Standing Out

If any of you are like me, you start off the day with SO MUCH TIME. You know - plenty of time to drink coffee slowly, visit MySpace a few times, read forwarded email nonsense a bit…just taking it easy. This relaxed attitude may last until lunch, or even for a bit after lunch.

But at the end of the day, whatever time that may be for you, you notice a crunch. Suddenly (yes, suddenly) there is so much to do!! And what’s worse is that you have this mentality (or it could just be reality) that you’ve got to get it all done NOW.

I know the feeling quite well. I had the feeling when I didn’t work from home and I still have the feeling now, while working from home. For some reason, whenever you’ve got something else to do other than work, the work just seems to pile on you, right?
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It started out as a “sick” Sunday. I know that tonsillitis is coming on (I’ve had it many times before) so I stayed home from church to rest. That’s how it started out. My baby son and I stayed in bed until a ridiculous hour of the morning which I will not confess out loud, and then decided to have a go at the day.

We did the usual - eat, play, sing, chill out, etc. Then I caught some time to myself as he took a snooze. That’s when Marketing Mania Day began its onset.

It started out when I decided to build out my new Linkshare program (Join B2B LinkShare Now!) which I actually found when browsing a competitor’s website (you can find really interesting things while browsing competitor’s websites…). I was creating links to add to my page and found a really great one for Vertical Response. Well, I decided that not only did I want to promote them on my website and earn money, I wanted to use them, too.

VR offers some really cool tools for direct marketing and e-mail marketing. I had already decided that I wanted to send out a launch e-mail to my “circle of influence”. VR’s tools just made it way easier. Instead of having to send a huge, mass e-mail from my webmail account that wouldn’t look so nice anyway since I can’t create cool-looking HTML e-mails with it, I was able to use VR’s e-mail marketing tool to make this amazing launch e-mail to send to my friends and family. I am so pleased with it! (If you want to find out more about it, click here.)

But anyway, the real point of this blog is to discuss circles of influence. I really had no idea that I had contact information for as many people as I do. At the end of the day, I had over 150 bonafide e-mail addresses of real family and friends to contact regarding my new business. That number will either seem small or large to you depending on how much you use and believe in circle of influence. If you had asked me how large my circle was prior to today, I would have guesstimated somewhere around 20 or 25. Obviously it is much larger than I thought. Why? Because I never looked! I never really looked into it until today.

How did I look into it? Well, this isn’t a how-to article but maybe one day I’ll write one. All I did was go to my contacts list in gmail and export it! I was shocked to see just how many “contacts” I actually had. After cleaning it up a bit and removing people I don’t consider part of my circle of influence, I ended up with somewhere in the 150s and that was darn good enough for a great launch.

Thus, I created a tres chic Pass-It-On campaign letter in which I simply asked those in my circle to pass on the news of my new business to someone in their circle who could use it. In effect, I was asking my friends and family to do me a favor by doing a favor for a small business owner that they knew, because I truly believe that my services can help small business owners. It was an earnest request that I know will have excellent results.

So I used my circle of influence today and I’m so proud of that. These are the types of activities that separate the small business wheat from the small business chaff. Seriously. I got a boost of self-confidence today from something so small - sending an email!

There you have it, folks. Everyday you can do something to take a step in the direction of increasing your small business’s value. Even on Sick Sunday!

or not to work from home, that’s the question!

Working from home. Seems ideal, doesn’t it? Waking up, sending out e-mails over breakfast… modifying a website while watching “The View”… responding to quote requests while burping the baby. Well, recently I’ve had cause to wonder if working from home actually ISN’T the ideal everyone says it is.

Especially when your children are at home. And that’s the perfect reason to stay home, right? For the kids? It depends. If your children are very young, like my son, they need constant attention or looking-after. It’s quite difficult to look after a baby or toddler while working.

So that got me thinking and thus the reason for this blog. Maybe working from home isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. I would gladly get a sitter just to get four hours of worktime to myself. But then, what would be the real point behind working from home, right? Ugh. Such a dilemma!

Even before I had a child, working from home didn’t usually work out the way I wanted to. I found that at work, I had a routine that seemed to be more productive than my at home routine. I went into work, got coffee, talked to colleagues, cleared my desk, etc. I found that at home, I was so easily distracted by the television, or the mess and clutter, or the neighbors’ dogs, or the FedEx guy, or whatever.

I know that there are people who find working from home awesome and amazing. If you’re out there, drop me a line or suggest a URL to an article that discusses how best to work from home. I’d appreciate it!

Til then… be successful, be blessed, and be happy!

Tia