Some Chicago area service businesses have now figured out that social networking and web 2.0 will help them make more sales and connect with more clients. It is surprising that more small businesses have not already jumped on the bandwagon to get the word out about their business and what they do.

It is the perfect way to market, especially if you are on a budget. Plumbers, handymen, and insurance agents are all incorporating web 2.0 into their marketing plans.

Blogging allows you to open up a conversation with people who want to learn more about your services. They can read your posts and then leave comments to give you feedback on each topic you write about. If your industry has made some recent changes, your blog is the best place to let people know. Be sure to use your keywords, including the city you do business in, in the titles of your blog posts. Search engines will also reward you for posting regularly to your blog.

Facebook is one way to connect with prospects and clients in a more personal way. You can import your blog into your homepage on Facebook, giving greater exposure to all of your posts and other information. You can also create a group or a page on Facebook, where prospects can connect with you on an even more personal basis. You can provide advice, discount coupons, and anything else that your clientele may want from you. You are the expert, and it is another way for you to position yourself as an expert in your field to attract new clients.

Twitter is another social networking site that is proving to be good for small businesses. You can include the name of your business and a link back to your company blog or website. In your bio be sure to tell people where you are located if you do business in a specific geographical area. Send a tweet a couple of times a day to let people know what aspect of your business you are engaged in at that time, and use a service like tweet later to send automatic tweets every time you post to your blog.

The idea is for all of this to be less time consuming so that you can focus more time and energy on your business, while still marketing yourself on the internet. If you need help learning how to do all of these things, or with online writing in general, look for someone who offers weekly teleseminars where you can easily get answers to your questions.

If you are facing this or even a blank white screen when you try to login to your wordpress blog, you could have been hacked.

Need A Solution For The “Parse error: syntax error, unexpected T_VARIABLE” error on WordPress Blogs or other PHP sites?

This PHP code error is running rampant through the internet and we just got done fixing several clients blogs that had issues with this this same T_VARIABLE Parse syntax error.

Tracking down all the pieces was quite a chore but we have come up with a solution:

1. The first step is to eliminate the infection that is allowing this to happen by using the free version of  Super Spyware Cleaner or another good anti spyware program to scan your entire system, the likelihood is great that you have been hit with a backdoor.bot or trojan dot Daonol – using the Super Spyware Cleaner to eliminate these or any variations from all of your workstations and computers that you have used to access your wordpress blog is the first step.
2. Change your logins and passwords immediately
3. Download a clean copy of WordPress 2.7.1 to your clean uninfected machine
4. Using an FTP program copy your wp-config file out of wordpress root and eliminate the code that has been injected in the header section save a copy of your cleaned wp-config file to upload later.
5. FTP all the contents of the fresh copy of WordPress 2.7.1  overwriting your current WordPress installation.
6. Within your active theme, you will need to remove the injected code out of both the function.php and the index.php as well and ftp the clean copies into your themes folder.
7. This php injected script has also been found in some of the plugin’s as well, Cforms and WordPress Back Up are two we are aware of that can be affected.

This is an extensive process, but can be handled within an hour or two if you find yourself at the mercy of the T_VARIABLE error, please feel free to contact us.

We are charging $100.00 for this service to get your blog back up and running, if you are interested please email us at info at designandpromote dot com.

We strongly urge you to go through and change login’s and passwords to any accounts that you may have with hosting providers and personal information to help eliminate the continuation of this particular issue