I guess I’m an ice cream daredevil.  When I go to the ice cream parlor, I never ask for a pink spoon taste.  I just go ahead and order what seems good — if it isn’t absolutely scrumptious — it is a risk I’m willing to take (besides I don’t really need to be eating ice cream anyway!!)

Buying an ice cream cone don’t require a huge upfront investment of time or money.  Investing in your business is usually a bigger commitment.  How do you know which product or service is the right fit for you?  On the flip side, how to you convince your customers that you are a wise investment.  Enter the pink spoon.  The pink spoon is a simply delicious taste of your services that you give away for free to potential customers.

The concept of the pink spoon is not new in the online marketing community.  Most websites with a mailing list offer you a “free report and newsletter cock full of invaluable tips (worth $97!).    That’s great — and sometimes enough to give people a taste.   But, people have widely differing learning styles and preferences for taking in information.  For example, I actually hate videos — I usually have them play in a different tab in my computer and just listen.  Some people really hate to read.  What if you offered your pink spoon in a variety of flavors (like video and transcript)  to allow you to connect with potential clients with differing learning styles.   My pink spoon  - a video on coming up with your USP offers a video and worksheet exercises.  The exercises can be used by themselves and you can get a lot from the video without working through the exercises.

Some other easy ways of increasing the number of flavors available to your “taste testers”:

Add interactivity.  In my experience, one of the best ways to build up a strong list is to hold a monthly free teleseminar and promote it like crazy.  My clients hesitate on this because they believe that having free teleseminars devalues their paid events. I have found the opposite is true.  Clients with regular free event build up an engaged following that is willing to pay more for their offerings.  Other ways to add interactivity are specifically continuing conversation from your teleseminars using social media  (see this video on how one guru uses his facebook wall to build community).

Record your content These days it is very easy to create audio content. know you better. Potential clients love to hear your voice and get to  One of the easiest ways is to just record your blog posts into audio segments.  AudioAcrobat makes recording audio as simple as picking up the phone and talking (you can also record your teleseminars to use as a freebie later).  If you have an iphone AudioBoo makes it dead simple to make quick recordings and distribute them via Twitter.  Video recording is also easy enough.  You can record your webinar or use Jing to record quick videos from your computer screen or a Kodak zi8 to record quick “talking head” videos”.

Have something to read Sometimes, when I am in stealth mode (watching TV with my family while working on the computer) – I don’t really appreciate audio and video.  It is easy enough to create something to read. You can have your last teleseminar transcribed (not as expensive as you would think), or you can create companion worksheets that give much of the same information – possibly with the addition of some do at home exercises.

What is your current pink spoon?  How can you increase the number of “flavors” it comes in?  Chime in below and let me know.

“Words are more treacherous and powerful than we think” – John Paul Sartre

I’m not ashamed to admit that I am a Harry Potter fan.  One of my favorite parts of story are the silly faux-Latin spells that the young wizards use to work their magic.

Blogus Postus Writus…

Is the post done?  no?  Too bad Harry Potter spells don’t work for Muggle bloggers…

Spells may not work to magically complete blog posts– but word choice is a very powerful internet marketing tool indeed.

Using the “right” keywords in your posts and on your site can help get your information in front of more of your ideal clients. The more people who see what you are up to – -the better chance you have of making a connection.

When I talk to my clients about keywords, the reaction I usually get is either –”what I do is so unique – I wouldn’t even know where to begin to find keywords”  or “I know I should be paying more attention to keywords – but using them seems too complicated to me”.  There is almost an aura of magic and mystery surrounding the whole keyword concept.

It really isn’t magic — and using keywords doesn’t have to be complicated.

The quickest path to keyword success is to use the words in your content that your potential client types into google to find the solution to their problem.

The trouble is… if you’ve been “doing your thing” for quite a while– it is sometimes hard to know (or remember) how someone who isn’t immersed in your topic would describe what you do.

Here are some tips for finding those magic keywords:

1.  Ask A Question One of the most effective ways I have found to elicit keywords from clients is to include a short “ask me a question survey” as part of my opt-in process.  I put the survey either on the “you need to confirm your e-mail address” page or on the thank you page after they’ve confirmed their address.

2.  Get Social Spend some time on social media (reading people’s blogs, twitter, facebook, etc.) – how are people talking about your subject area?  Those are the same words they will use to find you.

3. Use Internet Marketing Ninja Tricks Since keywords are so important – there are tools to help you find what people are actually searching for.   A very good place to start is google’s free keyword tool.  This tool analyzes your website (or a competitors website) and suggests keywords.  It also gives you an idea of how many people are searching for that particular keyword AND how many people are buying pay per click advertising around the term.

Another great tool is Market Samurai.  Market Samurai can give you a bounty of keyword ideas, tell you which words actually translate to more sales, give you a sense of who your competitors are for given keywords, find affiliate programs for you based on specific keywords and more.  I have used Market Samurai for about 6 months.  I find it to be really helpful – even though I feel like I’ve barely scratched the surface of all of its features.  Market Samurai offers a 2 week free trial.

In the end, there is no real magic in keywords.  Listen to your customers and use their language to describe your offerings.

Is Headway really a better and easier way to put together a Word Press-based website? I recently put the   Headway Theme through its paces constructing a site for one of my clients – India Think Consulting.

India Think is a cross-cultural communication consulting firm that helps Americans navigate the often very muddy cultural waters of doing business in India.  IndiaThinks clients are managers from larger corporations who have a lot at stake in making sure that their projects are successful.

Because of the audience, my client wanted the site to look very professional and to be very SEO friendly.  She basically came up with the layout and asked me to implement it for her.  While I can customize themes on a basic level (changing fonts, colors, getting rid of boxes on themes) – I wouldn’t call myself an “advanced” CSS and PHP coder.  Headway allowed me to easily move boxes around and customize different types of pages.

The theme is SEO friendly out of the box – which made my client happy.   We were also able to easily change the layout based on the feedback my client was getting from friends and potential customers.  We moved the site over and saw an immediate spike in traffic.  So far so good…

But… is Headway – really drag and drop simple?  Unfortunately, no.

Designing a site in Headway is a bit like taking up a new hobby with a whole new vocabulary.  You manage “leafs” and “content boxes.  With the IndiaThink site, I did a lot of CSS customizations.  The inspector feature makes it easy enough to do but learning how to call the different classes takes practice.  The controls aren’t exactly intuitive.  But, on the plus side the support in the Headway forum is very good.

There is one quirk that could make Headway a no-go for users of Mailchimp.  In its current incarnation, the Mailchimp subscription box code conflicts with Headway’s visual editor.  There is a MailChimp subscription box widget – but it only allows you to have a subscription box for one list on your blog at a time.

Overall though,  I enjoyed using Headway and my client and I were both happy with the end result.

What have your experiences with Headway been?  Do you like it?  Does it feel easy for you or dumbed down and clunky?

You have a strong but steady virtual assistant practice with a stable client base on retainer.  Why bother keeping statistics for your business? Because you attract what you focus on and keeping metrics allows you to set and see yourself move toward your business goals. Since I’ve started tracking statistics for my business, I have nearly doubled my monthly business income (of course, a lot of that is also marketing and taking on new clients, but without my magic spreadsheet, I wouldn’t have known how much room I actually had in my practice.

Until recently, I was a dyed in the wool member of the non-spreadsheet brigade.  I had a solid virtual assistance practice filled with ideal clients who had me on retainer. Yes, I did lose a few solid clients due to the economy, but my practice was generally humming along. One day though, I noticed that I just wasn’t bringing in as much as I used to.  I decided to track a few key metrics in my practice – hours committed, hours billed, affiliate income and billed income.  Just for kicks, I also added in lines for Send Out Cards, size of my lists, twitter followers and facebook followers.

That is when the magic started to happen. By taking a snapshot of my business and putting it all down in black and white, I could make some strategic decisions about how to grow.  I learned that I had a few clients who had room in their budgets for more virtual assistant hours, so I added new services.  I also discovered that I had room for a few more clients — so I added them.  As a result, my business income has nearly doubled in the past few months.  I like to see the numbers on the spreadsheet going up each month and it is a basic law that empty spaces get filled — by making spaces on my sheet for what I wanted, I was also making room in my business and in my life.

So, to get started, all you need is a simple spreadsheet (or just a piece of paper will work too).  In the first column put the things you would like to track (# of clients, hours billed, etc.), then put your baseline numbers in the next column.  Each month, add a column with the new information for that month.  Here are some things you can track:

* Number of Clients
* Retainer Hours (or committed hours per client)
* Hours actually billed
* Affiliate income (I include Send Out Cards in This)
* Hours subcontracted (if you have an assistant VA)
* Mailing list size
* Twitter followers
* Facebook followers

Add whatever else makes sense for your and your business.  Add new columns each month, track your results and watch your business. grow.

I just read the scariest sales letter ever from Scott Tousignant.

He is promoting his new program the Fat Loss Quickie Home Office Experience.  In the salesletter, Scott quotes study after study that show that excess weight really costs you in terms of productivity and money earned.

When I read the post, I literally pictured a 100lb weight tied to my foot holding me down and keeping me (and my business from taking off).

I think that in a lot of ways,  because I work online and have only met 2 of my clients,  I am at a tiny advantage weight wise.  Would my clients have hired me if we had had a face to face interview — I would like to think so… but I’ll never know.

On the other hand, being at home, close to food and not having to move (even to go down the hall and chat with a colleague) makes it more difficult to lose weight.  I also know that my productivity does suffer because I get tired.   What work-at-home-mom doesn’t — but still I know that the current pounds I’m carrying around can’t be healthy.

Like everyone, I am constantly scrambline for more time and I know that I waste time (who doesn’t).  But, it seems to be that I am usually either on a roll with my business or with my health — but never at the same time.  Yet, I know that in order for either to really take, both need to be in place and functioning (not to mention time for family maintenance, hanging out with my daughter, etc…

So, I signed up for Scott’s challenge,  the price is reasonable and I’m looking for support and ideas from people who are in the same boat that I am.   The Fat Loss Quickie experience promises to help me be more productive because I’m taking better care of myself… I’m all for that (then, again who isn’t).

Do you feel like your weight slows you down?

I love taking quick snapshots like this one with my iphone.  I also love turning my pictures into cards to send to friends and family. (Send Out Cards - a service that makes doing this really easy has literally saved my relationship with my out of town relatives…)

Trouble is, until now, I couldn’t figure out how to make my iphone pics high enough resolution to be turned into cards…

Thanks to this post on Lifehacker, I learned that how to e-mail myself the iphone photos in full resolution (1600×1200 on my iphone 3G — good enough for the card editor)

The trick is to cut the picture and then paste it into an e-mail you send to yourself. You need iphone 3.0 software to do this.

Here are step by step instructions on how to turn those iphone snaps into gorgeous picture cards:

1. Take a picture with your iphone.  For best results – turn the phone sideways so you taking the picture in landscape mode.  If you take the picture in portrait mode – you can always crop it in your favorite photo editor later)

2. Instead of e-mailing the photo to yourself from the camera (which reduces the resolution) – put your finger on the photo itself and leave it there a few seconds, you’ll see a little grey box that says copy.  Touch the box and the photo will get copied.

3. Using the mail application on your iphone – create a message to yourself.  Touch the body of the message. Hold for a few seconds and you’ll get a magnifying glass and then a little box that says paste.  Click the paste box.  Your picture will show up in its high-res glory in your e-mail.  Click Send.

4. Login to your Send Out Cards account. (If you don’t have one but want to try this out — go ahead and go to my account, click on the banner and you’ll get set up for a free trial account (on me! ).

5. Go to Picture Plus on the Main Menu of the Card Editor

6. Upload your photo.  (if it ends up sideways, you need to edit the photo so it is landscape orientation.)

7. Add a caption, borders, whatever and then save the card.

8.  The card will be available in the my cards section of the card editor.

See, wasn’t that easy.  Now you can send all those great shots to those people in your life who appreciate hard copies of photos