In less than nine hours (which means I should be asleep! too excited), the Women Grow Business Boot Camp is starting. I am out of my mind excited about all the things I’m going to learn and the people I’m going to meet.
And the fact that I’ll be conducting one of the breakout sessions with Joanna over at Matrix Group. Yay team!

The session I’m talking about tomorrow deals with a topic I don’t often speak about:  defining, finding and keeping your customer. Normally, I’m assuming you know how to define who you’re marketing to, that you’ve done your keyword research, even that your business is done mostly online.

Tomorrow I’ll be speaking to a crowd of people who are mostly solo entrepreneurs or are interested in starting a business — people who are new. The main conference room for Women Grow Business Boot Camp will be live streaming.

If youi’re there in person, be sure to say hi!

Age of Conversation Cover

Yes, I realize I used the word “Peeps” but I do believe it is Friday. So, yeah.

I have been blessed to participate in the Age of  Conversation project again this year.  Drew McLellan and Gavin Heaton put a call out to authors on the topic of Social Media, and those who make the cut get a chapter in a collective book.

To make things even better, all proceeds from the project go to charity. In short, I totally get to talk about myself and all the proceeds go to a good cause. It just doesn’t get better than that.

Seriously though, if you read last year’s edition, or the one before, you know that these collections tend to be packed full of wisdom and advice from a dizzying array of experts from many perspectives you might never have thought of before.

The book officially comes out some time in April, and pre-ordering starts soon.

In this blog over the next month while I wait for the book to come out, I’ll be sharing the experience with you and telling you about the people I’m writing with.

In fact, let’s start that part right now, shall we? Meet the authors of the Age of Conversation 3, below:

Just had a new friend of the Free Traffic Tips family named Steve write me a message, when today, my first day of feeling less that 50% crappy for the last week, a gut instinct told me to check the Help Desk tickets — where messages go to when you write to ask@asktinu.com.

And I found out that since I’ve been gone, no tickets have been answered. None, as in zero, of the thousands of messages that have been sent to me in the past week have been responded to — and on top of that, there are about a dozen messages that have been in the queue since Christmas!

So first of all, if you’ve sent me a question or comment that warrants an answer, and it was never escalated to me, I apologize. If you have an open ticket right now, feel free to respond to that ticket with the word “escalate” to make it easier for my new person to find and send directly to me. For the next week, all you have to do with an existing ticket that hasn’t been answered is put the word “escalate” in the message, and it will be transferred for me to deal with by me personally.

But please understand, that means replies will not take place within a business day as they have before (unless of course you’re a customer or client, those are now handled by a separate, 24/7 group.)  For those of you who don’t know, I have fairiy severa case of spinal degenerative disorder. It’s not a life-threatening illness, but it’s way more complicated than pulling a muscle in your back.

I’ve tried just about everything for it, and a mixture of physical therapy and medication helps a lot.

Still, I have some rough spells sometimes it’s hard for me to type, sit up in bed, that sort of thing. I’m telling you this because until I get some more help, there’s no way you’ll get a response in one business day.

I get hundreds of emails to that address every day, and there’s just no quick way of sorting the spam from the real requests for help, so someone has to open each one and read it. Three people used to spend the better part of the day helping me with this. Now it’s just me. I’d appreciate your patience with this until I get a new staff in place.

Today’s my first day back after being back a week. Normally that’s not a problem, and someone else will acknowledge your messages and let you know I’m away. But the person I hired to replace the last girl that left, who also runs my temp staff, hasn’t been heard of since the day I last paid her, which is the day I last sent you an email.

I’m letting you know this so you understand that I literally just heard about this, and I’m doing what I can to get caught up. That means the newsletter might be a little light again this coming week.

I also wanted to ask you for a favor.

I need to hire an intern or someone to work on commission until next month, who’d be interested in learning about this business in exchange. In May, this will turn into a paid position. If you know anyone who’d be interested in such an arrangement, a self-starter who knows a bit about the web and can work with me virtually 10 — 20 hours a week, have them contact me.

In future months, I’ll be hiring a temp staff of five people to take care of this situation, but I want the person I teach my business to not to be someone who really just wants a job, or someone who has a passing interest. I want to groom a successor who I can comfortably outsource projects to in the future.

I’ve tried just about every other type of arrangement, so I wanted to do this before I start an intern search at some local colleges.

Thanks for any help you can give, and I’m sorry if you sent me a message that I didn’t get yet.

That pretty picture is one of my two attempts at a Google Buzz persona type icon. Right now, I’ve written several pieces on and in Google Buzz, and though few of them are public yet, I’ve got a quick summary of those that are.

1. My Google Buzz Profile
2. 50+ Articles, Blog Posts, Buzzes & Videos About Google Buzz
3. What’s Even More Important About Google Buzz for Business

See you around the general Buzz area.

Not that this blog has some kind of huge audience, but the guilt of not updating is exactly the same.

And I’m writing about it because I know you’re having the same types of issues. I want to let you know that I’m not immune, that you have options, and that it doesn’t somehow make you less of a blogger to publish less frequently.

Because here’s the conundrum: you do all the stuff you’re supposed to do with blogging, and the result is that you help more people, or find more clients, or make more sales, or get more speaking engagements, or more in-store foot traffic, or all of the above, which now makes you too busy to blog.

Only, you better either keep blogging, or have some clients that pay every month, or else how are you going to keep yourself helping, finding, selling, speaking, meeting and greeting?

If you’re not consistent, the gravy train eventually stops — unless you’ve been smart enough to get stuff from several sources.

So what do you do?

First of all, you calm down, and ask yourself, do I really need to be publishing as much as I am?

Am I posting because I think I’m supposed to, or for linkbait, or to get more traffic, or because I truly have something to say?

The answer will be informed by your reason for blogging to begin with. You see, the idea is to publish Consistently, not necessarily frequently. My new commitment for this blog is weekly, for the main blog is three times a week, with two guest or round-up posts, and for the corporate blog, monthly.

When you’re setting up your blog, you’re going to want that to be your primary concern — how often are you going to commit to update, and why?

My Free Traffic Tips blog is the one that captures the much needed search positions that keeps traffic, and thus, regular sales, coming. It needs a serious overhaul, but even in its present state, visitors convert to subscribers at 7% which is great considering that only the least visited 10% of the site has subscription boxes. Sales result from about 81% of that traffic.

So to keep that party going, ideally I should be publishing daily.

Here, I’m blogging to share knowledge, to give the best thoughts I can on a range of marketing and web visibility topics. So I only publish when I have those thoughts. That could be several times a day, then not for several days, but it’s typically once a week.

The corporate blog is to establish a web presence for the corporate services wing of my business. It’s still in development, and right now I only want to have one corporate client at a time. So I’m quieter over there, making just enough voice to attract future prospects. I know it will typically take 90 days for me to form a trusting relationship, and each project will last between 3 months to a year.

Monthly is enough to establish a presence, so that’s how often I blog there.

The second thing you’ll want to do is what I’ve just done, establish the consistency and stick to it.

Next, think about format — you don’t always have to do a text post. Think about images, screenshots, screencasting, slide shows, or audios.

Finally, take note of all the other publishing you’re doing and map it out into a schedule. That includes submissions to social media, guest blogging, article marketing, video marketing, press releases, you name it. If it warrants input from you, it goes on your publishing schedule.

Bonus tip: help publishing isn’t a bad thing either. Team up with some friends and share a blog, get guest bloggers, pay a staff to re-purpose existing content, or hire writers to create unique content based on your ideas and voice.

I got an email today informing me that my Business Exchange profile will be featured at BusinessWeek tomorrow, starting around 9:30 am Eastern for about 24 hours. Compared to other Business Exchange contributors, my level of activity and contribution pales, though I think I hold my own as far as the quality of my shares.

That makes it even more of an honor. Thanks BusinessWeek!

If you’re not familiar with BusinessWeek’s Business Exchange social network, here’s an article I wrote on it for Ploked.

Many of my local business clients say that they just don’t get social media. They tell me they just don’t understand how using social media is going to get them more business.

And the answer is simple, really. More effective exposure, faster.

To really wrap your head around this, it helps to realize that behind the search rankings, dot coms and email addresses are people. Why are people online? Because they want information, they want to be entertained, and they want to connect.

We advertise in newspapers, magazines, on radio, on television because we want to reach people who want what we’re selling. The same thing goes for the web. Nowadays, that mean using social media.

The biggest deal about social media is so big, we often don’t even see it. Sites like Facebook, StumbleUpon, LinkedIn, Delicious, Digg, Mixx, Twitter and all the others have one thing in common: they’ve redistributed power that used to remain in the hands of the few to the hands of the many.

When this happened, a lot of the gatekeepers between us and our potential clients and customers fell away, in a way that allows more discourse between people, without leaving sensitive private information exposed.

I can write a blog post about an aspect of what I do without revealing the secret formula that gets people to buy from me or hire me. And you can read it or provide feedback without exposing your private information. For example, if you send a Twitter link about my post, and my blog recognizes it, you can make a short comment without even telling me your email address, as you would need to do if you were to comment on my site.

And blogging and tweeting are just two types of social media you can leverage to benefit your business.

I know, for some people this is really scary.

Socializing online puts you in a weird position as a business person if you start maneuvering without quite “getting” it. You don’t want to be the guy who thought it was okay to put his link on someone else’s Facebook profile and find it removed the next day, and have potentially powerful allies blocking you because you breached some etiquette or made a mistake.

You don’t want to end up talking business too soon, yet you also don’t want to be the person who had an opportunity to promote themselves, but saw that it was okay only after their competitor beat them to it.

I got an email today from a new friend who told me he couldn’t wrap his way around social media. Like in many new social situations, he didn’t know how to act. If like him, you think you don’t “get” social media, and how it can be used for business, I think that if you’re like most people, you’re wrong.

You already get Web 2.0 and Social Media. You just don’t realize it. The very fact that you don’t want to “be that guy” means that you’ve figured out that there’s a certain etiquette to all these new tools, and that they vary from community to community.

Remember how you figured it out offline? You found someone to help you, someone who had the results you wanted that you could copy, or you worked it out through trial and error.

Luckily, online there are people who are willing to teach you the ropes, so you can skip the trial and error. Now all you need to do is find people who are where you want to be, and do what they do.

Social media isn’t as hard as you think it is.

I don’t know this guy Soren personally, and I’ve never been to his blog before today. In the interest of disclosure, I will NOT make ANY money by telling you about this post. He probably will, but I’m too tired today to turn this into money for me.

He made an excellent post about outsourcing, and I’ll be frank, there’s an affiliate link in his post, for a product I think is a must-have. If I had gotten any sleep Thursday night before watching the twins (during my mastermind call!) I would probably have gone and signed up as an affiliate myself.

The sales page linked from his page alone is that good of a lesson. But this post isn’t about that.

The reason I’m telling you about the post, even if you don’t even click on the link to the sales page is that Outsourcing Saved My Ass. And by extension, my business. (Yes, I have that much junk in my trunk. lol. This is why people need sleep. Silliness like this.)

I was your classic, can’t afford to outsource case. I thought I was saving money by doing everything myself, and saving time by not teaching anyone what I know so that THEY could do it. Of course, I could have also hired someone who already knew how to do what I needed done, but in retrospect, at the time it didn’t make sense. if I did that, what would I do? What was my value?

Duh. I could do anything from “nothing but cash checks” to “build my brand”, to “focus on marketing” to “do the top-level, big-picture stuff that makes my prices worth it to my clients, and different from the next guy”.

Then I got sicker than I ever have been before and almost lost my business.

Twice. In four months.

I am STILL trying to pay for the mistakes I made then, and the only way I’m moving forward now is outsourcing, because of course, health care takes up 80% of anything I take home (another post).

But if my money goes to keeping the business open, paying for the ramifications of that time, and the cost of the projects I’m doing now, how can I pay for outsourcing?

At first, I was paying the people I outsource with on commission, training, and JV leverage. Now, with the profits having them makes me. I have more time free to make more products. When I make more products, I make more money.

I have more time free to create content to market myself. When I make more content, and use it to market myself, I make more money.

I have more free time to coach and train. When I coach and train a handful of carefully selected people, they make more money, and when they make more money, they stay clients longer. When they stay clients longer, I make more money.

So yes, this time last year I would have been one of the people who said “my job isn’t outsourcable”. The truth was, I thought that if it was possible to get rid of most of the work I had to do that I was useless. And I had all these ideas in my head about how making money has to be so hard.

And I learned that not only is that not the case, if you don’t outsource, hire employees or virtual teams, the thing to think about is that you’re not outsourcing to get rid of yourself, you’re outsourcing to FREE yourself. Whether it’s to have more time for family, to market yourself, or to have time to do the things that make your company money, outsource, create a job or virtual assistant for EVERY function that doesn’t fall into the core dream that you painted for yourself, AND every thing in the core dream that’s not the best use of your time.

And don’t forget things that you just hate to do to start with.

You can always add things back in. You always have that option later.

So yeah, your personal talent and touch may not be outsourceable. But if you think about it, that’s probably 1% IF THAT of what you’re doing. It may be the most important 1%, but it’s only 1%.

If you think about it, every major company in the world is just an outsourcing outfit. There were what, a couple of guys who started eBay? As they grew, they realized, hey, I can’t do all this crap myself.

You want to be a bigger firm? You want to create opportunities for your business? You want to expand your market? You want to make more money? You want to be a big brand someday — maybe even a household name?

Go and read Soren’s post about Outsourcing. Take the first step, and consider outsourcing.

I heart the lot of you but I simply can’t pretend I’m embedding this rebroadcast of today’s Grow Smart Business conference (soon to be archive of the entire event, btw) because of that.

It was simply amazing to be there and I was in great company. Not to mention that I made some really key contacts, as well as new friends that I hope to be able to point in the right direction.

However, I can definitely share it with you. So here it is.

You can rebroadcast the Network Solutions Grow Smart Biz Conference in your blog too. If you hadn’t noticed. (Or click through and view it there if the video isn’t displaying in the feed.)

I’ll be referencing it constantly throughout the week. And PS, here’s the Agenda [pdf] of the day if it’s of any help.

I’m sure you’ve probably seen me talking about the contest I’m having, here on Facebook or on Twitter. If not, here’s the deal.

Though my business is based on the West coast, I live in Maryland about half of the year. As a member of Network Solution’s Social Web Advisory board, I’ve been offered a few free tickets to the GrowSmartBiz conference they’re having all day next Tuesday in Washington DC.

I had several extra tickets, and I have two left, so I’m having two contests, one for each of them. All you have to do to win it is respond to this blog post with a comment. First winner and a random winner get the prizes.

Of course you’ll have to provide your own transportation to and from DC (which should be a breeze if you’re a local), but if you like we can spend the entire day of the conference together. Between sessions I’ll help you apply the information you learn to your specific business.

Again, the ticket, worth $299, is totally free to you — here’s how it happened. When I heard the 2 for $99 special for the Network Solutions Grow Smart Business conference, I was so excited that I got at ticket for me and my sister. It was for one day only, 09.09.09, so I made sure I got it.

Then I  realized that Network Solutions (of course!) was comping me a free ticket. Aces. Now I have these extra. Thus the contests. I gave my social media pals a head start but they didn’t move fast enough — their loss is your gain.

If you need more information -here’s the link again.

And if you’re already coming to the conference, let me know so we can meet up for lunch! I’m hoping a bunch of us can go together.