As you all know, we’re co-founders of Bloggertone.com. We have teamed up with the business bookmarking website, Bizsugar to run a cool blogging contest!

The combination of both sites’  names explains why this is a “Sweet Business Blogging Contest”. The idea is to give your articles extra online visibility, reward your social networking and an opportunity for you to win prizes to help you promote your business.

• It’s free to enter
• Anyone can join the competition including current Bloggertoners and BizSugar members!
• You’ll have lots of chances to win
• Prizes total USD 6,921

How You Can Win These Prizes

#1 Do you write business articles?

All you have to do is submit a business article to Bloggertone Between Monday March 15th and Wednesday March 17th – but there are a few guidelines you need to follow.

All votes will take place on BizSugar, the social bookmarking site for businesses.
#2 Do you like to read business articles?

You can also win prizes by simply voting and commenting on the Sugartone articles posted on BizSugar.com

Click on the banner below to learn more!

Last Thursday, January 21st, we successfully launched our first free monthly webinar. We believe it’s a great way to share and reach out to our audience and will continue to explore this method throughout the year.
We had a brainstorming session a few months ago about how could we share more value through a different channel than the blog or social networks, and the idea of the webinars came up.  It takes a good few days of preparation to deliver 1 webinar hour per month, but we’ll try to be consistent and bring you topics of interest, LIVE!

The first one was : “How to build your business network with social media” and as promised, we compiled all the relevant info below:

• Full recording of the webinar
• The slides
• The conversation thread under the Twitter tag #sm4biz
• Some questions…

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The slides are already available on our Slideshare account!

My Power Point slides also contributed to the Twitter conversation
Have a look at what was said during the webinar by clicking on the image below:

Thanks very much to everyone that helped us spread the word in the different social networks.
We’re looking forward to have you on our next free monthly webinar:  “Social Media for Sales & Marketing Departments“.

Got questions or comments? Add them to the thread below!

Have you worked already on the online strategy for your business?

We’d like to share with you an overview of our 2010 social media strategy. It’s a good opportunity to help you start with your own plan, give you some ideas or at least point you in the right direction
We are absolutely open to suggestions so remember to leave your comment at the end of the post!!

Blogging

Focus: Build authority / Expand community /  Increase US & UK readership / spark conversations / *Networking / Improve search engine rankings

* This year we’ll choose to read and comment on 10 blogs: 5 will be to follow trends and stay up to date, the other 5 will be strictly for business networking.

Blog topics (Tip: Define categories first)

Reviews, Video tips, Internet marketing, Social media

Blog’s ideas sandbox:

Ask on LinkedIn Q&A, Read other blogs (listen)/ reblog, Reviews (books, events, apps, etc), Web trends/ Search / video tips

Characteristics

• Frequency: Twice a week
• Posts must offer value
• Must include images and/or video
• Time allocated per post (research, writing, marketing) = 2 to 3 hours

Blog post Marketing

• Include relevant trackbacks in the post
• Send tweets throughout the week to promote the content
• Bookmark: delicious.com, bookmarks.yahoo.com, stumbleupon.com
• Submit post to: Bizsugar.com, Digg.com and Reddit.com
• Send post only to relevant LinkedIn groups and “follow” articles (this way you’ll be notified if someone makes a comment so you can follow up)
• Submit blog feed to 5/10 RSS news feeds weekly

Video & Photo content

Photos will be uploaded to FlickR and Facebook (automatic to Twitter).
Videos will be uploaded to You Tube / Tube Mogul, then Facebook (automatic to Twitter).

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Facebook

Focus: Share engaging photo and video content / Build authority / Expand community /  Increase US & UK fans/ multiply interactions / Networking / Company-Industry communications

Building the community

• Friend relevant contacts from Twitter and LinkedIn (profile)
• Pump good photo and video content
• Listen: reply to any question or comment ASAP. Keep the conversation
• Interact: Make comments / “like” status updates
• Facebook ads campaign: targeted to people in marketing and communications

Time allocated: 4 to 6 hours weekly

Twitter

Focus: Share helpful-engaging links / Listen to random and selected conversations / Build authority / Expand US & UK community/ increase conversations / Networking / Company-Industry communications

Building the community

• Follow contacts from LinkedIn
• Follow back relevant contacts
• Follow people especially traditional marketing and communications
• Proactively do Q&A
• Chit-chat
• Share GOOD stuff! try to always include a link to good content

Time allocated: 6 to 8 hours weekly

LinkedIn

Focus: Share helpful-engaging status updates / Build authority / Expand US & UK network/ increase group interactions / Business networking / Company-Industry communications / Increase business opportunities

Building the community

• Follow contacts also on Twitter
• Join US/UK strategic groups
• Send blog posts only to relevant groups and “follow” the article.
• Read groups’ digest and engage in relevant threads.
• LinkedIn Q&A: offer value answering selected questions. Ask industry questions also.
• Keep personal/business information and LinkedIn apps on profile up to date.

Time allocated: 6 to 8 hours weekly

Email Marketing

Focus: Share helpful-engaging content/ Build authority / Expand US & UK awareness/ increase business opportunities / Company-Industry communications / webinars main promotional tool

• Platform: Mailchimp
• Grow email database using website, webinars and offline networking.
• Segment database!!! (don’t send every single person the same information!)
• Newsletter will contain three topics: best blog post/s, Great tips or social media case study and invitation to monthly webinar
• Frequency: Once a month

Time allocated: 5 to 10 hours monthly (depending on the campaign)

Have you found the strategy useful? Go ahead, and share below what worked for you last year or how can this strategy be improved!!

Best,

Fred

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Hi there,

We’ve been quite busy with Niall the past few weeks getting Bloggertone.com ready for launch. We are nearly there, and here’s a sneak preview for you:

Bloggertone is a new web space that will allow people in business to access and share useful business information and opinions (in the form of blog posts), constantly updated by the collaborative effort of business bloggers.

The proposition is for this web space to enable and promote some sort of dialogue between business bloggers and business readers (hopefully I am not making up terms here!).  We would encourage commenting but also requesting comments!
Some site functionalities will include author pages for the bloggers, voting, post ratings, and some social media sharing widgets (share this, tweet this, facebook connect, etc).

This initial phase will consist on 11 main areas:

1. Starting up
2. Talking Leadership
3. Transforming Your Business
4. Managing Money
5. People Matters
6. Technology & Web 2.0
7. Marketing Ideas
8. Growing Sales
9. Going International
10. Work/Life Balance
11. What’s Happening?

We hope to launch in the next few days, those of you waiting to read, stand by; those of you getting your post submissions ready, keep it up, our inboxes are happy to see those posts coming

Why not join Bloggertone on: LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter?

Best,
Facundo

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