Arachne's Sister

How do you leap frog past all of your competition to land the perfect job that fulfills both your passion and your salary needs? Even in a bum economy? – With the right strategy!

My dear friend Lynn Strigh (“The Corporate Exit Strategist”) is teaming up with Liz Lynch (networking guru and author) to offer a special series of classes called the “Job Search Marketing Blueprint”.

They will cover the following topics (check out the link for a more detailed list):

1. Mindset of Successful Job Seeking Candidate

2. Branding yourself as the Expert within your field

3. Creating your Marketing JOB searching Campaign

4. Smart Networking strategies

5. 30 day job searching business and follow up plan

6. Showing your Brilliance – Side Jobs

The classes are offered by telephone, with recordings available for download afterward, so no matter where you live, if you are in the throes of a job hunt right now, I highly recommend you check this out.

Sandra Martini has dug through the 100+ pages of the CAN-SPAM law and pulled out a few things we as online marketers should be paying attention to, and might be confused about. If you send email broadcasts to your list (auto responders, e-zine, etc), you should review these items and make sure you are in compliance.

Sandra Martini's Success Strategies: Confusion over CAN-SPAM law

I came across this post today by Lara Kulpa of Ginkgo Consulting, and it very nicely elucidates some reasons I steer my clients away from using free hosted blogging services (wordpress.com and blogger.com) in favor of their own hosted domain name blog.

Read the whole post for the juicy details, but here is the quick summary:

Okay, so now that that’s cleared up, let’s move on to all the reasons why free hosted blogs suck.

1. As I said previously, lack of freedom. Lack of control. 
2. They’re simply NOT search engine friendly. 
3. Limited income opportunities, if any.
4. Credibility.

Read it online: Why Free Hosted Blogs Suck

Great overview of different ways to use FB to enhance your business relationships. Try implementing just one each week (or each day, if you’re feeling inspired).

32 Ways to Use Facebook for Business

If you are like most web surfers, you like to keep track of useful and interesting website and pages. You probably bookmark them somehow in your web browser. And I bet your list is getting pretty long. And I’m sure you are thinking “one of these days I’m going to sort them all into folders, I swear…” and in the meantime, you have to scroll through dozens (hundreds? thousands?) of links when you want to find a certain page (“I know it’s in here somewhere…”).

If you aren’t yet familiar with social bookmarking, I highly suggest you check it out. There are several sites to use, I personally use Delicious for my bookmarking (http://delicious.com). You just sign up for a free account and add some little buttons to your browser. You use these new buttons to bookmark pages you like (instead of the built-in browser buttons) and they are saved to your account online. You can add a description to a link, and as many individual tags (keywords) as you like. You don’t need to sort them into folders because the tags act as dynamic folders. When you want to use a bookmark, just visit your Delicious page and click the link. You can search your links, see all of the links with certain tags, share links with others, etc. The bonus is that since your bookmarks are no longer attached to your browser, you keep one bookmark list for all the different web browsers and computers you use, and you can access your bookmarks when away from your primary computer (at a library, for instance).

While compiling an article for my e-zine this week, I came across some interesting information regarding popular blog platforms. 

The blog platforms of choice among the top 100 blogs | Royal Pingdom – An analysis of the top 100 blogs on Technorati (January 15th, 2009).

Top five blog platforms | News Blog - CNET News – Though old (February 8, 2007), this has some useful commentary and links.

Just for fun, I’ve opened up a little Zazzle store where I am selling some of my Mandala Art printed on useful products. I plan to add additional items, more designs, and some other fun stuff, but thought I’d share as soon as I had the basics up.

Take a look and let me know what you think.

create & buy custom products at Zazzle

If you are planning to head out this weekend for a fireworks display, definitely take a minute before you do to read these helpful photography tips from my great friend, Nikki Incandela.

Nikki Incandela Photography: Tips on Capturing July 4th's Fireworks!!