Coming up this weekend is the World Internet Summit in Dallas. In case you haven’t heard of this event, it’s one of the premium places to go to connect with other Internet marketers and find joint venture partners. There will also be a list of well known “guru” marketers there that will be presenting information on how to make money online.

Here’s a pre-event video describing what you will see at the summit.

Get More Information About The World Internet Summit in Dallas

If you plan to attend, here’s a few things that I suggest you take along.

• Your laptop (this should be obvious)
• Laptop power cord and spare battery (again, obvious)
• Business Cards (print them at home if you don’t have any)
• A Camera for photo opportunities (you’ll put these on your blog later)
• A backpack to carry what you bring and what you take home.
• An audio recorder or video camera (if they are allowed)
• A friend, they will hear all the things you miss and you can speak well of each other in front of other people.

Be sure to make a list of items before you go to help you remember everything. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve attended various events only to find out I forgot something.

You might have your own personal list of items that you like to bring to events so be include those in the list as well. Check everything off before you go and you’ll have a much better time.

The Dallas event is four full days worth of information which is nothing compared to the extremely low cost. If you’re in the Dallas area and plan to attend, let me know. I’d love to connect with you and get your thoughts about Open Source Marketer.

Waiting patiently,

Charles McKeever
OpenSourceMarketer.com

Think you can’t do it?

Think Again!

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If you run any type of offline events to promote your blog, and you collect phone numbers from your meeting participants, then you might want to take a look at phonevite.com. This handy service helps you automate your call list so all you have to do is record your event announcements once and then have them broadcast to your call list automatically. This would even work if you had an online membership base that provided you with their phone numbers.

The basic service offers 25 calls for free and the Premium service offers calls at a nickel per call. You can even schedule calls in the future. So, you can record a message, schedule it to go out at a preset time, and then forget about it.

The best part of the process is that it’s your voice and your message. So, the person who receives the call will hear your voice, but you don’t have to make a hundred calls to get a voice message distributed. It’s genius!

I promote Open Source Marketer through offline events using Meetup.com and you can bet that I’ll be using this service to remind participants about upcoming events, remind them to leave feedback on past events, and to interest them in speaking at future events.

If your concerned about do not call lists or people not liking automated messages, remember this is just one tool that you can use to communicate with people. If you let them know ahead of time and tell them why you use the service, then they will be open to it. And as always, don’t add people to your list that you don’t have an active relationship with. Keep your list clean and responsive and tools like this will serve you well.

Remember, it’s your voice, your ideas, and your message. Make it unique and make it available to those who will listen.

Being creative,

Charles McKeever
OpenSourceMarketer.com

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Over the past few years blogs have enjoyed increased readership and visitor traffic. But, for the most part, the discussion about how to get traffic to your blog has involved a grocery list of techniques and ideas for bringing in new readers. I rarely hear anyone talking about how you can use offline methods or traditional media to gain blog traffic.

Maybe it’s because as bloggers we try to set ourselves apart from traditional media and to some degree there may be merit in that goal. But as much as we may think our blog’s message can carry itself without the help of traditional media, the fact is that main stream media can give your blog a well deserved boost of visitor traffic.

Big media communication channels like radio, television, and print are all well established methods of spreading mass information and as the lines continue to blur between traditional and new media we should be open to opportunities where they exist.

Even as news stories continue to pop up about reduced readership numbers for print media there is opportunity for getting your blog listed in a newspaper or magazine to draw attention to your blog. These media sources offer a proven way of getting in front of an offline audience. Even if your message is presented to a reduced number or readers, you have to imagine that those readers are still the people who are truly interested in the topic of the print publication because they are still subscribed.

So how can you get your blog featured in one of these big media sources as part of your blogging process? Well, recently my wife and blogging partner came across an interesting blog promotion network while reviewing partner blogs for her Great Cooks Blogroll.

The site, appropriately name BlogBurst, is a “syndication service that places blogs on top-tier online destinations”. They offer exposure to media outlets like Reuters, USA Today, McGraw-Hill, Fox News, and other blog friendly media sources.

Basically, your content gets pulled through the BlogBurst network where they match your content with publishers who benefit from serving your content along with their advertising. When someone reads your post on one of these major media sources they have the ability to click through to your blog. Essentially you are rewarded for producing good content that has value to publishers and their readers within the BlogBurst network.

As you can see, it’s not hard to understand how having your blog post distributed by a large network can help draw attention to your overall blog. As existing media sources look for ways to offer more and more content to their readers and viewers, I believe this type of syndication model will become more common. Isn’t that the point of RSS and blog syndication in general?

Looking for opportunities,

Charles McKeever
OpenSourceMarketer.com

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There are a number of recently popularized social media methods of getting website traffic, but many of these methods involve activities that are very technology focused and don’t leave much room for real social connections or direct personal feedback. If you’re looking for a more personally connected way of generating website traffic, then consider starting a group meeting on Meetup.com. In this article you will learn what it takes to setup a Meetup group and start generating website traffic almost overnight.

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