I L-O-V-E it when someone I know and admire creates an easy way to do something we all know we should be doing…but too often, don’t do.

My good friend Martha Carnahan has done exactly that with her Brilliant Testimonials Toolkit!

We all know that testimonials from happy customers have a positive effect on new prospects. I know they help me when I’m the prospect. I love reading specific examples of how the product or service I’m contemplating buying has helped someone else in my shoes.

So why does gathering effective testimonials – something we’d all love to have – keep getting pushed down, down, down the to-do list?

I’ve been blessed over the years with clients who’ve volunteered to write a testimonial because they’ve been so happy with me and the work I’ve done for them. God Bless them, because I know I’d have been too chicken to ask back in the beginning.

I’m not chicken anymore, but it still has been pushed down, down, down my to-do list. And that’s just silly, because can you really have too many great testimonials? I think not.

I know, for me, the reason has been lack of a clear outline in my head of what to do, how to do it and how to keep everyone happy and feeling good throughout the process. Knowing how to write a testimonial effectively makes all the difference in the world! And, let’s face it, our best client may or may not be able to write the best testimonial.

And what do you do when you ask someone to write a testimonial for you and they agree, but then take forever to do it? (They, too, may be unclear on how to write a testimonial effectively, so they stall. They want to give you a helpful testimonial, but just aren’t sure how to go about it.)

That’s exactly what Martha provides: A step-by-step, what-to-do along with when and how, guide for how to get a great testimonial from your clients and customers.

Get YOUR Toolkit here. At only $16 $11 – this one’s a no-brainer, folks.

As if it’s not terrifying enough to start your own business, sooner than later, you’ll find yourself writing an About page for your site.

“But, why? Why do I need an About page?” you ask…

A few reasons…

1. People do business with other people…not websites.
2. People do business with people they know, like and trust.
3. Allowing yourself to be known – particularly in your own words – engenders trust.
4. People don’t have all day…your About page tells them (among other things) who you are so they don’t have to read your entire site to piece it together.

The About page is usually the first click when I land on a new site I’ve never visited before. And I’m not the only one, apparently.

I was surprised (and gratified) when I checked this site’s stats and found that 18% of my total page views last month were my About page, and for 48% of those views, my About page was the visitor’s first click after landing on my site. So, that tells me that I’m not the only one (by far) who checks out the About page fairly quickly. Even better, about half of those folks went from there to other pages on my site instead of leaving. (So, I guess I didn’t scare them, too bad, eh? More on that in a minute…)

Do you have to have an About page? No. You can leave us guessing and wondering, if you like.

That said…

Elements of a Great About Page

• Your Picture: I’m a fan of ‘real’ pictures, not staid, boring portraits.
• What You Do: Here’s the perfect place for your X, Y, Z statement.
• Who You Are: Not your whole life story, but the parts relevant to you being in business…this business…
• Need to Know Info: Anything that you absolutely want people considering working with you to know about you, your work, or how you work.
• How to Contact You: State your preferences and your boundaries.
• Something Unique (aka Weird): You decide. But take a risk. It’s good for you.

You’re welcome to check out my About page for some ideas. Or Marty’s. Or Liz’s. Or Christa’s.

Your Picture

Yours. Not a cartoon version, either. Include more, if you like…but let folks put a face to your name. (I have a family pic as well as one of me holding my granddaughter when she was bitty bitty. These are my peeps and the reasons you do not find me playing online games or watching afternoon TV. These babies are always needing new shoes!)

What You Do

Preferably in one sentence, a paragraph, if you must. Call the name of your ideal client here. Others will respond, but your “right” people will recognize themselves as belonging here.

Who You Are

As you can see, I talk about the fact that I’m a single mom (because that’s what made me want to work from home so bad.) I also talk about how I came to blend coaching and web design into the same business. Some people think that’s weird, so after being asked a few dozen times, I decided it warranted a mention in a public space.

Need to Know Info

Here’s an example from my page: “My office is my home, so if you call here outside my business hours (9am-3pm CT M-Th), you’ll hear kids and dogs and all manner of other racket in the background. That’s why I have published business hours – to spare you all that drama. If you need to talk to me outside of those hours, consider yourself warned, and you’ll have to schedule it ahead of time.” Handy to know that ahead of time, no?

How to Contact You

Link to your contact page/form, post your phone number, give directions to your front door – whatever you feel comfortable. Just be accessible some kind of way.

If you’re involved in any social networks, this is a handy place and time to extend an invitation for people to connect with you there, too.

Something Unique (aka Weird)

I’ve got some favorite quotes, Liz and Christa have some “fun facts” about themselves…let people get a peek at the non-business you some kind of way. You become more ‘human’ when you do…more accessible…and remember, people do business with people, not websites.

The beginning of the year is a good time to perform an annual review of your website and make the necessary tweaks and fixes to address any issues you find.

Your WordPress and Plugin Versions

• What Version of WordPress Are You Using?

  As of this post, the current version of WordPress is 2.9.1. If you’re a version or two (or five) behind, it’s time to upgrade. Seriously. It’s the best way to keep WordPress secure, and it’s now freakishly easy to do.

• Review Your Plugins

  Take a look at the plugins you have installed and deactivate and delete any that are not absolutely necessary. Plugins load and call scripts, make server and database requests and use system resources, so you should only keep and maintain the ones you really need and use.

  Make sure the ones you keep are using their most recent version. Update any that aren’t.

Your Domain Name

• Review Your Domain Name Record

  Don’t let outdated information cause you to miss renewals and other important notices. Verify that the contact names and addresses on your domain record are correct once a year.

• Check Website Email Addresses

  Review the email addresses you have created on your domain name and make sure they all still work and serve a purpose. Delete any unused/outdated accounts.

Your Visibility in the Search Engines

• Check Which Pages of Your Site Have Been Indexed

  The Advanced Google Search Page has a means for identifying the pages on a specific base URL that have been indexed by Google. Enter the domain name (Base URL) in the Domain search box and leave the search terms box empty. Click on enter and the number of pages indexed on that URL and a link to each page will appear. Check and make sure you don’t have any pages indexed that you don’t want indexed, like the download page for your mailing list freebie. If someone can get your freebie without subscribing to your list, you’ve got a leak in your subscription bucket that needs repair.

• Verify Your Site’s Title, Description and Keywords

  Review your site’s title, description and keywords and update them, if necessary. If you have not set these yet, download DIY SEO for Your WordPress Site and follow its instructions to optimize your site for the search engines.

Your Navigation

• Search Capability

  Do you have a prominent search feature available no matter where you’re at on your site? Your navigation helps, but giving your visitors a way to search for what they’re looking for makes your site much more usable.

  And what if you could find out what your readers were searching for…without doing polls? So that you could be the one to give it to them. Imagine what that could do for your blog! The WordPress plugin, Psychic Search, does exactly that!

• Are Your 404 and Search Results Pages Useful?

  By useful, I mean do they truly help your readers? If someone follows a broken link to your site, they’ll get a 404 Error – Not Found page. Does that page help them find what they were looking for, or does it just tell them, in essence, “Too bad – what you’re looking for is not here.” And what happens if someone searches for something that is not found on your site? What are they told and do you give them any help finding what they were looking for?

  Here is my 404 Error page…
  

  

  404 Error Page

  … and my search results page when the search term is not found.
  

  You can see that on each, I give my readers some tools to help them find what they were looking for.

• Do You Have Good Internal Linking?

  Internal linking is when you link to your own content from your own content. This helps your readers find more of your content and helps your SEO, too. Check this post from ProBlogger.net: Interlinking Posts for more on the topic. Another way to accomplish internal linking is to use a plugin like Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

• Pare Down Your Blogrolls

  Listing links in a blogroll in your sidebar is fine – except when the list is 50 miles long and is of interest only to you. If you have a link list, take a moment to review it and see if everyone still belongs there. Linking to these sites from your content is more effective, anyway, because then your readers have context for what those links are and why they should click them.

• Clean Up Your Categories and Tags

  Review your categories and tags and delete any that you’re not using. (The listings of each, available from the Posts menu in your dashboard, show you how many posts each is associated with. Definitely get rid of the ones that show zero, and if that leaves you with more than 100 tags total, take a serious look at the ones that are associated with only 1 or 2 posts and pare your list down further.

• Do You Make It Easy to Find Your Best Content?

  Are your pillar posts easy to find? Are your most popular posts showcased?

• Do You Have Any Broken Links?

  Over time, your site will have broken links. It’s a fact of life online. But your job is to keep your links working and up to date. You can install the Broken Link Checker plugin that will alert you to broken links throughout your site, or you can use the W3C Broken Link Checker to find them.

Your Content:

• Does your site have a distinct, easily recognizable purpose?

  Granted, this question is (can be) rather subjective. The point is: Can anyone tell, just by looking at your home page, who you are, what you do and for whom you do it? If not, it’s time to tweak that front page some more. It’s just as important for your “right” people to be able to identify that you and what you offer are for them as it is for your “wrong” people to identify that you’re not.

• Is that purpose reinforced throughout the site?

  Again, this can be somewhat subjective, but look through your site with the eyes of a visitor as best you can. Does the rest of your site reinforce your site’s purpose?

• No Author Biographies

  Like it or not, today’s web is a social web. When doing business online, you must do everything you can to build the “know, like and trust” factor. If you don’t have an About page that tells your site visitor who the person is behind the anonymity of the website, you’re missing a huge opportunity to build that trust.

• No Author Photo

  Come on now…put your picture on your About page. (I don’t like seeing my own mug online, either…but my picture is up there. If I can do it – so can you.)

  If you’ve got a picture on your site – how many years old is it? Maybe it’s time for an update, yes?

• Do Your Post Titles Suck?

  Take a walk down memory lane (or in this case, through your archives) and look only at the titles of your posts. Are they great titles, or could you do better? You can fix them, you know, and as long as you don’t change the permalink for that post, you’ll be just fine and your readers will thank you.

• Links Don’t Say Where They Go

  Not only are you wasting an SEO opportunity when you use link text like click here, you aren’t enticing your readers all that much to click through. Get into the habit of writing so that your link text describes where they’d go if they click.

  Bad: If you’d like more information, click here to contact me.
  Good: If you’d like more information, contact me.

  Bad: There are some great New Year’s resolution posts here and here.
  Good: There are some great New Year’s resolution posts at IttyBiz and Dream Garden Coaching.
  Even better: There are some great New Year’s resolution posts on Goal Setting Accountability and Playing To Your Strengths.

• Does Your Site Suffer from Excessive Flair?

  What’s excessive flair, you ask? Too many widgets, gizmos, bells and whistles – in other words, it’s too busy. Again, a subjective thing, but have a look anyway. Check your home page first, your sidebars second. Pretend you had to pay $100 for each thing to appear there – is each one worth it? Make each item justify the real estate it occupies.

• Do You Have a Regular Publishing Frequency?

  Ugh…ok, I must hang my head on this one. Do they make a Metamucil for blogger’s irregularity? I spent the last week of December really looking at this and I realized there were a number of factors contributing to my irregular publishing frequency:

  • The busier I get with client work, the less I publish. (I was hopping busy in Nov. & Dec. with client work.)
  • The more going on with the kids, the less I publish. (To say there was a lot going on with the kids would be the biggest understatement of 2009. The hits just kept on coming in this department.)
  • The more I feel overwhelmed, the less I publish. (Yeah, by the time the kids started winter break, I was ready to just crawl under my desk and suck my thumb.)
  • The more of a plan I have, the more I publish. (Hmm…there’s a clue.)

  Take a look at your publishing frequency. If you’re happy with it, continue on. But, if you’re not, take some time to figure out what’s getting in your way and make a plan to address those things.

• Update Your Time References and Copyright

  Check your copyright date – is it current? If it isn’t now reading 2010, you’re looking outdated. Speaking of outdated, do you have any content that is outdated and needs updating? Any time references that need to be updated, like maybe on your About page? Do you talk about ‘last year’ and now what you’re talking about is really three years ago? Update those references.

• Test Your Forms

  Does your contact form work? Have you tried using yourself? Give it a whirl, just for grins. Make sure you get the email it’s supposed to send you.

  How about your opt-in forms? Have you been all the way through your opt-in process yourself, so you know what your readers are experiencing? Definitely want to give those a spin, and it’s a good idea to subscribe to your own stuff, anyway.

Take some time over the weekend to perform an annual review of your website. You’ll be glad you did.

If you haven’t upgraded to WordPress 2.9 yet, check out this quick video to see what you’re missing:

• Plugin compatibility verification
• Bulk updating of plugins
• Integrated image editing
• Ridiculously EASY video embedding
• Trash/Restore feature
• Much more!

Now some of us, on some hosts, experienced a bug right off the bat having to do with the publishing of posts scheduled in advance. That issue and several other small issues have been address with the release of 2.9.1, right on the heels of 2.9.

So, if you haven’t upgraded yet, do it now, and you’ll be upgraded to 2.9.1 and completely up to date. Remember, it’s a one-click upgrade in your dashboard.

HTML Email

Plain Text Email

Whether to send HTML or plain text emails depends on whom you ask. Lots of marketers advise against using HTML emails, citing lower email deliverability rates with HTML, yet according to AWeber, use of HTML email has risen 25.47% in the last year.

Hmmm…what gives?

I have not conducted any kind of formal study, but I can tell you why I like HTML:

1. HTML emails are prettier. I like pretty and easy on the eyes.

2. Speaking of easy on the eyes, I think HTML emails are easier to read.

3. HTML emails allow me to “brand” my emails consistent with my website. (Take into consideration I can – and have – created my own custom email templates to match my sites. You might not be able to do that without my help, but you sure can put your logo in there, and use your color scheme.)

4. HTML lets me track clicks. That means I can see how effective my emails are and how many people click the links I provide in them. VERY valuable information.

5. HTML allows you to use bold, italics and other simple formatting to call attention to important information.

On the other hand…

Here are a few good reasons to use plain text:

1. Some people prefer plain text. (gasp! Not everyone is like me?? LOL)

2. SPAM filters don’t like emails that are HTML-only. The thinking is that only spammers would take the lazy route and not include a plain text version. (More on this in a minute.)

3. More and more people are using mobile devices to read email, and not all devices handle HTML all that gracefully.

4. Sometimes plain text is just more appropriate. A good example is when you’re sending frequent, short update-type emails. Using HTML in some of these types of scenarios is a little overkill.

5. Some people set their email programs to read everything as plain text, whether it comes that way, or not. If you’re sending HTML only, they’re going to get an email full of HTML code strewn everywhere. Not nice.

Oy. Decisions…decisions….

So, how ’bout a happy medium? How ’bout you do both? Most major mailing list services (my favorite AWeber, included) provide a way to do exactly that. On the receiving end, whichever the recipient prefers – that’s the version they’ll get. A little extra work on your part, yes…but your subscribers are worth it.

And one last thing? You don’t have to use a fancy HTML template to send an HTML email. For example, AWeber‘s HTML email window looks and feels much like Microsoft Word. (As an aside, did you know that all Word docs are HTML? Yup.) Anyway – you can create both HTML and plain text versions of your emails very easily with most mailing list services.

If you’ve been building a business online for any length of time, I’m sure you’ve heard, “The money is in the list.” And back before blogs arrived on the scene, it was not only true, but pretty darn clear. We did everything we could to encourage people to subscribe to our newsletter mailing lists, and we diligently produced newsletters to stay in contact with those subscribers.

But now we have blogs and we publish new content on a regular basis. People can subscribe to our RSS feeds and receive those content updates automatically through a feed reader or via email. Does that mean we don’t need our newsletters anymore?

I think we do need our newsletter mailing lists, but maybe now that we have more options where staying in contact with our subscribers is concerned (not to mention different types of subscribers!), we should become a little more strategic about how we do things.

First, it might be helpful to explore the main difference between an opt-in mailing list and an RSS subscriber list: how you get the message delivered.

With an opt-in mailing list, you send them an email. With an RSS list, you publish a new blog post. Sending an email directly to their inbox is more private than a new blog post published for all the world to see on your blog. That is an important distinction, because you might need to send a message that is either not for public eyes, or you might just not want to muck up your blog, for whatever reason. Being able to get messages through to the people who are interested in what you’re doing without the “public-ness” of blog posts can come in quite handy.

Second, it might be time to rethink what goes in your newsletter.

I’ve seen a lot of newsletters in my day, and many of them used to have several sections to them, one of which was usually an article of some sort. My own newsletter used to be like that. Well, I don’t know about you, but it didn’t take long for me to find myself in a quandary – do I put the article on my blog, or do I save it for my newsletter? I think my blog is a much better use of my articles than my newsletter. More people get to see them and I get SEO benefits for my site from them. So what’s left in my newsletter? Announcements, special offers, all that stuff I don’t want to publish on my site, for whatever reason. You know…news. (Gasp!)

Third, it might be good to know who your subscribers are.

In my case, I have about 4 times the number of RSS subscribers as I have opt-in list subscribers. That’s on purpose, on my part. I also have about 2 times the number of visitors to my site as I have RSS subscribers. Said another way, about half the people who visit my blog become RSS subscribers (and more than half of those subscribe through a feed reader, not through email.) About 1/8th the number of people who visit my site have opted in on a mailing list. (You get a free e-book when you do that.) Then about half that number of people are on a private, invitation-only mailing list I have for clients.

Here’s a picture of how I see these different groups from a relationship-with-me perspective.

It’s not that my RSS subscribers don’t love me, it’s just that the nature of the relationship we have is a little looser because of how they’re subscribed. Because they haven’t opted in to a mailing list, they don’t get any of the “private information” I send out but don’t publish on my blog. So, they don’t know as much as my opt-in subscribers do. That’s even more true of my client mailing list as compared to my other opt-in lists. They get the low-down on just about everything going on with me. My relationship with my clients is pretty tight.

If I didn’t have an opt-in mailing list service, I wouldn’t be able to maintain these closer relationships with my clients, and that just wouldn’t do…at least not for me. I’m very relationship-driven, and I derive a great deal of pleasure from the relationships I build in my business, and I just wouldn’t be happy in business without them.

I should also point out that some people are on all of these lists. They want to get the “inside” information, and they also want to get each update from the site. You’ll have that situation, too.

So, yes, I still need my mailing list, but the content of what I send out has changed since my newsletter days.

When I take the time to write an article, it goes on my blog…period. With opt-in lists in place, I have the option of “reminding” those folks to check out the latest article on the blog by providing a link to it, rather than the whole article, while sharing information that isn’t necessarily appropriate for my blog. This keeps my blog nice and tidy. Nice and tidy is good.

Rewind back to Monday morning. I’m sitting at my computer, coffee in hand, with a deep sense of dread and foreboding about what’s in that inbox I’m looking at.

I know there are emails I need to address. Questions clients have asked. Initial inquiries from prospects wanting to hire me to build their website. Answers to questions I’ve asked. I know they’re in there…I’ve seen them…but I can’t find them now because they’re buried. The little whirly-gig is still spinning as the seemingly endless stream of emails comes in shoving the ones already there further out of sight…out of mind…

Email…my business lives and dies by it. Regardless of the many “systems” I’ve tried to adopt to manage it over the years, it still gets out of hand in the blink of an eye. When that happens, and I know I’m missing things, a good chunk of my energy and effectiveness is siphoned off worrying about it. Let it go on too long, and I’m stressed out before I even start my day. That’s where I found myself, yet again, this past Monday morning. “There’s no way I’m starting the week like this,” I told myself.

While I was sitting there, sipping my coffee, I saw this email pop into my inbox:

Email Triage: Calm Email Stress and Overwhelm in 30 Minutes (or Less)

Holy cow – I couldn’t click it open fast enough! It was from Charlie Gilkey over at Productive Flourishing. I’m a big fan of Charlie’s…I like the way he thinks, I like his perspective on things and most importantly, if Charlie’s got a way for me to calm email stress and overwhelm in 30 minutes or less – you can bet your sweet bippy I’m gettin’ my hands on that! I trust him not to pump sunshine up my skirt – Charlie wouldn’t mess with a stressed out, email-inundated, self-employed, one-woman-show single mom like that.

What is Email Triage?
“Email Triage is a process for sorting through your Inbox and determining what needs to be deleted, what needs to be archived, and, finally, what needs your attention. Just as medical professionals need to determine who needs their attention based upon the severity of their condition, we need to determine what email messages need our attention based on the kind of messages they are.”

What Did I Get with Email Triage?

1. A guided audio program that’s a little over 16 minutes long
2. A 19-page ebook that discusses the process more in-depth
3. A worksheet that lists the steps of Email Triage in a handy 3×5 format

How Much Does Email Triage Cost?

$10 No kidding.

What Were My Results Using Email Triage?
I’m happy to report my inbox went from 723 to 54 emails in the space of 20 minutes. Better than that – I found 3 – count them: THREE! – requests from new clients that I didn’t know I had.

Best $10 bucks I’ve spent in a very long time!

I’ve done email triage once a day since Monday, and my inbox has just 25 emails in it, and I haven’t unsubscribed from anything! It takes about 5 minutes to do now, and I don’t have to worry about what’s lurking in my dang inbox anymore.

So, go on – get Email Triage. Who knows what you’ll find hidden in that inbox of yours?!

Social networking can be not only fun, but productive, as well. In Tip #6 of 7 Social Networking Tips for the Busy Entrepreneur, I tell you to automate to leverage your time and extend your reach.

Hmmm…social networking…automation…is that really a good idea? Seems counter-intuitive, at first glance, at least to me. But the biggest hazard of social networking is the time suck effect it can have on your day, which of course, is the lure of automation…4-hour work week and all that jazz. Somehow, though, automation in social networking feels somewhat anti-social, doesn’t it?

I’m going to go on record here and say that I’m not a fan of auto-DMs on Twitter. I don’t like being thanked for following someone only to be thanked 13 more times in the next 10 minutes. I don’t feel all that thanked by then – I feel spammed. I used to know how to set up an automatic DM (Direct Message) to people who follow me, but after being the recipient of it going bezerk too many times when I followed other people who use it, I quickly removed it…and deleted it from my memory banks. Making people feel spammed (on purpose or by accident) is not a good way to win friends and influence people.

On the other hand, does it really make a difference if I personally take the time to log in to Twitter and tweet the fact that I have a new blog post up on my site or if I have a little automation helping me out? As long as the automation method is reliable and doesn’t start spamming the Twitterverse, I think it doesn’t matter. There’s no value added by me personally typing it versus a little program Tweeting it for me. The net result is the same: I have Tweeted my new blog post. The time savings, however, are HUGE.

I’m an advocate for effective automation in social networking that doesn’t compromise your authenticity (so that leaves out farming out all of your social networking updates to your VA.) If all that’s going on is some mindless notification update at each social networking site I use, I say bring on the advantages of technology! When I post something new here, it automatically gets Tweeted, added to my Facebook account, my LinkedIn account, and a handful of other social networking sites I use for various reasons. I save loads of time and LOTS more people get notified that I have published something new. THAT’s what I’m talking about when I say leverage your time and extend your reach.

Of course, if that’s all you do, it’s going to be really obvious really soon, so you want to make the rounds to the social networking sites on a regular basis and actually interact at each one. The kind of automation I advocate does not take the place of you interacting at these sites…it just saves you administrative time. In fact, I now use the administrative time I save to get social on Twitter and Facebook.

Another thing I do that helps keep my various social networking sites active AND helps a few of my blogging friends is I have my little automation helper set up to automatically Tweet the blog posts of a very select few other bloggers. By very select few, I mean very select few…3, to be exact. These are folks who I have NEVER seen post a half-assed post in any way, shape or form. I’ve been reading them all for over a year now, and never once have I seen them post anything but great quality posts. (To tell you how selective I am – I don’t even qualify by my own selection criteria!) When I noticed that I was always Tweeting their posts because they were so good, I realized I really ought to automate it and save myself a little more time.

People have asked me if I’d hook their social networking stuff up like I have my own, and finally, I have a service that does exactly that to offer! The methods I use do not require that your blog be a WordPress blog – any blog with an RSS feed will work. And if you’re not on Twitter yet, I recommend you set up a profile…yesterday. (Twitter is the one social networking site that seems to have people from all industries, all fields, all target markets. Doesn’t seem to matter what you do or who you serve – you’re likely to find at least some of your peeps on Twitter.)

So, get your Social Networking Hook-up today and start leveraging your time and extending your reach!

Today, I have a tale to tell you about changing domain names in the hopes that you can learn from my mistakes and avoid the knots I got on my forehead.

Once upon a time, I thought I wanted to be a Virtual Assistant. So I decided to create a website, and of course, the first thing I needed was a domain name. I had decided the name of my fledgling business would be Suzanne-Bird-Harris.com (don’t you just love the creativity? LOL), but at that time, that domain name was not available. I ended up settling for vAssistantSvcs.com. I set up an email account on that domain, but since I had one client who took up most all of my time, I procrastinated about setting up a website.

A few years went by, and I had several clients, but I wasn’t their VA, at least not in the traditional sense of the word. I had built their websites and I did Internet/website-related things for them once their sites were up. Word-of-mouth was the only means by which I gained new clients, and it got to be very embarrassing to be a web designer without a website to refer people to. So…I broke down and threw up a website on my domain.

Over time, I got more and more frustrated trying to relay my domain name over the phone (‘v’ sounds like ‘b’ and you can’t just say ‘services abbreviated’ because a surprising number of people don’t know that the abbreviation for services is ‘svcs’.) There’s the first lesson: Make sure others can easily understand your domain name when you say it, because they won’t always be clicking on a link to get to you. This is particularly important if your business is already enjoying great word-of-mouth growth! Make sure it’s easy to say and relay to others.

So, I went back to GoDaddy and checked to see if vAssistantServices.com was available yet. And it was! So I bought it with a quickness that would give you whiplash. Ha! Problem solved!

Uhh…not. By this time I had discovered WordPress and vAssistantSvcs.com was a blog with lots of posts and pages which our good buddy, Google, had indexed. All my content was on the hard-to-say domain name.

Around this time is when I learned about BlueHost, so I decided to move all of my websites (I had several by this time) over there. I setup vAssistantServices.com as the primary domain and moved all of my content to it. At last, I had all my content on the right domain name! My celebrating was short-lived, though, because our good buddy, Google, didn’t know about vAssistantServices.com – all of the indexing of my content had been done under the old domain name. All of those links I’d spread far and wide across the Internet were now invalid and gave a ‘Page Not Found’ error message. Gone was my Page Rank, my Alexa rank shot up into the millions again, and all my SEO work was trashed.

I started poking around in my hosting account and found something called ‘Addon Domains’ which would allow me to add the old domain name to this new hosting account, so that’s exactly what I did. I pointed vAssistantSvcs.com at the root directory of my account, and voila! Either domain worked and all my links worked again! I began using the new domain name, confident that the old domain still worked.

A few months later, I noticed that my two domain names had different Alexa ranks and different Page Ranks. Huh? What was going on? I really only had one set of content, shouldn’t both domain names have the same stats? Then it dawned on me – in using the Addon Domains feature and pointing the old domain name to the root directory of my content, I committed the Duplicate Content sin: I had two separate websites with exactly the same content.

Here’s the second lesson: What I should have done, instead, was a 301 Permanent Redirect, which is essentially like doing a change of address with the Post Office. Then, anyone clicking any link using the old domain would be automatically redirected to that same link at the new domain name, which was all I was after.

So, I had to undo the Addon Domain thing and go back to GoDaddy (where all my domain names live) and set up a 301 Redirect of vAssistantSvcs.com to vAssistantServices.com. Now, all is right in my world again.

Moral(s) of the Story:

1. Choose your domain name wisely. Make sure it’s easy to remember, easy to spell, easy to say and easy to understand when spoken over the phone.
2. Use a 301 Redirect on the old domain when you move your content to a new domain name. Don’t do what I did and inadvertently or unknowingly cause yourself Duplicate Content problems by using the Addon Domain feature of your hosting account.

P.S. This only works when all you’ve changed is the domain name. If you’ve moved your content into WordPress from an HTML site (which changes the URLs for your content), then there are other redirects you’ll need to do to preserve the links already indexed by Google and used by others. But that’s a story for another day…

P.P.S. Suzanne-Bird-Harris.com is still not a particularly great name for my business from a branding perspective. I still get a lot of inquiries from people wanting me to do traditional VA work for them. But I keep it for 3 reasons:

1. I could be considered a highly specialized VA, so the name isn’t just totally inapplicable.
2. I’ve had this name for a 7 years and counting, so most of the world knows me by this name, 100% appropriate, or not.
3. I haven’t thought of a better one. (If you do, please share. LOL)

You keep hearing about the power of social networking…how it can help you get your message out, get you new clients and JV partners, build stronger relationships with your audience and increase your income. But…and it’s a BIG BUT…who’s got time to keep track of all those sites and IDs and profiles and friends and…oh geez…nevermind.

Well, procrastinate no more, my friend – here are some tips to make social networking work for you:

1. Choose 1-3 social networking sites to use. There are dozens of social networking sites available, and they all have their own personalities, purposes and target user bases. Choose 1-3 that are a good fit for you and what you do to start out. You can always add more later if you wish.

2. Use the same picture of yourself on all of your profiles. Yes, a real picture of you is best. Social networking is a person-to-person endeavor, so don’t use your company logo as your profile pic or avatar. People aren’t going to network with your company – they’re going to network with YOU. The one exception to this is if you have a logo (like I do) that is a caricature of you. My logo is a cartoon version of me wearing “WordPress glasses”.

3. Be social! You are more than just your business, so let that shine through in your social networking interactions. Let a bit of your life outside your business be known – it makes you more ‘real’ to the people you’re connecting with and that’s very engaging. For example, I’ve Tweeted before that I’m counting the days until my kids go back to school. Trust me – every other single, work-at-home mom that read that Tweet could identify with me! How much to share is up to you, but do share more than your business.

4. Network! Hook people up with other people, cool tools and resources. Believe it or not, I’m an introvert through and through. At in-person networking events, I’m the girl who’d be on the periphery of the crowd just watching the people, listening and learning. I am not the one who’d march up to you and introduce myself. I can do it, but it depletes my energy in a serious way. But social networking online affords me a way to connect and introduce myself without the energy drain of being in a crowd of people. I’ve met some wonderful people this way, and some of them have become clients!

5. Give to Get! Make a daily habit of being helpful. Take 5-10 minutes to connect and see who you can help today. Answer a question, provide a link to a cool tool or resource, recommend someone else to someone. You make a great first impression, you become known as a valuable, helpful resource, and you get the feel-good of helping others – can’t beat that combination!

6. Automate to Leverage Your Time and Extend Your Reach. One of the best ways to leverage your social networking time is to automate what you can. I urge you to be judicious about this, but there are some things that make no difference whether you’re doing it by hand or a little program is doing it for you. For example, I have automated the process of spreading my new blog posts throughout the social networks I use. When I post something new here, it automatically gets Tweeted, added to Facebook, added to Linked In, and added to Plaxo. I’m saving myself at least 15 minutes per post because I don’t have to go login to each of those networks and manually post my new blog post. There’s no valuable interaction lost by my doing that, but it saves me a good chunk of time and extends the reach of each post.

7. Create Special Social Network Landing Pages at Your Own Site In a previous post, I recommended you create landing pages for your social media identities. This is another way to accelerate the “know, like and trust” factor in the relationships you build online. It’s the little things like this that make a big difference.