We will cover the “social triad,” which is Facebook, Twitter, and Blogs.

Stay tuned for more information on this exciting new seminar. For those of you who are out of the local area, we will be recording this event for future posting on this blog.

Testing an idea could never be easier today. The most successful businesses today failed many times to get to a successful idea that no other business caught on to. The rest of us may think that business was lucky or was in the right place at the right time, the business owner had some kind of advantage over everyone else. The fact is that this business owner was not better than 100 per cent of every other business person out there. They simply took action and that action proved the idea worked or not. That business person simply tweaked the idea and made it better or just dropped it completely and went on to the next idea.

Starting and making a business very successful takes a lot of trial and error and Seth Godin tells us that is reality.

Blogs have morphed into many different ways of presenting offerings from businesses. About 8 years ago, blogs have started to resemble conventional websites and many people who visit these sites could not tell the difference between an HTML site or blog site.

Blogs have become the standard in large and complex websites now because of the ease of use and most importantly, the built in features of search engine optimized coding within them.

What you are reading here in this post is based on a WordPress blog platform. WordPress is the world’s most popular blogging platform with Google’s, Blogger not too far behind.

A great advantange that the WordPress blogging platform has is the amount of third party developers who make so many plugins for it. You can use a WordPress based blog to be a time management tool, use it as an online calendar, hold contests, picture gallery, sales page for your product or service, polls for voting for a favorite topic, immediate connect to Facebook pages, post advertisements, able to get people added to your email list, able to add audio and podcasts, and so much more.

There are thousands of plugins and enhancements available that you can turn your blog site into something completely different that won’t even look like a blog. Blog plugin developers show no stopping of making new and improved plugins for this platform.

So blogging will continue to be a strong medium to bring your message or your brand to as many people as you want. Remember to add blog postings as often as you can because every new change and new blog post will attract the attention of search engines.

For more information, you can go to: www.helpmybusiness.com

He states that we have seen the end of the industrial revolution. Although he doesn’t mention the information revolution, he does mention how valuable the small business person is to our economy here in the USA. He wrote a book called “Linchpin,” which he refers to the entrepreneur as the true element that can make the difference in jobs in America. We no longer are “cogs” in the wheel who takes instructions and works within a specific set of rules. We are now individuals who are indispensable to the success of the company. We think on our feet, defy the rules and dedicated to a successful outcome.

Today’s successful worker is one who takes chances, thinking outside of the box and is truly personally interested in other’s benefits.

More and more bloggers are getting creative with their blogs with unique promotions. Here are a few ideas for you to consider:

1. Have a contest
2. Have a drawing
3. Offer online discount coupons
4. Alerting blog visitors to come into the physical location for free gifts

It is one thing to get people to your blog, it is a totally different thing to get people to act on your offerings.

Be creative and make sure you follow up with any promotion you do on your blog. You should realize that your blog is more than just a “simple ole’ website” about your business. It is a total online marketing tool that you should think outside the box with in terms of marketing your business.

80% of your target audience uses the internet to find you and your business. Make it easy and interesting for a blog visitor to come back for more useful information and to get the chance to buy your product or service. Remember that the web surfer who found your business blog is interested in solving a problem that your product or service can render.

There are no set rules on how to blog. Once you get the hang of blogging, think of what you can do to further promote your business with it.

You are the publisher from now on that is responsible to make your customers aware of how valuable your product is to them.

Check out this very informative video he did regarding “The Law of Averages in Sales”

Many marketing experts may tell you simply to put an opt in box asking for a name and email address in exchange for some free report or gift, but the real way to build your list is to offer value that is so awesome that it makes it impossible for anyone to not come back.

Think for a moment of a great TV show that got your attention. Quite often, these successful TV series would have a “cliff hanger” at the end of an episode that perks your curiosity of wanting to know what will happen next if you tune in tomorrow for the next episode. Get the idea?

You need to be more creative in the process of what your blog can do to market to your target audience.

Yes, it is true to have an opt in box to gather names and email addresses, but more importantly, you need to show more than one reason why a first time visitor or even a repeat visitor should keep on coming back to your blog.

World renown marketer, Seth Godin has a great insight on what it means to be positive now for paving the way for a successful future.

One mistake that a lot of bloggers make is to write a blog post that is not valuable or not relevant to the topic of the blog.

“Content is king” as they say, and there is a lot of truth in that. I know that it can be a challenge to keep making posts on a daily basis and keep it interesting, engaging, and entertaining to your visitors. You may be asking yourselves, what is the best way to write content, then?

What has worked for us is to make an outline of all 12 months of the topics you want to talk about and stick to that plan. It shouldn’t take more than an hour to make up this outline. You can worry about the exact articles later. The main thing is to develop your list of topics. It can be recurring topics throughout the year. Some can be related to your customers needs or related to the seasons of the year. Tie some of your topics into the holidays too.

Once you decide on the topics to write about, start researching early online and you will get an unlimited amount of ideas that will get your creative juices flowing. You may want to assign one person in your company to dedicate a set amount of time each week to research each topic you have laid out to write about.

If you implement a system of the outline of topics, you will never run out of quality of content to add to your business blog.

Remember, you become a publisher the moment you start a blog. Blog visitors want to continue reading your blog if you provide, on a consistent basis, good high quality content that is helpful to them.

A great way to keep your viewer base is to offer valuable tips and tricks in your industry and niche. People love free advice and since they devour content on other sites, such as the news or sports or weather, you should make your blog part of a necessary read for their daily “fix!”

Your original business plan may have involved the money needed for the start up, searching and renting a good location, compiling your store fixtures, lining up an accountant, etc. Oh yes, and of course, you needed money to pay for an advertising blitz and having the mayor over for a ribbon cutting.

But most business people over look the power of planning out the complete promotion strategy. Who are your customers, where are they located, what kind of promotional message can you relay to them that would make them come inside your brick and mortar business? These and several other factors are things you should think about. Check out the video below.

Just under the header image of your blog is the navigation buttons. You want to design these buttons very carefully. If you have too much, like a “newspaper” type of format, there will be way too much choices for a visitor to make and they will tend to leave the blog page all together.  Make the blog look user friendly. It should have only navigation buttons that are most likely going to be used and practical.

Navigation buttons are there to get you to the home page, to help describe the purpose of your blog, to have a way to contact you, and to provide a way to show your services and products. If you have any more navigation buttons than that, you may be overloading your visitor with the many different ways to go with your blog.

Also, make sure that your blog has ways to tell your visitor how to contact you or more importantly, where your business is so they can personally visit your store. After all, you want to use blogs as a tool to help marketing your physical store front to new and repeat customers through your doors!

Check out the video below from well known video marketer Gideon Shalwick.

Also, there is a big debate whether email marketing can hold it’s own because people are tired of the tremendous amount of spam and scams that fill most of their inboxes.

Email marketing can be effective if you can close the loop of who participates in your email list. Because of federal laws regarding spamming, the CAN SPAM act of 2003, no one can legally send unsolicited email unless it is by the permission of the subscriber. It prohibits any email that does not have a truthful subject line and the email marketer has to provide a way to unsubscribe at any time.

Email marketing can be a very effective way of marketing to your target market if you can get subscribers the legitimate way.

In our next blog post, we will go over the best ways of starting a successful email marketing campaign.

In the meantime, tell us how you have effectively used email marketing in your business. Simply click on the comment button above this post.

What is most important is the blogging activity of people ages 34 to 45 year olds. This group has seen a rise in blogging activity over 6 percent.

What does this mean to your customer base online? Plenty! It means that most people who have stable lives, has disposable income, and are buyers of your service or product are still active in the online community.

Blogging may be passe’ to the younger crowd, because of the “distractions” of the iphone and video games, but your key target audience is still getting it and staying online to do their reading of the news, price comparisons, booking hotels or air flights, blogging and buying things.

Keep this in mind when you are making your next blog post. Knowing who is reading your blog can help you target your message with the right demographic.