Rogers Online Business Management for the Agriculture Community

I was doing research this past weekend on the Internet and came across the webstie for the Pennsylvania Association for Sustainable Agriculture. I read that they were having a workshop coming up called Farmers Market Success: A Workshop for Farmers Market Managers and Vendors. So I called today and made my reservation to attend.

Leah Smith told me that they are going to talk about how to set up your stand and show creative ways to display your wares. And they are also going to touch on the new regulations for Pennsylvania.

Gene and I are really looking forward to this workshop and have invited some friends to come along with us. Our friends are thinking about selling at the Farmers Market this new season and don't know where to begin and so they are hoping to come away with a plan. And Gene and I know we'll learn about knew marketing techniques to help out our clients.

So take a look at their website information on the event and give Leah Smith a call to register. And if you decide to go, let me know and we can hook up…

Click Here to go to information on the Workshop

See you there!!!

 Ever have trouble talking to potential clients about what you do and why they should hire you?Choosing a niche is one of the simplest and least expensive ways to grow your business. It's easy to know what to say and how to say it when you know who you're talking to.Marketing is about communication and creating a relationship. And the way we approach those two activities varies, depending on whom we're dealing with and the topic of our conversation.Ask  yourself, "What group/kind of people are interested in what I have to offer?" Next, ask yourself, "What challenge is my Core Audience facing that I can help with?"Then fuse the two answers together to identify the niche you occupy. Now your message is crystal clear and it will be a lot easier explaining to potential clients about what you do.

Aweber is the undisputed, most powerful auto responder available to serious marketers. Yet most who pay their monthly fee for this service either let their account sit and collect "Virtual Dust" (thinking that some day it will magically spring into action and build a massive list for them) or they use only the very basic services and never take full advantage of this simple yet incredibly powerful tool!So I have put together a series of 14 detailed videos that will show you how to UNLEASH the full abilities of Aweber! Check Out the Videos: 

• Video 1 – Creating Lists! – 06:38 – And all the tips and tricks you need to do at the start to save you lots of TIME down the road

• Video 2 – Creating Forms 1 – 07:08 – All the tips and tricks you will need to create your own opt-in forms.

• Video 3 – Creating Forms 2 – 08:07 – Too much info to cover in one video so I had to add another!

• Video 4 – Verified Opt-ins – 05:15 – Lots of information including a HUGE time saver!

• Video 5 – Broadcast Messages – 08:02 – Time to send out your message to everyone! Some real "Gotcha's" here to watch out for!

• Video 6 – Follow Up Messages – 07:02 – Your automated follow-up system! Set it up wrong and you will have problems!

• Video 7 – List Organization – 09:04 – The method I use in organizing my many lists!

• Video 8 – List Automation – 03:27 – How to set up Aweber to do most of the adding and deleting from different lists automatically!

• Video 9 – Sending To Multiple Lists – 04:54 – Don't you HATE getting the same message over and over again from a marketer? Here's how to avoid doing that yourself!

• Video 10 – Click Tracking – 05:41 – How do you know if your marketing is effective? Here's how!

• Video 11 – Split Tracking – 04:29 – Which subject line, ad, or email got the best results? Here's how to set it up!

• Video 12 – Blog Broadcasting – 05:05 – Imagine each blog entry you make automatically gets sent to your list. Here's how!

• Video 13 – Campaign Sharing – 05:31 – Want to copy all of your follow up emails to another list of yours or to someone else? Here's how!

• Video 14 – Other Notes – 05:37 – I was sure to forget a couple of things. So here they are!

• Video 15 – BONUS: ANALYTICS – 08:35 – Since I made the original set of videos, Aweber has released their NEW analytics features I cover the basics of these new features!

Learn in 90 minutes how to use Aweber to maximize your marketing efforts in these fantastic 15 videos by clicking on the link below…

Aweber Unleashed Videos

As I was doing research this Sunday morning I stumbled across this script that I couldn't wait to try out. I am so thrilled that I now have a source I can use to create 3D images for my clients give-away products that will save me a lot of time. And I mean a Lot of Time!!!! Having a great product image is key to increasing sales and credability in your products.You do not need photoshop at all to create 3D ecover graphics, and you don't even need photoshop to design the cover designs!I know you have seen the amazing 3D covers, and you want to know how easy it is to actually use and create them? You probably thought that you would have to outsource this task as it would be to complicated to learn yourself.Well it couldn't be any easier. Once you login to your eCoverCreator install you can create new 3D graphics. From there you will be able to choose any of your created cover designs or upload ANY graphic you want.Then in a super simple wizard you will pick the eCover design you want to use, and right before your eyes your cover will animate into your new 3D graphics!

You can use YouTube to market your business, product, or services. However, you need a good video in order to draw traffic and make people want to visit your website after they have finished watching.So what goes into the perfect YouTube marketing video? Creativity always counts, of course, as does professionalism. Still, there are other things to take into consideration as well. The following is a list of 5 tips that will get you started.

1. Make your video creative. With all of the videos out there, yours needs to stand out in the crowd. Use fun music, great shots, and try to find an angle that hasn't already been done. People generally go to YouTube and other video sites to be entertained and your video needs to be able to do this.
2. Give some tips or solutions to common problems that are associated with your particular product, business, or services. This is an informational type of video and the audience will like the fact that they are learning something. Try to make the tips unique enough that most people can use them but haven't necessarily heard of them before.
3. Make your video educational. People like to learn things when they watch video. Your perfect YouTube marketing video doesn't have to be all about how to find your website and what the cost of your product is. For example, if you are advertising your mechanical business then why not give a demonstration on how to change a tire? People will watch your video, learn something, and then visit your website. These how-to videos are a lot less threatening than standard commercials or advertisement that you see on television. Plus, they are entertaining.
4. Add some realism or "behind the scenes" in your video. You can do this by introducing your staff, introducing some customers, or even giving the audience a "behind the scenes" tour of the office, factory, or place of work. People appreciate this and it gives your product or business some authenticity.
5. Add captions to your video. Keep in mind that not everyone is able to hear and that those audience members might be the very ones that want to order your product. It's very thoughtful to keep the hearing impaired in mind when creating a video, even a marketing video, because most people rarely do.

If you've ever asked for information online about a product or service, or signed up for a newsletter or group membership on the Internet, and received a nearly instantaneous response in your email inbox, an autoresponder program was responsible for delivering the reply.

Simply put, autoresponders are email programs that send out a preset message in response to every incoming email received. Some autoresponders, like sign-up services for online groups and forums, are one-shot deals; a single response for every message received. Just about every Internet-based company uses autoresponders for a variety of purposes, from automating tasks that would otherwise take up hundreds of man-hours to building lists and tracking prospective leads.Multiple autoresponders send a series of messages to received email addresses on a predetermined, timed basis.

For instance, a multiple autoresponder can be used to send an instant response, then a follow-up message three days later, then another five days after that, and so on. It can be programmed to send a message a day, one per week, twice monthly, or any interval that satisfies the purpose of the message series.Autoresponders are the most powerful Internet marketing tools available. They are easy to use, and once they're set up the entire marketing process is automated and instant. When you use autoresponders, your Internet business runs itself 24 hours a day.

Launching an effective autoresponder campaign can mean the difference between a struggling business and a wildly successful one.The autoresponder service I use is Aweber. Not only is it very easy to setup, it is also one of the most popular autoresponder services around. Most eCommerce services, and services like Traffic Geyser, allow you to integrate your Aweber autoresponder list right into their service. This allows you to keep control over your email lists. If you do not have control over your email lists you are only wasting your time. It takes a lot of hard work and a lot of time to build up a perspective client list so don't allow someone else to "own" that list.  It's like giving up your right to breathe!Setting up an autoresponder series can take hours. If you don't want to spend time creating your autoresponder series you can contact me at REAS Scheduling and I'll be happy to help you out.

On October 19th Mercyhurst College West announced  Faculty, students and staff are building a strawbale structure at the college’s Girard campus organic garden that will serve as a storage facility for the produce raised there, according to biology professor Dr. Mike Campbell, who said the idea actually came from Dr. Gary Brown a couple years back. Brown is executive vice president of Mercyhurst North East & West.

Building with bales of straw is a green building practice that has become common in some parts of the country. Mercyhurst, a frontrunner among Pennsylvania colleges and universities in sustainability pursuits, will be the first in the region to try it.

You can read more about it here From Gothic to Green … Mercyhurst builds strawbale structure at West

Having a professionally-looking blog is important for any business and Traffic Geyser will help you do just that with their tool Create a Blog. The "Traffic Geyser Tips" blog was created through this tool.

WordPress is a web design platform where the appearance is determined by a theme. Traffic Geyser provides several themes to choose from and the layout, colors, font styles and sizes have already been taken care of by the graphics professional who designed the theme.Creating a blog through Traffic Geyser is very simple and made easy for someone with no web design skills to have a beautiful blog up and running in a matter of hours. Then adding or updating your blog with content is equally fast and easy, and they provide you with 10MB of storage space.Traffic Geyser's themes have pre-built in plug-ins and they vary from theme to theme so you need to test out several to see if one theme has a plug-in that you desire over another.

What are plug-ins? Plug-ins allow you to expand your blogs functionality much like Legos, you simply add blocks as you need them.The majority of my websites are WordPress.org sites but only this blog (Traffic Geyser Tips) was created within Traffic Geyser under WordPress.com. I created this site so that I would be familiar with  how this tool works within Traffic Geyser and would know what to expect when a member would like one created. In my honest opinion I think this is a great feature for the members who do not know anything about web creation. You just need to fill in the blanks and then add your content. For a designer and web coder like myself, I found it restrictive.I've been designing/coding websites in html since 1994 and want to be able to add code to the site that I'm creating for a client that I feel is imperative to what the product is about or what will help my client get buyers.

I personally use wordpress.org for my client blogs. I use free plug-ins that I've come across and I've also paid for several plug-ins as well. Traffic Geyser has their blogs go through wordpress.com which is very restrictive from a designers point of view. And if your chosen Theme does not have a plug-in you want, you're out of luck because you can not access your blog files to add in new plug-ins.Traffic Geyser could greatly improve this Tool if they could only get us over to WordPress.org.

If  you need help in designing or setting up your blog, Sue Roger's Team of Professionals will be able to help you out. Contact us today for your FREE 30 minute consultation at REAS Scheduling.

So your Harvest Fest has been in full swing for a couple of weeks now….What do you mean you didn’t even put a Harvest Fest together for this year? Seriously?????

It really don’t take much to dot the fields with pumpkins of every shape and size. Offer special treats as you invite the public to view your corn maze or other demonstrations such as making Kettle Corn…let them pick their own ear right off the stalk and take it home to pop in the microwave.