How do your visitors find out about you?

Sure, they read your content and your blog posts and find out about your business or your perspective on things. They can likely find your upcoming events and how to contact you. But where do they learn about you?

It might seem an odd question. But it’s one that’s overlooked often. Sure, we put up our bio page and add a little photo and that’s all fine. But where are you on your bio page? In other words, when someone reads the page do they learn about who you are? Or are they left with a laundry list of what you’ve done?

The other day I was working with a client, Cindy, on a website. She had written some great copy. As I looked over her homepage, her services pages, and her pages describing her services and how they could help someone, they were really good. Her writing was clear and easy to understand.

Cindy had done a great job writing engaging, alive and caring copy. As the audience, I could see myself in what she had written. It wasn’t hard to figure out, right from the homepage, whether or not she could help me. I felt heard and seen in how she wrote. It made me want to find out more - more about her services, and more about her.

Just as I do with many of the clients I work with, I read her bio page almost last. I like to get a tone for how someone is writing to their audience and about their services before I read how they speak about themselves. Many times the style of writing changes when I get to the bio page.

My client, like most others, was no different. She wrote in the all-too-familiar style of reporting about herself in the third person. Gone was the feeling of personal relationship and aliveness I had felt with her other pages. And while her bio was technically well written, I felt like I couldn’t find her in it.

Having known Cindy for months, I’ve grown to know her well - her humor, he passion, her warmth. But I saw and felt none of that in her bio page. Gone was the person and in place was the report about the person.

Don’t make this mistake. Everyone on the planet knows that it’s highly likely you’ve written your own bio. So talk about yourself in the first person. Use I, me and we. Share your life. It doesn’t mean you have to get into personal details if you don’t want. But it should mean that when I read your bio page, it’s clear that you’ve written it. But more importantly that it’s about you and not some version of you.

Few of us know we can write about ourselves in a warm, honest, conversational style. Yet the best bios are often the ones written as though you are telling your own story, complete with your ups and downs.

A good bio shows that you’re human - that you’ve made mistakes and learned lessons. It meets the audience where they are in language they can understand. Ultimately, your audience should identify with you in your bio. They should see themselves in some part of it.

Cindy got this quickly and rewrote her bio adding those personal touches only she can. She also felt better about it. She really liked thinking about her bio page as her narrating her own story. And the people she’s shown it too have been very receptive to bio.

Remember, people are looking for a person to do business with - not a business to do business with. They want to know the person behind the business. And they want to be able to identify with you - as a real, breathing, honest-to-God, living being. So meet them there.

So as you write - or rewrite - your bio page, keep one thing in mind… your audience will become your clients when they feel they identify with you and can trust you. They’re hiring a person, regardless of your service, who they’ll be in relationship with. Hence, a bio describing you as a person, just like them, can go a long way to building that trust.

I’ve never hidden the fact that I really don’t like my Monday Motivation tradition. I like going through piles of email even less. But I’ve gotten to the point that I dislike it so much that I’ve decided there has got to be a better way to kick off my week.

But the real and wonderful reason I know I am going to pull this off is because I have a new VA who is infinitely better at responding to emails than I am. @JerseyMomma, I you!

But before I say Sayonara for good, I need one last push to clean out my inbox. Between being out of town for BlogHer and launching SparkplugU, my email situation has never been more bleak.

Try 747 emails. Hurl.

So let’s usher out Monday Motivation with a bang, shall we?

Step 1 - let us know what you are going to get done today, tomorrow, or this week (your to-do list, so to speak).

Step 2 - put it in a comment below or a post on your own site.

Step 3 - let us know what will motivate you to get it done - a reward, consequences, or whatever you need to think that will ensure you do what you say you are going to do. I’ve found that the public announcement and accountability is a particularly great motivator, but throw down consequences if you really need a kick in the pants to get stuff done! Unless, of course, you are working towards a new laptop too, in which case I think the reward is particularly motivating.

This week I will commit to:

I quite literally can’t face 747 749 emails in one day. So I am going to promise that every day I’ll knock off 150 emails from my ‘balance’ - including all of the emails that come in daily. I’m not sure that I’ll get much else done this week, actually!

So by the end of these days I will have this many emails left in my inbox:

Monday: 600

Tuesday: 450

Wednesday: 300

Thursday: 150

Friday: 0!!

If I don’t get all of this done by the end of the week, I will give one lucky Monday Motivation participant a 6 month pass to any class they want to take on SparkplugU.

So all you have to do to be in the running for this SparkplugU 6-Month Pass is to leave a comment or write a post with what you are committing to getting done this week before Thursday July 24. (I might just give away the pass anyway… wink.)

So what are you going to get done this week?

PS - Our first SparkplugU class launches tonight with Kelly McCausey’s Podcasting Bootcamp. If you want to register for this class and you happen to win at the end of the week, I’ll refund your registration fee!

This was my favorite part of the conference, and it’s only just started! This is Starla, Susan, Shannon, me and Erika hanging out together at BlogHer. Sparkpluggers unite!

If you’re not here with us at BlogHer in San Francisco, watch my Flickr feed all weekend for lots of photos. And if you ARE here, please make sure we connect!

www.flickr.com Wendy Piersall’s BlogHer San Francisco 08 photoset

For a virtual assistant it is your job to have available to you those tools that will allow you to help your clients run their business easier. Not to mention, these tools will help you run your business abit easier too. Most of these tools listed below are free applications however, one of them even though is something you will need to purchase, it is essential to have in your virtual assistant business.

Payloadz – This is a great application you can use if you or your clients have downloadable (ie digital) files you would like to sell to others. The process is relatively easy to add your files to and then you are able to sell your digital products on your site. Payloadz records the transactions received with the customer name, date of purchase and item bought. There is a fee once you have used up a certain amount of space. Just go to http://www.payloadz.com and check it out.

Backup Data Storage – As a virtual assistant you are responsible for many files including your client files. The last thing you need is to have your computer crash and lose all of the data. The easiest way to control this and prevent this situation from occurring is to have a external hard drive. An external hard drive costs about $130-$200 (depending on the amount of storage space) however, this is a worthy investment for your business. You can go to Staples or Office Depot and search for external hard drives.

Vista Print – This is a pretty well known provider of marketing materials for the small business owner and entrepreneurs such as business cards, letterhead, pens and even shirts now. And for good reason. Their prices and services are of high quality and worth while to check out for your virtual assistant business. You have the control over the layout of your business marketing materials on the screen and you can sign off on the printing and then you can have the materials shipped to you within a week, if desired. Go toVista Print

Survey Monkey – Sometimes you are looking for a way to collect the thoughts of your clients to see what services they may wish or perhaps you are needing to receive feedback on a program you just created. Survey Monkey is a free program that will allow you to customize your survey to fit your needs and then they will reveal the code you will need to add the survey to your website or send in a newsletter. You can read more at Survey Monkey.

Google Tools - Now, Google is very well known, however, are you aware of all the “hidden” gems Google can help you with as a virtual assistant? You can share documents and excel files with your clients and update files together (go to Google documents). Also, you can share email with them so you can both have access to the email but if needed you can handle it for your client. (This is under the Settings tab in the upper right navigation) The same is true with the Google calendar - there are viewing and/or sharing capabilities to set appointments. These “tools” are located on the top navigation bar once in Google Mail.

For a virtual assistant it is smart to be aware of the tools you can utilize to help you and your clients’ success in business. It is your job to oversee your clients documents, calendars, emails and even marketing at times. Allow your clients to know you can handle these tasks for them and then it takes the burden off of them and you gain more assurance with your client.

Teresa Morrow is on Florida Board of Advisors with The WECAI Network ™ (http://www.wecai.org) and Editor at Large at WE Magazine for Women ™ (http://www.wemagazineforwomen). She has over 15 years working with various industries to include property management, landscape architecture and financial planning firms in executive administrative positions. Key Business Partners manages online promotion for coaches and writers allowing the business owners to focus on their clients. She cares about her clients and offers a 3 day ecourse on how to start effectively promoting your online business. You can contact her via email at keybusinesspartners@verizon.net or visit her website at http://www.keybusinesspartners.com.

I ask this question of clients all the time - what’s the most pressing problem (or issue) in your business right now?

Most of the time the answers I get have to do with traffic to my website, lead development or revenue generation.

Sure, we all need more leads and we could all make more money. But is that really the most pressing problem in your business? Often, it’s not.

The most pressing problem can sometimes be elusive. Most of us could benefit from generating more leads, for instance, but that may not be the most pressing problem we face in our business. You see, often the most pressing problem in business has nothing to do with  your marketing or the traffic generation on your website. Rather it has to do with how you actually ‘do’ your business.

For instance, if we could generate 200% more leads for your business this month, what would happen? Could you manage having that many more people wanting to engage in your business? How effectively could you convert those new leads with that sort of increase in volume? Or would you end up dropping the ball on a whole bunch of potential clients?

We’re always thinking that more people means more business. That’s not always the case. Often, we need to prepare ourselves and our business for growth. It means we need to know how to deal with a large influx of new potential clients. We need to have systems in place to manage these situations.

How do you know, then, what is your most pressing business problem? Reverse engineering. Start with the end result. Consider what challenges you’re facing having 200% more leads flow into your business, for instance. Find the holes in your business and fill them. And to fill them, start thinking in reverse until you get to where your business is today. Consider all the steps along the way. Write it all down, turn it upside down and now you’ve got the outline for a plan. Focus on the issue closest to where you are now, and you likely have, at least one of, your most pressing business problem.

We hear it all the time - plan for success. Why couldn’t that mean imagine the success you want and work backward to where you are today? A little secret - it works!

This is a guest post by Jan Ferrante from Queen of KAOS

Well, it’s that time again.

The time we look forward to all year long. And the time we… umm… I forget what I was going to say. I’m 3 days in with one still in school and I’m already wondering where my brain might be hiding - could be in the closet with the rest of me!

Somehow I had managed to stuff to the far corners of my mind that summer holidays have been fast approaching.

Now I’m starting to remember…

So what are a few tips that can help us to stay productive and enjoy the summer with our kids?

CHILL - I know it’s summer, but you gotta chill, even if its 100+ outside. Especially for the first week or so while you all adjust.

The kids are excited… and you are debilitated until you get your summer legs (which involves taking some time outside in your short shorts). Give yourself and your family a bit of constructive down time. Clear your schedule to the best of your ability and rest up. Your going to need it.

MAKE A PLAN - From day one, create some structure and rules. Don’t let even a few days go by without it, well maybe one but be sure to announce in your loudest serious voice that this is the first and last day of mischief and mayhem.

Plan what chores the kids will be doing for the summer and when they will be doing them.

Plan to plan meals. Get them to make a list of foods and meals that they like and include some that they can make. Get them to make at least one meal per week… maybe more… depending on hungry they plan to be. Wink

SET BOUNDARIES - Decide when you will work and put a structure in place that will make it work for you (a deadbolt on the door and a few chairs and maybe your desk against it for good measure can work) If that seems too extreme, sit down with the kids and brainstorm ideas and activities that will keep them busy and safe while you’re working - age appropriate of course. Boarding up their bedroom doors from the outside probably doesn’t count as an activity.

ADJUST YOUR SLEEPING PATTERNS - Basically, this is a polite way of saying that you can plan to skip sleeping until September. To get any focused work done, you will have to rise early and stay up late, I’m sure that you didn’t want to waste any of the summer sleeping anyway. HA!

Just kidding but you probably will want to make some adjustments if possible so that you can get up a bit earlier than the kids do if you are a morning person, or stay up a bit later if you are a night owl. This isn’t fail proof of course, depending on the ages of your child. I remember when my youngest was about 4 or 5, it didn’t matter if I got up at 3am, she knew… somehow she knew and BAM… she would appear. Try not to let it get to you. Remember that someday you will be sitting up at 3am wishing that she was standing in the room. You can get some work done then.

Seriously, you will find the hours when the kids are asleep, no matter what their age to be golden, but you also need to be well rested. It’s hard to type while holding your eyelids open with both hands - or even one, take it from me.

KEEP THEM BUSY - Taking time to drive them to activities will cut into your day, but it will ultimately take less time than having a bored child wandering around the house and it may even be a nice break for you too. Take full advantage of any child trading you may be able to do (be sure to check that you get the right one back… that would be the quiet one) or any childcare opportunities such as parents, inlaws or mothers helpers who may be frequenting the neighbourhood.

Plan outings, both for the kids individually and as a family. Resist the urge to say no on the grounds that you need a few more hours with your head stuck at the computer. It will still be there when you get back (at which time you can re-attach it to your shoulders).

PUT THEM TO WORK - Depending on their ages, you can hire your kids to give your business a boost this summer. You can hire them in your business and get a tax write off as well. Or hire them around the house to take a load off and free you up for a few extra hours. Even small kids may be able to help you with something and they will be more likely to respect your business if they are involved. I find the biggest bonus being that now they have their own money, it makes mine stretch much farther. That’s a benefit you don’t get by hiring out.

PREPARE SNACKS AHEAD - Put some healthy snacks in snack size containers in the fridge so that they can grab and stuff or have cut up veggies, boiled eggs etc prepared. 90% of all interruptions have been proven to be food related. Make it easy on all of you.

USE A TIMER - It’s easy to get involved and not notice the time. Avoid mutiny on deck… time yourself so that you can keep your promises… and keep them.

BE SUPER FOCUSED - Now is a good time to get in the habit of creating laser focus in your work day tasks. Outline a plan detailing exactly what you want to focus on over the summer. Do only what is necessary and ultimately will increase your bottom line. Cut out the chit chat and time wasters and spend the time with your kids. Remember, even though M comes at the end of WAHM, you are a mom first. Some days the summer holidays may seem to go on forever, but they will be over before you know it. And then you can PAR-TAY!

HAVE FUN! - Loosen up a little and enjoy your kids, however much of a PITA they may seem at the most inopportune times. There is nothing worse than a sad old woman missing her kids and wishing that she could have just one more day of total knock down, blow out, little kid KAOS with the herd. Except for a sad old woman who is alone and wishing she had spent more time in total knock down, blow out, little kid KAOS with the herd when she had the chance. Better to know that you are going to miss these days with the smug satisfaction that you have rung every minute possible out of their childhood and had fun doing it dammit.

All in all, if you can remember the 3 P’s - Priorities, Planning and Pizza, you’re in for a great summer!

Jan Ferrante is the Queen of KAOS, a work at home mom who will be found this summer, working in peace under her desk and dreaming up the next solution for work at home KAOS. Get your free subscription to WAHM in Focus so that you can increase your productivity from under your desk as well this summer.

Many people know that when I founded Sparkplugging, I founded it over 2 years ago under the name eMoms at Home. Very early on I realized the name didn’t really represent the site very well. But it wasn’t until the spring of this year that I realized that not only had we outgrown our name, but it was actively holding us back from further growth.

So we embarked on a full blown rebrand of our site.And oh, if I knew then what I know now…

Lesson #1 - Creating a great brand name is no cake walk

If I could convey to you just how difficult it is to create a great name, I think you just might never do it. This part was excruciating.

We had a few choices:

• Name our site with good keywords in the URL, but be left with a name that would be common and get lost in the crowd
• Name our site with a made up word and have to build our brand from scratch
• Name our site with a metaphor that would convey some meaning while remaining original and catchy

It was my preference to find a name for that last bullet point - but trying to come up with a metaphor for web 2.0 resources for entrepreneurs and self-employed business owners that work at home was a challenge to say the least. But ultimately “thanks” to lesson #2, it was really our only choice.

Lesson #2 - Finding a great brand name that has an available domain name is next to impossible

OMFG. Last time I had to buy an important domain name it was in 2006. The domain squatting industry has exploded in that time frame. We had some really great ideas. Every. Single. One. Of. Them. Was. Taken. I kid you not. I spent literally about 120 hours on creating domain names and seeing if they were available.

I did find some indispensable tools to help with this process:

• Thesaurus.com - I think I paid their electric bill for the month of March with the amount of page views I generated on that site
• Dot-O-Mator - Give it some sample words, and it will make up cool web 2.0 names for you, like NewNamezio or NewNameify
• MakeWords - Not quite so cool but still extremely handy, plus it comes with built in ‘themes’ like banking, parenting, even communication verbs that will suggest words to combine with your sample word
• WordLab - A forum of people who like to make up names just for fun - and free! The drawback is that their great ideas aren’t always available as domain names. Some of their suggestions for me were JustBegun and BackyardGenius.
• BustAName - Another helpful domain suggestion tool based on your sample words. I used this one quite a bit. (Thanks Hieronymous for the reminder!)
• PickyDomains - Honestly some of my best suggestions came from this paid service. They only charge $50, and only if you pick a domain through them. I can’t recommend them more highly. An added bonus is that they only suggest available domains.
• GoDaddy has a Firefox (script, extension, add on? dunno) that will add an available domain name search to the list of search engines you can use right in the title bar. I used this a LOT - but can’t seem to find a link direct you where to get if for yourself. I got it by going to the GoDaddy site and a pop-up appeared asking me if I wanted to install it.

Lesson #3 - Don’t rush

We had some very close ‘final’ names we were working with. Unboxify. WorkLifeRemix. HomeOfficeGeneration. Bizsational. We even got to the point of having a logo ready to go for WorkLifeRemix. Then I happened upon the LifeRemix blog network, and we had to start all over again.

Thank god I didn’t run with it without sitting on it for a bit. I hadn’t heard of LifeRemix until then, but it would have been a branding disaster. Not only do they cover similar content, but we would have wasted all of our hard work on a new name that wouldn’t have distinguished us from the rest of the blogosphere.

When we came across the name Sparkplugging, we were also considering Sparkplugify and Sparkpluggers. Extensive research turned up the fact that nobody was even coming close to using a name like this. I really wanted to go with Sparkpluggers, but it turned out that Sparkplugger.com was already taken, and I couldn’t risk the inevitable brand confusion it would cause. Thankfully the previous owners of Sparkplugging didn’t need the name and sold it to me for a very fair price.

Lesson #4 - Keep your advisory committee small

When I first started out getting feedback from readers, I found that it was a train-wreck waiting to happen. No matter what one reader said, another completely disagreed. There was NO WAY to please everyone, so I had to pull back and decide what was right for me and my company.

So I turned to my authors for feedback and advice. Now these people are true marketing and branding experts. I couldn’t have asked for a better team to help me with this. But with 16 authors, there were still too many chiefs. So I found a handful of authors that disagreed the most - true opposite ends of the spectrum. And I ran my ideas past them. Not surprisingly, Sparkplugging & Sparkpluggers was the only one that everyone agreed on - and I knew that if I could please myself and this diverse bunch, I had a hit.

Lesson #5 - Hire competent technical help

This wasn’t a lesson so much as it was my rock-solid foundation for success. Steve Johnson from SawtoothID went so above and beyond the call of duty I still feel like I owe him.

Once we got our name selected, we had to do a series of fairly complicated redirects to ensure that every page on the old site was redirected to its exact new home on our new site. For some blogs it was a no-brainer. But my permalink structure was different than that of the rest of the network, which required special treatment that also affected the rest of the redirects. And some pages that used to be on my blog were going to find a new home at the root of the site (About, Contact, etc.), and I had to create a series of one-to-one page redirects that we had to create by hand.

Lesson #6 - Brace for a HUGE loss in search engine traffic

I knew it was coming - and I really thought I prepared myself adequately. But within 6 days of changing our domain name, even though every single page was redirected accurately, we lost 90% of our traffic from the search engines. And although I won’t tell you just how much that was, suffice it to say that I didn’t sleep for a couple of weeks. It was a LOT of lost traffic and revenue especially because our primary revenue model is based on page views.

Lesson #7 - Brace for a HUGE loss in StumbleUpon traffic

I was prepared for the Google loss. I was absolutely unprepared for the StumbleUpon loss, which was our second largest referrer only to Google. To lose our top two referrers in one fell swoop was a big effing deal, and one that we haven’t fully recovered from.

StumbleUpon sends URLs traffic over time, not in one fell swoop like Digg. You could get a post that hits it big with SU, and then 5 months later, that post can experience a resurgence. It turns out that when SU detects that the old URL has been redirected, it doesn’t just continue to send traffic to the new URL. It basically pulls your URL out of their queue permanently. So we had nearly two years of posts that were receiving residual StumbleUpon traffic that is now gone.

Ouch.

Lesson #8 - Don’t make major changes to your site at the same time as you change your URL

When we launched under the new name, we changed our template, changed our navigational structure, changed the names of several of our existing blogs, AND more than doubled the amount of blogs on our network. If I knew then what I know now, I never would have done all of that at the same time.

In hindsight, the biggest thing I would have done differently would be to either wait to add the new blogs after the new domain was more established or have launched the new blogs under the old name and dealt with rebranding a new blog (more likely the latter). The last time I added blogs to our site, they were immediately indexed by Google and benefitted greatly from the trust of our old domain. While the new blogs on our network are still doing fairly well in the search engines, it has taken longer for them to get established and are still behind the milestones we established the first time around.

Lesson #9 - If you find your name doesn’t fit, change it sooner rather than later

Honestly, I knew 5 months in that the name eMoms at Home wasn’t working. At that time I already had too many non-moms reading my blog, and too many people saying they had dismissed my site because they thought it was ‘just for moms’. I do wish that I had just bitten the bullet and changed it back then, though I will say that I didn’t know all that was in store for the future of this site at that time. But rebuilding a brand and traffic on a five month old site is nothing compared to doing so on a 2 year old site with a network of 7 (now 15) blogs.

Lesson #10 - Don’t dwell on your mistakes or regrets

While I’ve pointed out the challenges I have had with our rebrand, I honestly wouldn’t do anything differently, except I would have changed when I did what I did. While we still aren’t back to the levels of traffic we were at before (which is also partly a seasonal thing), I do know in my heart that our old name was a dead-end road. And under our new name, we will ultimately grow larger than we ever would have been able to before. (Plus I love it even more now than I did when we chose it)!

I get stressed about numbers, but that’s the life of an entrepreneur - it just comes with the territory. The experience has created a stronger brand, a stronger company, and I am a stronger person for having gone through it. The reason I put this information out there is so that other people going through a rebrand or a domain change can learn from what our network has been through.