I thought I’d take a break from writing about ecommerce and marketing and focus on some amazing folks who are blogging and sharing ideas.

Each of these bloggers have a unique blogging style that produces an inspirational feeling to their audience. They are dedicated to their readers and prove they listen by responding to questions and concerns each week. They impress me again and again with their topics and insight, and how much they share of their personal life. I’ll continue to look forward to reading their posts every week!

Chris Guillebeau is a world traveler and has set an impressive goal to set foot in every country in the world by the time he is 35. Right now the count is 125 countries, not too shabby! Chris’ blog is built upon of his world travels as well as offering advice and insight to being a freelancer. I interviewed Chris earlier this year and how he’s used social media to communicate his blog and business - Check out his blog and you’ll be inspired to live a life that’s unconventional!

Erica Douglass is now “retired” after selling her web hosting business at the age of 26. Erica composes blog posts each week about business advice, her challenges having Celiac disease, as well as her goals for new businesses that she’s launching this year. She’s very candid about how she’s achieving her goals and shares the steps and secrets of how she works her way to making $10,000 from her writing.

A very inspirational person, I always find that after reading some of Erica’s posts, that I can take her ideas and apply them to my business. I really enjoy how she communicates with her readers and maintains that she’s an every day type of person that can be successful and so can you. Most of it is hard work, persistence, and a winning attitude.

Snack Girl is Lisa Cain, a snacker who has a Ph.D., a published author and a mother of 2. She’s fascinated with snack food and is great at debunking what we might find as “healthy” at first, but if you read the fine print, looks are deceiving!

Every week Lisa either shares a snack that she feels is a healthy alternative to a fatty snack, shares her own challenges with weight, or shares her reader successes with weight loss and how they accomplished it. What impresses me is after reading Snack Girl for a few months is that I’m evaluate my snacking and readinb labels much more than before. Snack Girl is great about reminding us how many teaspoons of sugar are in a Slushie versus fruit juice and how that can affect us over a period of time. I notice that I’m making better decisions when I purchase drinks or snacks and have been influenced to even bake more of my own snacks, so I know what ingredients are being added!

Do you have a favorite blogger you read weekly or monthly? Who would you like to share?

Share

Related Posts:

• Squidoo, Seth Godin’s marketing animal

RSS stands for (Rich Site Summary) which is a simple way to deliver web content. News websites, blogs, and other oline publications usually have their content available for RSS.

Why would you want to use RSS?

RSS turns out to be this great time-saver. You can subscribe to all these different news feeds and put them all in one place. The most popular reader is Google reader, my favorite. It’s easier to get your ow reader, just go to http://www.google.com/reader/ and follow the directions.

Now, instead of having to go to all these different news websites and blogs, you can have them all in one place. I know a lot of folks who will save all the updates from their reader and read them one day of the week or a few minutes a day.

Try it out and see if it doesn’t make your life a little easier.

Share

Related Posts:

• Squidoo, Seth Godin’s marketing animal

Squidoo is one of those marketing tools you don’t hear too much about in all the social meda hype. It’s almost a secret to some, but I’ve been curious about it for a while.

Basically Squidoo is made up of single lens (a free web page) that you can edit and draw people to (for example, linking it through your Twitter account).

For example, I created a lens labeled “Why Portland, Oregon is so great” inserting my own text and Portland photos from Flickr.

The main modules that make up your page are:

-Text ( basically chunks of text created by you)
-RSS (just like a blog)
-Photo (bring in photos from Flickr and other photo sharing sites)
-Guestbook (get feedback from others or turn it into a Q&A)
-Amazon (choose products and make $ when products are purchased through you)

There are other modules as well, but these can get you on your feet.

You are encouraged to write about your passions, hobbies, yourself, etc. These lens are just another great way to generate traffic to places you like to funnel followers and customers.

How does Squidoo stay afloat? When a money changes hands through your lends -  you receive 50%, 5% goes to charity and the rest to Squidoo.

Squidoo provides tons of suggestions on ideas, ways to improve your lenses, a newsletter for tips/tricks, and much more. Overall, it looks like a great tool to take advantage of amongst all the social media tools.

I also have the option to add modules such as Amazon products (one of the ways to make money through Squidoo). Other modules include guestbook, other text inserts, and linking to other lens. Squidoo provides complete stats about who is coming to your lens, etc.

Share

Related Posts:

• Connect with Colleagues and Clients Today

When you start setting up a blog, you’ll notice that you are given the option to add “tags” to your blog post.

What is a tag you ask? A tag is simply a keyword you use to label your posts as well as make it easier to find your entry. For example, you have a blog about your coffee shop that specialized in organic, fair trade coffee. You like to blog about when new flavors of coffee come in, free tastings, etc. It would be good to use tags like “free-trade”, “organic coffee”, after each blog post.

Here’s why tags are important and powerful

1) Using the same tags over and over again. Why? So you can come up in searches when users are looking for the same keyword. It’s critical not to vary the tags too much, but instead reuse them, like in the example above: “organic coffee”, “free-trade coffee” ,“independent”.

2) Use tag clouds in your blog – tag clouds are commonly seen on the sidebar of blogs, are easy to scan. A list of tags can be easily read if it’s in a cloud. It squeezes a ton of information into a small space.

3) You can always include terms in your tags that aren’t necessarily in your blog. If you are located in Portland, Oregon, but it’s not mentioned in your blog post, you can tag “Puddletown”,  “Stumptown”,  “PDX”, or “Rose City”. These tags can alert search engines to which terms are most important and help lead the right people who really want to read your content.

Share

Related Posts:

• Just a few inspirational bloggers on the web

We want to help you learn to use the right tools to help promote and communicate with your customers! We’re excited to cover topics related to blogs, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and much more. It’s an exciting time in the communications world, but it can be overwhelming to know where to start.

In addition to blog posts, will be also be sending out the top 2-3 posts each month through our email newsletter.  Please feel free to leave comment or email us, we need to hear from you!

Share

Related Posts:

• The passion behind the bread, Dave’s Killer style