Check out this very interesting experiment of Adam Jackson on Twitter Advertisement!

I personally get a lot of traffic to www.MariaAbroad.com through Twitter. To increase your traffic, just tweet your blog posts, but remember that spamming will people drive away!!!

Maria

 

Do you like children? Well, most of us do, I guess! But I know a man, who not only loves children, but puts his whole life into supporting the ones that need support very much. Michael Porter founded a charity for children in bereavement, which helps the kids to cope with their loss through art. The KidzHearts Foundation is a non-profit organization based in San Diego, CA.

 This organization plans to set up an art center, where children can meet with artists and work on different art projects, from music to acting, as well as drawing and other artistic things. KidzHearts plans to offer this as a fun, as well as healing afterschool activity, which also helps to keep the kids off the street. KidzHearts also plan events for foster children and orphans, where the kids can have a great time and forget for a little while about their sadness, loss and tragedy that usually clouds their days.

Many people, whether young or old have had the experience that creative work helped them to cope with a tragedy. Art can become a channel for these traumatized children to express their feelings and create a niche for them that is beautiful, creative and meaningful to them.

According to Pauline Kafka, “Art therapy uses art and the process of creating art to help process emotions, especially those arising from illness, loss, or trauma. Art therapy also creates an opportunity for personal mastery and pleasure from creativity. This therapy is also useful with children who are young, shy, or not especially verbal. The art is a tool to help them open up and experience new, more positive, thoughts and feelings.”

I agree that art can be an effective tool to cope with a tragedy, especially for children. Children usually do not talk about their emotions and problems like we adults do. They need another channel to deal with the circumstances of their lifes and I believe any artistic project can help them.

The KidzHearts Foundation is currently looking for sponsors, volunteers and supporters for their cause. Are you interested in supporting this  charity by spreading the word? If so, please register here and invite your friends and family to join. After you register, you can send emails to invite more supporters, who then can also spread the word to their network. A map will show you, where your friends and friends of friends registered. See how far your word can spread over the US with your help.

Spread the word about KidzHearts now!

(Please leave “Loot” blank!)

Of course your email address will be kept private. (This is a university project of CIBU and all collected data will be deleted after the project!)

Thank you very much for your time and support!

Maria

 

Picture by Dianova on www.smugmug.com

Have you heard about Seth Godin’s theory of tribes? If not, you should check it out NOW!!! Seth Godin talks about how to establish a tribe rather than finding individual customers for your business. A tribe, according to Seth, has at least one thing in common: a shared interest, a common goal, or the same look (Seth focuses on silly hats - yes tribes will wear them for you, if you let them!!!). People want to belong to a certain community that they can identify with. Why do you think people put their favorite movies and bands in social networks like Facebook? They want to connect with others of their kind, with similar interests, ideas and believes. In contrast to your regular customers, your tribal followers will be much more loyal and will help you to promote your business -  for FREE!!!

But how do you establish a tribe?

Here are 5 ways to build a tribe for your business:

1. Create an interesting product or service

This one of the most challenging tasks and some companies will not be successful with this, as you just cannot make fertilizer a trendy object. But with most products or services you can. Think about it: Jamba Juice created a life style around fruit juice, Apple and Microsoft users defend their beloved computer to the knive and even the German food discounter Aldi  has become a new and trendy way to shop for cheap groceries.

2. Enable Tell-a-Friend function on your website

As you want your tribe to communicate to their friends about your company, product or service, you should make it as easy as possible for them. Install on every product/ service description page a function to tell their friends and also give them the opportunity to leave a comment. It is important to open up a direct communication line between your company and your tribe and their network.

3. Brand your product or service with a recognizable image

 It is very important that you brand your product or company consistantly to increase the brand recognition. It is very important for your tribe to recognize your brand and other tribal members instantly, so they can connect. This does not necessarily have to be your logo though. In Germany for example, every driver of an old VW Bug waves at every other VW Bug that he or she sees, almost like a little family. Therefore, you have to create a cool and recognizable image for your company or product!

4. Concentrate on a niche market

 It will be impossible to create an allinclusive tribe. You should focus with your business on a well-defined niche market. Your customers and clients have to have at least one thing in common and be willing to create a lifestyle around it. Whole Foods and Starbucks did a great job with that in the early stages of their business, but then the sirens of mass distribution were to tempting and in the end, they just became another chain and lost their loyal tribe.

5. Establish a platform for your tribe

Your company needs to establish a platform for your tribe to connect and exchange their ideas and thoughts. The easiest way to do this is to create a platform on your website, where your tribe can create profiles, identify themselves with a brand and connect with other fans. The German company Mixxt GmbH can create such a platform for you. Their own platform Pl0gbar provides a social network for geeks to connect with their kind and meet up in person in cities all around Germany. They then share their ideas, comments and pictures about these meetups and tell their friends about it. Pl0gbar only has about 640 German members right now, but it certainly is a very successful mini-tribe. Just look at how much effort these tribal members put into their meetups and their platform. Wouldn’t it be great, if your customers would do the same for you?

When you have an established tribe, the tribe members will spread the word about your company and increase your sales. But don’t think this is the new holy grail of marketing. Tribe building and fostering requires a lot of work. Constant communication with your tribe is necessary, as tribe members also want to be heard by you. They will provide you with valuable feedback and give you advice on how to improve your product, service or company, but they want to be heard and taken seriously. Even though a building and leading a tribe can be a lot of work, it is worth it. You will have a more loyal customer base than your competitor and offer more customer oriented products and services. Trust me, it is worth it!

I am also writing about studying abroad, hence the name MariaAbroad. Check out my blog, if you are interested in this topic! I will incorporate my own students-abroad-network soon!

Picture by Shankarmenon Flicker

Blogging is in… Nowadays, it seems everybody who has a computer and an internet connection is blogging. The funny thing is, nobody seems to be sure how many blogs are actually out there – not even the search engines. According to Technorati, there were 133 million blogs registered on its blog directory. So what do you do stand out among hundreds of millions of other bloggers?

Podcasts

Interestingly enough, 95 % of people do not like to read. Yes, they surf the net and read this and that, it is very hard to capture them to read your 800 word blog post. Are you still with me? And why is that? People are flooded with opportunities and when they surf the net, they skim through it, reading headlines, looking at pictures, klicking on links. To catch their attention, you need to offer them something new, a new way of presenting your information. Podcasts can be a great way to present old information in a new and appealing way. Another advantage of podcasts is, that people can multitask easier. You can listen to a podcast on your iPod, in the car, while you do the dishes or when you walk your dog. Suddenly, your followers can take you wherever they go, isn’t that what you want?

How to create podcasts for your blog

Digital Trends gives you an easy step by step guide how to create audio podcasts for every blog, for every budget. All you need are a microphone, a computer, your blog and an internet connection. And the best thing: There is open-source software for FREE. To convert the audio files into mp3-format, you also need to download LAME, which is also free. Just download hit play and go!

Content for your podcast

With a podcast, you can explore several different formats, whether it is a radio show, an interview, music or just you rambling your thoughts. But to please your followers, you should keep some guidelines in mind:

1. Be unique and stay true to yourself  – People will feel it when you are putting on a show for them

2. Entertain and be interesting - People do not want to get bored

3. Brand your podcast – use a jingle to make you podcast easy to remember

4. Follow an outline and finish your story, but give an incentive to come back

5. Most important: Provide USEFUL content

For additional tips, check out Podcastingscout.com!

Also check out my new blog at www.MariaAbroad.com. There I give advice for students, interns and expat on living and working abroad. Go check it out now!

When it comes to blogging, many companies have failed to make the most of this venue, some even harmed their corporate image. Prominent cases of this were Mazda and McDonalds, proof that even the big ones do it wrong. Blog readers hate it when they are taken for fools and have been very successful so far with getting back at those companies.

But how can you make it better? How can you use your company blog to improve your business and make your customers happy? Robert Scoble and Shea Israel, the authors of the Bestseller Naked Conversations: How Blogs Are Changing The Way Business Talk With Customers show you how to do it and give you examples of how not to do it.

Here an excerpt from Naked Conversations:

“Bloggings’s Six Pillars: There are six key differences between blogging and any other communications channel. You can find any of them elsewhere. These are the Six Pillars of Blogging:

1.Publishable.Anyone can publish a blog.You can do it cheaply and post often. Each posting is instantly available worldwide.

2.Findable. Through search engines, people will find blogs by subject, by author, or both. The more you post, the more findable you become.

3.Social. The blogosphere is one big conversation. Interesting topical conversations move from site to site, linking to each other. Through blogs, people with shared interests build relationships unrestricted by geographic borders.

4.Viral. Information often spreads faster through blogs than via a newsservice. No form of viral marketing matches the speed and efficiency of a blog.

5.Syndicatable. By clicking on an icon, you can get free “home delivery” of RSS- enabled blogs into your e-mail software. RSS lets you know when a blog you subscribe to is updated, saving you search time. This process is considerably more efficient than the last- generation method of visiting one page of one web site at a time looking for changes.

6.Linkable. Because each blog can link to all others, every blogger has access to the tens of millions of people who visit the blogosphere every day.

You can find each of these elements elsewhere. None is, in itself, all that remarkable. But in final assembly, they are the benefits of the most powerful two-way Internet communications tool so far developed.”

You want to read more? Buy it here from Amazon:

Naked Conversations: How Blogs are Changing the Way Businesses Talk with Customers

While the 6 pillars themselves are obvious for most of us, many business fail to find the solution. Naked conversation provides an informative section on all 6 Pillars and shows you exactly how to do it. Buy it now and get your business blog rolling!

Also check out my new blog at www.MariaAbroad.com. There I give advice for students, interns and expat on living and working abroad. Go check it out now!