I love dark chocolate, and I can justify my indulgence because it’s the healthiest of all chocolates. Vegetables, on the other hand, are not nearly as sexy; and at the risk of offending any vegans out there, I’d go so far as to say that vegetables are downright boring. Yet, there’s no doubt that eating more of them would be better for me in the long run—albeit less exciting.

American clothing merchant John Wanamaker is reputed to have said, “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.” He understood that, if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it. That applies as much to losing weight as it does to advertising. Problem is, businesses tend to jump on “the next big thing” like it’s the newest fad diet. Take Groupon. Formerly the media darling, Groupon’s business model is being called into question by investors and advertisers alike. In a blog post gone viral, one business owner called her decision to run a Groupon “the single worst decision I have ever made as a business owner thus far.”

Like dieting, advertising requires a bit of knowledge, a little common sense, and some math. But who wants to count calories when the South Beach Diet sounds so much sexier? Marketing with Groupon is sexy; LinkedIn, not so much. According to one author, LinkedIn’s lack of sex appeal is “a branding problem waiting to happen” and that “… Linkedin needs to act fast to fix it.”

Twitter … now that has sex appeal. After all, Kim Kardashian tweets, right? Apparently, most B2B marketers agree; a recent study shows that a whopping 91 percent of them use Twitter for business. But, oops … the same study also revealed that LinkedIn generates twice as many leads as Twitter. I guess sexy is as sexy does.

Just like my dark chocolate habit, what’s exciting isn’t always what works best. Take Yellow Pages. Everyone knows Yellow Pages are boring and obsolete … just ask any social media blogger, like the one who took an impromptu marketing survey in a roomful of people by asking, “Who has used the Yellow Pages in the past 3 months?” Seems that out of 300 people, only one person (in the back of the room, no less) raised their hand. Her conclusion? Yellow Pages are as extinct as the door-to-door encyclopedia salesman.

I’m sure her informal survey is much more accurate than the year-long study of 8,000 adults conducted by marketing research firm Burke, Inc. Rather than one out of 300, their study found that 74 percent used print Yellow Pages over the course of the year to find a local business—just slightly behind the 76 percent who used a search engine. Those percentages also illustrate that the average consumer uses more than one source when making a purchase decision.

Here are two things I’d like you to take away from this. The first one is: Be honest with your clients, and don’t push your own agenda on them. I’m probably in a unique position of having worked in both web marketing and Yellow Page industries, so I’m not tempted to pit one against another. I just like marketing that works. Make sure what you recommend is based on real data, not a biased opinion masquerading as fact. Many of my clients trusted me for marketing advice and I always tried to give them the advice that best suited their situation—even if that advice didn’t include me.

The second takeaway pertains to your own advertising and marketing. Forrest Gump’s momma said that “life is like a box of chocolates. You never know what you’re gonna get.” While that may be true about advertising and marketing, it doesn’t mean that, with a bit of testing and tracking, you can’t figure out what’s working and what’s not.

Blogging and social media are mostly free, but how much time do you invest compared to the return? If 25 hours a month online yields one client every two months, yet you get two new clients each month from 15 hours of cold-calling, where do you suppose your time is best spent?

I’m not saying that one method is better, but what I am saying is: Are you tracking it? Or are you doing what’s sexy and fun, but perhaps less effective? Don’t be like the 91 percent using Twitter and missing twice the amount of leads you could be getting from LinkedIn.

After all, sexy is as sexy does.

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In Issue 555 of the Tribune I wrote about Google+ and how they had only recently launched. They originally only focused on personal accounts, and there was a bit of controversy over Google not wanting brands to use Google+ at the start, however great news: Google+ Business Pages were launched last week,

Similar in a way to Facebook Pages, Google+ Pages are business profiles. Whilst I set up my company page the morning it launched, I really haven’t had much time over the last week to look at improving it.

A few odd things stand out at the start. Firstly, there is no authentication process at this stage, which means anyone could theoretically set up a page for any brand, irrespective of they are actually involved with it or not.

Unlike Facebook – which makes you upload business documentation to confirm your details – and even Google Places – which sends postal mail – Google+ seems to be completely open to potential fraud. For an example, look at all the results for the search on Coca Cola pages.

The second was a negative in my opinion when Facebook first launched their business pages too. Ridiculously long URLs are just so last century, so why insist on handing out horribly long ones for all users, personal or business?

Here’s an example for my business. Instead of having something like https://plus.google.com/bam-creative they end up handing out addresses like https://plus.google.com/107729622872696221067 which, to be frank, isn’t something I’ll ever remember in a million years.

On the plus side (excuse the very intentional pun), I like the Google+ interface, which is a lot cleaner than Facebook. The new Google +1 buttons have started appearing across the web on company websites, and now they have launched a Google+ icon for your website which will soon have more features.

They have some great features rolling out, and according to my unofficial chat with someone involved in the project, have already had over a million user feedbacks submitted since they launched in July.

To see all the differences between Google+ Profiles (people) and Google+ Pages (businesses) see the official list here.

We’ll wait and see where Google+ will head for businesses. However at this stage, they are still way behind Facebook and Twitter for adoption levels. Perhaps this time next year may be a different story.

Since we’re on the topic of Google+ here is some inspiration for you.

It may only have been a week since the launch of Google+ pages, but that hasn’t stopped some early adopter brands doing clever work with the platform. Here’s your chance to get some inspiration before setting up your own business page.

Toyota has used the profile images at the top of their page to great advantage.

Drink brand, Pepsi didn’t take long to get their Google+ page in order too.

Disney’s The Muppets even held a hangout for fans last week.

Save the Children UK shows that even not for profits can embrace Google+.

Google’s own Google+ Pages team has a great page (and so they should!).

British major broadcaster, the BBC, have a Google+ page for BBC News.

Those amongst you into space (who isn’t), you’ll be excited to know that NASA have a presence here too.

In a great example of Google using their own products, even their mail application, Gmail has a presence.

It didn’t take long before search competitor, Yahoo! jumped on board Google+.

Global brand Virgin have good interaction on their page.

Whilst there isn’t much creativity in the designs between these, this is a result of the tight parameters that Google is letting people control. The difference will be in how brands actually interact with their fans, particularly over the first few months.

What would you add to this list?

Imagine you’re at a dinner party with a group of people, and someone elbows into the conversation to let you know they are more popular than you. What would your reaction be? How would you feel?

Recently, I’ve watched ‘social score’ services like the very popular Klout crop up, which are great tools for measuring corporate social media effectiveness, but when you post them on your social media accounts, what does that say about you and your followers?

It seems that Twitter, Facebook and other services may be great for networking and sharing information, but many people stumble into them without considering how their interactions might be perceived.

Posting your Klout score, tweeting to say you’ve reached 1,000 followers and other such ‘bragging’ behaviors seem to be becoming more commonplace, and the posters obviously aren’t realizing the subconscious messages they are sending.

The problem with social media is the lack of thinking time before posting. With traditional marketing, a message is crafted, re-written, discussed and then approved for distribution. Sending a tweet or posting on the corporate Facebook account takes no more than a few keystrokes.

I’ve previously shared some of the disasters I’ve seen on social media, however these are smaller in impact individually, however what does it say about a brand if they become commonplace?

Let me know what social media mistakes you’ve seen from businesses – send me an email to tribune@sitepoint.com – I’ll create a list of what annoys us all, and publish it in a future edition of the Tribune for us all to learn from.

Many of us are involved in large scale websites and e-commerce. One element many of the above don’t excel at is user-generated content. I love user-generated content, and so do many.  Survey results are showing that people trust others before company propaganda, so beef up your reviews if you sell products online, and look for alternative content you could provide by empowering your community.

Here’s a great story. I like to think of myself as a savvy web user. I can see through those automated emails, and the nag screens to sign up as a member on many websites. I’m also a regular traveler, for both business and pleasure. I recently took a trip abroad, and when I returned, I penned a few reviews on a site of which I’m a member: TripAdvisor.

This is where they got really smart. I’ve already written a dozen or so over the last few years, however I neglect to review everywhere I stay or eat (heck, that would fill my weekends!).  About a week after my last reviews were published, I received an email, titled ‘People love your reviews!’ Opening it, I was given statistics on how many people had read my reviews, and how many had given them a helpful rating.

The email ended with a great hook: “You’re only 1 review away from your next badge. Keep going! What did you do this weekend?“

I was hooked! That night I penned another two or three reviews, just to earn my next badge. Do I need that next badge, or does it provide me with any tangible value? Nope. Do humans in general like to feel rewarded for their work? Yes!

Here I am, giving up my valuable time to write reviews to post on another website, which makes their money from all this user generated content. Well done to them! Well done to me for also earning that extra badge of honor.

How can you incorporate some of these ideas in your website? Maybe a ‘Review this product’ promotion, or a ‘Write a guest blog post’ may work – put your thinking caps on, you may land on a winner.

If it really goes well, I may end up writing on there too – as soon as I write that next dozen reviews for my next badge!

In a previous article, I talked about the consumer’s natural buying cycle and that, regardless of how much we’d like to believe the web has changed everything, basic human nature and the underlying motives that drive behavior remain the same. The acronym AIDA was coined by American advertising and sales pioneer E. St. Elmo Lewis in 1898 to describe the consumer’s buying process. It remains as relevant today as it was during the Industrial age when Lewis developed it.

A – Attention: A product or service gets the consumer’s attention.

I – Interest: The consumer becomes interested and begins gathering information to support a purchase decision.

D – Desire: The consumer gradually becomes more and more convinced that he wants and needs the product or service, at the price it’s being offered.

A – Action: He buys.

I also talked about the importance of having a clearly-defined sales process to keep you on track and help you maintain control of the sales call. The buying cycle and the sales cycle collide when the two parties meet and discuss doing business together. That can be as simple as walking into the Verizon store and walking out 20 minutes later with a new cell phone; or as complex as an enterprise software solution that requires an initial meeting with the CTO, a 90-minute PowerPoint presentation in front of the Board, a technical meeting with the IT staff, a detailed proposal submitted to the CFO, and six months of follow-up as they compare vendors. Yet, when you break it down to its lowest denominator, sales has been and always will be as simple as this:

Some people have stuff. Other people need stuff. Occasionally they get together and agree to trade their stuff.

In ancient times, “stuff” was items like grain or eggs, and people traded what they had for items they needed. Eventually, we came up with the concept of currency and we started trading our “stuff” for money. People soon figured out that they ought to let others know what “stuff” they had for sale, and the advertising industry was born. Copperplate-printed advertisements emerged in China during the 10th Century A.D. Egyptians used papyrus to make sales messages and wall posters, and commercial messages have been discovered in the ruins of Pompeii and ancient Arabia. The first classified ads that appeared in the Boston News-Letter in 1704 were so successful that they spawned an entirely new way of advertising, eventually giving birth to Yellow Pages and PPC.

Today’s Stuff is Just Different than Yesterday’s Stuff

Today, the “stuff” you have is information. Knowing things like HTML, CSS, and SEO allows you to create “stuff” others want—like websites, online advertising campaigns, and top search engine ranking. Instead of carving your message in a rock wall alongside an ancient highway, your prospect finds your PPC ad on the SERP and IMs you. Once that happens, you need a sales cycle.

There’s a logical progression that occurs in every sale, whether it’s a 20-minute cell phone sale or an IT consulting gig that takes 10 months to close. It only makes sense to document that process and use it to your advantage. Every sales organization I’ve worked for had some type of “Steps to the Sale” as part of their training. Even Google.

I’ve never worked at Google, but I did watch a series of videos for Google Engage. In a nutshell, the Engage program offers training and tools to help SEO professionals offer AdWords services to their clients. One of the videos outlines the steps necessary to sell such a program:

1. Preparation
2. Fact Find
3. Pitch
4. Overcome Objections
5. Close

Those five steps are nearly identical to the ones we use to sell Yellow Pages. That’s because selling stand-alone PPC advertising to clients with an existing website is remarkably similar to selling Yellow Pages, or any other advertising for that matter. In my next article, I’m going to present a slightly modified version that incorporates some of the steps in our sales process. I’ll also take you through the first step in the process and show you what to do—and what not to do—when preparing for that next big meeting.

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This is the third installment of the series “Understanding the Sales Cycle,” which consists of:

What’s a Buying Cycle and Why Should I Care?
What’s a Sales Cycle and Why Do I Need One?
Your Client is Ready to Buy, but Are You Ready to Sell?
Step 1, How to Prepare
Making a Good First Impression

In my agency, we are having more requests for Facebook work now than ever before. In speaking with other freelancers and creative firms, it seems I’m not alone.

So you’ve been asked to put a Facebook page together for a client.

You’ve seen a few pages for other businesses that you know, and hopefully you have your own business page as well, but where do you get that much-needed inspiration?

Well, you’ll be pleased to know that Facebook themselves have come to the rescue, with Facebook Studio, a website dedicated to showing some great Facebook-based marketing, and sharing tips and tricks on getting more out of Facebook for your business.

They have a series of articles and videos in the Learning Lab to help you, as well as great creative work in the Gallery.

Enjoy taking a look around, and I hope to see you plugging away at a new Facebook campaign soon!

The other day I tweeted about a presentation I’m giving next week, offering a coupon code to my followers. One user replied that they couldn’t make it to my presentation, but asked if I could retweet their conference event for them.

I took a quick look at their Twitter profile, and not only were they not even following me, they never even mentioned my event.

They wanted me to retweet their content and tell my followers about their event, but they didn’t even bother retweeting me first.

If they retweeted or mentioned my speaking engagement, I would have happily retweeted their conference. I don’t even take issue with the fact that they weren’t following me, or that they asked for a retweet.

But the least they could have done was retweet my post before asking.

Needless to say, I didn’t mention their event. Lesson to be learned: There is nothing wrong with asking someone to help you promote something, but first ask yourself how you can provide value to them.

Can you retweet something of theirs? Review their book? Send them a referral?

Remember, networking is a two way street.

Everything changes, especially in business. Even if your focus is a niche industry or market segment, you still have to be ready to change course to ensure you have a viable market and can remain competitive.

Sprouter: Twitter Clone to Startup Q&A

Sprouter was originally a microblogging service specifically aimed at entrepreneurs and startup founders. With largely the same functionality as Twitter, however, they likely found it difficult to compete. Last year they introduced a new question-and-answer feature and personally invited experts participate, yielding fewer but trustworthy and more targeted answers. The feature became very popular and revealed a potential market not originally considered.

Sprouter recently announced a complete reorganization of their website, dissolving the social networking components and emphasizing the question-and-answer feature as the primary focus of the service.

Performable: From Site Testing to Analytics

Performable started as a website testing tool that analyzed which design elements, copy, colors, and the like were most appealing to visitors. That industry has become increasingly competitive, with a number of startups vying for market share. Performable decided to redirect their focus, and now seeks to provide analytics on the entire customer life cycle.

Here are some tips from Performable that I’d like to share, to help you stay nimble and ready for change:

Be Agile

The more agile and flexible your business, the better your chances in an ever-changing industry climate.

Keep an Eye on the Competition

If you consistently see new competitors entering your space, it could be a sign that you need to further narrow your focus or change direction altogether. This is increasingly becoming the case with low-cost web design. There are so many competing services and service providers, and the market is over-saturated.

Listen to Your Customers

Are customers asking for services outside of your core focus? Are you getting requests to bid on projects outside your area of expertise? Listen to your customers, and try to determine how you can solve their problems.

Change Often

By changing a little, often, you can avoid having to completely change direction. By constantly testing new markets, services, products, and tactics, you can continuously evolve.

Social media has given huge benefits to small—and not-so-small—players in the web space. Here, I want to explain a couple of the ways my business uses social media to our advantage.

In my organization, we have a Twitter account and a blog for the brand itself. I have my own personal Twitter account, and we encourage our team members to have their own accounts too. We look for people across the team to contribute content to the blog, and we’re always out there doing public speaking at relevant industry events. We’re always out there, in the mix.

What’s great about these approaches is that they provide the opportunity to amplify your message: other people can retweet it or link to your blog. We also do a lot of guest appearances on other companies’ blogs; it’s worthwhile looking around and working out who else is out there in your field, then join together to make more noise, garnering more attention than you would otherwise. We did a video for BNET a few years ago, and it really is a gift that keeps on giving. We still receive contacts from that exposure even now.

One key way to promote these channels to your contacts is to include your Twitter, LinkedIn, and other social networking details on your business card, website, and everything you do.

The other benefit of engaging through social media is that these tools make it easy to find out what other people are saying about you, and keep an eye on your reputation within the market. You can take advantage of this in a number of ways: when a prospect asks me what our customers are saying about us, we encourage them to check our @ replies on Twitter as a first step. If people are saying good things about you, let your clients see for themselves.

Recently, a client asked us for our résumé and references. We sent him the Google search results for our names and a Twitter search for our Twitter usernames—and won the job. The client remarked that the Google search told him far more than we could ever fit on a one-page resume. As this example shows, it’s best to let the market speak for itself.

Now, that’s great from a promotional sense, but social media can also help you to manage your business. One of your key tasks as a business owner is to maintain your database of contacts. Traditionally, this was difficult to do: people would move from business to business, and you’d be none the wiser that they’d changed jobs. Your database could quickly become redundant. Using online systems such as LinkedIn, where your contacts maintain their own profiles, solves this problem: when they do move, they can update their details themselves, so you’ll know where your contacts are working at any given time.

As soon as you see that a contact has moved to another organization, get in touch. Often, they’ll be moving into a role in which they’ll have a need for help from a web design business, so keeping track of your clients as they move around can be a strong business strategy. One of my clients has been using my business’s services for years, across three different employers that he’s worked for. Check your LinkedIn alerts regularly to see who’s moved where, and jump on the phone to those contacts as soon as you can.

***

Peter Williams authored the new edition of SitePoint’s popular Web Design Business Kit – which will equip you with the business skills required to turn your talents into a successful, thriving business. Check it out!

These days it is impossible to disregard the importance of Twitter as a tool for business communication, but figuring out how best to manage it using the myriad of tools that are available is almost a full time job in itself!

There are two ways in which I use Twitter for business. One is to notify our followers of our latest blog posts and the other is to communicate on a more personal level with our community. I achieve the first goal via a service which delivers blog content from our RSS feed. The second is something that I have always done manually. I’m talking things like tweeting about forum competitions or asking people what they are working on at the moment. Community notices, generally – with the occasional tweet designed to whip up a frenzy. That’s the fun side of community management.

There are plenty of services out there which allow you to schedule tweets in advance, and I have used plenty of them in the past. But I didn’t fall in love with any of them like I did with Timely. To be fair, I’ve always been a girl that falls in love easily, but I’m fairly sure that Timely is going to look pretty attractive to lots of you. What caught my eye was it’s point of difference. Timely analyzes your past 200 odd tweets and figures out the best time slots in which to publish your scheduled tweets to get the best possible coverage. For a kiwi girl like me who tends to tweet when most of our audience is asleep, this is a marriage made in heaven!

And if you need proof, the numbers say it all. There is a Performance tab which tells you how many clicks and re-tweets each tweet gets, as well as it’s reach. @sitepointdotcom has 68,440 followers, and thanks to Timely, we have regular tweets which are getting in excess of 82,000 views. Can’t complain about that…

Stats aside, the service is easy to use and it’s free. I’m giving it the big thumbs up.

Last week, I let you know about our exciting new public speaking course. This is a highly interactive course where you’ll record and upload your own video presentations, so you really put what you learn into practice.

The course has just started, but you can still sign up or find out further information about it.

The ability to communicate effectively and give a great PowerPoint presentation are two key weapons in just about any professional’s arsenal. This course will not only give you the relevant theory and technique, it will allow you the opportunity to put that technique into practice in your own recorded presentations.  Course presenter Greg Ferenstein will then give a critique on your presentations. That’s the most comprehensive learning experience you could ask for, and because it’s all online, you can complete the course without having to leave home—your couch is your campus!

Greg Ferenstein is himself a sought-after public speaker, author, and educator. As an author, he writes in the areas of technology, business, and politics. As an educator, he designs college curricula that helps improve teamwork, communication, and technological skills. He holds a Master’s Degree in Mathematical Behavioral Sciences, and has made past contributions to CNN, Mashable, Fast Company, and The Huffington Post.

So, to the course details:

• Fearless Public Speaking and Compelling PowerPoint with Greg Ferenstein
  Sessions: 12 structured lessons, with 3 live webinars
  Cost: $29.95
  Sign up for Fearless Public Speaking and Compelling PowerPoint here

Full details of the course—including a video of Greg sharing more information on what to expect and a lesson plan—are now available.

Here’s a more in-depth look at the structure of the course:

First Week: Presentation Basics

• Lesson 1: Introduction and modern PowerPoint
• Lesson 2: Watch Greg’s critiques of your videos
• Lesson 3: Pictures
• Lesson 4: Watch Greg’s critiques of your videos
• Lesson 5: Live Q&A

Second Week: PowerPoint

• Lesson 1: Organization
• Lesson 2: Watch Greg’s critiques of your videos
• Lesson 3: Evidence
• Lesson 4: Watch Greg’s critiques of your videos
• Lesson 5: Live Q&A

Third Week: Practical Communications

• Lesson 1: Brevity
• Lesson 2: Watch Greg’s critiques of your videos
• Lesson 3: Spice: style, humor, and memorization
• Lesson 4: Watch Greg’s critiques of your videos
• Lesson 5: Live Q&A

The course has now begun, but as with all our courses it will remain online indefinitely, and you’ll receive at least 12 months’ notice if it’s ever removed. Even so, it’s worth your while to sign up right now, in order to benefit from the personal attention and critique that Greg is offering to students who participate in this debut run of the course.

We’re proud of all of our SitePoint courses, and judging from the positive student response we’ve had, you guys are pretty happy with these online education resources, as well. We’ve been fortunate enough to work with some incredibly talented and accomplished teachers, so the bar has been set pretty high when it comes to sourcing topics for new courses.

With that in mind, we’re especially excited to bring you our latest course, which aims to address the greatest fear that’s common to us all:

Fearless Public Speaking and Compelling PowerPoint with Greg Ferenstein

It’s a well-worn cliche that when asked to rank their greatest fears, many people put the fear of public speaking ahead of the fear of death. The liberal use of this finding doesn’t take anything away from its core truth: we’re all scared to death of getting up in front of a group of people and giving a speech or making a presentation!

If you’re in the web development and design industry, you might be content to get by on your dev or design skills alone. However, whether you’re a JavaScript genius, a PHP pro, or a WordPress wizard, sooner or later you’re going to need some PR skills. Whether it’s giving a presentation as a freelancer to secure that big client contract, presenting to hundreds (or thousands) of people at a conference, or simply addressing a small group of your peers, you need to develop some basic public speaking skills.

So why should you choose to learn this key skill set through our online course? Well, Greg Ferenstein is himself a sought-after public speaker, author, and educator. As an author, he writes in the areas of technology, business, and politics. As an educator, he designs college curricula which help improve teamwork, communication, and technological skills. He holds a Master’s Degree in Mathematical Behavioral Sciences, and has made past contributions to CNN, Mashable, Fast Company, and The Huffington Post.

So, to the course details:

• Fearless Public Speaking and Compelling PowerPoint with Greg Ferenstein
  Starts: 31st January 2011
  Sessions: twelve structured lessons, with three live webinars
  Cost: $29.95
  Sign up for Fearless Public Speaking and Compelling PowerPoint here

Full details of the course—including a video of Greg sharing more information on what to expect and a lesson plan—are now available.

No matter what line of work you’re in, or what your personal passion happens to be, the ability to communicate effectively in front of an audience is a highly desirable skill. Contrary to popular belief, it’s not about being an extrovert, being “good with words,” or being a natural entertainer. Greg will show you that, with a combination of good technique and a lot of practice, anyone can do it!

The course will cover:

• communication skills
• an introduction to modern PowerPoint
• using pictures in presentations
• organization
• evidence
• brevity
• making your first presentation
• PowerPoint tips
• adding some spice: style, humor, and memorization

It all kicks off on Monday January 31, so sign up now because with the across-the-board appeal this course has, we are expecting to have to close enrollment early to keep the class size reasonable!

Last week, we announced our new ProBlogger course, Boost Your Blog Traffic. With less than a week to go before the course begins (Monday, January 24—sign up now!), I thought I’d give you more detail on the proven strategies for attracting visitors to your site that Darren and Chris will share.

If you have a blog up and running, and you’re keeping it filled with polished, engaging content, you may feel as though all the hard work is done. But if you want to gain the maximum readership for your blog, you can’t sit back and assume that “If I build it, they will come.” You need to have a plan that will help you reach the kind of audience your content deserves. This course will show you how to create that plan, and no one else is better qualified to teach it. Darren’s ProBlogger site is one of the most influential and linked-to blogs on the Web, and with ten years blogging experience, Chris was perfecting his technique before the rest of us even knew what a blog was!

Here are the details:

Here’s a more in-depth look at what Boost Your Blog Traffic will cover:

Lesson 1: Where to begin

• Starting with the visitors you have
• Build loyalty
• Engagement
• Subscriptions

Lesson 2: Get off your blog

• Facebook
• Twitter
• Forums
• LinkedIn
• Blogs

Lesson 3: Gain more Google traffic

• Keywords and key phrases
• Keyword research
• Landing pages
• Links
• Other ranking influences

Lesson 4: Advertising and syndication

• AdWords
• Facebook
• RSS, aggregators, and syndication
• Repurposing
• Guest posting

Lesson 5: Live webinar

• Live chat with Darren and Chris

Not only do you receive four structured lessons that will set you up with a traffic-boosting formula to guide you through your entire blogging life, but you’ll also have the opportunity to ask Darren and Chris anything that’s on your mind in the live webinar.

If you have a blog with consistent quality content, but can’t seem to bypass the “only my friends and family read it” hump, you don’t want to miss this course. Boost Your Blog Traffic begins on Monday, January 24, so sign up now for just $29.95 to secure your place!