The solution: A sampler box that is gathered every month and sent out to the in the know pet community!

Why it Works: It gives small businesses an inexpensive means to brand exposure, while introducing pet lovers to amazing products created just for their pets.

How it Works: Business owners sign up to ‘Get in The Box’, this includes signing up for the campaign month(s) of their choice. The Cost: Nothing, except the cost of samples and shipping. Pet lovers will be notified of Sampler boxes going out, and be informed of all the amazing samples available in the upcoming sampler boxes.

So to make this work I’ll need: Contributing Businesses along with Sampling Pet Parents & Pets!

I’m excited to make this work! And how much fun is it to get goodies in the mail…the surprise of oooh what’s in that box?  And the joy of finding that special new treat, or toy or shampoo that does ‘just the trick’

So…You Ready to Get In The Box…or Be a Bark Sampler?

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You dress them, you pamper them, why not put some shoes on them too? While not all pups will take to wearing them, your’s just might.  Our Ashley pup doesn’t seem to like them all the time, but they’re good if we go on long walks down at the Oceanfront boardwalk and the concrete is especially hot. Here are some fabulous ones to explore.

Doggie Vogue

Air Doggy Boots

$39.99

Doggie Vogue

Fleece Lined Boots

from $15.99

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Eau de doggy…let’s face it, not every pup has the pleasant odor that we as pet parents are fond of. Luckily there are

natural, alternatives to showering them with household sprays. I found a wonderfully sweet smelling fragrance that is sure to be a hit with you and your furry one.  Take a sniff…er a read below.

Sexy Beast

$50 – 1.7  oz

We got a chance to sample this one

and wowza, it smells AM-Azing!

Ashley never smelled so wonderful.

Gosh life has a way of putting you in your place sometimes huh? And not necessarily in a bad way but in a ‘hey you’re taking on too much and your exhausted’ kinda way. Yup that was me a few months ago…I was chuggin away at Stick Me Designs, Bark Business, and at non-online life too as a mom, a wife and do it all-er… And ‘it’ happened…certified burn out. It was so obvious it was coming, and being blindsided by it is embarrassing a bit, and little overwhelming.

But the greatest cure is…to accept that yes I am an Overextender and that my help is taking a breather, taking things little by little and owning up to my faults.

Wow now that’s a mouthful. But while I’m here I just want anyone and everyone out there to know…if this is you too…You Are Not Alone. I think it plagues many entrepreneurs…and it’s ok. Admit it, Seek refuge, Come back and take on only what you can honestly handle.

This is where I am…Takin on only what I can handle. So Bark Business is still here…and for the moment taking on what I can handle.

If you feel the urge to comment, or share…go on ahead and do so. It feels good

Accept my apologies….and Thanks for having my back!

1) Plan – this sounds easy enough, but planning is more than jotting down a happy face on your calendar(although I don’t condone this). If you’ve been operating for a few years you’ll probably have a general idea of when your slow period is. It’s a good idea to try and schedule your down-time around this period.  If you’re just starting out… no vacation for you…you have a business to grow my friend!

2) Give Your Customers a Heads Up – Make a point to let your customers know you’ll be on vacation and what they can expect during this time. If you’ll still be able to fill orders, let them know. If you’re totally unavailable let them know that too. I generally do this through my social network with them, and with a reminder in my email signatures.

3) Prepare – If you’re going on an extended vacation schedule some blog posts during that time, to keep your blog fresh and crawled. If you’re on WordPress you can do this under the ‘Publish’ box on the right hand side while you’re writing your post. Go to the Publish line, click edit, you’ll then be able to schedule when you want that post to go live. This is a great trick to keeping your blog updated, and looking like you’re ‘there’.

4) Enjoy – Now technically if you’re really doing what you love, a vacation means something different than when you’re doing a J O B. When you’re doing what you love, and you take a vacation, it could be because you need to get some inspiration, or you need to go to an expo or convention…it’s still fun…as it should be.  So enjoy your time ‘away’, and be happy that you’re walking down the path of a fulfilled petpreneur

On one end there are certainly tools and services that can actually take care of all of your social media participation and automate the process of posting your content to every known social network.

On the other end is the desire to create personal engagement and branding building community through one to one content creation and participation.

The first certainly lacks a human touch, and the latter can suck up too much time. In my mind, the perfect balance lies somewhere between the place where tools can be employed to facilitate intent and leverage time, while still adding personal attention.

Below are five social media hacks that allow personal engagement fused with the use of tools that make it easier to do more.

–>1. StumbleUpon

StumbleUpon It’s essentially a social bookmarking site that allows people to bookmark and find interesting stuff. There’s a unique approach with StumbleUpon that makes it such a great tool though… once you create an account you can pick categories of content that interest you or that might interest your pet parents. Then you install the StumbleUpon browser tool bar and any time you want to find some potentially interesting content discoveries, just hit Stumble. The tool bar takes you to random sites identified by other users and is almost always a great way to come upon content that is unique and valuable from little know sources. This is a great way to share great finds in your blog posts and tweets while spending a few minutes doing the research.

–>2. The Round-Up

This isn’t a tool so much as a practice. Pet parents love to digest content, especially when it pertains to their pet companions. One way to create and deliver that is to get in the habit of using a bookmarking tool like Delicious and simply tagging sites you come across (perhaps in the tip above) with various tags like ‘blog’ or ‘newsletter’ or by client industry segment, and then going back at the end of the week and writing a post or  creating a newsletter issue based solely on abstracts of the good stuff you found during the week. By installing the delicious browser toolbar, you can tag any page with the right click of a mouse. Filtering content and delivering just the best of what you read (perhaps in your RSS Reader) can make you a very valuable resource to people who just want the good stuff. By employing your own filtering tool you can easily create the content on the fly.

–>3. Reader to TwitterFeed

TwitterFeed is a tool that allows you to connect any RSS feed to your Twitter account and effectively auto tweet anything that is added to the feed. I don’t find this very useful and in some cases it’s seen as spam, so that’s not what we are going to do here.

Since you can attach any feed to it you can have total control over what goes to Twitter, so it’s really just a way to make it easy to tweet things you find. For example, the delicious tags you created above also have RSS feeds associated with them. So, you run that feed through TwitterFeed and have it tweet anything you hand select and tag as you surf.

Another great use is to connect it to your GoogleReader account, but only for the RSS feed associated with your “shared items.” That way, as you sit at the diner reading the blogs you subscribe to on your phone app over lunch, you can find a great post that you want to share and all you do is hit the share button at the bottom of the post and that one item gets pushed out to Twitter. Still, done by hand, but just skipping a few steps to save time.

–>4. RSS to HTML

There are any number of tools that will take the content from an RSS feed, one that you produce or one that you find and read, and turn it into dynamic HTML content that you can display on any web page you like.

Creating content specific pages and pushing the content you find as you surf to them can be an easy way to create content for your web pages.

Google has a free tool called Dynamic Feed Control Wizard, but check out the great list of RSS to HTML web publishing tools from Robin Good.

–>5. Blog to Fanpage

There are lots of plugins and apps that make it very easy to republish blog content to your Facebook personal wall, but many businesses these days are much more interested in publishing new blog posts to their Fan Pages.

There are, in fact, a number of free and paid apps that allow you to do this, but the simplest (and in my mind best) approach is to use the built-in Notes function. When you enable the notes tab on your Fan Page you can click on add a new note and you’ll see that one option is to add a blog feed. When you do this you get a new tab (the name of your blog) and the last five or so blog posts, depending upon your RSS fee settings.

The reason I like this approach is that there’s not a third party app involved – that’s where most tech issues arise – and, in addition to simply having a blog page, your new posts go right into the wall stream when you publish them.

Blog post adapted from John Jantsch award winning social media publisher and author of Duct Tape Marketing

Do you have a list?

10 ways to build your list!

Build your list Build your Business!

You’ve heard all the buzz, hype and whoopee-la on building your list and email marketing but what really IS the big dealy-o?

Well here’s my take on it.  Should you build some sort of a pet parent list? Yes…do you need to bug them every other day with your stuff? Well maybe not so much.  Should you keep in touch with them, with useful, valuable information and updates…Absolutely.

Having a list of people that have stepped up and said “yes I’m willing to open up my valuable inbox to you and listen to what you have to tell me” is pretty amazing.  Not to mention a wonderful direct line to those who matter most in your business.

With that list you can ask questions, get honest feedback, share updates, make product and service announcements the possibilities are endless.

The idea is that if you have stuff to sell, the people in your list will be at least willing to hear you out, and if you present it with them in mind and they need what you’re sharing they’ll click the ‘buy’ button and you’ve just made an easy sale.  In theory this is how the gurus’ say it works, but what if it doesn’t.

What if you have a list of a just a few people and you’re just starting out?  Well here’s my theory.

To start out let visitors to your website and/or blog know that you’d like to have them on your list. How do you do this without sounding…’List-y’ ? You can go for the give stuff away bit. That works for some folks.  For example: “Sign-up for my 5-day e-course on selling to retail boutiques” this way they get something from you for free, and you get a name and email address…Golden!

Or if you don’t have an e-course to give away, you can share tips with them on something you know, or something you’ve recently found that they would enjoy or like.  Be creative and make sure it’s something that’s useful. DON’T trying selling something unless you know beyond a shadow that they want it. If not it will surely backfire on you.

Here are a few email marketing services you can look into.

1) Aweber – Have heard rave reviews about this service and it looks great if you have the budget for it. Pricing starts out at:

$19/month, and they have a free trial to give it a shot for $1.

2)iContact – This one keeps soliciting to me to switch and try them, while I have not yet, they seem worthy enough to mention.  They too have a trial to give them a try first, and their plans start at just $9.95/month.

3) Your Mailing List Provider – This is the one I personally use for Bark Business and for my other gigs. It’s free to use for up to like 1000 contacts, you can upload images, and you can configure the experience after they enter their name and email.  You can use HTML, and it’s pretty easy to use.  By far a great fit if you’re just starting out and don’t want to pay for a subscription service just yet. And when you’re ready to their plans are awesomely affordable, like under $6/month affordable!

4) Constant Contact – I’ve used this service in the past and was mildly pleased. I was upset that for each email blast I could only add I think maybe 5 images. Anything over you have to upgrade…bummer. And their lowest plans start at $15.95/month. Not much else to say, it’s an ok starter, but would personally go for one of the other service providers.

My guess is that your email list and your blasts will depend on what you want to share, what you want from them, and how much you’re willing to spend on it all. But at any rate, the idea of course is to start if you haven’t already.

Thanks so much to Bonnie Sweebe of Welcome Pup.com for participating and sharing her Petpreneur story with me. It came out pretty good for a first go, so spend about 18 minutes and hear her story. Comment or ask her a question to show some love!

More Bark Chat interviews are already lined up, and coming soon. If you’d like to be featured or sponsor an interview please contact me here!

Thanks for reading and listening! Click the ‘Interviews’ tab up above!

1. Make your pet community prominent.

Don’t hide your online community behind a link. Bring it right up to the front page. Anything less, and you aren’t giving your community the respect it deserves. If you are serious about your online community, prove it by giving it serious exposure.

Show that you value the opinions of your members by featuring their content alongside your own editorial content — you are equal partners in this.

This goes further than just proving your commitment to the community. It puts the community in front of eyeballs. A lot of the time, visitors won’t even notice a link to your community — so put it where they can see it if you want them to join and get involved.

2. Keep it simple.

You don’t need fancy features and a glamorous site design. Most of the time, these are simply distractions. Keep things simple. There is nothing wrong with basing your community solely on a forum. You don’t necessarily need a full range of ‘social networking’ features. People need to be able to communicate — it’s as simple as that. They can do this with a basic forum.

Fancy designs are often just an ego stroke for the organisation that commissioned them. Remember, an online community isn’t about you — it’s about your members. Strip everything back and keep it basic. Your community may not look glamorous, but it will be far more likely to contain activity and member engagement.

3. Tell me why.

I come across a lot of online communities that don’t explain or outline their purpose. As crazy as it sounds, there are a lot of people building communities without actually making it clear what the purpose of the community is. Sometimes this is obvious from the name — but even then, I need to know why I should join your community rather than one belonging to your competitor.

Ensure that all visitors to your site know why they should be joining and getting involved in the community. Keep it short, simple, snappy and accurate.

4. Be active.

As a community manager, you need to be active in your own online community. You can’t be a matchmaker unless you get to know members of your community. You can’t learn from your members if you don’t know who they are.

Lead by example — get stuck in and enjoy the community. If you aren’t active or if you aren’t enjoying being active, your community has a problem. Fix it.

5. Build pet parents relationships at home and away.

Some people who contact me stress that they are highly active in their community — in fact, sometimes they are its chief contributor. Of course, a community isn’t a community if there is only one person doing the talking. If this is happening to you, it’s an indicator that you need to be more proactive.

Just because you’ve built an online community it doesn’t mean people will flock to it. You need to get out there and find members. Fortunately, that’s never been easier. Your potential members are out there writing blogs, telling the world what they are doing on twitter, and networking on Facebook.

Don’t stalk these potential members, and don’t spam them. Get to know them. Comment on their blogs, provide value. It’s all about what you can do for them — not the other way around.

*I surely cannot take credit for this amazing article it was originally written by RodLow  on Social Media Today*

Since 2007 I’ve been wearing every possible hat available to keep my small business chuggin’ along. I do all of my social networking ( which doesn’t really seem like work most times I do all of my web, print and design stuff, I design my products I source manufacturers here and abroad, I pick out fabric, I sketch the drawings, I take of shipping, customer service and all of my blogging. Phew…I think I should be getting a mondo fat paycheck.  Well…nope not here my friend. But….I got an eye opener today.

I got a chance to speak with another fellow business owner who gave me some awesome advice this was his quick but very insightful tip! Here goes:

**No matter how much ‘profit’ you’re making, Pay.Yourself.First!  Now what exactly does that mean? Well it doesn’t mean you go and blow every dime of your sales on a Coach bag or new uber expensive plush spa bed for Dino. Here’s how my friend broke it down for me.

1) Even if you’re brining in $125/month. Set a pay structure in place, right from the beginning. Divide your ‘income’ into 3 divisions.

–>Pay yourself
–>Pay the business
–>Pay for growth, and expanding or sustaining ( depending on your personal or business goals)

If you can get in the habit of dividing up every single bit of income that your pet business brings in you’ll see that slowly or quickly it starts to build and you begin to gain more confidence in your business  and before you know it you’ve got a budge for yourself, your pet business and budget for the growth or sustainability of it.

You may know already what happens when you’re not paying yourself at all. You may doubt your endeavor at times, you may feel overworked and obviously underpaid. You may wonder why or why did you jump in and do this…But I can tell you that once your business has foundation and starts to ‘love’ you back it’s a great and wonderful feeling.

**So get those pay systems in place and start appreciating all your hard work**