Be it landing the next great project to work on internally, promoting your work as an independent consultant, or selling your company wares, you need to find ways to continue to promote talent and cultivate relationships on a shoe string budget in 2009.  But how?  Here are some tips:

1. Thank Yous

It’s what mom taught us…thank yous….but not the verbal kind, SMS text, nor with an eGreeting.  It’s the old fashioned, pull out a pen and note card, and write someone a thank you note.  When was the last time you sent a personal thank you card to a client, co-worker or industry colleague?  Here are some tips on how to save time writing personal thank you notes.

2. Pitch 3 Things

What three things make you stand out above the rest?  Remind colleagues, your boss and prospects what 3 things you and/or your business are great at doing and why they need to keep you around.

3. Incorporate Asking for Referrals Into Different Processes

When someone registers for your website or newsletter, do you ask them to refer others?  What about networking internally or within your industry networking group?

4. Reconnect with Someone Once a Week

Has it been a while since you chatted with a highly respected former boss?  Senior executive you have a relationship with?  Someone else you enjoy partnering with?  Make it a habit to re-connect with someone once a week to continue fostering relationships within and outside of your business.

So who are you sending a thank you card to today?

As I was sifting through my daily online reading list, I found a great list of resources for web designers and wanted to share them with you.

Adobe Illustrator Tutorials & Resources

Find an assortment of free top-notch tutorials, brushes, patterns, tips and .EPS files that you can use to learn more about Adobe Illustrator.

Free Web Apps for Designers

When it comes to design, there’s a plethora of free web-based tools to help you accomplish tasks such as color palette selection, creating unique fonts, editing images, and testing typography.  Check out a great assortment of design tools by smashingapps.com and sixrevisions.com

30 Must-Have Logo Books

Here you can find some of the bestselling and upcoming logo books in the market — created and/or inspired by people who know more than a thing or two about logo design.

Free Vector Packs

Here you can find a collection of free vector packs submitted by talented graphic designers to make your life easier and help your create higher-quality work.

Be more daring with colors

Colors set the tone and message of a website and designers often spend hours, even days, researching and coming up with a harmonious and usable color scheme. In this collection, you’ll find 30 web designs with vivid and colorful themes that evoke feelings of vivacity and dynamism.  I hope they can inspire you to be more daring with your color schemes!

Top 10 fonts of 2008

Myfonts.com has put together a list of top 10 fonts of 2008 based on sales font numbers.

In light of Yahoo!’s recent announcement of Carol Bartz being selected to take helm after Jerry, and then Internet rumors on whether other senior executive women at Yahoo! stay or go, I thought it was time to take a deep breath, sit back, and see what it takes for women to get to the top.

1. They’re Results Oriented

Women not only do they focus on achieving, if not beating, bottom line goals, they are able to consistently meet if not beat results year after year.  They don’t talk big then not deliver, they deliver with a team willing to help them make those goals.

2. They’re Pragmatic

They do things that are logical, not emotional.  They look at facts and historical information to make decisions and judgment calls.

3. They’re Strategic

They don’t just think about the operational side of the business.  They are creative and think big.  They connect dots with what the market needs to what the business could deliver to fill that need.  They identify opportunities that are good strategic decisions for the business before other leaders see them, and then steer the business in that direction.

4. They’re Efficient

They have a system of processes, people and technology in place to filter the important from the not so important.  They delegate effectively so progress can continuously be made.  They pay attention to what matters the most so ensure balls don’t get dropped.

5. They’re Responsive

No matter how much they have on their plate, they are responsive to the needs of the organization.  They are known to not sit back and let things happen, but take action.

6. They’re Out Spoken

They are willing to go out on a limb and speak up when things don’t seem quite right, or, stick up for an idea.  They will fight for what is right for the business.

Are you results oriented, pragmatic, strategic, efficient, responsive and out spoken?  Do you have role models at your office or in your community you look up to?  Is there an area you feel you could work on to help you get to the next step in your career?  Have you asked your local women executives to mentor or coach you?

Identify one of the above characteristics, find a mentor and improve on skills to help you move to the top in 2009 – if you have what it takes to get there, then what’s holding you back?

Think you have the world’s best website? Enter the MCM Awards from Multichannel Merchant and find out! We all work so hard to constantly improve our sites, so why not get a little recognition? You have until January 23, 2009 to enter. Each entry costs $275.

According to Multichannel Merchant, if your site is a finalist, you receive:

• Inclusion of catalog and/or Website image in special MCM Awards display during the 2009 ACCM, May 4-7 in New Orleans.
• Coverage in MULTICHANNEL MERCHANT magazine and on multichannelmerchant.com

And if your site is a winner, you receive:

• Coverage in MULTICHANNEL MERCHANT’s September 2009 Awards issue, on mutlichannelmerchant.com, and in the ACCM Show Daily newsletter
• A public relations packet including a press release, a personalized quote from MULTICHANNEL MERCHANT Editor-in-Chief Melissa Dowling, and an MCM Awards logo for use in promoting your company’s win

There’s even a payoff for those who don’t win. Everyone who enters receives comprehensive feedback and scoring from the judges on areas such as design, usability, copy, and ordering.

So what are you waiting for? Fill out an entry form and get your site noticed!

For the past few years, we’ve all been focusing on SEO to ensure we come up on the first page of Google search results. Well now it’s time to start focusing on MSEO: Multilingual Search Engine Optimization.

I recently read an article on Multichannel Merchant called “Looking for Love (and Other Search Terms) in All the Wrong Languages” that discusses this new approach on how to begin optimizing your site for multilingual search engines.

For sites in English, the goal is to not only capture the international market but also to attract non-native English speakers in your home country. The article states that:

80% of all online transactions begin on the Web and that 99% of foreigners use search engines built around their languages to look for, not surprisingly, words in their own language. SEO around English will leave a lot of these people on the outside, never finding your Website or what you offer.

To compete in the international space, you don’t have to go through the expensive and time-consuming process of translating and localizing your entire site (though that, of course, would help). The article suggests a different approach called “transcreation”, where you focus on translating keywords and other metadata into appropriate languages to gain new paths into your site.

Here is an excerpt:

That’s where the translation issue comes up. Do people who don’t speak English think about products in the same way? There are certainly direct translations for physical objects like an Eames chair, a sports car, and a rotary sander.

But some things may not be sold or used in a given country–think Lufthansa running a promotion for flights from Boston to Frankfurt to passengers in a regional airport in northern Germany or, to take an extreme case, Weight Watchers pitching its wares to a country chronically cursed with famine.

Translating every keyword obviously doesn’t make sense. This reality brings up the third option: what I classify as “transcreation” rather than translation. For their MSEO projects, companies first translate keywords for objects and concepts that easily cross borders; for example, look at words that are specific to your industry. For everything else, you’ll have to get into someone else’s skin.

Read the full article on MSEO.