August Meeting Recap

Peggy Duncan*, Personal Productivity Expert and founder of The Digital Breakthroughs Institute in Atlanta, spoke at our August 5 meeting on using the Internet more efficiently for self-promotion. Here are some of the highlights:

• Get your website ready and learn to build and maintain it yourself.
• Put something good in your title tag for your webpage rather than “Home Page.”
• Register your website at Google, Bing and Yahoo.
• Publish new content on your website all the time. Come up with new things to talk about.
• Buy domain names that are similar to your website name and have visitors forwarded to your main page if they visit other domain names you’ve purchased.
• Instead of sending out e-newsletters, consider making the information into blog posts instead. Then they will be picked up by search engines.
• You should get in the habit of Google searching yourself, but also searching your profession and industry. Who keeps showing up? Make it your goal to be at the top of the results list.
• Make sure you know what your competition is doing. Set Google to alert you about your competition.
• Get www.about.com to link to your website to drive traffic there.
• Send news to www.prlog.com, www.prnewswire.com, http://atlanta.daybooknetwork.com/ and http://www.businesswire.com/portal/site/home/. Then turn the press releases into blog posts for your website.
• Consider doing podcasts that will help build your reputation as an expert.
• Take a class on a computer program you use all the time. Learn to use it better and faster, saving you time.
• Nominate yourself or your stuff for an award.
• Make yourself available through www.awardsync.com, www.helpareporter.com and www.handsontraining.com.
• Consider what you can give away for free.
• Feed the search engines by calling yourself an expert, just be able to back up your claim.
• In a Google search, click “cached” and “text” so you can view what Google sees for search engine optimization purposes.