Free Online Marketing Classes

Come one, come all, and learn how to adjust your web content and online opportunities to attract more volunteers!

Online Marketing 101: Can Volunteers Searching on the Internet Find You?

Learn how to drive volunteers to your website and online opportunities.

Unless you work on optimizing your Volunteer Center’s website and marketing it to search engines (Google, Yahoo, Ask.com or MSN/Live), volunteers searching the web WILL NOT FIND YOU. The steps are easy,
and you’ll leave with steps and templates to get started.

You can register for the training that works best for your schedule at the following link: https://pointsoflight.webex.com/meet/kwatier

Online Marketing 201: Benchmarking your Site, Registering with Local Search and Using Web 2.0 Communities

Have you attended the basic Search Engine Marketing Training and you're ready for more? You will learn about how you measure how effective your website is at attracting traffic (based on how well your competitors are doing), and then dive into how to register for local search engines and how you can use online communities like Facebook, Gather.com,and Craigslist.org to promote your volunteer opportunities.

You can register for the training that works best for your schedule at the following link: https://pointsoflight.webex.com/meet/kwatier

How to Promote and Measure the Success of your Blog

I'm thrilled that Volunteer Centers are starting to blog, and so I've decided that it's time for me to share tips about how to promote and measure the success of your blog. Like websites, your blog will not be found without promotion.

So this will be the first in a series of posts about blog promotion.

First off all, there' s a great list of directories that you can submit your blog to.

Also, a great article on how to measure you're blog's success.

Feedback from National Conference on Volunteering & Service

I just received feedback from the workshop I gave at the National Conference on Volunteering & Service. Here are some of the highlights

• Great for non-geeks, very helpful, awesome & funny - good to laugh at yourself
• She's a great presenter.
• This is one of the best sessions I've attended so far.
• Great information - good job of connecting to a non-computer literate audience!!
• Great speaker - very enthusiastic & spoke in a way non-web savvy people could understand.

It looks like I'll be presenting a similar webinar for NTEN, so stay tune for those dates!

Recruiting Volunteers by Using Facebook

Considering my post yesterday was about you can use Gather.com to recruit older NPR type folks, I figured I would follow up with a post about how to use Facebook to promote your volunteer opportunities to a younger crowd.

So here we go.
1. Create Personal Facebook account
2. Join your regional/city network
3. Create an event (on the left navigation). Make sure to pick which network to broadcast it to.
4. You can either use Facebook's guest list feature, or put the 1-800-Volunteer.org URL address for the volunteer opportunity in the "Description" field to track folks who have signed up.

Very simple. You've just reached out to a portion of the 34 million users that use Facebook.