When social media sites became popular their intended purpose was to stay in touch with friends or to create friends anywhere in the world. As these sites became more popular their purpose grew and there are now over 9 million business using Facebook alone. With over 200+ social media sites, it’s almost impossible to pass up that kind of marketing for your business. They make it easy and user friendly to share photos, blogs, updates, and events. Sometimes we forget to maintain our appearances online but it is just as important as face-to-face interaction now. Here are five common mistakes we all make online:

Interaction-  With all the status updates and photos to upload sometimes we don’t actually talk to anyone. It’s time to kick this bad habit. People love to see our updates, events, and fun photos! But by not communicating, eventually we will just be the update that gets skipped past. People need to be acknowledged and to feel apart of your business because they are! Without your clients there is no you! 

Keep your personal life personal– If you are running a site for your business you need not mention topics unrelated to your business service. This includes personal finances, relationships, or anything stressful. Is this really how you want your business represented to first time clients? First impressions mean a lot so stick to a professional appearance. 

Blog– Blogging is a way of commuincating practically whatever you please. A blog can be 5 sentences or 3 pages its all up to the blogger and how they are feeling. But not blogging for your business should be a serious crime! If you don’t do any social sites for your business you should consider blogging. You can keep people informed on what’s happening in your business but its not just a one line update or random thought. Like I said people like interaction and details. Blogging fills both of those needs. 

Grammar– We have become a society that abbreviates when texting because we wish to spend more time doing something else or simply because it's easier. There is nothing wrong with this in the proper setting. Speaking of our phones they have made just about every app possible for them making it almost possible to do as much as you can on them as you could on a full computer. With all of the accessibility sometimes our lines get crossed. When you are representing your brand or company you have to remember to keep it professional. You wouldn’t want major opportunities to view your site and see: “Ck our new store @ apple and orange st. Gunna be awesome! LOL” This could mean losing that opportunity..

Where are you?– This is the first question asked when you go silent on your platforms. If they ask this question more than once you are well on your way to being replaced by another company who is keeping active. Are you trying to make it easy for your competition? When you’re hard to contact or locate, and keep up with, you get forgotten or replaced. Make sure you keep your platforms up to date and interactive to keep people coming back for more.  

Make sure you think of your appearance online. It represents you, your company, and your product.  It’s just as important as making sure your prepared for the day before you walk out the door. By letting social media do the walking, you can gain so much for your business. Just remember to keep it about business!

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You are your biggest asset. When you cannot function everything goes downhill, especially for the stay at home mom. You are the grand composer of your family and when you go down the family goes down in flames. This is why the most important job of a stay at home mom is to care of herself! I am not saying that you are more important than your child, but if you aren’t feeling good how can you take care of your child properly.

        Lets go back to the beginning and start with the basics, “Cleanliness is next to Godliness.” Never say that you are not worth the bottle of good shampoo or lotion, I promise you are! Feeling clean leaves you with a sense of pride. If you tell yourself you can do without and get the cheap stuff or don’t get it at all because you feels it unnecessary any more can ruin your process. When you do not complete your grooming process it can leave you feeling like your missing something and will cause you to be irritated all day.

        We also have to loose this diet of eating what the kids eat. We are not kids anymore. We do not burn calories they way they do and all of that sugar is just not good for us, really its not good for them either. Eating healthy and exercising is not all just about loosing weight. Exercising releases the endorphins in your brain that relax and calm you. Eating right helps your body run smoothly, from your heart and cholesterol problems to keeping your liver clean. When your body is in top shape you feel more ready and inclined to take on the challenges life throws your way.

        Last but not least, take some time for you. We love our kids, husbands, wives, and all of our other responsibilities, if we didn't’t they would not be our responsibilities. It is important to take a little me time in all of it. Whether it is getting a pedicure, or some Starbucks with out the kids in the car, or a hot bubble bath, taking that 30 minuets to be by yourself and not answer to anyone else can give you a mini-vacation. It can allow you to not think about all the problems going on in your world. Everyone needs refreshers otherwise we end up loosing our cool at worst possible moment because we are too tired.

        Taking care of yourself can keep you on track in your busy life. It can keep you feeling positive and wanting to keep going. It can also help keep you from catching a bug when the kids bring one home from school. You are the best player on your team; make sure you keep yourself ready to play!

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All day long we check our Facebook and Twitter wondering what’s going on in our friends, colleagues, and family members days while updating our own status to fit our mood. It’s an awesome way to keep up with what someone is doing from 1000 miles away. Others of us use it to keep our business going, or keeping clients updated, or the million uses in between. Sometimes in the middle of finding out who’s doing what and telling everyone what were up to we forget to actually talk to these people. 

        One of the biggest problems with social media is we forget to engage. These sites give us a million opportunities to interact with others and we don’t. We have gotten too comfortable just pushing the “Like” button. As the world moves toward everything becoming digital, the small things like customer contact become huge issues. As business owners who use these platforms to promote our businesses, we need to step up our game. From now on when someone leaves a comment on a picture or and update we will respond! But it is not only about responding. We have a duty to make our clients feel that we care about their support and loyalty. 

When someone leaves a comment, they took the time out of their schedule to tell you how much they love or hate your product or services. Now I know we don’t like the negative comments but they lead us to a better way to serve everyone when we think of solutions to these comments. Even though it is easier to respond to the nice comments but even the mean ones deserve our attention too. People like to share their opinions on things and it is very important to make sure that they are herd and understood even if you do not agree with them. 

So next time someone leaves a comment try and start a conversation with them. You do not need to have a 6-hour conversation and know everything about the person when you are done. But taking the time to talk to your clients and getting to know them will make them feel special and appreciated. Plus knowing your clients will allow you to fine tune your business to the custom needs of your clients. So do everyone a favor (including yourself) next time and take the time to talk.

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This is the year to take your business to its’ full potential. This is the year you follow these tips and let social media take your business to the next level. 

1.Link Everything

With all the different social media sites in the US the average person will participate in 3 social media sites. Out of those three, one is Facebook. With those kinds of numbers, sites have become friendlier and made it easier to share information across the board. Most have made them possible to link together. That way if you do something on one site it shows it on the others. This is an easy way to make sure all of your fans or clients see everything and keep it consistent.

2.Following, Following, Following

Following is one of the easiest things you can do to build a fan or client base. You should always be polite enough to follow some one who follows you. But I’m talking about taking it a step farther. Search for people who are like you, have your same interests, or people who could potentially be a client.

3.Saying Hello is the First Step

You have to engage. If you do not engage and respond people will quit trying to talk to you. You don’t want that do you? Say hello, or if they leave a comment say thank you or use it to start a conversation. Talking to your fan base will help you learn you your fans are and what they need from you. Make them feel like you care because you do. Without the fans and followers there is no you!

4.Are you Up To Date?

We all have busy lives with our kids, work, and the never-ending list of chores and in between all of that we forget to do things sometimes. Sometimes that thing we forget is to update our platforms or we only update one and not the others. This could lead to the loss of followers. It’s very important when using Social Media for business purposes that you be consistent. Not all people use all of the platforms. Some may only use Twitter, while others use Facebook and LinkedIn or Google+. If you do not keep all the  sites up to date some very important people might miss very important news!

5. It’s Time to Blog

Blogging can be one of the greatest things you ever do for your company. With blogging you can share more than just one sentence. You can tell a funny story or incident. You can let out your thought and worries as a business owner. People like to connect and feel attachments to other people. They want to share things in common and bond. By blogging you can give you fans and clients that connection they are looking for. Which could bring you new clients and loyalty.

6. Pin everything in Site

If you are not on Pinterest you should be, and if you have one and don’t actively use you it, then you’re loosing out. With Pintrest you can share as many photos as you want of all the things going on in your world. If you have a brand business you can share photos of all of your merchandise. You can rapidly gain new followers and expand your market base. Pinterest is one of the newest sites and is rapid growing to be one of the biggest and dominated by women. Which as we all know women dominate when it comes to being online consumers!

7.Sharing is Caring!

I know you have heard a million times sharing is caring from just about everyone online. The simple fact is it is the truth. Sharing allows you to pass on information to your friends about a place or thing that you like. This brings in a new base of followers and allows you to expand your base to a wider sea of consumers. Plus by sharing you create a chain. Those people that you share for are going to return the favor and share your things. This way everyone gets more fans, followers, and clients.

The online world is the future. Pretty soon everything will beonline and computerized. It’s time that you make the online world work for your business too. Allow social media to take your business to a whole new place this year and let the clients start flowing!

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With the New Year here everyone promises themselves as well as others some very well meaning promises. We promise were going to drop that 30 pounds. We are going to quit smoking this year and settle down in life. Were going to give more to our families, our church’s, and our community’s. Above all else this is the year we turn everything around for ourselves.

We mean well when we make this promises, but we usually never follow through with them. This is the year we are going to stop all of that! Seriously! This year we are going to make better promises to ourselves. Plus we are going to do better about keeping those promises. I want to see results and it is going to happen this year.

  Let’s start by making more realistic goals. For example: You want to lose that extra weight you don’t like to see when you get on the scale. Well instead of saying I need to loose X amount of pounds give your self short-term goals. So lets say by February you will stop drinking soda and only eat dessert two times a week. Cutting out those two things alone can lead to at least a couple pounds dropped. And you keep going from there, by May you walk 3 miles a week (that’s only a mile every other day). You give yourself smaller baby steps to get to your goal rather than stand in front of a mountain and wonder how to get over it alone.

    Maybe you are already a health nut! Which by the way, Bravo, you look marvelous! Maybe you want to get ahead in work. Make your baby goals work targeted. Make Valentines a dead line to find one extra work project that’s not in your usual list of responsibilities and complete it. Then make summer your dead line to find a special extra project from your boss to complete. You know your business and your line of work. You know what needs to be done and you know the jobs everyone hates to do that need to be done. Get a go get it done attitude this year and get the chores done. The bosses might not notice the instant you do it but the world has a way of paying off hard work! So go and get it done!

    Let go of all the negative thoughts of trying to accomplish a task that seems too big! Never lower the bar for yourself either because you think a task is to big. If your goal is a large one that seems impossible remember to break it up into to smaller goals. Before you realize it you will accomplish all the small goals that lead to accomplishing the major one! Make this the year you make your resolutions come to life!
 

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On the First day of Christmas my true love gave to me,

A brand new tablet for me.

On the Second day of Christmas my true love gave to me,

Two Webinars.

On the Third day of Christmas my true love gave to me,

Three Pinterest pins.

 On The Fourth day of Christmas my true love gave to me,

Four conference calls.

On the Fifth day of Christmas my true love gave to me,

 Five New Clients.

On the Sixth day of Christmas my true love gave to me,

Six business’ a blogging.

On the Seventh day of Christmas my true love gave to me,

Seven quotes inspiring.

On the Eight day of Christmas my true love gave to me,

Eight people sharing.

On the Ninth day of Christmas my true love gave to me,

Nine friend requests.

On the Tenth day of Christmas my true love gave to me,

Ten VA’s assisting.

On the Eleventh day of Christmas my true love gave to me,

Eleven Hootsuite postings.

On the Twelfth day of Christmas my true love gave to me,

Twelve Tweeters tweeting,

Eleven Hootsuite postings,

Ten VA’s assisting,

Nine friend requests,

Eight people sharing,

Six business’ a blogging,

Five New Clients!

Four conference calls,

Three Pinterest Pins,

Two Webinars,

And a brand new tablet for me.

Happy Holidays!

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No I am not talking about the movie with Helen Hunt and Kevin Spacey! I am talking about you! It is time that we take matters into our own hands. Every day at least a million times a day someone in the world wish for a better world to live in. One where everyone can live in peace and harmony. Well I’m here to tell you that’s not going to happen, unless you start today by doing your part. We have to start now, today, if we want a better future. Just like you start saving for your 401k early for your retirement, we have to start today to change the world in 20 years.

The world is not the same planet as 100 years ago and it won’t be the same in another 100 years. Instead of wanting to discover new land now we are trying to discover the cure for cancer. We worry about our health care system and if there will even be one in the future and if we will even have a future because of the thinning ozone layer. And that’s just issues we face together as a country at home we battle bills, having a roof over your head, and trying to keep the family a family.

The reality is if we just keep wishing life is going to pass us by and we will have never made one difference in the world. Someone very wise once said "All great things are only a number of small things that have carefully been collected together." By starting small you can make a miracle happen. There are so many things you can do to help. You can help out by passing along some information you think someone might need. You could donate all the old clothes you never wear. You could volunteer a couple hours of your precious time at the soup kitchen.

Not everything is about giving out money. I’m not asking you to do anything you cannot do. Some times in life we pass up little opportunity’s to help someone out because we are so busy with what we have going on in our own lives. Then there are times in our life when we our down on a little luck ourselves and need something as simple as someone passing your business card along to the right person. When these times come we wish, hope, pray, and cross our fingers that the one little thing we need will come through for us. Now is the time to do that for someone else, give them that little push they need to success. And next time when you need the little push in life, it will work out for you. Never forget to pay it forward because we can change the world with a bunch of little acts strung together.

So here is my challenge to you. Pay it forward. By Christmas help out 3 people. The task can be big or small; it can cost you time and money or nothing at all. During these hard times especially with Christmas around the corner we all need all the help we can get. Make sure you do your part to change the world into a better place. Can you meet the challenge and make a difference?
 

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