I’m delighted to announce that Lauren Freedman of e-tailing.com will be presenting a Models and Masterminds Workshop on e-commerce at SOBCon09. Lauren is smart, savvy, and a pioneer of e-commerce. She literally wrote the book on online shopping — It’s Just Shopping
Her firm’s Mystery Shopper’s Survey — now in its 11th year is the standard the is cited in the E-commerce Guide, “Survey Says: Customer Interaction Key to Online Sales,” and looked forward to by sellers online as a key resource for how best attract and keep online customers.

If you’re looking to open a store or sell more, this is a person you should have in your network. Lauren researches, reports, and reveals the techniques, tactics, and tools used by everyone from Amazon to Zappos … and she’s an excellent human being too.

Because our sponsors are investing us, we can invest in you!!

Blog it by March 7th!! Redeem it by March 14!!

It’s called the “Blog It, Earn It” discount. We’d like to hear from you about what “The ROI of Relationships” means to you. Tell us why relationships matter. How they affect what you do every day and how you do it. Maybe you can tell us how you see them changing the face of tomorrow’s businesses. We want to know how relationships and personal connections shape your world.

Heck, you can even write a love letter to a sponsor you’d like to have a relationship with. Pick a company that’s done something great for bloggers in the past and tell them why you think it was important and valuable that they did what they did. Propose an idea for how you might do something a SOBCon sponsor already listed on the SOBCon blog.

Blog your thoughts, share it, link it back to this post, and broadcast it on Twitter (hash #blogitearnit). We’ll also link to you on the SOBCon blog for others to see and learn. And as a thank you for sharing your story, we’ll send you a special code to take $200 off the $795 FULL conference rate – that’s over a 25% savings!

Or, if you can’t make to SOBCon09, you could “pay it forward” and pass the discount on to one of your friends — or offer it back to us as a gift for us to pass on for you.

If you need to check on your discount code email Terry at terrystarbucker @ yahoo [dot] com

This year at SOBCon, we’re more than excited. We started planning in October to bring you an event that would be

• more solid information
• more time networking
• more potential partners
• more opportunities to be SEEN, HEARD, and UNDERSTOOD

As part of that promise, I’m delighted to announce that we’re inviting attendees to participate by adding to the gift bag.

If you have a book, an ebook, a checklist, a product of value that you want to share with the participants to show what you can do, bring it along and add it to the gift back that we distribute. Share what you know. It’s one more way to show folks how and when they might refer you.

Every participant at SOBCon is has a voice that valued.

Liz