By Dawn Montgomery-Green
Originally posted on LinkedIn

While many celebrated the Columbus Holiday, I attended the “Moving Your Business Forward” conference hosted by Atlanta Tribune: The Magazine, held at the UPS headquarters here in Atlanta. One of my Fans Favorite Fan team members, Connie, stated that this look like a great opportunity for me to network and gain some clarity on a few business decisions I needed to make soon. She was right!

Business Visibility- Fans Favorite Fan is non-existent to our target persona. Let’s face it, FFF is not selling any products and our current services are not clearly stated to our following. We are visible on social media, but to translate that into more income is what we are focused on right now. Listening to Jewel Burks, CEO & CoFounder of PartPic, speak on how Google has free tools that many businesses are not utilizing was eye-opening.  FFF is making some major adjustments, investing in those changes and that began yesterday!

NO NEWSLETTER- Ramon Ray, Smart Hustle Magazine and Small Business Evangelist from Infusionsoft, was so amazing in his approach to share how we need to reach our customers and clients differently. I have been listening to some of the best bloggers that have tripled their income and many stated that a newsletter was the route to go. FFF started out as a blog by me, but it is now a company. I have to get out of the blogger mentality and make business decisions for my sports media company. We have a few things that FFF will begin to offer to sports FANS near the end of the year and one of them will not be a NEWSLETTER! We will just call it something else …

LinkedIn- Oh, how I loved this segment of the day, because I have professionally benefitted from this social media platform. I was able to update the look of my LinkedIn profile this summer and it tripled my connections as a result of it. I have worked with many of those connections on various projects, events and even ideas for their companies. Brian Pember, who is the Director of Customer Communications for UPS, shared some more insightful tips about LinkedIn that I have yet to utilize as a small business owner. I appreciated his information on Thought Leadership and how to be an effective influencer on LinkedIn. His slide on Primary Content Pillars is officially on my FFF vision board because of the in-depth description he gave.

I learned a lot at this conference. I made great connections with other small businesses mainly because of my knowledge of LinkedIn (you had to be there to see how I assisted another business via LinkedIn). I love working in the sports industry, and conferences like this will help Fans Favorite Fan move forward. Did I mention that I took my 4 year old son with me to the conference? I felt like he was a FFF junior team member. Parents go after your dreams and goals! Do not be afraid to show your children how you are working to provide them with a better future.

“How are you Moving Your Business Forward?”