I stumbled across this article from Freestone.com entitled “Top 5 Automation Tools for Your Online Solo Service Business”.  I have never tried any of these services, but must admit I am intrigued and will check them out.  Check out the full article for more details.  I summarize below.

1. 1ShoppingCart –  shopping cart, autoresponder, broadcast/newsletter, and database management systems all rolled into ONE system.   (But to get the all-in-one, you need to pay for the “Pro” level which is currently $99/month)

2. TimeDriver – an online service whereby your clients can self-schedule their appointments with you, avoiding the back and forth of emails that happens when you’re trying to arrangement appointments and, of course, the time spent doing this.  It works with both Outlook and Google calendars.

3. Submit Your Article –  an article submission service that submits your articles to hundreds of different article directories and ezine publishers on your behalf.

4. BYOAudio – A service to record and host your podcasts, as well as automatically share it with all the various podcast directories, including iTunes.

5. OnlyWire – create social bookmarks for blog entries.  In other words, when you publish a blog post it automatically notifies Twitter, Facebook, Technorati, Digg, StumbleUpon, with a link to your post.

Recently, a lot of people have asked me if I can help them start business blogs. While I’m always happy to help clients set up business blogs and work with other types of social media, I have to warn that business blogging is not for everyone. It can be a lot of work. That is why 60-80% of blogs are abandoned within one month.

DON’T start a business blog if:

1. You think it will be difficult for you to write at LEAST one interesting, useful post per week. Recycling your old press releases is NOT an option here. Your articles must be conversational in tone and free of marketing-speak, or else readers will stay away in droves.
2. You have lengthy approval processes before anything can be published to the outside world. If a seven-person committee, the VP of Marketing, and the CEO must all approve every single blog post and every response to reader comments, your business blog will fail. Ideally, you’ll set up some blogging guidelines for writers to follow and will require no more than one approval before articles and responses to comments can be published.
3. You don’t have the time to respond to reader comments, or are uncomfortable doing so. By definition, a blog fosters a two-way conversation. Readers will comment on your blog, and you might not always agree with what they say. But blog etiquette generally requires you keep all comments visible.* Instead, you should respond publicly to the negative comments in a polite and constructive way. Alas, this takes time.

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* Note that deleting spam, off-topic, and abusive comments is okay, though, and expected by your readers. Deleting well-reasoned negative comments is NOT okay.

Ten years ago, every business wanted a website. It was the thing to do. And over time, it’ became expected.

Nowadays, it seems like everyone wants a blog or to be involved with social media. We’re already at the point where customers expect a blog for any type of consulting business. Other types of businesses will follow.

Despite the trends and the hype, though, there’s a lot of confusion about what blogs actually are.

Here’s my take.

Unlike “set it and forget it” static websites, blogs are special kinds of websites that build communities of readers by:

1. Providing new, useful content* to readers on a regular basis. Most successful business blogs post new articles every 3-4 days, but posting frequency ranges from several times a day to once every one to two weeks. The new content is what keeps readers coming back for more and keeps the blog listed highly in Google search results.
2. Encouraging users to provide feedback and further discuss the content via blog comment on posts. This is an essential part of creating the two-way, interactive experience that creates fans and community members from mere readers. The two-way conversation is what makes a blog different than a newsletter or static website.
3. Making new content available on the website as well as via RSS feeds. Most blog readers don’t visit each blog’s website individually each day. Instead, they use an RSS Feed Aggregator (such as Microsoft Outlook, Google FeedReader, NewsGator, Bloglines) to collect and display all the new posts in the blogs they follow. Making your content at least partially available via RSS feeds is expected and mandatory if you want to grow your readership.

Blogging software and services (WordPress, Movable Type, Blogger, Typepad) make it easy to create and maintain websites that are frequently updated. They take care of #3 (RSS feeds) for you.

But simply using a blogging service does not turn your website into a blog. Example: you can cheaply create a really beautiful static website, with no dynamic or up-to-date content, using WordPress; however, such a site is not a blog.

Need to get some PR? Want a reporter to write an article about you?  There are basically four avenues for the small business:

1. Traditional wire services
2. Social Media
3. Direct contact with the media
4. Bloggers (yes, bloggers are sometimes considered “social media” but there is a big difference in the way you’d pitch an individual blogger versus sending out an alert to all your Twitter followers).

Wire Services

You can try the traditional route of putting out a press release on one of the news wire services, like PR Newswire and BusinessWire. MarketWire is a similar, but less expensive, wire service. While in the past these services have been effective, they are pricey and possibly becoming less effective as mainstream media declines and social media takes hold. For example, local-only distribution of a press release on BusinessWire starts at $180.

If you live in the San Francisco Bay Area, check out Bay City News Service. It’s a news wire service that focuses on news for the Bay Area. Rumor is it is FREE to put out a press release, but their website says “contact us for subscription and access pricing.” If you know more details, please leave them in the comments.

Social Media

Instead of a traditional wire service, try garnering some PR via social media. Of all your options, I most strongly recommend Twitter. First off, it’s FREE. Second, many people in the media use Twitter on a daily basis. Because of this, Cisco now uses Twitter almost exclusively for press releases. Need more convincing? Check out this blog post by April Dunfordabout how she used Twitter to garner her company more PR than they ever dreamed by eschewing the traditional news wire services.

Similar to Twitter, you might also want to check out Digg. Be warned that Digg is basically ruled by super-elite male computer nerds who are primarily interested in technology gizmos. So if you’re a video game manufacturer you might have a good chance of rising the the Digg ratings enough to be noticed by the media. But if you are an interior designer, Digg is not a good place for you. Don’t even bother.

PitchEngine also looks promising. It is focuses on “Social Media Releases” that can contain videos, audio, images, social links and more — in addition to the traditional text. Basically, members of the media sign up with PitchEngine to receive news on particular topics. Companies wanting to distribute news create Social Media Releases and host them (video, links, and all) on the PitchEngine site. PitchEngine then notifies the interested reporters and distributes the news to Google news. Currently, it’s FREE to host a social media release on PitchEngine for 30 days. If you want the release to be around – and findable by reporters – beyond 30 days, you can pay from $10 per month per release.

Of course, the worth of PitchEngine depends on it becoming widely adopted by both PR pros and journalists. Currently the network is kind of small – about 1000 users (many of which, I’ll bet, are “pushing” news for free instead of consuming it).

Direct Contact

The last, but most effective strategy for getting PR is to think of the 15-20 media outfits most interested in your news. Meet the specific reporters, get their contact information, and develop personal relationships with them – learn what they cover, the point of view they usually take, the type of stories they want to writer. Then, one day far in the future, email/fax your press release directly to them along with a personal note describing what that specific reporter will find interesting about the release.

Bloggers

All the above suggestions assume that your ultimate goal is to get members of the traditional media to cover your company’s news. However, in 2010 the traditional media is waning and bloggers are becoming more powerful. Having a high profile blogger cover your news can be a PR dream-come-true.

But targeting bloggers is also a whole other article in itself. Look for it in an upcoming post.

To be clear, I am not a graphic artist or web designer.

In fact, I really don’t like the way a lot of these folks do business.

So many of them (the “traditionalists,” I call them) stand in the way of empowering the small business owner to take control of his own website and other web properties.  With these folks, every time you want to add a new page to your website or change a few lines of text, you have to call them up, get in line and wait, and pay more money.  It shouldn’t be that way.  Further, many of them charge outrageous sums ($1000+) for simple five page websites that simply re-use existing branding and logos.

So, I’m not one of those.  I’m more of a consultant who will get you progressing toward your goals by using as much packaged services and products as possible, and avoiding custom web development unless it is absolutely essential to give you a competitive edge.

As the owner and principal of a consultancy focused on software product management and product marketing for software and SaaS companies, I’ve spent a lot of time experimenting with how to use social media to improve my business.  I’ve also used social media heavily in my work with clients –it’s now mandatory for any decent product marketing or product management pro to know how to best market products with social networking, but to also consider how users might want to use your products in a “social” way.

And now, years later, I’ve spent more time than I care to count working on blogs, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, email newsletters, forums, eBooks, and all dozens of other specialist social networks, communities, and tools.  Thus, from my professional interest in social media grew a personal interest, then a full-fledged hobby, and now a small business.

I’ve always been very excited to check out the latest services and tools and figure out how to use them for best advantage.  As a result, I might have been one of the first 1000 people on LinkedIn back in 20003 (one of my co-workers was married to an early LinkedIn employee).  I’ve also been blogging since late 2004, and over the years I’ve had 8 blogs, one of which became a full-fledged “online brand” with several thousand blog subscribers and thousands of Twitter followers.

I’ve also helped many clients, colleagues, and friends set up their own web and social media presences.  And from this, “Sure Web Consulting” was born.  I help small businesses and individuals define their web and social media goals,  find the right low-cost services and tools to help them meet these goals, and remove the obstacles they hit when trying to leverage the web.  I’m not a web designer or graphic artist that will custom-code your website from scratch.  Instead I help you identify and put into place the right packaged (read not custom) services and products to meet your goals.

And why should you go for packaged rather than custom?  1) Cost, 2) Long-term maintainability, 3) Long-term ability to integrate with other new services and products, 4) Cost, and 5) Cost.

This blog is an extension of this new business.  I like to share what I’ve learned about websites and social networking, especially as it applies to my own business, and hope that you find it useful.