You may already know how it works, but do you know how to fully utilize it to help you reach an unprecedented number of clients and boost your business? Take advantage of these social networking secrets and solopreneur tips now and let more people know about what you have to offer.

Don’t Limit Yourself

Many solopreneurs only have profiles on Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin and maybe Youtube, denying themselves of the opportunity that many other free social networking sites can provide. You should create about 30 or more profiles in other social networking sites to boost your online presence and get more exposure. Most of these sites are free to sign up with, so what’s stopping you from getting that extra list that will add up to the ones you have with the big guys?

Get New Fans

Getting new fans to your Facebook, Twitter or other social networking site pages is one of those solopreneur tips that will not only boost your audience, but will also present you as a dynamic and serious business person. You can create a special report or put up an e-book relating to your kind of business and send it all over the social networking world for people to get for free.

Make sure you set up the freebie in a way that people must sign up with your page first before they can get it sent to them through their email. When you use this method make sure you send the message yourself, add it to your email signature and announce it in your newsletter.

Make use of tools

Making use of social networking tools is one of the best solopreneur tips that can help make your work easier, stay informed of new trends and help you get the latest news involving your type of business. It also helps you to know what people are saying about your business and what your competitors are recently doing.

You can make use of tools like ‘Blogpulse,’ a search engine that reports on day-to-day activities in the blogging world. It contains information about people, news sources and news. You can also make use of ‘Blinkx’, where you can find videos more than 35 million videos, including the ones relating to what has recently been said about your business.

Use ‘Google alerts’ to get hints whenever your name, keyword or brands are mentioned online. With ‘Board Reader’, you can have access to the latest information and discussions on forums everywhere. ‘Social Mention’ is a tool that monitors more than 100 social media sites on the internet. Use it to track and measure the latest thing people are discussing about your product, industry and the latest products. And, of course, there are third party apps like ‘TweetDeck’ that help you monitor everything going on in your Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin and Myspace profiles in one place.

Decide what type of network you want to create. Do you need a water-cooler type of forum where you take a break and chat about the ups and downs of your business day? Are you looking for advice and business tips from other solopreneurs? Should it be all business or do you want to allow a bit of levity and frivolousness to creep in? Think about your ideal work relationships and aim for a network of like-minded people.

Join business and webworking forums to find other people working in your same situation. Join in the conversations and contribute meaningful information. Pay attention to the other forum members to find others you particularly enjoy. Don’t limit yourself to others in your same profession, but keep the list to people with your same degree of commitment to work.

Set up an online forum for your network to use. Design the forum and group with clear goals and state them outright. Invite the people you have found online to join in your forum and post daily to create interesting conversations and shared help with work. Encourage all the members to post frequently so that you begin to create a vibrant community that helps the members with the problems of solo work.

We’ve all been there. You start off a new blog with the best of intentions, looking forward to slowly building your audience until you’ve established yourself as a leader in your niche as your credibility builds. Time passes, and daily activity dwindles into weekly posts into sporadic writing followed by total inactivity and the unrewarding feeling of a job left unfinished.

Used properly, an editorial calendar can provide your blogging campaign with just the right level of organization and accountability you need to follow through on your plans.

1. Be Realistic: It’s find to reach for the stars when you’re planning out your editorial calendar as long as you can also keep both feet on the ground. Be honest about how much time and energy you or your team has available to devote to creating and distributing fresh content.
2. Include a Time Limit: In the same token, don’t bite off more than you can chew by planning out an editorial calendar that covers an unreasonable length of time. Set yourself some reasonable goals that you can accomplish over the course of a month or a quarter, and distribute your necessary calls for account accordingly.
3. Staying on Topic: Editorial calendars are also a great way to keep your content on target. By scheduling topics that are relevant to your business and related to your primary keywords, you’ll avoid the temptation to stray away from your niche.
4. Plan Ahead for Seasonal Content: In addition to producing evergreen content, keep your blog timely and relevant by scheduling posts related to topics at the forefront of your audience’s mind throughout the year. From tax season and back to school to the holidays and New Year’s resolutions, there’s nearly always some shared cultural event that you write about in relation to your professional services.
5. Be Flexible: There’s no way that you’re going to be able to plan ahead for everything. Life happens, and things are going to occasionally come your way that will take precendence over your editorial calendar. You’ll also probably find that your blogging efforts take require a bit more time and care than you may have anticipated. Be patient and make adjustments to your calendar as needed, and you’ll avoid yourself a lot of unnecessary stress and frustration.

Suggested Exercise:

Take a look at some of the different editorial calendar templates that are available, and choose one that suits the needs of your blogging strategy. Schedule a series of blog posts that you can realistically produce over the next few weeks. As the days go by, keep your calendar up to date with your progress.

Is maintaining an editorial calendar helping you meet your blogging goals, or is it creating an additional burden to your workload? If it’s getting in the way of doing your job, you probably need to scale back the level of detail that your trying to track.

This problem is particularly common in the case of web development, especially for solopreneurs and other small business owners. When you’re building out your web presence on your own or with a very small staff, it’s all too easy to get carried away with how you *want your audience to see and interact with your business without paying attention to how visitors actually behave on your site.

If your heading into the new year with big plans for online marketing, it’s worth considering getting a second pair of eyes on your businesses website to find out whether others see what you think they see. There’s a wide variety of user testing tools and services available, some of which I’ve reviewed over at our sister site, Top Marketing Tools, but even an informal survey among trusted colleagues and friends is likely to reveal me significant opportunities for improvement. If you’re interested in a more detailed audit of your website’s actual performance for SEO and online conversions, we offer our own website audits as well.

1. Find Your Own Voice

Though it’s easier said than done, finding your own voice as a soloist is one of the most crucial parts of creating brand authenticity, and it doesn’t happen over night. Most of us start off by imitating the leaders that we’d like to emulate only to find that our material appears stiff and forced upon later review. Once you know that your offering a service that’s improving the lives of a market niche your passionate to serve, you’ll find that just being yourself is all that your clients are looking for.

2. Master Your Message

Can you tell a stranger exactly what you do for a living in two sentences or less in a way that’s both engaging and enticing? If not, it’s worth your while to put ink to paper and develop a clear, consistent message for your small business. Make sure that your professional network has a clear understanding of the kinds of services and solutions that you provide. If you’re like most of us when we were starting out, you’ll find that even some of your closest contacts aren’t entirely sure what is you do for a living.

3. Think Big

All of us can think of a friend of a friend who risked it all on a dream only to fall on his or her face, but how many other much sadder stories could we tell of friends and colleagues who could have done great things if they’d just gone for it? It might be hard to think big when your mostly thinking about whether your going to keep your head above water another season, but many experienced solopreneurs and small business owners look back at their first couple of years to see opportunities that were missed or postponed due to nervous hand wringing.

You’ve got to struggle to get upstream when you are first starting out and nobody knows who you are, much less how great valuable your services are. Once you’ve made a name for yourself in your professional niche and have a network of colleagues and clients sending referrals your way, things start looking brighter. The trick is to keep pushing and working smart early on until the results of your labor actually becomes apparent.

One of the ironies of many failed startups is that they go under when they are at the very threshold of success but lack either the means or the foresight for the final push necessary to get over the famous startup hump. As a small business owner or solo entrepreneur, it’s important to keep this obstacle in sight when you are in the process of building a business so that you can keep the inevitable initial difficulties in perspective and realize that things will start getting easier once your enterprise starts gathering some momentum.

Whether you’ve been blogging about your profession for ages or are just getting started, you probably already know that the secret to operating a successful blog is getting people to know that you exist. One of the most effective ways to get more eyes on your pages is to establish some mutually beneficial relationships with other bloggers who write about the same niche as you. By devoting a few hours to putting together some informative and engaging guest posts for blogs that you’ve grown to respect, you can give your own web presence just the lift that it needs to start attracting a following of loyal readers and subscribers.

Guest blogging is so effective because it gives your site a boost in four major areas: branding, links and traffic. Unless you’ve already established yourself as a major voice in your niche, most of the readers who stumble across your guest post will not have ever heard of you before. By aligning your name and brand with a blog that they’re already engaged with, they’re much more likely to take your brand seriously than if they had just stumbled across one of your posts in search engine results.

Assuming the sites that you are writing guest posts for have some legitimate authority and are relevant to your own site, the inbound links generated from these posts can really improve your site’s overall standing with the major search engines. Better still, a couple of solid guest posts should send a ton of new readers your way, many of whom will bookmark your site and subscribe to your feed provided that they like what they see.

So long as your writing style is up to par and you’ve actually got something interesting to say, you’ll find that most bloggers will be more than happy to include a guest post from your site now and then. The way the process typically goes is this. You begin by finding a few blogs that you’re already familiar with and have seen guest posts on before. Next, get in touch with the owners of the site and inform them that you’d like to write a guest post to their site, including a link or two to some of your better work.

After going back and forth a little with them regarding the topic and execution of your post, get to work and put together something that you’re sure you can stand behind. So long as they like what they see, it shouldn’t be long before your guest posts are up for the world to see, including those all important backlinks that are the lifeblood of just about every successful blog.