Integrity.  Visionary. Web Pioneer. Twitter. Cybergrrl. Webgrrl.  Aliza is all of these and is now happily married and an Internet professional, blogger, columnist and mom living in Anchorage, Alaska, via Wyoming and New York City.  This is an engaging and an informational interview which you will learn everything about how to go about writing and publishing a book, finding a book agent, to tweeting.  Yes, tweeting is a verb and an addictive activity that can be found in www.Twitter.com.  When you go to Twitter you will learn to Tweet.  This is another addictive social networking phenomena.  This is like keeping up with the Jones 24/7 and then some.

Not surprising since Aliza is always up on the early technologies and things that are happening on the Net and else where.   Not only is Aliza an Internet pioneer, I found Aliza to be extremely warm and authentic during the entire conversation.  Aliza has always been committed to building communities and connecting women as well.  But hey guys, you’d be smart to hang around this call/podcast for all 60 minutes there is a lot in this podcast for guys and gals alike!

Aliza left NYC after 911 and drove across the country in a RV and met a biologist in Wyoming who was originally from Montana and eventually settled in Anchorage, Alaska and started a family.  Aliza and I have never met but we literally worked across the street from each other during the dot com boom in New Your City on Broad Street just down the street from the New York Stock Exchange.  Aliza was the CEO of Cybergrrl.com and Webgrrls.com. 

Aliza talks about the beginning of the Internet in the USA with Cybergrrl that started out as her personal web site that turned into a business.  Cybergrrl was Aliza’s own online persona.  She was a publisher of 3 Web sites for women, Cybergirrl.com, Webgirrls.com and Semina.com preceding iVillage.com and Women.com.  She was able to form over 100 chapters of Cybergirrls.com globally.

Cybergirrls was a dotcom hit and their valuation hit $2-3 million and she was offered several million dollars for a piece of the company, which she turned down.  We go into decisions made that were made for the right reasons but were not always the right decisions.  We were both way too early and a little bit naive in terms of crossing the chasm.  It takes a fair amount of risk taking and strategy to be successful.  Aliza talks about her businesses being profitable vs. being venture funded competing with the likes of Women.com and iVillage.com.  Aliza held on to a smaller piece of the pie instead of giving up a piece to get a bigger piece of the pie. 

Aliza talks about her one of her 7 books “Powertools for Women.”  She goes into her private network and her 3 male mentors and by the time she found women who might have been mentors they became competitors.  Aliza was a mentor to 100’s of women in the early days, especially via e-mail.  Webgirrls was a network of mentors online with over 30,000 women and an incredibly proud accomplishment of Aliza’s.  Aliza’s legacy still lives on and people still reach out to her because she has had a positive impact on their lives.

It is about making the connections and turning the connections into a positive and profitable experience.  Webgrrls was a free service and the costs were coming out of Aliza’s pocket for many years and when they started to charge $40 per year there was a huge uproar.  People were angry and offended by the potential fees that were going to be incurred.  Aliza talks about managing their expectations.

“Powertools for Women” is a book that originated from a speech she gave.  She interviewed 75 women in the book.  Nurture your network and be a mentor and share what you have done with others which can inspire other people.  Women are great story tellers.  Taking charge of change is important.  Embrace change and make something good out of it, force change and take yourself out of your comfort zone.  We want to guide and direct change.

Aliza created a web page that was a long list of links that eventually became the first directory of women’s sites.  Aliza also created a web page called www.rvgirl.com that is a site where she recorded her experience in her Recreational Vehicle as she roved across the USA.  Aliza recently wrote the “Everything Blogging Book.”  This is a book that was targeted towards housewives in the Midwest to teach them the basics of blogging.

Aliza goes into a lot of detail about what an aspiring author would want to do as far as being an author.  She suggests that you might want to go directly to a publisher if you have great contacts inside publishing groups and if you love writing and negotiating contracts.  Better than navigating the publishing world yourself Aliza Sherman says that you will want to get a book agent who has contacts inside the publishers and who can assist you with the business process of getting a book published.  While Aliza has had several of her books published by large publishers like Random House and Penguin Group she is now going to take on the experience of self publishing her next book in a print on demand environment.

You can find a good agent through another author.  You want to use an agent who is relevant to the type of material you are writing.  You want an agent to shop around your idea.  Aliza said that getting good press and positioning yourself as an expert is extremely valuable.  After having her book idea turned down at several publishers she had a feature article written in the Wall Street Journal and was approached by five with offers to write a book about women and the web based on her experience with Cybergrrls and Webgrrls.  The interesting this is that a few of the publishers had already rejected her before about the idea for a book and now wanted her back.

Aliza goes into the details of getting a book published and I recommend that you listen to Aliza sharing her experience if you are considering writing a book.  Aliza and I talk about the refinement of information on different subjects.  Aliza talks about some of the publishers like Working Woman Magazine and how they did not find their audience online and how iVillage is not the type of publisher to go into entrepreneurial type of subject since they are focused on other areas in women’s lives non business related.  Taking business information and putting it through a filter like Entrepreneur Women.

Aliza has moved from blogging to twittering.  Twitter is community building site that allows short bursts in very rapid succession personal posts or like blogging on crack.  It is like publishing and like nothing she has ever done before.  You get a home page with 140 characters to create a “tweet.”  A tweet says what you are doing and you can do it through almost any mobile device as well.  This is networking with some of the coolest pod casters and tech evangelists.  If you want to can add others as friends to your Twitter home page, like Robert Scoble, Dave Winer creator of RSS, Steve Rubel a is a PR expert.  You can keep up with what some of these folks are saying and doing.

Twittering is networking.  Howard Greenstein,  Angela Gunn who writes for the USA Today are also Tweeters.  You can read what these folks are doing weather it is getting another coup of latte or taking their kid to the doctor or about linking into a great web site or read a great article recommendation on social networking.  Aliza Sherman actually tweeted about our podcast interview.  You can find Aliza’s tweets on her home page at Aliza Sherman. 
About Aliza Sherman
Aliza Sherman Biography – updated 11/06.

“It’s a man’s world out there in cyberspace – but not if Aliza Sherman has anything to say about it. Her mission: empower women and girls through technology.” — The Wall Street Journal

Aliza Sherman is the Original Cybergrrl – an Internet thought leader, highly sought-after online marketing expert and passionate evangelist for the Internet, particularly as a valuable and useful tool for our personal and professional lives. She is a motivational and inspirational speaker who has spoken around the world about the Internet, entrepreneurship and women’s empowerment.

Named by Newsweek as one of the “Top 50 People Who Matter Most on the Internet,” Aliza Sherman is a Web pioneer, online marketing expert, published author, international speaker and regular contributor to national magazines and web sites.

Pioneering Work:
Sherman founded the first woman-owned, full-service Internet company – Cybergrrl, Inc. – in the early days of the World Wide Web,. She also founded Webgrrls International, the first women’s Internet networking group that grew to over 100 chapters worldwide in its first year. She is known as the woman who pioneered the Web for other women and has been building online communities for women since the early 1990s. She is the recipient of numerous awards for her innovative work on the Internet including the prestigious Avon Spirit of Enterprise Award.

In 1995, she built the first 3 websites for women (Cybergrrl.com, Webgrrls.com, Femina.com), preceding both Women.com and iVillage.com, and is considered the pioneer who helped pave the way on the Web and in the New Media industry for women.

New Directions:
In 2005, Sherman moved from new media to “old media,” producing, writing and narrating an original 12-part documentary series for Wyoming Public Television – “Wyoming Families First.” She and her husband started a production company – Moonbow Productions, Inc. – to develop film projects, publish books and create art with a purpose. Her first independent film is about miscarriage.

She has produced radio segments for “Marketplace” heard on NPR as well as for Wyoming Public Radio and Alaska Public Radio Network.

She is a regular freelance contributor to ENTREPRENEUR, HOME BUSINESS, PINK MAGAZINE, PROFESSIONAL WOMAN, MINORITY ENGINEER, and many others. She is currently working on her 7th book – a business guide to the Internet for late adopters to be published by Adams Media in 2007.

She continues to work on a variety of multimedia projects including a book about her year-long solo travels across the country in an old RV and a handbook about miscarriage to help bring much needed information to women.

Recent Activities:
Aliza recently spoke at the Women’s Forum in Deauville, France as well as at the annual convention for the Society of American Travel Writers in Santiago, Chile. In 2005, she spoke about women and cyberspace issues at the John Marshall School of Law in Chicago, Illinois. She also presented at a major workforce conference to be held in Jackson Hole, Wyoming in June 2004 with Jimmy Orr, former Whitehouse Internet Director. She has taught Internet, business and marketing workshops throughout the state of Wyoming as well asInternet courses at Laramie County Community College in Cheyenne, Wyoming and the University of Wyoming in Laramie.

Aliza received the 2004 Small Business Administration’s annual Small Business Journalist Award in the state of Wyoming. She appeared as a regular guest on Wyoming Public Radio’s evening talk show “Wyoming Today,” speaking on business and Internet topics.

Consulting & Advising:
While with Cybergrrl, Inc., she was a highly regarded Internet strategy consultant for major corporations seeking to reach women online including Avon Products, Inc. and Estee Lauder Companies, Inc. for whom her company built the first web sites for the Jane Cosmetics and Origins brands. She also built the first breast cancer awareness resource online for Avon’s Breast Cancer Awareness Crusade.

Her company pioneered one of the first custom shopping carts on the Web for another client – Dr. Atkins. She also consulted non-profit organizations including Girls, Inc., the National Alliance of Breast Cancer Organizations, the Bone Marrow Foundation, and NYC Planned Parenthood on their Internet strategies.

In addition to serving on the Advisory Board for Wyndham’s “Women on Their Way” program, the “Frank About Women” program and Oxygen/Markle Pulse, she has beenan advisor to several nonprofit organizations for girls including GenAustin and numerous websites and women-owned businesses such as HipGuide and College Broadband. She was part of the American Association of University Women’s gender and technology task force and has served on the SBA Braintrust for women-owned businesses.

Extensive Press Coverage:
She has been profiled internationally as well as in U.S. publications such as PEOPLE, USA TODAY, WALL STREET JOURNAL, US NEWS and WORLD REPORT, TIME DIGITAL, and ELLE magazine. She has been featured on CBS News with Dan Rather, CBS “This Morning,” Fox “Good Day New York,” Lifetime TV’s “New Attitudes,” and has had frequent appearances as an Internet expert and book author on CNN, CNN-FN, MSNBC, and CNBC. Radio credits include NPR, CBS Radio, Newsweek Radio and numerous local radio talk shows and Internet radio shows.

In 1999, she appeared on the cover of USA TODAY as part of a technology summit and was the only woman and the only small business owner on the panel of today’s technology leaders including Michael Dell of Dell Computers and the CEOs of Lucent Technologies, 3Com and Comcast.

Book Credits:
She is the author of:
The Everything Blogging Book (ADAMS MEDIA, 2006)
PowerTools for Women in Business: 10 Ways to Succeed in Life and Work (ENTREPRENEUR PRESS, 2001),
Cybergrrl @ Work: Tips and Inspiration for the Professional You (PENGUIN PUTNAM, 2001) and
Cybergrrl: A Woman’s Guide to the World Wide Web (BALLANTINE, 1998) among other books…

Personal:
Sherman spent all of 2001 on an extended double booktour promoting her 2nd and 3rd books, traveling the country in an RV with her chihuahuas. Her travel diary can be read at RVGirl.com. She is married with 2 Chihuahuas, a Black Lab, a wonderful husband and beautiful baby girl.