Small Business Marketing Advice?

My wife runs a massage therapy business in Staunton, Virginia. We are both looking for marketing ideas in our small town. Ideally we would like to find something out-of-the-box, but are certainly open to traditional options.

She has a website, a blog, a Squidoo lens, etc ... I've preached Web2.0 marketing from the start.

These ideas could also be used for our local arts organization - so bring 'em on.

Here are some links to check out what we are doing now:

Tabula Rasa Massage Website

Tabula Rasa Blog

Tabula Rasa Squidoo

Ampersand Arts - our local arts organizations Wiki Page can be found at:

Ampersand

Eventually we will be setting up a blog and maybe forums for Ampersand - as well as a community calendar about local art events and music happenings -

Any other ideas?

Blogging Success

There is a great post today over at ProBlogger:

5-prerequisites-for-blogging-success

This post really gets to the heart of what blogging is all about, and how to make it work for you (and your readers).

I will be trying to incorporate this advice into my own blogs and into much larger project I have going on at work(adding a community section to our website).

Between the fulltime job in the Consumer Electronics Industry and working on my MBA the amount of time I have to blog is limited, but it is certainly something I will work harder to get out there in the coming months.

Laziness or Productivity?

You can call it laziness if you wish, and perhaps it is. However, this morning I found a Google module (for my personalized homepage) that I found very exciting. You can find it here:

Socializer

This module basically aggregates several of the social bookmarking and social media sites. Instead of having a separate module for digg, del.icio.us, and reddit - I now have them all in one place.

Six months ago I was excited about adding the individual modules because I no longer had to go to each site. Now I don't even have to look at several modules. It is all condensed down to one module. Awesome!

You can call it laziness, but I see it is a major productivity gain. One module vs. 3 Modules (1-month ago) or 3 separate websites (6-months ago).

The speed of change is amazing.

I also recently found the following module which is great if you are into the tech junx:

TechBlogs