I’ve recently joined another forum (why do I do this??). I must be a forum junkie or something

Anyway, my heart went out to many there who are seeking work online but don’t know where to look, how to start, or what might be real versus a scam.  I posted a very long item on the forum but thought that the information would be useful outside of the forum so it was more public as well. Here seemed a good place to post it.  Your comments are welcome!

Hello everyone, I’m very new here but have been reading through the threads and contributing where I can.  I’m hoping that the advice I give here will help many of you who are seeking jobs or online businesses.

As you know it’s so very easy to get taken in by scams these days. So easy for people to set up a website, make it look impressive and make it sound
like they know what they’re talking about and that they have experience on
their side. Unfortunately it’s all too easy to hide behind a website and
you don’t get to see the real person for what they’re worth.

Whatever your skillset, research becomes a very necessary skill you need to
hone and develop.  Because the internet allows people to remain ‘invisible’
and only show what they want to show (there’s both good and bad in this)
then it’s important for you to check out who it is you’re planning to work
for or do business with.

There are some things you can do to help you:

• When you visit a website and you’re not sure of its longevity – has it only been around 6 months or 6 years, there is a way to check.  Visit the Wayback Machine and enter the URL.  It’s interesting to see how sites have progressed and matured over time. http://www.archive.org/web/web.php  If the site has only been around a month then you might need to tread carefully.
• Investigate the head person or the contact person for that business.  Do they show up on the web much or are they a non-entity?  Have people discussed them at forums and is the feedback good or bad?  If that person is really business savvy chances are they will have a profile at linkedin.com and have a website of their own. There may be articles written by them or about them or they may have shown up in newspapers and magazines online.
• If you’re looking to go into business with someone, or register with a
  business that requires you to pay a membership or subscription fee, then again make sure you research the company or person first.  No business opportunity is that urgent/important that you have to sign up today.  If the opportunity is good it will still be here tomorrow and next week, or even next month, so take your time to research and consider.
• Compile a list of pros and cons for joining that company or running that business.
• Look for discussion forums online that relate to that industry and if the forums are free (most are), then join it and hang around for awhile. Get to know the people and how they conduct themselves.  Let the industry speak for itself via the forum(s).  There are many board forums like this one, oryahoogroups.com has tons of forums there on almost any topic imagineable.  Ning.com does too.  And there are others so the research is worth doing.
• If you’re not sure what kind of work you’d like to do, make a list of your skills and abilities and then start doing searches on those skills and abilities. Google will show up all sorts of things – the adwords of people selling their services or products, lists of forums, websites and all sorts of other things relating to those items. This research may well open your eyes to possibilities you hadn’t considered before.

Who am I to tell you this? My name is Kathie Thomas and I’ve been in
business for over 16 years.  I began as a homebased secretary BEFORE the
internet so was well placed to adopt this ‘new’ technology when it entered
my country (Australia) back in late 95.  I was online early 96 and had my
first website by April that year.  My business has grown with the internet.
These days I’m known as a Virtual Assistant.

I get a lot of people (mainly women) emailing me, writing to me, phoning me up, just to make sure I’m a real person before they decide to join my VA
network. Others write to me for advice because they’ve seen my name on the web in lots of places and consider that I am well known in my industry.  I
get women from other industries seeking advice simply because they know
I’ve worked on the web for a long time and they want to know what they
should or shouldn’t be doing and what to look for.  It doesn’t matter that
they might be planning to do something different to what I do, they just
recognise that experience counts and they want to benefit from that.

There are always great new opportunities out there and once you’re in that frame of mind, they will keep showing themselves up.  I often get approached by people, mainly from the US, because their business is reaching my own shores and they’re looking for someone to join up, sign up, become a distributor or something along those lines and because I have a huge network of people I know, I’m an ideal target for those approaches.  Some I look at with interest, others I turn down immediately. But I only
get approached because I have a web presence and am visible to many.  Which brings me to my next point.

All of you can have your own website at no or very little cost to you.
There are services out there that are free such as blogger.com,
wordpress.com and similar.  Whilst these are known traditionally as
blogging tools you can create static pages instead of posts.  Why not set
one up in your own name and add your profile, almost like an online resume.

Don’t put in personal information such as your home address but do make it
easy for people to contact you if they need to. Anyone in business usually
has a contact form, or email address and a phone number for easy access.

If you have topics you’re passionate about and if you have good writing
skills, then use that site as a platform to share your knowledge – you
never know who might see it.

A good example: one of my daughters is into horses in a big way. She’s
almost 26 now.  3 years ago she got an email from someone who had been
reading her blog about the horse studies and work experience she’d had in
the industry. It kept showing up in their Google searches on the topic.
When she contacted me to find out if I thought the email was a scam I told
her ‘no honey, that sounds very real, you better call them’. She did.
Turned out to be a local Technical College of Advanced Education and they wanted to engage her as a teacher for their Equine Studies course. She’s now been teaching for them for 3 years. No, she didn’t have a teaching degree but the college recognised she had the experience and skills for the topic and they agreed to put her through a ‘train the trainers’ course. She’s now studying for her teaching diploma part-time while teaching at the college.  She’s making money she didn’t think she would be making as the industry is low paid but her passion outweighed her desire for a high income.

So, if you want to stand out and get noticed, start creating an online
profile for yourself.

While on that topic, it has been documented by the media many times now
that prospective employers can research their employees by checking places like Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, Twitter and so on.  What does your profile online say about you?  Is there anything you wouldn’t want a
prospective employer or business partner see? Best you get it cleaned up
now – before that time comes.  What you put on the web is there forever and
it pretty darned near impossible to get removed so take care in your online
presence – always.

Sorry for the long post but I hope this information helps someone here.

All the best to you in your searches!

My husband and I have recently shifted to the country from suburban life.  It’s still a suburb of Melbourne but an outer suburb amongst the hills and bushland. It’s beautiful and we look forward to many years here as we head towards retirement and grand-parenthood.

While I do run a virtual online business of my own, I find it’s still important to maintain contact with local business operators. There are just some things that need to be done on a local basis.  And it’s a great way to get to know the locals and let them know I exist too.

I woke up in the morning realising I hadn’t yet seen a local newspaper so when I went to the post office on my daily trek to the shopping area I noticed some shops had the local paper stuck under their doors. On enquiry I found out where I could get a copy and brought it home to check through the classifieds. (I find it strange thinking about the local paper on the very day it’s become available)

A short time later I had 3 appointments set for the day for a home handyman to do some carpentry, for someone else to come and cut up fallen branches and clear the area at the back of our property and for yet another to regularly mow our very large lawns.

It’s important to support the local business community whenever possible.

“Your Home Business” profiles home based businesses that have been in operation long-term. It came out just this week.  Published by Switzer Media & Publishing, I was approached a couple of months ago asking for an interview as I’d been in business for almost 15 years, from a homebased office. I was delighted. Any opportunity to promote the Virtual Assistant industry is always welcome.  And I love that the VA industry has allowed me to work at home now for almost 15 years (in March) so I could be present for our family as they grew up.   A decision I’m always glad I made.

Below is the front cover and my article starts on page 56.  The magazine is available around the country by various newsagents.  They also have an educational website called BizThinkTank worth visiting.

It’s always interesting to see how a year finishes up, compared to your hopes and plans at the beginning of the year.

I don’t make New Year’s resolutions these days but I do have a goal planning session around the middle of January each year and put the results of that onto a PowerPoint presentation in full colour, along with images and some Scripture from the Bible that is relevant to the theme of my goals, print it off, laminate it and stick it on my office wall close to my computer monitor so it’s visible in front of me every day.

I also share it with my business coach although I was doing this before I started attending sessions with him three years ago.

Some might not see the benefit of this but in the 1980s when I used to attend Amway meetings they spoke about affirmation cards and the power of dream building.   These were pretty much the same as goal setting. If you don’t know where you’re headed then you’ll pretty much end up nowhere or perhaps somewhere far from where you might have hoped to be.  And it’s important to keep your goals visibly in front of you for those days when things don’t seem to be going right and you’re almost ready to give it all up.  I’ve had those days and I bet you have too!

I want to wish you all a prosperous 2009, whether that be through finances, personal achievements or some other goal or goals you have for your life.  I hope that 2009 brings with it much contentment and a sense of satisfaction at the end of it.

For us as a family, we pray and hope that it will bring peace and new things.  Many of you know we lost a daughter this year and so we enter into a new one with some sadness and hope for better things to come.

Happy New Year to you all!

new year, resolutions, goals, plans, dream, achievements

In light of our recent family troubles I want to highlight some things that I do and which you may need to think about as a business owner/operator for times when emergencies arise and you are unable to be present in your own business.

Some years ago, when my husband and I started going on overseas trips, I developed some systems to ensure I could hand over the running of daily activities in my business.

• I set up a new ‘business’ phone line so that business calls came only on that number and not my home number.  And yet for 10 years previous I’d only used my home number.  With the new number it meant I could simply divert my business calls to one of my Virtual Assistant team members and she wouldn’t be receiving personal calls as well – those could be diverted to my mobile number if necessary or we simply left a voicemail message saying we weren’t available for a period of time.
• After hearing a professional speaker talk about the use of his mobile (cell) phone I stopped giving out my mobile number to anyone who isn’t family or a close friend and diverted my business line to my mobile phone only when necessary.  This meant that my business didn’t have to follow me wherever I went.  And because 98% of my work is carried out in my own office (I rarely do on site work these days) it’s not necessary for people to call me on my mobile phone but I recognise this might not be a suitable step for all business owner/operators.
• I have an email address that is used specifically for job requests for clients and this is automatically forwarded to one or more team members to handle when I’m away from my office for periods of time.
• I have an emergency phone list of clients and contacts stuck on the wall by my computer so that if my husband or another family member have to call anyone on my behalf, they don’t have to go hunting for that information. The sheet is updated periodically.
• I also have a simple email list set up so I can email all my clients at once notifying them of unavailable time coming up so I can organise backup support for them in my absence.  Planned trips usually mean 1-2 month’s notice to my clients but of course, in emergencies, it’s usually at short notice – but at least they’re not left in the dark and they’re given a contact name of a team member to look after them.
• I’ve also developed more than one income stream through my business so I’m not wholly dependent on client work to financially support my needs. Which means I could realistically have a bit of time off without worrying too much.  Mind you, it is important to plan and put away funds when you know you are going to take leave but if something unplanned came up, finances won’t necessarily be at the top of the list in your mind.

If you are planning leave timing it across two months, i.e. a week or two at the end of one month and a week or two at the beginning of another will allow you opportunity to still bring something in for each month.  I’ve done this in the past, but of course, when unexpected things come up, you cannot plan the timing.

These are just some simple things I’ve done to ease the ‘load’ of what needs to be actioned whenever I have to be absent from my business for a period of time.  What about you? What ‘emergency’ systems have you put in place?

systems, planning, emergencies, taking leave, planned leave

I get regular updates from Smart Company here in Australia and a recent article highlighted the difference between someone who is an employee and one who needs/wants to be an entrepreneur. Where do you think you belong? Would you like the flexibility and freedom of being an entrepreneur or do you prefer the stability of being an employee?

The Agony Aunt comes up with some great stuff in her column and this latest one is no exception.  The book she quoted I’d not heard of before, but I loved the chart she put up and I thought I’d share it with you. How do you fair in the test? I’ve love to hear about it!

Oh, so now entrepreneurship is the Gen Y answer to boredom. Jennifer, maybe you need a shrink, not a business. Why not try this poll? I found it in a book called Entrepreneur… and Beyond, By Alex McMillan.

Test yourself out on this.

Employee thinking

Entrepreneur thinking

To see the rest of this article, click here.

entrepreneur, employee, business owner, self-employed

When setting up a business at home, I find that people tend to sort themselves into one of two different groups. One group takes their business seriously, putting in the groundwork to get it established, do the research, learn about their chosen industry, mix with the people who are already doing it and basically performing a ‘monkey see, monkey do’ type scenario. They put in the work!

The second group put in the mouth work, i.e. they tell people they’re setting up a business, but apart from having the equipment at home and their internet connection, perhaps joining a VA network, they do little else. In fact, they’re kind of waiting for the next step but don’t realise that they can’t wait for it to happen, nor wait for someone to tell them what to do, but rather, they have to make it happen. They’re all talk and no action!

I find the difference relates to two different mindsets – the latter one is an employee mentality, the former a business owner mentality. Which one do you have?

If you seriously want to get your business happening, then you need to take it seriously. In other words it needs to consume you. It should be in your mind constantly, seeking out opportunities to network, to let people know you exist. I don’t mean make a nuisance of yourself and become boring to your friends and family. I mean that your business should add a new aspect to your character.

Seek out new ways to improve on what you already do. Seek connections. When it’s not foremost in your mind then it should be in the back of your mind so that your ‘business mode’ kicks in, in less than a moment’s notice if a suitable opportunity arises.

Do you carry your business cards around with you, wherever you go? And I mean WHEREVER you go. My husband once told me off for handing out a card at a funeral. But someone had asked me for my address to keep in contact and rather than scribble it on the funeral notice or a piece of paper that might get lost, it made sense to give my card instead. NEVER leave home without them, even if you’re just going for a walk around the block.

I challenge you to think today about whether you take your business seriously or not. You need to be mixing and mingling with those who are already doing it and are successful – something rubs off over a period of time. There’s a lot to be said about business networking, both face-to-face at local events and online – there are a number of business networking links on this blog.

If you need to, find a coach or a mentor to assist you. Don’t be afraid to ask questions – not ‘how much do you charge?’ but rather ‘how did you find your clients?’

You can never do too much research, but don’t let the research be an excuse for not starting – you can ‘learn on the job’! KMT

mindset, employee mentality, business owner, mentor, coach, learn on the job