How to Profit from your Networking & Prospecting Database

Are your networking efforts providing the additional profits you hoped for? Have you collected tons of business cards... but not done anything with them? Are your LinkedIn.com and Plaxo.com profiles helping to enhance and broaden your network?

If you answered "no" to any of these questions, How to Profit by Networking & Prospecting is for you.

This simple step by step course will show you how to use Microsoft Outlook in conjunction with our HuntressPro software and other third party software and social networking web sites in a way that will help boost your most profitable revenue streams.

In our new course How to Profit by Networking & Prospecting we will help you:
- Build and enhance your network
- Manage regular communication with your network
- Analyze your marketing effectiveness
- More efficiently manage and profit from your networking activities.

Click the How to Profit by Networking and Prospecting above to register or learn more about How to Profit by Networking & Prospecting.

Have you been bombarded with invitations to a plethora of online social networks? Are you a little confused as to why in the world you should join one?

It seems like every day I get an invitation to a brand new online social network and while not all of them are probably worth the investment of my time to join and input a profile, I have found that a couple have been very helpful in growing my network. Today, I'm going to highlight two (Twitter.com & Plaxo.com) that have been especially helpful.

Twitter.com is a very basic site that allows you to post your name, picture, a URL to your blog or web site and a short description of who you are. The one thing you can use twitter to do is answer a simple question - What are you doing right now? Seriously, there is a 140 character text box that allows you to answer that question and anyone following your profile will see the answer as you post it. In turn, you can follow other people to keep up with what they are doing. Now, while Twitter may sound like something your teenager would use instead of instant messaging or texting on their cell phone, it actually has some great applications for business.

Take Seth Godin for example. I follow Seth on twitter.com which is great because he updates it every time he publishes a new post on his blog. I can click on a link to the new blog post right there in Seth's twitter and now I'm staring at his latest post. I've also found twitter.com is a great way to throw a question out to a lot of people for a quick answer. For example, my friend Marc Nathan asked "anyone have any cheap / DIY solutions for a digital display? Like a digital photo frame, but it's larger and can handle wireless updates" and within an hour his friend Geri Druckman answered "use any flat panel monitor, attach to the back of it a Linux thin client (a cheap one) and voila! any size, no limit pic frame." Pretty cool.

But perhaps even more interesting is that Facebook.com and Plaxo.com allow you to publish your twitter comments on your profile for those sites (in the case of Plaxo, you can post your twitter in Plaxo Pulse). As a result, my name is constantly in front of anyone linked to me in Facebook or Plaxo any time they look at recent activity - talk about great top of mind awareness if used correctly.

Plaxo has really done a great job of aggregating your online activity in several well known sites like technorati, twitter, your personal blog and several others making it one of the online networks where I spend my time getting caught up on what my network is up to.

So check out twitter.com - and please feel free to visit my profile which is MistyKhan. And if you have a favorite online social network, please leave me a comment and tell me what you like about it.

Houston, Texas is one of the most entrepreneur friendly cities in the world - if you are ethical, competent, and ambitious then there are people in this city willing to try and help you succeed. StartUpHouston.com is a great example of that spirit so when they asked me if I would like to write a post for their blog, I was more than happy to oblige them with the post below.

Feeling a Little Lost & Overwhelmed as a Start-Up Company?

If you are, then as one of my old bosses used to say "don't feel like the lone ranger." I see a lot of questions on LinkedIn.com from start-up principals who feel the same way (especially in the technology sector) where founders may have more technical than business skills. But never fear, because there is a great solution to help ease these feelings called 'networking' and you may be surprised how much it can really help you out. Here are a few things networking can do for you as a start-up:

1. Introduce you to other start-up principals who are or were in the same boat as you. These folks can be a great source of not only a sympathetic ear (don't underestimate the value of the ear), but also of solutions they used to get past common hurdles. Why reinvent the wheel when someone else has probably already come up with a great solution that they are more than willing to share with you.

to read the rest of this post, please go to http://www.startuphouston.com/2008/01/14/5-ways-networking-can-help-your-startup-stand-out-in-2008/