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?

I don’t think it’s about the time at all, I think it’s about how we manage ourselves.  My friend, Pam Vaccaro (www.designsontime.com) says it best, “It’s about your focus!”

I know from my own experience, making a few simple changes have made a HUGE impact on my effectiveness, and stress levels.   I tried several different options and settled on the system that worked for me.

One of my biggest faux pas was thinking multi-tasking was a good thing.  I would work on a client document while I was running another client’s color postcards on my laser jet and another project on my copier, only to find that somewhere along the line the copier jammed, or the laser jet ran out of ink, and I was overwhelmed trying to juggle them all.  I don’t believe our brains work that way.  Since I stopped multi-tasking, I get so much more done, and feel more energized and effective.

I’ve also been guilty of creating a sense of urgency where one may not exist, or not being clear with a client who gives me an unreasonable deadline.  Since I’ve taken back that control, managing time is much simpler.  By increasing my level of communication, I also avoid having to spend time solving problems.  They just simply don’t exist.

I also try and be more aware of the time I’m spending on non-income generating Emails.  That was very difficult for me since a lot of my client projects and communication come through Email.   I used to cringe when I’d look at my watch only to find I’d spent several hours going through social media or volunteer Emails that didn’t need to be handled right away.

I now have a basic kitchen timer on my desk and allow myself a specific amount of time, at the beginning of the day, and at the end of the day, to handle these Emails.  My life feels so much more organized now, it’s truly amazing how these few simple changes have made a profound impact on the way I manage my time.

So give several of these options a try or come up with a few of your own, and see if you can’t transition your focus to better manage your time.  And remember to enjoy your life to the fullest; it’s not JUST about business!

Jeannine Clontz, IVAA CVA, MVA, EthicsChecked™, owner of Accurate Business Services is a Virtual Assistant (VA). ABS provides ‘as needed’ marketing and social media support, training and consulting to busy entrepreneurs. Clontz is a writer, author, VA Coach, and speaker on business topics including business ethics. For her FREE 10-Step Guide to Finding the Right VA, or herFREE Report, Social Media Marketing Benefits, visit: http://www.accbizsvcs.com. Find out more at www.VAbizcoach.com or her book website http://www.entrepreneurialfreedom.com

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Email marketing has become an acceptable option for marketing a business.  It allows you to stay connected to current and prospective clients and provides ways to grow your business and build a loyal following. As a viable and low-cost part of your marketing plan, it plays a big role as a method by which you can distribute, advertise, and promote various types of communication to a wide range of recipients.

Through a targeted email marketing approach you may tailor or personalize your message to your specific audience or niche. In marketing terms, this is called segmentation.

The advantages to using an email marketing strategy to promote your business are many, such as: low cost as compared to traditional mailing costs, the speed at which your message is delivered, and the ability for recipients to forward the message to others who may also be interested. Moreover, email marketing software allows you to track results of your communications, allowing you to evaluate your success and enhance your messages through your statistical insights.

While there are multiple advantages, keep in mind that email marketing is intended to be an enhancement to your other marketing activities. For example, it may be used to lead your prospects to your website, which should be designed to process sales, while your email marketing campaign will highlight the benefits of your offerings and encourage prospects to make a purchase. Your website should also be the focus of other online marketing strategies such as search engine optimization (SEO), pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, and article marketing. Email marketing allows you to enhance all your marketing efforts and encourages customers to patronize your business and become loyal fans.

Always remember when implementing an email marketing campaign do not overdo it, one of the downsides or disadvantages of email marketing. If you’re sending emails to thousands of people every other day, they’re going to get tired of hearing from you and either delete them or opt out of your mailing list, which will potentially cost you a lot of business. The last thing you want to do is irritate your subscribers by making them feel they’ve been tricked into signing up for something they didn’t actually want.

Email marketing is a very valuable tool to supplement your marketing strategies while giving you an additional method to keep in touch with your customers and prospects to build a loyal following.

Jeannine Clontz, IVAA CVA, MVA, EthicsChecked™, owner of Accurate Business Services is a Virtual Assistant (VA).  ABS provides ‘as needed marketing and social media support, training and consulting to busy entrepreneurs.  Clontz is a writer, author, VA Coach, and speaker on business topics including business ethics. For her free 10-Step Guide to Finding the Right VA, or her FREE Report, Social Media Marketing Benefits, send a request to: service@accbizsvcs.com or visit: http://www.accbizsvcs.com, www.VAbizcoach.com or her book website http://www.entrepreneurialfreedom.com

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Did that title give you pause?  Many people struggle to answer this question.  Sometimes referred to as your elevator speech, or infomercial, having a smooth and easy to understand response will really go far in helping people to know who you are and what you have to offer.

Here are five things to consider in crafting your 60-second infomercial:

1. Who is your target market?  While I can open my informercial by saying, “although I have clients in almost every industry…” – you still want to focus on your niche or target market to help people think of who they know that could benefit from your services.  If you’re still not sure, analyze your current client list and see if there is a particular industry, or type of client that seems most logical to your offerings.
2. What problems does your target market have that you can solve?  Keep it simple.  Come up with one or two things – don’t overdo it – less is more!
3. How do you solve these problems?  Again, don’t come up with a laundry list of products/services, just enough to whet the appetite so they’ll want to find out more.
4. Mention something specific that speaks to results, like: ‘many of my clients say their sales increased at least 20% as a result of working with us’.
5. End with either a memorable tagline, or a question – like – ‘is that something that might be of interest to you or someone you know?’

Once you have it setup, print it out and practice it (and time yourself) several times until you have it pretty well memorized.  You don’t want to come off sounding too scripted, but you will need to get comfortable with all the aspects so that you’re sure to hit all the points you need to in your time allotment.

Once you have this mastered, you will want to cut the content even more, for a true elevator speech – which is usually only 30-seconds in length.

Finally, especially if you attend networking events regularly, you will want to have several different versions for answering the questions numbered two, three, and four above.  This gives people the opportunity to hear more about the additional services/products you provide.  If you only talk about one specific product or service, they’ll believe that’s all you offer and you could be leaving potential sales on the table.

With a little bit of work, and practice, you’ll have the perfect 60-second infomercial that helps people immediately recognize what it is you do, and who they need to refer to you.  Word of mouth marketing is the most cost-effective way to market your business.  The infomercial is the best tool to close the sale!

Jeannine Clontz, IVAA CVA, MVA,  EthicsChecked™, owner of Accurate Business Services is a Virtual Assistant (VA).  ABS provides ‘as needed’ marketing support and consulting to busy entrepreneurs.  Clontz is a writer, author, VA Coach, and speaker on business topics including business ethics. For her free 10-Step Guide to Finding the Right VA, or her FREE Report, Social Media Marketing Benefits, visit:  http://www.accbizsvcs.com, www.VAbizcoach.com or her book website http://www.entrepreneurialfreedom.com

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Using an eZine (Electronic Newsletter) as a part of your overall Internet Marketing plan can be a powerful way to achieve your marketing goals. Less experienced marketers commit a number of common mistakes that may cause your targeted list to opt-out.  Here are several common mistakes to avoid in your eZine campaign.

1) Sending Out Promotions Rather than News

All Internet marketing, including your eZine, should focus on building long-lasting relationships with your subscribers over time. If your eZine message is consistently aimed at prompting an immediate sale, you’ll find a steady stream of subscribers opting out.

To build a loyal following, design your eZine campaign to provide content and resources that will help spark interest in your product or service by subtly providing them with topics that show the benefits of your offerings.  For example, if you’re a business coach, sharing information that your target market could benefit from, will quickly show them you are an expert in this field. This will eventually lead to a positive action on their part, i.e. contacting you for professional business coaching.

2) Not Focusing on Subscribers

When organizing your eZine campaign, provide relevant and up-to-date content written in a way that speaks to your subscriber’s needs, never on your business offerings. People don’t care much about what your business can do for them, but what they can gain by building a relationship with you, that may ultimately lead to working together.  Using our coaching example above, sending valuable resources and information about challenges your ideal client may face would be better than just an announcement about your next program. By providing relevant content in a timely manner, subscribers are more likely to be loyal to your eZine campaign.

3) Making it Difficult to Opt Out

Your eZine success is not driven by the number of subscribers on your list.  The quality, not the quantity of your subscribers is far more important.  Making it difficult for people to unsubscribe can potentially lead to disaster.  Beyond annoying and alienating potential prospects, it will be more difficult to track your eZine results.  Allowing people to easily unsubscribe keeps your reputation intact and allows you to achieve optimum response rates.

It is perfectly understandable for you to want to make the most out of your eZine campaign as quickly as possible, but don’t let that allow you to defeat its entire purpose. Realize that it takes some time for eZine marketing to produce optimum results by making sure it’s implemented correctly. To keep you focused on the desired result, avoid these mistakes that eZine marketers often commit when running their Internet campaign.

Jeannine Clontz, IVAA CVA, MVA, EthicsChecked™, owner of Accurate Business Services is a Virtual Assistant (VA).  ABS provides ‘as needed’ marketing and social media support, training and consulting to busy entrepreneurs.  Clontz is a writer, author, VA Coach, and speaker on business topics including business ethics. For her free 10-Step Guide to Finding the Right VA, or her FREE Report, Social Media Marketing Benefits, send a request to:  service@accbizsvcs.com or visit:  http://www.accbizsvcs.com, www.VAbizcoach.com or her book website http://www.entrepreneurialfreedom.com

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Many people struggle to answer this question.  Sometimes referred to as your elevator speech, or infomercial, having a smooth and easy to understand response will really go far in helping people to know who you are and what you have to offer.

Here are five things to consider in crafting your 60-second infomercial:

1. Who is your target market?  While I can open my infomercial by saying, “although I have clients in almost every industry…” – you still want to focus on your niche or target market to help people think of who they know that could benefit from your services.  If you’re still not sure, analyze your current client list and see if there is a particular industry, or type of client that seems most logical to your offerings.
2. What problems does your target market have that you can solve?  Keep it simple.  Come up with one or two things – don’t overdo it – less is more!
3. How do you solve these problems?  Again, don’t come up with a laundry list of products/services, just enough to whet the appetite so they’ll want to find out more.
4. Mention something specific that speaks to results, like: ‘many of my clients say their sales increased at least 20% as a result of working with us’.
5. End with either a memorable tagline, or a question – like – ‘is that something that might be of interest to you or someone you know?’

Once you have it setup, print it out and practice it (and time yourself) several times until you have it pretty well memorized.  You don’t want to come off sounding too scripted, but you will need to get comfortable with all the aspects so that you’re sure to hit all the points you need to in your time allotment.

Once you have this mastered, you will want to cut the content even more, for a true elevator speech – which is usually only 30-seconds in length.

Finally, especially if you attend networking events regularly, you will want to have several different versions for answering the questions numbered two, three, and four above.  This gives people the opportunity to hear more about the additional services/products you provide.  If you only talk about one specific product or service, they’ll believe that’s all you offer and you could be leaving potential sales on the table.

With a little bit of work, and practice, you’ll have the perfect 60-second infomercial that helps people immediately recognize what it is you do, and who they need to refer to you.  Word of mouth marketing is the most cost-effective way to market your business.  The infomercial is the best tool to close the sale!

Jeannine Clontz, owner of Accurate Business Services, a VA practice, is an author, writer, speaker and VA Business Coach specializing in providing professional business coaching to established and start-up virtual assistants (VA’s).  For her FREE audio CD “What’s Holding Back my Business Success?” or a 2-month trial in her group coaching program visit: http://www.VAbizcoach.com; or contact her at: coach@VAbizcoach.com.

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Hello, my favorite geeky gyrls! This is my first post here at GeekGyrls.com and I thought I’d start out with a new monthly feature of the best geeky tips and toys that I come across so you too can be an early adopter. I’ll strive to compile my own personal geeky finds and spare you the drudgery of hunting them down yourselves. I’ll highlight gadgets, online services and tips on using some of our most valued tools in our business and life. If you ever come across something truly geeky and would like me to include it, feel free to pop me a direct message at Twitter (I’m @VirtuAllin) or let us know in the comments. And on with the geeky show!

As an entrepreneur, keeping up to date on a broad spectrum of information is critical to staying competitive in today’s business climate. I need to know what challenges my potential clients face, what tools are available to them, how others are succeeding and more. Most of us gain this valuable insight through subscription to blogs using RSS feeds. If you need to know more about RSS, check out this cute and informative YouTube video from commoncraft.

So, I love me some RSS. Paired with my need to take in all that great information is my need to push it right back out to my social network. As you know, social networking for entrepreneurs especially is a vital element to growing your brand and establishing yourself as an authority in your field. Two of the most popular ways of sharing this type of information is by using  Twitter and/or Facebook to push the best and brightest blog posts and news items out to your list of friends/followers.

Now, what has all of this got to do with my favorite geeky tech toys? Exactly this – I’m going to tell you how I accomplish all of the above with some really fantastic time-saving toys. If you’re anything like me, you’ll adore these and will quickly find you can’t live without them.

RSS Reading and Social Sharing

Some of you may already be using Google Reader to keep up with your RSS feeds. Google reader is decidedly simple yet very usable, it’s free and thanks to a flexible system, quite a comprehensive web-based RSS feed reader.

But to take that power and multiply it by 1000 productivity points, you need Feedly. Feedly not only organizes your Google Reader feeds into a beautiful, clean categorized layout but easily allows you to share the best of the best feeds with other Google Reader friends, Twitter, Facebook and much more! Feedly is a Firefox extension, so if you’re still using Internet Explorer (what???) you may want to make a switch.

Feedly also offers the Feedly mini, a fantastic and powerful tiny toolbar that allows you to recommend any and all web pages you happen to discover – on to your community. It also shows you how many conversations that web page or blog post might have sparked up over on Friendfeed.

One of my favorite features in Feedly is the ‘latest’ tab, which displays the posts of the blogs you’re subscribed to as they’re published. This lets you read and share the hottest and most interesting stuff before everyone else. The first person to post hot news on Twitter is often the one that gets the most ‘RTs’ or ‘Re-Tweets’ and thus more visibility for your brand.

Another fantastic feature is the ‘Karma’ tab. Karma is Feedly’s latest experiment that shows you how people react to the content you’re sharing – how many times your peers clicked a link in something you shared, how many times it was re-tweeted and more!

I won’t go into each and every feature of Feedly here, but I highly recommend you check out my post about Feedly and Louis Gray’s terrific Feedly post and start using Feedly A.S.A.P. I just know you’ll love it! Let us know what you think and clue us in on some of your favorite geeky finds in the comments! Thanks!

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To say that I’ve been stressed out this year, would be a huge understatement, sometimes though.. you just have to laugh. Many of you know, I run 2 Minutes With A VA and sometimes the recording don’t always go as plan…

To set this up, I was at my desk (off of the kitchen). My husband, Tom, was in the kitchen and someone was working on the roof. I don’t know why I thought I could do a video without distractions… listen out for my darling husband’s commentary as I mess up around the :35 mark…

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Everyone is talking about social media marketing.  All of my clients and the leads I receive call me telling me that they need, want and have to have a blog, Twitter, Facebook, etc.  They don’t know why…they just know they do because everyone’s talking about it and everyone’s doing it.

So I get a barrage of phone calls and emails saying “I need it but why do I need it?” Some people get it, some people kinda get it and some people – you know – get that glazed over look in their eyes where they’re thinking “crazy marketing girl say what?“

If you’ve been struggling to wrap your head around social networking, this video by Perry Belcher on Social Media Marketing will definitely be helpful!

If you want to save half an hour to an hour of unbillable time (not to mention your sanity) explaining social media marketing to people over and over again, then definitely put this video into your toolbox for explaining to clients what it’s all about and why it’s so dang important! 

Okay, here’s the parental advisory – I think there’s one “bad word” Perry drops in this video…nothing you haven’t heard before and not bad for a 10 minute video actually – I probably would of had more slip than just one – however, just in case there are kids in the room or in ear shot, be advised. Other than that – this dude is freakin’ hilarious and makes me giggle while clearly explaining social networking in a way we can all grasp.

If you can’t see the video below, click here.   (also look below the video for some great book resources on social media marketing!)

By the way, here are a couple of fabulous books over on Amazon that I recommend on Social Media Marketing.

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Wordpress is a wonderful platform for not only your blog, but for your business as well. It has  great built-in features that are perfect for marketing and SEO. I love the idea that my website and blog are completely cohesive in style and navigation. The sidebar area is a great place to display content you’ve contributed to other sites. All this leads to some of the best and easiest social marketing strategies you can implement. Plus, it’s all wrapped up in a nice little package you call your business website.

A short time ago I switched my business website from an HTML static site to using the Wordpress platform. Along the way I did a ton of research on working with Wordpress, SEO strategies and tips, Wordpress hacks, and Wordpress plugins etc. If you’re a user of a self-hosted Wordpress blog, you know what it’s like to get plugin fever! I did finally settle on about 21 of them (although there’s one more I have my eye on).

Now that the project is done, I can finally sit back, relax, and enjoy a little “me” time.

Here’s my list of fav Wordpress plugins and why:

1) Akismet – protection from comment spam.
2) Add to Any: Share/Save/Bookmark Button – to help readers spread the word.
3) All in One SEO Pack – for great SEO features for your blog and pages.
4) cforms – for a tremendous variety of forms you can put on your blog site.
5) Comment Reply Notification – so people commenting can be notified on a blog thread they are interested in following.
6) Excerpt Editor 1.2 (not 1.3…that one broke my rss feed when using the auto-generate feature)- to keep the search engines from penalizing you for having duplicate content on the same site.
7) FeedBurner FeedSmith – so I can run my rss feed through Feedburner and get kickin’ stats and promotional features.
8 ) Google XML Sitemaps – to help search engines move about my blog more easily and find all the pages.
9) KB Countdown Widget – a fun widget to create countdowns to anything.
10) NextGEN Gallery – the best photo gallery plugin I’ve ever seen.
11) Redirection – to help redirect readers to other pages outside of my blog site.
12) RSS Footer – to create automated signature, info, and backlinks on the RSS feed page (not to be confused with creating automated signatures on blog posts – that plugin is #21).
13) Simple Tags – love automatically having my tags become my meta keywords.
14) Widget Logic – This was my best find ever! Control what widgets show up on what pages on your site. Most helpful if you’re using Wordpress as your site+blog.
15) WordPress Database Backup – automatically back up my database files.
16) WP-Polls – to put polls on your site for a bit of interaction with readers.
17) Dean’s Permalinks Migration – safely change your permalink structure without breaking the old links to your website, and doesn’t hurt your google pagerank.
18) Google Analytics for WordPress – so you can see how traffic is coming in…and all the other cool stuff that Google Analytics does for you.
19) HeadSpace2 – another great SEO plugin I’ve always wanted to try out.
20) Powerpress by blubrry – to easily integrate video and audio podcasts into my blog sites.
21) Add Sig – to automatically add a signature, keywords, backlinks to every post.

Wow, that’s a lot! It was amazing what I learned when I was moving my website to a Wordpress platform. There are so many great plugins and so many people that have posted info on working with Wordpress. It was quite the learning experience. Thank goodness for free-flowing information.

Andrea Kalli

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Alexandria Brown is the Ezine Queen.  I’ve been reading Ali’s newsletters for years not only because it’s a fun read but because I learn something new from almost every newsletter that I can apply to my own business to help generate leads or make sales.  Her knowledge is infinite in how to promote your business online via newsletters and marketing.

Boost Business with your Own Ezine is an impressive resource chock full of of information and resources that teaches you step by step how to develop, distribute and market an ezine to build your business, build your subscriber base and market the hell out of your products and services.

Visit Ali’s products page and check out some very cool tools she offers to help you make money online with your business.

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