It’s all about preparing for 2010 in the last couple of weeks with blog posts on New Year resolutions, self improvement areas and how to reach your goals. Now, you should be taking action and strive forward according to your plans.
My New Year started off pretty well, with a few of my plans already taking place, including a change to my Twitter follow strategy. Apart from that, I am also going to outsource more of my work so that I can focus on profit-making activities. I will also continue to review my social media marketing strategies over the coming few months with some experiments.
In this week’s Weekly Biz Buzz, I have a long list of blog posts to share with you but each and every one of them deserve your time. If you are looking forward to some fresh tips that you can apply to your business, this Weekly Biz Buzz is for you.
People of Haiti Needs Your Help
Unless you are living under a rock, Haiti is currently all over the headlines after the country was rocked by a 7.0 magnitude earthquake and a 6.0 magnitude aftershock two days ago. It’s heartbreaking to look at the damage caused by the disaster.
Every little effort counts. If you are trying to help but don’t know what are the best ways or the best channels, How Your Small Business Can Help Haiti by Shira Levine will be able to help you out.
In this article, she explained extensively on picking which non-profit organizations to donate to, suitability of donation items and some key issues that you should be paying attention to when donating. Personally, I made my donation via the Google Crisis Response page and you can make your donation over there as well.
Presenting at Big Venture Capital or Sales Meetings
Presentations form a big part of running a business, especially in a B2B or startup environment. Unlike selling to businesses with a single decision maker or pitching to an individual investor, presenting to venture capitalists or businesses with a management team or multiple decision makers are harder.
In fact, there are a lot of preparations needed prior to attending a big meeting. Successful entrepreneur and venture capitalist, Mark Suster, wrote a blog post with the title, How to Present at Big Meetings without Going Down a Rat Hole, which I highly recommend anyone reading this to read it.
In his blog post, he listed a few types of individuals with different personalities that you are likely to find at big meetings and how you should handle them while accomplishing your agenda as a presenter. Again, definitely a must read.
Improving Your Website’s Conversion Rate
One huge mistake that I see a lot in Internet marketing plans is the overemphasizing of traffic building. Yes, a site with no traffic is worthless. However, once your site is receiving a considerable amount of traffic, you need to shift your focus into turning site visitors into a lead or a sale.
21 Ways to Increase Your Conversion Rate by Michelle Strassburg is a must read if you are looking to generate leads or sales from your website and your Internet marketing activities.
In this blog post, Michelle introduced several factors such as the trust factors, user experience factors and checkout factors, which are very useful if you are going to tweak your site for better conversion rates.
Using Social Media for Better Networking
As more business owners and professionals get onto social media, it is important for you to understand how to communicate and network using these platforms. The way of we communicate is changing. For example, if you are contacting someone through a platform that he/she only logs in once a week, you might not get an instant response.
Soren Gordhamer wrote 7 Lessons for Better Networking with Social Media which is a nice read. The seven lessons in this blog post are more of a set of etiquettes that you are expected to follow when utilizing social media as a networking platform. It can be very different than your current methods of reaching out to others.
As a big proponent of networking, the fact that more people are using social media has opened up the opportunity for us, as business owners, to connect with more businesses and individuals easily. Keep in mind that keeping your relationships on social media platforms is not a wise choice as these platforms might go away someday. Always try to bring social media relationships to the next level.
Is Your Search Engine Optimization Company Lying?
Search engine optimization services can be found all over the Internet and everyone seems to be an expert on the topic. A business owner who cares about whether a marketing expense is well spent needs to know whether the search engine optimization company that he/she hired knows its stuffs.
Mani Karthik came up with a blog post, 5 Ways to Find Out If an SEO is Lying, and in this blog post, he outlined the signs of an SEO solutions snake oil seller. You can use this blog post as a guideline to indentify whether a potential SEO solutions provider is lying to you.
Just to give you an idea, a reputable and reliable search engine optimization company will not offer a link building service right after their appointment. Instead, they will first audit all SEO elements on your website and then identify all possible link building sources before initiating the link building process. They might also inquire about all past search engine optimization activities carried out.
Useful Marketing Content Coming Up Next Week
Other than my recent Twitter follow strategy blog post, it has been quite some time since I posted an article that is related to online marketing or Internet marketing.
Next week, I am going to publish a blog post covering the most important aspect of an Internet marketing campaign. Feel free to guess what is the most important aspect in the comments section. 
If you have any questions or opinions about the articles and blog posts above, feel free to leave a comment in the comments section below.
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Photo Credits: chanchan222, Zach Dischner and United Nations Development Programme
