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Taking small local businesses from offline to online is one way to create income and build your online business.

It’s hard to believe there are still so many small brick and mortar businesses that don’t have websites.

Obviously, they either don’t understand the value of taking their offline business online or they think it’s going to be too hard and technical for them. It’s up to you to show them why they need a blog or website and alleviate their fears.  With WordPress, that’s easy to do. Let’s talk about some of the reasons your potential offline to online clients should hire you to build their WordPress blogs and websites. 

1. To get and keep their business in front of potential customers.  

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  •  Most people use the yellow pages very rarely these days and competition is fierce. So, a blog or website could be the only way to be found by those using smart phones, computers and iPads and unless their customers live under a rock…
  • If they are not on the Internet, they are losing a huge chunk of business and their competitors are finding it! 

          2.  This is a great way to showcase their products and services to a broader audience. Read more... 

http://thehappypreneur.com/from-offline-to-online-how-to-create-income-by-helping-local-businesses/

 

With love and blessings, 

Celene Harrelson helps you take the training wheels off of your business, so you can ride like the wind! TheHappypreneur.com

Use LinkedIn Groups To Drive Targeted Traffic To Your Blog [Lots and Lots of Traffic!]

Use LinkedIn Groups to drive targeted traffic to your blog or website.

It works like magic and you will see results in just a very short time!

I can say this with assurance because LinkedIn became the # 1 source of traffic to my blog in less than 2 weeks. It now drives double the traffic than any other source. In fact LinkedIn is now driving more targeted traffic to my blog than Facebook and Twitter combined! 

Up until recently, I did little to nothing on LinkedIn. 

Wow, what a dunce! Because LinkedIn seemed to stuffy and “corporate like” I chose to blow it off instead of testing it out as a good marketer should. You can bet your sweet bippie that won’t happen again. When I think about all of the prospective clients I’ve ignored… Well, if I could kick myself in the butt, I would .

My stats show that new visitors to my site have increased and they are staying longer.

Yay! Although to be fair, I switched from a landing home page to my blog being my home page about the same time, so that could have something to do with them staying longer. The jury is still out on that one. Read more...

http://thehappypreneur.com/uselinkedin-groups-drive-targeted-traffic-blog/

With love and blessings, 

Celene Harrelson helps you take the training wheels off of your business, so you can ride like the wind! TheHappypreneur.com  

If I Hadn’t Made These 3 Mistakes When I Started My Online Business (I’d Probably Be Rolling In Money Now)

When I first started my online business, I was clueless

Silly me…

I had 25 years of business management and marketing under my belt and thought this was gonna be a walk in the park. I mean, I’ve run businesses with 50+ employees. Surely conquering the world behind a computer screen in my jammies would be a piece of cake, right?  Wrong!

I think that’s what most of us think when we start an internet business.  How hard can it be, right? After all, we’ve seen so much about average people finding overnight internet success on autopilot, while they slept.  If they can do it, so can we.

 I’m here to tell you that’s a bunch of whooie.

 It doesn’t work that way.  Nobody who’s green to building an online business just jumps right in and starts making money immediately.  It’s not realistic. You have to learn how it’s done. The process, the mechanics and the marketing. The offline world of business does not prepare you for the online world.  You have to educate yourself, learn then implement, rinse and repeat.  The one thing that offline and online have in common is that overnight success usually takes a while.

Mistake #1 -  Read more...

http://thehappypreneur.com/3-mistakes-when-i-started-my-online-business/

With love and blessings, 

Celene Harrelson helps you take the training wheels off of your business, so you can ride like the wind! TheHappypreneur.com

Go Viral – Blog Posts Gone Wild!

Ever wonder how some bloggers get their posts to go viral?

Ready to take a walk on the wild side and see how they do it?

OK, first they do these 3 important things…

Use an incredible, attention grabbing headline. How do you know if it’s going to grab your readers attention? Test it on social media. Tweet and post your headline and see what kind of reaction it gets. If it gets a good response, you’ve got a winner!  A little trick I use is to peruse the magazine rack in your grocery store or Walmart and jot down headlines, then change them up for your business. These are headlines that have been thoroughly tested at a cost of hundreds of thousands of dollars or more to make sure they are going to sell magazines. Why not piggyback off of tried and proven copy? Read more...

http://thehappypreneur.com/go-viral-blog-posts-wild/

With love and blessings, 

Celene Harrelson helps you take the training wheels off of your business, so you can ride like the wind! TheHappypreneur.com 

3 Simple Tricks To Be More Productive, They’re Proven And Powerful

We could all stand to be more productive where our business is concerned. Heck even in our lives in general!

If you are not doing so well in this department, there are a few tricks to help you to be more productive and focused.  Here are a few.

Make a plan
Start with the end in mind.  Think about this… If you were planning your first cross-country trip from New York City to Butte, Montana, and you had to be there by a specific time,  how much more difficult and frustrating would it be without a GPS and map.  You just have to wing it and figure it out as you go. Without a plan, it’s just like that in your business. It’s fantastic to know where you are going and what you want your business to look like, but it’s extremely important to have a plan, a map of how you are going to make that happen on a monthly, weekly and daily basis.  If you are just shooting from the hip every day, sorry darlin’, it just ain’t gonna happen! You will be lost before you know it. Read more...

http://thehappypreneur.com/3-tricks-to-be-more-productive/

With love and blessings, 

Celene Harrelson helps you take the training wheels off of your business, so you can ride like the wind! TheHappypreneur.com 

How to Be More Productive and Focused In Your Online Business

Learning habits to help us be more productive in online business seems to be something most of us need when first starting out.

When you work online from home, and you have a boss in another location, it’s sometimes difficult to set up a routine that will allow you to meet your employer’s expectations. You have set deadlines you must meet, or you get canned.  Period. There is accountability.  You have the works habits you need to make it happen or you don’t have a job.

However, it’s a bit more difficult to set up those important habits when working online with no one looking over your shoulder.  It’s just you and you alone.  When you are the boss of yourself, it’s pretty easy to cut yourself way too much slack.  This is the reason most internet marketers fail when building an online business. They aren’t disciplined enough to make the things happen that need to happen in order to be successful.  Then they quit and claim that you can’t make a living online, it’s all a scam, when in fact most times it’s a lack of productivity and time management. Read more...

http://thehappypreneur.com/be-more-productive-and-focused-your-online-business/

With love and blessings, 

Celene Harrelson helps you take the training wheels off of your business, so you can ride like the wind! TheHappypreneur.com

Social Media Marketing – Are You Being Consistent?

As most of you know, I live in a little town much like Hooterville on the old television show Petticoat Junction.  Just a little country store like Sam Druckers minus the pickle jar, a bank, post office and gas station.  So when I say I live in the middle of a corn field, I mean it literally. As you can imagine, there’s not much to do here but watch the corn grow.

In the summer months I like to go to yard sales on Saturdays just for something to do. I see lots of people I’ve known all my life there.  It’s funny, but it gives me a sense of community. These are people I played with as a child, went to school with, their parents,  my old teachers. It makes me realize how important living in the community I grew up in is to me as I get older. It anchors me.

Thinking about this makes me realize how different we are in these digital times. It used to be that we got our news talking to our neighbors over the backyard fence, at neighborhood cook outs, from our front porches or school and community gatherings. 

That was then…

Now, we talk on social media. Read more...

http://thehappypreneur.com/social-media-marketing-consistent/

 

 

With love and blessings,

Celene Harrelson helps you take the training wheels off of your business, so you can ride like the wind! TheHappypreneur.com

Your WordPress Blog – Is It A Virtual Yardsale?

Is your WordPress Blog one big mess?

I’m a sucker for a good yard sale.  Unless I’m in a hurry, I can’t drive past one without stopping. I guess that started back when my daughter was little. As a single mom of one child and the only provider,  there were no hand-me-downs or much of a clothing budget.  Plus, we lived in Florida…the yard sale mecca of the south! If you’ve ever spent any time there, you know what I’m talking about.  People move in and out of Florida at an alarming rate, so there are always really good yard sales, every day of the year.  Not just on Saturday’s like they have here in my little rural Illinois community.

This afternoon I headed into the big city (population 4,200) to run a couple of errands.  I noticed  several yard sales signs along the way. Well, old habits die hard and my grandson out grows his clothes as fast as he grows into them, so I decided to drive around and see what I could find.

As luck would have it, I did find a few nice articles of clothing for my lil’ guy, a rustic chair for my garden and the find of the day – a large ceramic pig wearing overalls. I’m a bit eclectic, so I just couldn’t resist! He’s such a big piggy that I could hardly carry him back to my van!

As I was driving home, I was reminded of a WordPress blog I came across this morning. Read more...

http://thehappypreneur.com/wordpress-blog-virtual-yardsale/

 

With love and blessings,

Celene Harrelson helps you take the training wheels off of your business, so you can ride like the wind! TheHappypreneur.com

Internet Success – Desperation Serves No Purpose

I’ve gotta tell you, I know first hand that being desperate impairs your chances of internet success.

When first getting started in online business, I was totally clueless.

When I was a single mom in my 30′s I was too busy raising my daughter all alone and working 2 jobs to survive to really take notice when Al Gore (smirk) invented the internet. Of course I knew of the internet, but it didn’t enter into my life until much later.  So I was at a disadvantage when I decided to give this work at home online thing a try. I knew how to use my email and surf the web a little, that was it. Oh yeah, I was pretty skilled at buying stuff on eBay too,  But that was the extent. Maybe some of you can relate? Read more...

http://thehappypreneur.com/internet-success-5/

 

Celene Harrelson helps you take the training wheels off of your business, so you can ride like the wind! TheHappypreneur.com

 

Does Your Business Blog Reflect Who You Are?

Have you ever visited a business blog and have no idea what it’s about or anything about the writer? 

Often times when I do blog reviews for clients, I discover a huge problem.
Their blog has no identity – dry and void of personality. I’m sure you’ve had this same experience from time to time when surfing around, right? 

Sometimes this happens because of PLR.
Don’t get me wrong, I think Private Label Rights is a wonderful thing and I encourage you to use it as often as makes sense for you.  The problem lies with using it “as is”.  It’s really important that you give it your personality.  That requires a bit of re-writing to make it your own.  A little tweaking so that it sounds like you goes a long way in your blog reflecting who you are. Read more...

http://thehappypreneur.com/business-blog-reflect/

Celene Harrelson helps you take the training wheels off of your business, so you can ride like the wind! TheHappypreneur.com

Blog Posts – Does How And When You Post Matter?

When writing your blog posts, do you only write when you have something to say or do you write blog posts ahead and schedule them to go out at a later time?

Let’s look at the difference…

First, let’s talk about scheduling.  As you know by now, I love WordPress.  One of the many reasons for my very public love affair is that WordPress enables me to write my blog posts in advance and automates when they are published on my blog.  I schedule them to run every Monday and Thursday to coincide with my newsletter.  This works really well for me because I can schedule several weeks out and not have to stress about deadlines.  This makes publishing my newsletter a more enjoyable experience. And because it’s not a scramble to get it done at the last minute, I can pass much of it off to my business assistant to do, giving me more time to do other things in my business.  Read More...

http://thehappypreneur.com/blog-posts/