I want to tell you about a great Social Network, Pinterest, that is starting to get a lot of traction. In fact, Time Magazine named Pinterest one of the five best social media sites of 2011, along with Klout and Google-Plus. I can see why. It is downright addicting.

Pinterest is kind of a cross between the words Pin and Interest because what you do is “pin”  images of your favorite foods, clothes, places, designs, and everything else, to online boards that you create. When you find something of interest in a blog post, you can “pin” it to one of your boards. If you see something you like on Pinterest, that someone else has pinned, you can “repin” it.

Pinterest came into it’s own in the midwest by women planning weddings and doing crafts. They would use it to make wish lists of beautiful things. It spread from there. This past summer more men jumped in giving it a dose of Testosterone!

When you pin something, it is strongly encouraged that you find and credit the original source. I just heard from one of my peeps who writes a food blog that her peanut butter and jelly french toast photo was pinned on Pinterest and it resulted in her traffic zooming to over 6,000 hits in just one day.

Because it is newish, and does not have as big a community as a Facebook or You Tube, you have a much better chance of something going viral and bringing traffic to your site. It is also a great way for you to communicate your ideas to a designer. Whether organizing a wedding, renovation, or a website brand and design, share your Pinterest boards with your professional to easily communicate your look, feel, and ideas without the messy miscommunication words can have when translating design ideas.

You have to be careful when you go on Pinterest. Last Sunday, when I should have been writing the Just a Digital Minute, I got on Pinterest and two hours flew by. I had the feeling that someone needed to stop me. “Step away from the computer, Judi.”

The images that are presented to you when you go to Pinterest are somewhat determined by the people you follow.You can start by following me and other people you may know but don’t stop there. Check out the boards of people who pins you like and you will most likely find you love everything they do.  But do it at your own risk, and don’t say I didn’t warn you!

I am very excited about the new product MailChimp acquired called, Tiny Letter. It is a very, very simple e-mail newsletter program that is much needed by most of my tiny clients. My team spends a lot of time teaching our small business clients how to set up the whole newsletter sign-up and templates in MailChimp so that they can send out a newsletter. MailChimp does offer tutorials, but there are so many options that my clients don’t even know which tutorial to watch.

Most of my small business clients don’t need anything fancy. They are never going to do fancy internet marketing and A/B testing of their content. But they do need to get a newsletter out to their clients/customers every so often with a great offer or an upcoming event. Love the Chimp, but MailChimp is pretty overwhelming for the very new blogger or small biz owner who is struggling just to get up to speed on their website and all that comes with that.

MailChimp is so smart. The Chimp knew this. Because they are free, people wanted to use them, but then some people were fussing that it was too much to learn and MailChimp didn’t have a stripped down version. They give away their Enterprise level program for free to people with lists less than 2,000. But what to do for the Mom and Pop shops? They bought Tiny Letter to give people for free!

A lot of people that should send out a newsletter, don’t. They might even have a sign-up form on their websites but still never send an e-mail to their subscribers. Or then there are those people that send out an e-mail blast to their entire Gmail contact list, 200 at a time (that’s Gmail’s limit). Most of the time you see everyone’s e-mail since they were not respectful of privacy and didn’t blind copy the names. Now Tiny Letter is a very easy solution to getting that e-mail blast sent out the right way. Here is how:

Go to TinyLetter.com and you come right to the “get an account” page.

Get your account and then you come to a clean screen with a limited number of options: Write a Newsletter, Read Your Replies, Old Newsletters, Meet Your Subscribers, Import e-mail addresses, Get subscribe link and embed code, Welcome Message to New Subscribers, and Design and Settings. That’s it.

You can enter up to 25 e-mails a day and it will send them a confirmation message with an unsubscribe link. Just like any e-mail newsletter company, they will cancel your account if you get too many spam complaints. You can’t collect the subscribers name though. But, for most purposes, an e-mail is all you need.
The newsletter is a plain text newsletter, but it will allow you to create hyperlinks and upload images.

What are you waiting for? Start getting your contacts entered into the system (25 a day) and get your first newsletter ready to go. You now have no excuse!

The tip today solves a terribly annoying problem, how to input the information from all those business cards into your contact on your phone/computer. Business cards are still the most practical way of exchanging contact information in real life and yet we want that information to be available at our finger tips from our phones and computers. After a networking event, most of us have a hard time making ourselves enter in all the data from the cards we collected, much less, follow up with people we have met.

There is now a fantastic and fun solution. CardMunch is a free iPhone app (Blackberry and Android versions to be coming soon) that will process your business cards in a matter of minutes. Just hold your phone over a card. When you see the card information come into focus, tap the screen and it will take a photo of the card and send it to be transcribed, right into your contact list. You will see the the image of the card photo as well as all of the relevant contact information in the appropriate fields in your contact list.

How does it get it right? Instead of using an optical scanning service, CardMunch uses a real humans to transcribe each business card and verify the accuracy of the transcription before returning them to your mobile phone as a contact. You can imagine that process sounds a bit spendy and in fact, Card Munch use to cost 2.99 for the app and 25 cents for each entered card, but a year ago, in a genius move, LinkedIn bought CardMunch and now offers it at no charge. This brilliant acquisition also allows us to have instant easy access to our contacts’ full LinkedIn profile information. And do you want some icing on that cake? With a tap of a button you can send the contact an e-mail or an invitation to connect via LinkedIn. How great is that?

PROTECT IP / SOPA Breaks The Internet from Fight for the Future on Vimeo.

Tell Congress not to censor the internet NOW! – http://www.fightforthefuture.org/pipa

PROTECT-IP is a bill that has been introduced in the Senate and the House and is moving quickly through Congress. It gives the government and corporations the ability to censor the net, in the name of protecting “creativity”. The law would let the government or corporations censor entire sites– they just have to convince a judge that the site is “dedicated to copyright infringement.”

The government has already wrongly shut down sites without any recourse to the site owner. Under this bill, sharing a video with anything copyrighted in it, or what sites like Youtube and Twitter do, would be considered illegal behavior according to this bill.

According to the Congressional Budget Office, this bill would cost us $47 million tax dollars a year — that’s for a fix that won’t work, disrupts the internet, stifles innovation, shuts out diverse voices, and censors the internet. This bill is bad for creativity and does not protect your rights.

Here are the slides from my presentation at WordPress Birmingham last weekend. I am also going to be doing it again at WordCamp Atlanta in a couple of weeks. I will also try and add the video after we get it processed.

The other night I was at a party and some friends were complaining about some Facebook apps that post things on yours and your friend’s Facebook sites without your exact permission. It is enough to drive a person crazy. But not to worry. You can take care of it through your privacy settings so that you don’t annoy everyone.

Log-in to your Facebook account and go to your profile. There is a blue bar at the top of the page. Your profile photo and name is on the right hand side of the bar and to the left of that you will see the word home. Click “Home” to get a drop-down menu and select “Privacy Settings”.

One of the selections on the page is called “Apps and Websites” If you select the option to “Edit Settings” you can control what gets shared by your games and apps.

Find the option, “Apps You Use” and select “Edit Settings”. This will show all of the apps you have installed over your years of being on Facebook.

First, you may want to go through rather long list and remove any apps or games you no longer use. Now is the time to get rid of Farmville. Just click the x by the app or game and verify that you want to remove it. Gone!

Then you can go through and change settings on the other offenders. Take Spotify, for example. If you do not want Spotify to notify people of the songs that you are listening to, select “Edit” and when your selections come up, change “Who can see posts and activity from this app on Facebook?” to “Only Me”

Another thing that you want to look at is the setting that says, This app can: One of the choices is: “Post to Facebook as me”. This setting allows the app permission to post status messages, notes, photos and videos on your behalf, unless you remove that ability from the app by clicking “Remove” next to that option.

Now don’t go all crazy with this. There are some apps that you want to give permission to post for you. I use Hootsuite to post status updates and if I remove that option for Hootsuite to post for me, I would not get my status updates published.

I hope you just take a minute and clean up your privacy settings. It doesn’t take long and it can get rid of those pesky irritating issues you have been putting up with for too long.

Are you ready to get started with a WordPress Website but it still seems a bit daunting? In this webinar, I start at the beginning and talk about all the things you need to do to get a WordPress website started. We will go over the very basic elements, such as how to get a domain name for your site and how to choose a hosting account and exactly what you need to ask for. I will show you a simple WordPress install method and show you what settings you must know how to configure properly.

Whether you are going to create your own site or have someone help you, it is good to be informed. I work with people new to WordPress everyday. If you are a beginner, I know what you want to know and I am going to dish it up!

Be sure to sign up for my Just a Digital Minute which comes out every Wednesday with tips to grow your business with WordPress and Social Media! The signup form is in the sidebar to the right!

If you need a hosting account, I recommend Bluehost. If you click here to get it I do get compensated, but I swear I would do it for nothing! They are great to work with; answer their phones right away and answer all of my support questions.

Time is a funny thing. The past year flew by so fast that I had to stop and think a minute before I could actually believe that New Tricks is now three years old this month.  What a lot has happened in such a short time.

I work with a lot of people who are making big changes in their lives and their businesses. Some are farther along than others. It is always easy to compare your insides with other people’s outsides and not realize what they went through to get where they are today.

I can remember being the couple of years before I started New Tricks. Real Estate development was at a standstill. I saw the writing on the wall and I didn’t want to build anything else I had to sell.( see some of my projects).  I was doing some fun renovations, but that was precarious given that it was the beginning of 2009 and the recession had just hit the fan. So there I was blogging and kind of trying out a lot of different ideas and wondering what exactly I was going to do next.

In my spare time, I did some websites for friends and spent a lot of time in my neighborhood coffee shop talking about websites, blogging and online business. People would over hear us talking and ask for my card. I didn’t have a business card or a business!

But this kept happening and I started to do some sites for people who weren’t friends and family and certainly had no idea at all I would have a web design company. I fell into this business by following my passion.

Lest that sound easy, I will tell you the truth. It was a bit daunting. I was afraid I couldn’t/wouldn’t be able to do it. That first year, I was up many nights until 3 AM, learning as much as I could about doing WordPress sites for other people. I think I was making about 3 dollars an hour, but that was okay. It was like school for me. They say if you do anything for 10,000 hours you will become an expert on it. I certainly put in at least that much time.

It boggles my mind about what can be achieved by putting one foot in front of the other and do it even if you don’t know how it is going to turn out. I did not have any idea that in three short years, I would have a thriving business supporting me and my team and be the co-organizer of one of the largest WordPress Meetup groups in the country, with over 900 members.

If there are things you love to do or have been thinking about doing, this is the time to go ahead and start now.  Although I always say,  “It’s never too late”, it is preferable to go ahead and get going – now.  I’m telling you, it doesn’t become any easier when your stand at the edge of something you care about and don’t go for it. Go ahead. Take the steps and see where they take you. You might be surprised.

Here’s to a great 2012!

All my love,

Judi

Quote by April Greiman Poster, Poster via Conran & Partner

I am a fanatic about having a WordPress website as the hub of your social media marketing efforts. But, just having a site is not enough to attract clients. You must craft a message on your website that targets  and converts the exact people that you want to reach.

Some people are afraid to stake a claim for one group of clients for fear that they won’t have enough business if they limit themselves. But, if your try to go after your whole market you will have to water down who you are and what you write  about so much that it won’t attract anyone. You will just blend right in with the other blah, blah, blah type websites.

Now is the time to step up and stake a claim for who you are and what you want your business to be.

Be yourself.

Let it show in your messaging and your blog posts. Do that and you will be going after and getting the business that you want.

Starting the new year is a great time to get some clarity about what you are doing and who you’d like to do it for. Try this exercise to hone your marketing message and creating or improving your elevator pitch by writing on each of the the headings below. When I do marketing coaching groups,  I am always astounded at how bad people are at briefly explaining what they do. And these people never stake a claim for who they want to do it for. And if they do know their ideal client they aren’t communicating that very well to their referral sources or on their websites. Now is the time to change that by doing this exercise and then making changes to your site based upon the results!

My ideal client (describe in a lot of detail):

My target market (list and describe):

Write an Introduction:

• Who are you?

• What do you do?

• Who are your clients?

Shorten this introduction (synthesize the above into a 30 second blurb that you can easily say and “own”):

My Example

See my example below where I did this exercise and then took my ideas about my ideal client and reworked them into a message on my website indicating who could benefit most from my services. I can tell you that by doing this I have been able to attract my exact clientele.

My Ideal Client:

1. Is starting a business he/she is serious about and has been successful in other ventures.

2. Has an existing business and understands the value of a more professional website with current technology.

3. Wants to work with a company that brings business and marketing experience to the design process.

4. Knows about WordPress and the value of a Content Management Website.

5. Needs help creating his/her brand, logo and overall website layout and design.

6. Is an interesting person and is fun to work with.

7. Respects the value of my time and work.

My Target Markets:

•  Individuals starting businesses or blogs after leaving corporate positions

• Women who are getting back in the workforce or starting businesses after raising their children.

• New and established entrepreneurs.

• Small businesses and entrepreneurs that want to project a top notch image with their brand and website, both in design and usability.
• People that try to create their own WordPress websites and find out they don’t have the skills to do it fast enough or create the polished design they want.

My Introduction:

1. Who are you? My name is Judi Knight. I am a business coach, web-designer, artist and entrepreneur. My company is called New Tricks and our motto is, “It’s never too late”. . .to start a new business, a new website or a new life.

2. What do you do? I help small businesses create an amazing online presence that resonates with who they are and gives them a voice to the world. I am passionate about teaching entrepreneurs to manage their own sites and use social media tools to create a client base who knows, likes and trusts them in order to grow their businesses.

3. Who are your clients? My clients are small business owners, both new and established, who need to create or improve their online presence using the latest web technologies that they can then maintain themselves. My ideal client understands the value of a polished, search engine optimized, web presence tied into social media tools and wants to be able to work on it themselves but realizes the benefit of having an expert who understands business, design and marketing to set it up and teach them to use it.

My Short Introduction( elevator pitch):

My name is Judi Knight and my company is New Tricks.

I am a business coach, web designer, artist and entrepreneur. I help small businesses create a branded, online presence with WordPress and teach them to use social media to grow their businesses.

Now it’s your turn!

Do the exercise and introduce yourself in the comments!

Most of you know, I am a big proponent for getting yourself a WordPress website. If you have a business, it is essential to have a place of your own, where people can find out exactly what you do and why they should work with you. If you don’t have a job, but are looking, then it can be a great way to set yourself apart from your competition and showcase who you are and what you do in a way a resume can never do. But if you haven’t got a web presence yet or, if you do, but want to have another place online to put your profile out there so that you or your business comes up in a Google search, check out About dot me.

About.me lets you quickly build simple and visually elegant splash pages that point visitors to your content from around the web. It is an easy and free way to have a web presence, where people can find you or your business and where to connect with you on various social media sites. If you already have a website, it is still a nice thing to have because it can come up in a Google search and connect with a link back to your website. Take a look at my About.me profile and then give it a try yourself.

About.me provides an easy interface with several templates and examples to help you with ideas. Upload a background and a photo, write your bio, add your social media sites and you are good to go. I’d love to see what you come up with!