As I’ve been getting more involved in using social media like Facebook and Twitter to market business services, I’ve been spending more and more time inside each site, keeping up with my various “presences” there. Meaning I have less time to actually create those services and content that I can sell to my clients. Familiar story, right?

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Many of my friends and even some of my clients are looking for work. One of the reasons I know is because they ask me if I know of anyone who’s hiring, since I have so many connections in the design and publishing field.

If I know of any openings that would be a good fit for them, I tell them, of course. (And sometimes it even works out — my referrals get hired, and I get thank you letters from the seeker and the hirer — and I feel like the Yenta of publishing gigs!)
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I just got a call from a client, a web designer, whose boss told him he's now in charge of starting up the company's HTML E-mail marketing campaign, and had no idea where to start. He asked, "I can just copy and paste HTML code into a new Mail message and send that, right?"

It felt like hearing your kid look up at you with their big brown eyes and ask, "Mommy, Santa Claus is real, right?"

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I personally never opt to receive a company's e-mailed communications as HTML — I always choose the "Plain/Don't Know" option. It's not because I have a slow connection or I'm a Luddite, it's because my e-mail program, Eudora, completely sucks at interpreting HTML. It's a fantastic program in just about every other regard, so I continue to use it. I think of it as a wonderful husband who has one large, annoying flaw, like being an ex-felon, or even a White Sox fan.

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Last week I reprised my seminar, "Finding Clients: Marketing Your Creative Business Online" for the Web SIG of a wonderful organization, the Association for Multimedia Communications:
http://www.amcomm.org

If the link to my 3/9/05 seminar on AMC's site is gone, you can get a general idea of what I talked about here:
http://senecadesign.com/designgeek/web-marketing-creatives.html

I've done this seminar a few times for various events and always learn new things in the process … either while I'm updating the content in preparation, or from the audience themselves during the Q&A or via follow-up e-mails from them.more >

If you've got your own web site, or you're a site designer, you've probably already tried Googling your or your client's site on Google, the most popular search engine. That is, you've entered your domain name or keywords that relate to your service in the search term field to see what comes up.

Not sure if Google's indexed all the pages in your site? Try entering this in the Search Term field:
 allinurl:www.yoursite.com

… of course, replace "www.yoursite.com" with your own domain name. You don't need the http:// part.more >