In wanting to support solopreneurs and small business owners in North San Diego County, I’ve developed North San Diego Business At Large Online Radio Show. I’ll be interviewing solopreneurs in North County, and beyond…..

On Friday, December 5th at 3pm Pacific Time, I’ll be discussing with Roger Lane how to manage your thoughts during the coming months. This is actually a great time to leverage your business. Being visible is one of the best marketing strategies, but not the only one.

Roger will be sharing ideas on how to manage our thoughts so we can close more sales and achieve the goals we’ve created for our businesses. Join me by clicking the Blog Talk radio button. Just tap listen now, or call in and join the conversation. You can ask Roger any question about creating your ideal business year, and you’ll be part of the archived recording. What a great way to add to your online visibility!

It’s a small world. Roger and I have know each other for years, but drifted apart when he moved to Hawaii. It was over the Internet that we found each other after all these years. Here in North San Diego County he held The Finance Course, helping business owners create their ideal business. Let me share a little more information on Roger.

Roger Lane is President of Roger Lane Inc, a learning organization that provides the skills, tools, and processes that enable individuals and organizations to experience significant, sustained and measurable improvements in performance, productivity, profits, and a sense of accomplishment.

Roger Lane is a professional trainer and consultant engaged in the training and development of various programs to increase the productivity and effectiveness of companies and their staff. The company has offered these services since 1978 and has over 7,000 clients.

According to Lane, "Business is like a sporting game, except no one has to lose. In business, everyone can win: customers, owners and staff." He explains, "In games, as well as business, we sometimes meet obstacles that keep us stuck. Until we get some coaching, most of us think it is normal to be stuck or just surviving, or average."

For Lane, being a business owner began in the second grade selling newspapers. His love for business grew and his curiosity kept him testing businesses and business principles throughout his life. He owned and managed a variety of businesses ranging from the first Apple Computer store in Hawaii, to a chain of beauty salons, to a national educational program. He coached the development of Paul Mitchell Hair Products and developed The Finance Course a nationally renowned personal and business finance program.

He currently lives in Hana, Hawaii.

Don’t miss this chance to jumpstart your 2009 with Roger Lane. Join me December 5th, 3pm Pacific Time at North San Diego Business At Large Online Radio show.

What kind of shows would you like to see North San Diego Business At Large host in the future. Let me know by commenting!
 

I have had solopreneurs tell me they need a website, not a blog. For all intents and purpose, a blog is a website as far as the search engines are concerned. So why would you want to blog for your business?

Blogs, especially blogs set up for social networking, offer you a complete, easy self-publishing platform for your business. Often I hear solopreneurs complain that they can’t get their webmaster to make any changes for them in a timely manner. Now, that’s all taken care of with a blog. You don’t need programming skills to create your blog content.

Then, there’s the RSS feed. With that feed, which comes with a blog, you can start to spread your message, increase your online visibility, your perceived expertise and drive traffic to that static website, if you have one still!

So, a free blog, or self-hosted?

You’re reading a self-hosted blog. The benefits of self-hosting your blog are far too many to share in one post, so let me share the basics. If you self-host your blog, you’ve bought the URL (website address/domain name), you’ve purchased a hosting package and you’ve had the blog installed. Or, you’ve used a turn key blog site, like Blogi360. The important component in all this is that YOU own the blog, unlike the free sites. You own the traffic to the blog and can use the blog as you wish without worrying about violating one of the free blog site rules and finding your free blog gone.

If you already have a blog and want to know what to do next to get your blog seen and heard, tune in Friday, November 21st for Syndicating Your Content at 3pm PT and find out how your blog and a Facebook profile can work to leverage your business online.

I think with companies talking about laying off employees, there may be executives who are ready to take control of their future by starting their own consulting business. However, unlike me who loves being homebased and am very proud of being homebased, not everyone wants their clients to know they work from home.  Call Solutions Group provides a sophisticated telephone service that leaves the caller with the impression they are speaking to a much larger firm.

Take a listen and let me know what you think by commenting, and give Bill’s site a once over.

This month Mindy Selinger, PowerPartner Connections, will be presenting "Build Your Network - Build Your Business."

It’s $35 through today, $45 after today, so if you want to network with about 150 other women solopreneurs, this is the breakfast you want to attend. If you do attend, track me down and say hello. You know me, I’ll be wearing the hat.

Another fabulous event this week is being held on Sunday, November 16th at Simply Ambrosia 2:00 PM to 4:00 PM Call Simply Ambrosia (760) 593-0350 to purchase a ticket for our afternoon tea, including tea, scones, jam & curd, tea sandwiches, and dessert. Tickets are $16.00, seating is at 2PM. Limited to 25 spaces. Live harp and flute music will set the stage for this event.

They began by hiring some one to blog content for them at $10/hour and developed a Google Adwords program to drive targeted traffic to the sites.

After 12 months they determined from their results that the social networking/blogging strategy yielded them more than 93,000 visits and cost them $3,600 in salary costs.

Their Google Adwords strategy which yielded 2,047 visitors after spending $1,250. Their cost per visit with social media was 4 cents per visit, Google’s Adwords cost them 61 cents per visit. They determined that their overall return on their investment for social media optimization was a staggering 1,427%.

Depending upon your budget and time resources, social media marketing can drive targeted traffic to your web site.

What are your thoughts? Have you used Google Adwords? Are you participating in social media to gain more visibility and establish trust with your site visitors? Feel free to share by commenting.Technorati Tags: social media

Discover The Power of Etiquette to Grow Your Business 

Learn what it takes to be charismatic and unforgettable in your industry, community and social circles by attending the Chamber’s First Friday Breakfast November 7th.

The featured speaker will be Phyllis Davis, who has been teaching American business etiquette to companies, government organizations and individuals for 33 years. In 2001, she founded the American Business Etiquette Trainers Association.

Davis is the bestselling author of “E2: Using the Power of Ethics and Etiquette in American Business.” She has been featured on “CNN Headline News,” “CNN Financial News,” “Bloomberg Financial Radio,” “Good Day New York” and “NBC Chicago.”

During the First Friday Breakfast, Davis will:

•Instruct men how to shake hands with women so that they like and trust them automatically and teach women how to shake hands with men to make them comfortable.

• Discuss the corporate hierarchy of who initiates the handshake and who receives it.

• Teach you the nonverbal components of a sincere handshake that creates a strong unconscious, yet human connection.

• Educate you about how to give a business card to someone and how to receive a business card. Like the handshake, the business card also is based on hierarchy and follows certain guidelines during networking situations and business settings.

• Demonstrate the art of making small talk that reveals your character, so people will like and trust you, without revealing private information about yourself.

First Friday Breakfast is the Chamber’s premiere networking and business promotional event, and one of the most regularly attended monthly programs. The breakfast will be from 7 to 9 a.m. Nov. 7 at Hilton Garden Inn, 6450 Carlsbad Blvd., Carlsbad, 92008.

According to Groundswell there are several categories of online activity. From the Creators, who publish blogs, web pages, upload video and music and write articles, to the Critics, Collectors, Joiners, Spectators, ending with the Inactives, there is change in each of those groups.

The largest growth is in the Spectator group, who read or watch consumer social content. The graph at Groundswell shows us that there is room to grow in each of these groups. But if the Spectator group is growing right now, and they are the ones who consume our content, wouldn’t you want your content to be there for them to find?

Friday, October 24th at 9am Pacific time I’m holding a private online class, Facebook 101, to help solopreneurs get their marketing message past the filters and out to the masses where it can be heard, or consumed. This is a great place to start.

If you’ve followed me at all, you know I believe the blog is the heartbeat of your online marketing megaphone and Facebook is the body that allows you to share your content easily with your friends. The opportunity for you to cut through the clutter with your message is tremendous.

Join me for Facebook 101 and start getting your message out there now. The sooner you start, the more you catch the growth wave in social networking.

This episode shares the power of RSS and how you can use FeedBurner to really ramp up the sharing, or syndication, of your content. These are some of the FeedBurner tools I shared.

BuzzBoost
Have feed, will travel. BuzzBoost republishes your burned feed’s content as go-anywhere HTML. Want to promote your blog on another site you manage? BuzzBoost gives you a snippet of JavaScript you can paste into your page templates.

Email Subscriptions
Give your biggest fans another way to keep up with your blog or podcast feed by placing an email subscription form on your site.

Chicklet Chooser
Promote your FeedBurner feed directly on your website! Place HTML that Chicklet Chooser automatically generates for you in your site templates to help users easily subscribe to your feed.

BrowserFriendly
Make it easy for potential subscribers to preview and subscribe to your text or podcast feed. Applies clean visual formatting to the eyesore of raw feed XML for much improved readability in all modern web browsers.

SmartCast
Makes podcasting easy in feeds that normally cannot support it. Link to MP3s, videos, images, and other digital media in your site content and SmartCast creates enclosures for them automatically. Optionally adds elements required for a richer, more detailed listing in iTunes Podcast Directory and sites using Yahoo Media RSS.

SmartFeed
Reach the widest possible audience while publishing a single feed on your blog or site. Translates your feed on-the-fly into a format (RSS or Atom) compatible with your visitors’ feed reader application.

FeedFlare™
Give your subscribers easy ways to email, tag, share, and act on the content you publish by including as many or few of the services listed below. FeedFlare™ places a simple footer at the bottom of each content item, helping you to distribute, inform and create a community around your content.
Allowing you to share on digg, facebook, and delicious.

Amazon ID Burner
Save time when linking to Amazon.com. This service conveniently auto-inserts your Associates ID into any links to Amazon.com catalog items it finds in your feed content items.

Configure Ads
Activate FeedBurner Ad Network and/or Google AdSense for Content and then configure how you want ads to appear in your content.

Photo Splicer
Merge two views of your online world! Splice your blog feed with your photo feed. Photos in your Flickr, Buzznet, or Webshots account will be merged in with your original source feed entries, most recent first.