Date: Monday, July 14, 2008 from 7:00-8:00 p.m. Eastern

What happens when you get ten top professionals on a call together to discuss the future of business and leadership? You walk away inspired to change the way you think, live and operate in business. Join Bea Fields as she shares this open call with her partners from EDGE: A Leadership Story for a call you don’t want to miss. Fields will be joined by Michael Gerber, Michael Port, Corey Blake, Dave Buck, Carol Dickson-Carr, Eva Silva-Travers, Kimberly George, and Roger Dewitt. Each professional will be asked a question they have never been asked before about the future of business, and you don’t want to miss their answers. This is BIG!

Register Here

Learn about the presenters here.

ROY G. BIV? The colors of the rainbow: Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo, Violet

Or some of the crazy stuff we put to music in our heads so we would remember?

I found the SEO Rapper today and I am rolling on the floor. Brings back memories of childhood, when I put the state capitals to music so I could remember them all. LOVE IT!

There is a lot of information available about how to market a coaching business and yet many coaches still struggle.  How do you know which idea to follow and how to make it work for you?  The answer is in what I call the “pre-marketing” work that needs to be done to build a successful coaching business.  At the heart of your pre-marketing work are “The Four Questions”.  This is the contemplative work that you must be willing to do as you begin your business and again periodically throughout the life of the business.  The four questions lead you to know how to market what you do because they are at the core of your business.

First let’s address who you are as a person.  This is the “Who Are You?” question.  It is a tremendous help to know yourself inside and out in order to succeed in the coaching business.  If you know yourself well there is less chance that “your stuff” will get in the way of the client so you will be a better coach.  As an entrepreneur, knowing yourself well allows you to get the most out of your abilities and compensate where needed.  What are ways to describe your own uniqueness?  What is the combination of experiences, personality traits, history and values that makes you who you are?  “Who Are You” is the vital piece that makes YOUR coaching business different than the other thousands that exist.

“What do you do?” is the second question.  This addresses having the ability to talk about coaching and what it is.  If you can describe your work in a genuine, impactful way, you will be seen as attractive by those people who you are trying to reach.  The more practice the better in terms of learning to talk about coaching.  Make sure to talk about coaching with anyone who will listen,  research what others say about coaching, read widely about coaching and get your own coach so you truly understand its impact.  What you are doing is collecting knowledge so that you can express the results that your potential clients can expect to get from coaching.

“What do you have to offer?” is the third question.  This question delves into who you are as a coach - what are your skills and strengths as a coach? Begin to answer this question by asking  for lots of feedback about your coaching.  Your clients will have some insights into your style and what is most helpful for them.  Remember to ask your coaching partners, supervisor, or peers for feedback on your coaching.  Spend time thinking about how your personal beliefs and  values impact the work you do as a coach.  In particular, consider what you believe about motivation and personal change.  Think about how your belief system affects your presence with your coaching clients.

The final question is “What is your passion, purpose, and path?”.  The driving force that makes your coaching come authentically from your soul is your passion. This is some of the contemplating you must do in order to find your niche.  Your purpose is the spark within you that makes you want to be a coach.  Spend time considering all the things that you think are great about coaching.  The way that you put all the elements together in a business that is unique to you is your path.  This includes knowing what the essential elements are for the business to be authentically yours and how you will measure success.  Consider how these two factors will impact the way you run the business.

The pre-marketing work of The Four Questions will build a solid foundation for your business.  Make sure to revisit this periodically in order to ensure you’re your business continues to flourish.  Spending time on The Four Questions will make your marketing easier, give you a foundation for attracting clients, increase your income and keep you motivated.

About the Author
Janet Slack of Life Adventure Coaching is a specialist in helping new coaches, therapists and consultants create the thriving business of their dreams. Find more business building ideas and learn all the details that you need to know as a coaching entrepreneur at www.biztipsforcoaches.com/blog/. She recently released Mind Your Own Biz: Discover the Secrets to Creating a Successful Coaching Business a step by step guide to starting your coaching business right.

What You Need To Know: Follow and Be Followed!

The key to twitter is to follow and be followed. If you’re on the site talking about what you’re doing to nobody and not finding what anyone else is doing, it’s sort of useless and rather boring. Once you get a few followers and start following a person, that’s when the buzz starts. You can update your status on the web, via instant messaging client or via a third party tool like Twhirl that lets you use twitter from your own desktop. You can follow and be followed on your cell phone as well and be plugged in to the Twitterverse on the go.

You have a profile page that lets you manage the tool and lets people look you up to see what you’re all about in a few lines and with a URL. It’s the “What are you doing” section that counts.
Your Twitter friends or peeps (a.k.a your Tweeps) all carry on conversations with or without you and when you pop in and chime into various conversations, it gets rather lively. People ask questions, answer questions and share URLS of what they’re doing, what they find interesting and what they want opinions on.

There’s also the public timeline that tells you what other people are doing and you can search on that for more followers or conversations to eavesdrop on. It’s like a virtual water cooler that you can stop into during the day and check in with your tweeps.

Use Twitter when you:

-Post an update to your blog

-Want answers to a technical question

-Want to vent

-Want to tell people what you’re having for lunch (seriously, that can sparks some very interesting questions)

and more.

You can also send direct private messages as well as respond to people both directly but also publicly. The more interesting of a Tweet you post, the more likely people will follow you and re-tweet. A re-tweet is when you post a URL and someone likes it so they share it by tweeting or re-tweeting it to their followers. Do you see how it can become a benefit to you in an area like affiliate marketing, product launches and technical challenges you need help with?

You can also post Twitter feeds on your website so that people can follow you, read your conversations, see who you’re following and visit their posts or URLS so it becomes a very viral way to share and communicate and even to collaborate.

The downside to Twitter

Not only is the tool currently growing at such a fast rate that it goes down regularly but there is another downside and that’s productivity. Sadly there’s almost always a downside to social networking and bookmarking tools and as with many others, Twitter can be a time waster if you’re not careful so it’s important to use it and have fun but also to set limits for yourself.

About the Author
Matthew Bredel
To learn more about how social marketing tools can help you and your online money making efforts, visit TheWebReviewer; a resource for making money online, affiliate marketing and more.

Now twitter serves the basic purpose of every social site and virtual community out there, and that purpose is to connect the users, or to provide the hub or gathering place for its members to communicate.

Twitter specifically gives your friends a way to keep up with what you’re doing immediately. Your friends and fellow members of twitter subscribe to receive updates about what’s going on in your daily minute by minute life.

There are countless ways you can use this tool other than to just let buds know when you’re off to the salon, or hopping on a plane. I figured the best way to show all the capabilities of Twitter would be to just list them for you. So without further explanation here are some amazing possibilities of Twitter:

1. Of course, you can use it to keep up with what your friends and competition are up to

2. You can use it to update your friends on every little thing

3. To announce a special event - like a child’s party or a business seminar

4. To announce special offers - like a discount on one of your products or services

5. To do a pre-release campaign for a product or service your about to launch

6. To request feedback on a new site, product or survey

7. To direct traffic to an opt-in page

8. To build a relationship by giving a free offer like a contest or give away or free product

9. To build a network of business partners

10. To recruit for a charitable cause

11. Or to collect donations for a cause

12. To build your friend-base by directing to a myspace or facebook page

13. You can update you status in many ways including your IM program or cell phone

14. To make connections for a joint venture project

15. Add it to your blog or other social site profile page to have automatically updated content

16. Use the twitter wiki to keep up with applications and other advancements made by the twitter community

17. And many more

Those are just some of the ways my friends and I have discovered to use twitter in business and in life. This is a fantastic resource and I recommend you take a look, and test a couple options on this list. Here’s to your success!

About the Author
Melissa Mangrum
I am a seventh year internet marketer with my wonderful husband Jason, and our 3 little, irresistible noise makers. I have a life-long background in acting, music, and writing. I have written a salesletter that generated a quarter of a million dollars in less than two weeks. Also I put a product in the genius book of world records as the highest price auction ever ran on ebay. For more information on the many uses of Social Sites you can check out the new book at: My Social Marketer

Why do they like your services or products?

Do you offer retainer discounts or discounts/coupons codes for products?

Do you practice excellent customer service and respond faster to client questions?

Are your product descriptions better?

Don’t be afraid to ask.

Be generous with your contact information.
When you sell online your customers can buy your products 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Your customers can be across town or across the globe. Always provide contact information, preferably on every page of your website, complete with mailing address, telephone number and an email address that reaches you. People may need to contact you about sales, general information or technical problems on your site. Also have your email forwarded to another email address if you do not check your website mailbox often. Nothing turns off potential clients and customers faster than lack of contact information. In an impersonal, online world, your customers want to know where you are and how they can contact you if need be. Don’t disappoint. Strive to be as credible as possible when operating online.

About the Author
Becki Noles, Visionary of Virtual Accuracy Companies has been at the forefront of stream-lining coaching and entrepreneurial businesses since 1998. Utilizing her background in marketing, publicity, corporate training, advertising and media, Becki custom tailors and implements individualized action plans for taking coaching businesses to the next level. As a Virtual Assistant her business partners with top business and executive coaches in the United States, Canada, Switzerland and the world over.

The most popular search engines are Google, Yahoo, MSN, AOL and Ask. Search engines keep their methods and ranking algorithms secret, to get credit for finding the most valuable search-results and to deter spam pages from clogging those results. A search engine may use hundreds of factors while ranking the listings where the factors themselves and the weight each carries may change continually. Algorithms can differ so widely that a webpage that ranks #1 in a particular search engine could rank #200 in another search engine. New sites need not be “submitted” to search engines to be listed. A simple link from a well established site will get the search engines to visit the new site and begin to spider its contents.

If you are unable to research and choose keywords or work on your own search engine ranking, you may want to hire someone to work with who deals with search engine optimization on a daily basis.

Search engine marketing and promotion companies, will look at the plan for your site and make recommendations to increase your search engine ranking and website traffic. If you wish, they will also provide ongoing consultation and reporting to monitor your website and make recommendations for editing and improvements to keep your site traffic flow and your search engine ranking high. Normally search engine optimization experts work with your web designer to build an integrated plan right away so that all aspects of design are considered at the same time.

About the Author
Becki Noles, Visionary of Virtual Accuracy Companies has been at the forefront of stream-lining coaching and entrepreneurial businesses since 1998. Utilizing her background in marketing, publicity, corporate training, advertising and media, Becki custom tailors and implements individualized action plans for taking coaching businesses to the next level. As a Virtual Assistant her business partners with top business and executive coaches in the United States, Canada, Switzerland and the world over.

June 10, 2008 at 9:00 p.m. ET (New York USA)

You do not need to be a Virtual Assistant to register. If you have wanted to know what a VA could do for your business, we’ll answer those questions as well.

Have you ever attended a VA Conference before? If not, you’re really missing out. The camaraderie is awesome and you leave pumped up and ready to take your business to the next level! If you’re ready for the next level in your business right this very second, take advantage of our special offer on Virtual-Assistantology here: http://www.vatraining.com/virtual-assistantology/

If you’re still up in the air about attending the OIVAC, have you ever asked yourself these questions?

Is there a secret to increasing my bottomline?

Can I really make money while I sleep?

Why do I really need to have a target market and niche?

Follow up, Shmollow up, why does it matter?

Is it really possible for me to sound like a Fortune 500 company?

All these questions and more will be answered and addressed at the Online International Virtual Assistants Convention (OIVAC) and registration ends today. So hurry and go to http://www.oivac.com/register-seminars.htm and register before midnight ET (New York, USA) to attend this one of a kind event. This event was designed with every budget in mind.

You’re also invited to attend the International Virtual Assistants Day celebration on Friday, May 16th at 5:15 p.m. ET (New York, USA). This year’s special guest speaker is motivational speaker Paddy Spruce. At the event, the OIVAC will present both the Janet Jordan Achievement Award as well as the Thomas Leonard Virtual Assistant of Distinction Award to two deserving virtual assistants. Stay for the entire International Virtual Assistants Day celebration because there are prizes…and lots of them! **Please note that there is no charge for the VA Day celebration, however seating is limited.**

Registration ends today, so secure your spot immediately by going to: http://www.oivac.com/register-seminars.htm

______________________________

The Alliance for Virtual Businesses and the Online International Virtual Assistant Convention (OIVAC) invite you to attend the first Internet-based Introducing the Virtual Assistant Industry to Savvy Business Owners series. These complimentary sessions occur during the annual industry online convention, Thursday, May 15 through Saturday, 17, 2008 (US).

The agenda will include a short presentation, followed by a roundtable discussion led by veteran VA industry experts eager to answer your questions. Attendees can learn how to select the right VA, tasks VAs can perform, etc., ask niche-specific questions, and much, much more. If you ever considered working with a VA or are curious about exploring the potential, be sure to attend.

The virtual assistant industry is growing enormously because smart business owners are quickly realizing the advantages and savings of outsourcing to a VA. Select the session that best fits your schedule:

* Session 1 – Thursday, May 15, 2008, 1 p.m. – 1:45 p.m. EDT

* Session 2 – Friday, May 16, 2008, 8:30 a.m. – 9:30 a.m. EDT

* Session 3 – Friday, May 16, 2008, 3:00 p.m. – 3:45 p.m. EDT

To learn more about this exciting, one-of-a-kind activity and to reserve your complimentary seat at one of the three (3) Introducing the Virtual Assistant Industry to “Savvy” Business Owners sessions, visit OIVAC. Attend from the comfort of your home or office; via computer and headset mic. Mark your calendar for this informative event. We look forward to seeing you.

Please contact info@oivac.com or call Sharon Williams at 1-410-521-7001 if you have questions!

PS - Feel free to invite your associates to this one-of-a-kind event. They will thank you for sharing this smart business decision.