Are you into social networking? Do you belong to one or more social networking sites, e.g. LinkedIn, MySpace, Twitter, or Facebook? The tips listed below will help you manage your time and get more networking done in the shortest time possible.

1. Schedule time to work on your page or site. Treat it like a meeting. Schedule how much time you want to spend developing your page for each of your networking sites. Also consider having a weekly agenda or list of items you want to complete. Now, block that time and commit yourself 100% to the completion of the meeting's agenda.

2. Quality Time. Depending on the usefulness or quality of the site, you may consider how you divide your time. Example, if you believe one site is more useful or better than another for your business or for maintaining friendships, you may schedule more or less time per week or per day. There are some sites I commit 20 -30 minutes per week while others I commit 1 hour per day.

3. Plan Your Work then Work Your Plan. As mentioned above prepare an agenda or list of tasks to complete; remember it's another meeting and you want to accomplish specific items. Read blogs, send messages, update profile, send friend requests, or make some comments, etc., I think you get the idea. Decide what you want to accomplish and as Larry the Cable Guy would say "git-er-done."

4. Time Saving Tip. If you're a member of multiple sites you may want to manage the emails received from your sites. In my opinion most of the emails and alerts can wait until I log in. I only want to respond to friend requests or specific questions that are sent to me and not to the entire site. As you develop relationships, you can exchange emails with those contacts that you trust. To control which emails you receive on any site visit the email options on your setting's page.

5. Celebrate Your Accomplishments. Give yourself a HI-5 for completing the tasks you completed. Don't feel bad if you can't complete everything; most of these sites won't make you rich or even generate huge profits. They're low cost (free to join but require time) and I feel most have value but they won't replace daily marketing and sales strategies.

6. Start with the End in Mind. This is probably the most important point. Ask yourself what is the result you desire from networking? Do you just want to extend your brand's awareness or maybe explore new customer service options? Or, do you want to explore new of ways of building relationships with your customers? If you have a specific goal in mind, networking will be more valuable and more lucrative.

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Thank you everyone for your emails and feedback. Next week will be discussing how to get what you want with what you already have. Why NOT having "the money" or "the Contacts" isn't an excuse.

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Why do you crave certain foods while other foods leave you feeling flat? Would you like to know how to control your cravings?  The steps below will help you engineer your eating for success? This is not some fast weight loss diet or no carb diet or even a diet program. This is about engineering your emotions or associations with food.

Think about your favorite foods (you may need to close your eyes to visualize this) and find out how all the different foods you eat appear.

Let’s take chocolate cake as an example. Notice how you SEE your chocolate cake. Is it richly detailed 3D right in front of you? Is it a big picture or a small movie or a still photograph?  On the other hand, let’s picture a less desirable dish. Does it appear in drab grays and blacks? Is it a photograph down in the corner?

So if you want to eat better food to meet your health goals, systematically change the the way you view food. Make the chocolate cake or other sweets less attractive in your mind’s eye; black and white, flat or make the picture in your mind small and fuzzy. This will reduce its attractiveness immediately. Also increase the attractiveness of healthier dishes; making them more colorful, richly detailed and 3-dimensional.

I promise this strategy will have a big and automatic affect on your eating habits. You might think, ‘ it’s too simple.’ When you know how to do something, it is easy. Learn it, practice it, and put it to work for you.  Remember, just like riding a bike or tying your shoes or most things in life, repetition is the mother of skill.

You’d be surprised how many people FAIL to motivate themselves. They have poor flat pictures of their work or fuzzy black and white images of their goal or reward. No wonder they’re not motivated.

Now you have a strategy to help you get what you want, what you value. The bigger, richer, more colorful and more 3-dimensional your mental pictures, the better your motivation and actions become.

Google has a very helpful service which can help you get more publicity. And the best part it’s FREE!

It's like a having a media clipping service which scrutinizes both the web and Google News database, then sends you an email as soon as something you're interested in appears in the search results.

For instance, let's say you're a big fan of “Glen Beck”. You can set up a Google Alert for
“Glen Beck”. Then whenever Google finds anything mentioned in a top news story or on the web, you'll get an email including the web site address so you can go see where
and how “Glen Beck” is mentioned.

To set up your own Google Alerts for free, just go to http://www.google.com/alerts (read further down for using this service and its paid alternative).

The exciting thing is you can use this service to grow your business in all sorts of ways.

Some of the obvious ways to use it includes setting up alerts to see what others are saying about you or your business online: 'discover' what they saying about your competitors; find out about new developments in your field of expertise and/or discover some other businesses with whom you might want to ally yourself in some way.

This service is also one of the best publicity tools ever created and it's FREE! Here are three tips to use Google Alerts to get media exposure:

STRATEGY #1 –
Obtain IMMEDIATE publicity by tying your product or service with breaking news stories.

One of the best and easiest ways to get FREE publicity is to be able to comment on what's already in the news. For instance, one of my clients is Gerry Robert, a book writing coach, wealth expert and author of the Millionaire Mindset. One of the strategies we employ whenever an alert pops up having to deal "Wealth, Book Writing, or the Economy" in America or Canada, is to contact newspapers and radio/TV shows in that city immediately and let them know we can comment on what’s happening.

Robert once asked me, 'But how will I know when a related story hits the news?'

My answer: "Google Alerts."

The results will blow you away!

STRATEGY #2 –
Build friendships with media contacts who discuss your topic.

Another of my clients, Patrick Snow, also uses Google Alerts service in a very systematic way to get publicity.

Here's what Patrick does: First he set up alerts to track stories written on his area of expertise, which is "Success, Selling and Families".

When he gets an alert email pointing him to a good story on that subject, he then sends the journalist who wrote the story a short email saying he enjoyed article and offers a sincere compliment.

His email stands out because journalists don't often hear from their readers and when they do it's usually to complain. Within his email Patrick mentions his website CreateYourOwnDestiny.com to reinforce his credibility.

If the journalist writes him back and thanks him for his comments, Patrick then offers to send them a free copy of his book and mentions he's happy to be a resource on any future stories they might do on this or similar topics.

Patrick Snow has made the front cover of USA Today and multiple TV/Radio interviews.

STRATEGY #3
The Hook is more than a Book

Authors are always asking me about what's a good 'hook' or angle to use when approaching the media. I'll immediately ask them, “What hooks have others used in your industry?”

Usually they don't know, but by using Google Alerts (or even just searching the Google News database at http://www.google.com/news) you can quickly find video clips, articles in which others with similar expertise are quoted.

For example, let's say you've written a book about "Selling." Suppose also that you're based in Phoenix. One day you discover a story in the New York Times about Selling in the New Economy. Well, if it's newsworthy in New York, it's probably going to be considered newsworthy by the media in your city. So pitch your local media on doing the same story, only this time they'll be interviewing YOU as the expert.

Here are a few words of advice on implementing this strategy:

Use quotation marks to narrow your alerts. For instance, I have an alert set up for "Bert Martinez" to receive more exact search results since I'm not the only person in the world with that name. I avoid getting a lot of off-target alerts.

You Were Created to Succeed . . . .with Publicity.
Bert Martinez
www.bertmartinez.com