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The Women's Business Gallery Products page has been re-organized and new products have been added.
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Dear Carma,
I hope that these two months (November and December), so full of a wide variety of comercialized pressures, bring you a great deal of joy, prosperity and success. In this issue, I'll be highlighting some of the many features that the new design for the Women's Business Gallery offers. I hope you find them useful and will participate in making the Gallery the best resource for women entrepreneurs and business owners.
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New Stuff at the
Women's Business Gallery!
The new design for the Women's Business Gallery is live and with it you get a whole suit of services to help you improve your business and network with other women entrepreneurs and small business owners.
- A weekly blog focuses on one theme each month. November is blogging and December will be mindset.
- A forum where you can discuss a wide variety of busness topics. There are also two forums to help you find products and services members provide, as well as let members know about the products and services you offer.
- A new shop has new products and lets you rate all the products that are there. If I find a product gets consistently low ratings, I'll fix it or remove it.
- Add your comments! You can comment of blog posts and other pages found throughout the site.
- New "Portraits" section. All the profiles from the original site are housed here and with the new year, I'll be profiling a successful woman entrepreneur or small business owner earch month. Feel free to nominate anyone you think would make a good portrait.
More features are in development and your ideas are always welcomed!
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Boost Your Business With Blogging!
Having a business blog can be an incredible online marketing tool that saves you thousands of dollars while providing you with great business opportunities. Blogs are a user-friendly, customizable and flexible medium for disseminating useful information and effectively positioning your products in the market.
Companies engaging in business blogging have a definite edge over their competitors. Here are some advantages:
- Word-of-Mouth.
In a survey, there are currently 14 million blogs with 80,000 more being added each day and about 30 percent of the 50 million Internet users are blog readers. Imagine how much gain your business could have if your products were advertised through blogs. With the Internet, information spreads so quickly, especially if an impressive write-up goes with your product. Soon your blog posts could be passed on to hundreds of possible customers.
- Awareness and loyalty.
Open communication with your customers creates trust and loyalty with them. Being there to respond to their questions and comments makes them all the more willing to try your products and services.
- Feedback.
Blogs are good for product research and reviews. It would be easier to improve on your products if you could observe your customers' thinking and behavioral patterns. You can also take immediate action on your customers' concerns.
- Community halo-effect.
Bloggers are perceived as reasonable, friendly and helpful. They often are more than willing to create a blogosphere of comments regarding your product. The only thing you have to do is embrace and take active part in the culture and your product will surely become top of mind.
For better marketing results, actively promote your business blogs by submitting them to blog search sites and directories. Remember include you URL. Be sure that your blogs contain exclusive information with value and are always updated to keep readers popping in to read your blog as well as subscribe for updates.
Settng up a blog for your business is much like setting up a booth at the biggest trade show on earth everyday. Marketing possibilities are just around the corner.
The Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feeds are important too. Use effective keyword phrases to generate high ranking status in the search engine traffic. In this way you have better chances of people finding your website. More traffic means more potential sales.
For this to be successful, you can use RSS for news update feeds which can be read through an RSS reader application. This is a very useful tool for business and internet marketers as well.
If you are already convinced of the potentials of business blogs for marketing and increasing sales, your business is now ready to start blogging. But first, you have to be in tune with your business objectives. This way you will be able to determine if blogging will really help you achieve your goal.
- Several blogs are dedicated to teaching people the dos and don'ts of blogging, READ them! Include in your reading materials blogs that are consumer-based too to give you an idea. You'll find information like this here at the Women's Business Gallery, as well as other ways to improve your business.
- Setup several to test blogs right away. If your initial experiment with blogs works well, you can start setting up more.
- Study blog design. Blog hosting services provide pre-designed templates. But if you opt for paid blog service, you can ask your artist to design and layout your blog site to match the company's identity and needs. (By the way, Monday's blog post talks about design and I offer WordPress design services through <a href="http://www.dragonwyze.com" target="_blank">.)
- Choose a topic. Its good to have a line-up of topics you want for your blogs, but be sure they are in line with your business objectives. This will test of your flexibility and open-mindedness since results may be going against your set objectives.
- Remember the following safety measures in blogging, especially if your business has employees:
- legal issues are sometimes involved in blogging; it is safer to include disclaimers and limitations of liabilities;
- corporate communication and legal department are responsible in educating the senior management on how blogs might affect business;
- create blogging policies; set limits on who gets to blog and what information are allowed to be made public;
- avoid having an outright marketing blog or you will turn away potential readers;
- update content regularly and keep t relevant and fresh;
- reinforce the company's core values; and,
- encourage employees to use it.
- Start blogging and complete 20 posts before going to market.
- Regularly monitor your stats and measure your results.
- Adjust if needed. You can always play with your designs in the blog site as long as it remains to match your business identity.
- Strive to be consistent with your topic at all times.
- Schedule updates regularly.
Once you have done all these things, you can now ultimately enjoy the benefits of business blogging.
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I'm experimenting with this newsletter format. Let me know if you like having the entire article in the newsletter, or if you would prefer having only part of it with a link to the rest on the website.
Sincerely,
Carma Spence-Pothitt
Women's Business Gallery
info@womens-business-gallery.com
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