Many of my clients come to me for help because they lack either the technical skills or the time required to create or maintain a website or a blog. Whether you handle these tasks yourself, or you choose to outsource them, there are a few basic terms and facts you should be familiar with.
The other day, someone asked me how he could get others to follow him on Twitter. That’s a question many of us have pondered, whether we’re just getting started on Twitter, are trying to grow our following, or are trying to figure out whether it would be worthwhile to use Twitter at all. Here are a few strategies that work, as well as a few that don’t.
Although I tend to focus a lot on the benefits of WordPress, a traditional HTML website can promote your organizing business equally well, if it is professionally designed, properly optimized for the search engines, and represents your business effectively. Otherwise, you may be wondering why your website is not generating the results you are looking for.
Scott Stratten (AKA @unmarketing) raised quite a stir last week when he compared advertising in the Yellow Pages to Aiming Your Company at the Bottom of the Barrel. I’ve been a fan of Scott’s work since I attended his teleclass on The 7 Deadly Website Sins for Professional Organizers in 2004, but I’d hate for you to rule out Yellow Pages advertising before looking at it from all angles.
As promised, I’m back today for the second part of the January Professional Organizers Blog Carnival. If you’re not familiar with this feature, it’s a monthly collection of blog posts submitted by our readers. On Monday, we read about Christmas, New Year’s Resolutions, and time management, and today we’re going to learn about a few other topics to help you and your business.
There’s something exciting about a new year: that blank calendar is just ripe with possibilities! Sometimes it’s fun to guess what will fill those calendar pages, but when it comes to marketing your business, it’s a good idea to have some type of plan. If one of your marketing strategies is blogging, advance planning can keep you from drawing a blank when it’s time to write a new post.
Blogging is an effective way to share information and show the world that you are an expert in your field. It can also be a lot of fun! On the other hand, when you spend hours researching, writing, and editing your posts, it can be discouraging if it doesn’t seem that anyone is reading it. Fortunately, Facebook has many different methods you can use to put your blog in front of potential readers.
There is a ton of information online, including this blog, to help you start or grow a professional organizing business, but spending time researching various topics and sifting through all the search results can be very time-consuming. Even if you have lots of time on your hands, if you don’t know that you need to learn about a particular subject, how can you even begin to explore it?
You’ve finally got your website updated and started blogging, and now everyone’s saying you need to be on Twitter! Monitoring your new followers, looking for people to follow, reading and responding to their tweets, and posting your own could easily take several hours per week! How on earth are you supposed to fit that into your already busy schedule?
As I mentioned in my last post, Do You Need a Blog, a Website, or Both?, one of the things that make blogs such powerful marketing tools is the fact that they allow readers to interact with you by commenting on what you’ve written. I personally click through to the blog or website of every organizer who comments here, and leave a comment for them whenever I can.
