Self Employed Success

I’ve posted nine new articles about mastermind groups on The Success Alliance website:

• Why Mastermind Group Guidelines Matter
• Getting Your Group to Set and Keep Goals
• Inviting Guest Speakers to Your Group
• Great Books for Mastermind Groups to Read Together
• 10 Reasons Why Mastermind Groups Fail
• Staying Connected Between Mastermind Meetings
• Start With a Core Group Then Build From There
• How Many Members Should Be In a Mastermind Group?
•  Mastermind For 90 Days

I hope you enjoy these articles and find them helpful with your own mastermind group!

http://www.thesuccessalliance.com/articles.html

Your pricing strategy should reflect your worth and what the market will bear for your skill level and type of service.

Research the average fees for your type of business so that you know your prices are in line with expectation. If you can’t get competitor pricing information, try Brenner Books. If your experience warrants it, increase your pricing to reflect your higher skills, knowledge and experience. If you’re not sure how to create a pricing strategy, research it online or talk with a small business consultant or mentor.

If you know you need to raise your fees but don’t know how, or you’re feeling uncomfortable doing so, read my article How To Raise Your Fees.

Mastermind groups are a great way to get the support and brainstorming you need to be successful in your personal and business life. We have created a Mastermind Group Finder so that you can research all the free and fee mastermind groups looking for new members.

Read our description of what a Mastermind Group is and is not, so that you can be sure these types of groups are right for you.

I saw a great blog post today that I think you’ll find helpful:

Social Media Marketing- The Top 20 Social Media Sites that Can Impact Your Traffic

Does it seem like stamp prices just increased in the USA a few short months ago? They did, in May 2008.

Stamp prices are set to increase again on May 11, 2009, from .42 to .44 for a letter. As more and more small business owners use email, the United States Postal Service (USPS) is taking a beating and their revenues are heading downward each year. To offset this, the USPS announced a stamp price increase — and you will see one every May, I suspect.

Also, the postcard stamp will increase 1 cent, and the first ounce of “large envelope” mail increases 5 cents. Lots of businesses use postcards for marketing, and large envelopes to send out proposals, contracts, etc.

Last year I announced the stamp price increase for 2008, and encouraged you to start thinking of electronic products versus paperback books and audio CDs. I followed my own advice and converted nearly every product I sell to downloadable  (PDF for ebooks, MP3 for audios). Despite the obvious file-sharing concerns, I’ve been very happy with my choice. My customers tell me they are happy as well, as they appreciate the instant access to ebooks and MP3 audios instead of waiting for a mail delivery.

As always, there is a bit of good news: you can still buy the USPS “Forever Stamp” at .42 until May 11 and use it anytime in the future to mail a letter, even if stamp prices increase. Count your blessings.

Rant: The one thing I can’t understand is this: if the USPS is losing money, why are there FIVE post offices in my area within a ten mile stretch of road? And I live in the countryside, where the population is minimal. Can’t they combine office and reduce costs? (I’ll get off my soap box now…)

Did you know that your laptop, cell phone charger, computer monitor, and printer can draw electricity, even when they’re not turned on? This is also true of items around your home: your television, cable TV box, and other power tools. This is called Phantom Power, or sometimes Phantom Energy or Standby Power.

When some electrical items are plugged into a socket, they pull electricity even when they’re not turned on. This wastes electricity and increases your electric bill but doesn’t benefit you at all.

Discovery.com has a great article entitled “Save Energy by Avoiding Phantom Power” that is very helpful and includes links to other Green Living articles. They say that phantom power can account for as much as 10% of the electricity an office or home uses. Wow!

Here’s what we’ve done in our office to reduce the amount of phantom energy drawn:

1. Put all items that draw phantom energy, like our laser printers, computer speakers, and computer monitors on a power strip, which we turn off each night.
2. Unplug items we don’t use every day, like cell phone chargers.
3. Pay attention when recharging items like laptops, and remove them from the charger when the battery is full (instead of leaving it on charge all night).
4. Turn off items when not in use. For instance, I use my laser printer all the time, but only use my color printer occasionally. Why pull power for a color printer that I use once a week?
5. Always look for energy-saving devices when replacing an item.

Here’s the key with running a Green Office: all these little items DO add up to big savings and a decrease on natural resources. It’s worth doing.

No, it’s not “spring cleaning” time, but if you’re like me, you’re constantly looking for ways of de-cluttering your office. Do you have an old filing cabinet or computer you want to get rid of? Consider giving it away for free.

The FreeCycle Network is a group of people assisting each other to give away any item for free (instead of it ending up in a landfill). Here’s the FreeCycle description from their website:

The Freecycle Network™ is made up of 4,581 groups with 5,690,000 members across the globe. It’s a grassroots and entirely nonprofit movement of people who are giving (& getting) stuff for free in their own towns. It’s all about reuse and keeping good stuff out of landfills. Each local group is moderated by a local volunteer (them’s good people). Membership is free.

Failure. No one likes to talk about it. And when we do talk about it, we like to feel there is some deeper meaning or learning in every business failure we have. I suppose it helps us to feel that we didn’t go through a bad time in vain.

Barry Moltz’s new book, Bounce!, talks about failure in a different way. Gone are the platitude, replaced by the practical notion that failure is part of every growing business, neither to be praised as a “learning experience” nor to be bashed as something to be ashamed of.

Instead Motlz sees failure as a way to build strength and confidence. Failure isn’t the opposite of success, it’s a step along the path to success. So knowing and expecting some level of failure allows you to take more risks because you learn resiliency along the way…not from your successes, but from your failures. Once you develop resiliency, you have the confidence to take even more risks and try even more big ideas because you know you can bounce back from them if they don’t go well.

And Moltz should know: he’s had his fair share of failures before he rose to his current level of success, and he talks about them proudly and without shame. Bravo!

There’s a new website in town and it’s going to clear your desk forever. Catalog Choice is a free website that helps you to remove yourself from paper catalog mailing lists.

If you’re like me, January seems to be the month to declutter the office, file away those piles of paper, and generally clean up to start a new year. After the onslaught of paper catalogs from the December holiday season, now is a good time to get off the mailing list from catalogs you no longer want. Catalog Choice allows you to use your identification number from the back of each catalog, then they contact the catalog company and have you removed from the list. And it’s a free service!

Clean your desk AND preserve the environment. Can it get any better than that?

Hackers, spammers and virus creators have come up with another way to infect your computer: Google Poisoning.

By using “black hat” SEO techniques, they are able to get high organic listings in the Google search engine for websites that are infected with a virus. When you click onto these sites, your computer becomes infected.

To learn how to avoid this, see this Red Tape Chronicles article.