Self Employed Success

A few months ago, in my blog entry The Green Home Office: Duplex Printing, I talked about how you can save paper by printing double-sided (duplex) and how printing to a PDF file, instead of paper, can save you reams of paper each year.

I’ve got a few more “green home office” tips for you:

• Whether you work in an office or from home, consider making small changes to the temperature in your office in order to save fuel. For instance, lowering your thermostat in the winter (and wearing a sweater and socks) or raising your air conditioning temperature in the summer (and using an electric fan or ceiling fan) can significantly. We lowered our electric bill by 10 percent by using our air conditioning less.
• Use compact fluorescent (CF) light bulb. The older type CF bulbs use to flicker and had a weird color tone to them, making them practically impossible to use in an office setting. However, the new CF bulbs have a pleasant warm tone (especially the GE Soft White CF bulbs) and no longer flicker. We reduced our electric bill by 25 percent by changing all the light bulbs and turning off lights when we were leaving a room.
• After you’re done using paper in the office, you can recycle it. If your local garbage collection company does not have a recycling program, check with your city or township office, they may have one.
• If you can’t recycle paper, re-use the blank side for notes and to jot down information.
• Buy recycled products and supplies for your home office. For suggestions, visit The Green Office.
• Working from home can really impact the environment in a positive way. My husband and I bought new cars within a few months of each other. My car has 25 percent less mileage on it than his car, and he drives 250 miles a week as compared by my 45 miles (and that includes grocery shopping, post office, and other “errand” miles on my car). Just group all your errands together and make one long trip that includes the bank and post office, instead of separate, short trips.

I know global warming seems practically impossible to fix on a personal level, but every little bit helps. If you have other green home office tips, I’d love to hear them!

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According to an article from the National Dialogue on Entrepreneurship:

“Organized angel investors invested $25.6 billion in 2006—a 10.8% [increase] over 2005. Overall, 234,000 angels backed 51,000 different firms last year. Both deal numbers (up 3%) and average deal size (up 7.5%) grew, thus offering further indications of a healthy angel market.”

An angel investor is a wealthy individual who provides business capital for start-up or growth of a business, in return for a share of the equity of the business. Typically they’re looking for investments under $1 million. According to Wikipedia, “Of the 51,000 US companies that received angel funding in 2006, the average raise was about US$500,000.”

While angel investors often invest in companies with larger revenue possibilities than a typical self-employed person might earn, it’s worth considering angel investors as a source of capital, especially if you’re growing an existing business to a new level.

You can read more news about the angel investment markets here:

http://wsbe2.unh.edu/cvr-news

Small business owners often ask me which internet marketing techniques work best. The answer is, “it depends on your audience.” Knowing your target audience and testing to see which techniques they respond to should be your #1 priority in your internet marketing plan.

With that said, MarketingSherpa did a survey recently with these results:

BEST internet marketing results:

• 49% of survey respondents said “paid search ads”
• 47% said their own in-house mailing list
• 45% said search engine optimization (SEO)

WORST results:

• 56% said rented mailing lists gave them the WORST results
• 45% said pop-ups and pop-unders

MarketingSherpa.com is a wealth of information, especially surveys and studies. Here are some good reports. If you sign up for their mailing list, you get most of their reports and articles for free (if you access them within a week of the email broadcast; after that, there is a fee):

• MarketingSherpa Email Marketing Presentation: Top Email Marketing Opportunities for 2007
• MarketingSherpa Search Marketing Presentation 2006: PowerPoints, MP3 and Transcript

Many people have asked me how I record my teleclasses. I use a digital recorder, connected to my telephone line. Some teleconference companies will allow you to record your call through their service. However, since I also record all my live speeches and workshops, a digital recorder was the way to go for me.

As for digital recorders, I have an Olympus DS-40. Here’s what to look for when buying a digital recorder:

1. That the recorder can be connected to your PC for downloading files easily. I’m not sure if they work with a Mac, so if you have a Mac, you’ll have to research the options available here.

2. Removable storage. This means the recordings are stored on a flash card. By having removable storage you can always buy more flash cards to store more audio if you’re going to record a one- or two-day live workshop (where you can’t get back to your PC to download the recording then remove it off the flash card).

3. That it can store files in MP3 format. This way, you don’t have to do a lot of fiddling with file conversions: MP3 can be uploaded “as is” to your website.

4. That it has both a SP (standard play) and an LP (long play) mode. SP modes give you higher quality audio recording, but reduced the length of available recording because the file size is larger.

5. Long record times: If you’re teaching a full day, 8-hour live workshop, you need to know that your recorder can record the whole day in SP mode.

6. It must have a microphone jack so that you can plug it into your telephone.

Good luck in your search!