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!
Do you hate the process of creating proposals? If you have a service-based business, make it easy on yourself and use Freshbooks to create detailed estimates (proposals) and invoices for your clients. Freshbooks does not take the place of an accounting program. We need to use a program, such as Quickbooks, to track our income and expenses for our businesses, but the invoicing system in Quickbooks is terribly cumbersome. Freshbooks is an online application that I use to create my project estimates, turn them into invoices and track the hours I spend on each client project.
You can log into Freshbooks from anywhere. When you create an estimate for a client, you can send it to them by e-mail. They can click the link, which takes them to Freshbooks to see their invoice. They can save it or print it out. If they are ready to proceed, they can accept it, which turns the estimate into an invoice. If you like, your client can pay their invoice by credit card using PayPal all from the Freshbooks invoice. [click to continue…]
I am so glad to be able to have Sarah Robinson speak at New Tricks on August 25. Brandon Sutton and I are sponsoring this event and we hope you can come (you can RSVP at the bottom of the page).
You know how when you start a business you struggle to find your place in it? (It’s kind of silly when you think about it. After all, it’s YOUR business.)
But, starting a business and making it work for you is a HUGE undertaking and it can be overwhelming. Getting clients, doing the work, invoicing, getting more clients….If you don’t have a clear definition of what you do and who you serve, you can feel like you’re on a hamster wheel—running in circles but not getting anywhere. You watch other business owners who seem to “have it all together” and know exactly what they’re about and who their market is. They make it look so easy don’t they?
Here’s the secret to success. Discover what you’re good at, what makes your heart sing and how you can mesh those into your business. Easier said than done, I know.
That’s where our friend, Sarah Robinson and her Creating Irresistible Presence Equation comes in.
Clarity + Confidence + Courage = Cash Flow
You won’t just magically wake up one day and know how to make your business run smoother and be the success you want for it.
You have to work to discover the secret formula trapped within you. Dig deep to uncover those secrets and bring them into the light.
We all have a powerful Presence that once we tap into it, will ignite our passion, creativity and even bank account in a way we’ve never seen before.
Wow! Can you believe that summertime is right around the corner?
The flowers are blooming, the weather is warming up and I know those days are coming when we would rather be sitting by the pool than in the office.
In fact. . . check this out, my New Tricks team has already started their warm weather work habits!
Yes things do tend to slow down in the summer, BUT, I once had a boss back in the day, when I was doing healthcare marketing, who said to me, [click to continue…]
A Facebook “Like Box” on your website is a great way to increase the number of people who “like” your Facebook Page (these instructions are for sharing your “Page,” not your personal “Profile” account) by allowing them do so right from your WordPress website. In this post, we have shown two options to get the “like” box on your site. One is a simple Facebook “like” box and the other a tabbed container for Facebook “likes,” Twitter feed and RSS combined.
Here are the steps for adding just a Like Box to your website. I am assuming that you already have a Facebook Page set up for your business or event. If you don’t have a WordPress site, the concept will be the same, but the directions to adding it to your site will different. [click to continue…]
As an entrepreneur with a small business to run, everything we can do to streamline our work flow leaves us more time to get the “real” work done. I am going to share with you an example of what I did to manage a big freelancer issue. I had begun to be inundated with requests from people to “pick my brain”. How to handle these requests was a conundrum for me. Some of them would turn into clients or referral sources, yet many others just needed a bit of advise or coaching on their ideas and, either would not be a fit for me, or the cost to do business with me (coaching, web design, or social media management) would be out of their budgets.
I tackled this issue by making it easy for someone to get an hour of my time, but they must fill out a form with some questions in advance and they must pay for the session beforehand. If they choose to work with me on an ongoing basis, I will deduct the cost of that hour from their proposal. This works great because offering this session allows people an affordable point of entry to work with me. And it encourages people to contact me who may need just an hour or two to talk out some issue they are having. When I actually created this offer on a page on my site, it began to work like a charm. This also helps me to put boundaries on my time. It is really easy for me to get carried away talking to someone about the things that I love. Now, I can easily refer a potential client who wants to talk about their project to the “Talk it Out” form on my website and have them schedule and pay for the time they need.
Creating this page was good for my business, but even better was “how” I did it. There are several tools that, when working together, made the whole process streamlined for me. [click to continue…]
The WordCamp Savannah is happening next weekend August 20-22, and it includes ME! I was already excited about taking the New Tricks Team to their first WordCamp experience. This will be my fourth WordCamp but the first one where I am a speaker. Here is the line up of speakers:
Speakers
WordCamp Savannah will bring together a variety of speakers including both visiting WordPress experts and local WordPress practitioners. We’ll be posting speaker bios shortly, but so far, here are some of the confirmed speakers:
- Matt Thomas, SCAD alumni and designer for Automattic.
- Caila Brown, SCAD Radio General Manager & District Print Art Director.
- Mark Jaquith, lead core developer of WordPress and independent consultant.
- Andrew Nacin, committing core developer of WordPress and Google Summer of Code participant.
- Jane Wells, user experience designer for WordPress.
- Daryl Koopersmith, contributing core developer of WordPress and Google Summer of Code participant.
- Ptah Dunbar, contributing core developer of WordPress.
- Sheri Bigelow, Happiness Engineer for wordpress.com.
- Anthony Bubel, Happiness Engineer for wordpress.com.
- Matt Mullenweg, co-founder and benevolent dictator for life of WordPress.
- Lisa Sabin-Wilson, author of WordPress for Dummies and BuddyPress for Dummies.
- Sara Cannon
- Dan Cannon
- Judi Knight ( Here is a link to the presentation)
I will be speaking on using Social Media Plugins that you can use on Websites to help you with using your site as the hub of your Social Media Marketing. In the meantime here are some things you can do to get your social media game rolling.
This is a smaller WordCamp and offers a chance to really have some face time with a lot of well known people in the WordPress Community and to meet and mingle with others. It is only 25.00. How can you lose?
Florist Website Design has been dominated by old school design of the on-line floral groups, FTD, TeleFlora and 1-800 Flowers. Now florist’s have a wonderful opportunity, with the new technologies available with social media and content management websites, to beat out their competitors in showcasing their finest work and specialties on-line. These technologies can be used to increase revenues from business activities they love to do, large parties and wedding for example and decrease their reliance upon the marketing provided by FTD, Telefora, 1-800 Flowers and other on-line ordering companies. With the new web tools and increased use of Internet, people can now easily Google a brick and mortar florist to order flowers from any city in the world. They can place their orders directly to a real person. This allows all of their budgeted money for an arrangement to go into their flowers and florist and delivery, cutting out the portion to the unnecessary broker. Check out this Business Week article, Is the Bloom off at FTD?.
In Atlanta, there are so many FTD, Teleflora and 1-800 Flowers sites and they all look essentially alike. The Florists Websites relying on these company templates have been lured in by easy and have become complacent maybe thinking a more personalized site would be too expensive or hard to maintain. Not now with WordPress Florist websites being able to be a regular business site with built in blogging ability all ready for Social Media Marketing Opportunities. Now you can post those professional photos your bride sent to you right on the site in a couple of minutes, showcasing the beautiful work that you did. The pictures of those roundy moundy’s from the Teleflora and such sites cannot compete with your being able to post beautiful examples of your favorite and more profitable work. Then you can send those posts out to Twitter and to FaceBook where more brides and event planners will be searching for options. Florists who use this new design and website technology have a huge advantage as their sites stand out from the crowd and are more personal representation of the shop and its unique qualities. People buy from people they Know, Like and Trust. These new Florist websites are able to build that in like a window into their shop.
New Tricks designed a WordPress website for Candler Park Flowers last March and by Mother’s Day they had sixty new orders from out of town than they had the year before all saying it was because of the website.
Want to know more? Here is Part One of the presentation by Dene Shepherd of New Tricks for the November 19th Floral Meet and Greet sponsored by Carlstedt’s Atlanta and Linda Knight McCarter. Beautiful flowers donated by Associated Farms were given out as door prizes throughout the night to the delight of all.
Part two of the presentation was given by Judi Knight of New Tricks.
