Self Employed Success

Spam.  Those annoying, time-consuming emails that clog your Inbox and ruin your day.  You wonder: How did it ever get so bad?  While it’s not possible to completely eliminate spam, there are quite a few things you CAN do about the problem to reduce your burden.

Spam is defined as an unsolicited email trying to get you to buy something.  In addition, it’s email that tries to get you to give up something: your credit card number, social security number, login ID, etc., by pretending to be a legitimate email.  Here are ten tips for stopping the current spam you’re getting, and avoiding getting on new spam lists.

1. Maintain two email addresses: a Personal Email Address (that you give to family, friends and business associates), and a Safe Email Address (one you use whenever you’re ordering something online, signing up for an email newsletter, or creating a profile on a website).  For instance, I use a Hotmail account for my Safe Email Address.  If a spammer were to get a hold of that address, fine.  All the spam will go into my Hotmail account, which I only look at once a week.  Hotmail has a great anti-spam filter built in, so it’s easy to see what’s spam and what’s not.  This practice leaves my personal email account relatively spam-free (maybe I get two spam emails a day to my personal account).  Some free email services include Hotmail, Yahoo and GMail (Google’s new email service).

2. Use your Safe Email Address to send emails to companies who might be harvesting email addresses from incoming emails. For example, say you want to write to a company to ask them about their products.  Some companies will harvest your email address from the email you send to them, and put you on their mailing list.  By using your Safe Email Address, you can avoid seeing messages from these companies come to your personal email address.

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When I first started coaching, I bought a telephone headset so that I could speak with clients while still taking notes.

Five years ago I graduated from a wired phone headset to a wireless phone headset… freedom at last!

Now when I speak with clients on the phone, or teach a teleclass, I can get up and move around. Not just around my office either: my cordless headset will reach all the way out to the mailbox, 165 feet from my telephone base!

My preferred model is the Jabra (GN Netcom) GN9350. I can talk for hours on one charge of the battery and the sound is crystal-clear. This is especially important for teleclasses, as the quality of the teleclass recording is directly related to the quality of the microphone on your headset. Plus, there is no static or interference from other computer or electrical equipment.

Shop around for these cordless phone headsets, as prices vary. Try a shopping comparison site, like Yahoo Shopping or Shopzilla, to compare prices and find well-rated vendors.

Also be aware that some phone headsets are for Internet-based (PC) phones only, so read the description carefully.

I wanted to share with you some of the office supply items I use — especially those items I use daily (almost hourly) and make my work day easier.

Today’s favorite: Post-It Pop-Up Dispensers.

I’m always losing my small pads of post-it notes. They get lost under other papers, or get pushed behind the desk. Then when I finally clean up my desk, I find a half-dozen of these pads scattered about.

Solution: Dispenser.

These are regular Post-It notes, in a weighted dispenser you can keep on your desk. You purchase special pop-up post-it note paper to put in the dispenser, and whenever you need a Post-It note, there it is! It never falls off the desk and it never gets lost among the papers.

It’s an inexpensive solution to one of life’s little annoyances. You can purchase them at Amazon.com.

A few weeks ago we had a burglary in our office. Among the items they stole were two laptops.

But our data — especially our confidential client information — was safe. Here’s how:

• We don’t keep client credit card information on our computers or in paper anywhere in the office. It’s all kept online in our shopping cart, and it’s only kept online for one day — the day the client’s transaction gets processed through the system. Then it’s cleared out of the cart.
• We keep all client files in a locked drawer or fire-proof safe.
• We burn or shred all client information from inactive clients.
• We don’t keep notes about the client in the computer. Instead, we take all notes manually and keep them locked away with the client files.
• We back up our computers daily to an offsite backup. We use http://www.mozy.com/ (recommended by Consumer Reports), which automatically uploads any new or updated files each night.

There are three things you need to protect against: loss of data because a hard drive fails, loss of data because of theft, and loss of data because of fire or flood. Most people backup their data to an external hard drive or CD. That will protect you if your hard drive fails, but it won’t protect you if your computer gets stolen or burns up in a fire.

We’ve learned some important lessons about office data security through this experience, and you know we’ll write an ebook about it as soon as the dust settles!

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!

For the self-employed, keeping our own (and our customer’s) data secure is a necessary requirement to doing business.

Accoring to this article on MSNBC, “…during the last half of 2006, 93 percent of all targeted attacks were aimed at home machines. ID thieves know many of us store sensitive data, such as banking information, on our computers. They also know we often get careless when it comes to security.”

Here are some questions to ask yourself:

1. Do you store bank or credit card information on your PC (either your own or your clients’)?
2. Do you store login IDs and passwords on your PC?
3. Do you have any software in place to help prevent identity theft?
4. Are you aware of the common identity theft scams?
5. If you store bank or credit card information, or login IDs and passwords, on paper, do you have this paper locked up? How do you dispose of this paper?

I suggest you read the above article, as well as listen to John Gontowicz’s teleclass on identity theft and the self employed:

http://www.passionforbusiness.com/teleclass/john-gontowicz.htm

If you’re like me, you’re always looking for a word. Now there’s a website that makes looking up words in a Thesaurus so much more fun and interactive!

http://www.visualthesaurus.com/