My promise

Dear Blog,

I promise to do better at maintaining you. I'm currently signing up for a class so I can learn how to better maintain you. I've also enlisted some help - another pair of eyes - that will help us look better, sound better and inform better. Good luck to us. Here we go!

just testing the blogger-droid app from my phone. I downloaded the app months ago but this is the first time I remembered to use it. Enough ~ go test!

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How To: Look for Biz Advisors

Although I'm not a designer or have any design abilities, I'm almost obsessed with design related blogs. They're not only pictures for great eye candy, but there are a lot of insightful articles about crafty people. These crafty people are usually independent designers and entrepreneurs themselves who share and nurture small business communities.

One design blog I've followed over the years is Design*Sponge. They have a category called "biz ladies" which I've been following and this particular article is an example of how you can get useful information and insight from anywhere, even your non-business related hobbies.

This article advises users on how to look for business advisors and what to look for in a business advisor. Check it out and always keep open to inspiration that can come from anywhere.

Design*Sponge » Blog Archive » biz ladies: establishing relationships with advisors

5 Reasons Why Billy Mays is Annoyingly Persuasive

Persuasiveness of Billy Mays

Very interesting article about the persuasiveness of Billy Mays. It pinpoints the five characteristics he exemplified that make him the great salesman that he was. Oxy Clean? Ya, I use it. And I can attest to the quality of the Magic Jack.

I also think these are great qualities to observe for any salesman. Check it out and see if you're not convinced. ;-)

Twitter Strategy

So, I jumped the gun and asked my admin assistant to get ready to help me with Twitter tactics, all before I came up with a clear strategy or did any research. I'm a brand manager by day but, unfortunately, I haven't had that much exposure to the social media strategy for the company where I am employed. I've read tons of articles but never had to apply any of the knowledge. So, that's what I'm doing this evening. I'm reviewing articles, other strategies and recommendations - anything I can find online. Here's what I've come across so far. Warning - these are old articles but definitely still useful and a start...

Create a Twitter Following by Guy Kawasaki
This article sums up some great tactics to follow like (1) Send @ messages to the "smores" (social media whores) because, "It's not who you know. It's who appears to know you" (2) Follow everyone who follows you (3) Establish yourself as a subject expert (4) Repeat your tweets. These are only a few of the suggestions he makes.

Five Market-Research Tools for Twitter from Entrepreneur.com.
This article provides useful research tools to find out more about your target audience and competitors who are using Twitter. One really useful tool I started using immediately after I read this article was search.twitter.com.

And another compelling article is Find Your Audience Now. This article provides various online tools used to find hyper-local audiences - something that could prove to be very useful for me since my site focuses on a geo-targeted audience.

I'm definitely not done researching and I'll continue to post new useful articles I find, but hopefully this is enough to get me started.