One of the things I love to do for our Sparkplugging Advertisers is give them a little extra coverage on our network. This is never something that they pay for directly, I just like to spread the word about other small businesses who have supported our site. Since I actually turn away more advertisers than I take on, these companies really do rock.

For small business owners looking go further in the areas of customer service and overall professionalism, consider checking out the professional voicemail service by Professional Voice Greetings. They create audio recordings to be used for voicemail and on-hold messages that can be uploaded to almost any phone system (including cell phones).

This service is a cheap and easy way to gain credibility with clients and further your own business agenda all at the same time.  Starting at $34.99, potential clients can choose from over 20 different voice samples and submit a script for a 30 second message (background music optional).  For an additional $4.00, you can create a professional on-hold message, which would allow you to showcase your products and services while your customers wait for further assistance.

A professional voice greeting can:

• Give your business added credibility
• Enhance the professional presentation of your business
• Turn your phone system or voicemail into a sales and advertising tool (and I think this is an especially attractive option when you have WARM LEADS waiting to talk to you!)

Additionally all their voice messages are:

• Recorded by professional voice talents with years of experience in
  TV and radio
• Available with optional background music
• Specialized for Phone and Voicemail Systems

Best of all, the website has a clear and simple “upload tutorial page” that walks you step-by-step through the activation process.  Even the most “technologically challenged” business owner can take advantage of the service with minimal assistance.

So if you’re looking to polish your professional image in the cheapest way possible, Professional Voice Greetings may be of value to you and your company.  It’s my personal belief that small business owners can never go wrong investing in tools that promote professionalism or future credibility with clients.

I have been in love with MOO for well over a year - what’s MOO? MOO.com - they print up the most adorable, professional, fantasmical-looking pieces of stationery I’ve ever seen. I’ve been to 8 tech conferences over the last year or so, and at every single one of them, someone has passed out MOO business cards and thus made themselves stick out from the pack.

What I also love about MOO is that they are so incredibly versatile. They are integrated with Flickr, Vox, even Facebook, which makes it a snap to create products out of your own photo collections, no matter where you have them. They also have ready-made collections from fantastic photographers & illustrators.

Personally, for business use, I love that you can pack a pound of branding into an ounce of pricing. Everything MOO.com carries is less than $20 a set. The print quality is phenomenal, as is the paper stock. With just a little bit of photo cleanup in a program like Photoshop, you can take pictures on your front porch and turn them into an entire set of pro-looking promotional tools (Yes, that’s me. On my porch. And my 13 year old daughter took the pictures too - talk about low-budget!).

[CraftBoom has a tutorial on polishing up photos just like this one]

Since I’m working on heavily promoting my speaking career this year, I made a whole set specifically for this purpose, including notecards, stickers, and the MiniCards (business cards). One afternoon of photos and photo retouching turned out this set (that I’m quite proud of, thank you very much)!

MOO products are really a must if you are a creative - you can’t get cheaper and more high quality materials made of your own illustrations, crafts, design work, or photography. They are also perfect for coaches, authors, speakers, or anyone else that is promoting their personality as part of their business. But what’s cool is that you can also have fun with them and make sticker books of your kids’ drawings, make flash-cards, retail hang-tags, wedding thank you notes, pretty much anything you can imagine.

Yes, I know this sounds like a big, fat, sappy commercial. But that’s what MOO gets for making me fall in love with them.

Although you may not believe it when I tell you this, there is a downside to having a popular blog. As comments and conversation increase, so does the time it takes the blogger to respond. In fact, I used to be able to respond to nearly every comment made on the site, and it broke my heart to have to give that up.

But last week Lorelle VanFossen from Lorelle on WordPress clued me in to two Firefox Greasemonkey scripts that have absolutely changed the way I am able to respond to people who want to join the conversation on my blog.

What is Greasemonkey?

It’s like a Firefox Add-on/Plugin that allows people to write scripts that alter the web pages you visit. They are usually created to make a web site more readable or usable. Do use caution in installing them, just like with any other plugin or freeware, because they can be created for malicious reasons. But these two are safe and you will LOVE them.

WordPress Comment Ninja

WordPress Comment Ninja makes it a snap to respond to as many comments as you want to all from one screen. This means you don’t have to go out to your blog, navigate through multiple posts and pages, and you don’t have to wait for pages to reload to continue the conversation.

On your Comment Page in your WordPress Admin Panel, Comment Ninja adds a “Respond” option, which opens up a dialog box right on the page. You can enter your response and it automatically adds a link at the beginning of your comment to direct it to the person to whom you are responding to. You can then either post the comment to your blog, email it directly to your reader, or both. And it will take care of any and all of that for you while you are responding to the next commenter.

Akismet Auntie Spam

With comment spam reaching epic proportions, I gave up on trying to find ‘false positives’ that Akismet thought was spam, but in actuality was a comment from a real person. I mean, how can you seriously go through 30,000 comments trying to find 3 or so real comments - or sometimes none at all. You could spend all day looking for that needle in a haystack.

Enter Akismet Auntie Spam, which sifts through all of your spam comments, shortens each to one line, and groups multiple entries into one line. Suddenly 30,000 spammy comments fit nicely on one manageable page, and you can then scroll and find the legit comments, which are quite easy to identify.

The first time I ran this script, I found more than 7 false positives (Sorry Dane!), even from people who had commented previously on my blog. I suddenly wondered just how many conversations never happened because I was prevented from ever seeing a reader’s response! But the best part was that I never had to read through the 186 comments that “noggroona” left for me.

When I first thought about writing an article on PPC (Pay Per Click) search engine marketing, I really hesitated until I had some success in this area - and I will tell you right now, it has taken me a few months to be able to publish this piece! But in the last few weeks, I have been able to more than double my return on investment as I experimented with sending targeted paid traffic to several of my websites.

Can I suddenly turn this into millions? No. Is it encouraging and am I on the right track? You bet.

Here’s my secret :: there is no secret to success with PPC marketing. Even my mentor who is currently grossing $25,000 a month will tell you there are no easy answers and that what works for him may not work for you.

Step 1 :: Have a good offer

This is the easy part. You can either promote your own products, or someone else’s products via affiliate marketing. But whatever it is, you’ll do better with an offer that is legitimate and high quality.

Surprisingly, I’ve even had good luck sending PPC traffic to specific blog posts, so even those of you with only blogging experience can make more from your websites than you are currently making on just organic traffic to your site.

Step 2 :: Have a good landing page

A landing page is where you will send the people from the search engines to hopefully buy your offer. This is where things get a bit tricky and a LOT of experimentation is in order. But here’s what I’ve learned from my best landing pages:

• Don’t leak your traffic
  This means that the only things on the page are links to buy, or to sign up for something requiring the visitor to give you their email address. This isn’t the place for links to free resources or irrelevant ads.
• Do make the page EASY to understand in under three seconds
  This doesn’t mean you can’t have a lot of information. It does mean that you need to let your visitor know why they are there and convince them to read more :: fast.
• For intangible products, the higher the price point, the longer the page should be
  You will need to sell, sell, sell on this page if you are pushing anything priced higher than $30-$40. This doesn’t apply to higher priced consumer goods, especially if the visitor knows what they are looking for. An example would be a certain brand and model of a laptop - all you want is a buy now button with a features list.
• Make the sale fast and easy
  If your visitor has to go through 5 pages to just get to your shopping cart, you’re wasting everyone’s time.

Step 3 :: Set up your PPC campaign

Although Google is easiest, it’s also the most expensive. But all paid search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN Adcenter, Enhance and Search123) follow the same basic premise:

1. Build a keyword list
2. Write your text ads
3. Set your bidding budget

Again, there is no one-size-fits-all answer to what works here. Two people selling the same product and bidding on the same keyword might have a very different conversion ratio based on the landing page and text ad that is written. So although it is a risk to perhaps lose a little money in your testing phase, once you get it right, you can put your campaign on auto-pilot and let it make money for you (checking periodically, of course!).

A few more tips for success:

• Try at least 5 different text ads, and add one or two every few days. Search engines will automatically rotate your ads to help you determine which ones get the most clicks - drop the ones that underperform.
• Bid on very highly targeted keywords - which still could mean hundreds. Include common misspellings and know the editorial guidelines of the search engine. “Blog Hosting” and “Hosting Blog” are considered the same with Yahoo, different with Google.
• Do a lot of keyword research - Google has an excellent free tool in their AdWords system, plus Aaron Wall has some excellent free keyword resources.
• For serious keyword research, I can’t recommend KeyCompete.com
  more highly - it tracks and pulls competitor keywords for you.
• Test, test, test - have I made this point abundantly clear yet?!

Most search engines have some kind of free coupon to get started - here’s a few of them to give your PPC campaign a low-cost kick-start:

Technically, these offers require anywhere between $5 and $50 to get started, so aren’t exactly free. Combined though, they offer $300 worth of PPC (Pay Per Click) and text link advertising for $125.

Yahoo! Sponsored Search $5 for $25 worth of clicks

Yahoo Sponsored Search is second only to Google’s power - and Yahoo’s paid ads appear on a wide network of big sites, including CNN and AltaVista. They also have an extremely helpful user-interface and a how-to section.

Enhance Interactive $50 for $75 worth of clicks

Enhance Interactive is a niche search engine marketing company that serves ads for a variety of sites, including Dogpile, VeriSign, OpenList.com and MyZip.com. They also have testimonials from big players such as BizRate and HotWire, as well as some advertising alternatives such as paid inclusion (flat fee guaranteed inclusion in search results).

Although some companies require a minimum of up to $.10 bid per click, Enhance has a very low $.03 minimum bid per click. So the money spent with smaller search engines can potentially go much farther than with the big players.

Search123 $50 for $70 worth of clicks

According to the Search 123 site, their visitors come from portal pages, a Spanish language network, niche content sites and some branded search directories. They also are unique in that they offer free account set-up, keyword research and expansion, and account management and optimization services. None of the other search engine marketing companies do that!

Google and MSN Adcenter are infamously vague and inconsistent with their coupon offers - I suggest just hunting around on the internet in the hopes that you can uncover a deal from them that is unexpired.

PPC is not for everyone - but for anyone who is making money off of their website, it’s really a must to at least test it out. You don’t want to be leaving money on the table!

The very first business seminar I ever went to was a Franklin Covey time management seminar. To this day it was one of the best seminars I’ve ever been to in my life. I still use some of the principles I learned in that program - like scheduling life priorities into my business calendar (like time with the kids, meditation time, date nights with my hubby, etc.).

So when Franklin Covey has a sale, my ears perk up.

Here’s a sample of some of the cool things they are clearing out:

Swanky Bags	Addictive Productivity Software
Adorable Planner Covers	Manly Laptop Bags

Although much has been made of RSS subscribers as blogs grow, the fact of the matter remains that only a small percentage of internet users subscribe to anything via RSS. Email marketing will always be a strong performing promotional initiative online, just like we will always get offers delivered to regular real-life mailboxes.

The reason is simple. Direct response marketing works.

I’ve worked with several email marketing providers over the years, and choosing the right company or system will be based on your marketing goals, customers and your business model. All of these solutions are best for smaller businesses, because larger business will usually require a custom solution.

All of these email marketing solutions offer:

• FREE trials to help you determine if they are the right product for your needs
• Built-in CAN-Spam compliance tools

For Simple Email Marketing Needs

Most providers either charge on a monthly or per-email basis. But if you have a small list that is geared more towards client retention or education, the return on investment for ongoing fees may be difficult to justify.

TemplateZone’s High Impact Email Basic and Professional are the perfect solution. The one-time cost is easily justifiable and the program walks users through the campaign creation process step-by-step. It also plays nice with Microsoft Office, so you can mail merge. With templates and drag and drop file creation, this is one of the easiest tools to use.

Check with your ISP’s (internet service provider) terms if you plan on sending more than 250 emails a day. All ISP’s have some restrictions on how many emails you can send at one time/one hour/one day to ensure you aren’t spamming.

TemplateZone offers a 30 Day Free Trial

For Intermediate Email Marketing Needs

I’ve written before about how much I like Constant Contact. They charge customers based on how large your email subscriber list is, so it’s a very affordable solution in which what you pay is commensurate with what you’re likely receiving in profits. Plus, until you have over 100 subscribers, you won’t pay a thing.

Constant Contact’s product is super-easy to use, and I actually prefer their response tracking and reporting over that which I get from my current provider. Additionally, they have an extensive free tutorial section on their site, which has beginner to advanced level tips for optimizing your campaigns for the best possible results.

Constant Contact offers a 60 Day Free Trial

For Advanced Email Marketing Needs

When your needs have grown beyond sending newsletters, then consider the following two companies. Both of them are slightly different but highly recommended and respected in the industry.

AWeber

AWeber is a combination of regular email marketing and autoresponder services. An autoresponder is simply a delivery system that automatically delivers emails on a schedule or based on a customer action, such as when a new subscription launches a pre-written series of emails.

Although a little more challenging to learn and set up, using autoresponders is a seriously cost-effective and time-saving way to keep in touch with clients, because most of the delivery is automated. AWeber has all of the niceties of Constant Contact (including the swanky reporting) along with unlimited delivery of emails, autoresponders, and whatever you want to send.

Since some of the biggest names in internet marketing use AWeber, I can unquestionably recommend it. If they offered an integrated shopping cart such as Professional Cart Solutions below, I’d be mighty tempted to use them, too!

AWeber offers a 30 Day Free Trial

Professional Cart Solutions

I love Professional Cart Solutions, and I use their products on my own sites. Not only is it a full-blown email marketing and autoresponder service, but there is also a shopping cart feature that allows individuals to sell their own products and services and the entire transaction is handled automatically - including follow up emails to customers.

As an added bonus, their cart also has a built in affiliate program - so that it is easy to set up a process to have other people sell your stuff. The only drawback I’ve found with this company is that if I want to track specific click-throughs in emails, I have to do that on my own by using redirects or a service like TinyURL.

Again, setting up the emails and autoresponders with Professional Cart Solutions and AWeber is a little more work than the first two solutions, but the added functionality makes it worth it to save so much time further down the road. This service is also the one with the most scalability, meaning that as I grow my business, I know that whatever I need to do can be done with Professional Cart Solutions.

Professional Cart Solutions offers a 30 Day Free Trial

I don’t know about you, but when I started working from home, I stopped using my cell phone a lot. And with Caller ID, I really didn’t even need to check voicemails because I could simply call people right back.

Then voicemails started piling up and my ‘inbox’ got full. What a pain - I didn’t notice it for weeks!

With Vonage, you can get your voicemails delivered automatically via email. But for cell phones, there’s not many options out there, especially if you brain is hardwired into your email inbox, like mine.

But GotVoiceoffers voicemail –> email delivery for all major cell phone providers, and they offer a 14-day free trial to see if it’s worth it to you.

Like I said, if your email inbox is your central organization spot for all things to do, getting voicemails delivered via email is totally worth it!

Just yesterday I added the live “Request Deals” feature to this site. And today one of you fine folks asked for a resource for free custom company pens.

Unfortunately, “Free” on this one is something I wasn’t able to find. But I did find some deals for you:

Branders.com has a coupon for $50 off your first order - they sell branded pens, pencils, erasers, and just about anything else under the sun. They also have FREE samples, so at least there’s a little bit of free action going on over there.

Thanks for the request and keep them coming - I’m happy to hunt down deals for you!