Tuesday, March 18, 2008

Country Living Women Entrepreneurs Part 2

While I was in Chicago, my friend Maggie took me to the Macy's (State St.) Floranova Flower Show that is open now through March 30th. The entire first floor of the store is transformed with vibrant botanical garden displays inspired by Latin America. This hydrangea and maidenhair fern grouping was my favorite. What I didn't anticipate was the heavenly scent - orchids and lilies were everywhere and it really made it feel like Easter.

Country Living Women Entrepreneurs Part 2:
The "Make the Web Work For Your Business" panel discussion was led by Susan Mernit (Blogger & Yahoo Product Developer) and featured designer & blogger
Heather Bailey, Beth Ferreira from Etsy (online marketplace for handmade items), and the team of Ann Fox & Donna King from a favorite catalog/website of mine, Room Service Home. The takeaway points were these: Make sure that your website tells your story and differentiates you from your competition. Use great photographs to represent your brand online and consider having your media kit available as a downloadable pdf. They all felt that a blog was a great way to humanize an online store and that blog activity helps with page relevancy and link rank. It was a great discussion and I left with a page full of notes and a brand new "to do" list.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

It's so true how the tiniest bits of advice make the biggest difference. The function you went to sounds great, I love Etsy too. If you're looking for more information you should check out Vision to Venture, which is 5 live events (April-May 2008) hosted by industry insiders showcasing trade secrets and featuring "Girl's Guide to Building a Million Dollar Business". One of the featured speakers, Karen Dayan, will be discussing online business promotion that’s easy and affordable. You should take a look at http://smallbusiness.officelive.com/v2v/; the event is completely geared towards us female entrepreneurs and provided by Microsoft. You should also look into their new web service Office Live Small Business, which is so easy to use and features a ton of resources on how to organize and manage an online business. If you have any questions let me know, I work with Microsoft and I'm always around!