I'm still kind of wondering that to this day, but somewhere along the line, someone convinced me that the exorbitant amount of information in my brain might actually be useful to lots of small business owners out there. So here I go....blogging. In hopes that maybe, I might actually help many of you out there that just need a little nudge in the right direction.