Having your own business is the ultimate in power. You totally control your lifestyle when you’re an entrepreneur. It’s your call. You found the power within yourself to get this far – you know you have superior skills; you know you have value; you know you can eventually spend more time with family and friends once you establish [...]

Starting your own business is taking a big risk. The easiest way to manage your risk is by seeking information and looking at the business by analyzing the pros and cons. Keep your expectations high while putting systems in place to guard against the cons.  If you come up with more cons than pros and can’t [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Article marketing on the Internet harnesses the power of the Web and the hunger for written content. Article marketing allows writers to promote themselves, their websites, products or literally anything, by writing about them and making the content freely available for reproduction on other Internet sites and electronic mediums. To use it as a marketing tool [...]

The task of building a list of subscribers for email marketing isn’t too difficult if you already have a website that has engaging content and decent traffic. However, your visitors won’t sign up just because you asked, you need to optimize your site to build your subscriber list without compromising its current focus or making [...]

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 [...]

If you’re one of the 40 million people who enjoyed watching the “Wedding Entrance Dance” on YouTube, you are familiar with the concept of viral videos. In less than six weeks, Jill and Kevin’s wedding entrance had been viewed over 25 million times. No doubt, viral videos can attract a lot of attention and drive [...]