Ulistic will be sharing tomorrow at lunch on the importance of search engine optimization, social media in business and overall marketing

Thanks Stu for inviting Ulistic to participate in your awesome event.  Don’t miss this next time it is being held.

• Business plan
• Leadership plan
• Life plan
• Legacy plan

Joining for the live meeting will be Jamison West from JWCS and Brad Schow from Compudyne. The event is code WES36PAL and it will be held at 9:00 AM Pacific that day. The session is titled Four Plans That Can Change Everything and that is exactly the potential outcome from the session.

If you learn to use these plans, you can change the result of your life and business. Without planning, you leave things up to chance and quite honestly have far less opportunity to achieve your dreams or succeed. We often spend a lot of time focused on our business plan but neglect the things that may be more important. Never forget your life will leave a record, a history and a legacy. Planning can help make sure those turn out as you would like.

Invest an hour and join me for this webcast. To register go to www.mssmallbiz.com/training and select the appropriate session. There are many other great sessions available as well. Hope to meet with you online that day!

I have been following some of the networking tips shared by Bob Burg over the past little while about networking etiquette and what is acceptable bahaviour when it comes to handing out your business card at events, lunches etc.  Well, according to all the experts and networking gurus they state “never give out your card until someone asks for it”.  Good advice in my opinion.

This same approach can spill over to the online world.  Especially one of my favourite business to business sites, LinkedIn.  Why do some people reach out to you when you really have no relationship?  There are legitimate people out there looking for help or advice, great this is what social networking is all about.  Some maybe looking to sell to you, this is what social networking is not about.

Therefore, if you are reaching out to sell something using online social technologies, don’t.  If you are looking at linking up with some to build a network, share experiences, share client needs or seek help or advice….make sure you state that in your request.  You will have a better chance of successfully building your online and face-to-face networks.

Don’t through your card in someone’s face…wait for them to ask for it.

Yep, the number of emails I get daily now since I made the move from a Calgary Small Business Computer Consultant to my new gig working with the business community in Calgary helping many small to midsize corporations with online marketing, social media strategies and search engine optimization have drastically increased.

So no, I don’t want to exchange your garbage links with you! Just because my clients have great page rank doesn’t allow you to spam me asking to exchange links.  That is so 1999 of you.  It simply never works out to be a fair trade anyways.

Go out there and earn your links the right way.  Offer real information that people would love to share, blog about or retweet…but don’t email me asking for a link from my website to yours.  The answer is NO, if you even get an answer from me.

Calgary International Trade Broker, AvGlobe had just successfully obtained a mandate to provide 100 to 200 software providers using software as a service – cloud computing in Singapore as part of Singapore’s drive to be a IT Hub of southeast Asia. This initiative is supported by the various business chambers and associations in Singapore.

Currently, the cloud computing platform had consistent supporters of around 3000+ small / medium businesses. The softwares of interests would be any customisable business associated software such as accounting, invoicing, payroll, sales/lead generation, customer resource management, supply chain management, remote desktop, process management, project planning and management and much more.

For more information contact Alan Tay from AvGlobe Consulting Inc.

I used to think in order to be a real leader you needed to be in front of the room, the one leading the group, being in charge, organizing the events and so on…

Boy was I wrong!

Sometimes a real leader comes from the back of the room, the quiet one, the one that when they speak they have something to say…and so on.  The real leader is the one who is there for you when you don’t need them, but also when you do.  The real leader understands the importance of the big picture, a real leader doesn’t scoff with smart ass comments but digs deep to see the relevance of the big picture.

Thanks for the wake up this morning!

But, I still have a tremendous amount of respect for Erick Simpson at MSPU.  So, why not share this information for him after all he helped me big time over the past few years.

Jeremy shared a very interesting story of link spam showing up in his blog the other day and where it came from and who was doing it.  A while back, I was getting a tonne of link spam as well when I installed the IntenseDebate Wordpress plugin.  Stay clear of this plugin all of you WordPress bloggers, total trash and full of spammers who surely increase your comment count but not in a good way.

Jeremy shared a story about four firms who are paying some SEO firm in North Carolina to do SEO work for them.  According to Jeremy’s blog post this SEO firm employs blog commenting and linking tactics aimed to get a higher number of inbound links to their client’s websites.  First off, what about the NOFOLLOW tag Google put in place a while back designed to combat this type of behaviour?  A good SEO firm would understand this loophole has been closed quite sometime ago and link comments don’t work anymore.

Jeremy shared the names of these four firms on his blog post. But I will say this.  There are some SEO firms out there who wound rather take their clients money and run.   I wonder if these four business are even aware that the behaviours of their SEO firm just got them blogged about by my Washington, DC friend.

Question…how do you know what your SEO firm is doing out there?  This is why we are teaching our clients how to do their Calgary SEO work and our approach of education will help your business stay clear of this sort of junk that happens out there.

Buyer beware comes to mind, how are you going to employ your next search engine optimization firm?

Read the complete post from Jeremy here.

On March 18th, David and I will be hosting a full day “Do It Yourself, Search Engine Optimization” course for Calgary business owners and marketing professionals.  Yes, we will show you everything we know and what we do to optimize our own websites.

Get ready to roll up your sleeves and learn from professionals who do SEO in Calgary for a living.  This is all we do, we eat, sleep and work on search engine optimization strategies for small business.  We want to teach you how to do it.  We will work with you so you learn.  Type in what we tell you into your own website and start optimizing right in the classroom.

Sign up today for the Calgary Search Engine Optimization Workshop on March 18th from 8:30 Am to 4:30 PM.

There are lots of options out there.  Do you want to learn from Professionals or someone who lures you in with a free breakfast?

What are those devilish software giants in Redmond up too these days?

It looks like they are continue the scare tactics, now with UK IT services providers.  The focus remains zeroed in on the Microsoft BPOS offering and some IT partners are running scared into the vast UK wilderness.  Hey guys they did that on this side of the Atlantic as well.  Microsoft BPOS solution is a great offering for the small businesses, not only in the UK but also here in Canada.  It is ideal for the small business who doesn’t need anything complex and wants to save a small fortune in server costs plus monthly maintenance fees from their local IT provider.

Ulistic is a Microsoft BPOS partner providing Hosted Exchange, SharePoint and the rest of the suite.  Although we run Google internally we still have clients running the Microsoft hosted suite of products and we never have to support them, it just runs and runs great.

Richard is looking for some feedback on this latest Redmond driven scheme.  Read the Tubblog article here and jump in with some comments.