Posts Tagged ‘Ideas’

If you use Constant Contact, you may already know this, but I just found out the other day and thought it was pretty cool! (If you don’t use it, click here for more information and a free 60 trial
). There are many different ways you can add contacts to your database. Sometimes they sign themselves up through your website which means you don’t need to do anything. Other times, your new contacts come from networking or business meetings and the e-mail addresses are on business cards. This means you have to log in to your account and add the information, or so I thought!

Although there are different ways to add, and sometimes you might just upload a spreadsheet of new contacts, if you just have one or two to add, you can do it simply, direct from your desktop. Log into your Constant Contact account. From the home page, click the Import your contact list link on the right side, or alternatively, click the Contacts link from the top to add new contacts.

Next, you will be asked how you would like to add contacts to your list. Click on the link right at the bottom for import tools:

You will see a list of many different ways to import in contacts directly (you may find some of these useful also). Click on the one right at the bottom, the Contact Capture Tool.

This will start a download. Pretty simple, just walk through the steps to complete the download. Once complete, you will need to enter in your user name and password for Constant Contact. You also determine which of your mailing lists you wish to sign people up to by clicking on Add or Remove Contact Lists from the middle of the pop up. Enter in the new contact e-mail address. At the bottom, you can determine up to 4 fields of information that you wish to contact. First Name is always a good one, as is Company Name. With fields, you can add these to your e-mails for a personal touch. Enter everything in and click Add.

If the contact is already in Constant Contact, it will let you know and ask how you want to handle this contact. If its a new contact, it will be saved exactly as you enter it. Click OK.

Once the contact is saved, you will be notified at the top of the screen. You can close out of the capture tool, but can either get back to it from your icons on the bottom toolbar of your computer, or from your desktop if you created a shortcut icon during the install. Quick and easy!

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I am proud to be one of the organizers of a local networking group here in Lawrenceville, GA. We have events a couple of times each month. This past event we were lucky to have George Robbins there from Your 1 Minute. He creates videos for business owners to help promote themselves and their company. Here is one he did as a gift for our networking group. Thanks again George, it looks fantastic!

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If you are like me, you don’t exactly have ‘free time’. Twitter is a tool I use, and have a love/hate relationship with. I love it for marketing and getting the word out there, and building new relationships with people I would otherwise never meet, but I hate it because there is so much I know I miss! There are so many great links posted, good information and also retweets and mentions that I some how don’t always have time to get to.

Well, to help keep me up to date, I use a service called Social Oomph. I signed up for it almost a year ago when I first got into using Twitter but have really found it useful the past six months during which I have tweeted more and more on the social networking site. Social Oomph allows you to sign up and create an account and link it to your Twitter feeds. It will track when you are mentioned, when you get Direct Messages, or when your tweets are reposted by someone else (retweeted).

Simply sign up for a free account, then click on Social Accounts, Add New Account, then Add Twitter.

Once you do this, you will be prompted to authenticate with Twitter which allows SocialOomph to connect with your account. Once you have done this, the following screen will appear. You have options to autofollow people that follow up, and send them a message directly at the same time. Be careful how you use this. Many people using Twitter hate this, including me. It’s impersonal and even worse, if it’s someone trying to sell to you it’s really offputting. You may notice that in the screenshot below, I do have a message and I am auto following people. Well, true, and here is where I view it as the exception. This account listed is one for our local city project, New Lawrenceville. The message is to inform people about an upcoming event we are having. Hopefully it won’t appear as salesy or offensive! Make up your own mind about setting that message.

Finally, you can then see all of the times you are mentioned and who mentioned you. One of the settings for your account allows you to have an e-mail sent to you at the end of the day, listing all the times you were mentioned. I like this feature as it allows me to see who has retweeted my tweets or sent me a direct message, even if I have been busy with other things throughout the day and not noticed this.

Finally, they do have a paid version with some fantastic features that I wouldn’t mind trying, but after the free trial, at $30, not sure I would be willing to fork out that much each month.

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Usually my posts are all about computer or techie related subjects. Today I wanted to do something a little different. In a way, you could say this is still business related as this is a fantastic marketing opportunity for a small business local to the area. I live in Lawrenceville, Georgia and last year I had the honor of being a part of making a great video to promote a free, community run event. The event is detailed below. If you are local, or will visit the area any time within the next 13 weeks, starting April 4th, why not come by and ride the trolley! Also, the video my husband and I made is at the bottom of the post.

THE TROLLEY TOUR’s of the Lawrenceville Community are back.

This information is currently for local business owners, but please, if you have any suggestions as someone who rode the trolley last year, or with interest for this year, please let us know.

Come join us again this year as we ride through the streets and neighborhoods of the Lawrenceville Community.    This is a positive investment in Lawrenceville community involvement.  This will benefit Local Businesses, Residents and Real Estate within our community.  We are putting this event together to be proactive in this economy and not only SURVIVE this economic downturn but THRIVE in it.   The only way do this is to be proactive yourself.  We hope you will see the positive impact this idea will have in our community.  We are open to suggestion, comments and questions.    Here how it works, TENATIVELY (always subject to change)!

Starting April 4^th 2010 through June 27^th 2010, the Trolley will run Tours on Sunday’s through Lawrenceville and Scheduled Open Houses throughout our Community. That is a total of thirteen (13) consecutive Sundays.  We are very pleased to have life-long resident and Lawrenceville’s Local Honorary Historian (Awarded in 2009 by Mayor Millsaps) Mary Long as our Trolley Tour Guide.  Each tour we will highlight Lawrenceville Square, the parks, historic graveyards, the businesses and some of the rich community history.  We will have Realtors, Builders and Developers who will have their homes open for those Sunday’s as well.   All the homes will be within the City Limits of Lawrenceville.  We have two (2) Trolleys’ this year.  Each Trolley holds approximately 30 people at a time.  We would like to have 4 scheduled tours in that day.  The tours will start at 1pm and run every hour until 5pm, the last tour starting at 4pm. We have already had several local businesses, Realtors and Developers and of course the Trolley Guy ready to make this project a GO and a WIN for the Lawrenceville Community.   We have also had suggestions (which will develop) of creating events on the square specifically for the tour.  This is great opportunity for your involvement in our community and to promote your business.

The actual Tour will be FREE to those riding the Trolley each Sunday.  Each guest on the Trolley will get a “goody bag” with Local Business marketing materials, coupons, business cards, etc. when they get off the Trolley.   This will be approximately 120 goody bags each week for 13 weeks.  We will also have a banner on both sides of both Trolley’s with the “Qualified” Sponsors Logo’s displayed.   Local television media and print media already want to do stories on the positive approach to this idea.  So there is a possibility of your business getting additional exposure to other communities as well.  As we progress with the idea there will be other ways for us to market the idea and promote it with and without cost.  There are several free internet marketing and networking opportunities to get this event out to various communities.

Interested in being a sponsor?

So, you are excited now and want to know the most important thing, the cost!  Are you ready?  $10.00 per week!   That is it! If you pay for the whole 13 weeks ($130.00) up front, than you will have the opportunity of being included in the banner display on both sides of the Trolley.  The banner will be an additional expense but depending on how many “Qualified” (those who pay 13 weeks in advance) business it will be divided equally.  So, that is it!  We hope you are interested and would like to participate.

For more information or if you are interested in becoming a sponsor, please e-mail Rodney Camren – rodney@newlawrenceville.com or call him on 404-375-1496. We look forward to hearing from you!  

Come and see what makes Lawrenceville such a wonderful city to be a part of. Come and experience NEW Lawrenceville! See our video from last year.

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If you have a blog, do you ever feel like you are writing articles and posting them out to the world, and never quite sure if anyone is reading them? Your knowledge is being shared, but it would be nice to know it’s actually being read right? Although there is no fool proof way to know how many people are subscribed to your feed, Feedburner is a great place to start.

Feedburner.com will take you over to Google. They moved over recently and now it’s even easier to manage everything all under one account. If you don’t already have an account, you will be prompted to create an account. If you do have an account, go ahead and log in.  You will be prompted to enter in your feed address. Then click the Next button.

The feed can then be named. It will also show you a new feed address. You can modify the url slightly if you want to, to make it more user friendly. Click Next. Then walk through the rest of the screens for more options and information you can set up.

Finally, next time you log in, you can take a look at the statistics for your feed. You can view stats for the current day, past few days, months and so on. You will be able to see how many people on average are viewing your feed.

From the Feedburner website, here is how it defines Subscribers and Reach.

Subscribers is an approximate measure of the number of individuals currently subscribed to your feed.

How is it calculated?

FeedBurner’s subscriber count is based on an approximation of how many times your feed has been requested in a 24-hour period. Subscribers is inferred from an analysis of the many different feed readers and aggregators that retrieve this feed daily. Subscribers is not computed for browsers and bots that access your feed.

Subscribers counts are calculated by matching IP address and feed reader combinations, then using our detailed understanding of the multitude of readers, aggregators, and bots on the market to make additional inferences.

Reach is the total number of people who have taken action — viewed or clicked — on the content in your feed.

What does it tell you?

Subscribers is a measure of how many people are subscribed to your feed. At any given time, you can expect that a certain percentage of this subscriber base is actively engaging with your content and this “Reach” measurement provides this additional insight.

Additionally, there may be people viewing your content beyond your known subscriber base. For example, they may view your content on a feed search engine or news filter site.

Reach aggregates both of these groups, providing an accurate and useful measurement of your true audience.

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