Here’s my video interview with Shama Hyder Kabani of The Marketing Zen Group and the author of the upcoming book ‘The Zen of Social Media Marketing.”

Based in Dallas, Shama is a real up-and-comer in the technology space, hosting her own Web-based televisions show — Shama.tv — on new media marketing.

Stay tuned for more video interviews from SXSW.

What is your favorite app so far this year?

For the GigaOM network’s complete SXSW coverage, check out this round-up.

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A broad book, its contents revolve around how to get prospects to find you through blogs, search engines and social media. Halligan and Shah also discuss converting customers and how to apply that to your business and web site.

The short first chapter explains what has changed in marketing, and how online technologies effected the change. The first part of the book provides little value with its brief coverage of your web site as a marketing hub and creating a remarkable strategy. Really, these first chapters set the tone for the rest of the book in that its contents are wide and shallow.

The bulk of the book rightfully focuses on “Getting Found,” with 100 pages devoted to the topic out of the book’s roughly 200. Despite that much coverage, it’s still elementary stuff. The section on converting customers only lasts for three chapters, and it needs more material than the five chapters of “Make Better Decisions.”

The “Make Better Decisions” section included a whole chapter devoted to picking a PR agency and another on how to hire the right people for your marketing team. The advice given on how to find marketers who are digital citizens, however, is outdated. For example, the suggestion to hire people based on their web reach recommends looking at how many followers they have in Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. Most of us know that raw follower numbers have little value, with so many low quality users who know how to rack up the numbers.

The authors are also behind the Website Grader and Twitter Grader web sites, which they mention so frequently that at times it reads like a promotion. This book really is just a primer: You won’t glean anything new if you know the basics of search engine optimization, such as the difference between organic and paid listings, and you already know how to use social media tools and connect those tools with your business and web site. ”Inbound Marketing” does a good job for those who don’t have a clue about how to use social media for business and want to understand the bigger picture.

Have you read “Inbound Marketing?” Please share what you think in the comments.

Fortunately, it is a skill that can be learned. “The Blogger’s Guide to Effective Writing,” a new e-book from Ali Hale, offers a guide to sharpening your writing skills and improving your ability to get important information across in a blog post.

While Hale doesn’t dispute the importance of the need to practice blogging to build up skills, she works hard to demystify the art of blogging. She offers the background necessary to help writers of every level speed up the writing process, write effective posts and even improve the quality of the blog as a whole.

What sets “The Blogger’s Guide to Effective Writing” apart from other writing instruction manuals is that while it includes general writing tips, it also explores the specialized needs of blogging. For instance, where you might write a memo or an article and expect it to stand alone, a blog post is expected to relate to the rest of the content on the site. Blogs also tend to be written with an end result in mind. If you’re running your own blog, that goal can be something like keeping readers coming back, so that you can land advertisers. On a company blog, that might be convincing readers to purchase a new product. Individual posts have to support that overall goal.

Of course, Hale doesn’t skimp on explaining the mechanics of writing for a blog. She digs into details like tips for improving on the standard how-to post with images and resources, as well as an upfront explanation of why it can take significantly longer to write a how-to post. She also gets into how to effectively create each section of a post, devoting a chapter each to writing a post’s introduction, middle and conclusion.

The e-book is also full of links to further resources, from examples of how to implement Hale’s instructions to research that backs up her suggestions. She draws on successful bloggers of every stripe to create an educational book that should help.

“The Blogger’s Guide to Effective Writing” is available for $29. It’s 82 pages long, and comes with a set of templates for different types of posts, including a look at how a few particularly successful blogs construct their posts.

Have you read “The Blogger’s Guide to Effective Writing”?

Instead, I set my sights on January. The merriment is over, and I’m ready to get a grip on my work world again. The only problem is that my inbox is so backed up, and my to-do list has grown so long, that it takes me most of the month to process through the open items that have congregated while I was mentally away for the holidays.

So here I am in the beginning of February, finally ready to knuckle down and work on my business plan for the year. A process that — while I’ve gone through it dozens of times over the years — is always a bit daunting at first, but greatly worthwhile.

I find that my productivity during the year is always enhanced when I have a road map to follow in my business. Even if all the gaps aren’t filled in or the fine details sorted out, just knowing the major stops along the way, and how I plan on getting there, empowers me to be more on purpose and more productive during the year.

Now that I finally have the breathing room to sit back and reflect on my business plan for 2010, I sought assistance from my client Christy Strauch in her new book titled,”Passion, Plan, Profit: 12 Simple Steps to Convert Your Passion into a Solid Business.“ Here’s her take on creating a business plan.

Karen Leland: First off, why did you write this book?

Christy Strauch: I wrote this book for creative types (like web workers) who are in the business world, but haven’t necessarily had a peaceful relationship with making the business side of their business work. Because of that, the first step in any business plan process is to connect with your purpose for being in your business — whether you’re self-employed or working for a company. It’s easier to persevere through some of the challenging times if you have a purpose to pull you through.

Karen: Well, once you know your purpose, then what?

Strauch: You need to determine who your perfect clients are. Take the knowledge that you already have about who hires you and who works with you, and then talk to your clients to gather the rest of the information. You need both the demographic information about them (things like their age, where they live and their level of education) and psychographic information (what they like to do for fun, their attitudes about technology, what they read, who else they go to for help and so on).

Karen: How does knowing who your perfect clients are help you to build a business plan?

Strauch: If you understand how people find you and why they are drawn to you, you can better determine the best way to reach out to them. Is it through a networking event, advertising, cold calling or writing articles? People often choose web workers because a colleague has recommended them.

Karen: In the book, you talk about the importance of looking at the competition as part of your planning process. Why is that so important?

Strauch: Well, to begin with, you need to figure out what you’re best at. What is unique about you? What do you offer that is distinct from your competitors? By taking a look at your competitors, the economy and your own business, you can find a way to position yourself to your clients. That positioning becomes part of the strategies for your business that you pick and put in your business plan.

Karen: Do you recommend any particular tool for this analysis?

Strauch: Yes, I suggest every businessperson do a yearly SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats) analysis. It will help you, along with knowing your purpose and your customers, to choose business activities that make the most sense in the current year — to serve your current customers and attract the right new ones.

Karen: How important is including financial information in your business plan?

Strauch: It’s critical. At a minimum, you need to have a forecast of your income for the next 12 months and projected expenses for the same period. You also need to choose three or four measurements that you can watch regularly to make sure everything’s on track in your business.

Karen: Is there anything else people should do to stay on top of their business plan after it’s written?

Strauch: Yes. Do a monthly and quarterly review process. Because things begin to change right after you remove your pen from the paper, these reviews help you keep up with (or even stay ahead of) the inevitable changes that happen to all businesses.

Do you have a business plan for this year?

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Those in corporate jobs that come with a daily commute get a few chapters’ worth of advice on how to convince the boss to let you work from home. The authors only address this for a small part of the book, so if this is important to you it may be better to borrow the book from your library. It probably would have been helpful to split the book into two: one for corporate employees looking to work from home, and another for those who want their own businesses. The two groups have different needs and requirements, and Lister and Harnish concentrate more on the latter in this book.

The book gives you most of the information you need to figure out the whole “work from home” thing. Unfortunately, the book barely touches upon how to deal with health benefits, a big concern for many self-employed folks. The contracts and proposals chapter are also lacking detail.

If you’re a regular WWD reader or already work from home, you probably won’t get a lot from this book, unless you’re thinking about switching gears and starting your own business. But if you’re thinking about becoming a web worker, “Undress for Success” is a well-rounded beginner’s resource. Visit the book’s companion site at undress4success.com.

What tips do you have for people looking to dive into web working?

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Warnke says that Wal-Mart and Sam’s Warehouse Club Founder Sam Walton’s last words were, “I blew it.” How could one of the richest people in the world think this? According to the author, Walton wasn’t reflecting on his massive wealth and business successes, but rather on missing family time.

“ONO, Options Not Obligations” explores changing your mindset to live with an options-oriented outlook rather than just an overwhelming obligation to become a rich entrepreneur and provider. Living as a “family first entrepreneur” requires a commitment to overarching change while working past the fear of not having enough money to live the kind of life you want. Warnke, a recovering alcoholic who has dyslexia, shares everything about himself to show how it’s possible to live an ONO life.

Warnke covers all the bases, including working with finances, figuring out wants vs. needs and managing time. The last part of the book goes into acting on your new thinking process. It’s easy to go back to key parts of the book later on, since every chapter ends with a bulleted list of key points covered.

You don’t have to be a parent to benefit from the book. If you have dreams of traveling, working fewer hours, or spending more time on a hobby, you can apply ONO thinking to enjoy the things you love and put an emphasis on what matters to you. Warnke inspires, enlightens, educates, and gives practical assignments to help anyone ready and willing to live the ONO life.

Do you find that web working leads to more or less of a sense of being burdened by obligation? What strategies do you use to deal with work/life balance?

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Photo by: borman818

As a freelance online community consultant, I spend a lot of time thinking about ways to stabilize my income to reduce the ups and downs that come with having my own business. The most obvious solution is to manage your pipeline to make sure that you have new projects to replace the ones that are completing, but it’s also a good idea to have alternative income streams to complement your main client work and fill in any gaps.

In an ideal world, you finish one project on Friday with your next project ready to start on Monday; however, we don’t live in an ideal world, and even our best planning efforts occasionally go awry. While my client base has been fairly steady, I’m always concerned that I might have gaps. I would rather have plans to fill those gaps rather than being caught off guard and unprepared, so recently, I have been experimenting with alternative income streams that will generate regular revenue without relying entirely on client work.

This isn’t a new topic on WebWorkerDaily. Georgina recently wrote a great post with some of her recession avoidance techniques: saving more, managing debt and spending, and strategies for finding new work and staying motivated, while Anne Zelenka wrote a great post with 10 new ways to make money online, and Mike and Aliza followed up with 10 more new ways to make money online. However, I wanted to write about my personal experiences with alternative income streams.

Regular blogging and writing gigs in your area of expertise are a good place to start. I started blogging here on WebWorkerDaily last December, and I have really enjoyed the experience. I can do the writing whenever I have some spare time, in between client meetings or in the evening, so it doesn’t interfere with my regular client work. In this case, I get to do something that I love and I get paid for it, so the revenue stream from blogging was an easy first step for me.

My second regular income stream comes from a self-published book. Late last year, I decided to take the online community content from my blog and turn it into an e-book: “Companies and Communities: Participating Without Being Sleazy“. While I started this project as a PDF e-book, it eventually snowballed into something bigger with Kindle and paperback versions now available. This was a great experience in a couple of ways.  Not only is the revenue from the book useful, but by taking the existing content from my blog, updating it and reorganizing it, I found several gaps in my writing where I had talked about the later steps in the community-building process without first outlining the work that needs to come before. You need to be a little careful with this approach, since you must make sure that you own the rights to the content before republishing it. If you are blogging for a company, you probably don’t have the right to republish that content.

I am also experimenting with training classes. I held my first Yahoo Pipes training class last week in Portland, Ore., with about 10 students. As a first class, it went pretty well, but I still need to work on the course content to make a few improvements before I do a second class in late June. I’m hoping to expand my training classes with face-to-face training on other topics, like online community management, and I also hope to reformat the material into an online course, too. Offering it online would allow me to make it available to a wider audience and, hopefully, increase the frequency of the class.

These efforts have come with a whole new set of challenges for me. The biggest challenge has been pricing, which seems to be part art form, part science that I have yet to master. I tend to make the rookie mistake of pricing things too high and then needing to offer discounts or lower prices later. I am starting to get a better feel for pricing these types of products and services, so hopefully this should get easier. My second challenge is marketing. While I do a pretty good job of promoting my work and getting the word out via social media, the people who need more training and my book are not the people who live and breathe social media, so I need to get better at finding traditional marketing channels to augment my marketing strategy.

What are your alternative income streams? What are your success stories, and what challenges have you experienced?

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Chi.mp gives you a web site to consolidate your contact info and blog/social network content in one convenient location, at a unique URL within the “.mp” top-level domain. It’s a new service, and they’ve only just opened up registration, so you might still be able to sign up and get “yourname.mp” (I snagged darrelletherington.mp). It also serves as an OpenID provider, so you can use your Chi.mp account to sign into other sites that use OpenID. A free domain including a site that requires no HTML knowledge struck me as a fairly attractive package.

Your Chi.mp site is divided into “Profile Items” and “Content Items.” Under the Profile Items tab, you can enter contact information, employment history, education details and more biographical information. Think of it as a plug-and-play web-based CV, complete with links to our work online and an integrated portfolio.

In your Content Items, you can import contacts, updates and other info from a number of popular web services. You can also publish status updates to Facebook and Twitter from directly within Chi.mp, and choose to display your Twitter stream on your profile. All together, thanks to Gmail, Yahoo Mail, and Hotmail support, most people should be able to aggregate a fairly comprehensive address book through Chi.mp with little trouble. Unfortunately, it’s missing the option to import contacts from Facebook, which would make it a lot more useful.

All of your imported contacts are stored in your “Ultimate Black Book” located under your Contacts tab. You can add new contacts and edit existing contacts from this page as well. You can also tag contacts for easy searching and grouping, and merge the duplicates that are bound to occur if you’re importing from a variety of address books. Chi.mp helpfully auto-detects duplicate contacts.

Like Facebook, Chi.mp offers you the ability to control the level of access people have to your profile. It does so through “Personas,” which are divided in to three categories. You have “Public,” “Work” and “Friends” Personas, each of which can be customized completely according to your taste.

Aside from integrating many outside services, Chi.mp also offers its own blogging and photo uploading features. These are very nice features to have if you’d like your Chi.mp profile ito be the go-to spot for all your online activity. Chi.mp’s blogging service is rudimentary, but completely adequate for most people’s usage. It works like Posterous and other mini-blogging services, giving you just the basics without the non-essential frills of more complete blogging systems.

In addition to offering customizable content and service integration, Chi.mp also gives you some control over your site’s look and feel. Design options include the ability to choose from a number of pre-set themes, and you can even design your own (limited) theme from scratch if you feel so inclined. You can also add your very own favicon, which many comparable services don’t allow.

It’s a very impressive service overall, and clearly designed to be completely user-oriented. You can even export your entire site with the click of a button, which includes your contacts as a vCard file, your blog posts as HTML, and more. Best of all, it’s completely free. Web workers could definitely do much worse for a comprehensive identity management platform.

What do you use for online identity management?

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So what is WEbook, really?
From what I understood so far, it is a collaborative tool for writing books. You can create a book project, invite anyone to co-author with you – including an open invitation to the entire WEBook community – invite feedback from others including the community, and then submit for consideration to be published by WEBook in either print-on-demand, e-books, audiobooks or all of the above. The community votes on a submitted manuscript (the American Idol portion of the site) through a 1-5 rating system.

The first published book from WEBook’s Alpha phase is titled Pandora, an international terrorism thriller composed by 17 writers.

Available through WEbook, BN.com, Amazon.com (although this could change based on Amazon’s recent announcement that they will stop carrying non-Amazon POD books) and even SMS. The first four chapters of Pandora, for example, are available by texting “WEbook” to the phone number 41411 or by visiting Mobile Pandora from any web-enabled mobile device.

According to the company’s press release, WEbook is breaking the traditional publishing models and not a moment too soon.

The staid $50 billion publishing industry is dominated by a few traditional publishers that wield tremendous power over the titles that reach bookstores. Writers face a daunting challenge—the odds of an unknown writer securing a publishing deal are 15,000:1.

What about protecting one’s book ideas?
Copyrights and IP issues are top of mind with WEbook, and they’re working on sophisticated IP protections. Any member can keep their writing entirely private and opt never to submit to publication through WEBook. So I can, for example, start using WEBook to collaborate only with the co-author on a new book project where I already have a book deal.

Or my husband could start working on the third book in his science fiction/fantasy trilogy about a new age after the Third World War and allow an editor, family and friends participate to give him feedback before he shops it around with the first two books that are already finished. At the moment, WEBook doesn’t provide tools to upload a completed manuscript with ease for further feedback and editing.

The company’s Terms of Use covers copyright and ownership issues, and they will have a short video explaining the risks (and rewards) of publishing any writing online, particularly in such a collaborative environment. There are also safeguards in place to monitor for plagiarism.

So why try publishing through WEbook
If you go for a regular book deal with or without a book agent and going through traditional publishers, you are looking at least a year from acceptance of the proposal to publication of the book but more typically two years. WEbook says the process from acceptance (by the WEbook masses and the WEbook company) to publication is about two months.

If you self-publish, the long and hard part of book-writing is writing it, getting feedback and editing it. Bringing in other writers could certainly ease the time suck of writing the whole book by yourself, but even enlisting editors or people to give feedback on your edits can speed up the entire book-writing process.

Personally, I am looking forward to seeing how it works on several book projects I have – one with a single co-author, one with two additional co-authors, and several essay anthology ideas that have been in limbo but through WEbook, I can solicit essays from other writers and begin compiling the actual book.

And the deal with WEbook if submitted for publication is not onerous. They have six months to decide if they will actually publish the book or not. Most traditional publishers want a year.

WEbook pays royalties from sales to the writers, editors and other contributors to the finished work so everyone can share in the rewards of a successful book.

What else can members do?
Once a member, you can ask to participate in a variety of open book projects. Right away a children’s book about the plight of wild mustangs caught my eye, and I’m going to see what other anthologies are in the works so I can possibly contribute an essay or two such as the one about ex-pats writing about their experiences living abroad.

And of course, WEbook has all those little social networking tools that link members with like-minded writers and editors including a Friends list.

All in all, I have to say I’m pretty excited about putting this tool into action for my book writing projects. I’ll report back in a few months to let you know how it is going.

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