GuidePedia

0
For those of you who don't know me or are just beginning to follow what I have to say...(it still amazes me that anyone cares what I think...LMAO)

I am a non professional. I have never gone to school to learn marketing or journalism, I have no college degree except the ones for modeling and modeling instructor from John Casablancas Model Management from many, many moons ago.

8 years ago, I saw a real lacking in our community - there were zilch for true communications tools...today that has changed with the advent of Face Book and Twitter.
While no seasoned vet, I have learned a lot about the publishing and marketing industries - in some ways I think our team and business would be bigger had I gone to school to learn the advertising and marketing world and yet....I think I have been brought the right people at the right time to teach me the right things!

There are some things about marketing that I have learned from seminars I have taken, books I have read, on line courses and of course my most abundant and well educated teacher - the school of hard knocks. There rest - well , I love my community and as a rider, I think I understand what at least some people are looking for by way of information and tools.

It has taken me 7 and a half years of being in business before one kind soul from the Alberta Lonewolves told me about how I could attract top brand name advertisers to our web site.
I did what he counseled - I was listed on Friday and had my first inquiry yesterday!
It is another avenue with which to grow the web site and newspaper's presence and allow us to  market your groups, riding clubs, causes, events and businesses to a broader audience.

We all know that in order to be a success out there we have to market be we business, event or riding club - in order to grow you have to market. BUT - we compete with thousands and thousands of bits of information going out to people all of the time. Just think of all of the information you have to absorb everyday. How many times have you forgotten a meeting, appointment, birthday or event? How many times have you forgotten a coupon or a sale you wanted to attend? If you and I have ANY common ground as humans your answer will be at least sometimes....it has happened to us all.

I have a lot of little business partners that are pushed against the wall time wise and can't find the time to work ON their businesses - one of the services I would like to be able to offer in the future is a data  entry service that can help them take care of their on line marketing. OMG Face Book and Twitter - to do them well take a lot of time.
For myself - I spend three hours of my day writing things like this blog, hunting the news feeds for the days top stories...it's nuts - rewarding but nuts!

So - in order to help people be they volunteers or riding club members with little time or small business people with little time, Ali and I have worked hard to find tools and components for our web site that can help you market YOUR business, event or riding clubs faster and more efficient than before!  When you log in on our web site - go to your profile page and edit and up date your info and photo...you can manage your friendships
and on the right hand side of the page under your profile picture is a tool box that allows you to quickly manage or track what you have done on our web site and see what results you are getting.

If for example you want to submit a classified ad - you go right to the tab for classifieds and submit your ad right there...no hunting - no wasting time - just make sure your pictures for the ad are web sized...and you'll have no problem - our twitter feed will pick that ad up and share it to our Twitter followers and my Face Book Pages - so you now have the potential for my network of some 11K riders  (Plus the 35,000 riders who use our site that are not members) seeing your ad. Who ever is on line at the time coupled with their level of interest in what you are offering has some potential for serious impact.  You can also see how many hits the ad has had and if you aren't getting the feedback or response you desire - maybe you need to rethink your wording? Now you have some tools to make decisions by!

There are a ton of time saving tools in that tool box...

Then there are the event calendars - shareable to over 80 social networks, by email, to Face Book and Twitter and shareable to 5 other styles of calendars OUR events calendars are one of the most effective ways to get your events message out there!

We can make you an event admin for your riding club or business so that your events go live the minute you submit them OR we can just let Sally - (our version of a Calendar girl) check your event over and ensure that no information is missing etc...once she has checked it over and made it live you get an email that tells you it's live and now you can go ahead and start promoting!

Make sure you add your poster, registration forms, pictures etc - because everything attached to the event goes to the person you are emailing or IM'ing and if you have the physical land location or the postal code and street address - there's even a Google map for people to find the location by.

Either way - once the event is live you can share it to everyone in your net work and so can the riders who use the calendars - we have on average 38,000 riders using our web site for news and information...if you add your network and my network and every other riders network - you see what happens? Now we have an information highway!!!!

If you are a member of our Rider FriendlyTM Business Association we can help you advertise and market for as little as $130.00 a year plus taxes! That's right for as little as 36 cents a day you small business people can be marketing your business to riders.
Email me at : bdbetty @ gmail.com  (remove the spaces to send your email to me) and I can send you the low down!

All riders who are a member of the BDB Club benefit because as a member of the RFBA (Rider FriendlyTM Business Association) you offer them a special, a discount or a special service...we all win...Because when you work with us - the riders get free information and tools that serve them in their day to day lives be it riding season or not.

If you are a riding club we have many FREE  and cooperative marketing opportunities to share with you.

I hope you will join us either as a member of our site and hopefully as a subscriber to our newspaper, as a business partner and advertiser or as a riding club...sharing our community stories, helping our small businesses and events by giving them a targeted and affordable - time saving and pleasurable way of marketing (it's like we are talking to friends and family cause at the end of the day - that's exactly what we are doing - sharing with friends and family.)

Belt Drive Betty & The Busted Knuckle Chronicles are working hard to give the riding community in Canada and those curious about Canada as a riding destination some fabulous tools...join us as we share and grow!

As always I welcome your feedback and input on this topic and every other thing we discuss - it is through sharing that our community will become the united and strong!

There's not a ton in the news feeds today but what is there is pretty choice!
Check it out at www.beltdrivebetty.com


Please drive safely...

Belt Drive Betty
Editor & Rider
www.beltdrivebetty.com
www.bustedknucklechronicles.com

Post a Comment

 
Top