Posts Tagged ‘Social Media’
Learning to Market a Blog
A Mini-Course on Blogging! Great idea to learn more about marketing your blog and all in 2 weeks!
VAclassroom is a favourite learning place of mine, much of my social media training was done with them. This month they have rolled out another innovative way to learn virtually – the Mini Course! The first one is all about Blog Marketing! What a timely topic too considering that more than 10,000 blogs are started everyday according to WordPress
The 2-week mini-course titled, “Blog Marketing Tips, Tools & Tactics” and starts on August 10th, ending Aug 24th. The program includes self study as well as live components.
The registration doors are officially OPEN NOW and seats are going fast. They have 60 32 3 seats still available for this training program. You can use this discount code VABLOG to knock $10 off their special price of $67 when you register.
Whether you are looking to learn for yourself as a blogger or new to blogs, or are looking to add to your services offerings – it’s a fantastic way to learn more about blogging and in a condensed time period at a great price!
With a little help from my Friends
Paul McCartney is playing in Halifax this Saturday, his only show in Canada too! He’ll be playing on the Halifax Common – a green space meant to be open to share for use by all residents and I believe they are expecting 60,000 people.
Anyhow, in my attempt to win tickets for my brother-in-law, I have been listening to News95.7 and the Beatles & Paul McCartney have been playing over and over in my head. I won’t describe to you the horror I put so many people through today as I sang my song (made up by me) to the listeners of the show - you had to go on air and sing to be in the draw to win.
That’s my segue to, the title of my blog post today! I chose this song to showcase my social media experience this past week to my readers. Social media is more than a marketing channel/tool, it is also about networking and connecting with others.
Last Friday I had a client run into some issues with her Facebook fanpage. I was asked to figure out why it wasn’t working properly. After much searching, I found myself stumped. So… I started putting out my ‘feelers’ to see if anyone else could help figure it out. I used Twitter, facebook and some blogs all weekend and through until yesterday.
Finally this morning, 5 days later, I found the answer with a little help from a friend of sorts; but many ‘friends’ were trying to help me figure it out. These were not people I have ever met, yet they were attempting to help me just the same.
What was in it for them, you might ask? Nothing. So why would they bother? Simple, to help out a ‘friend’ who happens to be someone they have never met and probably never will. Being helpful is the only reason why any of these people made contact with me. Connecting and networking… that’s all it was about and I am so grateful they took the time to help me, and ultimately my client.
The next time you are talking about social media and Twitter and Facebook and don’t seem to get it all… try thinking of it as the water cooler or staffroom in your office. When you are sitting at your office stumped on a problem, where do you turn? To your co-workers in the office… well, social media works in the same way sometimes; the only difference being that the ‘office’ of each party involved most likely spans a great distance and they may never meet face to face.
The ‘bug’ was noticed by Salman Ansari, with Involver . Salman, I really appreciate your help. It was a simple solution, but one that took an extra set of eyes! Involver is a company that has some great Facebook Applications for Pages – definitely check them out! I use them with many of my clients. Salman, you also helped out someone else having the same problem, she contacted me after seeing the posts, and once I found the fix, I passed on the info to ehr as well!
Thanks to everyone else (I hope I do not forget anyone) who helped by retweeting my posts or commenting back on a blog or sending me a message on Facebook or Twitter. I am grateful for the time you gave to me and my problem.
Training is vital to Growth
I realized the other day after finishing a consultation with a new client, that my business has grown almost 40% since completing a certification course this past April. It was kind of a wake up call on how important training is to growing your business.
Of course training is always beneficial in that you gain new knowledge and skills. As small business owners, we sometimes forget that it is these very items that make us more valuable to our clients.
Bringing in new ideas and abilities helps clients, and in my line of business the primary goal with any client is to help them get their work done, no matter the task and doing so in a way that saves them time and money. For most the goal of having a virtual assistant is to free up time to devote to generating more revenue or in some cases to having more time for family and life.
What training did I complete? A Certification course for Social Media Marketing. The course from VAclassroom gave me deeper insight into this type of work. Social Media Marketing is quickly turning into my niche, or niche, as some people say (…sorry, I couldn’t help that, so many people pronounce that word differently!)
This training taught me how to focus on my clients, their targets and goals; creating a strategic plan for them. It helped me clarify and define a process and system with my work in social media. I discovered how to be as efficient as possible for my clients and to be always thinking of new ways to use social media in order to help my clients grow their business.
Will I stop at this course? No way, as more opportunities to learn arise, I will sign on! This past year I have taken a bookkeeping course, have taken weekly seminars at VAnetworking and joined in many other courses that saw me making improvements in how I manage my own business or work for my clients. I’m even going to lead a class myself on July 16th as part of a Summer Speaker Series. I will be teaching others – exciting and scary at the same time!
There is always more to learn to improve yourself, your work and your business – and by doing so you will grow and prosper your business.
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If you’d like to partake of 28 Seminars for $27 this summer, please check out the VAvirtuosos site. The topics are varied and very applicable to many types of businesses.
If you are interested in taking VAclassroom’s Social Marketing Training, it is a self study and open to anyone. If you use the coupon code SUMMER09, you can save $100 off the course.
You don’t have 100 fans…what can you do?
This weekend there was a flurry of activity and messages and collaboration between strangers all over as businesses tried to gain enough fans on their Facebook Page to create a vanity url for it.
Facebook changed the rules last minute and upped the ante from 25 fans to 100. Sunday night was a busy night online for many… but if you have yet to reach your goal and are looking for a short url to use for this same purpose, why not add the Memorable Web Address to your Facebook Page?
It’s there, it’s available to everyone and it can be customized as you wish. Ours is http://companies.to/timeontaskva.
Simply sign in to Facebook, click browse applications on the bottom left menu bar and look for Memorable Web address. You can assign one to your personal profile as well. For people with a more common name, it may be an option if you missed out on your facebook username a few weeks ago.
Once you add this to your Page, go to the page and hit edit, under your page profile picture. It is in this area that you will scroll down the list of applications on your page. Once you find Memorable Web address, click edit and it is in here you can assign the address to your page.
Great thing about the Web 2.0 world, someone is always using their brains and talent to create applciations that help out others.
Any questions using this, feel free to leave a comment and I will help you out as best I can!
Technorati Tags: facebook, Social Media, social networking, virtual assistant
I can't join another Facebook group or page!
It’s a comment I hear a lot lately, people are getting ‘grouped out’ on Facebook. Personally, I don’t see the issue and there is a simple solution.
Let’s look at the problem first. What happens when you join a group or page?
Well.. for starters, you are now connected to many more people through the group. hmmm… that was kind of the point in ‘working’ Facebook for your business wasn’t it?
Then you start to receive updates or invites to events. Let’s see… if you respond, your update goes out to all the members… again, your name in front of many.
Now, when someone posts a note, wall post or link, on any of the groups or pages; their post will show on your wall. Which also means, if you make a comment on another group’s wall or page, your comment will be seen by all the group members or fans. Wow, so many people you are talking to.
The issue everyone seems to have is when they start to RECEIVE all these notes, invites, links and more on your Facebook homepage…that’s when most people become overwhelmed and stop joining anything.
Well… if you are like me, and have more than 100 friends on Facebook, you probably have lots of stuff already being posted on your wall from actual friends – not to mention the flower gardens, butterflies, IQ challenge tests, TV quizzes etc, etc, etc. Do you read all those? Probably not… that’s why everyone skim-reads now. Way too much to take in. You skim and only look further into items that catch your eye.
So… long before you joined any groups you had trouble brewing already. How do you deal with it and still remain connected to all the groups and pages? Read the rest of this entry »
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