According to Wikipedia – The Internet actually started in 1969, (yes, only 1969!), as the ARPANET, a Defense Department system designed to let survivors share files after a nuclear attack. From being available on just a handful of top secret computers, it’s grown to millions and millions of users.

And it’s still growing. According to a recent survey, the volume of Internet traffic is expected to double annually over the next five years. Consumers are expected to account for 70 percent of all Internet traffic over that period with the rest of the market made up of business users.

What does that mean for you?

It means customers—millions of them.

No other business tool can put the products you sell in front of so many people so easily. Nothing even comes close. Read the rest of this entry »

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Don’t you love it when people ask you these questions!

I do try to answer as best I can but without knowing the person or their blog speciality it is difficult to give a helpful answer.

Unless you’re one of the blog gurus who have been blogging for many years then I suppose the answer has to be “no”.

But don’t let that put you off, you can make a tidy living from your blog but it comes with a price. You need to put a lot of time and effort in, the old saying, “write it and they will come” is a fallacy.

The magic word is traffic. You need to drive traffic to your blog. Sure, regular posts will attract the search engines over time but you need to grab your marketing with both hands and promote yourself in the right places. See my previous posts on marketing in places like LinkedIn and Twitter to drive traffic.

If your blog has an underlying business, as does mine, then I suppose my answer to you could be “yes”, your blog can make you rich but your blog needs to be one tool in the toolbox, you need other tools to market your business like networking and good email campaigns and of-course you need something to sell. You could do worse than learning “The Image Attraction System“, the profile builder, to create the right image using your blog and to enable people to see you as an expert so that you are someone that they would like to buy from.

It’s not about intelligence or education or who you know. It’s purely about how much you’re prepared to put in at the beginning to build your profile and how hard you are prepared to work to keep the momentum going.

Once you have a good online profile you need to start to create customers. You need to become an Internet Celebrity, you just need to be seen and be heard by everyone.

Comment on other people’s blogs, answer people’s queries on social sites like LinkedIn and Facebook and set up genuine messages to automatically thank people who follow you on Twitter. One thing that is soooooo important at this stage is NOT TO SELL TO THEM YET!

Create that relationship, don’t mention what you do, allow them to research you themselves, I promise you they will. If you have done a good job on your profile then they will be impressed – that’s for sure!
Pat Sutton

Learn “The Image Attraction System” the profile builder. Become an internet celebrity!
Pat Sutton is Forbes Listed as one of the top 30 women entrepreneurs to follow on Twitter.

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Did you know that blogging is the new “BLACK”?

A blog can be uploaded to networking sites to spread the word about your business – that’s free advertising!
A blog gives you the chance to voice your opinions to the world.
A good blog can generate subscribers and we all know how important they are!
A blog with the right keywords will help the search engines to find you.
An informative blog can give you kudos…you could be seen as an expert in your field.
A blog can create an income from affiliate advertising and adsense.

So what are the 8 things you should have on your official blog site.

1. A subscriber’s sign up box. This will enable visitors to subscribe to the RSS feed of your posts.
2. A newsletter subscription box. Once they have agreed to receive your mailings then you can safely market to them by e-mail – it is always better to add a few subtle links to your products or services in a newsletter than to bamboozle them with adverts.
3. A comment box. When people comment on your blogs you are capturing their details.
4. The Opportunity to buy something. Of-course it is great when your visitors spend money on your website but you will need a lot of visitors to make any real profits from it but it is possible. The magic word is traffic!
5. Adsense – I have a lot of visitors and do make a few bob from Adsense but again you need a lot of traffic to make any real money.
6. Adverts – a busy website is more likely to attract advertisers so concentrate on getting your visitors up before you approach any advertisers.
7. Bookmarking buttons to places like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. Everytime you write a new post hit those networking buttons and send your work around the web. I am a member of 50 groups with LinkedIn alone, my posts go out to all of them on a daily basis. Don’t upload the full article, just a snippet then a link to your website.
8. This brings us to the most important part of your blog or article…THE TITLE!
If you want literary accolades then write something clever like “To blog or not to blog that is…..”
The trouble is that this title will not help the needy searcher…if your target audience is someone who wants to know more about blogging then make your title as search engine friendly as you can.
Think of the words people will use when searching Google then create your title to not only inform people of the content of your post but also include the important keywords.

Pat Sutton
Official Blog – Internet Marketing and Personal Development
http://www.patsutton.com

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Isn’t it frustrating when you arrive at an office reception only to find that there’s no receptionist! There you stand, waiting for someone to notice you.

And some how the staff manage to beaver away while at the same time giving you glances but, infuriatingly, not making any effort to come to your rescue?
You think to yourself, should I wait, should I talk, should I….

I have worked in many busy offices in my time and the one person who seems to have the most fun and the cushiest job always seems to be the receptionist.
The problem is that when a company has a belt tightening period, then the receptionist is usually the one that bites the dust leaving a void in the reception area and some poor employee out of work and me, the poor visitor, left to her own devises.

I can understand the reasoning for her demise – maybe she spent a lot of time filing her nails or chatting on her mobile – but who’s fault is that? She could have been kept busy with a crucial occupation that most small companies tend to ignore usually to their peril.

She could have been the companies “Social Media Whizz Kid”!
Now don’t get me wrong, I am not saying that you would encourage her to chat on Facebook all day, I am talking about structured marketing using Facebook, Twitter, Plaxo, LinkedIn and all the other important social networks.
She would be given targets to meet and results to report on, in fact she would be kept extremely busy.

There’s four things you would need to have in place in order to ensure you really do benefit from her activities, in other words to make sure she is actually marketing your business not chatting and making dates with her new found friends.

1) Big Brother is watching!
What a lot of companies don’t know is that if an employee is using a company e-mail then you have every right, as their employer, to monitor their e-mails. This is the first thing you should make clear to your new “Online Marketing Manager”, (it is amazing how a good title can incentivize).

2) A weekly feedback report.
This would be to ascertain, (sorry for the posh word), things like, how many followers you have gained on Twitter and how many Facebook, LinkedIn, Ecademy, Plaxo friends you have on your business pages etc.

3) Somone to write good copy.
Find your cleverest writer, (you could hold a competition!), and get them to write a couple of blog posts a week. The posts should contain all the right key words for the search engines and, ideally, should come out of your website but if you don’t have a blog on your website then you can start a blog easily using blogger, or blog spot, there are many others! (A little bit of training for your blogger wouldn’t go amiss either!)

4) A good trainer.
It doesn’t matter how much she thinks she knows about Facebook etc. she will not know about the right way to leverage this new media to market the business.

The beauty of teaching a member of staff Internet Marketing is that you will be in complete control; your staff member will be gaining some great skills and you will save a lot of money down the line – money that you would have had to pay to a marketing company to do it for you.

Give a man a fish and he eats for a day teach him to fish…………

Pat Sutton – Professional Blogger and Marketing Director at Niche Media Marketing
One to one training, workshops and seminars on Social Media Marketing.
Pat Sutton – Forbes Listed as the 30 women entrepreneurs to follow on Twitter!

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