The VA Says

Twitter Hacks - What To Do If Your Account Gets Compromised

2009-11-07T01:11:06-05:00

Normally I go about my business and don't pay a lot of attention to talk of Twitter spam and hacks. Until it happened to me. I was active on Twitter and had been noticing a number of dms and @ messages asking me to take an IQ quiz. There is an awful lot of quizzes and games out there. You can send followers this and that. Generally, I don't pay much attention--I have too much else to do. But I did receive a tweet from a business acquaintance asking me to view a video. She is far from frivolous and...

Credit Rule Changes

2009-08-24T18:35:46-04:00

Credit rule changes will begin taking effect this week as a result of the recent passage of the Credit Card Act of 2009 according to Marketplace. This will impact anyone who relies on credit cards as many solo-preneurs do. But that doesn't mean you still don't have to watch your back.

Health Insurance, the Health Care System and the tight-rope walk of the Solo-preneur

2009-08-22T17:58:25-04:00

One of the dicier aspects of your decision to go it solo is that you are thrust into the individual health insurance market. That is where you go head-to-head with an insurance behemoth (the health insurance industry had undergone a great deal of consolidation so the companies left standing are by and large behemoths) to negotiate your insurance coverage.

Maybe the answer isn't a job.

2009-07-09T00:15:00-04:00

15 years ago, I had that sickening experience that too many people have gone through in the past several months. My position was eliminated. The company had been been bought and sold, bought and sold. They went through three ownership changes in the eight years I was with them. And a year or two after I left, they were sold yet again. Each time they were merged with the buyer's existing operation with a resultant churning of management and staff. Being totally burned out, I decided to leave Corporate America and started over. As a solo-preneur-although the term used then...

Sure beats reinventing the wheel

2009-07-06T21:00:23-04:00

The beauty of a system is that you don't have to reinvent the wheel every time you begin again. Systems are used in all kinds of places for all kinds of things. Whether you are a busy Mom running the household or a manager running a business, you can't function without systems. Even my cat has me on a system--he gets me up early to give him breakfast and he reminds me when I need to feed him dinner. Michael Gerber wrote a book a number of years ago called the "E-Myth." In a nutshell, he describes the necessity for...

Private Label Rights Products: the key to passive income

2009-07-03T20:14:35-04:00

One of the big hurdles for people getting started in internet marketing is creating a product. Fortunately there are many useful tools that can help even the greenest of us. One is PLR products. PLR stands for private label rights. These are digital products: ebooks and sometimes audio downloads that are available for you to sell on your own website. The authors were paid to write them and you can usually purchase rights for less than $10. They often come complete with a sales letter and graphics--the basic work has already been done for you. Since the name of the...

2009 Self Employment Telesummit

2009-06-11T01:15:20-04:00

One of my beefs about the business "advice" generally offered is that it is written by and created for "Big Business." We, self-employed people, generally float beneath the radar. This has two major implications. First, self-employed people are marginalized in the eyes of those who set policy. Perhaps the term "marginalized" exaggerates the situation. We simply don't exist. Which means that public policy does not take our needs into account and we are the recipient of unintended consequences. Secondly, it means that most advice out there simply does not apply to us. And that leaves us on our own to...

Mercury turns Direct and so does Your Business

2009-06-01T03:03:00-04:00

Mercury turned direct this past weekend, and Mars just entered Taurus. So how can you best use these energies in your business? The time is ripe to plan and allocate resources to long-term activities or those that require a sustained momentum. After we've de-cluttered our minds during Mercury's three-and-a-half week process, our thinking is clearer. It's likely that new information will be revealed about negotiations or important communications which can have the effect of making some options more or less attractive than they were before. Nonetheless, with Mercury still in Taurus, and Mars beginning its journey there, you are more...

Bargain Alert: 50% Off Internet Training

2009-05-26T09:00:00-04:00

VAs and online business owners need to perform certain functions to maintain an online presence. They need to be able to build a simple sales page. Increasingly, they need to have a presence on Twitter and Facebook and perhaps some of the other social networks. And no one wants to be held hostage to their web designer. Especially when he (or she) goes out of town when all you need to do is make a simple change, but you need to do it sooner rather than later. Erin Blaskie, VA turned internet strategist, has developed a number of online trainings...

URL shortening services: What to look for?

2009-05-11T08:14:00-04:00

Publicity hound Joan Stewart points out the following article regarding URL shorteners. There are more considerations to choosing a URL shortening service than just the ability to quickly and easily shorten your URLs. The ability to shorten a URL has always been important--to the average user who doesn't want to incorrectly copy long and clumsy links, to the affiliate marketer who wants to mask affiliate and tracking links, and now for Twitter users where the 140 character limit requires links be short and sweet. Danny Sullivan points out that there are a number of criteria you may want to look...