I just had a rather unpleasant experience with a forum owner.  I’m not going to name names here. If you know me, you’ll know that isn’t my style.  I firmly believe that If I can’t say anything nice about a person, I shouldn’t say it.  So if I’m writing something negative, I leave the person’s name out and I try to put a positive spin on it for my readers.

I am considering using one of those paid forum posting outfits to help me grow my forum.  I’ve actually worked as a paid forum poster for forumsfirst.com and enjoyed the experience.  I also believe in shopping around.  I went looking at some of the other forum posting providers and pretended that I was looking for a job as a forum poster.  I believe that if a company treats its employees right, then they’ll treat me right as a client.  I also believe that if a company is nasty to the employees then I will get bad service.  So I applied at this one company and apparently they are a real stickler about people applying for the forum using the same username they use somewhere else.  I must have missed it in the terms of service using the smallest font in the world…  So the forum owner gets all snippy with me about this huge infraction I made with the username and says I blew any chances of working there because I made that one mistake.   The forum owner didn’t even give me the chance to correct the mistake and was consistently rude during the whole exchange.  I told the owner that they lost a potential client because of the bad attitude they exhibited and they responded by banning me from the forum.  OOOH! I am so hurt!

Now I bet you are wondering what the moral of this rant is.  The moral is this: Be polite to everyone you encounter.  This includes job seekers, salespeople, and telemarketers.  You never know who is a potential client.  You never know who has an audience of 5000+ people that they can share their negative experience with.  Remember we are in the age of social media where anyone can ruin a company with a few keystrokes.  Just be nice!

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I have reinstalled my forum! You do have to register to post.  Just go to http://www.learnsmallbusiness.com/forum today.

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If  you came here looking for the forum, I deleted it.  I’m looking for a simpler way to host it.  I will let you know when I’ve found something suitable.

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When you’re contemplating starting a home business, you want to pick
the correct model. The rest of this post explains how to do that.
The four stages of a business model are, preparation,
creation, implementation and evaluation. These stages
are made up of components which make them work and
flow into the next stage.

The second stage of the business model, the creation
part, is set up through an ABC system.

A- is to attract future customers.

There are three components in which to do this. First,
you must find your products. This is not as easy to do
as some make it out to be so it is important to
investigate and choose each product carefully.

Pick the best products available. Ones that you may
have experience with already or ones you know
something about or have an interest in.

The next component is setting up business to find
leads. Write articles about your product and get it
out over the Internet. Subscribe to lists that allow
you to find out ideas about your products or
interests.

B- is to bag and capture potential customers.

Set up a system to secure leads. This can be done both
online and offline.

Online you can use an auto-responder system where you
give visitors to your site or blog a free purchase or
gift for subscribing to your newsletter.

Offline you can use newsletters competitions and
giveaways to get people information about your
products.

This will also build relationships with prospects. You
will also find your niche through surveys and
research. Ask your prospects what they want, what they
are looking for.

C- is cashing in.

You will begin to see profit from the sales made to
customers and this is where you will finally begin to
see your business succeeding.

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I just wanted to let you know that I am putting this blog on a vacation.  I should be posting on a regular schedule again after the Memorial Day Weekend.

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Seth Godin of InnerPreneur.comanswers the question, “Is social networking a valuable resource for businesses and if yes, what businesses?” and more in this video. Seth is a best selling author and entrepreneur.

I really loved his reply and could not agree more!

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Of all of the internet marketing books I have collected and read over my time working on the internet, this one is still one of the most informative and useful ones I have come across.

Written in 2001 by Charles Burke, this ebook is a series of interviews with some of the most savvy and successful business owners on the net. It is crammed full of words from these people taking about how they manage their own thinking and emotions and lives AND the things they DO to help themselves build greater success.

Charles is graciously offering my readers a FREE copy of this ebook and it is certainly worth your while to download it, read it and even share it with other up and coming business owners.

Get your free copy of Inside the Minds of Winners by clicking on the name of the book.

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If you’ve fallen in love with twitter, you’ll really like sokule. Sokule has everything that twitter has, plus a lot of things it doesn’t. You can actually earn money with sokule. Listen to the interview below for more information.

Interview With Jane Mark About Sokule

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Okay so one of my twitter friends posted a question about aggregation on his blog post, Aggregating Social Media Updates Pros and Cons and he asked us for our opinions.  So here’s my answer:

I hate to give a female answer such as it depends, but it depends. LOL If I’m announcing something for business then I will use an aggregating service.  Right now my favorite one is the selective twitter app on facebook.  I like that app because I can choose which twitter statuses get posted on facebook.  This is important to me because I can get quite chatty on twitter.  A lot of times I’m sending @replies to my twitter friends.  I have some friends on Facebook that aren’t on twitter.  That’s why I don’t push out all of my twitter conversations to Facebook. If all they see from me is LOL, but they didn’t get to see the original joke because they weren’t on twitter, that can get kind of confusing.

I do use ping.fm if I’m announcing something that can stand alone.  Like if I’m posting my last blog post or if I’m promoting a link, then I’ll post it on ping.fm I know it seems like it takes up a lot of time, but I don’t want anyone confused.

I hope that answered your question, Carlton!

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I will be posting the event listing for this week tomorrow.

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