The Tin Shingle Blog - #MembershipGoodles (for Service Based Bizes)

Website Maintenance Tonight!

by Katie Helmuth | 5/17/13 | 2:36pm

We will be performing some planned maintenance to the website tonight (Friday, May 17, 2013), which is one of several small updates over the next few months as we make improvements and grow with our small business members and readers.

The Tin Shingle website will be offline this evening starting at 6pm EST, and is scheduled to be back online by Saturday May 18, 2013. Access to member Account Centers will be offline, as well as our free articles and downloadable classes. We suggest you take the night off and enjoy an early summer cocktail!

Sometimes we feel like scientists as we create resources for small business to help them get the word out about their business. Today, we feel like Jane Blankenship Gibson, a scientist in the 1960s (even though our team is men and women).

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Membership Update: Media Contacts and Editorial Calendars are Ready!

by Katie Hellmuth Martin | 5/08/13 | 4:21pm

Media Contact Lists and Editorial Calendars

For our small business members: the Media Contacts and Editorial Lists are ready for you to research! You may have already started poking around and using them, so here are a few tips on how to best use them:

Search by Magazine: At the top of the lists, you'll see a drop down menu bar called "Media Outlet". Pick this for if you want to search by magazine.
Search by Subject: If you are looking for editors who specialize in "golf", for instance, you can use the drop down menu bar called "Category", and select a subject. You'll get a list of editors at different magazines.
Search by Magazine AND Subject: The combo. You can use both drop down menus at the same time to see who at Vogue specializes in "Beauty". This does produce a more limited set of results. If you get no results, it just means that no one at that magazine claims to specialize in that subject. This may or may not be true, so search by magazine if you want to find a reason to pitch that magazine.
Start Over: To start over with a clean search, just select the <Any> choice from that drop down menu. Or, just select a new Outlet or Category and click Apply.

The Editorial Calendars work much the same way. Be creative as you read through these to see how your brand might fit into their editorial line-up! And then go for the pitch.

PS: Want in on these? Go unlock this benefit and lots more all in one swoop with a Membership with Tin Shingle. Click here for details.

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Member Profile Idea: Add Your Pinterest Link

by Katie Hellmuth Martin | 5/08/13 | 8:06am

One of the best parts about when a small business joins Tin Shingle is that we dive in and learn more about them. We sleuth around on the web to check out their website, Twitter, etc. And when that new member follows one of our social networks, we'll get an email from Pinterest, for example, saying that "so-and-so just started following you." And then we'll learn about some bright, beautiful place on the web, like SolEscape's colorful Pinterest collection about beaches, sun hats, beach bags, and all things vacay.

Which got me to thinking: Do members realize they can put a link to their newest social outlet, or newest digital anything on their personal and business member profiles here at Tin Shingle? When customers and clients are browsing Tin Shingle for the best in small business, they visit the profile pages of our members, which we have tricked out to quickly showcase where and how their brand is represented online.

Here's where you can find it in your Member Account Center:

1.) Click on the PROFILE (add/edit) link in the right side column. These are shortcut links to tools available in your member account.

Profile edit area

2.) Fill in the link. Once you're in your personal profile area, scroll down a bit and you'll see a list of text fields. The left column is for the title of your link, and the right field is for the URL of your link. By title I mean what you want to call it. So for your Pinterest account, you'd type in "Pinterest" in the left column, and then paste the URL in the right column. Yes, the sky is the limit as to how many and cleverly named links you add here (well, no spammy links of course...we do monitor to make sure nothing bogus is going on).

It will look like this once you've filled it in. This is a screenshot of my link list:

3.) Click Save and you're done!

That was easy! The profile pages are designed to be your entrepreneurial portfolio. You can also do this for your business ventures, and we know that some of you have more than one business or project that you are promoting. If so, create a unique company profile for those, and create your link list there! It makes it so easy to find where you are everywhere!

PS: Do you want in on what we're talking about? Go check out all of the perks you get with a membership with Tin Shingle, and then activate it for instant access. :)

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Membership Update: Media Contacts and Editorial Calendars Getting Updated

by Katie Hellmuth Martin | 4/29/13 | 3:41pm

Media Contacts Updated

Media Contact lists for Tin Shingle members are currently being updated for new spring 2013 contacts, which include the range of contacts you love from Wired to ELLE Decor to ESPN the Magazine to Vogue. As always, if there is a magazine from your region or industry that you don't see in our collection, you can email member@tinshingle.com and we can look into pulling it for you!

EDITORIAL CALENDARS GETTING UPDATED
Also look out for fresh new Editorial Calendars, which you can use as guides when pitching their editorial sections. They give you insight into what editors are looking for each month so that your brand can pitch strategically. Remember - some magazines work on a 3 to 6 month lead time, so plan ahead!

Interested in unlocking our collection of Media Contact lists and Editorial Calendars, as well as special PR Leads and member to member insider opportunities? Consider joining Tin Shingle to unlock all of our buzz building tools. Click here for membership benefits and information.

Click here for a tripple-member success story that happened at the Handbag Designer Awards judging panel, thanks to an opportunity that one member shared over our private email group!

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#Growing Pains (aka Website Upgrades)

by Katie Hellmuth Martin | 4/03/13 | 4:53pm

You may have noticed that the Tin Shingle website is a little slow lately, and some other things are a little...wonky too. We know, and here's why:

We're upgrading!

Yay. #growingpains

When we moved into our new Tin Shingle life, we decided to take that opportunity to invest in our infrastructure a bit, which is an understatement. For those who like geeky things, here's what we are doing, and how it impacts you:

Faster Website Server:
The website has been slow for too long. The reason? We're maxing out on memory. So, we're moving to a new server and a new frontier entirely. We've been at Media Temple for a long time, and do love them for most websites, but for ours, we need to move to the Amazon Cloud. That takes a lot of server tinkering, which is now mostly done (I don't think server work is ever realllllly done).

Upgrading Drupal:
Our website is built on an open source platform called Drupal. It has its own upgrades that websites can put into place. Like any update, stickiness can happen. We had to make this big upgrade on the live site, and before we moved to our new home in the Amazon Cloud. This is our current project - getting the site from Media Temple to Amazon.

Then Come Pretty Page Layouts!
We have visual changes as well, like a better top navigation, better layouts of the Marketplace and Diaries of Small Business Owners, and a better way to manage membership and billing details. Those will happen after the above uber techy things happen.

Frustrated about something? Email us.
We can take it. Please email us at info at tinshingle.com . We want to make the site great for you. If there is a problem, or if you can't find something, we'd love to hear about it so that we can make it better.

Meanwhile, we're hooked on reading Diaries of Small Business Owners!
We're reading some great stuff coming from our fellow small business owners in the trenches!

Get inspired and feel the connection:
> The Outsider, from designer Peggy Li
> Hanging My Tin Shingle, from designer Emily Elizabeth
> No Bulls**t Money & Service Models: Inspiration from Wedding Planning, from Tin Shingle co-founder Sabina Ptacin
> Off to the Garment District! from designer Liz Emery

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(FREE) Pitch Review Service Added to Tin Shingle: Major New Benefit for Small Business Owners Revealed!

by Sabina Ptacin | 3/26/13 | 12:47pm

BREAKING NEWS FROM TIN SHINGLE - GET READY FOR THIS!

Have you ever created a pitch and wished that a PR fairy godmother or an actual public relations pro could swoop in and give it a quick once over, weigh in on any modifications you should make and tweak it a bit where necessary?

Do you feel alone in your pitch writing, serving as creator, copywriter, editor and final judge and jury before you send it out?

Do you wish you had a partner in pitch creation lending their eyeballs to your final product before it is read by the editors, producers and bloggers you’re reaching out to?

If you’ve answered YES to any of these questions have we got super-awesome breaking news for you! Our latest small business tool found exclusively at Tin Shingle is going to knock your socks off! Drumroll please...

Announcing Tin Shingle’s Private Pitch Review Benefit.

Our latest membership benefit ensures that an expert pair of eyes from a public relations pro will gaze upon your pitch and weigh in on it, returning it to you with a list of recommended changes and tweaks that will make it more pitch ready. Tin Shingle members receive 5 complimentary private pitch reviews.

We believe in helping you get the word out about your business so much, we’re sprinkling even more of our much-loved PR fairy dust on it and lending our expert PR pros to help your business’s shingle shine!

So how do you get in on this amazing new benefit?

Step 1:
Make sure you’re a member of Tin Shingle. If you’re not, check out small businesses like you are saying about what they love about membership.

Step 2:
Send us a completed pitch (attached in word document form) along with a note in your email letting us know who your pitch’s intended target is and what your goal is with the specific pitch you’re sending to us.

Step 3:
We’ll send it to our internal PR pros who will review the pitch and send it back to you within one week along with a Pitch Review & Recommendations Sheet with tweaks, tips and thoughts on how to make your pitch even better.

Step 4:
You make the edits we recommend and you send that pitch out! Go for the PR gold!

One last recommendation!
Be sure you join us on our weekly PR Tune Ups (and download any you’ve missed) to ensure you’re getting all the input and advice you can while crafting and executing your public relations campaign! Our carefully crafted #TuneUps are available to the public, but are free for members.

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Our Lock-It-In Sale is On!

by Katie Hellmuth Martin | 1/07/13 | 3:10pm

We're having our yearly kick-off sale, where you can lock in a lower yearly rate! Use coupon code 450LOCK at checkout to save big on the yearly rate for the life of your consecutive membership (regularly $695)!

Or, if you want to try us for a month, get $35 off your first monthly membership payment (the regular monthly rate of $75 will apply for future months). Use coupon code SAVE35 to save one time on your first monthly membership payment.

When you activate your membership, you can start right away on these business boosting strategies, and more!

Some of our favorite benefits include:

	Get Press in Lucky Magazine, People, Inc., Real Simple, and many other publications like these members did using our PR Leads, Media Contacts, and special leads from other members.
	Free DIY Podcasts Learn how to score your own press and empower your PR campaign and master plan to dominate the web with your online presence. We host live calls for members to call into, and post the recordings online. The general public can participate for a fee.
	Boost Your SEO and Web Traffic Right away, create pages on this website boasting of your business greatness, and create a link or two of where to find it. The link is great for your SEO when people search for your business and what you sell. And we'll hand write a tweet for you! Because we love our small business members.

And so much more! Click here for a list of benefits, and to get started! Email us anytime with questions.

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It's 4pm on Sunday...Do you know what's in your INBOX?

by Katie Hellmuth Martin | 1/06/13 | 6:36pm

It's 4pm on Sunday, do you know what's in your inbox

It's 4pm on Sunday, do you know what's in your inbox?

If you're a business owner, you know that the hustle begins on Sunday evening, whether you like it or not. People, usually your clients or customers, are winding down their weekends and setting themselves up for their Mondays.

You may be doing your laundry for the coming week, but your inbox is filling up.

Does this stress you out?

If you get stressed on Sunday due to early emailing, when you could be recharging your brain for the week, don't check your email until Monday morning or late Sunday night, if you just want to be aware of what's coming up for your week. As a business owner, perhaps do your staff or team a favor and don't send them email on Sunday.

But what if it's a potential new client or customer? Those are usually too irresistible to answer, and swift answers can often be rewarded.

I often do a little prep work on Sunday afternoon or evening, and the emails that I do write, or reply to, are saved in my Drafts folder until Monday morning. I have sent email on Sunday nights, and it's in moments that I dub extremely important to the Sunday evening brainstorming of my team and I never expect a response back until Monday. That said, I'm weak just like the next business pro, and can't resist starting my hustle for a strong Monday. What about you?

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New! Cyber Monday and Black Friday Sale Promotions

by Katie Hellmuth Martin | 11/14/12 | 12:22pm

Sales for Black Friday and Cyber Monday What's new at Tin Shingle this week for ProPreneur members? We've added Black Friday and Cyber Monday sale categories into the Events Calendar! This means, our members can promote their sales on this website for the world to learn about and shop.

If you tuned in to last week's PR Tune Up call, now is the time to start promoting your sales. The good news is, we're here to serve as your megaphone from a social media and an SEO (search engine optimization) perspective. List your sales now in the Event Calendar, and it will be grouped with other member's sales. The group effect is powerful for SEO (translation: better chance of your sales coming up in searches), and great for us as we tell editors about your sales! If you're not a member yet, click here to join today or learn about membership to get started with this sale promotion, and feel the effects of the other goodies aka member benefits!

We will also be pulling the sales listed in the events calendar for social media promotion, so if you want to get on our Twitter and Facebook schedule, be sure you're listed!

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UPDATE: Sandy Donations - Need Your Input

by Katie Hellmuth Martin | 11/05/12 | 12:47pm

Striking a cord with us right now is how small businesses are fighting through the impacts of Storm Sandy (hurricane, tropical storm, whatever). Sabina is in the trenches in Brooklyn, cooking chili for shelters, waiting in lines for the ferry, remaining stuck in Brooklyn due to flooded subways. I am in Beacon, which is up the Hudson River, and I have power and basic needs (but am currently in Ohio at my parents because I fled the storm with my kids early to be sure to get to my sister's wedding in Chicago. I have a two day driving journey ahead of me to get back).

I digress. We want to donate our Tin Shingle dollars to directly help small businesses impacted by the storm, and want to hear from you what people or organizations are making that happen. We are wanting to stretch our dollars to all boroughs affected by the storm, so please let us know via the comments below or on our Facebook page what you have heard of that is directly helping small businesses soldier on. This could be a local popup volunteer organization, a nonprofit that's been around that swoops in for help, etc.

Thank you in advance.

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Motivation, education, and strategization of how to get the word out about your business. And words of encouragement because what you're building is big!