The secret to getting out from under the avalanche of choices when it comes to promoting your business is simple. What’s the secret? Why it’s right in front of all of us, pick a couple of ways to promote and leave the rest on the side of the road. With hundreds of advertisers and social media mavens vying for your attention it is easy to think you need to do everything there is to do, you don’t.

Find one or two social networking sites to join, sign up with two bookmarking sites, grab a seat at the twitter fair, create content and get some links. Stir this for a while mix it with offline tactics and bake.

On an off topic note I found this list of Social Media 2009  Predictions over at Being Peter Kim and thought I would share it with you all. It is a bit hard to read in the viewer but can be made full screen with just a click on the box in the upper right corner of the viewer. It is not reolutionary but does offer a view to build on or tear apart as your needs in business dictate.

Yes there are thousands of people who dole out millions of lines of both online and offline Marketing Advice, I’m sure it seems as attractive as putting you finger in a light socket trying to find just the right few for you. No need to fret here are two that will lead to more. The first is the Canadian Marketing Blog a rich source of great information and the second is the Church of The Customer a down to earth and straight forward look at everything.

Everything we do in business comes down to two simple things.

1. everything is local
2. everything is marketing

Now think about those two things as you go about your day building your business.

So what is a satellite website and do I need one? First, a satellite website or website are a series of websites each built around one topic. If your main website is about writing then you might build 5 or 6 satellite websites each with its own topic but all relating to your main website. An example: fiction, short stories, journal writing, writing exercises and science fiction would each have its own 5+ page website with all of them pointing to your main website. Other then pointing to your main website they would only point to one other of the satellite sites, so A would point to B, B would point to C, C would point to D and d would point to A with all other external links have a rel=”nofollow” attribute so not to leak away Google Juice.

Why on earth would you go to all this trouble? Back-links are the life blood of ranking in search engines but they can be very time consuming to acquire and that time adds up to lots of money. Building-out a number of great content websites can can you an ongoing set of strong links. The sites you build are under your control.

Don’t get me wrong, not for a second am I suggesting you don’t need a robust back-link strategy to go along with the satellite program, you do, this is just a highly effective way that gives you one more weapon in your arsenal to get to the top of the rankings.

If you have been neglecting your blog it’s time to once again dust it off and let the world know what you have to say. The main caveat is, blog at least 4 times every week and keep it going otherwise you are wasting real valuable time for no real benefit.

Once you get the old blog cleaned up and back on track make sure you have it listed in lots of good blog directories that are part of your link strategy. Here are a few I think offer value. Of course there are many more places to list your blog, some cost and some are free. The trick in to jump in and experience success.

1. Best Of The Web  BOTW
2. EatonWeb Directory
3. Powered by Wordpress Directory
4. Wingee Directory
5. Delightful Blogs Directory

Once the SEO is complete you will have a strong set of keywords to use as your basis for things like article marketing, web page building and external linking. Having a direction is always easier then not having one.

Once you are ready to expand your pages and write expert articles you will need so help. The web is full of handy tools to help you organize your information and research your niche. Here is a list of sites you may find meet your needs in getting both organized and efficient in promoting your business.

1. Advertised as “A personal research assistant. Inside your browser” Zotero is full of tools to help in your research endeavors.
2. DecisionStreet bills itself as a website service that “helps you make smarter decisions through a set of simple yet powerful tools and access to the experiences of others.” Check it out.
3. LingoZ offers a user built dictionary in many languages.
4. Right off I loved this site, SuTree, it is a site of free instructional videos with hundreds of topics to choose from.
5. MindBites is built around the community model of everyone has things to share.

Many of these sites are still in beta but you just never know when you will find just the right tool to help in your work of finding and collecting information that will put your business in the lead and your website on top.

It’s a huge subject, for me to make it somewhat manageable I choose Soup Kitchens as my focal point. I’m pretty sure everyone knows at least tangentially what a Soup Kitchen is but do you know where they are in your community, have you ever visited one to put in a couple of hours of work?

Soup Kitchens can be found in most communities big or small, local churches and community groups come together to offer a few meals a day to those in need of food. Millions of people across the US and around the world utilize these meager resources made available to them by caring and concerned people. Yes we must end Poverty but until we do we need to help those who are struggling with Poverty everyday.

In New England where I’m located the need grows as the weather gets cold. I’m listing 6 Soup Kitchens, my hope being, you will visit at least one of their websites and leave them a couple of bucks or maybe stop on over to see what you can do.

In Maine you’ll find groups like Waysde Soup Kitchen serving hot and nutritious food to hundreds everyday. In Nashua New Hampshire the Nashua Soup Kitchen is working hard to turn grocery receipts into food for local residents. In Boston you will find the Boston Rescue Mission, working to help people since 1899. In central Vermont there are dozens of daily Soup Kitchens listed at the Secretary of States website. In Connecticut you will find the Shoreline Soup Kitchen that served over 400,000 meals in 2006. In Rhode Island you will find volunteers at Judy’s Kindness Kitchen making and delivering food to the Soup Kitchen

I want to thank all the bloggers who have taken part in Blog Action day 2008 Poverty. The more we bring things into the open the quicker solutions will be found.

In the last year I have built over 125 pages or lenses as they are called at Squidoo to test out what was possible, to test out what works and what doesn’t. Squidoo is a good source of back-links for your main website, it seems to get quick ranking and listing in search but unlink an authority site like Wikipedia it may not hold onto a high listing unless you are doing lots of regular updates to your lenses.

I recommend you create your Squidoo lenses in conjunction with your article marketing and satellite websites so that everything is traveling around your main website universe in a smooth orbit. Of course as with all subjects there is a wide latitude in what topics you choose when building lenses at Squidoo.

I’ll use some examples of lenses I recently add to Squidoo. First is my lens for Utterli which is a mobile service for publishing your social media bits. Second is Social Media Tips, a collection of things to do to expand your social media footprint. Third is my lens called Google Search Alternatives, thoughts and listings of search beyond Google. Forth is Micro Blogging and as the name says it is about the joys of Micro Blogging.

Each one of the lenses I list above is tied into SEO and this blog, I use them to add value to this blog and garner authority within search. As you can see the titles of the each lens fits nicely into my SEO universe but each can stand alone. Within this subject there are a multitude of articles I can write, pages I can build on my website and an equal number of external topic pages I can create at sites like Squidoo.

Populate your content universe with many views and colors of a topic, it will garner authority for your business and ranking for your organization.

First you can submit your work to an article submission website (EzineArticles or Work) or have an article marketer do it for you. Second build a new page on your website that zeros in on the new article’s topic adding lists and hints that will expand on the topic without losing focus. Third build a new 3 page website using the articles topic as the focus, import all the info from the web page you just created but do remember you want to be creating something new and of value beyond what you just created. What I’m saying is expand on the topic don’t just copy the same stuff to every new page or site.

Every step in the process builds on the one before it. Your users will be able to choose a summary or dig deeper, you are giving them the choice all the while keeping them on one of your web properties. I hate to use the term but in this case it fits, this is a win - win proposition.

Now coming up with new, fresh and exciting ideas surrounding your product and service might seem nearly impossible. If you drill down in the subject almost any product or service will give you dozens and dozens of new ideas for articles, pages and websites that spin around the universe of your offering.

Guess what, if you focus in on useful information most of your optimization will be done for you. All the keywords and section headers will be waving at you to use them. Search Engines will see your value along with your users returning over and over.

I am adding an example of a simple article that a writer created to aid in promoting his book. Ellis Goodman published his new spy novel Bear Any Burden earlier this year and has written a series of quick articles talking about aspects of writing. You will see how he has focused on an aspect that informs the reader but he does not give all his ideas and thoughts away in one article.. He has countless room to write more and more and get more and more promotion.

Creating Characters

Creating Characters
By Ellis Goodman

I believe a great deal of good fiction is based on fact. I have found that, when one is creating characters, you are drawing upon personal experiences, people you know, or have met. Some made positive impressions. Some negative.

Recently I was writing a story using a number of key characters. Sir Alex Campbell, Head of an International Drinks Company, was based on a number of people that I knew and worked with over 38 years in the Beverage Alcohol Industry, particularly in my 20 years experience of the Scotch Whiskey Industry, before I moved to the U.S.

Jacob Kornmehl and the Kornmehl family were loosely based upon my own family members and stories about those that had gone before us.

When I first started out in business, the first employee that I hired was a secretary. As a young bachelor, perhaps it wasn’t surprising that I had chosen a very pretty Polish girl with high cheek bones, bright blue eyes, and long blond hair. She had an aristocratic bearing and posture, and walked like a ballet dancer. Her English was far from perfect and her typing was awful, but then you can’t have everything!

I remember her telling me of her family history. She came from a land-owning family whose estates were overrun by the Germans at the beginning of the Second World War. Her father was in the Polish Army, and she never saw him again. She fled with her mother and brother and walked for well over 150 kilometers, eventually finding themselves in Russian occupied Poland. They were herded on to trains and shipped off to the Russian Steppes, where she spent the whole of the War in a labor camp on a collective farm. Just before the end of the War, they were released and spent five days and nights on a freight train, arriving in Baghdad more dead than alive. I remember her saying that, she was so weak after that journey, she couldn’t stand. They were then shipped off to a British camp in Uganda, eventually making their way as new immigrants to Australia, where she finished her education and became an airline stewardess.

She, her mother and brother moved to London at the end of the 1950s. I can’t remember why they made this move, but her story stuck in my mind, and forms the basis of the character, Anna Kaluza, in my book.

Tim Bevans is the epitome of the British officer and gentleman - tall, slim, elegant, well-educated, polite, and intelligent. I’ve met many such people over the years who display considerable charm and understated British intelligence and wit.

My father-in-law in London had a close friend who owned an appliance store. He was a wizard with anything electrical and like my father-in-law was a lover of gadgets. He was a Polish Refugee who’d come to England after the Second World War, having lost all his family in the Holocaust. He’d spent most of the War with various partisan groups operating under terrible conditions in the Polish Forests, sabotaging German lines and communications. He developed an expertise in wiring explosives. He was a bubbly, effusive gentleman with close cropped gray hair, glasses, and bad teeth. I saw Tausig, the Border Officer, as having some of his characteristics.

Other characters I write about are also based on people that I’ve met, done business with, or socialized with. If one is observant, it is not too difficult to call on your knowledge - past and present - of the people you’ve associated with, to create the fictional characters in your novel. Creating the characters whom you get to know as your novel develops, can be a very interesting and rewarding part of your writing experience.

Ellis M. Goodman is a Chicago based businessman who came to the U.S. in 1982 from London England. He is the author of CORONA: THE INSIDE STORY OF AMERICA’S #1 IMPORTED BEER, and has recently completed his Cold War Espionage Thriller Novel - BEAR ANY BURDEN. To learn more about Ellis M. Goodman and BEAR ANY BURDEN, visit http://www.bearanyburden.com

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Ellis_Goodman
http://EzineArticles.com/?Creating-Characters&id=1397267

If you have an idea simmering in the deep recesses of your mind now is the time to being it forward and not just to show the world, show it to Google and you may get the cash to make it happen.. You only have till Oct, 20th 2008 which is the closing for entries. Get over to Googles Project 10to100 today.