Web Business Woman

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.

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!

Last time I checked my Starbucks gold card balance online, I was two stars away from another free drink.  Every transaction = star. 15 stars = free drink.

When I’m in Starbucks, I feel GOOD. Granted, it could be the frappachino talking. The venti double chocolaty chip crème frappachino light with a splash of decaf and chocolate drizzle to be exact. I’m cuckoo for cocoa puffs enough to pay Starbucks $5 for a beverage, but it’s more than just the sugar rush. It’s also Starbucks’ savvy marketing and corporate responsibility.

When I go to Starbucks:

· The pastry display signage, crinkly brown bag and napkin all tell me Starbucks doesn’t use trans fats, artificial flavors or high-fructose corn syrup in their multigrain bagel (me on a good day) or classic glazed doughnut (naughty day).

· My cup holder tells me it’s made of recycled materials.

· The cup itself says “YOU. Are a pioneer in using recycled cups. Everything we do, you do.”

When it comes to recycling, Starbucks is in it to win it. They give free 5lb bags of used coffee grounds for your compost pile. Starbucks even held a Cup Summit to create a better recyclable cup. 

According to cause marketing authority Cone, more than two-thirds of people consider a company’s business practices when deciding what to buy. And 85 percent of people expect companies to make and sell environmentally responsible products and services during the economic downturn.

Starbucks’ website tells the rest of the story, from community support to volunteering to Product Red HIV support to ethical sourcing to improve livelihoods around the world. 

What this all brews down to is a brand that speaks corporate responsibility to consumers, while serving addictive, chocolaty, caffeinated beverages. What’s not to like?

So, what is YOUR brand (business or personal) saying about you?

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.

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

I will be one of the many bloggers making tracks to BlogPaws West starting tomorrow. This conference will be attended mostly by pet bloggers which is taking place in Denver on Sept. 9-11. Yvonne is one of the founders of BlogPaws and you can read more about it in her BlogPaws West post that she wrote earlier this week.

Now I am a pet owner and lover, I have two dogs, two cats and taking care of my daughter’s chincilla while she’s at college. But I’m not a pet blogger. I write a marketing blog and I will speaking at the conference on Saturday morning on the same subject that I spoke about at the first BlogPaws 2010 event that was held in April in Columbus, Ohio, “The Nuts and Bolts of Contests, Sweepstakes and Promotions”. This time Simon Tonner, VP Marketing at Dogtime Media, will be joining me and share some of the promotions they’ve done for various advertisers.

I’m finalizing my presentation today which includes a review of the BlogPaws or Bust Video Contest that I managed for the event. The contest invited people to submit videos describing why they should get to BlogPaws West or Bust. It required that the person submitting the video actually appear in the video, as well as at least one of their pets, and be no longer than two minutes max.

Now I hadn’t managed a contest in a while and this was the first contest I did utilizing the Wildfire Promotion app which allows you to run sweepstakes and contests on Facebook as well as off your website or blog. I’ve run many sweepstakes with this app and I think it’s a great self-service tool for bloggers that would like to run promotions.

I consider myself a pretty experienced professional when it comes to running these types of interactive promotions and have consulted many companies and individuals who want to run them. However I have to admit that I did learn a few things from this one.

First off, as I had heard from others running similar contests, people wait to the last minute to enter. The longer you have a submission period, the longer people put it off. It’s human nature to wait. We received many of our submissions in the last 24 hours, some close to the midnight cut-off. We had discussed extending the submission period because of lower than expected entries, but glad we didn’t. I advise my clients not to change the rules once a promotion starts as it could make all the rules void if you do.

The second thing was actually more of a confirmation than a learning. When you run a video contest in which you are asking for specific content, i.e. why you want to come to BlogPaws, don’t expect a huge turn-out. Creating a video like this takes time and some expertise. It’s not as easy as just submitting a video of your pet doing cute tricks. So if you want quantity, make it easier. If you want quality, make it more specific to you. Also make sure all those involved know this upfront or they may be disappointed.

Next I learned that you need to be prepared to provide technical help for the uploading process. The Wildfire app gave people two choices to upload a video: 1) either submit a video that you have already uploaded to your YouTube account, or 2) upload the video from your computer which will end of hosting it off your Facebook page. Wildfire doesn’t host the videos, so they have to exist online either on Facebook or YouTube. Those that were trying to upload a video from their computer without being logged-in to their Facebook account were not having success.

However, the great thing that I learned about sponsoring a video contest is that it’s worth all the work when you receive the videos. I was surprised at how entertaining and creative some of these submissions were. They brought smiles to my face and some even made me laugh out loud.

So congratulations to Stacy Kowalchuk and Angie Bailey, our two grand prize winners who each won a trip to BlogPaws West. I invite you to view their winning videos here on our contest page. They received the highest number of votes from our pet community. I can’t wait to meet them in Denver. See you all soon!