By Xenios Thrasyvoulou

When you own your own business you have to learn to blow your own trumpet as there’s nowhere to hide and no company to advertise your skills for you. Women in business often grow in confidence as they not only run their own company but become excellent marketers too. Despite popular belief you can promote yourself on a budget, all you need is a little time and a lot of self belief.

Here are some ways to make sure you reach your target market:

Online Profiles

You may not work for a big organization that guarantees recognition through advertising but you can utilize other websites to ensure your name appears in search results. For instance there are many women in business websites where you can set up a profile, detailing your hourly rate, your skills and even your portfolio. You can then use the sites success to ensure your own skills are noticed. Filling in online profiles on any business or freelancer website takes a matter of minutes. (more…)

By Alyssa Aldrich

Social media is a powerful tool. When used right, it can be effective in connecting very amazing people to other amazing people, businesses and organizations from around the world. People should use social media to heighten their existence, reflect their interesting projects and aspirations, to share something they find truly amazing, to inspire others. In a perfect world, social media would be used primarily as a source for inspiration. Unfortunately, however, although it has great potential to be an awesome window to the world, it is often cluttered with gossip, non-interesting, and non-inspiring garbage.

Below are a few things to consider and avoid doing when using social media.

Don’t Be Ignorant

• Using profanity and vulgarity in social media can make you appear aggressive or unintelligent. To present your thoughts in that manor can cause people to not take you seriously. (more…)

By Holly Reisem Hanna

“What I am suggesting is that each of us turn from the negativism that permeates our society and look for the remarkable good among those with whom we associate, that we speak of one another’s virtues more than we speak of one another’s faults, that optimism replace pessimism, that our faith exceed our fears. When I was a young man and was prone to speak critically, my father would say: “Cynics do not contribute, skeptics do not create, doubters do not achieve.” – Gordon B. Hinckley

Lately I’ve been seeing a lot of attacks, criticism, and overall negativity on social media. In fact, last week after Angelina Jolie shed light on her preventive mastectomy, I saw some malicious updates that I couldn’t even believe were being said.

And don’t even get me started on when there’s an election or political issue being discussed, it’s like hate flows out of people’s fingertips to their keyboards. Of course there are the less heated, but very judgmental conversations which are still insulting. (more…)

By Holly Resiem Hanna

A few months ago, I started creating text only updates on my Facebook Fan Page. Meaning that I would add the text for my update in the status box, and then I’d put the link to the article within the first comment. The reason I did this was because Edgerank, had drastically decreased the number of individuals that were seeing and interacting on my Facebook posts.

If you’re not familiar with Edgerank, it’s Facebook’s new algorithm which automatically determines which posts you see, and which ones you don’t. According to Brian Solis, Facebook is trying to help ensure that you see the “best content” and that the spammy content is filtered down.

However, the caveat to this is that anyone can PAY to have their updates and posts ranked higher, thus being seen by more people. (more…)

By Chris Martin

Has this ever happened to you?

You stumble upon a rumor that has been circulating about you among your school classmates/work colleagues/peers in an organization you belong to. You come to the realization that for an indeterminate amount of time, people have been assuming things about you that were simply not true (or at least taken far out of context). Maybe this discovery affected you intensely… or maybe you were able to just laugh it off.

Now imagine this same scenario multiplied by a thousand. Or a million. Or perhaps… infinity. That’s what the Internet can do to a “silly” rumor. (more…)