I have been working the last few months to get my business ready. I am starting a Childrens Birthday Party service and I am looking to launch my website within the month.
Aside from talking it up with family and friends, how would you suggest I promote my business?
What are the best ways to use FaceBook and Twitter to network?
What tools (business cards, brochures, etc) should I have on hand when starting out? What are the best ways to get these tool in potential clients hands?

Any advice is greatly appreciated!!

www.yourprettyparty.com

You absolutely have to have: website and business card. Brochures aren't necessary because they get lost amid all the papers. As a professional organizer, I find them all the time. Look at LinkedIn and Twitter. There is a lot of excellent information about social media on Inc.com (Inc Magazine).

Think about where there are parents and children and that's where you go.
Donate your services or a portion of your services at church/school/non-profit fundraising events. You'll get advertising and word of mouth.

Nancy Nemitz - organizer-mom
Create the Space Professional Organizing LLC
twitter @NancyNemitz
nancyscocktailhour.blogspot.com
nancy@createthespace.com

I agree with the previous post. A business card and a website are of utmost importance. Also helpful would be web banners and buttons. These can be placed on different websites parents might surf. Usually, these are very inexpensive to place even sometimes free. I have recently created a Facebook page for my business as well as a Twitter and LinkedIn account. I think the main thing is to make sure you update regularly and post things that are of interest to your customers such as special offers, etc. I am also in the process of getting my website finished and hope to launch on May 10th. Right now, I am networking and promoting my grand opening. That might be another thing you could do as well. Hope this helps.

Debra Nail
Deb's Desk Virtual Assistance
Twitter: debsdeskva
Facebook: Deb's Desk Virtual Assistance

Wow! Loaded question. Here are some resources I'm currently learning. I haven't used them yet but I hear nothing but great things.

www.PING.fm is a service that allows you to post something ONCE and it will post it to all your social networks for you.

Tweets are your obvious press releases, if you will; however, if you're like me you can spend all day on twitter.

Go to SocialOomph.com (or Hootsuite.com) and schedule your tweets so you don't have to do it everyday. You can direct Twitter folks to your Facebook.

If you have a website (or blog)...point your tweets and facebook to your blog.

Example: YOu have a website called Parties. Your tweet will say something like "Read what these moms have to say about our children's parties." At the end of this tweet you will attach a link to your website. If your website name is too long, you can try a URL shortening service (Bud URL, Tiny URL, Bit.LY)

Another "trick" I'm learning is to use video responses on YOUTUBE. Find a video with a lot of hits within your category. Click the link below the video that allows you to post a video comment. Everytime people see the popular video, they may see your video attached.

I know this is a lot but I hope it helps.

_________________
TUMAINI RIVERA
Artist, Mom, Wife
http://www.curbsideconnections.com
Twitter: @curbsideconnect
FaceBook: Curbside Connections

Maybe you should think about using an online press release?
There are many that are free and for more advance features there are also paid ones.

Most importantly, be sure to have a blog. In order for you to "exist" in the black hole we call the internet, you'll need to make sure that you have a blog that is active. Web crawlers crawl blogs the most, followed by FB and Twitter. Having a website only doesn't bring much traffic anymore.

Do some keyword searches and find your top 50 or so...the be sure to use those keywords in your blog posts.

Hope that helps!

_________________
Christina G Martin
http://www.yourelaunched.com & http://www.yourvirtualpm.com
Twitter: http://twitter.com/YouRelaunched
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/pages/You-Relau ... 7976277694
LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/yourelaunched

You seem to be asking all the right questions. I would highly recommend doing as many of these things as possible. While searching around the internet for help with a similar problem, I found a website ([url]techassemble.net[/url]) that helped me to do a lot of these things. They had a one on one consultation with me over the phone and recommended the best course of action for me. They were able to make me a YouTube video from film that I recorded and setup a facebook marketing plan. This was the least expensive solution I could find outside of doing it myself.... too bad I had No Idea where to start.