Barbara Ling, Your Maverick Virtual Coach » Business Blogging

Killer Branding Blogs you MUST investigate…and a crucial question

Barbara — Mon, 16 May 2011 15:16:37 +0000

Good morning!

Yes, I know…I promised to write about mommy and daddy blogging this week. However, given that I'm knee-deep in completing my research, I figure that I should schedule those topics until next week.

So instead…let's talk branding!

Have you ever branded yourself?

If so…. (wait for it)….. did the burn hurt?

Oh gosh, that made me groan too.

Anywhos!

Branding!

'Branding' is the art of getting known in your customers' eyes. To quote the American Marketing Society, a brand is a "…name, term, sign, symbol or design, or a combination of them intended to identify the goods and services of one seller or group of sellers and to differentiate them from those of other sellers."

Thus, you want to make yourself unforgettable in the eyes of your customers.

Luckily, there are tons of exciting resources and blogs out there that can get you started on your merry way!

Begin with:

Brand Autopsy

Branding Strategy Insider

Brand Simple

Personal Branding Blog

You should definitely add those blogs to your feedreader so you can be alerted every time something new and useful to your business shows up!

Got that?

Alrighty, but before we go, let me ask you one simple question, might?

What makes you essential to achieving your customer's goals?

Are you known for always finding the *best* solution for your customers?

Or perhaps…do you know *how* to teach so your words aren't instantly rejected because they focus on the long-term efforts and *not* the quick fix?

What about style?

Are you the type of customer provider who can nuture when necessary, transform yourself into Sargent Slaughter when needed, and then revert back to Molly Muffin if gentleness is required?

Hmmm?

What about your delivery times?

Can you bite the bullet and cause miracles to manifest themselves when your customers are utterly desperate for guidance….ideally, yesterday

Now, here's the most important question…

Is what you've said….self-evident on your site?

You only have one chance to make a smashing first impression….so you always want to ensure that your skills, your qualities, your utter magnificence to how you're the answer to your customer's most fervent dreams….is immediately obvious.

Such a bold statement…can only make your sales levels go up.

And that, of course, is a Very Good Thing indeed.

Grow strong.

Barbara Ling

ps – want to flatten your learning curve and grab my 14+ years of marketing secrets for personal branding and niche domination in less than 30 seconds? Click below and check out my latest edition of Income Fitness 2011! You'll love what you discover.

Post from: Barbara Ling. Thank you for your time! If you've already subscribed to my feed, please download your FREE copy of 24 Hour eBook Digital Product Creation at http://www.barbaraling.com/Ace/24HoursLite.zip - I think you'll find it most useful indeed. -- Barbara

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Are YOU Blocked on Google Gtalk? Here’s how to find out!

Barbara — Fri, 15 Apr 2011 14:56:23 +0000

Morning!

Ever run into a character-building challenge with your friends…and all of a sudden, they disappear off of Gtalk so you cannot communicate with them?

Ever wonder if, by chance, they've simply blocked you on Gtalk instead?

Well then, wonder no more! Here's how to find out.

Step 1.) Download Pidgin Universal Instant Messenger.

It's an open source universal Instant Messenger. You can download it by clicking on the logo above.

Step 2.) Add your Gtalk information.

When you first start Pidgin, you'll be prompted to add an account. And you're not only limited to Gtalk, mind you – lookie below at 'em all! You're going to want to select "Google Talk".

Step 3.) Look at your contact list popup.

You should seem something like:

Step 4.) Right-click over someone you know has NOT blocked you.

At the very least, you'll see their name and possibly their contact info like so:

Next,

Step 5.) Right-click over the person you think might be blocking you.

If the person is blocking you, you will NOT see a name, nor an avatar…you'll only see the status like so.

If you do not see a name or a picture, chances are…you've been blocked.

Now, what's really funny for me is that the person who is blocking me…I had created a special gtalk account for said person just so I'd be available whenever I was needed.

Obviously, as I'm now blocked…I'm not needed.

Ah well, these things happen. Live and learn.

Anywhos, should you be wondering just what's going on with your contacts online, the above should give you more of a sense of, is the person REALLY off-line, or just doesn't want to talk with you.

You can never control how others act….but you can always choose to control how you react.

Take back your power today.

Grow strong,

Barbara Ling

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The One Site You NEED To Use To Monitor If Your Site Is Hacked

Barbara — Tue, 05 Apr 2011 13:01:17 +0000

Morning!

Quick! Tell me!

Do you have a website?

Yes?

Well then, if so…..

Are you immediately alerted whenever your site is hacked?

It was a dark and dreary day two days ago. After I had imbibed my beginners 43 cups of coffee, I opened my email to see the following.

Can YOU say "eeek?"

As you might imagine, the links above….kinda sorta are rogue and not supposed to be there.

In other words, the site in question got hacked.

Luckily, I was able to notify my customer asap, and get it fixed.

The site I use to monitor such things is free! and called:

WatchThatPage

At that site, you can enter in a list of pages you'd like to monitor, and voila, whenever a change occurs (read: spam injection!), you're notified of it.

Very useful indeed, eh?

There are other applications you can use, of course – things like:

Whichever one works for you, great! But just make certain you use *something*….your clients, customers and yourself will be Extremely Happy Peoples for it.

Grow strong,

Barbara Ling

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Today’s Make Money Online Tip – Schedule Your Helpful Tweets

Barbara — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 21:31:57 +0000

Today’s Make Money Online Tip

Why hello there! QUICK! TELL ME NOW!

Are YOU maximizing the benefits Twitter can give your business?

And NO, I’m NOT talking about those ridiculous "Get 4,298,398.291 more followers on Twitter every single nano-second of the first summer solstice!"

No, instead….I’m asking you, do you schedule your tweets?

Actually, let me first back up and talk a bit about the ways you can use Twitter for your business.

You can tweet about yourself. I do that often; every morning, I’ll send out the following tweet:

"Morning everyone, coffee and mooses call! How is everyone today?"

I’ll also chat with my community as well and touch base with friends I’ve met online.

The other way you can tweet is to share helpful information too!

For example, you can retweet tutorials, resources,your prior blog posts, forums posts…anything that would be of interest to your followers.

I decided to that myself, and yesterday, signed up for

Social Oomph

This service lets you preschedule lists of tweets that you want to share in the future! You can set them to go out every day, every few hours, every week….you can even give the application your blog URL and have your latest posts tweeted automatically!

And guess what!

Social Oomph gives you a FREE week to try the service out!

I tried several different applications but the blog RSS is the feature that did it for me.

If you’re in the knowledge-sharing business and want to increase your authority online, I can highly recommend Social Oomph…It’s truly a very powerful tool in the right hands and can grow your business brilliantly online.

Enjoy,

Barbara Ling

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Icky NASTY wordpress hack hit tons of blogs today. :(

Barbara — Sat, 05 Sep 2009 00:35:28 +0000

Have you checked the permalinks on your blog lately? If not, you should – this morning a very nasty WordPress hack hit tons of WordPress blugs.

I wrote about it at

WARNING – WordPress blog hack – eval(base64_decode($_SERVER[HTTP_REFERER]

and HIGHLY suggest you check it out – I found the site that offers the solution as well.

If your blog WAS compromised and you’re having trouble fixing it, swing on by our Virtual Coach Income Fitness forums and we’ll try to help you out.

Tomorrow is another day,

Barbara

ps – if you’re looking for other resources regarding WordPress, you might be interested in:

Teach Yourself Visually WordPress NEW by Janet Majure

Sports Betting Niche WordPress Blog

MRR — WP Covert Linkz (this is a plugin for wordpress)

6500 Professional WordPress blog Articles Text or Word

WordPress Auto Content Generator

WordPress website Setup and Install and Year of Hosting and Domain Name

250 WordPress Plugins

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RANT – When bloggers are PAINFULLY clueless

Barbara — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 19:54:14 +0000

Morning,

You know, there’s not many things in this world that really get my dander up, my goat roaring, my fingers drumming, my karate gi in a twist, my picnic rained out, my….you get the idea, right?

Not many things but I will admit, they DO exist! And here’s my number one rant for today -

Clueless clueless CLUELESS bloggers.

Now of course, I’m not speaking about you, gentle reader! For you, certainly, would *never ever ever* do anything as idjut-totic as the following:

Post PLR (private labeled rights) articles as if they were your own.

Why is this so asinine? Well, it’s like this , you see. I always walk the walk I talk….and I always tell my customers and students that one should comment thoughtfully on other blogs that utilize commentluv to ensure deep links back to their site are generated on the Internet.

So! Imagine my surprise when, from my investigative quests online, I discovered a cool blog post that read sooo well, I felt compelled to stumble it. But before doing so, as is my wont, I randomly chose a phrase from the article and searched for it at Google like so:

"If you find yourself with lots of plans"

Let me tell you, my urge to stumble the article died a horrid, agonizing, soul searing tormenting death it did.

Sigh.

YES, I know that sometimes….it’s difficult to come up with original content. I understand that. But would it really have taken more than an hour to re-tool that PLR article and make it something utterly unique…that contained the essense of YOUR brilliance and your brilliance ONLY?

There are MANY ways to bash past writers block on the Internet! Some nifty resources include:

‘course, I KNOW the real issue isn’t over writer’s block….it’s instead that bloggers and business folk want to take the short cut, get posts up that are littered with Adsense and ads, drive up traffic and the like. And I can understand that truly….heck, a few years ago I wrote an auto-blogging software that generated unique content daily as though the blog was populated by a living breathing person. It saved time and got the job done.

The thing is…those blogs were part of my portal building sites…and I didn’t attach my identity to them.

I’m not only a blogger – I’m an entrepreneur, a marketer, and know when to hold ‘em and when to fold. I can honestly say that I’ve never ever ever posted anything I didn’t write and claimed it as my own….because I know that such foolish behaviors can bite individuals back in their hiney when they least expect it.

Credibility! Honesty! Walking the walk you talk!

Do yourself a favor and make certain you can stand proud on any article you publish on your blog….because it’s written by YOU.

I don’t care if your goal is to make money or develop your network or build your community or what have you…your credibility is something that NOBODY can destroy…except yourself.

And yourself….heck, that’s #1. Be good to your #1. Your network is watching.

Enjoy,

Barbara Ling

ps – speaking about blogging, are you into affiliate marketing? If so, you might be interested in:

Ads By CbproAds

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Biggest CLUELESS mistakes you can make when overhauling your site

Barbara — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 15:46:14 +0000

Morning all,

Ever have an insane urge to completely overhaul your domain? I mean rip out the current guts, redesign entirely the site layout, use a different Content Manglement system like WordPress, Joomla, etc., and then launch it to the waiting world?

‘course you have! Heck, I do that myself every now and then…my first site redesign was back in 1994 when I was figuring out how to make cute little image map thingees for boring old text links (hey, it was Netscape Navigator 1.0….back then, image maps were more cutting edge than a finely sharpened samurai sword!).

Anywhos, here’s the deal. Chances are, your site is ALREADY listed in Google. Right? ‘course right! So ideally, those pages are (my, there’s moose hair in my keyboard. Odd) ALREADY delivering to you traffic. And of course, because you possess mental brilliance that’s greater than a fossilized toenail, you certainly don’t WANT to lose that traffic.

RIGHT????

Well! If the above is true…here’s what you should do.

Option 1.) Don’t remove the old pages.

Instead, add a header to each that tells visitors, this site has been redesigned – please visit us HERE to see the new site! Your visitors will see you’re still alive and viable, and not think to themselves….Jeepers! No page! Let’s go back to the search engine and find a different solution!

An easy way to do this is add an SSI call (server side include) that automatically reads in a snippet of text. Learn more at

Now, if you DO decide to remove your old pages, move next to:

Option 2.) Add a 404 "Missing Page" redirect to your .htaccess

Ever visit a gorbleflecked page to see it’s not there? But instead of seeing the boring old "file not found" message, you’re presented with an opportunity to visit the homepage, buy a product, see the sitemap, etc.?

This miracle of loveliness was accomplished by adding the following line to your .htaccess file in your main domain root:

ErrorDocument 404 /404page.html

The above, of course, assumes your customized missing page is named "404page.html".

Need some help with 404s? Check out:

Now…what if you want to stoke excitement and anticipation in your fans? Don’t forget to:

Option 3.) If you use a "New Site Coming Soon" splash image….

Please…make certain (pretty please!) you include your email address and phone number (and ideally a link to your products that are still available!).

Just because your site might be under construction shouldn’t mean customers cannot buy from you.

Wouldn’t you agree?

Site redesigns can be truly a benefit for you…just make certain you don’t short-change your visitors and current customers should they need your services during the interim.

Enjoy,

Barbara Ling

ps – speaking about site design, have you seen:

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Free way of Updating your location via your iPhone – Great apps !

Barbara — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 09:55:13 +0000

Morning!

If you have a luscious iPhone and are a dedicated Twitter user (and confess, don’t we ALL want both of those criteria?), you might have seen those cute little Twitter updates that describe where a person is currently located.

This is accomplished via the miraculous marriage between the iPhone and GPS!

And it’s yours, free.

Just visit TwitterFon, install and enjoy!

Looking for other iPhone goodies? Here’s some excellent resources for you to enjoy:

It’s amazing the kinds of goodies you can scout about online…if you know just where to uncover their lair.

Enjoy,

Barbara Ling

ps – speaking about the iPhone, have you seen:

Apple iPhone 4S (Latest Model) – 32GB – White OR BLACK (Factory Unlocked) Iphone

10 NEW MICRO SIMPLE MOBILE SIM CARDS – For UNLOCKED iPhone4 OR T-Mobile Phones

GEVEY Supreme UNLOCKED iPhone 4 SIM Card New 20 units

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Gevey Turbo Sim Card 4 Unlocked iPhone 4G + Free Post

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Setting up autopilot blogs, product pages and more

Barbara — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 14:55:09 +0000

Morning all,

This is a long post, but I urge you to read it – you’ll see several of my secret techniques that I use to build up traffic and income for any niche imaginable.

Have you ever wanted to generate direct intrest to your products online?

Okay, true, that’s like asking, have you ever wanted to experience soul-searing unimaginable joy every 10 or 15 minutes, but I digress.

Here’s one way to tackle this. Recently, I released the Job Seeker’s Power Advantage over at

http://www.jspoweradvantage.com

I severely underpriced it at $37 as I wanted to test if consumers could recognize such an incredible deal. Alas, it appears the answer is NO – I’ve received several emails stating how the price is *so* good folks believe it NOT to be true.

Joy. So soon, I’ll be increasing the price. But that’s not the secret I want to share right now.

My challenge was and IS to generate wowness for my visitors. Sure, I have my affiliate program over at
http://www.jspoweradvantage.com/affiliates/…

But relying solely on your affiliates is delivering control to outside sources. I want to build up excitement myself as well.

So! You know how Google generally loves to index blog postings? I figured it would be truly nifty neato indeed if I could generate useful posts automatically…and then design my layouts so that visitors would be presented with my JSPA no matter from where arrived.

Enter a domain I bought 4 years ago -

http://www.joblessnews.com

Visit there now. You’ll see resources for Career Help, Job Tips, the Recession and more….but more importantly, you’ll see one of my great big huge bleeping banners for JSPA too!

This site posts automatically, meaning…I set it up ONCE and then let it run on autopilot.

But I didn’t stop there – I also built

http://www.joblessnews.com/shop.php

with

http://www.joblessnews.com/seeaom.php

It took me less than 5 minutes to set up that store…and because it’s hooked directly into my blog, the site should be indexed rather well in the future.

How did I do it?

One of the best resources you can use for automated blog posting is found at CF.

This resource is something that allows you to set up campaigns that will automatically post to your blogs…whatever it is you’d like. I personally choose news feeds myself…but you can also use forum postings, chat discourses and more.
I have many similar resources set up like the above! And it can be applied not only to ONE product, but you can use it to market other niche resources, offline businesses and the like.

For niche ideas, check out:

http://nr.barbaraling.com

and for offline brilliance, mosey on to:

http://www.barbaraling.com/olb.php

Remember, when it comes to making your ihncalm online…do NOT rely solely upon your affiliates or rest on your laurels…you simply HAVE to take control of your future today.

It really does work.

Enjoy,

Barbara Ling

PS – speaking about blogging, have you seen:

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Why should ANYONE hire you?

Barbara — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 15:04:48 +0000

Morning!

Ah, the sun is shining, the birdies are mooing and the cows are tweeting and oh yes, that reminds me!

How’s the economy (I mean, pardon me, the "Opportunity to experience great financial frustration!") treating you?

That good, eh? Well, I hate to be the bearer of lousy news but….it’s only going to get worse and worse.

Although….that can actually be a wonderful thing for you personally…IF you know to how shine bright and sterling ahead of any of your possible competitors!

And that brings me to the point of this post. Humble people that many of us are, we generally are loath to toot our own horn and gently express to the waiting world with the quiet elegance of the Northern Lights….just WHY we’re head and shoulders above any possible other consultant or job candidate one can imagine.

Does this sound like you? If so, I have some utterly soul-searing agonizing advice to offer – lose the humility!

You see, you can be more certain than the demise of an ice-cream sundae that visits a steel smelting furnace that other individuals have no such scruples…and will figuratively hire a brass band to ensure THEIR credentials are examined FIRST ahead of yours.

Not good whatsoever, wouldn’t you say?

So! Onto the purpose of this post – why SHOULD anyone hire you? And I’m even talking solely about "hire for a new job" – this can also be applied to consulting as well.

What IS it that you do superior to the rest of the world? Hmmmm?

Remember, companies will not look to hire you out of the goodness of their hearts. They’re in business to make money! They’re in business to succeed. So it makes sense that the people who interview you will be far more favorably impressed with you if you’re quietly aware of all the benefits you can bring to their corporation.

Perhaps you’re the kind of person who doesn’t leave a problem until it is solved. Maybe…

You’re the best in vendor negotiations.
You are known for completing projects in a timely fashion.
You are skilled above and beyond the call of duty in helping fellow employees learn the company ropes.
You’re the number one sales person in a specific franchise.
You can perform the duties required in your sleep.
You’re a recognized leader in your industry.

See?

You need to articulate just what you bring to the table…and deliver that information in a self-confident, purposeful fashion.

One of the best ways to do this is to include an "Accomplishments" and a "Why Hire Me?" page on your own personal branded website.

The benefits to this are huge!! Remember how recruiters and employers will find your site in the first place….quite often, they’ll come across it from your profiles, your resume, your signature link in your forum posts, your Twitter Twelcome page and the like.

When these individuals visit your site, you HAVE to grab their attention within the first 15 seconds. And proactively answering the WIIFM question ("what’s in it for me to continue learning more about you?") is a very wise thing to do indeed!

You can spell out in terms even your Aunt Bertha could understand…just what it is you DO bring to the table. Your past accomplishments! Your present successes! Your industry awards!

You can spend time crafting such things up yourself…or you can check out my latest job-seeker tool, The Job Seeker’s Power Advantage. I’ve already created a template that requires you to simply fill in all the goodies about yourself and voila – instant professional web presence online.

No tweaking with the look and feel, no coding required….I’ve done it all for you.

You can see an active working example over at Wallace Harkness.com. I invite you to tell me now….what impression do you think that leaves anyone who visits? And the best news is…the deluxe version costs LESS than a night for 4 at the movies.

If you’re looking to brand yourself online as THE person to hire…ahead of the thundering herd…do yourself a favor and check it out now. Remember, it’s the smart and savvy professionals who take advantage of what the Internet has to offer them in terms of tipping the scales in their benefits….it just makes great business sense.

Enjoy,

Barbara Ling

ps – speaking about careers, have you seen:

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