The first thing you should do after setting up your blog is to set up your social media accounts. You might already have some accounts set up; now you need to make sure you are using them the best possible way.

Social media is an amazing tool for anyone online, and especially for moms. One of the top reasons moms spend time online is to be social. They are looking to make friends, find information, share what they know, sympathize with others, and maybe even make some money.

Social media sites are set-up so moms, or anyone, can pop in and out and easily share. They are always busy with a ton of traffic and you need to direct some of that traffic to your blog. However, you need to make them want to come interact with you because your sign is so compelling; not be forced to drive past because someone has a whistle and white gloves.

If you want to make friends on social media sites here are 5 things you should avoid:

1. Boring conversation about the details of your life
2. Links in every update
3. Constant bragging
4. Only retweets
5. Constant quotes

None of those things are terribly wrong. In fact, each of those things will appeal to someone, but not if that’s all that they hear from you. It’s the mixture that’s important.

If you think, “I’m blogging to make money, not friends” you won’t get anywhere online. Readers visit people they like and shoppers buy from people they know. The key to using social media sites the right way is honest interaction. Here are five tips that might help:

1. Be yourself. Don’t set up a persona.
2. Use your best level of conversation. Don’t talk like you are at a sleepover with your friends; talk like you are at a networking conference.
3. Search for a topic that you like and talk to people about that topic.
4. For every tweet you post about yourself reply to someone else.
5. Strive to build people up and never tear people down publicly.

Don’t be intimidated by the unwritten rules of social media. Instead watch, read, and learn how to go about things the best way so that you are accepted easily and hopefully, spread around. You want people to associate good things with your name and brand.

Building relationships, gaining trust, becoming friends, honest interaction – those take time; but remember that anything worth doing is worth doing well.

If you want to learn more about blogging, gaining more exposure in the blogosphere, building great relationships and incorporating new profit points into your content be sure to sign up for the Smart Blogging Skills 10 week course. If you sign up for the next course starting on March 30th you will have group coaching added to the already incredible coaching ecourse.

I have a Wii and my son has the xbox360. If I want to play a game then I’ll shut down my laptop and go to one of my game consoles. It’s better that way. Differentiate work and play. I don’t watch tv or movies from my laptop because I can’t work and watch, so why didn’t I differentiate between the games before now?

I’ve had major motivation. This has been my best month for as long as I can remember. It’s January people, it’s not “supposed” to be a good month. Getting off the games has proven very productive. Was it all because of getting off the games? NO, not even. But getting off the games had a big impact on it. It was the mindset for where I was spending my time.

I’m a procrastinator. I have been for as long as I can remember. I don’t need help being a procrastinator I do it very well on my own. I don’t apologize for it, I’ve done some incredible work under pressure. But I don’t want to be working under that pressure all the time. So I’ll do what I can to keep it at bay.

Do I miss facebook games? Yes, I do. I think a major reason I miss them is because of how high I’d gotten. My name and face was way up there on my friends game walls. Oh well, I let it go and all with a click. Those games are deleted and there is no going back.

Now I’ll build my fanpages up and live through those instead! They are so much more me than those games were

photo © 2010 Channelship Web Agency | more info (via: Wylio)

Four years ago (November 6, 2006), Facebook launched their advertising program. It’s essentially a PPC, Pay Per Click, program. However, it offers a number of features and benefits that other PPC programs don’t. Want some good reasons why Facebook advertisement works?

1. Facebook is in millions of homes around the world. In fact, it has more than 500 million active users. When you create a Facebook ad, you have direct access to those 500 million users.

2. Facebook allows you to narrow your ads to be seen by more specific demographic. For example, you can specify your prospects’ age, sex, location and interest.

3. Facebook ads are delivered directly to your target audience. The advertisements show up on their profile pages. This is a much more focused method of advertising. Other ad programs don’t guarantee this degree of attention from prospects. The more targeted the program, the more likely it is to convert.

4.There’s less competition on Facebook than other PPC services. This means you pay less per click than you might with another program – Google AdSense for example.

5. You can advertise your website, blog or your Facebook fan page with a Facebook ad. More options is nice.

6. People can “Like” your advertisements. This helps you generate attention for your advertisement. The more people who like your ad, the more attention – and clicks – it receives.

7. Facebook provides a wealth of data. Like many other PPC programs, Facebook provides you with the ability to test and track your ad’s success. This gives you the power to get the most return on investment from your advertisements and change things up as needed.

Facebook advertisements offer the most targeted options found anywhere. Business owners can create user-specific campaigns to drive traffic to their landing page, sales page, opt-in form, blog or even their Facebook fan page.

For example, with Facebook you can create one separate ad for single women, married women, and divorced women. You can then further segment them by age. For example, single women aged 30-40. Each advertisement you create can be designed to speak to this person specifically. Your choice of keywords, your headline and your call to action can all be written to target that exact audience.

Facebook advertising offers one of the lowest cost PPC options on the market. Combined with the ability to target a specific demographic, you can really maximize your ad’s effectiveness. If you use PPC in your marketing strategy, consider trying Facebook’s advertising program.

Have you had success with your facebook advertising?

But that aside, it’s always driven me nuts that I don’t know about any local big online events until the weekend of or after. WTF? I am not bragging when I say that I am a social media nut and I also include local media in hopes of finding out about stuff early. Hasn’t happened, so guess what, I’m deleting all of those biggies in my area because in 2 years I haven’t learned jack shit from them that I didn’t already know and I didn’t get early notice of any events. Usefullness? #fail as we like to post in twitter.

However, my being active on my account and posting to smaller local accounts? #twitterawesome I have now gotten an introduction to a social media event next week. I will clear the deck and head downtown Seattle. I’m excited and this stems on my missing a major event I wanted to hit in Portland. It’s the last one I will miss as I’ve made quite a few friends from the Power of MOB and I’d honestly like to put a package together and speak at next years event. Besides the fact I want to just hang and have a real drink instead of a virtual drink with friends.

Then another site has been going out and out and out. It’s a passion of mine. Firefighter Wife is not a money making site of mine. Yes, I do hope to make some here and there, but it’s truly a resource. To be contacted by others with resources I can push and especially resources that are charitable is awesome. Once such site I’ve fallen in love with, Firefighters Wives.net is built around helping those with career ending disease or injury. This is an organization I would love to get involved with and I couldn’t believe they are local. Sure, it’s a 2 hour drive, but hey it’s not every day. lol They have their site launch in 2 weeks and I want to be there to meet the women behind the site. I already have emails to them about some joint work.

Local meetups will increase your passion. Social media has been the answer to my local meetup. I’m making connections and then meeting up. Previously the groups had a link that they met up and not much info. I can’t tell you how excited I am about these local events and how out of character it is that I’ve already told my family I MUST GO!

Google Groups

Google Groups allows group members to self-enroll or enroll by invitation only – it’s up to you. And you don’t need to have a Google email account to sign up with Google groups. You do need a Google account, but that’s free. (Yahoo Groups requires all non-Yahoo account holders to establish a Yahoo ID and then “link” that ID to their email address.)

Google Groups sends each member a message every time a page is changed or a comment is added to the thread.

Google forums are organized by topic and members must sign up for a topic to receive email alerts and updates. With Yahoo, messages are presented in a list. Whether this is a pro or con simply depends on how you prefer your messages, topics and forums to be organized. It’s a personal preference.

Both groups allow you to specify public or private membership. And you can also choose a “newsletter only” membership with both groups.

Member profiles are easy to edit via Google Groups.

The pages feature allows users to create web pages, whilst Yahoo offers sections for posting additional information. Again, this is neither a pro nor a con, simply a personal preference.

Both groups allow users to choose how they receive their emails from the group – as individual emails or as a daily digest.

Generally, most people tend to prefer Google Groups because it’s easier to use and more intuitive than Yahoo Groups. However, many users complain about their inability to moderate posts with attachments or quoted text. And owners cannot designate certain powers to managers. It’s an all-or-nothing choice.

Yahoo Groups

Yahoo Groups allows you to personalize your welcome message in a number of easy to use ways including adding a syllabus, links to external pages and attachments. (Google Groups limits your welcome message to 250 words.)

Both groups allow you to add members manually or invite them by email.

Yahoo helps users manage any email problems by tracking bounced mail. They also make it easy to resolve lost password issues.

Yahoo Groups provides a daily digest, email, or website email as options for receiving updates to the group thread(s).

Yahoo Groups offers a calendar feature. (Presently, Google Groups does not offer a group calendar feature.)

Yahoo has had a customer service issue in the past with closing groups and owner IDs without any warning or reason.

Additionally, message attachments are not stored on the group.

Many users complain about the advertising present. (Google also has ads but they’re less obtrusive)

There is a 750kB message size limit. (Google has a 5MB size limit)

Both Yahoo and Google Groups offer a number of features and benefits to business owners, non-profit organizations, and other organized associations. They enable large groups of people to communicate and work together in one area easily and efficiently.

I stated that the only negative was my own mindset. If I am lowering my fees or charging less than I think my time and/or product is worth, that will be my fault. I find this to be more true this week than when I originally posted.

For some reason I was setting a slight stereotype up in my head. I think the many emails I get every day from different marketers are a part of it. I swear many of them are only lowering prices for their products. Now they may not actually be lowering prices, but if the sales page shows a value of X and you are selling the product for no where near that amount, then you really can be devaluing your products. Now when your next product comes out, buyers have a price in mind of what they will pay for your product, or more likely not pay. This is sales pages in general though and definitely not WAHM only. Some food for thought.

Now a big issue I’ve noticed is discounts hitting me left and right. Why would I pay full price for any of it anymore? I know within a few weeks I will get a coupon for a major discount or it will go on clearance in a few months and I can pick it up for half the price or less. I will admit that there are times I’ve waited to purchase from a few because I know without a doubt a discount will be on it’s way. There has been a pattern that may not have been meant, but has seemed to surface. Now I’m all about a good deal and especially when I honestly would pay more for these products because their value to my biz’s is huge. But they are definitely defeating themselves by offering major discounts for their products all the time.

That may have put something in the back of my mind. It’s something I need to put to use and look at my sales pages, specials and what I’m sending my lists. Try out some different sales pages and see conversion rates. Both of those two ideas are thoughts to ponder and for those that have done many pages, I’d value your opinions.

But I know it was my own doubts in myself that was really pushing a stereotype to the forefront for me. I don’t think I’d even call it doubts. I think it’s kind of that fear of success thing going on.  I have a post coming out about that next week.  See, I’m learning as I blog to you all as well. lol

I unplugged for 4 days and got back to just pen and paper last week. By doing so, I found a renewed passion. I found my focus again and mapped out more resources and finished up some ecourses and reports that were sitting in notebooks begging to get on the internet.

Guess what this focus is all on? Yeah, moms and typically those of you that work from home. Hey, it’s what I am and who I love to talk to and help on a daily basis. It’s the problems that arise daily and I look for a solution in my own life and for others.

But in my renewed focus I also remembered that I have some great stuff coming out and I need to remember to value it appropriately. I’m not going to feed into any possible stereotype I may have set no matter how far back it was in my head. I know I’m not afraid to pay good money for great resources and I know many others feel the same. I’m out to help those that really do want to move forward, not sell to everyone in every market for only a couple of bucks a piece.

Most of my training clients are other Moms. Do I discount my training fees just because I am worried they can’t afford it? Nope, if you see the value, you will pay accordingly. DUH, I was even taught that in school. Sometimes putting the offline classes to my online work is a mindbender. I still haven’t figured out why I can’t connect that quicker.

The more I looked at my sites and blogs the less I felt the need to even branch out from the WAHM niche. I only have one site that is set for all bloggers and three sites that aren’t necessarily WAHM, but are geared to women and moms in general. I guess it’s pretty obvious by looking at my notebooks that I’m not going anywhere else

So there will be more posts on this topic I’m sure as I try new things out. But the biggest thing I can ask you to promote is your value.  I don’t give a damn if you are a WAHM or you work outside of the home.  Your time is of value and you have to sell either an employer or a customer on that fact.  If you don’t believe you have value, neither will anyone else!

Once you’ve joined Facebook the idea of using it to network business might be more than you feel like you can handle. Fortunately though, if you’re looking for a one-stop way to manage your business networking, Facebook could be the solution you’re looking for.

Making your profile pop is the start to building your network on Facebook. Take the time to complete your profile. Bear in mind that you’re going to use Facebook far beyond socializing with old college buddies so include your contact information and keep it up to date.

The one thing to remember about Facebook is that social networking and professional networking lines can get blurry. It’s important to create levels of privacy so that you can interact with friends only as well as keep your professional face about you when business networking. Mixing the two could be a major faux pas when it comes to sharing too much personal information with business contacts and networks. Also consider setting up a fan page so that friends and contacts can become a fan of your business or site and stay up to date on the valuable information you’ll share.

Put the word out to business contacts that you’ve joined Facebook and invite them to become a friend of yours. There’s no need to invite them to join facebook as many of them are likely already a member. A quick email or a blurb in your newsletter can alert them to your new means of networking.

Take the time to join a few groups within your niche and introduce yourself and your brand. Join in relative discussions and be sure to reciprocate when someone likes or comments on something you’ve shared.

Facebook is rapidly growing into a business networking hub and overcoming the many obstacles that small business and independent contractors struggle to overcome when it comes to reaching new clientele or a fan base. Manage your facebook time wisely but be sure to explore all of its possibilities to expand your business network.