Networking for Moms

As an Internet based entrepreneur we have various choices and opportunities that many women working outside the home unfortunately don’t have. We can work around our children’s schedules. We can choose to garden in the morning and do business tasks at night. We can arrange to exercise in the afternoon, in the middle week without checking with anyone other than our own date book.

While this flexibility is wonderful, there is one aspect of working at home that can be a challenge for some and that is the issue of isolation.

When we’re knee deep in an engaging project and have the need to run an idea by someone close by who understands our work, that person simply isn’t there. So many people need that peer interaction to keep sharp, inspired and current in their field.

I know this is an issue because that’s part of the reason you’re here and why Internet Based Moms has been so popular for more than 7 years. Internet Based Moms hosts one of the Internet’s best tools for online interaction the discussion forum.

We have dozens of topics and an active membership who everyday discuss issues and ideas that are relevant to work at home entrepreneurs just like you.

If you’ve got a marketing idea or question or a client problem or opportunity that you’d love to discuss with someone, you need only post it in one of our discussion rooms and another member, Internet Based Moms staff or myself will gladly address your question or comment.

New social media tools like Twitter and Facebook also provide an opportunity for solo-entrepreneurs to connect with like minded individuals. Twitter and Facebook don’t necessarily provide a comprehensive and supportive network that a mentorship group like Internet Based Moms offers, but these tools still offer almost instant responses to questions or ideas.

Of course a fast and furious exchange on Twitter might not be nearly enough for a new business owner looking for detailed answers. That’s why participating in a mix of networking groups can be your best bet, as long you have a home base where you can find trusted information and real peers that know you and your business.

We’re happy to be your home base. Visit Internet Based Moms’ Discussion Boards regularly to establish yourself and to meet peers that can become part of your trusted business and social network on the web.

Stop The Snooping On Your Web Site

Depending on the configuration of your web server, on some, when you create a new folder and neglect to put a file named index.html or index.php, anyone going to the URL of that folder can see all the contents inside. This screen shot should give you an idea.

Look familiar? Chances are you’ve come across something like that on some sites. As you can see, the files inside the directory are exposed and by clicking the Parent Directory link, people can check out the other directories on your site especially if the next directory up doesn’t happen to have an index file either.

One way to stop that is to simply create an strongindex/strong file. You don’t have to add content to it just create a file, name it index.html so now people will see a blank page when they go to that URL. But what if you have tons of folders and folders inside of folders and you don’t know which of them are exposed?

Relax. You don’t have to go through them all individually. Drop the following code into the .htaccess file inside the public_html or www folder. If there is no .htaccess file just create it and paste the code inside.

span style=”color:#008000;”code# Disable directory browsing
Options All -Indexes/code/span

Why I work from home…

Because we can go to the park during “office hours”

No boss to well… boss me around

I can go into the garden and smell the roses whenever I like

Office politics only involves who gets the comfy chair (me or the dog)

Gazing endlessly out of the window is considered creative not slacking off

For that funny look people always give me when I say I work from home

Because working in stripey socks versus heels is pretty cool

Because my kids think I’m just “mama” and that’s okay with me

For all the school trips, bake sales and school performances I have the privilage of attending

Because I can bake muffins, write a rocking sales letter AND still have time to smell the roses

Because I like confusing people with the terms “copywriting” and “internet business”

Because I can sing out loud and not get fired

Just a few reasons why I work from home… so why do YOU work from home?

Put Some Bounce into Your Revenue with Spring Strategies

With the hot summer months and vacations ahead, it can be easy to feel a little distracted during these sweet Spring days. Yet during this quarter, as with every quarter it remains important for us to hit our marketing and revenue goals.

So as much as spring fever, gardening, soccer games and surfing the web for affordable vacation ideas can be okay in moderation. Too much of these kinds of activities, however, can throw you off of your business marketing plan.

On top of these distractions, there are also so many new marketing opportunities and strategies to help small business owners like us, that it can feel somewhat overwhelming. Feeling overwhelmed can sometimes lead to inaction.

We all know inaction is not an option so let’s look at a few major aspects of your business marketing strategy to help determine how best to break down work into bite sized chunks of activities that actually get done and not deferred.

Social Media

Social media networks like Twitter and Facebook make the news everyday. If you’re in business online, you really can’t afford to ignore social media. If you’re unfamiliar with social media networks, not to worry we have a new tutorial on Internet Based Momsyou can access here.

Rule of thumb: choose the networks where you’ll find the largest audience in your target group. Don’t choose too many social media networks and tools. Remember social media is only good for your business if you control it. Don’t let it eat into all aspects of your work-day. For example, let’s say your selection of effective social media networks for your business includes Internet Based Moms, Twitter and Facebook. Dedicate a set amount of time to those venues and monitor your activities so that you’re either learning, networking or promoting at all times.

Blogging

If you have a blog on your business website or you have a separate blog that supports your marketing goals, make sure to blog frequently. Blogging helps to promote your business to a wider audience and gives you an opportunity to express your opinions and expertise.

It won’t always be enough to think about blogging frequently. Blogging is one of those tasks that can be so easily deferred during a busy day. The thought of having to come up with a topic is often all it takes to put off blogging all together.

Instead, it might be more effective to set up in advance a schedule of topics and ideas that you can use to help you blog every day or at least 3 times a week. The more you blog the more successful you will be at establishing yourself as an expert in your field and at establishing higher placement in search engine results.

Promotions

Have you noticed how many more online conferences and webinars there are today? Do you know that these events offer great and often affordable advertising opportunities?

As a conference sponsor or advertiser you get a captive audience that has chosen to attend this event. That’s an ideal environment to either promote your product/service in a static ad or live sponsor demonstration or presentation (if offered by the conference producer).

Research conferences that reach out to your target group and ask about sponsorship/advertising opportunities. If you’ve earmarked dollars for promotions and advertising, here’s a great way to spend it.

Start focusing on social media networking, blogging and advertising over the next little while and see if that helps you to get a better handle on your marketing strategy during this lovely time of year.

To your success,

Mila Sidman

Free Social Networking Tutorial

Hi, we have a new free social networking tutorial for you here – Social Networking Tips and Help

And our April newsletter is packed full of social networking tips – Marketing Newsletter Social Networking

Enjoy!

10 Secrets to Repurposing Your Content Part Four

Content repurposing is more than a way to fill in the gaps when you’re on vacation or when you’re struggling to come up with original content. Repurposing your content makes good financial sense too. In past posts in this series, we’ve discussed repurposing books, reports and articles – all fairly obvious content to repurpose. However, one area which you may be overlooking and which can provide powerful and compelling content are ecourses and client communication or FAQ’s.

Let’s take a look at both and explore your options.

Ecourses

If you have an online course or two in your content catalog, either as a product you sell or a giveaway, bonus or lead generator, that online course can be paired down to create snappy and information dense autoresponders.

For example, if your online course has 10 lessons, you can pull three of the most useful lessons out, whittle them down to a paragraph or two, and create an autoresponder series. If the course is a product you??re selling then the autoresponder can be a great way to motivate a purchase. You can also use this autoresponder to promote other items in your product or service catalog or to promote other items, for example if you’re an affiliate marketer.

Your repurposed ecourse also makes for a great lead generator.

Frequently Asked Questions

Whether you’ve been in business for a month or ten years, chances are you’ve been asked questions about your business. They may be questions you get from people on the street who learn about you and your business or questions you receive from your customers. These questions, and more importantly your answers, make great content material. Grab those old email responses and repurpose them into content.

Format them as a Q&A piece or pull apart the important points in your response, add an attention-grabbing headline and voila, you have a great article or blog post. If you receive a number of compelling questions you can gather them together, along with your compelling answers, and create a short report, for example "The Top Ten Questions People Ask about _________."

The great thing about repurposing content is it only takes a few minutes to pull things together and polish it into quality fresh content and it’s an easy task to outsource!

Next time we’ll wrap this series up by talking about repurposing blog posts and PLR content.

Happy writing!

Is Fear Stifling Your Content?

I receive a lot of questions from people interested in entering the freelance writing world and I’ve noticed that one thing holds all of them back – fear. It got me to thinking, and blogging, about how this emotion, which we all deal with at one time or another, affects internet marketers and the content they write. I’d like to take a look at a few ways fear can hold you back from connecting with your audience and from making money.

Fear Can Make Your Content Dreadfully Dull.

When you write , we’re talking about articles, blog posts, and even ebooks and reports, do you write without fear of being judged? Do you write without fear of stepping on a few toes, of stirring up controversy, of being perceived a certain way? Many people write their content with a great amount of restraint and unfortunately their content lacks enthusiasm, passion and to be quite blunt, it’s not interesting.

If this rings true for you, if you feel as if you’re holding back when you write, because you fear being judged or angering people, consider taking a leap of faith. Write about something you’ve always wanted to write about, don’t hold back, and then publish it. It can be a liberating experience. And you’ll likely attract some new attention to your website.

Fear Can Make Your Sales Content Ineffective.

Many business owners struggle with writing their sales content. They strive to cover all the bases, the emotional triggers, the benefits, the testimonials and so on, while at the same time they fear sounding too boastful, too salesy, too cliche and so on. However, what happens when you let fear rule your writing is you end up focusing on the wrong things.

The Poopy First Draft

One of the most powerful ways to overcome fear whether you’re writing sales copy or content, is to sit down at your computer or notebook and commit to writing a first draft. Not just any ol first draft, but what you will gratefully accept as a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad first draft.

In our house we call it the "poopy first draft" because my daughters used to sit at the computer for hours writing and editing their book reports. They put so much pressure on themselves for it to be perfect it took twice as long as it should and sometimes they weren’t very good.However when they write their poopy first draft, spelling and grammar check takes care of the editing and a few contextual revisions usually brings their report together quite nicely

When you eliminate judgment from your writing it frees you to write without fear. When you write without fear, you accomplish your writing goals much more eloquently and efficiently.

Your audience is able to connect with you on a very personal and human level and your sales content will feel genuine and have more power to convert.

Do you let fear stifle your content and if so, how do you overcome it – share your stories!

Wolves In Sheeps’ Clothing

Just before April 1st, there was a lot of talk and news coverage about a computer worm called Conficker. If you’re using a PC you probably have heard warnings about it. Most of us are pretty savvy by now. We know we need a good antivirus and firewalls to keep our systems clean of such insidous software.

Before you download that free Antivirus, firewall or virus scanner, do you know if it is clean?

That’s right. Some antivirus, firewall programs and virus scanners are only pretending to be good for your computer but in reality they carry nasty worms, viruses and spyware themselves.

strongSolution:/strong
ulli
Don’t download and install protection programs that you or people you trust to know these things have strongnever/strong heard of.
If you know the program is legit and good, don’t download it from a site you’ve never heard of or looks suspicious. strongGet it straight from the company’s web site/strong itself.
If it came in an email – strongstay clea/strongr of it./li/ul

I’m Just Not That Into My Podcast

When a budding new podcaster comes to me for advice on preparing for their show, I encourage them to make a big list of potential show topics. If they can quickly list 50+ topics, they may just have a chance of making it through the first year without ‘podfading’ into silence.

If you can come up with 100+ that is even better.

We’ve all seen it happen. A new host has a great idea and launches their show with all kinds of vim and vigor – but just a couple of months later they’re struggling to come up with show topic and guest ideas. They thought they had endless ideas but the end came too soon ;)

Maybe they just need to do some creative brainstorming – or maybe they have realized they’re just not that into their show topic.

There’s nothing wrong with giving something a try and changing your mind later – but wouldn’t it be better to go in armed for success?

If you’re thinking about launching a new show – make that big list!

10 Web Developer Firefox Add-ons I Can’t Live Without

One of the reasons I’m a big fan of software and browsers like Firefox is because of plugins. Plugins make the browser truly my own. Because of my work in web development and design, there are plugins I use practically every hour of the working day. I counted 10 of them and they are:

1. ColorZilla – This allows me to quickly find matching or exact color codes from a client’s existing or desired design / logo. No guessing, no searching all over the stylesheet.
2. Firebug – How can I not use this? I practically live by this plugin and have recommended it to many people over and over. Don’t tear your hair out wondering which code controls a link in the style sheet or figuring out where the code for that box is located. Firebug will tell you exactly.
3. FireFTP – Although I use FileZilla to upload large packages, for quick uploads, FireFTP is so darn convenient.
4. Evernote – How does a note taking plugin make it into a web developer’s arsenal? Because that’s where I keep a bunch of code snippets. Instead of bookmarking, which I also do for bigger more comprehensive instructions, but quick and small code snippets are kept in Evernote. I used to keep them GoogleNotebook until they decided to pull the project.
5. IE Tab – Ah just when you perfect the design in Firefox someone tells you the site looks horrible on IE. IE Tab simply makes is easy to switch from Firefox to IE to do quick checks on the design.
6. ShowIP – What a fabulous plugin my fantastic web host recommended. It tells you the IP address of the web site you are currently on. While this may not be of use all the time, but it can be of immense value when you’re switching your hosts’. I use it to help me determine if a web site has resolved to the new host or not.
7. Split Browser – great for working on code, comparing a design on IE (on IE Tab) and Firefox or following a tutorial while you edit the code on the other side.
8. Web Developer – this has quite a few tools in it. Makes it so easy to validate HTML, CSS or your feeds. I love the View Generated Source – some sites try to hide their source code with crazy javascript. View Generated Source shows you the underlying source code – that’s right, forget hiding your source code. Oh I also love the ruler to help me quickly measure box and image sizes. Another thing I love about the tools in this plugin is the ability to display the form details. This means I don’t have to view source and dig around to find out where the form is being sent to, what are the field names and so on. Super handy.
9. Delicious – Uhuh. Remember those longer tutorials? That’s where I keep them so I can quickly jump back to them to refer when I need a refresher.
10. RoboForm – I confess. I don’t know the password to many web sites I log in to regularly. Why should I? RoboForm does it all for me plus its so much easier to when working with multiple clients.