Ralph Waldo Emerson once said “If a man can make a better moustrap than his neighbor, though he builds his house in the woods, the world will make a beaten path to his door”.

Emerson O.B. Winters made the insightful reply “The manufacturer who waits for the world to beat a path to his door is a great optimist. But the manufacturer who shows this ‘ to ‘mousetrap’ to the world keeps the smoke coming out of his chimney.”

In other words people need to know about your ‘mousetrap’.

What are YOU doing to get YOUR  ‘mousetrap’ noticed ?

Have you produced a marketing plan for YOUR business ?

Here are just some of the things you could be considering:

• Sharing helpful information in your Facebook status and in your tweets
• Having a blog, writing posts that are relevant to your target clients and promoting your posts on Facebook, Twitter, Linked In
• Commenting on blog posts by the people whose blogs attract a lot of traffic from your target clients
• Having your own channel on YouTube and making short videos so that people can get to know you and your products or services – you can then promote them on Facebook, Twitter, Linked In
• Writing articles and posting them to sites such as Ezine Articles and again promoting them on Facebook, Twitter, Linked In

All of these ideas work as well for an off line business as an online business.

My challenge to you: come up with 10 things you could be doing to promote your ‘mousetrap’ and then pick four and action them !

If you want to read more about article marketing read my post on The Power of Articles.

One of my strategies for getting visibility and credibility is publishing articles. The content of your articles will cover topics that you know a lot about – in my case I write about market research, using questionnaires to discover more about your market, networking, the power of social media for business.

You can include your bio, some information about your business products/services and a link to your website which enables readers to discover more about you and your services and of course brings visiters to your website. Take a look at this one of mine to see what I mean.

I always announce the title and URL of my latest article on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter.

You’ve probably heard the word ‘repurposing’ – this means using something you have written several times over – an article can be included in your newsletter, used as a blog post, a series of articles could be grouped together to form a free report so that people can get a taste of your style and expertise.

For those of you wondering where to publish your article here are some suggestions:

Ezinearticles
Articlesfactory
Goarticle
Ideamarketers
Isnare
Articlesbase
Article Dashboard
Article Alley
Selfgrowth

I hope this is of help – do leave your comments and share your views and further advice on article writing.

…. for every time someone expects me to do something free, give free advice, free guidance, a free talk, work on an exciting, high visibility project at a reduced rate or on an exchange of service I’d make more money than I do by mostly only working with paying clients. So the cartoon  below from Webdesigner Depot really resonated with me.

This post is dedicated to everyone who does free, reduced rate or exchange of service with a suggestion that you STOP doing this – there’s rarely a really justifiable reason for doing free or cheap.

Tell yourself: I’m almost never free – I’m never cheap – The only exchange I do is my knowledge & experience for your $$$ (preferably paid on time).

My first website – GSPinsights– was born between me flying from Canada to the UK and the lovely Suzanne Whitby, founder of BrandYou, flying from the UK to South Africa. She’s been fixing it up lately and this morning I’m getting a training session in Joomla from her.

So what’s this got to do with anything ?  well, apart from a pitch for Suzanne (which she well deserves) and perhaps opening up a debate about WordPress versus Joomla, I wanted to share with you some things I found on her blog. Two really great tools in fact.

DIGITAL SIGNATURES

Have you ever wanted to have your own digital signature that you can use to “sign” online documents, emails, and letters but did not get around to it because the process of creating a digital signature was too long and tedious?  A nice easy way to sort this out is  My Live Signature – it allows you to create an online signature and save it in an image format that you can use online and in emails as well as anywhere else too in minutes.

To get started, just go to mylivesignature and…

1. Type in your name as you want it to appear in your signature – for example, Jane Bloggs or J.P.Bloggs etc.
2. Select your preferred signature font
3. Select your preferredsignature size
4. Select the color you want for your signature
5. Select the slope
6. Save the image as a .png document on your desktop.
7.  Insert it into your documents and files

It’s that easy!

TIME TRACKING

or as Suzanne called it – A Sexy little timekeeping tool – also known as Fanurio.  Not only is it easy to use, but it allows you to click record as soon as a call starts or as soon as you start working on a specific task, so that you can record when you started, when you paused and precisely what you did.  You can then generate invoices and issue clients with a report so that they can see exactly what you did for them.

Enjoy !

Oh, and check out Suzanne at BrandYou if you are non-Wordpress website type of person. or if you need a logo or other creative work.

Oh, and if you’re curious about my original website and one that I still promote to off-line contacts who may need the services of a boutique management consulting company : GSPinsights.

I was living in Toronto. As I got ready to go to the dentist I heard on the news that a plane has crashed into the World Trade Centre in New York. Then the news announced that another plane has crashed. I remember thinking that the US was not having a lot of luck with it’s planes that day. I naively assumed that a light aircraft had hit the WTC and a helicopter had landed badly at the Pentagon. Never in my wildest imaginings could I have  imagined what I was about to find out.

I walked out of home into a city of blue skies and sunshine. I love Toronto. I was carefree. Life seemed good. I took the tram to go down to King Street West for my dental appointment – two crowns were to be fitted. We were to only fit one – in three hours. When I got to the dentists I discovered what was really happening in the US. My dentist, her assistant and I listened intently to the news. This was why only one crown got fitted. We spent time in silence. We cried. When I left we hugged each other, crying, saying that for the rest of our lives we would always remember who we were with when the towers came down.

I walked out into the street – the sky was still blue and the sun was still shining but the world was grey and scary and I was cold. The down town core of Toronto was empty – offices had been closed, staff sent home. All flights were grounded. Air space closed except for emergency flights from New York. The hospitals in Toronto had cancelled all elective surgeries in order to treat the wounded from New York. No wounded came – everyone had died or… miraculously… survived.  No-one knew what was going on, why planes were crashing , who or what was targeted.

Once back home I switched on the TV – the images were of the WTC towers were falling, people jumping, people running. Those images were engraved on my brain – they were all I would see night after night for a very long time.

A few years later I met a guy on the coach from London Heathrow to Woking – we were getting the same train to the West Country and we started talking. He lost all his colleagues in the WTC on 9/11.

I’ve since been to Ground Zero and looked at the names of those who lost their lives – people that left behind them family and friends, young children who  never really knew their fathers.

This post is to their memory, to the courageous passengers and crew of flight 93 and to their friends and families who have had to find the courage to carry on and live with the memory of the horrific events of September 11th 2001.

Protecting your website – those of use with a website (or two) would do well to read a blog post by Jessica Mathews in which she strongly advises having a Terms of Use Policy and a Privacy Policy posted on your website.  Once you’ve read the post don’t just think “yeah I must do that” – go and do it – write that Terms of Use and Privacy Policy and post them on your website. Here’s the link to her post Is your website puttng you at risk?

Hubspot are offering a free report on Social Media, Blog and Search Engine activity by industry. It’s great on advice about which social media platforms to be focusing and the strategies to adopt. You can download the report here.

For those of you with a WordPress website or blog head over to the Social Media Examinerand read the guest post by Denise Wakeman on 24 impressive blog plug-ins. Denise is a well-respected blogging expert so this post is worth checking out.

How often do you blog ? How often do you think you should blog ? Grant Grifffiths addresses this much debated question in his blog post rather unoriginally entitled:  How often should I post to my blog ? nonetheless it is a post worth reading.

Following on from this I found Chris Brogan’s post on Numbers that matter very apt. Chris wrote the post following someone expressing concern about their numbers on Facebook and indeed everywhere you turn you find someone stressing about how many friends they have on Facebook, how many followers on Twitter and so on and so on. Some of the numbers that Chris thinks are worth worrying about include:

Worth thinking about eh ?

Well of course you need a plumber to install a new bathroom, fix a dripping tap or to switch off water gushing from a burst pipe but I was thinking more of money leaks from your business – when YOU need to be your own plumber stopping those money leaks – and trust me – when you’ve done reading this blog post you’ll all be agreeing that you have leaks – probably so many it’s a big flood.

I certainly hope you’ll leave a comment telling us all about the leaks that you’ve identified that aren’t covered in this post. I’ll bet there’s a ton of things I haven’t thought of.

So here are some potential sources of leaks for you to think about:

• Do you read all those books you buy? do you need to buy them or could you borrow them from your university library or even local library?
• How many VIP and membership programmes are you signed up for and never read the stuff that you receive?
• Do you pay to go on workshops and put the learnings into practice or do they remain notes in a binder?
• Do you use those home study courses you buy or do they take up valuable shelf space?
• How many networking events have you been to, collected business cards and then done no follow up?
• How many domain names do you have? do you really need so many?
• How many hosting services are you signed up for?
• How many premium WordPress themes do you have and make no use of?
• Do you buy ink for your printer, almost never print or photocopy anything and then when you do you find the ink has dried out and you need to replace them? (this is my favourite trick)
• Could you use a Skype calling plan instead of a landline?
• Do you really get benefits from premium membership on Linked In?
• How many business organisations do you belong to and are you reaping the benefits? Do you go to the networking events? do you have an enjoyable time? do you make useful contacts? if you’re answering no then maybe you should question whether you should be spending money on these. Of course some you need to belong like the Chamber of Commerce simply because it adds some credibility and prestige but …
• Annual travel insurance is cheaper than buying travel insurance per trip
• Do you really need that extra suitcase you now have to pay for on transatlantic flights (another favourite of mine although I would claim that going for one to two months makes it justifiable!)
• Do you need to fly on a weekend? maybe if you fly during the week the cost of the additional hotel nights would be less than the extra cost in the airfare and you get some quiet time to focus on your business or hey, even some YOU time which is very important too.

Now write your own list and be prepared for a BIG shock .. my list showed that I could easily save $3000 a year – at least. That’s money you could invest in your business; money that would pay for the services of a virtual assistant (VA) to free up some of your time to work on your business or spend time with family; you even be radical and give yourself a very nice – and probably well deserved – holiday !! or just simply save on all that credit card interest.

Why not share with us some of the things that appeared on your list.

John Williams, author of  Screw Work, Let’s Play: How to do what you love and get paid for it sent me an email the other day (I guess I signed up for something at some point). He’d been inspired to write it following a holiday at a wondeful boutique hotel in Sicily.

I’ve extracted the following inspiring words that will, I hope, help some of my readers  find THEIR brilliance and make a business out of it (and I hope John won’t mind that I’ve done this !)

1. Find your brilliance
Find that thing you have a natural ability and enduring passion for (clue: you’ve been doing it in some form your whole life)

2. Accept your brilliance
Even if you don’t shout about it to the world, you must stop pretending you’re nothing special (Brits in particular take note here). Downplaying your strengths short-changes both you and the world and it guarantees you will never rise above the level of ‘good’ to reach brilliant.

3. Develop your brilliance
Take what you’re already good at and enjoy doing and focus all your energy on that. Become superb at it. It’s going to take a while but if you’re “in flow” you’ll have a blast along the way.

4. Create something truly brilliant
Use your talents with the skills and knowledge you’ve developed to create something really special. Focus on something very specific you can excel at. Collaborate with others who are brilliant at the parts you’re weaker at. Producing something is the most important step of all. It doesn’t matter how brilliant you believe you are if you have nothing to show for it.

5. Show the evidence of your brilliance
Occasionally I meet people who tell me how brilliant they are. I’m really not very interested. Tell me what you’ve created or contributed to and what other people have said. Better still don’t tell me, show me by helping me with this skill and knowledge of yours. Or just let me find you by others’ recommendations.

Blogging Tips carried a guest post by Charnita France who seems to always come up with great suggestions on internet tools. This time she talked about the benefits of using Spyvo to manage reminders and keywords: Quickly Manage your Reminders and Alerts with Spyvo.