Self Employed Success

Do you need to hire a VA, but don’t know how to get started? Are you using a VA and need help in creating more effective project/task management and communication?

Then join me and my special guest Angee Robertson, who is MY virtual assistant. Angee will answer your questions about finding, hiring and using a VA, and we’ll share some of the secrets about how Angee and I work effectively together to run Passion For Business. Angee will also talk about what types of projects and tasks you can delegate to a VA and where technology can help you and your VA work better together.

After you register for this free teleclass, you’ll be sent a link to a web site where you can ask your most pressing questions about hiring and working with a VA. We’ll use your questions on the call, so be sure to include your name, your business name, and where you’re from!

February 17, 2010
1:00 PM – 2:00 PM eastern

Classes will be recorded, so if you miss a session, you will be able to download the audio recording of the live class and listen to it at your leisure.

To register for this free teleclass:
http://www.passionforbusinesslearning.com/calendar.html

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About 20 years ago, I set out to make a Vision Board for myself about my perfect business and my perfect life. At the time I was working a corporate 9-5 job, plus running a photography studio in the evenings, and photographing weddings every weekend. My corporate job was safe but a little boring, and working most evenings and weekends left me no time for dating. I had been living in a two-bedroom apartment since college, but longed to have my own home and garden.

I pulled out a stack of magazines and began cutting out images and words that inspired me. Soon I made a Vision Board of my perfect small business, my perfect new home, and wrote a list of What I Want In A Husband, which I added to the Vision Board.

Fast forward six years later: I had bought my own home and created eleven garden beds, which brought me tranquility and a deeper connection to nature and beauty. I had met and married Aly (he laughed when I showed him my Perfect Husband list!). I had started my life coaching business that would eventually morph into a small business coaching enterprise.

Last year I created a new Vision Board for myself (see photos below). Already some of the things on it have come to pass.

What’s a Vision Board?

A Vision Board is a collage of things you want in life, experiences you desire, and people, situations, and feelings you want to manifest. Sometimes it’s called a treasure map.

Making a Vision Board has several purposes:

• Helps keep your goals constantly in sight and in your mind
• Surrounds you with the energy of what you desire most
• Helps you gain clarity about what are your most important goals and dreams
• Keeps your emotional energy high and your focus strong

The way to achieve your goals in life is to have a clear picture of what you actually want. Brian Tracey says, ” An average person with average talent, ambition and education, can outstrip the most brilliant genius in our society, if that person has clear, focused goals.”

The Law of Attraction says that the more you focus on the things you want, the more time you spend paying attention to your purpose, the more you draw your desired items and experiences into your life. So surrounding yourself with visual representations of what you desire helps to elevate your energy in the direction of those things.

What You’ll Need

1. Poster Board – I use 20″ x 30″ poster board, because you can find inexpensive frames of that size in any discount department store. A frame will keep the board flat and dust-free, and will allow you to hang it on your wall.
2. Old magazines – You’ve been wanting to clean up your old magazine pile, so here’s a good excuse! Also, check with friends to see if they have any old magazines, or ask your local library if they ever trash magazines. Choose magazines that have always appealed to you in the past, as they’re a treasure trove of images and words for your Vision Board.
3. Glue – Don’t use glue sticks as the glue isn’t stable (unless you’re going to frame the Vision Board between a plastic cover and a cardboard backer, which should keep all the items secure). Personally, I use paper cement. There are also double-sided sticky tabs you can buy at most photography stores. These tabs are commonly used for putting together wedding albums, but work great for a Vision Board, too.

Getting Started

While it helps to review your goals and dreams in advance, I find that just diving into the magazines and cutting out any words or images that appeals to me to be the best way to collect ideas.

Don’t judge or critique what you’re cutting out yet. Just cut out any image or word that attracts you, as these are subconscious messages from your brain, heart and soul.

Sort them into piles of themes:

• Feelings you’d like to experience
• People you’d like to attract into your life
• Travel and places to see
• Money goals
• Lifestyle goals, like health, relationships, etc.
• Professional goals, like enhancing your business, becoming famous, or writing a book

Prioritize what must go on your Vision Board. Soften your focus and allow your thoughts, feelings and intuition to guide you to the most important images and words.

Layout without gluing. This helps you to group the items in a pleasing manner and eliminate those items that don’t work for you. Don’t forget that you can write your own words and draw your own sketches for the Vision Board, too.

Glue and frame.

Put it where you’ll see it. Take a moment each day to focus on a portion of the Vision Board that calls to you.

Do you remember in The Secret, John Assaraf talks about creating a vision board that included his perfect home?  Six years, and several moves later, he was unpacking an old box and came across his old vision boards – and discovered an amazing thing: the photo of his dream house on one old vision board is the EXACT house he lives in today! (Not a house “like” the house he wanted…the exact same house he was currently living in.) John tells the story in this moving video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=svkV9xoaVuI

When you create your Vision Board, take photos of it, and post it on your blog or Facebook, so we can all share in the manifesting of your dreams! (Post the link on my Facebook Fan Page: http://www.facebook.com/PassionForBusiness or use the Comments link below to post your link to this blog.) I can’t wait to see what you create!

Congratulations to Helga Matzko! Last year we designed a new website for her, and last month Helga asked us to create a matching blog, which she launched yesterday: http://www.gestaltri.com/blog/ 

Helga has a great take on the blend of Gestalt psychotherapy and life coaching…it’s worth reading the past issues of her newsletter and blog!

Helga understood that in order to create a lasting brand for The Gestalt Institute of Rhode Island, she needed her website, logo, and blog to deliver the same visual message.

• Check out her home page and the natural “spiral” theme from the photographs.
• Next, look closely at her new logo that was created from the website spiral photos we used.
• Then, go to her blog and see how, using WordPress, we were able to bring the logo and colors from her main website (including the SAME navigation!)  into her blog for a consistent brand.

When thinking about your website and the possibilty of adding a blog to it, remember to tie the visual elements together so that you create a strong brand, too.

Also notice that Helga put her blog on the same domain as her website, not a new domain/URL. In this way, her main domain receives more SEO credit for each blog post she adds. A big mistake I see people making is having one URL for their main website and a different URL for their blog.

Heard a great quote from CopyBlogger for all of us who speak and teach and write: “We’re valuable precisely because we can cut through the noise and give them only what’s useful and relevant to them.”

Sometimes I think, “Everyone knows what I know!” There is so much free information on the internet, it can get disheartening when you’re trying to create a profitable business. Then I remember: it’s BECAUSE there’s so much free information that people can’t cope with the quantity of it…and they NEED us to synthesize it, distill it, and give it back to them in practical, simple terms.

A friend and colleague said to me, “I often say I offer a shortcut and I’m able to share what works and more importantly what doesn’t.”

It used to be that people couldn’t get access to all this information easily, so they needed us. Now they have too much information, and still need us.

Quick reminder: the One Action Now teleclass is tomorrow, January 14, from 1:00 – 2:30 PM eastern.

Need to figure out how to do Action Planning for your business? Join us!

Class will be recorded, so if you can’t attend live, you can download the recording and listen to it at your convenience.

Learn more about this class here:

www.OneActionNow.com

In December, I had lunch with David Newman and grilled him (no pun intended!) about creating information products.

Lots of great strategy ideas and tips!

You can listen to the interview in MP3 format here:

Karyn Greenstreet interviews David Newman about Information Products (MP3)

It’s January, and that means you will be innundated with offers for workshops, classes, weekend intenstives, bootcamps, and teleclasses. How do you decide which one is best for you?

Here are six tips:

1. Decide on your MOST important business goals first. Only choose classes that will help you achieve your business goals for this year. If you learn materials that you can’t implement immediately, you’ll forget most of what you learn by the time you really need the information.
2. Decide how you like to learn — and how you learn best. Some people like to have intensive, immersion experiences; others like to learn a little at a time. Some people like to have time in class to practice what they’re learning; others like to take the exercises as homework and work on it at their own pace. Some people like small group classes; others thrive on large conferences. Some people like a lot of interactive discussion with the other students; others want to have a ton of information given to them and find classroom discussions to be an interruption.
3. Decide what you need to learn and at what level. For instance, say you need to learn about internet marketing techniques. Do you want an overview class, or do you want to learn a specific internet marketing technique? If you want to learn a specific topic, do you already know something about the topic (and therefore are looking for an “advanced” class) or do you want to learn from the very beginning, where an introductory class would be right for you? If you choose a class that’s too easy, or too hard, you’ll find your learning diminished.
4. Decide how much time you have to devote to the learning experience. Can you take two days away from your business to attend a weekend bootcamp, or do you only have one hour a week available to attend a teleclass series? Factor in travel time, for those training events that are not local to you.
5. Decide on your financial budget. Most business classes should make you money, once you implement what you’re learning. But spending huge amounts of money on a training class when you can’t predict Return On Investment (ROI) can feel uncertain. Ask yourself, “How soon will this training repay me in increased revenue for what it cost to attend the training?”
6. Choose the teacher with care. What is the teacher’s reputation, both as a topic expert and as a trainer? Have you ever sat through a class where the teacher droned on and on? No matter how exciting the topic, a boring, poorly prepared teacher will put you to sleep instead of offering a training experience that helps you to cement your learning in your mind and in your daily life. Be sure to ask your friends and colleagues about their experience with different teachers.

Lifelong learning is an extraordinary backbone to a successful business. Just be sure you choose the best class, and the best teacher, for you and your business. Then, sit back and enjoy the training experience!

Two days after celebrating my mother’s 70th birthday in late October, my throat got that tell-tale scratchy feeling. You know the one. It’s predicts the advent of the dreaded November Bronchitis season for me.

I seemed to be able to fight off this first round in early November before it became full-blown, but the dry cough lingered all month, making for some very interesting teleclasses. “What would you do if <cough> your email campaign results <cough, cough> returned less than a one percent click-through rate <cough>?”

But my energy was up and I was lulled into a false sense of security, taking walks by the canal and visiting the new BJ’s Wholesale Club in town to take a gander at the high-def TVs. Big mistake. By last Wednesday, I had fever and chills, the lungs clogged up like a beaver dam, and I was forced to the doctor’s office once again. I had to miss the family Thanksgiving dinner, cancel a new class that was to have started on Tuesday, and cancel a speech I was to give at the ICF Conference in Orlando this week.

This happens to a lot of small business owners. We work hard, our adrenaline is up, and colds and flu seem to avoid us. But the minute you relax, the minute you take a vacation or end a big project, POW…you get sick. I used to think my annual bronchitis was tied to my airplane trips to England (my husband is from England and we visit his parents once a year). But I began to realize it wasn’t the airplane’s fault, per se, but it was because I was relaxed and on vacation — typically after working like a crazy person the week before to “catch up” before vacation started.

Now that I’m flat on my back this week, I’m going to ponder a new routine, a new way of both working and relaxing that keeps my equilibrium and my immune system in balance. First thing I did was take my six-page To Do list and reduce it to three pages. (Boy, that felt GREAT!)

If you’re like me, you get very excited about the projects you work on and enthusiastic about working with your clients and students, and your mind is always going a mile-a-minute with ideas. But there’s a price to pay for trying to do it all.

P.S. I’ll miss everyone at the ICF Conference! I hope you have a great time!

P.P.S Does this happen to you? What advice do you have for me? 

Great design makes your business look more professional and helps it to stand out from your competition. A few easy-to-learn design techniques will help you create marketing materials that communicate your benefits effectively, and help your brand to look BIG: professional, trustworthy, expert.

My mastermind group colleague, Pamela Wilson has a great ebook on tips for graphic design in marketing materials, perfect for the small business owner who doesn’t have a graphics background.

But she needs your help! She is putting together a course on marketing and graphics, and would love your feedback about the topics you’d like to learn about.

In return for taking the 3-minute survey, Pamela will give you access to her free ebook, with great tips you can implement right away. What a deal!

Please take Pamela’s 3-minute survey here. Thanks! I appreciate your help.

Some people are natural-born planners. They think through an idea, start to finish, not only looking for loopholes, but asking the important questions:

• WHY am I doing this?
• WHY am I doing this now?
• WHAT do I expect my outcome will be?
• HOW will I test and track to know what my outcome is for this particular plan?
• WHAT else could I be spending my time, money and energy on instead, that would yield greater results?

But some people are do-ers. They like to jump feet first into everything they do, and worry about the details later. When it comes to marketing, this is a huge mistake.

Planning allows you to brainstorm and think through possible scenarios before you commit your time, energy and money into your marketing ideas.  Ninety-five percent of the time, I advocate planning, especially if you’re starting a new, un-tested marketing campaign, using a new marketing technique, or launching a new product or service.  The time you spend with research and working through possible alternatives, as well as the time you spend thinking about how you might handle worse-case scenarios, will reap huge rewards later on.

For example, I see everyone jumping on the social media marketing bandwagon. Every major conference I’ve been to in the past year has at least one breakout session on Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook. You are told by the speaker that you must do social media marketing to stay relevant, so the moment you get back to the office you sign up for the social media sites and feel your way through the maze of new technology. You spend $1,000 on a customized blog.  But without a strategy for WHY you are doing it, HOW to do it effectively, and WHAT outcomes you can expect, you are wasting your time and money.

Every self-employed person will tell you that there’s no such thing as being 100% sure of success. But with strategic thinking and planning, you are moving yourself higher on the Probability of Success Scale than if you jump in without thinking.