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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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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I had a great dream last night – it was about chocolate!
I actually dreamed I was writing for an advertising campaign. I even remember this poem from my dream…
“What does chocolate do for me?
It’s comfort food when you’re feeling low
It’s something to grab when you’re on the go
It’s smooth as silk
It’s made from milk
Comes in a box tied up with a bow….
Tacky eh!

The reason I’m telling you this is because it’s a great experiment to see if the Google adsense on my blog actually does start selling you chocolate. If it does…please let me know! Fun eh!

But seriously, aren’t these new technologies amazing! If we were living 100 years ago we’d be using the ducking stool rather a lot wouldn’t we?

But we’re not living 100 years ago, we are in a time when we allow crawlers to access our online homes and invisible robots to fight our online battles against them.

We can talk to anyone we want with the click of a mouse and find out about anything we want by Googling it!

Have you ever wondered how Adsense came about?
My research tells me that it was owned by a private company called “Oingo” based in Los Angeles. In 1998, two guys, Adam Weissman and Gilad Elbaz invented what they called a search algorithm that recognised words and their meanings. This was then developed by Princeton University.

After changing it’s name, Oingo was bought by Google in 2003 for $102 million.

Not a bad night’s work for Weissman and Elbaz eh!

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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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Thank you to all the people who have e-mailed me and commented on my websites about my first Twitter article. Here is a link to it, if you would like to read it again:
http://patsutton.com/index.php/archives/154

I am so pleased that you all found it so useful. With that in mind I have decided to write a sequel by way of your questions answered, hope you find it just as useful?

Here are some of the questions you have asked me:

1. What do I tweet about?
It is important not to be self serving. If you want people to follow you and to re-tweet you then the magic word is “quality”.
As an example: A gardening company would tweet about the best way to keep your grass nice and green or the easiest way to grow marrows…get the drift? Of-course, don’t forget to include where the tweet has come from. If you have a long website name then shorten it at “bitly.com”. If you are promoting a blog or website, try asking a question or excite them by announcing something new happening; you will find that more people will click through if they are curious.

2. The direct messages from people thanking me for following or just saying hello – should I answer them?
If, like me, you have a number of Twitter accounts then it would be a full time task to answer all your direct messages. I do sift through them and answer ones that are of interest but I am afraid that we are victims of our own actions – a lot of the messages that come into my inbox are automated so it can be a fruitless excersise and will fall on deaf ears I am afraid.

3. Is there a platform where I can manage all my Twitter accounts together?
Yes, there are many…I use Hootsuite which I believe is the best – you can add as many accounts as you want and you can tweet right out of the program to all or any of your accounts with just one press of a button. It also has the facility to feed your Blog or articles automatically to your Twitter stream.

4. Is it OK to ask questions of my followers?
Absolutely yes. I have asked many business related questions and had some really helpful replies. The best one was when I was told by my doctor that I had a slightly under active thyroid. He said that if I started medication I would probably be on it for the rest on my life. He told me that it is possible to treat the illness with natural therapies and change of diet so he advised me to give the natural route a go before resorting to medication.
After fruitless searches on Google I decided to ask my Twitter following on my “WomenSpeakBiz” account. I was in-undated with replies and helpful suggestions, it was overwhelming.

5. How do I know if people are mentioning my Tweets?
You can use “Twitter Search” you will be able to search for your Twitter name. It is not a bad idea to contribute to the conversations occasionally.
If you use TweetLater, (mentioned in my “How to Market On Twitter” blog), you can subscribe to a digest. They will send an e-mail to you every time someone mentions you or re-tweets your tweet.

6. Is there a more targetted or better way to follow people?
Yes there is, it is called Twellow!
Twellow is a directory of public Twitter accounts, with hundreds of categories and search features to help you find people. The beauty of Twellow is that you can search by name, demographic, sex, business, geography, industry or just keyword.
As a Twitter user you are probably already on there but, it is a good idea to register. If you register then you will be able to update your profile and add yourself to categories so that people can find you easily.
I found the geographical search great as I have a social network based in Warwickshire, Uk and I wanted to follow people in the Warwickshire area so that they would, hopefully, follow me! Once they did follow me, my direct thank you message to them would subtly mention my social network and …. Bob’s you’re uncle, my Warwickshire Network would start to populate nicely!

7. What if I want to write more than the 140 character limit?
You have a platform called TwitWall. If you already have a Twitter account, all you need to do is to login to TwitWall using your Twitter userid and password.
Twitwall is a sort of Blogging companion to Twitter. Your submissions can be less formal than a blog but more comprehensive that a Tweet. Every time you write something on TwitWall it will feed onto Twitter complete with a link to your full entry. It is a great way of getting longer messages out quickly.

So why do we use Twitter?
Relationship building, profile building, sharing ideas, marketing, getting answers, staying connected, news, staying up to date, direct messaging, communicating……..
Can you think of more?

Pat Sutton is a professional blogger her website is http://www.patsutton.com

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I am not going to explain to you how to create an account, I am sure you are capable enough! Once the account is created with a nice profile and picture you can then start to add your “Tweets”.
You are allowed up to 140 characters and it is advisable to keep the tweets as short as possible, I will explain why shortly.
I know a lot of people use Twitter to talk about their latest night out or what they had for dinner but as a business person you can utilize Twitter to market your business.

The first thing to do is to find followers. You do this by using the search facility and searching for keywords that people, who are your target audience, would be using, either in their names or their tweets. As an example, “business”! You will have pages and pages of people talking about business and now you need to scroll down to choose who you want to follow.
Now, it is etiquette on Twitter that if someone follows you, you then follow them, not everyone abides by this rule but a lot do. As I am sure you have worked out by now; you will end up with people following you who are likely to be your target audience.

Be careful not to follow too many people all at once as, you must balance your follower/following ratio. So as not to bring down the wrath of the Twitter police, basically; you can’t follow 50,000 people if only 23 people follow you.
I would suggest that you follow 100 a day for a couple of days then wait until you have upped your following then you can go and follow more.

There is a great little website called, http://huitter.com/ where you can automatically un‐follow people who have not followed you. Don’t do this every day as you need to give people time to notice that you are following them but it is worth doing it about once a week.

OK, now you have a few followers it is time to do some marketing.
Obviously you can announce new items you are selling or services you are offering but the strength of Twitter is the relationships you can build.

So tweet stuff like motivational quotes or links to great blogs or websites that you think will interest your followers. Keep these short and remember to always add your website address at the end of the tweet. If you have a long address you can pop over to Bitly.com and get it shortened. You just enter your web address then hit “shorten” and it will give you a short version that you can use when space is limited.

Now I am going to tell you a secret trick that is so valuable that we need to keep this between you and me alone!

Find someone who is tweeting and is following you and who has a whole load of followers then find their website and take a look at what they do. Then come back to your Twitter account and Tweet an exceptionally wonderful complement about them. With luck they will see your Tweet and will then re‐Tweet it to their whole follower base, they won’t be able to resist it; we all love complements and can’t resist telling people that we have received them!
This is the reason your original tweet needs to be short, to enable people to re-tweet your comments. People do it all the time.

Here are a few tips you can do to simplify Twitter.
You can automate a message thanking people who follow you thus creating those important relationships. You can set this up at TweetLater.
You can go to the Twitter Yellow Pages, Twello, to search for people to follow.
You can download Sesmic Desktop to keep an eye on everything including, tweets, messages and mentions.
You can set up an RSS feed into your tweets so that even when you haven’t the time to tweet, something is going out for you.

The list is endless and I could fill another book but I think we have touched on the most of the important stuff here.

How does Twitter work with “The Image Attraction System”?

When you write a blog you announce it on Twitter, say something like: Great blog about Viral Marketing see http://www.patsutton.com you could shorten this link in Bitly.com if it’s too long.
People will then click through to your website and see you, your great profile and your product. Clever isn’t it?
You can also set up a welcome message through TweetLater directing them to your blog or product page or better still your profile.

Excerpt from “The Image Attraction System” by Pat Sutton

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