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Yep – I’m a Joiner!
It’s my birthday! (Let the linkbacks begin!!)
I’m so excited. My birthday is June 30th (in 14 minutes) and I’ve already had three people (and two emails) wishing me a happy birthday!
So I’ve decided to be a nifty-type-person and give the people kind enough to send good wishes my way a linkback. It can’t hurt, right?
The emails were from Vegan Freak Forums and Earners Forum – what a great idea sending an autoresponder message on someone’s birthday!
I had a meeting with Michael Tipper at 3pm today and he SANG happy birthday to me! How cool is that??
Happy Birthday Skype Messages from:
Amanda Hamm – Mommy Neighborhood (a place for ALL moms)
Pam Sargant – Does amazing photo retouching
Spencer Jones – Physician & PT Internet marketer
Sally Kuhlman – VA coach! (and VA)
Heather Jacobsen – Ms. Valley VA herself!
Yamisi Daniel – InTouch VA and my design buddy
E-cards!!
Carol Deckert sent this one
Angela Wills sent this one
Paula Williams (who is in GREECE right now!) sent
Patty Dost sent
Making Money Blogging
I’ve always been fascinated by the idea of making money from having an opinion.
There are debates on if business blogging should be monetized, and there are debates on if AdSense is tacky or not. (The answer, AdSense is only tacky if the person reading thinks it is.) Or using services like PayPerPost or readily accessible to someone else. Don’t you think everyone deserves a chance to decide if they want to submit articles for money at Associated Content (see link to the right) or blog for money through PayPerPost?
Or even make money doing surveys. I have a few friends that don’t want to own a business and handle all that goes along with that (the responsibility, the being up until 2am to meet a deadline, etc.) They just want to spend a couple hours a day reading emails and answering surveys for money. Nothing wrong with that, right? It’s great that there’s a place for everyone, not just for those of us that can start a business from our homes.
The internet shows itself to be, yet again, the great leveler of playing fields. (Leveler? What an awful word!) You don’t have to be Einstein, you don’t have to be an entrepreneur. You can be a blogger, or a survey answer-er, or one of a hundred other things…and you can make a living.
A friend of mine asked me to compile some work from home resources for her, and I came up with www.abundanceweb.com – There are affiliate links, survey links, start a business links, and get paid to read email links. She was really pleased, and I’ve gotten positive email responses from other stay at home moms that I’ve sent it to as well. Stay at home moms that don’t want to start a business, but want extra income.
If you know someone that needs some extra money but doesn’t want to start a business, send them to Abundance Web and let them have at it. In this age of abundance I think everyone should have the chance to get what they’re looking for from the internet. I think I’m going to put a blog on that site as well, to give tips and tricks to make visits to those places even more profitable.
Back in the day when I first started online, I might have looked at that site as sleazy. Now I see it as providing a resource that not everyone has access to. People are thanking me for it. Kind of mind blowing, if you ask me. But who am I to say who can and cannot have access to resources? I guess the old adage is still as true as it’s ever been…It’s all in the eye of the beholder!
When to send e-mail
If you’re planning on using email for your next marketing campaign, you’re on the right track!
Here are some great reasons to send an email to your list of customers and prospects (you do have a list of your customer/prospect emails, don’t you? If not, call me, we’ll figure that out together) so you can claim some of that valuable real estate known as the “referral center of the brain” – I totally made that up just now, but it makes sense, doesn’t it?
- New employee on board. Send out an email with a bio and what the new employee does. Be excited about your new acquisition.
- New product or service being offered. Sure you’re going to tell all your customers from here on out that you have a new product or service…but you also want to tell all the people who may not know and won’t call you as a brand new prospect.
- Launch of a new campaign. Changing your branding? Changing your style? Let people know!
if you’ve got a new product, service, or the launch of a new campaign (a sale, for example) a good number of emails to send is four. Yes, four. You can send more if necessary, and less if you forgot…but people get so much email these days that to create a little enthusiasm youshould let them know the following…
- During the “beta” phase. If you have a list of customers and are planning on rolling out something new…ask them for advice! Your current customers can give you feedback and ideas regarding a new product or service. Heck, you could have a contest for a slogan for a seasonal event if you’d like. You’re generating interest here, make it interesting!
- Pre-Launch. Let your list know your timetable, when you expect launch to happen. Let them know you’re thinking of them. Touch base .
- Launch. Toot your horn, tell everyone you DID it! Share your excitement and enthusiasm and, who knows, they may have a friend or two that will be interested as well…
- Post-Launch. Check in and say hello. Let your list know how the launch went, thank them for their help in your success….a nice way to wrap up the series and make your customer feel like they matter to your organization as a person!
Keeping in contact with your customers is vital. You don’t want them to forget who you are! The key is to be in contact in a friendly, not sales-y, way that makes them think, if only for a second, you were sending email to no one but them. Make people feel special and they will refer your company.
It really is that simple.
Everything old is new again
There’s a new “making money from surveys” site that has a web 2.0 feel while still offering things the beginning WAHM can do to make some extra cash.
Normally I’m not a fan of paid survey sites, but this one seems to have a very upfront interface that’s easy to understand, and according to Amy Bass, of My Debt Free Goal, she made over $1000 on cash crate since the 1st of June…so hey…it won’t make you rich but it can pay some bills, or pay for your business cards.
Click the banner to sign up, and then come back for some tips and tricks you may want to know to make your experience more profitable as well as less annoying!
…..all signed up? Good.
They have a referral program. Now, you don’t have to have referrals to make money. That’s why I wanted you to sign up first and then come back…so you could see for yourself that there are mucho opportunities that don’t require you to get referrals if you don’t want to participate in that portion of the program.
Some helpful tips and tricks that I learned from Amy:
1. If you’re using gmail you can put the . anywhere in your email address and it will go to the same place. Example: atypicalva@gmail.com is the same as a.typicalva@gmail.com is the same as atypical.va@gmail.com – if you use different addresses you’ll have a higher approval rating for surveys.
2. Clean out your cookies between offers!
3. There are a wealth of tips in the forum at CashCrate that will help you to maximize your experience.
Like I said…I’m not easily convinced, but this really does seem legit. If you haven’t yet, sign up and start making some extra money!
Stroll with me down memory lane
I was at Ryze.com tonight and someone asked when we first discovered the Internet.
Scrolling through the answers was interesting, with answers ranging from “6 months” to “a few years” even as far back as “1992″ – which is when I realized it was time to flex my nerd-a-licious muscles.
Because I’ve been online since 1988. I kid you not. My great-grandmother realized the new “computer thing” was not going to be a fad and she was determined that I would be the first kid in my High School class to have one.
Would you like to see a picture? I’d be happy to oblige.
Isn’t she pretty? That’s the Tandy 1000. We bought it at Radio Shack, and it was top of the line at the time. I swear I remember how that computer smelled when we took it out of the box. I loved that computer so much! When I got online, I was just amazed at what it meant to be elsewhere. Uncharted territory. Really, I don’t know if I’ve ever felt more special than I did that day.
Not so shocking when you take that into account that I own an online business now, is it?
I spent the first two weeks playing Zork I and then was given a modem to go with my computer. 1200 baud. I don’t know a more lovely sound than a 1200 baud modem connecting to the internet. I’ve been looking for it as a ringtone for my cellular phone. Let me know if you know where to find one.
Once I was online I tried to find a BBS (now called a forum) to find out what strategies others were using for getting through the maze. Kids nowadays, they have it easy peasy – back in my day we had text based games. Try getting out of a maze when this is what it looks like:
go left
go forward
go left
go forward
go right
Just to have the program come back with:
You’re in a dark room, you see a grate above you with sunlight filtering through it.
And you realized you’d spent the last hour getting back to the beginning. Sometimes I’m amazed my Tandy 1000 lasted as long as it did. I considered taking a baseball bat to it on several occasions. Usually they all involved that same darn grate with sunlight coming through it *laugh*
Maybe sometime I’ll look for the picture of my first laptop. It weighed a bajillion pounds, had a handle, and was almost the size of a briefcase. It even had this weird yellow-ish sepia-ish colored screen (the screen was black, the stuff on it was sepia/yellow) – I played Zork 0 on that one. I’d already played Zork I, II, and III on the desktop.
When did you take the internet plunge? How did you feel when you connected? What was the first thing you wanted to do?
I look forward to hearing your “back in the day” computer stories!
What does an SEO do?
This is a good one!
I found a forum post over on SitePoint and the question asked by a coder is “If I hire someone to do “SEO” what exactly are they doing?”
As most of you know, I bristle when I hear someone use the term SEO (search engine optimization) because it’s an acronym that makes people think in terms of “CIA” or some other clandestine – very very secret – operation.
My favorite response on the thread (after someone says they cannot reveal what they do, at least without a Non Disclosure Agreement) is that you can say what you do, but it’s how you do it that makes you worth paying for. (That’s totally paraphrased, but it makes sense, doesn’t it?)
If you call me, and ask me how I get your site (and you) noticed by search engines, I’ll tell you exactly what I do to make that happen. I provide a marketing plan in outline form, we discuss it. I’m so full-disclosure it’s not even funny.
But ask an SEO specialist what they do…you can hear the crickets in the silence that follows. (In my experience.) Ok, that’s not entirely true. They say the words “keywords” and “linkbacks” and generally do it in such a way that you feel you can’t ask further questions because it would just be too complicated for you to understand.
Yeah, you can start your own business, deal with networking, scheduling, accounting, and goodness knows what else…but you won’t be able to understand keywords. Maybe you don’t have time to care – that’s ok! But you can certainly understand it. You ARE smart enough.
So if you’re one of the people who’s curious about what an SEO professional does, check out the main post over at SitePoint and let me know via a comment what YOU think about the whole thing.
Ultimate Productivity Tip
Tagging. It’s not just for 14 year old girls on MySpace! I think tagging is fantastic because it gives you a reason (plus a little added pressure) to make that new post on your blog.
My tag came from Sally Kuhlman of Virtual Simplicity. This tag topic was originally started by Ben Yoskovitz on the Instigator Blog.
The whole post is supposed to be about your ultimate productivity tip. I found a great one for email today on a great new site I was previously unaware of! The site is Change This and the manifesto (yes, you read that right…manifesto! What a great word!) is The Low-Information Diet: How to Eliminate E-Mail Overload and Triple Productivity in 24 Hours by Tim Ferriss.
It’s an easy read, and can be implemented immediately – I find that when someone says it best the most appropriate thing to do is send others to the source, not try to re-explain it myself. That just dilutes the message.
Now, it is my turn to tag some people. I tag Yamisi Daniel and Patty Dost. I’m looking forward to hearing your tips!
Here are the rules from the Instigator Blog:
- Write a post on your best productivity tips.
- Include links to other people that have written posts, or include their tips in your post with proper attribution.
- If you use Technorati Tags, then tag your post “ultimate guide to productivity.”
- Tag others in your post to spread the meme. Tag as many people as you like!
- If you link back to Instigator Blog and email Ben, he’ll be sure to include at least 2 links back to you.
Five free ways to start marketing online.
Money or Time?
I’m a big fan of the phrase "It’s an AND world" – sure it’s a little clunky, but it’s simple and true. People find themselves in situations where they feel they have to make a choice, but they could really have both if they just planned accordingly.
In the case of money and time, you could feasibly work with AND as your word, but most people find that they are lacking in either money or time. Your marketing is going to reflect that. You can have wicked effective marketing on not a lot of budget, you just have to spend more time.
Because no time AND no money….equals no business. No one wants that option!
If you have money and no time, well, that’s why we’re here. It doesn’t take a whole lot of money to see great results from your marketing plan. It takes us about five hours to come up with a customized marketing plan for your business.
Really, if you think about it, that’s not very much time at all to have a great plan that will get you real results.
Some quick suggestions if you’re short on money but can carve out some time to get your message out:
- Forums. Find where your people are and let them get to know you. People love doing business with people they like and trust. Be that person.
- Wikipedia. If you haven’t gone there yet, you should visit. You should also add an entry about yourself, your company, and anything else you are an expert on. People read Wikipedia every day…you should represent yourself!
- Become an expertly by becoming a guest. Radio? TV? How about YouTube and Podcasts? If you’re going on no money and no publicity agent, you should consider finding podcasters that have listeners and seeing if you can be a guest on their podcast! Offer a special or a discount to their listeners to make it more appealing.
- Post comments on the blogs of others. Don’t have the time or money to put up a blog? Show people you know what you’re talking about on an already popular blog. You can put in a link to your site and they can visit you from where they read your comment.
- Remember, they’re humans. When you post a comment or a reply in a blog or forum, please take care to actually answer questions. Do not respond to a question with "Check out our website and hire us for that answer!" People will think you’re a jerk. You can give a vague answer, but give some kind of information that makes the person think you actually care. (Actual caring and not fake caring helps tremendously!)
So there you go. Five quick things you can do on a no money budget. I hope this helps if you haven’t started. You cannot just have a website out there and think people are going to find it.
A website is like a beautiful menu. If people don’t know about the restaurant, they’ll never see it.
