Check out this quick edited version of a webinar from the Word of Mouth Marketing Association. They give some good, practical tips on staying in compliance with the new FTC Guidelines regarding the use of testimonials and other online marketing copy.

Then, if you want a little more help, my colleague Michele DeKinder-Smith just started a full course called Demonstrate My Results, which helps you make sure your testimonials and marketing stay within the guidelines. You can access a free call at www.DemonstrateMyResults.com, then decide if you want to join in the class. Don’t risk being in compliance – figure out the new guidelines now!

In coaching my clients (and in my Social Media Content Creation Kit) I encourage taking advantage of the power of already-created content, like YouTube videos, articles, etc.

I also have many clients and readers that would much rather record a video (or create a photo montage) than sit down and write up an article for their blog – the power of video is amazing, and this is a great way to market yourself online. But there is a downside!

Videos and photos give you absolutely no SEO benefit. It’s kind of like creating a project for school, only to find out you didn’t earn any credit for it!

The reason is that search engine spiders cannot watch a video or see a photo – if there’s no text on the post, they have NO idea what the post is about. And so they have no reason to index it. Search engines are all about providing good content in their search results and in their eyes, you don’t have any content on that post.

So how do you earn SEO credit from your videos and photos?

By making sure you appropriately tag them, as well as your blog posts.

People new to blogging are often confused by tags, so here is a quick explanation – tags are simply keywords! You can tag your post, you can tag your images, you can tag your videos on YouTube and other videos sites, etc. So how do you make tags your new best friend for better SEO?

• Take advantage of the “Post Tags” field in your Wordpress blog to add keywords that will tell the search engines what the post is about
• Make sure you have “alt tags” for all your photos. In Wordpress, this is really easy to do! While you’re Inserting a photo, add some keywords or a description of the post to the “Caption” field and voila! You’ve tagged your photo and given the search engine a better idea of what the post is about (note: describing the photo itself is not very search engine helpful – do you really want the search engines to think your post is about a “business woman drinking coffee”, or something like that? No! So use keywords from your post – what the picture symbolizes for the post)
• If you upload your videos to YouTube (or other video sites) and embed from there, then take advantage of YouTube’s tag feature. It will help for search engine friendliness on their site. But on your own site, you will also want to add a quick sentence describing what the video is about, and why someone should watch it. One - because search engines can’t watch the video for themselves. And two - because the video won’t come through in your RSS feed or in someone’s email, and you want to encourage them to come back to your site and actually watch the video.

This doesn’t mean that you have to give up video blogging since you have to write anyway. One simple sentence is enough to at least give the search engines info on what the post is about so they can index it. And there really is power in video. So just be sure to take that extra step of tagging your photos, videos and posts, and you should start to see improved SEO in no time!

It’s a one-of-a-kind event … yet couldn’t be more timely!

Whether you admit it or not, the word resolution goes hand in hand with the start of a new year.  Whether you make your resolutions in the form of business goals and priorities, or actual resolutions …. By mid to late January, you’re likely tired of forcing yourself to follow-through on what you set out just a few weeks ago.

In comes Terri Z at Solo-E, a virtual learning resource for solo entrepreneurs, with the Post Resolution Hangover Giveaway. This isn’t your typical giveaway…each item is a true gift, not available anywhere else for free! The value of each item is the price at which it sells today. How cool is that?! And I’m so honored to be a part of the giveaway!

The gifts include ebooks, audios, home-study packages and more, on topics including: 101 Ways to Attract Clients, 7 Things You Must Do to Get More Clients, The Facebook Fan Page Intensive, The Online Video Playbook, 5 Psychological Triggers to Turn Prospects Into Clients, Abundance in Business, The Finding Time Quick-Start Guide, and my very own, brand new Social Media Content Creation Kit!

Solo-E has partnered with me and 19 other solo-entrepreneur experts to offer these incredible resources for online based business owners.  For 12 days only – January 25 to February 5, you can download all these gifts at absolutely no cost (and no strings). That’s right…you don’t even have to give up your email address!

There’s an incredible group of Experts participating in the Post Resolution Hangover Giveaway, including:

Alicia Forest, Ann Ronan, Loren Fogelman, Tracey Lawton, Allison Babb, Tina Forsyth, Rebecca Zwar, Christine Gallagher, Lou Bortone, Heather Dominic, Laurie Weiss, Laurie Mandato, Zahra Efan, Hazel Palache, Laura West, Eva Gregory, Alicia Smith, Michele PW, Nina East and Paula Eder

Take a few minutes to see what all the fuss is about, and cure your Resolution Hangover! You’ll get access to fantastic resources that you can download and review at your convenience.  Visit http://www.solo-e.com/PostHolidayHangoverRemedy

Article Reprint from Fabienne Fredrickson

Let me share a big secret with you that all wealthy solo-entrepreneurs know: If you want to have an ideal business, work less and make a whole lot more, I can assure you that you CANNOT do it by yourself. You must outsource!

You know how I know this? Because for years, I tried! For years, I tried to do everything in my business by myself, like the good “lone ranger” that I thought I was. You know what? It didn’t work. In fact, a few years ago, I remember getting on the phone with my coach and crying for the first 8 minutes of our coaching call. He listened patiently as I sobbed and then said just one thing to me:

“Fabienne, Frank Sinatra didn’t move his own pianos.”

Silence on the phone. I stopped crying and it was like The Truth had been spoken. It may seem like a “duh” moment to you, but when I heard this for the first time, it felt like the skies had parted and the answer to all my problems were streaming down from the sky. I realized that I had been trying to “move my own piano”, instead of focusing on my brilliance and my “genius” work – the stuff that I’m good at and that only *I* can do in my business.

The minute he said those words to me, a surge of energy went up my entire spine. I realized right then and there that I was trying to do the impossible by doing it all myself and that I would never be able to grow my business further if I didn’t change the way I did things.

So I changed my whole way of doing business and I started DELEGATING different aspects of my business to others. And I’m deliriously happy to report that my business, my bank account (and my sanity) have never looked better!

Fact is, you cannot do it all on your own either. No matter how much you like to think that you can do it better, faster and more efficiently than anyone else, the fact remains that you will eventually burn out. In his book “No B.S. Business Success”, Dan Kennedy talks about the worst number in ANY business is the number 1. Meaning, you never want to be the only one working in your business.

You MUST leverage your time and resources if you are serious about running a successful business,getting clients and finally making a good 1ncome being self-employed. There’s just no way around it. And getting it ALL done means you have to eventually start outsourcing and delegating.

Thing is, you can wait like I did until you nearly crumble into a state of near exhaustion where things are falling through the cracks left and right OR you can come from a Full Practice Mentality and start getting assistance NOW, before you ever get to that place.

Proper outsourcing means delegating specific things to someone who’s happy to do them for you:

• Stuff you’re not good at
• Stuff you don’t know how to do
• Stuff you don’t have time to do
• Anything outside of your brilliance/genius (meaning, everything other than the stuff only you can do in your business)

Delegating allows you to strengthen your strengths, instead of trying to “better” your weaknesses. It means only working on your core competencies and focusing on your brilliance and genius work. In turn, you’ll get more done, you’ll make more money, and you’ll enjoy more time off for the important things in life (like your family, your friends, you know, the important stuff.)

It’s the ULTIMATE leverage!

Now, I have a team of 7 virtual assistants and one in-person assistant helping me on a part-time basis. On top of that, I get help from bookkeepers, attorneys, accountants, fulfillment houses, etc., so I can focus on doing what I do best: speak, write, coach and create products. Oh, and marketing too. Don’t forget that. And because of it, I’m personally able to PRODUCE so much more than I’ve ever been able to.

But I know what you might be thinking. “That’s fine for you, Fabienne, but I’m not in a place where I can bring on a whole staff of people.” Well, believe me, I know about that because I used to be there too! This wasn’t an overnight thing. It’s taken me a few years to get to this point. But the good news is, you can start slowly and ramp up from there, like I did.

Here’s what I want you to do:

• Calculate what you’re worth per hour when you’re doing your Brilliance/Genius work; that which only you can do
• Make a list of all the things you do each day
• Attach a dollar value to what you could pay someone to outsource this to

Example: Let’s assume you’re worth $200 per billable hour. Ideally you should be generating $200 or more for EACH hour you work. However, I’ll guess you’re doing DOZENS of things each day that someone charges less for (and is happy to do for $15, $25, $45, $75, etc.) These are the things you want to outsource, so you can make $200 every hour you DO work. It’s all about working smarter and more efficiently.

To justify this, REPLACE the time you’ve saved with doing your Brilliance/Genius work and working on your Client Attraction assignments. Why? Because marketing = more clients = more dollars. Enough said. (That doesn’t mean you can go goof off. That’s NOT the point, at least not at the beginning.)

Makes sense?

If budget is an issue, just start small. Focus first on tasks that will immediately make you money (stuff you’re not doing now, stuff you don’t know how to do) and set a maximum hour cap per month. Then, as revenue comes in, you can grow from there.

Within months of my taking the leap and doing this, outsourcing helped bring in so much more money, I was able to increase the hours I could delegate and outsource some more and I eventually doubled my revenues in ONE year.

You can too. It’s really easy.

Your Assignment:

So, take out a sheet of paper and do the following:

• Calculate what you’re worth per hour when you’re doing your Brilliance/Genius work; that which only you can do
• Make a list of all the things you do each day that don’t fall within the category of your Brilliance/Genius work
• Attach a dollar value to what you could pay someone to outsource this to
• Begin to outsource and delegate, little by little

I guarantee that you too will catapult your income as you focus more and more on business development and Client Attraction, as well as your genius work. You won’t believe you ever did it any other way.

Need some resources on how to clear the decks and make Client Attraction a priority by outsourcing? Then get a copy of the Client Attraction Home Study System™. I’ve outlined every Client Attraction technique in detail, including outsourcing, and it’s all there so you can start using it right away to get similar results. It’s all step-by-step, not a big mishmash of things. So, you do step one of the system, and when you’re done with that, you move on to step two, and so on. SO easy. That’s why my clients have gotten such great results from it. All the tools, scripts, templates, and examples are handed to you on a silver platter. You can get yours at TheClientAttractionSystem.com.

©2009 Client Attraction LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Fabienne Fredrickson, The Client Attraction Mentor, is founder of the Client Attraction System®, the proven step-by-step program that shows you exactly how to attract more clients, in record time…guaranteed. To get your F.R.E.E. Audio CD by mail and receive her weekly marketing & success mindset articles on attracting more high-paying clients and dramatically increasing your income, visit www.ClientAttraction.com.

A very basic way to explain “SEO” or Search Engine Optimization, is that you are trying to make your site as easy to read and understand as possible for the search engines spiders. Ideally, you want them to visit your site regularly in order to update the search engine listings, you want them to be able to tell exactly what your site is about, and to visit all the deep posts and pages within your sites so you have as many search engine listings as possible.

A very easy way to do this is to use the Google XML Sitemap plugin to generate a sitemap for your site that Google spiders will love! This step, as you can see in the video, literally only takes 2 minutes to set up. If you go on to set up an account with Google Webmaster Tools (which is a great idea), that may take just a few minutes more. But having a sitemap makes it super easy for Google spiders to find all the pages on your website quickly, and be alerted when there’s something new.

Twitter is a busy place, and it’s easy to miss some of the great content that gets shared there every minute of every day. Twitter’s new feature, Twitter lists, are a great way to sort out people whose content you want to be sure to see. These might include industry experts, people who you know share great info all the time (either their own, or by retweeting), the Twitter accounts of tools or companies you recommend to your readers and clients (for example, I recommend following @Hootsuite on Twitter, because I love their service, and they will often share new features that have just been launched), or anyone else whose content you enjoy.

To get started setting up a new Twitter list for yourself, watch the following video to learn some of the in’s and out’s of using Twitter lists. And don’t forget, these are the kinds of social media tasks that can easily be outsourced to a VA, once you give them a good sense of your strategy for your social media marketing, and the types of content you want to be sharing with your followers. Your VA can do a quick check-in daily and preschedule content to keep your Twitter stream full.

Do you have your social media profiles on your website? Hopefully so, because just like offering a freebie or free-taste on your website, it’s a great way to encourage readers to connect with you in a casual, non-salesy way. This lets them get to know you and your expertise without any pressure to immediately become a client. And it helps you build that KLT (Know, Like and Trust) factor that is so important online.

So today’s post is going to show you how to add those snazzy Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn buttons you’ve seen around, to make it easy for readers to find your social media presences, and connect with you there too!

To start with, you need to find some icons you like! Now a word of warning – just because you find an image online doesn’t necessarily mean you can grab it and use it on your site – things like that can get you in trouble! So you want to start with a source that you know offers the right to reuse on your website. My particular favorite is www.iconspedia.com, or you can visit www.twitter.com/goodies to generate the html code AND link and save yourself one step. You can also do a search on Google for free social networking icons.

Once you find icons you like, go ahead and download to your computer.

The next step is to generate html code for the image, as well as the link to your profile. If you’re not familiar with writing html code, the easiest way to do this is to go into your Edit Post screen on Wordpress, and Upload the image.

Once you have the icon in your post, select it by clicking on it, then use the Insert Link button to add a link to your profile – should like something like this  http://www.facebook.com/rebeccazwar?ref=profile or this http://www.twitter.com/rebeccazwar

Now, all you need to do is switch to the HTML tab, and copy ALL the html code you see!

It should look like this:

The very last step is to go into Appearances –> Widgets, and drag a new Text Widget onto your sidebar. You can name it something like “Connect With Me”, then you just paste your html code into the box, click Save, and VOILA! You can check out your new icons!

Knowing what people are looking at on your site, and what sites and keywords are bringing them to you is very important in being able to improve and increase your traffic. But how do you spy on your visitors? Install an Analytics service like Google Analytics. Having some sort of tracking and analytics system on your blog makes it easy to…

• see what posts are most popular, so you can write more on the same topic
• see where a lot of your traffic comes from, so you can focus more time there (for example, you may find you get lots more traffic from Facebook than from Twitter, so you would know that your time is better spent interacting and posting on Facebook since more people click through to visit your site)
• see what keywords are bringing people to your site. You can then focus more on the good keywords that are showing a lot of interest, and you might even get ideas for keywords you hadn’t thought of!

Here’s a quick video on installing Analytics on your Wordpress blog, and what some of the different terms that you’ll see mean.

While I love Wordpress, it’s not all that search engine friendly right out of the box. But with a little bit of tweaking (and the help of a plugin or two), you can really set your site up to rank well and get the search engine spiders to visit regularly.

There are lots of SEO (search engine optimization – the technique of doing things on your site to improve how search engines rank you, how often they visit, what they “see” that your site is about, etc.) plugins out there for Wordpress, but my personal favorite is the All In One SEO pack plugin. For me, it takes care of all the most important optimization, while still being easy for clients to use. Because, I don’t care how fancy your SEO plugin is, if you don’t use it it’s useless!

To install the All In One SEO plugin, just visit your Plugins tab from the left-hand menu, and select “Add New“. By the way, if you don’t see a left hand menu in your self-hosted Wordpress Dashboard, you are on a much older version of Wordpress and should update before you do anything else. I recommend the Wordpress Automatic Upgrade plugin to help you with that.

The video below will walk you through setting up the All In One SEO plugin, but before we do that, I wanted to go over a few terms and tips to get as much out of it as possible:

Definitions:

SE - Search Engines

SERP - Search Engine Results Page. This is where you want to show up – whether it’s on Google, Yahoo, Bing or any other search engine, you want to be found on the Results page (not the paid listings area), preferably on the first page. As you probably know from your own experience, people don’t generally go too far beyond the first or second page of results to find what they are looking for.

Meta - this is information about your site that is not displayed visibly to visitors on the page, but is visible in the code to the search engine spiders. The 3 areas you’ll fill out for the plugin will be the Title, Description and Keywords. The most important of the different meta types is the title, so you want to do your best to write up a short, concise title using keywords to describe the website.

Now, a few tips – your title is the most important section to fill out, so you might want to spend some time here. You are limited to about 70 characters (not words, but letters!) so it needs to be to the point. It needs to be readable and make sense to humans, but also tell the search engines what your site is about. So a couple good examples might be:

“How to handle employee conflict & learn conflict resolution at work – St. Louis”

“How to start a business – free tips, tools and resources for startups – Mary Jones”

When you’re writing these, think realistically about how you search. There will often be keywords that you really want to use, but if that’s not how your average client will search for you, those are not your best keywords. Most people are online looking for a solution to a problem. If you can phrase your title to solve that problem, you’ll usually do much better than if you try to use industry standard phrases that the average person isn’t familiar with. As you can see, we included things like “How to” and “tips” which go along with your keywords well for solving problems.

Lastly, it’s always a good idea to do some keyword research to see how people really search on your subject. You can do that at Google’s Keyword Tool, or on the free version of the Wordtracker keyword tool. Both should let you know how popular your keywords are, and hopefully give you some other suggestions to try as well. This is also an easy task to outsource to a VA if you don’t have the time or just don’t quite “get it”.

This is just a basic overview of SEO for your site, but if you spend a few minutes trying some keyword research and thinking realistically about how people will be searching for your site, you should be able to write some really great titles and descriptions for your site. And that alone will help you start to rank better!

Now get going and set up the All In One SEO plugin!

Oh, and one last thing – don’t worry too much about getting it perfect the first time! You’ll get new ideas for keywords, especially if you’re looking at your Google Analytics report on a regular basis, and you can always be tweaking your main site settings, along with the individual posts.

Writing articles is a great way to increase your visibility on the web. Article directories (places you can submit your article, and have it picked up for syndication or reprint) rank very well in the search engines. And posting your own articles there means that you increase the number of places you can be found on the web, as well as increasing the number of incoming links to your website through your resource box.

Want to take advantage of the power of article marketing, but aren’t sure how to write web-friendly articles? Here are some great resources on how to write good articles that can be used in your newsletter, on your blog and can be submitted to article directories:

5 Basics to Article Writing

Writing Persuasive Articles

Feature Article Writing – Uncover 4 Incredible Feature Article Writing Tips

Article Writing Solutions – Discover 4 Effective Secrets to Multiply the Number of Your Articles