Web Business Woman

Archive for September, 2010

I'm a baby boomer. The world seems fascinated with us, these days. Especially with baby boomer women. At every twist and turn, you find articles announcing we have no retirement plans, having relied on those of our hubands'. If not married, baby boomer women are depicted as scaredy cats afraid of numbers.

That could be me. How about you? I'm not proud of the fact that numbers intimidate me. I was never good in math. I can keep myself on a budget, mainly because my budget is pretty small and easily managed. And, I know the value of savings, as well as a good retirment plan. Yet, I don't have either, really.

When I read articles about "us", the baby boomer generation, I'm struck by the realities of our lives compared to the myths that continue to persist. For instance, the myth that we were all hippies, we all attended Woodstock, and we all smoked marijuana.

I don't know anyone else's truth but here's mine: I was never a hippie, though I dressed like one. I did not attend Woodstock and don't care. And, no, children, I never smoked marijuana, though many of my friends did. I was sure we were all going to be hauled off to jail and that no one would believe I hadn't smoked anything. But, that never happened.

The Atlantic Monthly has an article titled "The Least We Can Do" in its October issue, discussing the baby boomer generation, calling us, "Self-absorbed, self-indulged, and self-loathing."

I'm not sure who they're talking about, but I am sure it's not me. Yes, I have been self-absorbed – but it was so long ago I barely remember it. Having children took the "self" out of being absorbed. I do not ever remember being "self-indulged" although I am a clothes-hound, to this day. If that counts, then I guess I'm self-indulged, along with millions of other women – of all ages. As for self-loathing, doesn't everyone experience that at one time or another in their lives?

The article struck a nerve with me because it attempts to put all baby boomers into a box. We're all this or that. We're all from the same time period, generation, whathaveyou, but we're certainly not all from the same place. And, we're certainly not all part of the Woodstock mentality, which they ascribe to us. It's a mentality I've heard over and over; essentially, "Baby boomers rejected 'the man' and now they are the man."

Rather than continue to tell us what we did (or didn't do) and what we should now do (to redeem ourselves), perhaps the folks who would chronicle our history need only to look to the current and future generations. Did they not learn what they know from us? Are they not smart, responsible citizens, working to make life better for … each other, their families, their country, the world – even their pets?

If there is to be a testament to the good or bad of our generation, and to the way we live out our lives as citizens of the U.S. and the world, it will come from our children and grandchildren. I am confident the kids growing up today will work things out better than we did. They're smarter, taller, curious, devoted to the earth (for the most part), and willing to take on responsibility – like the Grandma who has no retirement savings.

In the end, our impact on the U.S. will be as major or minor as the impact our kids make when they tackle the big issues – there will be some cheering and there will be some shouting. At ground level, it's as it has always been. The good and bad of a society is reflected in its treatment of children, the elderly, and pets. I think we boomers stand on solid ground when it comes to kids, our parents, and our pets.

But, what do I know? I'm just a boomer woman on a blog.

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By Guest Blogger, Donna DeClemente, Donna's Promo Talk

Driving Traffic through Search Engine Optimization (SEO) was one of the break-out sessions I attended at BlogPaws West in Denver. It was so good I chose it not once, but twice. It was a highly interactive session that included audience participation, so after experiencing the first session on Friday I just had to come back the next day for more.

Mary Archer of Strategic Rankings started off both sessions with her quick SEO Myths Debunked presentation that she has shared with us on her blog. Many of us guessed that most of these statements were indeed true. Download the presentation and you'll see what Mary's dogs, Sadie Lu and Sally Mae, taught us!

Next the real fun began with Stephan Spencer, co-author of The Art of SEO, along with his daughter Chloe Spencer, the Lip-sticking blog's newest guest blogger, took the controls and asked for a volunteer to review their website. They pulled up the pet-care related site from our first victim and started to tell us what could be done to improve it's search rankings. Here are some of my key learning's from the sessions:

First off most people don't use the proper keywords in their title tag. This is what shows up at the very top of your browser when you visit a site as well as on the search engine results page. If you look at the top of your browser now you'll see the word "Lip-Sticking" or if you clicked on a link for this specific post it will read " Lip-Sticking: Tips on Driving Traffic Through Search Engine Optimization (SEO)".

Most of the examples of sites from those in the audience showed that they are just using the name of their blog, company or organization. For the majority of sites, unless you have a very popular brand name, this is not the most effective title since people are not searching for your brand. In the case of Lip-Sticking they may be searching for "Marketing to Women Online". So a suggestion would be to change the title tag to include "Lip-Sticking: Marketing to Women Online". I have to speak to Yvonne about this recommendation.

I went to my blog, Donna's Promo Talk, and did just that. I added my tag line to the name of the blog so now instead of it just the name of my blog appearing it reads "Donna's Promo Talk – Promotional Marketing that Creates Excitement and Gets Results". I hopefully will now start to see more traffic from people searching for "Promotional Marketing".

Both the Lip-sticking Blog and Donna's Promo Talk are built on the Typepad platform which doesn't give you the option to change your title tag. It just defaults to the name of your blog, which is why I added words to the name of my blog. WordPress however has a plug-in that can do this that Stephan actually created called SEO Title Tag. This allows you not only to change the title tag of the site, but also any individual pages and every post.

Typepad gives you the option for posts to have the name of your blog before or after the title of the post. I just changed my to have the blog name after the post title. Again, as Stephan had pointed out, more people will be searching for content from keywords in your post then from the name of your blog.

This brings up a great tip we all learned regarding content which is that you should be using relevant keywords in all your blog post titles. They recommended a few keyword research tools that you can use. The one I use that is free is Google Adwords Keyword Tool. One thing that Stephan pointed out about this tool that I haven't been doing is after you type in your keywords and hit search, scroll down and change the default from "broad match" to "exact match". Since the tool is primarily for pay-per-click (PPC) ads, not SEO, broad match doesn't give you accurate traffic volume results. For example, many more searches will include the word "shoes" but a much smaller amount will include the keyword "horse shoes".

Links to your site is another pillar of SEO that was discussed. The more links you have from quality, relevant sites, the higher Google will rank you. To see who is linking to your site you can use Yahoo's Site Explorer. In order to use this free tool you must be logged-in to your Yahoo account. You can change the results to not include links from your own domain so it will give you a more accurate number of in-bound links. My results included many links from Lip-sticking to my blog of course, but I did find many other blogs and sites that are linking to me that I wasn't aware of. You can export this list to an Excel document as well.

Both Stephan and Chloe (who BTW is still a teenager) did a great job presenting at these sessions. Take a quick read over at Chloe's last post, Breaking Through the Glass Ceiling at 16 Years-Old on Lip-sticking to learn more about her. I met Stephan at BlogPaws in Columbus back in April when he presented there as well as several years ago when he came to Rochester to speak at a luncheon sponsored by our local AMA. So it was wonderful to finally meeting Chloe.

These were some of the basics that were covered at BlogPaws and I'm now planning to read more of Stephan's book so I can become somewhat of a SEO expert. Everyone walked away from these two sessions with a few things that they can easily do to help increase their site's search rankings. I hope you also received a few new tips from reading this post. Please feel free to add more!

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Being a young, female entrepreneur, and speaking at conferences, usually as the only woman on the panel, has been challenging. A lot of times, the men are loud speakers, they interrupt, and they jump into answering questions before you can even open your mouth.

Coming to the panel as a 19-year-old girl with a virtual pet blog I made when I was 14, makes it hard to stand out among this crowd.

That's why speaking at BlogHer, at 16 years young, was the best, first conference experience I could have asked for. There were 4 other women bloggers on my panel; women I felt comfortable with and, with my age and shyness, was acknowledged by. It was a great atmosphere for my first speaking gig.

From there, it got harder; speaking at sessions with all men for the most part. But, I got words in at each one, and I'm still speaking at conferences today. Just last month I moderated at SES San Francisco, on a teen entrepreneur panel (again, all males, who were very successful and very much tech geniuses–it's hard to shine next to blindingly bright lights).

Coming up this month, my dad and I are running an SEO session at BlogPaws West 2010. My dad, Stephan Spencer, is an official SEO whiz; but I know more than the average blogger, so I'm confident I'll manage to get a few tips in, to work along with his expert advice.

See what I mean? Young and female is tough. But I'm a tough girl, and I'll keep fighting for that limelight.

I plan to start a new company, soon, that I hope will take me far and do fantastic financially. I'm just waiting for that lightbulb idea to pop up, like for NeopetsFanatic.com did back in 2006. Now that I'm following that climb to success, I plan to turn ChloeSpencer.com into a popular personal blog and vlog, not just a press site, as it is now.

So yes, I'm a small girl with big dreams. But aren't we all, inside? And somehow, we ambitious driven women always find a way to break through, to shine brighter than we had ever imagined.

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As most readers know, I co-founded a new venture with Tom, my hubby and partner, and Caroline Golon of Romeo the Cat, last fall. About ten months ago, to be exact. It feels more like two years – two exciting and active years. But, ten months it is. BlogPaws, the new online pet community for pet bloggers, was created out of a desire to help our pet blogger friends and to give back to the pet community as a whole.

We were cautioned, at the launch ofBlogPaws, to do it "this way" or "that way." Our goal was to organize and hold a conference where pet bloggers could learn how to use social media tools more effectively, and meet each other – and the brands they buy – IRL. We decided to hold that conference in April… in Columbus, OH… regardless of the fact that none of us had, at the time, any experience in putting on conferences.

We did it. We did it because we didn't let "I don't know how" get in our way. We did it because we are passionate about this cause and this community. We did it because we tapped into the very people we hoped to serve and asked for their help, and they jumped on board without hesitation. The conference in Columbus, fondly known as BlogPaws East, was a shining succeess!

It wasn't without its issues, mind you. It wasn't "easy" or "smooth"… we sort built the bridge as we crossed over it, and created a conference that could serve three purposes – one, to teach bloggers and brands more about the social media tools their friends and competitors are using today; two, to bring everyone together in one place for some fun and laughter; and three, to raise money for shelters and rescues.

The bridge we built was sturdier than you might think. We learned how to do things "right" by paying attention to what the bloggers and brands were asking for. We followed in some solid footsteps (using Blogher as our standard). Mistakes were made, but repaired mostly before anyone knew about them. Missteps were taken and became learning experiences. All in all, the conference got rave reviews and… shouts for "when is the next one?" could be heard across the blogoshpere and on twitter and facebook.

The "next one" is happening next Thurs through Saturday, in Denver. Yes, we are holding a second conference in the same calendar year. Yes, we realize that's crazy. But, the bloggers asked for it. We exist for them – it's not about us, it's not even about the brands, although they are highly important to our purpose. It's about the bloggers, and about giving back.

BlogPaws West is going to be as fantastic as BlogPaws East was. It's going to knock some socks off. It's going to bring even more bloggers, brands, and experts together – to teach each other how to use these new social media tools for — branding, marketing, raising funds, supporting shelters, taking photographs, understanding SEO, learning how to run contests and sweepstakes, getting a handle on the FTC rulings for product reviews, and a little session on writing by yours truly. There will also be hands-on sessions on WordPress, Typepad, Blogger, Lijit and Squidoo.

Yes, you can still register…here. No, you don't HAVE to be a pet blogger to attend, just be aware – there will be a good many dogs, cats and at least one ferret, in attendance. We are very pet friendly!

But, that's not the purpose of this post. The purpose of this post is to remind you that being an entrepreneur means taking risks. It means stepping out of your comfort zone. It means taking your passion to the next level, even when you don't know what will happen. It means asking for help and accepting it. It means getting out there and actually accomplishing something – being what my friend Bruce Peters calls a bricoleur (getting it done with whatever is as hand).

We expect BlogPaws West to give the attendees the same positive experience that BlogPaws East gave them, and more. We expect to learn, again, what worked and what didn't and what the bloggers and brands would like to see next. And, when BlogPaws West is over – when Sunday, September 12th dawns, Caroline and Tom and I will be meeting to put our thoughts and ideas for BlogPaws 2011 into action.

Stay tuned.

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10. Everyone already knows you. You're a Diva of the highest order known the world over. A blog would just drag you down.

9. You're too busy. You work round the clock. A blog would just complicate an already busy work week. Never mind that it could take the place of your newsletter or half of your marketing.

8. Blogs and bloggers are just crowding the Internet with useless chatter. You don't have time for gossip. Or, sharing your newest product development…you latest greatest hire…your key points relevant to your industry…your insight into thought leadership…your views on the economy…or anything else.

7. None of your clients, customers, or associates blog. Really, they don't. No one in your industry blogs. No one. Really…no one. (obviously you live on another planet – I bet I can find a blog in your industry)

6. Your website's contact page say it all. I mean, what else is there? Contact me… that's successful engagement.

5. You prefer chat rooms where you can be "anonymous"… in case you say something stupid. Cause, you would never say anything stupid in real life – just online. You're too smart to speak out IRL.

4. You know your opinion isn't worth anything. Nobody ever listens to you. (maybe that's why you're struggling to get clients?)

3. Blogs have nothing to teach you, so why would you start one? To teach other people? Hey, you're a business professional, not a teacher, right?

2. Blogs are dangerous! People say mean things on blogs. People criticize brands on blogs. People speak their minds. If you start a blog, they might criticize you! (on your blog… or on theirs… which is better? where will you be able to engage better – on their blog or yours? Or mine?)

1. And the number one reason you shouldn't be blogging today – you prefer to be reactive instead of pro-active. Fix it when it's broken instead of before it gets broken.

Classic! If you see yourself here – lock the door, stay home, and be careful turning on the TV – it could corrupt you with all that reality TV.

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Today we have a new author guest blogging at Lip-sticking. Amanda Ponzar is the Director of Communications for Global Corporate Leadership at United Way Worldwide, the world's largest privately-funded nonprofit. You can read more about Amanda on the team page.

Enjoy Amanda's insight on non-profits, today and every other Thursday, going forward.

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I just read a story in the New York Times about young lawyers choosing public interest work rather than making the big bucks.

With the economy taking a trip to Hades in a hand basket, why on earth do people choose to make less money to work for charity? Everyone I’ve asked has said the same thing, “I want to make a difference.”

Although cliché, I felt the exact same way before I broke into the seemingly impenetrable nonprofit world. Who needs Prince Charming?

I fantasized that I would ride in on a white horse, saving people every day, all while getting paid for it. I was a zealous do-gooder on wheels, volunteering all over the place, so who wouldn’t want to hire me?

Well, despite the fact that nonprofits are proliferating like rabbits and a new one seems to pop up every day, only 6.29% of Americans actually worked for a nonprofit in 2009, according to unpublished Data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

So, how can YOU be one of these lucky 6%?

Let’s start with a tip from a friend of mine, Lisa Hamilton, VP of Public Relations at UPS and former head of the UPS Foundation.

Lisa is incredibly beautiful and creative. But don’t let that fool you. She’s also smart. Lisa started as an attorney, then served as program director in the tax department, and then made the case that her unique skills and experience would benefit the UPS Foundation.

“The lesson here is that when people pursue Foundation jobs, they often talk to hiring managers about their interest in the work or their experience as a committed volunteer,” said Lisa. “They fail to appreciate that Foundations are businesses and need staff who can bring excellent management skills (financial, legal, IT, HR, performance measurement, etc.) to the table.” Lisa’s advice?  “Stand out from the crowd” by emphasizing what you contribute. “As in any organization,” said Lisa, “you will be hired and evaluated based on your PERFORMANCE, not your passion!”

I thought about the last time I interviewed someone. I didn’t ask how passionate she was about the cause, I asked about her experience managing complicated projects and demonstrating return on investment.

Ladies, let’s help ourselves out. And no matter where we work, prove our worth with top-notch performance that gets results. That’s an asset anywhere.

More tips to come.

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