Posts from — June 2010

As you guys know, I am always on the lookout for additional sources of revenue that don’t interfere with what you are already doing.  I have good news.  I stumbled upon something called a social media manager.  Basically you manage other people’s social media campaigns.  You don’t have to have products.  You don’t have to be an affiliate.  You don’t even have to have experience.  If you want to be trained on how to do this, my friend Kate Buck has created a training program to help you jump on this new career.  To get to this training just click on the words, Social Media Manager in this post.  I forgot to mention that I actually know Kate! I met her last year at Matt Bacak’s Marketing Madness Seminar in Atlanta. Here’s us at the conference:

DeAnna Troupe and Kate Buck

Let me tell you a little bit about Kate. She is simply an awesome person. I was at the conference taking a bunch of pictures and videos and I had left my laptop at home. Of course my camera was running out of memory and we still had hours before it was over. We were at a break and I told her my problem and she actually helped me by letting me store my pictures on her computer! That’s the type of person you’ll be supporting when you buy this product.

When you click on the words Social Media Manager, you will be taken to my affiliate link for this product and yes I will earn money when you make your purchase. There’s also a video on this page. You can pause the video, but I don’t think you can rewind or fast forward it. So if you’re interested in becoming a Social Media Manager, click on the words Social Media Manager in this post and purchase the training so you can shorten your learning curve. You won’t be disappointed.

Here is a guest article that I found on ezinearticles about podcasting.  I hope you enjoy it and learn something about podcasting.

Podcasting How-To – A Pretty Good Podcast is All You Need

By Doug Champigny

A pretty good podcast, or really a succession of pretty good podcasts, is all you need to attract an online audience. But just what does a ‘pretty good podcast’ entail?

First, let’s look at how to make a podcast. A podcast is just creating MP3 files from your audios – it can be you reading an article, giving advice, teaching how to do something or an audio recording of a teleseminar or webinar you did. If you’ve been creating MP3 audios and putting them on your blog, you’re already a podcaster whether you knew it or not.

So don’t be frightened of becoming a podcaster, especially since you don’t have to get it perfect – a pretty good podcast will see you through. Your best podcasts will be the ones that deliver the most information, information helpful to your target audience, irregardless of the quality of your MP3 audios.

Now that doesn’t mean you should have a lot of background noise or poor recording quality – your best podcasts should be crystal clear and easy to understand. But creating a pretty good podcast can be done with the standard mic and headset combinations for computers, or even with the mic built into most laptops and netbooks these days.

If you need a podcast tutorial there are a lot of Podcasting 101 type of resources online, but really it’s just a matter of recording the material you want and then uploading the audio MP3s to your blog or using an RSS feed to submit your podcast site to a podcast directory like Podcast Alley or iTunes.

But the main point here is it doesn’t have to be perfect – you don’t need fancy intros, background music, audio effects and the like – nor do you need to have that perfect ‘radio voice’. As long as you speak clearly and don’t have a heavy accent you’ll be fine – or, of course, you can always have a friend, colleague or pro voiceover artist do the MP3 recording if you feel your voice isn’t ‘right’ for your podcasts.

In general though, don’t get too wrapped up in the technical side of RSS feeds, creating MP3 audios, building an RSS script, etc – focus on the content you deliver, and on delivering that helpful content on a regular schedule. As any successful podcaster can tell you, consistency is more important than the quality of your MP3 audios, as long as you’re producing a pretty good podcast at the minimum.

Marketing mentor, coach and speaker Doug Champigny is the author of ‘It’s You, Live! – Podcasting and Vlogging Your Way To Success’. Creating podcasts and video blogs is just part of the curriculum taught in his PowerStart Marketing coaching classes. Doug is also a regular speaker at many of the live marketing events and conventions around North America – watch for him speaking live onstage in your area soon!

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Doug_Champigny
http://EzineArticles.com/?Podcasting-How-To—A-Pretty-Good-Podcast-is-All-You-Need&id=4430864

If you’ve been on twitter any length of time, I’m sure there are a few hashtags that you follow. Basically a hashtag is twitter speak for a keyword. For example, I like to participate in the chat for journalists called #journchat. It’s a chat for bloggers, journalists, and public relations professionals. Basically we get together and discuss best practices in journalism. It’s helpful for me as a business owner because I can learn what works NOW to get coverage in the media and not what worked 20 years ago. That chat moves pretty fast and it is really easy to miss parts of it. With paper.li you can keep up with everything that is said about a particular hashtag just by creating your own paper. There is a limit to the number of free “papers” you can create. Overall, I think this is a pretty useful service. It gets an A+ for me! You can check the site out by going to http://www.paper.li

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!

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