Do you use gmail?  Have you seen the ads on the right hand side of your messages?  Did you know that you can set up your Google adwords account to show ads on the gmail network?

Internet Marketer, Ryan Deiss has found a HUGE backdoor into Google advertising (PPC)  that cuts costs by up to 90%
and boosts conversions up to ten times.

Watch this 13 minute video to see how you can get your ads appearing beside the gmail messages.

PS … Ryan’s offer is good only until midnight January 19th … so do this now!!

No related posts.

GET YOUR FREE CD NOW!

Jeff Mills is the King of Outsourcing and MY Personal Outsourcing Guru.  I met him last spring at a Internet Business Conference here in Vancouver. In addition to being an amazing resource, he is one of the NICEST people I’ve met.

I have transformed my business using Jeff’s tactics and information. I now have several teams of “worker bees” working for me while I sleep.  I wake up in the morning to find that all the work I assigned the night before is done.  I can’t tell you how fabulous that is.

It has taken my productivity and the efficiency of my business UP by over 500%   All my workers are experts at what they do, which has expanded the capabilities of my company.

Jeff’s Free Video Reveals the #1 Secret for Tripling your Time Off and Doubling Your Monthly Income by Working with Virtual Assistants & Outsourced Teams Who do ALL Your Internet Marketing & Money Generating Activities For You!

If you want just a little bit of that for yourself …  CLICK HERE Enter your name and email … then fill out the form. You will get the free CD (just pay a very reasonable shipping charge) AND a 30 day FREE trial of Jeff’s Outsourcing Program. This is the SAME program I belong to. You’ll get 30 days to kick it around and see if it is a fit for you!  In addition to that you will get all sorts of OTHER FREE goodies. Be sure to go and take a peek at everything Jeff is giving away.

If you want to GROW YOUR BUSINESS you are nuts if you don’t take advantage of this program.

Melanie

Get all your goodies here

Related posts:

1. You’ve GOT to Have a Business Card!
2. Blog Profit Camp
3. Finding Work By Focusing on Events

In order to establish a thriving Internet Business, you must use every channel available to you. This includes all the online channels, but it also includes the off-line world. Here are a few ways you can promote your on-line presence:

1.  Word of mouth promotion

2.  Brochures, off-line newsletters

3.  Business cards

4.  Direct mailing

5.  Business Networking

(1) Word of mouth promotion: Talk to your friends, families, and other people about your web site, they know you and hopefully  trust you! Let them know what you are doing and encourage them to visit your website and to tell others.  Make sure the people close to you know and understand what you are doing.

One day I had the opportunity to overhear my father tell an acquaintance what I did for a living.  My business had been in transition for several years and the way Dad described my business was years out of date.  It made me wonder how many other people in my life also had no idea what my business was about, or what I was marketing!

(2) Brochures, Flyers, leaflets … the intent is the same … describe your business in writing. Make it short and as simple as you can. Promote the benefits of doing business with you.  It seems crazy to have to remind you to make sure  you include your web site address and email in the flyers, but I’ve seen businesses spend good money on a full color brochure and then neglect to include all the important contact information.

I help one client produce a  “newsletter” four times a year.  The four page newsletter printed on a good quality glossy stock, is her “brochure.”  It contains a few interesting articles, some tidbits and of course, her promos and a strong call to action for her services.   She networks with about ten complimentary businesses and gives them a stack of newsletters for their reception rooms.   She is directly able to track new business that comes from the newsletters.

(3) BUSINESS CARDS: Make sure you have business cards that contain your web site and email addresses, give your business cards to the people you know or meet.

It’s interesting, people rarely throw away business cards!  I’ve kept business cards for up to five years and then have contacted the person when I needed their service.  I had someone keep MY business card for over 8 years … they turned into a fabulous client when their business changed focus and needed by services.

Business cards are CHEAP.  Give them out, don’t hoard them.  If you have networking partners you could have them display a stack of your cards. Think outside the box!  At a conference I attended, I had special cards printed … pointing people to my contest pages.  The conference organizers slipped these into everybody’s conference package for a token price.  (They NEED stuff for their packages).    Check out MOO CARDS, they are very, very cool.

(4) DIRECT MAILING: Don’t forget real mail.  Send out brochures or newsletters to targeted lists. Experiment with post cards or small booklets. Though this doesn’t quite quality as “direct mail” … put three or four business cards into EVERY envelope you mail out.  Check out my LUMPY MAIL article for great ideas on getting your mail opened!

(5) NET-WORKING: Those of us who run Internet related businesses often find ourselves sitting in front of the computer day after day.  We can forget that there are real live people wandering about in the world … who aren’t on the Internet 24×7!  Net-working with real live people is a great  way of building your business, and getting out from infront of your computer screen for a few hours.

Personally I find this difficult. I’d MUCH rather be in front of my computer screen and on the phone.  However, I make myself go to at least a few meetings a month.  I found a Dan Kennedy business group that was interesting and very low pressure. People went for the information … they also networked, but it was easy because people talked about the information being presented and didn’t try to “sell” themselves.   Surprizing to me, I have  several long-term customers resulting from the relationships I developed.  It didn’t happen overnight, but considering the actual time I put into it, it is actually quite magical.

Successful marketing is the result of taking many different steps consistently.

Melanie Rockett

RESOURCES

Referral Marketing:  Top International Marketing Expert Reveals Professional Secrets On How to Dramatically Increase Your Referral Business and Get More Customers, Sales & Profit.

How to Get Your first REAL Copywriting Client … in 14 days or less!

Let Your Fingers Do the Talking : Using Word of Mouth Advertising on the Internet

Make Your Contacts Count: Networking Know-how for Business And Career Success

Related posts:

1. You’ve GOT to Have a Business Card!
2. Two of the Most Powerful Ways to Market Your Copywriting Services
3. Marketing Your Services With Lumpy Mail

I’m trying not to get too OVER THE TOP about MOO CARDS.  So instead of telling you how wonderful I think they are I’m going to show you.

Business Cards: In ONE pack of 50 business cards you can have 50 different images.  Did I say FIFTY DIFFERENT images? Yes!

Mini-Cards: Use up to 100 images or photos in a package of 100 mini-cards.

If you have a business, imagine the possibilities for yourself. If you are a photographer or a designer, imagine the great value added service you can offer your clients. WOW them … they won’t believe it!

Mini-cards, Business Cards, Post Cards, Greeting cards. Think about how you can use them all to market your business or to sell value added services to your customers.

Moo Cards.  It’s EASY!

Related posts:

1. 15 Tips on Selling Your Photos
2. How to Reach Your Targeted Audience Offline
3. You’ve GOT to Have a Business Card!

GETTING WORK: Local, Regional and National Events

Some freelancers are always wondering where the next contract is coming from.

Market smart freelancers are constantly looking ahead and making sure their marketing machine is working for them, far in advance.

There is a constant stream of local, regional and national events that freelancers can tap into. These events may be one-time occasions, or regularly scheduled annual occurrences. They all bear looking at for potential freelance work.

Living here in Vancouver, BC Canada, what immediately comes to mind is the 2010 Winter Olympics. Now I know that some of you are saying “2010! That’s a whole year from now.” In reality, it is only 12 short months from now. Think about the timetable and at what must, and will happen in that time.

**UPDATE:  The Vancouver Olympics have come and gone … but the same concepts apply to the upcoming London Summer Olympics 2012.

The media will move into place in 2009, a full year in advance. The athletes’ village is in the process of being built. The event venues must be designed and constructed. Millions of dollars will be spent on planning an event that will have hundreds of thousands of visitors pouring into the city. Hundreds of new Olympic focused businesses will start up. This means tens of thousands of documents, illustrations and photographs. Hundreds of new websites. The work is now at a breakneck pace.

If you think further afield, you will realize that the Olympics is a world wide event, that happens to take place in Vancouver.  Teams from each country will have their own infrastructure, their own information base. Magazines, newspapers in each country will run articles about the Olympics, and about Vancouver years in advance. How many different languages will be represented? If you are multi-lingual, the opportunities expand even more.

The Olympics is just one event, albeit a BIG worldwide event. Closer to home you will find dozens of other kinds of events that require the services of freelance writers, photographers, illustrators, website designers and programmers.

Locally you will find fundraiser events of all types and sizes. In cities and towns across North America, Europe and Australia hundreds of thousands of people participate in hundreds of walk/run/bicycle type fund-raisers. There are summer and winter festivals, multicultural awareness events, theater and performing arts events and film festivals, some of which take place over a period of weeks, not just hours or days!

Regionally, you will have the statewide or province-wide events. These could include birthday or anniversary celebrations. Governments often have large budgets for these celebrations and make sure that even the smallest communities are somehow included.

In North America, national events include celebrations such as the 1st (Canada) or 4th (US) of July and Labor Day. National observances include the upcoming Remembrance Day (Canada) or Veteran’s Day (US).

All of these events generate potential work for freelancers  press releases (someone writes them), pamphlets, brochures, websites, articles. And yes, I know that some of this is done by volunteers! We’ll talk about YOU being one of the volunteers in Part Three of this series on Events.

Take a peek at this Remembrance Day site created by the Canadian Federal Government. Someone got paid to research and write the information. Someone got paid to write, design and create these WebPages.
And here’s a site developed by the US Department of Veterans Affairs http://www.appc1.va.gov/vetsday/

In order to tap into the freelance contracts generated by Events, you have to do your research months or even years in advance.

Here are some places to get started:

• the local chamber of commerce
• convention bureau
• city, regional and province/state tourism boards
• city, provincial and national government websites and publications (who develops, writes, designs these websites?)
• check historical records to find annual, semiannual events — the local newspapers (daily and weekly)
• press announcement lists or websites
• an Internet search using Google,  or your favorite search engine

Just out of curiosity I decided to do a Google.com search on Vancouver events. Within less then 30 seconds, I found an up-to-date list of over a hundred Vancouver events that will take place within the next six months. Not all of them will have work for freelancers but some of them will!

Another source of event related work is though the various event coordinating companies. These companies are often hired to oversee, promote and run an event. Find out which companies operate in your area. Get to know them. Make working with them one of your goals, even if it takes years! The contracts and exposure you get will be well worth it!

Research is only the first step of many. Next you must tap into your network, contact, call and meet with your potential clients … and of course — get the business.

Developing business in the events marketplace can be very rewarding personally. Get on the team, tap into the synergy, and become part of something exciting and meaningful.

In the next segment on Getting Work, I will look at how to get work from “late breaking news” types of events.

~~

The author, Melanie Rockett, is a Search Marketing Consultant who works with freelance writers and photographers who are struggling to attract more clients and increase revenues in their businesses.

RESOURCES:

Robert Middleton’s ACTION PLAN MARKETING has some of the best marketing information for small one person businesses. The material is affordable and will make a difference to your bottom line!

Related posts:

1. Two of the Most Powerful Ways to Market Your Copywriting Services
2. Blog Profit Camp
3. Outsourcing and Virtual Assistants

This Business Card Actually Sprouts!

I met this young guy the other day … turns out he was an Internet marketer.  Part way through the conversation I asked for his business card. He stood there and for five minutes told me why Internet marketers didn’t NEED business cards. The main gist was that because Internet marketers were on the Internet (duh) they didn’t need to market in the real world.

Now how stupid is that? How was I supposed to find his website?  How was I supposed to contact him just in case I wanted to promote him. Turns out I don’t.  And if I did?  Well I guess, somehow I’m supposed to remember his website, or even his name and find him.  I don’t think I want to.

The bottom line?  Don’t be STUPID.  You’ve GOT to Have a Business Card.   Crikey you can get 100 free cards from Overnight Prints!

Here is an amazing display of THE most creative business cards you’ve ever seen from the good folks at CreativeBits.  I’m not sure where I’d file the cloths pin in my rolodex (yes  I DID say rolodex … another post).  I DO love the sprouting card, but I’m not sure I want this in my rolodex either!

There’s a page two … so be sure to look at these too.  Then go out and GET a business card.

Melanie

Related posts:

1. Photography Business – Build Your Photography Business Through Referrals
2. Best Business Practices for Photographers
3. How to Reach Your Targeted Audience Offline

Roy A. Barnes sent me the following article to consider.  Roy first approached me to see if I was interested in articles for the newsletter and website. The first thing I noticed was his email name travelwriteroy so I answered him and told him I wasn’t interested in articles about travel, but would be interested in articles about travel writing or about the business of writing. He immediately emailed me back with the perfect submission!

As you read the following article, understand that your email name IS very important.  I’ve been really “put off” by people who are “professionals” and use very unprofessional email names.   Dragonlady just about perfectly summed up my feelings about one acquaintance.  Sillyslurp perfectly fit what would have been my own description of another.  I know that people chose these names because they thought they were funny, or because they thought they fit, but why on earth would you carry this into a working relationship? Just as the clothing you wear sets a expectation, so does the email name you use.  If the Sillyslurp had not told me he was one, it may have taken me longer to realize it … then again, maybe not!

If you want a fun email name, go ahead and use it with your friends. Business is business.

Use your own name so people immediately know who they are getting email from; choose something they will remember,  or a name that tells something about what you do.

Same goes for the user name you use on forums, in twitter and other social media sites.  In twitter, I go by Rockett because I want people to find me personally and professionally.  In some of the forums I use ContestGuru … because that’s what I am!  All you have to do is read that name and you’ve got to figure out I am interested in contests … oh yeah, and the fact that ContestGuru is the name of one of my websites doesn’t hurt either!

Let Your Email Address Snag Some Paying Assignments! by Roy A. Barnes

Marketing ourselves as writers can be a very daunting and time-consuming task.  Think of the books, articles, and seminars which are in existence today that cater to just the marketing and promotion of books and for getting started in the field of promotional writing.  For writers who have yet to aspire to the creating of a full length book manuscript or to writing advertisement copy for small businesses and corporations, the concept of marketing oneself may seem a moot issue.  This way of  thinking can be very costly; that is, a number of potential published clips and subsequent visits to the pay windows of editors may not come to pass.

One of the best decisions I ever made concerning my fledgling writing career occurred in late 2004.  I made the decision to create a new email address from which I would submit the brunt of my queries and finished works to editors from, wherever online queries and submissions were allowed.  When I began getting more serious about my freelance writing during the summer of 2004, I submitted and queried from an email address that could be best described as cute, and not really business-like.  I realized that I needed to create an email address which would reflect what I was striving to do in my career.  So I picked “travelwriteroy”, because it alluded to the primary activities I was now engaging in to help pay the rent, utilities, and food bills; that is, traveling, and then writing about those travels when I wasn’t crafting poetry, personal experience essays, or articles on a variety of other subjects.

In December 2004, I submitted an article on constructive ways for writers to deal with rejection by editors to an online writing publication called The Fabulist Flash  (www.fabulistflash.com).  Gregory Kompes, the editor, didn’t wish to use my article in the near future, but he noticed my “travelwriteroy” email address.  He wanted to know if I was a travel writer, as he needed some articles on getting started in travel writing.  Well, I had just received my first pay check ever as a freelancer for a travel article by Transitions Abroad (www.transitionsabroad.com) on a piece I did about a unique volunteer holiday in Spain, which appeared in their March/April 2005 print edition, as well as online.  In addition, I had previous work experience in the travel agent and airline industries, which afforded me further opportunities to be able to travel on four continents in my lifetime.  I let Gregory know about my credentials.  He emailed me back asking me to send him an article.  It was accepted and published in the March 24, 2005 online issue of The Fabulist Flash.

Had it not been for my new email address, I strongly suspect that Mr. Kompes wouldn’t have even brought up the subject about travel writing when he passed on using my article about dealing with rejection.  My email address lets editors know that travel is a part of my writing forte, even if I am submitting a query or work that isn’t travel-related.

In addition to having a business-like email to submit queries and finished works from, listing some of our publication credits in different categories other than the category we are submitting to or querying about may lead to some unexpected surprises.  It’s because an editor is going to know more about the scope of the work we do as writers.  Email addresses and published clips can provide some free, indirect advertising which showcases a writer’s abilities to craft articles about a variety of subjects.  Don’t forgo those opportunities to, as my father used to say, “brag about yourself”.  If you have truly done something, it isn’t boasting!

BIOGRAPHY: Roy A. Barnes writes from southeastern Wyoming.  His travel-themed works have been featured in such publications as Transitions Abroad, GoNOMAD.com, Live Life Travel, and The Traveler, and Tampa Bay ParentGuide.  His articles on writing issues have appeared insuch onlline and print publications as The Busy Freelancer, The Willamette Writer, Writer2Writer, Writing for DOLLARS, FellowScript, and more.
Tell me about some of the crazy names you’ve seen used in business contexts … or about some really great ones.  Please only use the first part of the email name, for privacy and so that poor unsuspecting souls don’t get spamed to death!

RESOURCES:

Email: The Manual: Everything You Should Know About Email Etiquette, Policies and Legal Liability Before You Hit Send

Never Check E-Mail In the Morning: And Other Unexpected Strategies for Making Your Work Life Work

Send: Why People Email So Badly and How to Do It Better, Revised Edition

25 Ways to Write For Money

Related posts:

1. Make A Living With Travel Articles Part 1
2. Make A Living With Travel Articles Part 3
3. Make A Living With Travel Articles Part 2