Starting and growing a successful business isn’t easy. You need to surround yourself with like-minded people. And that means people who encourage and support you in starting and maintaining a business. As hard as this is to say, you may have to minimize connections with family and friends who are not supportive of you in a positive [...]

If you’ve been in business for any amount of time, you know that this is not easy. There’s no immediate success without very hard work. You have to really want to have your own business, and want it badly. You need to be totally committed to doing what’s necessary to make your business work. It also may mean [...]

As a Virtual Assistance Coach I’ve learned there are some people who are not coachable. They simply don’t understand the concept, or don’t have enough business acumen to understand how they might benefit from such a relationship. Two clients recently signed up for my 12-week one-on-one program; we’ll call them Debbie and Claire. Each had been in [...]

I’m Paying it Forward to Thank Everyone for Being a Coaching Client! Thanks so much to everyone who took advantage of my BOGO, One-on-One 30-minute coaching session special.  I really enjoyed connecting with so many of you and helping you work on your businesses.  To pay-it-forward, during the month of July, I’m offering a FREE [...]

Many of the virtual assistants I coach tell me they either don’t do any marketing, or do ‘some’, but nothing consistently. This is especially surprising to me for VAs who promote themselves as Internet Marketing Virtual Assistants.  There are some great resources available to you from well respected and established virtual assistants in our industry, some [...]

We all have the same amount of time to expend each and every day, so why does it seem like some people have mastered their time better than others? As Virtual Assistants I think we struggle with this quite a bit.   I don’t think it’s about the time at all, I think it’s about how [...]

To continue our discussion of the advantages of article marketing to promote your business, we look at some immediate benefits. Carrying your name across the Internet can also give you some excellent reputational benefits. To build your reputation, focus the resource box more on you and less on a target website that you want people to [...]

Last week we looked at how utilizing Twitter in small businesses can save marketing dollars, expand your customer base, and manage and increase your ability to build relationships. In this final segment, we look at additional ways Twitter allows small business to reap big rewards. Feedback loop   Small businesses rarely conduct market surveys due to [...]

According to research released recently by O2, the mobile phone provider (“Small Businesses are Catching Twitter Bug,” Richard Tyler, The Telegraph, 16 March 2009), almost one in five small businesses now tweet regularly. Although the larger, multinational firms were the first to jump on the Twitter bandwagon, increasing numbers of small to medium sized businesses [...]