Biz Tips Blog: Online Marketing, Visibility and Business Blogging Tips

Feedback Please

Patsi and I, along with our colleague Adam Urbanski, are developing a new, hands-on class for setting up and using a blog.  We would like to get your feedback on some names for the class:

Boost Your Biz with Blogs

Biz Blog Starter

Biz Blog Builder

Let us know your preference by clicking on the Comment link below and stating which name you feel works the best.  Thanks!

Audacity: Free Audio Editing Software

I may have mentioned in the past that I use Audacity to edit my audio files for podcasts and class recordings.  Forgive me if you've read this before.  Since I use this software every week, I'm continually reminded how easy it is to use and the fact that it's free is even better!  Definitely, this belongs in the category of 101 Low and No Cost Marketing Tools.

About Audacity

Audacity is a free, easy-to-use audio editor and recorder for Windows, Mac OS X, GNU/Linux, and other operating systems. You can use Audacity to:

• Record live audio.
• Convert tapes and records into digital recordings or CDs.
• Edit Ogg Vorbis, MP3, and WAV sound files.
• Cut, copy, splice, and mix sounds together.
• Change the speed or pitch of a recording.
• And more! See the complete list of features.

I am not a tech wiz, though I can usually figure out software works.  Over the last few months, I've learned how to use this software to edit recordings, insert intro music, add audio to a recording, set up the mp3 tags, make the audio better when it's too quiet and few other things.

If you're going to get into podcasting or delivering audio to your customers, blog readers and prospects, you can save a lot of money by learning how to use this software.

Direct Marketing Techniques to Sell Your Book

Using Direct Marketing Techniques to Sell Thousands of Copies of Your Book
Wednesday, August 24, 2005, 8:30 p.m. ET
Guest Expert:  Bob Bly of bly.com

One out of three hardcover books distributed to bookstores is returned to the publisher unsold, but you can still make your book a best-seller by selling it through ads, direct mail, and the Internet. In this interview, author and direct response copywriter Bob Bly shows you marketing techniques that can boost your book sales.

Guest: Bob Bly is a freelance copywriter specializing in direct marketing and the author of more than 60 books including The Complete Idiot's Guide to Direct Marketing (Alpha Books)

Register:  www.ConversationsWithExperts.com

Conversations with Experts: How to Build Your Business On and Off-line
Hosted by Denise Wakeman and Patsi Krakoff.

Conversations with Experts is sponsored by Build a Better Blog System.

Snipurl.com makes long URLs short

Have you ever had to send a really long URL to someone in an email only to have it end up broken so the receiver could not click on it and get to the correct page?  I encounter this often when I send payment links to clients that are generated by my shopping cart.

I've known about a free service called tinyurl.com for some time, but I never liked the way it creates URLs that have a bunch of random letters and numbers.  Last night I discovered another site that does the same thing with one big improvement...you can create a short URL with a "nickname" so the URL makes sense to the receiver.

The site is snipurl.com.  The nickname feature is what I like the best about it and it's FREE!

3. MORE INTUITIVE URLs WITH NICKNAMES
Don't like URLs like http://snipurl.com/h because they are just some random text? Then you can make http://snipurl.com/digicam_review and post more intuitive URLs to your mailing lists or in your newsletters with sophisticated user tracking etc.

Blogging, Blogging All the Time

I've been spending so much time working with other people on their blogs that I hardly have time for posting on my own blogs these days.  My to-do list gets longer with every phone call I have yet the time I have to do the stuff, gets shorter.  At the moment Patsi and I are working with several new clients on setting up their blogs; we are in the middle of the Blog Squad makeover with Suzanne Falter-Barns (lots of good tips being posted over there), we are doing a blog audit for a very big internet marketing guru who shall remain nameless at this time; we have several new participants in our Blog to Book Project; we're developing a new blogging class with another partner; we are prepping for the International Coach Federation annual conference that's in November; our weekly Conversations with Experts continues unabated plus we've been invited by other organizations to give intro blog classes to their members.

So you can see, there's a lot on the go.  I'm constantly finding interesting, relevant things to blog about, now I just need to find more time to do it!