Business & Learning’s Work At Home Expo is right around the corner…

I attended my very first Work At Home Expo in May of this year, 2007. I was literally stuck to my computer day and night the entire time the expo was running. There was so much wonderful and useful information, all provided for free of course. And not only that, but I also was able to share and interact with others and promote myself as well.

I strongly suggest that everyone attend the next Expo which is set for November 13, 14, & 15th. You can register as an attendee for free. Or as an Exhibitor and promote your business, products or service.

This Expo is expected to be better then ever! Take a look for yourself. Click Here!

Website Promotion

There are lots of ways to promote your website. You can submit your site to all the major search engines. You can add a link to your site in your Signature Line with all of your outgoing emails, as well as on any forum posts you make. One thing you need to understand if you are going to do this yourself is that it will take some time for it to really gain momentum and a constant flow of visitors.

However, there is something that I absolutely love, it gets you immediate visitors, as well as allowing others to review your site and let you know just what they thought of it, and whether or not any improvements could be made to make it better. It’s free, all it takes is about 30min to an hour each day for you to review other people’s sites in return. If you do this daily, you should average about 20-60 hits everyday. And we all know what that means…the more people that see your site, will lead to more people contacting you who are truly interested in what you have to offer.

You can check it out at LinkReferral.com Let me know if you join in, I would love to drop by and review your site.

Online Groups and Forums

Online forums and discussion groups are a really great way to market yourself and your business, or product & service. It’s simply you putting yourself out there in every way possible. You might be talking about your family and kids, or helping answer someones question that they have posted. It shouldn’t be about just “advertising” your business, there are classifieds for that. Add a link to your website in your signature line, that way those who are interested in what you have to offer will be able to request information from you instead.

You can do a google search to find different groups that are focused towards your personal interests. I will share some of the one’s that I use…

www.wahm.com/forum Here you will find a little bit of everything.

www.mywomanownedbusiness.com This is a rather new online social networking site for women business owners. (If you decide to join in, let me know and we can share together.)

www.cafemom.com Another mom site with lots of different groups to join in with.

www.mayasmom.com I really love this site. Not because it’s a great place to advertise, it’s more of a place to meet other moms, and a few dads, in fact there are only certain places that you can actually advertise your business and such. This is nice because you are not constantly hit up by people trying to sell you something. So if you are looking for a place to meet others online, and make some friends along the way, this one is great. (You can find me here by searching for my3lives)

So there you have it, just a few of my favorite places to network online. If anyone has others that they just absolutely love, please share.

MySpace & Building your business

It is important to find ways to get your website out in front of people. Not everyone will be interested in whatever it is that you have to offer, but the more people that go to your site, the better response rate you will have. Not rocket science now is it?

MySpace is definitely one way of getting lots of people to know about you and what you are doing. You can find long lost friends and family, make new friends, find people in your area, or with interests similar to yours. There are endless possibilities. My suggestion to you is this…people are more likely to be interested in you as a person, not the business you are in. That being said…

1. Build your MySpace page around who you are..what are you interested in? (Besides building your business…)
2. If you try using the same story on your page as everyone else in your business is using, I will tell you right now, you are not fooling anyone. It most likely has been seen a million times over and personally, when I see the first line, I just move on.
3. Essentially the best prospect anyone could ever have is someone that they already know. We trust people we know to give us the honest truth, right? Same thing applies here. Even if I have never actually met the person, I can tell who is being honestly sincere and who is just trying to get me to buy their products or join their team.
4. Don’t accept friend requests from every person that sends them to you. There could be benefits to having a large list of friends, but I don’t want to be constantly bombarded with advertisements and such from people trying to get me to join them, etc. If someone sends me a request, and tells me why, then I am more likely to accept, if their page is about them more so than their biz opp.
5. Put a link to your website on your page or a banner, whatever method you use, just don’t overdo it with too many advertisements.

Overall, think of how you would feel, put your shoes in that of your prospects. What would interest you or catch your attention? Do you like to constantly have ads thrown in your face?

And last but not least…instead of trying to do things fast and easy, take your time and do it right. If you put the effort into it people will notice and you will get a much better response as a result.

You can visit my myspace page at www.myspace.com/cberney80 (And for anyone who thinks that they can’t do it because they don’t know how and it will take to long or it is too hard to learn…I had no idea what I was doing when I first started. I don’t think it turned out so bad either.)