Im so excited today is the daybook launch day for How the Fierce Handle Fear. One of my favorite clients ever is Janet Slack of Solopreneur.biz and she is one of the co-authors of this fabulous book!
In addition to Janet Slack, you will get the wisdom of:
Andrea J. Lee Donald Trump Sandie Glass Sophfronia Scott Howard Kay and many others
Youve probably heard from me already about How the Fierce Handle Fear: Secrets to Succeeding in Challenging Times, I’ve written blog posts and tweets about how it’s helped my life. The best part is if you purchase the book within the next 24 hours, youll get a powerful free bonus. (And did I tell you that the proceeds from the book go to charity?)
These are challenging times and I really believe that your ability to handle fear is one of the most important skills you can master. This book of the best ideas of 22 amazing experts will help with exactly that whether the issue is little scary moments or the big, mind-numbing fearful events.
http://www.HowtheFierceHandleFear.com
Now, heres the offer good for today only:
If you buy your copy of How the Fierce Handle Fear from Amazon.com within the next 24 hours you’ll also get exclusive access to the complete audio collection of the groundbreaking “Fearless Fridays Telesummit”. This was the recent event featuring over 30 amazing speakers offering their best tips on handling fear.
Just go to http://www.HowtheFierceHandleFear.com for details on how to get the recordings and other bonuses.
The proceeds from the book sales will go to Frank McKinneys Caring House Project Fund which provides needed help to the desperately poor and homeless throughout the world.
I would love for you to share this link with your family and friends. Getting a grip on fear will help us all to move out of these challenging times and on to the better ones ahead.
Build Trust: Give Something Away for Free
Your relationship with your client is one of both necessity and pleasure. You need clients to stay in business. And hopefully, you enjoy connecting with your clients. To build a good rapport and maintain trust, it takes a plan and ongoing strategies for success. Here are a few ideas you can use to build and maintain a positive relationship with your clients.
Communicate with them often. Now maybe you already do this. Maybe your customers receive regular emails from you. However, what you say in these emails is important. If each and every email you send is a promotion or asking for a sale then theyre going to stop reading your emails pretty darn quickly. Theyre going to lose trust in you.
On the other hand, if your email communications are chock full of valuable information, value, and benefit then youre building trust. Customers will look forward to our information.
The same goes for social networking. You can communicate with your customers on a regular basis. Instead of posting promo link after promo link, post real, human interactions.
Prove youre worth trusting. If you are a service provider then its imperative to post samples of your work on your website. And if youre a service provider, retailer or even an information marketer or affiliate marketer you can provide case studies to demonstrate the value of your products or services. This provides credibility and it makes it easier to trust you as a provider and business owner.
Give away things for free. Free can be used as a marketing and relationship building tactic on many levels. For new prospects you build trust by providing valuable information and free downloadable information. For current customers, they love freebies too. You can give away reports, videos, and ebooks . You can even take it a step further and give current customers a coupon or freebie.
For example, current customers can be offered a free report as a loyalty thank you. You can even start a loyalty program that awards customers with points or dollars they can use toward future purchases.
Be Transparent. Transparency is a word thats thrown around a lot lately. It essentially means that you dont hide any of your polices or procedures. Youre 100% up front about who you are and what youre about. This may mean making sure you have a double opt in for your email signup, a privacy statement thats easy to find, contact information and even a FAQ page. Transparency helps customers and clients trust you.
Show gratitude. Depending on the size of your client base and the nature of your business, ending clients and customers a personal message is a great way to build rapport. Send cards and gifts during the holidays if it fits your budget. Or just send a note now and again with some helpful information.
There are many ways to build rapport and trust with your clients. Begin by taking a look at y our clients and what you can do for them. Then set about to create an ongoing plan to connect and build trust. A little planning and action can go a long way to creating a business that is successful today and ten years from now.
The WordPress Thesis Theme is one of the favorites among site owners with minimal technical knowledge. Basically, it makes it easier to change your site without knowing PHP or even HTML.
There are many themes to choose from. Here are five reasons you might want to use the thesis theme:
Ease of use
This is a great platform that allows you to have a good-looking site with minimal technical know-how. It is easy to change, no matter how little knowledge you have.
It contains a panel on the side that enables you to alter the theme without the need to change the code. If you want to make more advanced alterations, you might need to know some PHP and HTML. However, for most changes this isnt necessary. Its much more customizable than the free themes.
And even more complex jobs are relatively simple. You might have to change the code a little, but when compared with other themes, it’s not hard.
Just be cautious. You still have to know what you are doing. While this theme is simple to use, like any theme its possible to mess things up if you get reckless. For this reason, take time and read online instructions about working with thesis theme before you start experimenting.
Inexpensive
The thesis theme will run you $87 dollars to use it on a single site, and $164 for multiple sites. Considering how easy it is to use, this is very reasonable. Its certainly pricier than some themes out there, but the quality more than makes up for it.
Support
The main site has a responsive support forum. Should you run into any difficulties, your question will be answered very quickly. The main developer, Chris Pearson, even answers the questions himself on occasion. This is one of the main selling points of this theme.
Instructions
As mentioned before, there are sites online that have in-depth instructions on how to use it. This isn’t the case with a lot of themes. This makes using it much simpler than one of the lesser-known themes.
SEO friendly
One of the big benefits of this theme is that it is easily optimized for SEO. The code is not complex, which means the site is much more likely to get ranked than other themes. Uncluttered code is always well liked by the search engines.
Some bloggers have reported an increase in traffic largely from using this theme. Its not magic, so you cant expect to just install it and see instant results. However, it certainly wont hurt your efforts, like some of the free themes.
The bottom line is, the WordPress Thesis Theme is one of the better ones out there. if you are looking for an easy to use theme that is relatively affordable, look no further.
I went to Raincamp Boston on Monday. I highly recommend that everyone go to the one in their area. Sure, it’s Real Estate specific but I learned so much there. Ben Kinney is so knowledgeable about how to use social media to get business. Although my brain was fried at the end of the day, Ben gave us many ideas that could be implemented immediately. If you want your site to come up when people are searching for what you sell, then you should implement these strategies too.
The first thing I did when I got home is went to my site and added titles and descriptions to every page. My site is built on the WordPress platform which gives my site an advantage because many SEO (search engine optimization) strategies are already built into it, and the ones that aren’t built-in are easy to add. Not that you can’t SEO a site built in HTML – but because WordPress is actually a blog, it has the advantage of built-in changing content. It’s less work for me to maintain it.
I then added titles to all the links in my pages – not any titles. I used keywords. When you create links here on ActiveRain, they ask you for a title. The title is not the word that you are linking, it’s the word that you believe people will type into a search engine so that your post pops up first.
Oh, most important about keywords, when choosing a keyword, try to get very specific: ie if you are writing about Worcester real estate, using the keywords (key-phrase) “WordPress blogs” is probably too broad and there’s too much competition. They may type in “how to SEO my blog” though. That is called The Long Tail, just to give you the technical term.
Now, on each page and when writing a blog post you should use your Long tail key-phrase at the beginning (in the title) and also at the end of each article, then once or twice in the middle of the article. Ben suggests 2-3 times for every 100 words that you write. A typical blog post is 300-500 words long. Any more often would be considered spamming the search engines.
Of course the most important SEO strategy is to write good content. Write for your reader first, the search engines second.
Another tip you can implement easily is to get other sites linking to yours. I use blogsearch.google.com to find other blogs to comment on. Since I am a WordPress expert, I look for blogs that write about WordPress. Oh, do not leave your URL (web address) in the post. WordPress is set up so that your name is linked to your site automatically. Leaving your URL is considered spam in the outside world.
I can go on and on with more SEO Strategies that you can implement right now, but I don’t want to leave you in overwhelm so I’ll save some strategies for later posts.
I use Dreamhost for my web host. I signed up with them about 3 years ago. I only chose them because I had found a coupon code on the internet that gave me $97 off of my first year of hosting. That meant I only had to pay around $21 for an entire year.
Once I purchased my hosting I found out that I get a free domain name for the entire time that I am with them. So I purchased a second domain name – crystalpina.com. Domains are cheap, but it’s pretty cool that they offer that.
Dreamhost doesn’t come with phone support but they answer their emails almost immediately. Not only do they answer the email, they go above and beyond to make sure that my support question is resolved. Since I help people set up their blogs, I’ve needed support a bit more often than the average web host user. I’ve gotten the same fast response every time.
In the 3 years I’ve been with Dreamhost my site has never gone down.
Dreamhost also offers 2 extra tidbits that make using them pretty enticing. First, you can set Dreamhost to automatically upgrade your blog when an upgrade comes out. Second, you can backup up to 50GB of files from your computer to their Backup User area. Ok, that’s not a whole lot of space, but it’s a lot more than the free 2Gs offered by Mozy and DropBox.
If you are interested in hosting with Dreamhost, use the coupon code VISIONS for $50 off your first year of hosting.
You may have noticed some changes around here. Not the blog, but to the site. I have another project in the works. You asked for WordPress training. I am giving it to you.
Mark your calendars. The grand opening of the new WordPress training site is March 1st from 7-9pm. I’m working on getting prizes. Anyone want to donate, the target market is virtual assistants and entrepreneurs who want to maintain their own blogs.
During the grand opening call, I will show you around the site and introduce you to what it has to offer. It’s what you’ve been asking for!
Details will follow.
To listen, scroll to the bottom of this post. Just for you iPod users, AZVAs the Podcast is also found in the podcast directory at the iTunes Store (FREE!). Here’s that link: http://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/blog-looseends-net/id355550315
This episode of AZVAs the Podcast is sponsored by Cuppers Coffee House in Prescott Arizona (pictured below right). Thanks to owner Karen Richmond, for her time and support. (Scroll down to read more about our sponsor.).
Most of this month’s episode was recorded on site at Cuppers charming location in downtown Prescott. Tara and I learned a LOT from this interview about considerations we should all realize when we are using the space, electricity, and wifi at cafes, coffeehouses, and restaurants for business purposes.
You’ll hear the busy background noises of a thriving local business, which we find very inspiring and believe is something to celebrate!
Contents:
Not many people know this, but a cupper is a professional coffee taster. Just as with grapes and wine, you must sample coffee beans for their quality so that you know how to best roast, blend, and brew them. This formal tasting process is called cupping.”
Cuppers Coffee House is named for all those who enjoy the taste of fine coffee. You can grab a copy of the Cuppers menu here.
Karen Richmond, owner (pictured at right), opened the doors of her inviting historic downtown Prescott location in January 2006 and since then has won six awards for Best Coffee and Coffee House in the Prescott area. Though she has worked in several other industries, Cuppers is her true passion, along with traveling, and adopting homeless animals. Karen strongly recommends every person pursue their passions in life.
Karen displays a spirited collection of quotes about coffee on the Cuppers web site. One that sums up Karen’s commitment to coffee excellence is this: “Behind every successful woman is a substantial amount of coffee.”
Cuppers is located at 226 S. Cortez St. in Prescott, AZ. Online: www.cupperscoffee.com Phone: 928.445.1636.
Looking for a great way to get your business info in front of an audience of other small business owners, solopreneurs and VAs? You can be the subject of one of our interviews or sponsor an upcoming month of AZVAs newsletter & podcast? Click here to retrieve the details.
To receive an announcement by email when a new podcast is available, email ktcosmos@LooseEnds.net.
AZVAs the Podcast is produced by two Virtual Assistants (VAs) from Prescott Arizona. Tara Fort, owner of Versatility, provides “Virtual Assistance for the Real World,” and offers a complete range of deadline-driven, expert-level proofreading, copyediting, transcription and social networking services handled and delivered professionally and efficiently. With an eye for detail and a knack for consistency, Versatility will make your project one of perfection and pride. Katie Baird, owner of Loose Ends, harnesses her client’s particular talents and creative energies and provides web and social media support, layout and design services, and project management expertise. Katie is also skilled at bringing diverse groups together, think-tank style, to generate inspired solutions to challenges and discover new opportunities and directions.
Speaking of this, here are links to earlier AZVAs podcasts:
To listen, scroll to the bottom of this post. Just for you iPod users, AZVAs the Podcast is also found in the podcast directory at the iTunes Store (don’t worry, it’s free!). Here’s that link: http://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/blog-looseends-net/id355550315
This episode of AZVAs the Podcast is sponsored by Jeannine Clontz, owner of Accurate Business Services and Your Virtual Assistance Business Coach. (Scroll down to read more about our sponsor.).
Tara and I took this episode’s theme to heart and made sure that portions of it were recorded in numerous locations: her office, my office, a local restaurant, and in Phoenix Arizona. While we were out and about we had a terrific time and hope you’ll enjoy the varied locations, too. Contents:
Jeannine Clontz, has owned her own successful virtual assistance practice since 1998. Shes an author, writer, speaker and VA Business Coach specializing in providing professional business coaching to established and start-up virtual assistants (VAs).
After co-authoring the successful book, Entrepreneurial Freedom: How to Start & Grow a Profitable Virtual Assistance Practice, Clontz began focusing on mentoring VAs. In 2008, she established her VA Coaching practice to reach a larger number of VAs while sharing her valuable insights and coaching expertise to help VAs improve their business success. She is an avid volunteer and has served the International Virtual Assistants Association for more than 10 years, including service as the Associations Board President twice, initially in the 2005-2006 term and again in 2010-2011.
Her no-nonsense approach for helping virtual assistants be accountable to themselves and their businesses has been one of the milestones of her VA coaching success. Whether youre looking for group coaching, one-on-one coaching, her 10-week training course (utilizing Entrepreneurial Freedom), or her products focusing on International business (Going Global) and setting up a Marketing Plan System, Jeannine Clontz, and Your Virtual Assistance Business Coach provide a fresh perspective on your business.
She offers free information and resources through her website: www.VAbizcoach.com, a 2-month trial in her Elite Virtual Assistance Insiders group coaching program, a 1-month trial in her Virtual Assistance Coaching Club, and has an Ask Your VA Business Coach section on her blog, www.vabizcoach.com/blog/ask-your-virtual-assistance-business-coach, where you can get answers to those burning questions.
AZVAs the Podcast is produced by two VAs from Prescott Arizona. Tara Fort, owner of Versatility, provides “Virtual Assistance for the Real World,” and offers a complete range of deadline-driven, expert-level proofreading, copyediting, transcription and social networking services handled and delivered professionally and efficiently. With an eye for detail and a knack for consistency, Versatility will make your project one of perfection and pride. Katie Baird, owner of Loose Ends, harnesses her client’s particular talents and creative energies and provides web and social media support, layout and design services, and project management expertise. Katie is also skilled at bringing diverse groups together, think-tank style, to generate inspired solutions to challenges and discover new opportunities and directions.
Here’s an interview with Tara Fort, Versatility, and myself, recorded by our colleague Candy Beauchamp (the brains behind both “Two Minutes with a VA” and OffAssist) during the recent IVAA Live Summit in Phoenix, in April 2010.
One of Candy’s listeners asked her, “How do you see social media changing the face of conferences and live events?” Thanks for the opportunity, Candy. Watch the interview now!
Candy will answer your questions about the virtual assistance industry, too. Just visit the “2 Minutes With a VA FaceBook” page.
By the way, Tara and I also manage AZVAs a network for entrepreneurs, small biz owners, virtual assistants and other SOHO workers who live and work in the Southwestern US. For more on that, check out AZVAs here, or listen to some of the recent AZVAs podcasts here, now!
Speaking of this, here an article on live blogging while attending an industry event from the Loosely Speaking archives:
Calendar of Events for Bloggers and VAs (send me names of annual events you find invaluable!)
VA Blogs
VA Blogs