Announcing CentralFloridaOnline Where IndieCEO Contributes Articles

You can find IndieCEO and GalleriaLinda now on CentralFloridaOnline as an author!

Authoring articles about you, your businesses' services, or products is a great way to become known. Articles that will offer up informative topics that can be used by others is a goodwill gesture that will not be forgotten. Share your knowledge and people will appreciate you. And, every time you are posted online is an SEO target for people to find you!

I write for several blogs, as well as my own and have recently written blog posts for placement on CentralFloridaOnline. If you are from Florida, this is a great website to get Florida news, human interest stories, and happenings in Central Florida!

Charity Giving for Business

One of the things I love about online networking is meeting others who are street-smart marketers. One such friend is FairyCardmaker on iCraft.ca. I discovered a great two-part blog series that she wrote on charity giving for business. It is right on point.

Charity giving can be planned strategically as a part of your business plan. When working it into your objectives for the business year, you will not only be in control of how much inventory and investment you hand out, but also will have the ability to select charities that may benefit to your business.

As FairyCardmaker shows us, we can be specific in our planning for charity giving that may give us the opportunity for exposure to our products, advertising to a target group, or even develop other opportunities for our products. Charity giving is easy, welcomed, and helpful. It also can give your business a boost! I recommend this reading.

From the FairyCardmaker Blog:  Business or Pleasure?
Why not BOTH?  Just because you are running a business to earn a living doesn't mean that giving to charity has to be a one-way trip out of your pocket.  There are many ways that you can work charitable donations or time in to your business model.  It's a win-win scenario!

The key to selecting a charity to support is knowing your target market.  You can create a symbiotic relationship with a charity where the host is a shared target market.  This topic will be covered in two parts:

• Part I: Selecting a Charity
• Part II: Selecting a Manner of Support

Online Sellers: How Important Is It To You?

...to have one page that you promote that will show all your shops, social media connections, and other widgets? It is pretty important to me. As online sellers, we can get pretty scattered across the Internet with multiple social media networks and multiple shops.

Zibbet has made this possible. It astounds me (in a good way!) that the Zibbet philosophy is to give artists, crafters, artisans, vintage sellers, and craft supply sellers a place to gather all of their Internet presence and paste it onto one page to promote. They encourage that!

No more worrying about how/if you can link to your web site that sells the same items. No more worrying about promoting your bead shop from your jewelry shop. There is nothing to hide here. And, I love the openness and helpfulness of Zibbet admin when it comes to online selling and it is a welcomed breath of fresh air.

I have had GalleriaLindaLoft's Vintage Jewelry shop on Zibbet for a little over three months now and have opened another GalleriaLinda Bead Shop on Zibbet that will soon go "premium." The "Loft" shop is a premium shop and I am delighted in what I can do to help promote my tiny business.

I cannot fully express how much I love the look - very white, very clean, and very uncluttered, as an artisan community should be. And I can manage how large my product photos are, and the color of the Zibbet logo, and categories, and, and, and..... There are just too many features to describe right now and new features come on board weekly. Oh, and I just used the sale/discount/free shipping feature. Oh my goodness...no more editing EACH listing. One click and I am done!! There is a gift certificate feature too. Well, go check it out or I will talk your ear off. Zibbet is fairly new on the scene and traffic is building quickly and there is a certain excitement within the community.

You can check out my post on the GalleriaLindaShowcase handmade jewelry blog here. It has screen shots to give you a taste of how you can promote your other shops (with photo widgets), your Facebook, your Twitter accounts, and anything else with widgets!

Right now, until July 20 - you can get a FREE month when you become a premium member! After that you pay only $9 a month until the 119 (at this writing) shops are gone (then the price goes up). Click here to get started on Zibbet. Hope to see you there!