Marketing Roadhouse

When I started VillageWorks many moons ago, everyone told me I needed to work on my elevator pitch. It made sense to me to have a short description of my business including what I did and the kind of customers I help, but I found so many were laden with buzzwords that you really couldn’t get a feel for what someone actually did. I use to think, “just get to the point already”. Fast-forward to

Note: this is a very personal post, and I totally understand if you skip it. Last year at this time, I was blogging every weekday of July and writing my book. I spent my vacation publishing posts, managing comments and working on my book. I feel like I completely neglected my family during this process. They are more than supportive, my daughter even has a copy of my book in her room. Have I mentioned

What happens when the person in charge of social media for a company goes on vacation? As summer is upon us, this is something all of us that use social media for business should consider. As the sole employee of my business, I am always connected to clients and others no matter where I am. Even on vacation, I am connected via my MiFi and phone, so I can still monitor my social media accounts

Katy Perry “gets” social media or at least the people she works with get it. I’m a fan of her music so I started following her on Twitter and “liked” her Facebook page. In the beginning of June, Katy introduced a character Kathy Beth Terry  and encouraged people to “like” her Facebook page and follow her on Twitter. Kathy Beth Terry is Katy’s character in her video for Last Friday Night, but she built a

If you have spent any amount of time using social media, you know that everyone uses it in their own unique way. Some strictly for work, some strictly for personal and many a combination of both. I definitely fall into the both category and my guess is that if you are reading this, you fall into this category as well. This leads to the question, where to draw the line between personal and private? You

I share a lot of the same characteristics with my parents, especially the desire to always be learning new things. For as long as I can remember, my dad has been building an HO scale train platform (to the left is a picture of one section), but once he retired it really grew with the addition of an amusement park, campground and even a mountain rescue complete with helicopter hanging from the ceiling. You can

One challenge businesses have is getting their blog in front of enough eyeballs. There are a lot of ways to promote your blog and LinkedIn gives you a great tool that allows you to set it up and forget it. If you have a WordPress blog, you can pull it into your LinkedIn account using on of their apps. I put this video together for a client and thought I would share it with you.

I do a fair amount of speaking, which is something I really enjoy. In the past, I tried to manage notes either in the form of hand-written notes or in the little area for notes that PowerPoint provides. Either way they had to be on paper which caused a few problems: 1. I would lose them 2. They sometimes got out of order 3. If I didn’t lose them, I got tired of storing them.

I don’t typically promote events here, but wanted to pass on an event that Network Solutions will be holding a Small Business Mobile Livestream on May 17th. Given the new trend of mobile, the more information we can all gather the better, so that we can better understand when and how to best utilize this technology. From Network Solutions: Our recent Small Business Success Index (pdf) reports that small businesses are widely embracing the concept