Top 10 Women Bloggers to Follow

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Some are cheeky. Some are all business. One is off the charts (and not for the kids!). All are awesome, interesting women who have built a following for their businesses through great writing and building community. We’ve talked about a few a lot and some are probably brand new to our TVLAI readers. They are all great role models in the online business world. Enjoy!

1. Pam Slim. Pam has been highly touted here on TVLAI.com. She is an entrepreneur’s coach and a successful author. Here is one of my favorite posts about selling yourself.

2. Penelope Trunk. If you are a 30-something pursuing a career or entrepreneurial startup, it is hard to beat Penelope and her Brazen Careerist site. Here is a great sample of her advice and work.

3. Danielle LaPorte. Danielle and her “White Hot Truth” have become incredibly popular. She is also a business, entrepreneur coach and so popular that when she announced her “firestarter sessions” were going from $300/hr to $500/hr in 2010, she booked at the $300/hr rate for the rest of the year! Check out this awesome post.

4. Naomi Dunford. Naomi writes for all folks who run an “itty biz”, a really small niche business. With information on search engine optimization and general online marketing, she has superior content and e-courses available on her blog. She was also selected as one of the Top 30 Bloggers to Watch in 2010 by ProBlogger.

5. Carolyn Elefant (along with Susan Cartier Liebel) are the two cheerleaders for solo practicing lawyers. Carolyn writes killer content on her blog at MyShingle.com.

6. Lea Woodward. Lea, along with her husband, started Location Independent, a blog and site for virtual workers who travel the world. Highly motivating content if you want to break free and live a much more mobile, independent lifestyle.

7. Gina Trapini. Gina was the founding editor of the incredibly popular Lifehacker.com and wrote Upgrade Your Life . She has since spun out on her own and mostly writes about tech issues (impressions of the just announced iPad here).

8. Gwen Bell is really popular in the social media world, especially on Twitter. She writes on using this type of media in business effectively, is a yoga guru and excellent blogger. She is currently working on a media campaign for HP.

9. Arianna Huffington. Yes, this liberal powerhouse still writes for The Huffington Post which has grown huger than huge and is usually in the top 3-5 blogs most read blogs in Technorati’s Top 100. Interestingly enough, she’s been writing about sleep as well. You can read one of her posts about what she says should be the next feminist issue.  

10. The Bloggess. Oh ladies. She is handful but she says all of those things we wish we could. This one is for fun and to give you a laugh out loud break in your day. If you’ve ever ever been ready to kill at the movies, this post is for you. (It is NOT G-rated). She also writes a parenting column for a major paper.

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Improve Your Business By Sleeping

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Sleep

Image by via Flickr

Full disclosure: I don’t get enough sleep and I do it erratically, sometimes working at 3 or 4 in the morning on a project. No one expects me to do this. I do it because I can and because it beats tossing and turning when I can’t sleep. Entrepreneurs have busy minds, thinking up ideas, scanning the horizons for new opportunities. It can be hard to shut down. But ample sleep is important for your own peace of mind and for your business.

How much sleep is constantly debated but generally 7-8 hours of uninterrupted sleep is important for your average adult’s functioning. Continued lack of sleep can cause confusion, irritability (not good when working with clients!) and declining health.

Adequate sleep is the fuel of calm creativity, crucial to developing and growing your business relationships. There are some easy steps to increasing the quantity and improving the quality of your sleep:

1. TRY to keep a schedule. Your body knows when to wind down if you teach it to.

2. Establish rituals. If you’ve set 11pm as your “lights off” hour, start at 10pm with a warm bath, a novel and some soft music. No stimulants like TV or business books at bedtime!

3. Keep your bedroom as cool and clutter-free as possible. It’s better to have a cooler air temperature and more blankets than warm air and a messy bedroom does not engender sleep.

4. If you cannot sleep, do not get up. Give yourself 30 minutes and then turn on the lights and read in bed some more. Avoid getting up.

5. Many people are able to sleep better with a machine ( has apps for this!) or a fan to block out street and house noises. If there is too much light, get improved window coverings or try a sleep mask.

Let’s make a pact, you and I, to getting consistent and better sleep this year!

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Making the Most of Google Reader

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There are a variety of web readers but my favorite is Google Reader. Along with a zillion other online productivity tools, Google’s reader provides me with a “one-stop spot” for reading web content that I’ve subscribed to. If you are bookmarking blogs these days that you never get around to reading and you aren’t using a reader, here are a few reasons to try Google’s and how to get the most out of it.

Adding subscriptions to blogs/sites is a breeze. Simply type in the URL of most blogs into the “Add Subscription” field and you are set. You can organize your blogs by category just like you do documents in folders. If you are on a page with an RSS feed button, click on it and Google is one of your options.

What I like most is I get a main page that shows snippets of the 3 most current posts from my blogs. I can scan through quickly to see what is of interest or need to me. You can always return to it by selecting Home. And you can mark posts as “read” so they don’t show up again.

As a social add, you can share your Reader list with friends (or the general public) and you can also add notations and point things out to them. You can browse other users of Google Reader and see what they are reading. And you can *star* your favorite posts to refer back to.

If you’ve shared stories or posts with the public, you can create a public page that connects with your Google Profile (if you don’t have one yet, I recommend you set one up because it is fast and easy and another way to develop your brand). It looks like a snazzy Web site and you can create a designated URL for it. Finally, you can create a widget to embed on your existing web site/blog of your suggested stories.

Google Reader also has statistics that allows you to track what sites you read most, etc. I haven’t found that particularly useful. If you are a power reader, you might. Oh, by the way, the Google Reader app for smart phones is pretty sweet and user friendly.

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Saturday’s Success Story: Suzy Prudden

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I came across a great article on Entrepreneur.com about Suzy Prudden, whose face I recognized but whose name I did not. She’s had quite a life and offers many lessons for business people and entrepreneurs. Starting off as a fitness trainer out of her own, Suzy has seen serious financial ups and downs (which included being homeless and out of work), mostly based on youth and inexperience. She transformed herself into a motivational speaker, reaping praise from folks like Deepak Chopra and Oprah.

At 22, with a new baby on the way and a husband in school she needed an income and started doing fitness training from home. Soon she spun this into a full-fledged fitness company which she owned for 18 years before selling it in 1983. She started giving workshops, which she sold cheaply to gain a following and to brand herself as a speaker on mind-body connections. She’s now written 13 books, and is acknowledged as a leader in holistic mental/physical health.

What I particularly loved about the article and Prudden herself is her succinct advice for individuals interested in starting a business. This from Entrepreneur.com:

  1. Have a business plan: “I actually for the first time ever have a business plan,” she says. “I’ve never had one before. I just had an idea and did it.”She’s now working with business coach Bobbie Leonard. “She looks at all the things I’ve done and she said she doesn’t understand why I’m not more successful in the world.”

    Prudden knows why: “It’s because I don’t plan, I just do.”

     

  2. Find people to help you. “Getting a business coach is paramount,” she says. “A lot of us think we have to do it ourselves. We think we have to know everything. We don’t know everything. There are people who know much more than we do, and we need to get hold of them.”
     
  3. Make sure you have money. “I suggest people keep their day job or make sure they have some kind of income. If you don’t have money, it’s too hard.”
     
  4. Go for it. “Now is the best time to start a business because everybody’s a mess. The playing field is more even. And if you can make a business successful at a time like now, then you’ve got it made when things start turning around.”
     
  5. Make sure you fill a need. “When you start a business, you have to look at what is needed, not necessarily what you want to do. People get a good idea, and they think everyone wants it. You’ve got to find out if they want it before you take it out there.”

For pulling herself up and following her own series of dreams, Suzy Prudden is our Saturday Success Story!

 

 

 

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Getting 2010 Organized!

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It is still January and I think many of us made the resolution to “be more organized” for 2010. Organizing your personal information is important, of course, but we’ll address your business documentation here. However, many of these services and tips will work for home!

Pixily is a service a friend of mine has signed up for. There are a variety of plans but I’ll tell you about the one she signed up for because she is a solopreneur without tons of paperwork to deal with. Pixily is a document scanning service that lets you send in your paperwork and they will scan and store it for you and then send the hard copies back. For $14.95 they will scan and store 50 pages which includes a prepaid mailer and return mail. Monthly storage for up to 1000 of these scanned pages is $4.95. So, she is having them scan ALL of her existing necessary paperwork and store it. If she needs more than the initial $14.95 she will request another envelope. Then she can access anything she needs from “the cloud”.

Some of you will have concerns about privacy and safety of the hard copies. She isn’t sending anything like a birth certificate or other crucial documents and isn’t worried about the other stuff. She wants that pile of paper GONE and doesn’t have the time to scan it on her flat-bed scanner.

Google’s new “Gdrive”. It isn’t really called this but a little advertised new Google feature that is rolling out over the next several weeks will allow you to store a ton of stuff on Google Docs. Not just documents but music, photos and more. You can read about it in detail here but if you are looking for an incredibly affordable offline storage site, this might be the spot for you. You get 1GB of storage free (if you convert documents into Google Docs formats it is unlimited) and then it is 25 CENTS per Gigabyte per year. This means 20GB for $5 per year(remember when computer hard drives were 1GB?)! Individual files need to be 250MB or less.

Finally for an ongoing resource for all things organization, head over to Unclutterer.com (prepared to spend awhile at first because there is a lot going on). There are great categories like Paper, Workspace of the Week and Cable Clutter to get you started. The site has a very active forum, as well, where you can connect with other people for suggestions and input on your particular organizational demon.

Photo courtesy of Unclutterer

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Saturday’s (Super Cool) Success Story

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You gotta give it to this guy. Jason Sadler developed a business idea that allows him to get paid for getting dressed. He’s been all over the media (literally: check this Press link) which he undoubtedly works harder at than his actual business model.

Businesses pay Jason to wear their t-shirt. He is a walking billboard. The model was brilliantly simple. On Day 1, his body costs the company $1 to advertise. Day 2, $2. Day 364? $364. So companies bid to get in early when his advertising (and the subsequent wealth of media exposure) is still low. He only wears the shirt for one day, but if he happens to be on CBS with Katie Couric, your “ad” could be seen by millions of viewers-for a buck. Even if he doesn’t get on a national show in your shirt, he still posts photos all over social media networks and on his site.

2009 sold out. So, he got a buddy to work Los Angeles while he continues to work his original spot of Jacksonville, Florida. 2 Guys to Wear Your Shirt. Guess what? Today is January 15, 2010. There are only 60 days in 2010 left to buy!

The income off of wearing the shirts comes to (in case you were trying to work out an Excel formula) $66,795. But there is more advertising on the site and you can be sure a book must be in the works. And they have a store that sells I Wear Your Shirt t-shirts. The guy is smart.

Jason, and now Evan, really understand self-promotion, relationship marketing and personal branding (sort of). So for picking a business model you gotta love, they are our Saturday Success Story!

 

 

 

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Top 10 Business Blogs to Follow

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Readers, we scoured the Internet for you, investigating what big wigs like Forbes and Inc.com consider the best business blogs (particularly small business) in cyberspace and tossing in one or two of our personal choices. Here is TVLAI.com’s definitive list!

1. Chris Brogan. Chris is one of the leading experts in social media so if you want to get the low-down on how to use it and how it’s changing, this is the blog to read.

2. UnMarketing. Scott Stratten is a leading proponent of relationship marketing, clearly following in the footsteps of Seth Godin. Learn how marketing is done these days through this entertaining and informative blog.

3. The Entrepreneurial Mind. Dr. Jeff Cornwall’s in-depth, ongoing study of all things “entrepreneur”.

4. AllBusiness Bloggers (owned by Dunn and Bradstreet) is a clearing house of nothing but business bloggers, breaking them down into sub-categories like human resources, home-based business and women in business bloggers. GREAT resource!

5. Mashable. Mashable bills itself as “The Social Media Guide” but it has really turned into a news repository for all things online, including small business, mobile apps, money and finance and more. Follow the whole Google versus China story here.

6. TechCrunch. For all things technology and technology news, this is your place.

7. CalculatedRISK. A fast mover on Technorati, CalculatedRISK covers finance, the economy and housing markets. 

8. Small Business Trends. Pretty much what it says!

9. Small Business Brief is a news aggregating service for all things “small business”. The site gathers news and categorizes under topics like entrepreneurship, finance and legal and marketing.

10. Tied for 10th place are some of our favorites: IttyBiz, Escape from Cubicle Nation, Career Renegade and Copyblogger.

 

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How Are YOU Marketing Your Online Business?

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Whether you have a real office or a bricks and mortar store, you have undoubtedly moved part of your business, at least your advertising, onto the Web. But are you making the most of the Internet and the wide variety of ways you can market your real or virtual business? Probably not. Let’s recap a few for you.

An interactive Web page. Throwing up a website with no place to “sign up for more information”, “subscribe to our newsletter”, “subscribe to this blog” feature is like pasting a print ad in the paper. It is old news. You must have some type of call to action to cause your customers to interact with you.

A blog. Yes, we’ve said it before and we’ll say it again. Blogs give web crawlers a much larger variety of ways to find you. TVLAI gets huge traffic through its blog that it wouldn’t another way.

Video. Adding video to your website or creating and actively using your YouTube account to speak directly to your customers creates a relationship early on. Additionally, rumor has it that webcrawlers like video more than text and are more likely to place your search engine ranking hire than if you didn’t have it.

A Facebook fan page with a link to join on your site. This allows you to interact in discussion forums with your customers and “fans”. Free to do or you can promote it inexpensively through FB advertising.

A free information product of some type. We have 5 Things You Should Know Before Hiring a Virtual Assistant

on our home page. Read Free by Chris Anderson for more information on engaging customers with free, valuable content.

So, are you still advertising in the Yellow Pages (great post from Scott Scratten of UnMarketing about that here) or considering a billboard ad? Reconsider other ways to spend that advertising buck.

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Saturday’s (Legal) Success Story: Karen Stewart

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Divorce is an obviously unhappy event (though many people jump for joy when it’s over!). But you add insult to injury by employing a rabid divorce attorney which can take things from sad to evil. Karen Stewart felt there ought to be a better way and, in exploring that, built one of the fastest growing and most respected franchises around: Fairway Divorce.

Interestingly enough, Stewart saw the implications of divorce from a financial perspective, not a legal one. She was a financial advisor and not an attorney when she started considering starting the company. Of course, her own difficult divorce was also a key motivator. She wanted to offer a holistic approach to ending a marriage and has succeeded. Fairway Divorce offers financial and parenting counseling and legal advising during seminars. Much of the approach is through mediation in an attempt to end the marriage fairly and peacefully. Both parties must sign up through Fairway and they are charged a flat-fee.

Stewart began her business journey by doing extensive market research after her divorce which led to the book  Clean Break: How to Divorce with Dignity and Move On with Your Life, branding herself as an expert in non-traditional divorce. She started Fairway Divorce in Canada but franchises are opening all over the United States and the company has received praise from many corners.

For my entrepreneur readers, you should know that Stewart raised $2 million through private investors, has done heavy marketing (including online via her blog), she snagged the COO from 1-800-Got-Junk to help with media and did not promise a profit until 2010, four years after the first franchise opened.

We’ve all either been through or witnessed a painful, acrimonious divorce so here is to Karen Stewart and Fairway Divorce for trying to do it in a kinder, gentler way.

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10 Worthwhile Charities to Donate To

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Its a new year and we are all planning our personal and business strategies for 2010. Let’s not forget those organizations and people who are striving to pursue missions greater than our own. Here are our Top Ten picks for worthwhile charities to consider getting involved in.

1. Doctors Without Borders. This organizations mission is built around doctors and nurses assisting “people whose survival is threatened by violence, neglect, or catastrophe.”  Founded in 1971, it cares for individuals across racial, political and religious borders.

2. Skip1.org. I love this concept! You sign up and skip something (morning coffee, magazine, lunch, shoes?) and donate the amount to this organization. You can set your account up to routinely skip or you can do it spontaneously. The tie in makes it feel better somehow, don’t you think?

3. Heifer International. Hard to imagine that the purchase of a cow, goat or a few chickens can save a family’s life in another country, but it can. Through the sale of milk or eggs to other families, it can sustain them both financially and nutritionally. Heifer International has built their cause around caring for one family at a time.

4. Kiva. See how microcredit lending charities are helping in developing countries in this great article.

5. Make it Right NOLA is the charity supported by Brad Pitt in building sustainable, hurricane-resistant, stylish housing in damaged parts of New Orleans.

6. The One Campaign. Fighting global poverty and AIDS, with Bono as their spokesperson, this is one of the most visible, well-promoted charities. Working with artists to create unique t-shirt designs as fund raisers as well as famous musicians and actors, this organization strives to hold world leaders accountable to commitments and make them aware of needs around the world.

7. Women for Women International. Thanks Oprah for pointing out this powerful sister supported charity!

Animal Society and Sanctuary.

9. Leave No Veterans Behind helps war veterans with their education debt. Featured on Oprah, it is a way to support and reward those who have served in the US Armed Forces.

10. Global Colors is both an educational and support charity for global concerns. Founded by an amazing man, Barton Brooks, Global Colors is a guerilla aid movement. The photo above is of Barton via Word To Your Mother.

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