6 Tips on Running a Home Based Business
A lovely rose garden leads to the entrance of Creative Juices.
Running your business at home sounds great. I started my business in 1981 out of my parents home. From there I moved my office several times. From store fronts to industrial parks, then to an office building and now my own home.
Too Many Distractions
I love working at home. The commute is very easy. I work off my living room in what once was a one car garage. Two glass French Doors lead off the driveway into the office. A blanket of rose bushes guide the way. In Spring and Summer it’s quite beautiful.
It also means lots of distractions. It’s easy to take a few minutes to prune the roses and pull a few weeds. My Chihuahua loves to sleep on my lap, preventing me from moving.
Occasionally my two foster boys, ages 5 and 7, are home from school with lots of needs.
Then there’s laundry, cleaning, mail, dog walks etc. It’s not easy to keep your mind focused on actual work.
How to Get Work Done
So here’s my suggestions for working at home and staying on track.
- Set aside a dedicated workspace. Having your own room would be ideal. If not, create a little nook somewhere.
- Start and stop work at specific times. Give yourself a schedule and stick to it.
- Turn off the TV and iPad. You’re there to work, not play.
- Take a break (after several hours of working, of course). Walk around the block and clear your head.
- Tell the neighbors, children, dog, cat that you are not to be disturbed when you’re “on the clock”.
- Only answer your business phone. Forget the telemarketers on your home phone (if you still have one).
Easy peasy. Feel free to share your tips too.
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5 Simple Ways to Achieve Amazing Small Business Success
Image courtesy of Ohmega1982 / FreeDigitalPhotos.net
Running a small business is an art. You have to trust your instincts and use your talents to achieve success.
It takes a lot of hard work, research and study. Never give up on your dreams.
I’ve been running Creative Juices for over 32 years. It never gets easier. In fact, with today’s economy and the changing field of graphic design, it is a daily challenge to stay up to date and relevant.
That is why I am constantly reading and studying the news for anything related to social media marketing and changes in technology for website design and function.
Here are five simple ways you can increase your chances for business success:
- Engage the readers of your website with a variety of content. Make sure it’s helpful and useful.
- Try using pictures, polls, tips, facts or even videos in your social media mix.
- Sign up with all the social media you can keep up with. Try Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn as the minimum.
- Give great customer service and you will retain your customers. And they’ll tell their friends.
- Keep your website current and active. You want customers to keep coming back for more.
For Email Newsletters you can trust
Check out the following articles. They will help you reach your goals of business success.
Facebook Marketing: Why Less Is More
7 Ways to Beef Up Your Sales Strategy
5 Ways Small Businesses Get Social Media Wrong
The 10 Commandments of Using Pinterest for Business (Infographic)
How to Take Charge of your Business Success
It’s not easy running your own business. Especially if you’re doing it by yourself, like me. Don’t let your business run itself into the ground. Take Charge.
One way to do that is by checking out what other people are saying about your business. Whether good or bad, it’s important to know where you stand. Then you can act upon that information.
Check out the following link for online reputation management tips.
4 Online Reputation Management Tips for 2012
Also catch up on the latest articles from Mashable.
Mashable Weekend Recap: 36 Stories You May Have Missed
Thanksgiving-Eve Marketing News You Can Use
Thanksgiving is a time to be grateful for what you have. It’s also a good time to work on getting more… business that is.
Here are some helpful business marketing articles I’ve found interesting:
Measuring Offline Vs. Online Word-of-Mouth Marketing
Five New Online Tools for Finding Local Customers
Social Media: 4 Simple Principles To Convert the Harshest Critics
The Lede: 7 Writing and Marketing Links You Don’t Want to Miss
If you use WordPress to design your own website, checkout Premise:
Get Premise Ultimate for only $95.
Copyblogger Media just released version 1.2 of their Premise landing page software for WordPress, and it includes lots of cool new features and refinements.
Most impressive of all is the introduction of an innovative 8th landing page type — the social sharing page.
Premise Ultimate usually goes for $165, as it gives you:
1. All the landing pages you can build
2. Use on as many domains as you want
3. Access to ongoing optimization seminars
4. Copywriting advice from inside WordPress
5. 1,100+ custom graphics by Rafal
6. Unlimited technical support
7. Unlimited updates (you’ll thank yourself for this next year)
During their Thanksgiving sale, you can get Premise Ultimate for only $95. Yes, really.
Just use the code THANKS when you check out and you’ll save $70 on the best landing page software available for WordPress.
This deal ends promptly at 7:00 pm Pacific time on Monday, November 28, 2011. Hurry up and get Premise Ultimate before they come to their senses!
Helpful Articles with Marketing Tips for the Holidays
The holidays are upon us. It’s never too late to improve your business. Here are a series of articles I found that relate to helping you and your business succeed.
I regularly check out RSS feeds from Entrepreneur Magazine and other business related sites. Topics will range from running your business to marketing, social media, website design and blogging.
Check back often to my blog. You never know what you will find.
Enjoy reading these articles this Thanksgiving week.
Seven Easy Tweaks to Turn Your Site into a Holiday Sales Machine
Brian Solis on Five Common Social Media Mistakes and How to Avoid Them
More Small Businesses Extol the Benefits of Social Media
Social Media and Content Marketing
How to Create a Google+ Business Page
I believe blogging is an excellent way to increase traffic to your business website. The following books can help.
5 Good Kindle Books For New Blog Owners
Why not buy yourself or someone you love a Kindle Touch for the holidays.
9 Tips on Promoting Your Business for the Holidays
Halloween is almost here. Do you have your costume yet? How about plans to escape trick or treaters?
Most importantly, what are your plans for promoting your products and services for the all important holiday season?
Here are some tips to get your name out there this holiday season.
- Blog about how your product, service, or industry will help your clients/readers.
- E-mail your newsletter with tips related to your products or services. Try Constant Contact or MailChimp for a simple email solution.
- Update your website with specials. Make sure these specials will really benefit your customers and not just you. Explain how these benefits will help your customers.
- Add testimonials to your product pages. Don’t make them up, though.
- Use Twitter to build buzz.
- Create a contest or auction and promote it regularly.
- Set up a Facebook business page with fun facts and tips.
- Spread the word on LinkedIn to reach more businesses.
- Advertise online using Google’s AdWords or FaceBook Ads. You can set how much you want to spend. Make sure your ads go to optimized landing pages.
Be sure to read the following for more information:
5 Holiday Marketing Ideas to Boost Sales
Top 5 Online Holiday Shopping Tips for Marketers
What are you planning to do to promote your business?
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You Must Promote Your Business Daily
Promoting your business should be your main focus on a daily basis. It’s not easy, especially if you are like me, a small entrepreneur with many hats to wear. (I wear my hats to keep warm, and pay the bills.)
I am constantly reading all the latest news feeds on marketing and sales, content creation and social media. Everything changes daily and it’s often difficult to catch up. I take my iPhone with me to the gym and read my Google RSS news feed while climbing the StairMaster at Ballys. Most evenings I scan the news feeds on my iPad while relaxing to mindless TV shows and playing toss with Lucy, my Chihuahua.
As part of my desire to provide helpful content to small businesses who are reading my exciting and very useful blog, I will be adding links to what I feel are helpful marketing and business advice on a regular basis.
Check these out.
- 3 Ways to Use Twitter to More Deeply Engage Influential Prospects
- 5 Steps to Small Business Public Relations Success
- 61 New Media Resources from Mashable
- How to Thrive, Not Just Survive
- 4 Ways to Protect the Reputation of your Small Business Online
What do you do to promote your business? Spread the word here. Don’t forget to follow me on Facebook. Oh, and sign up for my newsletter. It’s there in the sidebar. Do it now. Please.
The Ultimate Guide to Free Fonts Online
In the beginning, there was Compugraphic
Once upon a time, in the late 1970′s, I used to run a typesetting machine. It was an old Compugraphic Imagewriter, a blue electronic box with a typewriting keyboard and a display screen consisting of a single line of type. The type was all caps. A simple arrow let you know if the type was in lower or upper case.
To typeset a job you had to visualize the entire layout in your head. Or you could sketch it out, if you were so inclined. And here’s the fun part, every time you wanted to change the font, you had to open the machine and change a film strip. Each font was on a different film strip, which had to be carefully attached to a roller of sorts. And they were expensive.
What you got was all there was
Even more fun, there was no memory beyond what you were currently working on. As soon as you set the machine to process the text to film or photo paper, it was gone. Yes, GONE.
Once a job was printed out it could be pasted up on a job board, using hot wax. Corrections and changes had to be entirely re-typed and pasted up.
Typesetting was a sought after specialty
For graphic design companies this was great news. It meant few people would be able to design, typeset and create their own ads, flyers, forms, brochures, business cards, etc. When you wanted these products you would visit the printer or graphic arts studio.
Today, free templates seem to be everywhere
Times have changed. Now all you have to do is turn on your iMac or similar PC type machine, select any one of hundreds or thousands of free templates and “create” your own, unique artwork. Changes are easily made and printing is at a touch of a button. Just remember, though. Free is not always better. If you truly want a professional, unique website, logo or design project, call Chuck at 310-791-5803. Just saying.
What is a font?
The dictionary describes a font as “a set of type of one particular face and size”.
Fonts are a breeze. Hundreds are included free with almost any program and thousands are available online, also for free. Just search and download.
Here are just some of my favorite places for finding free type fonts. Most have Windows and Mac versions.
When using free fonts make sure you read the licensing agreements. A lot of these fonts are available for personal, not commercial use.
The very popular Doris Day font
Everybody loves Doris Day. The 1950s was a great time. Business was booming, as were babies. I was born in that era. Relive the nostalgia of the 1950s with a perky script font that says Doris Day.
Download the Free Doris Day font here (for both Mac and PC).
A boatload of other free typefaces
Daily Free Fonts The free font archive (TTF fonts for free and cool fonts)!
Famous Fonts Lot of famous fonts from TV, Movies, Music, Publications, Games, Companies, Automobiles, Sports and more.
Fontspace Free fonts from designers around the world.
MadTuts Fonts and inspiration for designers.
SearchFreeFonts The name says it all.
Urban Fonts Lots of free fonts for your use.
dafonts A great collection of free fonts covering many themes.
1001 Free Fonts You’ll never run out of fonts at this site.
Let me know if you have a favorite free font website.
Sign up for our free Juicy Newsletter. Look for lots of fun, useful and fabulous tips on graphic design, marketing and business.
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How to Make Money Online in 5 Easy Steps
I have been a graphic designer and writer for over 30 years. Creative Juices was born in 1981. And in spite of the changing design field with the introduction of e-lectronics and computers, starting a business of any kind takes lots of hard work and perseverance. But with that said…
Starting your own online business is as easy as starting a blog.
This will not make you rich overnight, unless you get lucky. But you can bring in extra cash with a little effort by following these 5 simple steps.
- Start a blog in a niche you love. Make sure it is something you’re passionate about. I highly recommend using WordPress.org to create your blog. Because it’s self hosted you have complete control.
- Create unique, killer content. By killer I mean highly relevant and helpful content that people will search out and read.
- Sign up with Google for their free analytics, AdSense and keyword tools.
- Apply for affiliate programs like LinkShare or Commission Junction and sell other people’s products by placing ads on your site or reviewing products.
- Create your own products or services and sell it on your site and through affiliate programs. This could be anything from eBooks to T-shirts. Also check out Zazzle and Cafe Press to create products for sale. It’s free to sign up.
See how easy that was? Again, you will not make millions doing this. But some people have been know to make six figures a year with their online businesses.
If you have any ideas on making money online the easy way, let me know.
And don’t forget to sign up for my semi-regular newsletter for fun and helpful tips on marketing your new and small business, online or otherwise.
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Easy AdSense is Reset When You Install New Themes
The Easy AdSense Plugin for WordPresss is a great way to add your AdSense code to your self-hosted WordPress site. It’s easy to use and is often updated. You just need to generate the code first with your Google AdSense account and copy and paste it into the plugin.
Changing themes could wipe out your AdSense codes.
If you use the Easy AdSense Plugin and change or update your WordPress theme, the Easy AdSense Plugin returns to default settings and erases all your codes.
It’s important that you check on this. Failure to do so could result in lost income.
At least that has been my experience when using Artisteer 3.0 for the Mac to create my themes. I have not attempted to test this with other themes and would welcome other people’s experiences.
The only thing to do if this happens is to go back into your AdSense account and copy and paste all the original codes again. This would be a great time to update your AdSense ads if they’re not performing well.
#1 WordPress Theme Generator. Instantly create great looking and professional WordPress Themes.
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