Olinda Services

HOW TO NOT UNDERSELL YOURSELF IN A DOWN ECONOMY

Mikelann Valterra

Has the economy got you down? Do you worry you won’t earn enough, but you find yourself giving away free time and discounting your services in other ways?

Author Mikelann Valterra, director of the Women’s Earning Institute, focuses on empowering women to earn their worth—even in a down economy. In this powerful teleclass, Mikelann explores the psychology of why even successful business women undersell themselves and what to do about it.

Women who “underearn” deal with complex emotional issues around making money. Mikelann will look at the emotional and financial cost of discounting yourself and your services, and the message you convey when you suppress your fees. She will talk about how to protect your time as well as what people really want to buy from you. She will also explore the hard notion that not everyone should be able to afford you and how this translates when the economy is down. Lastly, she’ll discuss ways to feel great charging your full fee.

Learn:

- How and why women under-price themselves;

- How getting in touch with “resentment” can make you more money;

- How to avoid discounting yourself;

- How to protect your time;

- How to charge your full fee and feel great about it!

… and much, much more!

REGISTER TODAY: http://www.virtualassistantnetworking.com/teleseminar.htm

Who Should Attend: This class is open to all Virtual Assistants, small/boutique business owners, solo professionals, solopreneurs and independent professionals. Invite your business buddies! If you know some folks who would like to attend, feel free to copy and paste the contents on this page, and post invitations on the forums, listservs and groups you participate in.

I tried the Firefox add-in from feedly today.  I have used Google Reader for quite some time and love it.  Someone recommended feedly and so I had to give it a go.  In some ways it loads the same as Google Reader but as feedly says “feedly. A more social and magazine-like start page for firefox!”  It does have a more social feel and does feel like a magazine.  I uninstalled it this evening because for me it had too much fluff.  I had difficulty finding where to edit my feeds.  I did not want all of the entertainment feeds or every tech feed available to me.  I believe I’ll watch and wait until they have tweaked it a little more.

I am still riding the fence with AWeber.  I have had trouble getting people to opt-in to the list even though they have requested to receive information from my various clients.  Then they email me because they have not received an email about something.  When I asked why they didn’t opt-in to the list they say they didn’t get the email or can’t find the email.  Then I have to wait 30 days until I can resend the opt-in.

Chris Garrett has published an interesting article about AWeber.  He has not been impressed with the results of his pop-up window.  He writes “It’s worth a try for new blogs to get that early momentum, and certainly others are gaining subscribers at a better rate, but for me I am not entirely convinced the results justify the damage to credibility and longevity.”

I continue to try the program and am taking a long term approach.  I am resending opt-in’s in another week and will see if my opt-in rate improves.

I have been receiving stat reports from GoStats.com for months but have only recently looked in depth at the reports.  This is a great resource to use.  I found keywords that people are using and clicking to my website.  I always assumed that people were going to me website and then my blog.  Now I know that more people are accessing my blog after keyword searches and that I need to put more information about my business in my blog.

If you are looking for an inexpensive way to get some more information on who is accessing your website, give it a try at http://gostats.com/.

If you use an inkjet printer you know the operation costs can be high.  PCWorld has released an article about inkjet cartridges that I believe will helpful to you.  Check out how much ink may be left in your cartridge!

I have been using AWeber for 2 weeks now.  I love the stats and being able to see how many people have opened the emails and clicked on links.  I do not like the templates.  I find them difficult to work with.  The jury is still out.  Around 50% of emails do not opt-in to the list which shrinks your list considerably, but conversely they are probably not going to read your emails anyway.  I would love to hear your comments.

I am trying out AWeber.  After sending out several newsletters for several years from Outlook I am in the end of the first week and have created 2 lists.  The first list I did incorrectly and now have to wait 30 days before I can reenter the email addresses into the list so that people can opt-in.  That was very discouraging.  The second list I did correctly and had around 50% opt-in.

I have found the process fairly painful.  All of the people on both lists have requested and verbally agreed to the mailings but they won’t opt-in to the mailing lists.  I do these mailings for clients and they don’t understand why I can’t email to all of their client emails.  I will continue another month with AWeber and then decide whether I want to try out Constant Contact.  I believe they do not require the opt-in.

I am interested in hearing your input.  Do you have experience with opt-in lists?  Tell me all about it!

If you are interested in changing your WordPress blog from one hosting company to another tread carefully.  I recently found out that my hosting company does not give me the option of backing up my database and transferring my content to another provider.  Of course this has colored my decision about switching my hosting company until I research ways to transfer my content.  If you have established a blog you do not want to lose content.  When I setup my blog I was under the impression that my content would transfer.  When I signed in and found no content I immediately contacted the company and was able to reverse my mistake before losing my content.

So, be cautious when switching your internet hosting package and make sure you research to make sure your content can transfer.

You look at a document in Word and see no graphics.  You do a print preview of your Word document and see no graphics.  You print your document and suddenly a graphic prints on your document.  You search and search and cannot locate the hidden image.  Erggggg!  There is a solution!

No…stop!  Don’t retype the document.  Use your document inspector.  After researching the problem I found information on the Microsoft website that gave a quick overview of the document inspector.

Go to the main menu, click on “Prepare” and then click on “Document Inspector”.  You then click on “Inspect”.  After the inspector runs click on “Remove All” under the Header, Footer and Watermarks section.  That clears the image from the document and you only have to redo headers and footers, not the complete document.

I just finished reading an article in the Gritty Business Buzz.  It talked about small business owners needing to know all the little details about how a job is done.  They compared it to me learning how to rebuild a car engine so I would know how the mechanic re-built my car engine.  Speaking as someone who recently had their car’s engine taken apart and put back together again, I am happy to have a mechanic who handles that and I only have to pay the bill.

As a small business owner focus on what you do well.  If you have the vision to put a slide presentation together let your assistant handle the fine details of that, you don’t have to know how to do it yourself.  If you have the vision to have a newsletter, let your assistant put it together.  Leave yourself open to brainstorm new ideas and do the job you do best.  Be happy to delegate tasks and details to someone who enjoys doing the details.  If you don’t feel you can delegate and be sure the job will be handled in a timely manner or with the same attention to details, hire someone who will!