Successful Blog

Time for a Tune-Up: 8 Simple Updates to do Today

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by Rosemary O’Neill

Social profiles have gotten a lot of tweaking in the past year.  Have you kept up with all of the updates?

Today’s the day to roll up your sleeves and get it done.

Here’s a handy cheat sheet:

1. Twitter header

A few months ago, Twitter started including a photo header at the top of your profile.  It should be a graphic 1252 pixels wide by 626 pixels tall, maximum size of 5MB.  You can easily change it by going to your Twitter profile settings page.  Here are the details straight from Twitter: https://support.twitter.com/articles/127871.

2. LinkedIn company page header

Not to be outdone, LinkedIn now allows you to have a profile header for your company page.  The graphic should be a .png, .jpg, or .gif no more than 2MB.  Size recommended is 646 pixels wide by 220 pixels tall or larger (you can crop on the page). Here’s a handy video on setting up a company page: http://youtu.be/WiTQL_M_fv0.

3. Facebook cover photo

You should already have this one nailed, but just in case…your Facebook cover photo should ideally be 851 pixels wide and 315 pixels tall, and under 100KB (for fastest load time).  Here are Facebook’s recommendations: http://www.facebook.com/help/125379114252045/.  Remember that Facebook frowns on calls to action or overtly promotional content within the cover image.  It’s intended to be a compelling photo or graphic, not a banner ad.

4. Pinterest business pages

Your favorite slack-time hangout just put on a business suit. If your business is suited to graphic imagery, or you want to flex your creative juices, you might want to create a business account (or convert your existing personal account, if you’ve been using it to support your business). Learn all of the details from the Pinterest announcement: http://blog.pinterest.com/post/35710687813/new-tools-for-businesses-in-the-pinterest-community.

5. Your own site needs some tweaks

When is the last time you spiffed up your own blog or home page? Do you have a widget on there from last year’s conference? Take 10 minutes and look at your own site with a newcomer’s eye, or have a friend look — a refresh might end the year on a high note.

6. Update your avatar

I’ll step forward and say “guilty” on this one.  My avatar is from a favorite photo that was taken 7 years ago.  Ouch.  It’s time to cowboy up and get a new picture taken.  How old is your avatar?

7. Forum signatures

If you participate in online communities around the web, you probably have customized forum signatures in some of them. Usually these are appended to the end of your posts, and include a favorite motto, sometimes a link to your site, or your bio information. These can get totally forgotten in the day to day hustle. Take a moment today and fix the broken links, update your job title, or breathe some new life into your forum signatures.

8. Stop procrastinating on Google+

I know, it involves “code” and it seems really tricky (it sortof is).  Many posts have been written about how to implement the author tag for Google+, but the best one I found (and the one that actually worked for me) was this step-by-step from Social Media Examiner: http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/google-author-tags/.  Do this one today.

If you systematically go through and complete these 8 minor tasks, you’ll get a bounce into the new year with a fresh face to the world.

How to Prioritize Your Time When Working at Home

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Deb Bixler

Keeping on Track is Keeping on the Money

When you have a work at home business, it’s great to be your own boss. It can also be a nightmare to manage your own time. When you can’t fire yourself, it’s hard to actually motivate yourself to get anything done. However, time is money, and when you can’t get yourself to keep on a time schedule, you are doing little more than wasting your time. Put these quick tips into place to keep you on track and help you prioritize your time when it comes to your business at home.

How to Prioritize Your Time When Working at Home

First of all, do the hard tasks first. When you prioritize your tasks in order of importance and skill, you are less likely to procrastinate before you get anything done. Do the things first that have a deadline, are hard to accomplish, or are just plain boring before you move on to the more fun aspects of your work at home business, like marketing, designing, or making phone calls.

If you have to, put yourself on a time schedule. Working at home we often do not work a set schedule as if we had a job. When you actually write a business schedule you may find that you go to work more regularly. Many people treat themselves as if they are an employee in a classic job, and make themselves work from a set time to a clock out time in order to stay on track. Many work from home business owners actually even put aside time for a lunch break. When you have a hard time keeping track of your time, it may be best for you to treat your job as if you are in a traditional office setting, even if you are your own boss and your job is merely your living room.

Finally, keep track of the hours you work. You’d be surprised how much you are actually not working in a work week when you see your hard work in hours. When you keep track of your work hours, whether you delegate yourself to a time schedule or not, you can see how much, or how little, you are actually working, and it may be just the motivation you need to help you get moving.

Many people will say the hardest part about having a work at home business is finding the energy and motivation to physically start the day. When you put a little discipline in your schedule and keep track of your efforts, you just may find yourself putting more time into your business, and making more money at the same time.

Author’s Bio:
Deb Bixler retired from the corporate world using the proven business systems that made her a success working for others by incorporated them into her home business. In only 9 months Deb replaced her full time income with the sales and commissions from her home party plan business. Find her on Twitter at: http://www.Twitter.com/debbixler

Thank you for adding to the conversation!

Follow Through is Everything

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Rosemary O’Neill

Follow-Through is Everything

There are two kinds of people in the world. People who are good at following through, and people who are frustrated, wondering why their plans never work out. If you can master the follow-through, you have already put yourself ten steps ahead of everyone else.

Consistent Practice

When I was first learning to golf, one of the hardest things was learning to move the club “through” the ball and take a complete swing. A lot of dirt was flung before I got the idea. And the muscle memory is part of the art.

The more you practice following through, the easier it gets.

Action Items to Practice Following Through

  • After conferences and events, record all of the contacts you made, and for each one, find a way to reinforce the connection within one week after the event. Ideally, you can find one small action you can do that will help move your contact’s project along.
  • When you say you’re going to do something, do it. Make this an ironclad, “prime directive.”
  • Create a tickler file with reminders. Use the technology at hand to give yourself automatic reminders. With “reminders” now built in on Mac OS, and thousands of Android apps, you almost have no excuse.
  • Maintain contact information. Whether you prefer a stack of paper business cards or you pull them in with CardMunch, keep your contact information up-to-date and include notes about where you met the person.
  • Close the loop. We already discussed having your “ask” ready in case an opportunity arises. Get practiced at making that next phone call or sending that next email that will seal the deal. Don’t just leave it out there hanging, and don’t be the one waiting for your contact to call you back. Go get it.
  • Return your phone calls and emails. A good practice is to save some period of time (maybe at the end of the day) when you clear out the messages. Just delete the ones that are unsolicited and not of interest to you—they’re just mental clutter.
  • Don’t take on projects you don’t intend to finish. Practice saying “no” as well! It’s easier to follow through when you are focused on commitments that align with your goals.

How do you build your “follow-through” muscle? Do you use any tricks to support your practice?

Author’s Bio: Rosemary O’Neill is an insightful spirit who works for social strata — a top ten company to work for on the Internet . Check out the Social Strata blog. You can find Rosemary on Google+ and on Twitter as @rhogroupee

Thank you, Rosemary!

You’re irresistible!

ME “Liz” Strauss

Embrace the Chaos

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Rosemary O’Neill

The best (and worst) part of being an entrepreneur or small business owner is the sheer unpredictability of day to day life. Planning anything is tricky when you have no idea what’s going to happen next.

Welcome to life as a glamorous business person!

There’s a scene in the movie Parenthood in which the grandmother reflects on life as either a merry-go-round or a rollercoaster. Later, Steve Martin’s wife (played by Mary Steenburgen) tells him that she “loves the rollercoaster.” He’s worried about everything that happens, and she is excited by the thrill of not knowing what’s around the bend.

If you can’t embrace the chaos, you should not own a business.

So how can you cope with life’s curveballs?

  • Go ahead and make strategic plans for 3-5 years out, but also incorporate flexibility. Revisit your plans routinely and update them to account for changes.
  • Create some very short-term plans as well. Do you know what you want to accomplish this week? This month?
  • Make sure you have activities that you love outside of your business. Don’t sleep with your phone under your pillow. Leave a zone of peace that you can escape to when the rollercoaster takes you upside down.
  • Keep friends close to you who will support you when things get scary. Business is unpredictable, but a strong network of “people who won’t let you fail” offers a refuge of comfort so that you can carry on.
  • Remember that chaos works in both directions—if today’s surprise is a total disaster with your shipping, tomorrow’s surprise could be a big new customer inquiry.
  • Have standards, routines, and training in place to make sure that the little things are under control (or as under control as they CAN be). You shouldn’t have to be reinventing the wheel every day.
  • Find a way to keep it all in perspective. Volunteer for a non-profit, look out at the ocean, stargaze, find a touchstone that will show you your place in the universe on a regular basis. It’s easy to start thinking that if the FedEx doesn’t arrive on time, all is lost. Step back in humility once in a while and realize the true importance of things. Let your dog lick your face, kiss your son or daughter.
  • Don’t surround yourself with people who live in chaos on purpose. You know them, right? They carry a cloud of disaster around with them, and they attract it. Keep those people at arm’s length and maintain your sanity.

The ABCs of Scheduling

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Rosemary O’Neill

The ABCs of Scheduling

You can burn the candle at both ends, but eventually you end up in the dark with no candle.
Therefore, one of the most important skills a business owner can have is the ability to take control of the schedule.

A-Always. B-Be. C-Calendaring.

(Apologies to David Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross.)

Get out in front of your schedule

One of the most embarrassing incidents of my life was in high school (aren’t they all). I was Junior Class President, riding high, and responsible for putting together the whole-school Spring Dance. Unfortunately I was also a world-class procrastinator. Let’s just end this sad tale by saying that there was no Spring Dance, for the first time in years. Picture a 16 year old girl fielding phone calls from angry parents who had bought dresses for their 16 year old girls.

That humbling experience made me a goal-setting, calendar-keeping nut.

Use the calendar tools that work for you

If you don’t wrangle the calendar, and your daily events, it will wrangle you. Here are a few tips for scheduling sanity:

Take advantage of your natural rhythms – Liz recently posted about kicking in your peak productivity time. Don’t try to work against your body, if you’re an early riser, schedule accordingly.

Have a central, master calendar – I use Google Calendar for everything, and have it synced to all of my devices. You can make different colored sub-calendars for various aspects of your life, too. I have an editorial calendar, family and kid activities, business meetings, birthdays, and personal development time displayed together in one master calendar.

Tell people how you want them to schedule with you – If you use an online appointment system like Tungle.me, or you have a virtual assistant, let people know how to get on your calendar. Ideally, you don’t even have to be directly involved. The key is to use only one mechanism.

Start your month, week, and day with the calendar – Everyone should master the art of visualization. When you start out by planning and picturing how the month, week, or day is going to go, you’re already ahead of the game. Put aside sacred time (yes, put it on the calendar too) that you will use to prepare your mind for what’s ahead.

What’s on your calendar this week? How can you start making next week look even more productive for your business?

Author’s Bio: Rosemary O’Neill is an insightful spirit who works for social strata — a top ten company to work for on the Internet . Check out the Social Strata blog. You can find Rosemary on Google+ and on Twitter as @rhogroupee

Thank you, Rosemary!

You’re irresistible!

ME “Liz” Strauss

Keep Time Working … For You

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Keeping Time

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I think my life has sped up in the last few years.
Do you feel the same way?

Things that need doing seem to pile up faster.
Things I want to do keep coming up more quickly too.
Are you having the same experience?

These days I think of time off as the luxury of time to do what I want to.
And I ease into Mondays with ideas of keeping time working for me.

Keep Time Working For You

Time is flexible. We can waste time, spend time, invest time, have a good time, even use time to plan how we’ll use it. We’ve been know to stretch time and cram things into it. Some people actually speak of killing time. Why would you do that? The only thing we can’t do is get more of it. Twenty-four hours in a day is what we get no matter what we do with it.

I’ve spent some time considering the time I spend when I’m feeling like I don’t have enough of it.

If you want to know what you value, look where you spend your time and who you spend it with.

We Make Time for Things Important to Us

Here are a few truths about time that I’ve become aware of. You should too if you want to keep time working for you.

  • We make time for the things we know are important.
  • We find time for the things we want to do.
  • We use time to find things that will save us time. Sometimes using up the time we had do it whatever we would have been doing.
  • If we can’t find time to do something, we don’t value it as much as what we’re already doing.
  • When we take time for ourselves, we’re not so tight on the time we spend on others.

Time is the only resource we can’t renew. We need to use it while we have the time to. Time well invested gets us closer to the people we care about. When we spend time focused on what the relationships, projects, and businesses we’re building, we build them better.

This week, before time gets away from you, take a few moments to choose one goal that’s important to you. Decide to focus your attention for a set amount of time each day on that important goal and see what happens. Quality time focused in that single direction will have an exponential effect. But you knew you.

Be aware of the things you’re doing and the time you’re spending doing it.
Are you spending your time on what you value?

How do you keep time working for you?

It’s irresistible to be generous with your time.
Be irresistible.
–ME “Liz” Strauss