NETworking

The Lone Ranger would never have made it as an online businessperson.
(PTI-Hurricane Irene stopped bye!)

Marketing as well as any Home Business involves marketing your product or service as well as yourself. It is called Branding, or making yourself visible so that you are associated as being a pert of your business and a recognized expert on all that is involved. Your first step should be to decide WHAT you are going to represent in your business and do research on as many aspects as you can. The second step is to begin networking, to put yourself and your business out where you can begin making and promoting a name for yourself.

Step 1) Let's start with basics, e-mail. It does not matter what you are using personally...AOL, MSN, Hotmail or especially Yahoo, many professionals as well as the people running the listbuilders and mailers will not send to anything but a Gmail account. This is due to the filters that many other email companies use to reduce SPAM, a lot of mail from vendors and email programs is ending up in the spam box or totally lost. Gmail has less restrictive filters but the main thing is that you can actually "tune" your Gmail to send mail to specific folders or to be flagged. The bottom line is that you should start with setting up SEVERAL GMail accounts for your business (I have 4 myself besides my personal accounts). Always set up your personal email in a totally separate account.

Step 2) Make sure you have accounts on the following: Facebook, Twitter, Myspace and YouTube.
In todays Socially oriented society these are the "Major" players and at the very minimum you need to become familiar with how they work and how you might be affected through using them. That is not to say you will be tied to them all day (you will be tied to to many other things) but escpecially Facebook and Twitter may be major players in your marketing stratagies.

Step 3) Linkedin, Stumbleupon, Home Based Business Program and APSense plus a few others make up the "Free" business social networks. These are actually hybrids that cover both the social stratus as well as business connection which are sometime even sanctioned by employers for their people to keep in touch. These are less crucial to join (at first) until you find what if any influence they might carry with your customer base.

Step 4)
            SWOM (Society for the Word Of Mouth)
http://swom.com/?r=173687
            Bizzoppers (Sister of SWOM)
http://bizoppers.com/?r=329098

            Sokule (They speak their own language, seriously!)
http://www.sokule.com/bargainguy

            Kule.com (Sister of SOKULE)
COMING SUMMER 2012