Standing Out

Social networking (Facebook, Biznik, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc) for business is all the rage right now, and while “trendy” things are usually frowned upon, you need to be where your target market is, trendy or not. Social networking will not only increase awareness of your product or service, it could lead to sales and to those priceless business connections we all need.

But do you know where to start? You don’t want to end up spending hours and hours maintaining your social networks because you didn’t have a solid social network marketing plan from the beginning.

Introducing a free, 4-day e-course that will help you get started on a social networking plan.

Kickstart Your Social Networking Plan Free E-course

Discover:

• which social networking sites are right for your personality type & internet exposure desires
• how much time it takes to maintain each social network optimally
• what you can do with your social networks to bring in business and make solid connections

Sign up below!

Phew - it was not fun at all having that painful Google page rank of ‘0′ for the last month, especially after all of the stuff out there saying that a page rank of ‘0′ means you’re being penalized…yada yada yada. It was devastating! I kept racking my brain trying to figure out what in the world I could have done to be penalized.

But alas, it’s over. Both my blog and my website are out from under the ‘0′ curse. The rankings are still not great (3 and 2 respectively) but they are not terrible, either, all things considered. I haven’t done as much linking as I would like to yet and I’m still getting articles together to publish, which adds a pretty big stream of incoming links.

So if you’re out there biting your nails like I was, here’s my advice. Hold on! And do these things. I can’t be absolutely positive they helped, but they most certainly didn’t hurt.

1. Create an account with Google Webmasters and upload your sitemap. If you have already done this - CHECK IT. I’m almost positive my site was ranked ‘0′ because I had broken links in the index, because I indexed my site and then went and changed it without telling Google (bad bad bad). If you need a sitemap generator, use this one: www.xml-sitemaps.com/
2. Submit URL removal requests to Google for the broken links. I used their “expedited” process rather than waiting for the site to be crawled again.
3. Submit at least ONE article to a large, popular site like ezinearticles.com. I did this recently, and voila! My site climbed in the rankings. I can’t be positive that just one article submission helped, but again, all I know is that I did these things and the next thing I knew, my rank was improved. So take it for what it’s worth.
4. Get some incoming links - really. Just try. You can hook up to startupnation.com and get involved in the message boards, creating a signature that includes a link to your site (make sure that the links are in keywords, not just a URL). Example: Tia is a virtual assistant. Notice how the URL is linked to the keywords “virtual assistant” rather than, Tia is a virtual assistant and this is her website: http://www.allamericanadmin.com. Google doesn’t really care about links like that.
5. Learn about improving your site. I’ve done this. Admittedly I am addicted to my website and my blog and I have more email newsletters coming to me about SEO and SEM than I can possibly take in. But why not? If you have the opportunity to learn something, do it. A great place to start is: Young Entrepreneur blog’s weekly posts on SEO.
   
6. Make sure your site has content. I have at least 300 words on every page except the contact page. And my blog posts are typically on the long side. You need content because tags mean nothing unless the keywords are actually on that page. You can’t just put a keyword in the title tag and leave it unsupported in the document itself. Remember writing paragraphs in grade school? Your teacher said that you must “support” the opening statement. Likewise, you must “support” your meta keyword tags by including those keywords throughout the content.
   

Hope this helps! Those simple changes improved my site.

Cheers,

Tia

So I followed Andy Sernovitz’s advice (admittedly, I followed it partially) and I have to say that I did not get addicted to Twitter, and so now I will officially become a Twitter Quitter. The only part of the advice I admittedly didn’t follow was to “follow” as many people on Twitter as I could. I just didn’t have the time (or inclination) to go through people’s profiles and find others to follow. Too tiring!

Here’s what I discovered: keeping up with the social media crowd is exhausting! This is a lot to ask of any small business owner. As a means of marketing your business or getting the word out, trying to do the social media thing is just beyond me. I use MySpace and Facebook for FRIENDS, and the nice thing about it is that if I don’t log on for a few days, no biggie. My friends have plenty to do besides just listening to me rant or rave about something new. Adding the blog has been great - I’ve expanded my circle of influence and I’ve also gotten a lot more hits to my business website. But beyond the blog and my other marketing methods, and actually doing work for clients, I was tiring myself out trying to figure out how to make Twitter worth it for me.

I also discovered that Twitter simply takes too much time! Yes, they’ve made it more convenient with a feature that lets you text your little updates to Twitter, rather than logging into the website and updating it there, BUT, convenient though it may be, it is not less time-consuming.

So, being the generalizing woman that I am, I am going to go out on a limb and say that social media works for social media gurus and junkies. They have the perfect audience: other social media gurus and junkies. And it also works for people like Andy Sernovitz (who I love) and Seth Godin (who I also love… “marketing-threesome”, maybe? ;-), who are definitely considered experts in their field and who had a huge following before Twitter was even conceived. Twitter also works for people who enjoy reading the little updates of random people they don’t know, OR, who simply enjoying updating people they don’t know about their own random thoughts. Twitter is also popular with the TED crowd. I had never even heard of TED until I joined Twitter.

There are some things to be thankful for. Here is the list.

Thank you, Twitter, for…

1. Introducing me to TED. Very cool.
2. Making me feel proud that Andy Sernovitz became a follower of mine. That, really, was my only goal.
3. Giving me exposure to another very popular social media tool.
4. Aiding in the realization that social media tools aren’t part of my ideal marketing cuisine.

Cheers, folks! Have a great day! By the way, if you haven’t checked out Twitter, check it out! Seriously, you should try it. You might learn something new like I did!

Tia

(I’m also done with Blogjet…but that’s for another blog)

I found YoungEntrepreneur.com’s blog on alltop, which is where I go to find the most popular websites. So when I saw it listed there, I knew I was in for some good stuff.

Turns out, I love it. Evan (the blog’s manager) posts useful articles about topics such as naming your company, top 21 celebrity entrepreneurs, and a number of posts related to Entrepreneur University. Not only that, but the site has a Forum, and a ton of loyal followers leaving lots of comments! A great way to stay in the loop and get yourself heard.

Recently, Evan has actually been offering specialized, FREE SEO advice for your blog. Something every one of us should take advantage of (although he may not get around to us for awhile – the waiting list is probably booming! Be patient). We all could use a little bit of (OK, a lot) advice regarding driving traffic to our sites. Why not take some advice from someone who obviously knows? YoungEntrepreneur.com’s listing on alltop, in my opinion, proves that this is a site worth perusing frequently.

I knew just from the name – YoungEntrepreneur.com – that the site was going to have some relevant information for my readers and myself. Entrepreneurs are a special breed, but young entrepreneurs deserve a place in the spotlight. We’re changing the world!

So, go, browse, enjoy. And definitely let me know what you think of the site!

Cheers!

Tia Peterson

Virtual Assistant

I have installed an interesting application - BlogJet. It’s a cool Windows client for my blog tool (as well as for other tools). Get your copy here: http://blogjet.com

Give it a try and let me know how it works for you!

“Computers are incredibly fast, accurate and stupid; humans are incredibly slow, inaccurate and brilliant; together they are powerful beyond imagination.” — Albert Einstein