Bourn Creative Offers Free Teleseminar Series in January to Help Entrepreneurs Build Their Brand and Market Their Business

Classes Begin Jan. 5 and run weekly through Jan. 26 at 10:00 a.m. PST

Rocklin, CA – January 1, 2010 – A company’s brand is its most important asset. It can be the one thing that makes or breaks a new deal, opportunity, or sale. Therefore, it is imperative that business owners focus on building a strong, authentic brand that connects with their audience, is memorable, and helps them build long-lasting relationships.

Jennifer Bourn, Internet marketing expert of Bourn Creative, is offering a free series of seven informational teleseminars, The Ultimate Brand Building Teleseries in January to help entrepreneurs build their brand and marketing their businesses in 2010. Calls begin January 5 at 10:00 a.m. PST and will run every Tuesday and Thursday through January 26, 2010. To register, visit www.bourncreative.com/free-stuff or call 916-788-1740.

“Entrepreneurs are often misinformed about what activities should be part of a solid marketing plan. They can’t compete without marketing in the current unstable economy,” explained Bourn. “I’m offering this teleseminar series to help educate them about their marketing options so that they can better understand how to promote and grow their business in 2010.”

According to Mark Stevens, Entrepreneur.com expert columnist and marketing guru in a July 2009 interview, “…marketing is the engine for growth. The only valid definition of marketing is the ability to take a company from one level of profitable revenue and continue to do that.”

Stevens goes on to remark that, “(Entrepreneurs) should never stop thinking about marketing. The person who owns the business should always think of himself or herself as the marketer-in-chief. It should be the most important thing he or she does because it’s the growth of the business…”

Bourn Creative’s Ultimate Brand Building Teleseries topics include:

• Expand Your Brand: Ten Techniques to Build Your Brand, Increase Your Visibility, and Conquer Your Market
• Website Secret Weapons: Seven Strategies to Market Your Website, Generate Leads, & Increase Profits
• WordPress, World Success: How to use WordPress to Skyrocket Search Engine Results and Put Your Marketing on Autopilot
• Google Domination: Do-It-Yourself Search Engine Optimization Tips to Increase Your Ranking
• Fill Your Funnel: Secret Strategies for Publishing an Ezine That Converts Prospects into Paying Customers
• Triple Your Traffic: Social Media Strategies You Can Use to Supercharge Your Business
• Online Marketing Demystified: Internet Marketing Strategies To Grow Your List & Build Your Bottom Line

Entrepreneurs who participate in the teleseries will learn:

• Why a strong brand can catapult your business to success
• Step by step strategies for marketing online
• How to use social networking to grow your business without spending hours a day
• Why blogs and blogging will play an even larger role in business success in 2010 and how you can use it for your business
• What Internet marketing really is and what it is used for
• Free and low cost Internet tools that will help them automate their marketing
• Tips to make your website a lead generating machine
• How to drive more traffic to your website

For more information on The Ultimate Brand Building Teleseries Series by Bourn Creative, please visit
www.bourncreative.com/free-stuff or call 916-788-1740.

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You can call it anything you want, but ultimately when you break down every business to it’s core, you are engaging in commerce and trading a commodity for payment. Yes you may be aspiring to make a difference in the world, or help other business owners just like you achieve greater levels of success, or you may even be in business to create social change. But ultimately, you as a business owner must do one thing to make it all happen. You have to sell your products, services, and ideas for a profit.

To Make a Profit, Your Target Market Must Know That You Exist.

Your target market must be able to find you and learn more about what you have to offer and how it can help them solve their problems or achieve their goals. Only then will they be able purchase from you.

The easiest way to help you target market find you is:

1. To combine an impressive, eye-catching website or blog with consistently updated, fresh, and compelling content.
2. To optimize every aspect of the website and content. You must optimize first for the user with an easy flow of information, and second for the search engine robots to help increase your search engine rankings.

Gone are the days of merely having an online presence or brochure website. Now with web 2.0, it is all about interaction, engagement, community, relationships, sharing, teaching, and learning.

Your website can no longer be just a place for prospects to learn more about you. It can no longer be a glorified brochure.

With more and more businesses turning to the Internet each day to expand their market reach, high quality website design and blog design is becoming more important than ever.

Your website needs to:

1. Stand out from every other website in your industry. It needs to stick in the minds of your website visitors so they come back and tell their friends about your website.
2. Provide the information your visitors need and want quickly and easily.
3. Be a central hub of activity, sharing, and interaction, as well as a resource for fresh, valuable, useful content.
4. Show up on the first page of the search engine results pages for your keywords and long tail key phrases.

If you can position your website as the hub of activity and go-to resource for your niche, you will fill your marketing pipeline or marketing funnel with a consistent stream of new prospects and new customers. And, you will soon increase profits!

Do you have any questions about updating your content and making your website a lead generating, profit machine? Let me know!

In fact, while search engine optimization efforts do accelerate your results and help drive more traffic to your website, many entrepreneurs and business owners are seeing an increase in website traffic and search engine page rankings as a result of simply adding a blog to their existing website, or upgrading their existing website to include a blog and a complete content management system, such as WordPress (which is what this site is built on).

Here are some quick ideas to add fresh and new content to your website:

• Add a newsroom or press room to your website and add press releases and new articles as appropriate.
• Integrate a blog or upgrade your website to a blogsite to easily add short blog posts with valuable information.
• Create an articles section on your website and add new articles as they are written.
• Publish RSS feeds on your website of other complimentary blogs, positioning you as an information publisher.
• Add a Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) section to your website and as your prospects and customers ask you new questions, add the question and answer to your website.

Do you have any other ideas on ways you can make it easy to add new content to your website? Have you tried on of these options and had success? I’d love to hear your thoughts!

Each day, more and more entrepreneurs are using the power of the Internet to launch a new business, grow an existing business, or change the way they are doing business.

These entrepreneurs are tired of following the status quo and doing things the old-fashioned way. They are tire of doing things the hard way.

Today Internet savvy entrepreneurs are stepping into and embracing a whole new emerging business model that gives them the freedom to do what they love, to make more money, and to have more time to live their dream life. Internet marketing is what is giving some smart entrepreneurs the ability to as they say it, “Make money in my sleep.”

Are you one of these entrepreneurs?

• Are you ready to stop trading hours for dollars and start trading knowledge for dollars?
• Do you know that you are meant to do more and be more? Are you ready to step into your true purpose?
• Are you ready to use your expertise to create and affect social change and help improve the lives of others?
• Do you need to get your name and your brand in front of a bigger audience who wants to buy from you?
• Are you committed and focused on changing the way you do business to leverage the power of Internet and automation tools?
• Do you want to start living the life you dreamed of when you started your business, but hasn’t quite yet become a reality?

If you answered yes to any of these questions, the wide variety of Internet marketing solutions can make difference for you and hiring Bourn Creative as your Internet Marketing Implementation Action Team is the perfect choice.

It doesn’t matter if you are experienced Internet entrepreneur or you are just starting out online, my team and I can help you:

• Get your projects done quickly
• Build a stronger, more professional and credible brand
• Generate more qualified leads
• Convert more prospects into paying customers
• Automate your marketing to give you back your valuable time

What that means for you is that you experience less stress and feel more relaxed. I can say that confidently because I have created sales and landing pages, squeeze pages, ezines, websites, and blogs for countless entrepreneurs who are rocking the online business world in a huge way!

Bourn Creative offers services on a project-by-project basis, or on monthly retainer. Depending on your level of engagement, my team and I may be:

• Writing and scheduling social media posts
• Designing your custom Twitter background
• Designing and building a website or WordPress blog
• Adding audio and video to your website or blog
• Posting new content and images to your blog
• Optimizing your website or WordPress blog to increase your search engine ranking
• Writing blog content
• Designing and setting up your ezine templates
• Planning a custom online marketing strategy
• Designing and setting up your sales and landing pages
• Adding custom squeeze pages to your sites
• Setting up your shopping cart and autoresponders
• Coordinating and implementing your ezines issues

If you are interested in working with my Team and I as your Internet marketing implementation partner,
please contact me directly or check out my a-la-carte Internet Marketing Services.

Have more questions about Internet marketing? Check out theanswers to the most commonly asked Internet marketing questions.

If your website is still just an online brochure that just sits there doing nothing, you are risking a complete shut out in the new online business competition for customers.

This doesn’t mean you have to go out and add a bunch of flash or moving elements to your website. Believe me, you want to limit your use of flash and be very strategic with it when you do because search engines can’t search and index content in Flash sites very effectively yet and it irritates visitors. It also doesn’t mean your website has to be complicated. In fact, just the opposite is recommended. You want to keep your visitors in mind at all times when working on your website and you want to keep it simple. Your ultimate goal is to get them the information they need as quickly and as easily as possible.

In today’s web 2.0 business climate, the need for a strong online interactive user experience increases by the day. An impersonal website that preaches how great you are is no longer going to cut it. Your website now needs to be utilized as a valuable and important tool to connect with your customers and prospects, to share information, and to build relationships.

What it does mean, is that your website should be regarded as a living, evolving, changing thing. From website design to website functionality, here are some basic recommendations for your website:

1. Your site should be consistently updated with new and valuable content regularly – a blog is a great solution.
2. Your site should share information your customers and prospects want and need, and help position you as an expert in your niche.
3. Your site should be a portal for high-quality information.
4. Your site should provide crystal clear contact information on every page so site visitor’s can easily get in touch with you.
5. Your site should make your marketing easier and make it easier for your visitor to get what they need.
6. Your site should have a call to action get visitors to take action, whether that is to build your list or make a purchase or contact you.
7. Your site should give visitors a reason to come back.
8. Your site should be authentic, representing you and your business, your values, and your benefits.
9. Your site should include an opt-in box to capture visitors’ email addresses in return for some valuable information.
10. Your site should generate new leads and prospects.
11. Your site should hep you make personal connections with visitors.
12. Your site should utilize automation tools and strategies to put your marketing on auto-pilot.
13. Your site should show up in the search engine results, preferably on the first page.
14. Your site should connect to and integrate where appropriate links to your social networking profiles and feeds from your posts.
15. Your site should include a media page and/or press room.
16. Your site should be flexible and expandable so it can grow with you as your business grows.
17. Your site should encourage interaction between you and your target market.
18. Your site should stand out from your competition and set you apart.
19. Your site should have a planned structure and design that plays a supporting role to your content.
20. Your site should help you make more money.

Quick SEO Tip #1

Find blogs that your target market frequents, read their posts and leave genuine keyword rich comments about their post. First, be sure to keep you comment on topic. Second, make sure you also include a tip, strategy, or insight direct from you, to help position yourself as an expert. Third, add your signature with your name, business name, tagline and website address.

Because search engines view blog comments as content and search engines love and look for fresh content, blog comments are often featured highly in search engine results and can help with the search engine optimization of your website by seriously improving your ranking.

Your comment will always be tied to that blog post, and you will benefit from their keywords and optimization of writer’s original post and all of the other comments! Likewise, if you have a blog, make sure you reply to comments left on your posts. Your reply should also use keywords and long-tail key phrases when appropriate, increasing the optimization of your post as a whole.

Recommendation: Subscribe via RSS to get alerted to new blog posts on your favorite blogs. Personally, I use iGoogle and have my RSS feeds populate my Google home page. That way I only have to check one place for all the latest posts. If you read a blog post, commit to leave a comment about the post and with an added tip. Include your name, biz name and website in your signature.

Quick SEO Tip #2

Some of my favorite resources for learning about search engine optimization are:

• www.SEOBook.com for great tips on search engine optimization
• www.webpronews.com for news on all thing web related
• www.stompernet.com for all you need to know to stomp the search engines
• www.hubspot.com experts on website marketing and tracking

Quick SEO Tip #3

Did you know this shocking fact about Google? Incredibly, sites can actually have different positions in Google depending on who is searching for them!

“Several things can account for differences in search engine position results,” says my SEO guru Ed Taylor. “One factor is the Google server (data center) that is accessed. Google has many data centers around the world and they often have slightly different rankings.” Another factor affecting the results you see in the Search Engine Results Page (SERP) is the location of your PC. According to Ed, this is especially evident on searches that Google deems of a local nature (i.e. a dentist). In the case of local searches, very often the Google Map setting will appear with a group of listings specific to the local area. Ranking differences can also result from the searcher’s computer settings. Computers that are logged into a Google account often display different ranking results that than those that are not. These results are influenced by the Web sites the searcher has visited in the past.

Recommendation: The best way to view core Google indexes — the rankings uninfluenced by your browsing history and location — is to log out of your Google account, clear out your browser’s cookies and cache, and then perform a search on your keyword. Source: Ed Taylor, www.edtaylor.com

Quick SEO Tip #4

Post your content everywhere you can and always link it back to your site with keyword-rich text HTML links. Take advantage of posting photos on Flickr, get a page for your business on Facebook. Grab a Twitter account for your business. Post in depth information about you, your business and your expertise on Linked In. You also could setup a profile on Fastpitch, Plaxo, ZoomInfo, and other profile sharing sites. You may not be as active on the second tier networks, but your profile will posted with links back to your website and your top tier networks. For example, I will be launching a duplicate copy of my portfolio on Flickr very soon! Also, make sure you setup and populate your Google Profile – It will not only get high ranking in the results, but you can add all different types of content, including links to your articles, blog posts, and more!

Recommendation: Take advantage of every FREE opportunity you can to drive traffic and add links back to your website. The more places that help people find you, the better.