Business Development Advice

I bought into the StomperNet SMARTS program after Rich Schefren had really focused my find on the Web 2.0 social media phenomenon and I realised that I knew very little about how to use these new technologies for marketing purposes.

I was also very impressed with Andy Jenkins series of get natural videos, both in terms of content and delivery and if you haven’t yet watched them then I do recommend that you do because unless you are a world class website expert I believe you will learn from the experience.

We should be in Week 6 but really we are in week 5 of the SMARTS coaching course.

Boy is it tough.

Don Crowther, the SMARTS leader is an excellent teacher but there is just so much to do both in terms of watching the training videos and then putting what we have learnt into practice.

I can’t say too much about the program. Remember I have splashed out my hard earned cash for this course and so have the other 2,000 plus members of the program and you haven’t and StomperNet are very keen to keep certain things in house.

Now here is the dilemma.

As I do things and create more attention and my attention to my two blogs (the other one is my blog on business coaching ) you will see what I am up to and indeed to promote some of the things I am doing so that my regular readers get value, I have to tell you about them.

A bit of a catch 22 there then.

So here goes.

First of all Facebook.

Are you on there and if so, would you like to be my friend? You can find my profile here.

There is a lot that can be done with Facebook. The traffic it gets every day is awesome and it has much more momentum than MySpace so if you only have time for one, I recommend that you choose Facebook.

OK I am biased against MySpace. I have tried at least three times to register and failed each time because of some technical glitch. It’;s as if they have programmed into the code “Paul Simister! We don’t want him.” so I can take a hint.

The next revelation is that I have fallen in love with a website called Squidoo.

This was created by Seth Godin (famous author on marketing) and it is such an easy way to create great pages (or as they call it lenses) which promote your business while educating the readers.

What I like in particular is you can build in reader interaction through votes, comments and changing the order of lists and adding extra points.

But this is just the start because I have a host of other lens in the pre-publication stage.

I love Squidoo. Easy and fun to do, you get good search engine rankings and extra traffic.

What is there not to like?

Sadly the SMARTS program is closed and may never re-open so if you want the inside track on Squidoo, take a look at Social Networking on Squidoo. I have bought it to make sure that I don’t miss a trick because Squidoo is becoming the third major leg of my Internet presence after my two blogs and my main website.