Self Employed Success

In this great article by Christopher Knight, “Is EarthLink Dropping Your Permission-Based List Members?” you can learn more about the recently problems you may have been having with Earthlink email addresses suddenly bouncing from your mailing list.

When you see a lot of bounces from a certain ISP (like Earthlink, Comcast, or others), it’s a good idea to do a little manual research to find out what error message is really coming back from those ISPs. In Christopher’s case, the automated message he was receiving back was a request that HE fill out a request for the recipient to receive his email. What looked like “hard bounces” (email addresses that were no longer valid) were actually being captured by Earthlink’s challenge/response system.

This article is well worth reading if you send out email newsletters or other email marketing.

Good news to report!

I’ve been selected by Practice Pay Solutions to act as their National Education Director beginning July 1, 2006. I’m taking this position over from C.J. Hayden (author of “Get Clients Now”), who had been acting as Education Director for the past six months. I’ve been using Practice Pay Solutions as my merchant account and shopping cart for years, as have many coaches, and I can attest to both the quality of their services and the excellent customer service they provide.

My role will be to create and give free classes and teleclasses to PPS members, member associations, and the general public, on e-commerce, creating passive income, and automating your business by accepting credit cards for your services, workshops and information products. I’ll also be writing a lot of how-to articles for the PPS newsletter as well as some member association websites.

You’ll be seeing quite a lot of me all over the place! I hope you’ll be able to make the classes. They’re free!

I’ll be doing this new role a few hours a week, and still devoting the majority of my time to Passion For Business in my small business coaching role.

Recently, Susan Klein gave a teleclass to Passion For Business subscribers entitled, “Stress Makes Us Stupid.” Wow! What a great class!

Not only did she tell us why stress makes us stupid (biologically-speaking), but she tells us what to do about it. Great advice, good tips and wonderful stories…listen for free here:

http://www.passionforbusiness.com/teleclass/susan-klein.htm

According to this report, sponsored by the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, over 464,000 new businesses were created each month in 2005. That’s over 5 million new businesses!

The highest increases were in the Northeast and Midwest, while the South and West actually decreased in numbers. I find this interesting, because it does not correlate to population growth and declines in those same areas.

In another report (PDF), North Carolina is increasing its entrepreneurial activity, especially among rural areas. The report also gives some “lessons learned” for effective rural entrepreneurship strategies.

A quick reminder for all of you in the USA who pay estimated self-employment tax on your Schedule C: Happy Tax Day! Today is the day you need to send in your quarterly estimated taxes.

Gee, what fun!