Taught by: Martin Brossman or Noah Boswell
You’ll learn how to design a website online and save hundreds of dollars doing it yourself. Best of all, you’ll learn tips and techniques to get results and basic information about search engines, social media and internet marketing. Plus, you’ll learn how to avoid many of the internet scams related to having your own website. Including free web site options.
You can almost completely run a small business without buying any software today. Below is a list of many of these free services and free programs. Some offer a rich free service that allow you to pay for greater utility when you need it. Thanks to my Virtual Assistant Angel for compiling this list ( http://virtualassistantsocialmedia.com ). A few items you have to pay for or only give you a short trial. These items are marked with at “$”
Core office tools like Wordprocessing, Electronic Ledger and Presentation tools
CRM – Customer Relationship Manager
Event Registration
Document Sharing
E-mail Marketing
FBML Landing Page
Hourly Rates
Invoicing
PDF Creator
Install PDFCreator carefully. Listeners have complained about PDFForge toolbar, which is included. It apparently directs users to urlseek20.vmn.net. You should have the option of not installing it. However, some people believe it installs regardless.
If you install the toolbar and have problems, it can be uninstalled. Click Start>>Control Panel. In Windows XP, double-click Add or Remove Programs. In Vista, double-click Programs and Features. In either, find the toolbar in the list and remove it
PDF to Word
Pictures (Royalty Free) [Very useful for Blog post]
Photo Editing Software
Photo on the Web (sharing photos and using your own on the web)
Video sharing on the web
Press Release Distribution (NC Only)
Screen Capture
Twitter Tracking (and other social media status updates including Linkedin):
Signature
Podcasting / On-line Radio and Audio
Accounting / Money tools
Phone
Project Management, information management and File Sharing
Blogging
Password Management
Bookmark Sync
This is a small list of thousands and we want to hear which ones you like and why?
Compiled by Martin Brossman NCSmallBusinessTraining.com and Angle virtualassistantsocialmedia.com
Share this with others: http://bit.ly/freetoolsforbusiness
A Facebook Business page can be a great way to stay connected to your customers.DO NOT: use a Personal Profile as a Busienss page. It is against Facebook’s terms of use and you will at some time in the future will be shut down and lose all your friends. If when you look down the left side and all you see is “Friends” and do not see a window that says “People Like This” then you have broken the rules of this free service.
If you have a Facebook business page: even though it looks like people can see your personal page from your business page, they can not. It is only connected that way because YOU are the adminstrator. Make sure to build a personal profile then a business page and understand the “administrator” private info is protected from the busienss page.
An easy way to create a business page: Create a personal page with your real name. After signing in go to any Facebook business page, like mine: http://Facebook.com/MartinWBrossman and scroll down the page looking to the left. After all the images are going you will see the words “Create a Page” and create an appropriate page from here.
How to find your business page after you create it: Sign in to your personal profile. Click on the word in the upper right hand corner that says, “Accounts” then “Manage Pages” and you will see it there.
A few more things to keep in mind when you set up a business page on facebook:
• Choose the page name carefully. It cannot be changed once you have more than 25 ‘fans’
• Remember that facebook is still the internet. Choose words that would be relevant ‘search words’
• Choose a photo not just a logo. This is a social network. People want to connect with people.
• Don’t set up a page unless you are willing to go there and post at least once or twice a day
• Decide what you will offer before you start. Think about what topic(s) are relevant to your business, that people will find value in. (ie. a Real Estate Broker might choose investment info, community info, latest trends,etc)
• Commit to finding/posting an article or video each day on that relevant topic.
• Make sure that you have contact information on your page, and remember that a lot of people still prefer to use the phone.
• You won’t receive notifications when people comment like you do with a personal page, so you have to go to the page and check it often!
Above all, remember that most people avoid advertisements whenever possible (think of all the ways people avoid TV commercials!). Focus on how you can add value in a way that is relevant to your expertise. People buy from those that they know, like and trust. Be personable and use photos and video whenever possible.
Share your tips on Facebook or what was useful to you.
Created by Martin Brossman – NCSmallBusinessTraining.com and Heather O – FacebookandBeyond.com.
A few resources for learning about email marketing. Remember with email marketing you still have to earn the right to stay in your customers attention or your email will not be opened. The content needs to be relevant to your customer, clear what they are reading from the first line, clear who it is from and provide value worth their time. What is important to your customer beyond what you sell? Why should they take the time to ready your email if they already are overwhelmed by email? Value, Relevance and a personal tone is important but not sloppy. Look as how your email look if you remove all the graphics for many email services do that and how it look on a smart phone. People don’t want more emails but they do want useful information that is relevant to them.
A number of email marketing sites:
– Constant Contact – 1st choice for small business users for ease of use and integration of social media for business.
– Mail Chimp – Lets you have 1000 contacts and send out up to 6,000 emails per month FREE and work with Eventbrite. Very good for micro-businesses and groups with a very limited budget.
– awebber – a professional high capacity email program used for high volume ‘list building’ by many top email marketers.
– iContact – A competitor to Constant Contact with equal features, just not as much support resources.
– Swiftpage – It’s big plus is it fully integrates with ACT contact manager. Reliable with a number of useful features but very challenging to use. See these Swiftpage demos for more info.
These are two GREAT resources for email marketing tips and tricks.
The Constant Contact Learning Center is second to none and the user community is huge.
http://www.constantcontact.com/learning-center/index.jsp
http://www.constantcontact.com/community/index.jsp
Useful on-line posts about email marketing:
Top 7 Email Marketing Trends – Tips for 2011
8 Email Marketing Tips – from CRM.com
How To Avoid Getting Your Campaigns Accidentally Junked – from MailChimp.com
Increase your Open Rate -Opt-in Marketing
A number of posts on email-marketing-report.com about the best time to send emails
Examples:
Restaurant email marketing example
Business trainer announcing an event
How do you use e-mail marketing and what resources do you find useful?
Compiled by Martin Brossman and Brian Walker who offers eMail Marketing Magement.
See Martin’s class on the topic: Marketing Your Business Through E-mail
