Act now while there are seats available! Registration closes 9/7!

Are you making the most of the resources available to you online? Did you know there are FREE options for many services and software that others pay hundreds or even thousands of dollars for?

How about Social Media? Can you tell a Tweet from a Yelp? Have you been liked on Facebook? We live in an increasingly connected world and the online economy is experiencing tremendous growth, even in the middle of the worst economic crisis of our time.

Did you know

• The Internet economy was estimated to be $500 Billion – in 1999!
• Facebook has over 500 million active users
• Twitter has over 75 million users
• The average US internet user spends 7 hours per month on Facebook
• At the end of 2009, there were over 27 million tweets per day
• The 2nd largest search engine in the world … YouTube

For the first time, you will have an opportunity to learn the tricks of the trade from a seasoned veteran. Not only will you learn about at least 15 free resources that will help reduce your expenses, but you will also learn the “what now” for your website and social media strategies.

Spend an evening with online expert and website developer Brent Friar. Brent will guide you through money and time saving resources that will help make your online marketing efforts more efficient. Find out what it takes to be named one of the top 5 Twitter users in Charlotte by the Charlotte Observer.

Here’s what you will learn

• 15+ free online resources your business needs
• How to set up a professional web presence in 10 minutes
• How to set up your Twitter account PLUS the other accounts and services you will need
• How to use LinkedIn to get introductions to new clients
• How to use Facebook to increase your brand awareness

Compare to other courses that cost $299, $499, or even more! More value for the one time low price of $149! We are so confident that you will learn enough to pay for your seminar with just a few of the resources and strategies that we are offering a 100% money back guarantee. If we can’t increase your revenue or decrease your expense, we’ll give you your money back!

Act now, class size is intentionally small! You will not be a nameless face in a large auditorium, this class is hands on and you have the opportunity to ask questions and interact during the presentation. You will have unprecedented access to direct advice about your existing strategies and web presence! Bring your laptop or netbook, WiFi will be available free of charge.

About the Speaker

Brent got his start building his first website in 1994 which turned in to a part time consulting gig. In 1999 consulting turned in to full time work for one of largest sports sanctioning bodies in the world. Through the dot com boom Brent was at the helm of web properties that accounted for millions of page views daily.

In 2005 Brent turned his sights on e-commerce, helping build a top performance parts website that experience triple digit growth year over year under his supervision. Marketing the site lead Brent in to the realm of search engine optimization and some of the earliest social media marketing campaigns.

Brent now spends his time building his successful website development firm BNR Branding Solutions and educating small business owners and entrepreneurs about online marketing and online resources.

This may be a general human obsession, but the tech world seems to be enamored with the next giant killer. Not a week goes by without a news report or blog post touting the next iPhone, Warcraft, Google, or Microsoft killer. In case you hadn’t noticed, iPhone, Warcraft, Google, and Microsoft are still alive and kicking – and might even have made a buck or two even in the middle of the worst American economy in over 70 years.

Back in May 2009 there was a giant killer story with a twist. This time it wasn’t David v. Goliath, it was more like USA v. Russia or Ali v. Foreman. Microsoft had decided to make a serious effort to cut in to Google’s dominance in online advertising. Apparently the thought of Google taking the lion’s share of the multi-billion dollar market without a serious threat was enough to make them invest in their Bing search product. Bing debuted with a lot of fanfare and TV commercials backing the launch. There was finally another big kid on the block that was going to muscle in on Google’s turf.

A while back I got a call from one of our clients that also happens to be a good friend of mine. He was a little upset that he had an advertiser that wanted to pull the banners from his site. The advertiser had bought a full package with banners of every size they offer on the site, and the banners were very nicely done by an agency with online marketing experience. He asked me to take a look and see what was going wrong with the campaign so we could hopefully salvage the client.

There really isn’t much to check on our end – make sure that the banners show up where they are supposed to and then link to the correct page. I logged in to the admin and all the banners where there. They had the impressions that I would have expected and the click rate was actually a bit higher than average. I was a little puzzled, but I went ahead and pulled up the front end of the site so I could actually click a banner to make sure everything was working properly. After a couple of reloads I got one of the banners in question and clicked it.

Last week I wrote about the people who say “I never click on those links.” Of course, for every one of those I also hear “We tried AdWords, it didn’t work.” Now, I will be the first to admit that AdWords is not for everyone, but more often than not, it’s not that AdWords didn’t work, the problem lies in the execution of the campaign.

It’s fairly easy to pick out the people who tried AdWords on their own with poor results. You start asking some basic question – How did you research the keywords you used? What were your criteria for promoting or demoting keywords or ads? How did you come up with the dollar value for the goals you set up? You did set up goals right? If their eyes glaze over, chances are they did it wrong to begin with.

Have you ever noticed when you do a search on Google that there are “Sponsored Links” that show up above the search results and to the right of the search results? You know, those links you never click on? You’ve seen them right? You do use Google as a verb right?

Now that we’ve established that you don’t live under a rock, let’s talk about those “Sponsored Links.” When discussing online marketing the subject of pay-per-click ads inevitably comes up, and as sure as the day is long the very next statement always seems to be “I never click on those links.”

One of the common questions a prospective client has is “Why do you insist on providing the hosting?” There are several reasons ranging from server set up to security. Today I came across an article that illustrated once of the most important reasons why we highly recommend BNR hosting so I figured I would take this opportunity to talk about hosting in detail.

First, there is the matter of server setup and why it matters. Most hosting providers have a standard server configuration they use on all of the boxes they maintain outside of the custom dedicated servers that are usually way too much hosting for a small business client. Try calling GoDaddy and ask them to configure a server to your spec. From the provider standpoint it makes perfect sense to have a standard install because it makes setup and maintenance a lot easier to do.

BNR servers are configures and optimized specifically to run Joomla. The setup we use is the one recommended by Open Source Matters and it is more secure that most providers standard installation. Our installs allow us to turn off the FTP layer most providers require for proper uploading capabilities. Our setup also fixes the permission and file ownership permissions common to other configurations.

A complete profile is an effective profile. Having a good profile picture is one of the cornerstones of having a good profile. People don't connect with company logos, they connect with other people. Take a couple of minutes to watch this video to learn the five steps to editing your BNI website profile.

Back in May I decided I was going to look in to the various Joomla CCK offerings and write some reviews. My quest started with checking out the major players and getting a copy of the component for testing. Most are either free, or have a free version, but Open Source Design's Form2Content did not at the time. Within days of my blog post going up, Patrick Faasse from OSD contacted me and offered a full version of their Form2Content component for testing. I must apologize to Patrick though because I was so impressed with K2 that I had not tested F2C.

OMG I am one of Charlotte’s top twitter users!!! No, for real. It was in the newspaper (link) so it must be true right? Ok, maybe the metric chosen by the writer – number of followers – is completely bogus and not representative of anything other than the accounts ability to gain followers. Unfortunately every social networking site puts an emphasis on followers/friends/connections which generally makes people think it matters. An account with 500 connections to the CEOs of the Fortune 500 is probably a little more desirable that just about any other list if that is your target audience. However, having a large number of follower/friends/connections is not necessarily a bad thing.

Let me first say that I prefer not to do SEO. Now, that doesn’t mean I don’t do SEO at all, I do the basic setup on ever site we develop. The part I don’t like is the constant testing and changing and keyword research to try and stay ahead of the competition. Yes it has many benefits, but it’s not really my thing regardless of how important it is.