Are you working on a new book or an ebook? Then now is the time to create buzz for this new product!

What tools will you use to do that? Take a look at blogs. As more and more people are reading blogs, bloggers are becoming influential in recommending resources and creating buzz for new products. My very own blog readers (you know who you are :) sometimes ask me to recommend a products that will help them market and promote themselves online.

Look for blogs that your target audience reads, and approach the person(or people) who blog on it. Maybe they can review your book or ebook on the blog? Give away a copy to one of the readers in a raffle? Promote your book on their blog through your affiliate program? See if you can create a win-win situation for yourself and the blogger – this will help you get exposed to a whole new audience.

And don’t forget to start your own blog. It will help you brand your business and products further and create your own brand online. For more information on promoting your business with a blog, take a look at 5 Steps to Success with Business Blogging Special Report.

Biana Babinsky

According to this WSJ article, AOL’s Switch To Free Features Sows Confusion.

“As laid out by AOL, paying subscribers who ignore the change will stay on their current plan at the existing rate. Those who have an alternative Internet connection can use AOL software and its virus and spyware protection — without a monthly charge.”

AOL still offers other paying packages to its consumers. What seems to be confusing to many people who have received an email about the free AOL service was how to actually switch to the free plan.

Is your web copy clear to your clients? It might be crystal clear to YOU (of course, you wrote it), but it could be extremely confusing to your web site visitors. And, when people are confused by what they are reading, they usually don’t take advantage of the offer.

Biana Babinsky

Biana Babinsky is the online business consultant, expert and author, who helps coaches, consultants, virtual assistants, professional organizers and other solopreneurs use their blogs and web site statistics to market better online. Learn more about her marketing training program at https://www.MarketingSalad.com

If you are spending time networking online and not getting any clients, you are not alone. Many people I have talked to tell me that they spend 5-10 hours a week networking online, and have nothing to show for it.

If you are not getting any clients online, you might be networking in the wrong groups or not networking effectively.

Join me for the Online Networking That Gets Results Teleseminar and learn all of the following:

* The very first step you must take to establish yourself as a credible expert, while networking online

* The critical information on dramatically increasing the number of people visiting your web site, after they encountered you during online networking. Almost everyone I have met gets this wrong.

* Little known ways to create online deals and opportunities that will help you promote your products and services to a bigger audience

and much more.

The teleseminar will take place on August 31st at 8pm Eastern and it costs just $19 to attend.

Click Here To Register for Online Networking That Gets Results Teleseminar

Internet and blogging are becoming a part of daily life for some couples. Couple-surfing: ‘Love me, love my blog’ says that some couples don’t communicate about some subjects verbally. Instead, they use a blog.

So, what exactly is couple surfing? According to the article,

“Coined by bloggers responding to a column on the online version of “Wired” magazine, couple-surfing describes “netaholics” or “infomaniacs” who surf alongside each other — doing together what used to be seen as a solitary activity.”

So what does this mean for you, an business owner? More and more of these articles on new uses of the Internet are telling me that more and more people are using the Internet, and even more about interested in doing that. Articles are written in hopes that people will read them. If there weren’t any readership, the Internet-related articles would not be appearing as frequently in the mainstream media.

And, as Internet becomes more and more prevalent, more and more people will be using it to get products and services they need.

Biana Babinsky is the online business consultant, expert and author, who helps coaches, consultants, virtual assistants, professional organizers and other solopreneurs use their blogs and web site statistics to market better online. Learn more about her marketing training program at https://www.MarketingSalad.com

When my clients want to create multiple income streams, some go for creating very different products for the same target audience. Others go for different products for different audiences.

Which approach do you think is better? If you are working with different target market, you will have to do different mailing lists, write different blogs, different articles, and use different promotional techniques to reach your target markets. When you have different products, but work with the same target market, it is easier. While you are promoting or networking with your target market, you could offer different products. After all, your products are created for this market; all you have to find out is what a particular person’s needs are.

What I teach my students at Marketing Salad, the online business coaching community for solopreneurs is the need to create different products and services for the same target market.

There are many different products you can create. Books, ebooks, special reports, CDs, group coaching/consulting, audio guides and many more. Creating them for the same target market helps you really concentrate on your target market, and become well-known in it.

For example, as I work with solopreneurs, all of the products and services I have created are for solopreneurs:

https://www.MarketingSalad.com helps solopreneurs create passive income streams online.

Online Business Coaching helps solopreneurs get more clients by marketing online.

Complete Step by Step Online Marketing Course helps solopreneurs promote their business better online.

I would recommend that you concentrate on one target market, find out what it really needs, and create products / services that can solve their problems.

Once you have done that, and you have some time, you can look at your other target market, learn about the needs and problems, and create products to solve their problems.

Biana Babinsky

Product placement is not just for movies and TV shows anymore. Product placement has come to online social networks. According to the article On MySpace, Millions of Users Make ‘Friends’ With Ads article in WSJ, movie characters now have MySpace pages. They also have lots of friends.

Which movie charcters have MySpace pages? According to the article, Ricky Bobby, from the new movie “Talladega Nights” has a page:

“Ricky Bobby has 47,000 “friends,” MySpace lingo for users linked to the page. The 1,500 comments range from admiration (“You kicked butt in the race the other day. Loved when you signed my baby’s head”) to exultation (“Ricky Bobby is the Man!!”).”

Other characters with pages include:

“John Tucker, the womanizing teenager of “John Tucker Must Die,” and each of his four girlfriends have MySpace pages. (You can check John’s basketball schedule or read about Carrie’s plans for college.) So do seven of the characters from “Accepted,” a film about college students debuting this week. (Bartleby Gaines, the fictional star, lists “Fake I.D.’s” and “Monica” as his interests.) Even the creepily-quiet mascot king from the Burger King commercials has a site. (“If you’d like to be the King’s friend, he’s totally down with that,” his page introduction says.)”

While it might seem that it is easier to promote a new product (all the cool, new product buzz), there lots of different ways to promote an older product, as long as it is relevant to your target market.

When you have just created a page about the new product online, the page is brand new. This means that search engines don’t know about it, there are no incoming links to it, etc. As the web page matures, while you are (hopefully) marketing the product online, search engines index it, there are more and more incoming links to it, more people are recommending it, after buying it themselves, etc. The buzz is building on top of buzz, and more and more people are learning about your product.

But how do you start creating buzz? Which techniques should you use? Here is an article I wrote on Online Marketing Techniques To Drive Traffic You Your Web Site.

Can humor ads create buzz, and, more importantly, SELL? The Alltel ads are definitely generating buzz, both in the online and offline worlds. According to the WSJ article, Alltel Spoofs Itself in Online Ads, But Not Everyone Gets the Joke,

“In advertisements on hundreds of blogs, visitors are being encouraged to join a lawsuit against Alltel Corp. over a new discount-calling plan from the regional cellphone company. The plan, called My Circle, allows Alltel customers to designate up to 10 phone numbers that can be called for free, regardless of the cellphone carrier they’re affiliated with. ”

The article says that the ads are so good, that not everyone realizes that it is a spoof, and not an actual thing.

At the end, though, the abdurdity of the web site itself gives the joke away:
“While most of the ads play it relatively straight, the sites they link to are full of absurd details that give away the joke. Many of the ads feature Edward Maxwell Von Houten, a fictional attorney for the People Against My Circle Foundation, or PAMCF. The attorney’s earlier courtroom wins supposedly include lobbying for greater dress-sock elasticity and suing his mother’s obstetrician for giving him an “innie” belly button (“One day I calculated that over the course of my lifetime so far, I’d spent nearly 18 weeks cleaning lint out of my navel,” he writes on PAMCF’s Web site). He rails against My Circle, accusing Alltel of encouraging long, rambling calls among friends.”

Alltel ads seem to be generating blog posts and lots of Internet buzz for them. Can you come up with a humorous campaign to generate buzz for YOUR business?

I was recently asked about multiple streams of income for coaches. Creating multiple streams of income is a passion of mine, and something that I teach to my clients. I think that different income streams is the best way to leverage your time and earn more money. Many streams are about packaging your knowledge into different Here are a few diffent income streams that I recommend to my clients:

– Ebooks and Special Reports. Many professionals package their knowledge into an ebook, and/or create shorter special reports on smaller topics.

– Group coaching – lower fees per person, and better profits for you.

– Teleseminars. A great way to teach your target market in groups, and get them familiar with what you have to offer.

– In person workshops.

– Subscription web sites.

– CDs.

– Audio recordings.

– Ecourses.

– Selling other people’s products.

There are many different ways to re-package what you already know, and create products from it. I teach members of MarketingSalad.com how to take their knowledge and turn it into products and passive income streams.

Did you ever want to know who comes to your blog, how often, what they read, and how long they stay? Some of these questions can very easily be answered with your web site statistics.

Just like you can track web site visitors on your web site, you can track your blog visitors and readers through the web site statistics on the blog’s web site. These web site statistics should give you information about the visitors who come to your blogging web site.

Web site statistics contain wealth of extremely useful information about your online customers and web site visitors. However, very few business owners actually use the statistics to find information to further their business. You can learn more about using your web site statistics in the Understanding Web Site Statistics Report.

With blogs in particular, some people who read blogs prefer to use RSS readers (I use Sage to read RSS feeds, there are many other RSS readers on the market as well). With RSS readers, you don’t need to visit every blog yourself, to see if they have been updated or not. Instead, the reader checks each blog automatically, and tells you if the blog has been updated since the last time you read it. These readers make RSS requests, that are also seen in your web site statistics. This means that if you have web site statistics for your blog, you will see how many RSS Reader requests your blog receives.

Biana Babinsky

Biana Babinsky is the online business consultant, expert and author, who helps coaches, consultants, virtual assistants, professional organizers and other solopreneurs use their blogs and web site statistics to market better online. Learn more about her marketing training program at https://www.MarketingSalad.com