Written by Doreen Dilger, The Home Based Business Coach

Having an online seminar is a great way to market and grow your business. But, if no one shows up it can be pretty worthless. Sure you can record it and share it with others later, but in reality you want as many people to show up as possible. The following tips will ensure that you double your seminar attendance easily.

Pick the Right Topic

You must really know your audience well to know what type of information they'd like to hear in online seminar format. Understand your audience's needs, and select a topic that is an overview and not too niched down so that you can be open to more attendees. Broader topics work best when it comes to getting more members to view your seminar.

Set Achievable Goals

You should know up front how many people you want to attend your online seminar to ensure that it is a success. If you have a specific goal, then you'll work harder each day promoting the seminar to ensure that enough people show up. If you're new to seminars and new to online business, you may want to set your goal lower the first time until you establish yourself. Once you're already established and you have a good following online, you can set your goal higher.

Get Help

Affiliates are a great way to ensure that you get plenty of attendees to your online seminar. Even if you offer a free seminar, you might consider paying your affiliates a straight dollar amount for each person who attends your event. Even one dollar spent this way will help increase turn-out to your online seminar.

Offer Free Gifts

Everyone who attends the live event should get something special such as a free gift of some kind. It might be your eBook, or even a certificate of attendance - and if you can afford it, offer them a gift certificate to a free cup of coffee, or a discount coupon off personalized coaching. Offer something to your attendees that gets them excited. You can even give the gifts out randomly during the event as prizes for those who are online live at your seminar.

Partner Up

Form a short-term joint venture with others who market to your audience but who are not direct competitors. Make it a requirement that anyone who speaks at your seminar share the news with their email list, social media accounts and more during the promotion phase of the event. Make it easy for them by providing copy they can use to promote the event to their audience.

Time It Right

Finally, it's important that you choose the right time of day to host your online seminar. You'll need to find out from your audience what their best times of day are. In the teasing about the seminar you can even poll the audience to find out when they can attend. Lunchtime seminars seem to do very well for most audiences.

Doubling your seminar turn-out is possible if you put these tips into practice.

Written by Doreen Dilger, The Home Based Business Coach

There is one universal truth for entrepreneurs, you’re a hard worker. Building a business, maintaining a business and growing it is hard work. Now it’s generally not back breaking work like a lumberjack might face. However it can be a 24/7 endeavor.

Even if you love your business and enjoy working on it day and night you may be working too hard on it. There are dire consequences to this imbalance. Burnout is an eventual probability. You may enjoy those 12 hour work days right now but down the road you may want to run away.

Another common downfall of working too hard on your business is the inability to see the finer details. It’s too easy to become overwhelmed by all of your plans, actions, and goals and miss out on the important details.

Additionally, you may try to do everything yourself and let’s face it, you’re not an expert at everything. Leveraging your resources can help you cut back on your tasks and responsibilities and actually improve your business. So how do you know if you’re working too hard on your business?

Let’s take a look at a few questions.

Are you consumed by your business? Do you think about it even when you’re not actively working on it? If your answer is “yes” then you may be working too hard on it. Designate planning and brainstorming sessions and schedule time away from your business.

Are you wearing all the hats? Do you do everything yourself or do you have a team of people working with you and for you? Ideally, you’ll spend your time performing tasks that fit your skills and abilities. You’ll outsource other tasks to experts. For example, unless you’re a web designer you might want to hire a pro to build your website.

How’s your health? If you often feel tired or like you’re fighting a cold then you may be working too hard on your business. It’s a subtle sign from your body that it’s time to take a break. Signs include anything from achy joints to insomnia. Pay attention to the cues your body gives you.

I’m Overworked, Now What?

Okay, maybe you’ve identified that you are working too hard but how do you pull back? There are still tasks and responsibilities. There are several steps you can take. Schedule time away, modify your action plan and deadlines and outsource some tasks. Prioritize and consider what’s truly important for the vitality of your business. 

Written by Doreen Dilger, The Home Based Business Coach

Whether you’ve been in business for two days or for ten years there’s one common denominator, being an entrepreneur is hard work. It requires patience, perseverance, and persistence. Let’s face it, sometimes the desire to persevere can wane. You might lose your momentum and your business mojo from time to time. That’s to be expected and it’s the time when you take stock of what you’ve accomplished and where you want to go. However, you can reduce these times and have more entrepreneurial persistence by embracing the following tips and steps.

#1 Why Do You Want It?

It’s much easier to be persistent and to put one foot in front of the other, despite failures, if you know why you want it? What is your goal and what’s the motivation behind the goal? If you’re unsure then step back and spend time figuring it out. This is important. If you don’t know your why then the how, what, and when are much more difficult to follow through on. Vision boards are often recommend for new entrepreneurs. This may be a super approach for you. And if you’ve worn the entrepreneur hat for a few years consider reinventing your vision board, chances are a few things have changed in the past few years.

#2 It’s a Chipper

Generally, success doesn’t happen overnight. It takes years of work and more baby steps than you can count. Accept that. Embrace it. It’s much easier to take many small steps toward a goal than to try to achieve a handful of monumental steps. In the fitness industry any workout that requires many different movements over a long period of time is called a chipper. It means that you just have to chip away at the workout. The same is true for your business and business goals.

#3 Support Matters

Create processes and systems that support you to succeed and identify people who can support you as well. By building a team of people who are behind you whether you succeed or fail you’ll be able to hang onto a positive mindset. Attitude is essential for perseverance. Additionally, when your systems support you to succeed every step you take along the way is much easier to manage.

Perseverance is the ability to stick with it, to follow through, and to remain steadfast even during times of struggle. It’s an entrepreneurial requirement. Understand your motivation and your reasons for your business actions and decisions. Accept that the process may be difficult. Finally, build in support systems and positive people who are there to help you along the way. 

Written by Doreen Dilger, The Home Based Business Coach

Every business needs a vision. A vision is like the big daydream you have in the middle of the afternoon after paying all your bills. It's about sitting on the balcony of your beachside resort room watching the sunset while working from your laptop. It’s the fanciful but possible potential of your business dreams. It’s not going to happen today, but if you reach for the stars, and work toward it, it could happen.

Here are some questions to ask yourself:

* What is your USP? – This is about your products and services now.

* What is in your mission statement? – This is about what you will do for your customers, how and why.

* What is your five-year vision – Where you will be, and how you’ll get there.

Use this information to figure out where you’ll be in five years from now or ten years from now. That is your business vision.

Example:

Acme VA Services will be the top grossing, premier virtual administrative providers in North America by providing reliable, consistent and knowledgeable administrative and author services to six-figure e-book authors.

Once you write a business vision, use it to take action, create a strategy, and formulate tactics to actually reach your vision. Use the vision to motivate yourself, employees and contractors. You know how they say to dress for the part you want? Well, it’s the same with your business vision. If you have the vision to be the top-selling Kindle e-book seller, then you need to act like you already are and do the things it takes to make it a reality.

Maybe money isn’t the most important thing to you. Maybe something else is important to you. If that’s the case, this should show up in your business vision as well. What’s right for one business might not be right for another. Perhaps you want to be able to donate millions of dollars to charity by giving away 10 percent of your profit each year. If that’s the case, and your dream, write it down.

Your vision can include dreams about:

* Finances – This could be about supporting yourself, your family, retirement or supporting employees, contractors, or a community.

* Reputation – This might be about the business’s reputation with customers, employees, contractors and other interested parties.

* Quality – Your vision could be to provide the best of whatever it is that you make.

* Value – You want to give your customers valuable information, products and services.

* Growth – You may plan to double your business in two years, quadruple in five and so forth.

* Passion – You show your customers how much you and your employees (contractors) love doing what it is that you do.

* Charity – You want to be able to donate to and help charities.

* Sustainability – You care about environmental issues or other long-term issues.

* Service Oriented – You care about doing service for others.

* Community Minded – You want to help your community, be it local or within your industry.

You can include any number of other issues that you find important within your business vision. Not everyone is in business only to make money. After all, this is about a vision that you have and it’s personal to you about your path in the world and with your business. 

Written by Doreen Dilger, The Home Based Business Coach

When you think that you’ve picked a niche that is worth exploring deeper, it’s important that you test the niche to see if there is enough interest for you to earn money before you spend too much money developing, creating, and marketing a new product or service. One really great way to do so is to test interest with a teleseminar.

A teleseminar can be given just over the phone, or online and on the phone. The audience can call in and listen live or listen to a recording. With some teleseminar platforms you can even play the teleseminar “as live” where the clients don’t realize that the event is recorded at all and it's run on automatic.

1. Choose a Topic – A teleseminar can be on any topic you want, directed to any niche you want. Choose a topic of interest to your test niche. Maybe your event can be something like “20 tips for (fill in the blanks).” Choose a topic that they would care about enough to attend with the idea of collecting email information to market other products to them later.

2. Set the Date and Start Marketing – Set a date for the teleseminar a few weeks from now and start marketing it right away through email, social media, joint ventures, advertisements and press releases. You can work on the content between now and the teleseminar date.

3. Collect Sign-Up Information – Be sure to collect information from each person who signs up for your teleseminar event. In this way, you can collect the information needed to be sure you can attract enough audience members for your niche.

4. Have More Than One – Don’t give up if your first turn-out isn’t what you expect; it can take a long time to attract a brand new audience to start your new niche. The way to tell is to look at your reach compared to your conversions.

5. Ask for Help – There are already likely people who serve this new niche you want to get involved in, and you may want to include them in your teleseminar by inviting them to speak for 10 to 15 minutes. They will promote the event to their lists which helps you get on the inside of the new niche.

6. Develop the Content – Based on the title you choose for your teleseminar, you’ll want to start creating the content so that you can give a good event to the new audience.

7. Create a Spectacle – If you can offer free “door prizes” and discounts to participants in the teleseminar, your turn-out, and your email list by extension, will be a lot bigger. The bigger the turn-out, the better you can judge the niche based on their participation subsequently.

8. Follow Up – After the teleseminar is really the time you can better test your niche. You’ll use the information you collected on the participants to contact them and ask for even more information. This response is crucial to testing whether the new niche is appropriate and profitable.

If you try a few times, have a good amount of website visitors, and you still do not get a good response, then it is possible that the niche is not a profitable niche. But, if you are able to get some response and more information from the niche based off your follow ups after the teleseminar, then you’ve found yourself a new niche that can likely become very profitable.

Written by Doreen Dilger, The Home Based Business Coach

There is a saying that goes like this: “Failing to plan is planning to fail.” When running a business, if you skip steps because you think they don’t matter (because you just have a “small” business or a “sole proprietorship” and it’s just you), then you’re not going to be able to build a sustainable business that will provide the security and future that you desire. A business vision allows you to think big in terms of your dreams, but to also think big in terms of how you can reach those dreams.

While your first goal is likely to turn a profit, there are other things that are important to care about too. Any successful project actually starts with the end in mind. Even if you build houses for a living, the thing you should concern yourself with is the end result of the livable house, not the first nail you hammer. Without a clear picture of the end result, you won’t even know where to put that first nail.

Therefore, starting with the end in mind will help you create a business that is successful because you’ll know where you’re going.

1. Helps You Create a Sustainable Business – If you have a vision, you can have a long-term business that grows and evolves as time moves forward.

2. Creates a Business Not a Job – If you really want a business that lasts longer than week to week and month to month, you need a vision.

3. Helps You Develop a Growing Business – If you want your vision to grow, you will need to know where you’re going so that you can create a plan to get there.

4. Allows You to Live Your Passions and Do What You Love – While the first thing a business wants may be to earn a profit, the first thing most people want is to live a happy life doing what they love. By creating a business vision you can do both.

5. Knowing Your Vision Helps You Choose Like-Minded Contractors – If you know what you stand for, you can tell those you interview for positions so that you can ensure that together your visions align.

6. Your Vision Signifies to Others What You Stand For – Your business vision will let customers, contractors and employees know what you stand for, above money, well into the future.

7. Your Vision Helps You Know Your Exit Plan – A sustainable business always needs an exit plan. After all, someday you will want to retire, and having a vision can assist with ensure that comes true.

8. Your Vision Helps You Create Systems – Knowing the end point in mind, you can work your way back to today and create a system to reach your goals.

9. Your Vision Helps You Market to Your Audience – If you know where you’re going, and why you’re going there, and who your market is, you’ll be able to create more targeted marketing messages.

10. Helps Your Offerings Become More Unique – Your business vision enables you to create unique offerings throughout your product funnel, ultimately leading to the big dream vision you have for your business.

It should be clear that having a business vision isn’t optional if you want to be successful. Don’t fail to plan; instead, develop your business vision to align with your beliefs, values, and goals so that you can accomplish your dreams.

Written by Doreen Dilger, The Home Based Business Coach

Outsourcing is an important part of running a business efficiently, and it can grow and become more profitable over time. After all, you don’t expect a CEO to do everything on their own; instead they have assistants and experts to do a lot of work for them. This is what makes them look amazing - their ability to pick and choose amazing experts to put on their team and motivate them to get work done. 

1. Do More in Less Time – If it takes you two hours a day to go through emails that someone else could deal with, and this is especially true of customer service email, then you should outsource it to someone else. Those two hours might cost you 20 to 30 dollars an hour to pay someone else to do, but it’s costing you potentially hundreds of dollars an hour in new ideas, new products, and whatever it is that you do that you’re an expert in.

2. Duplicate Yourself – Many times you can also outsource work that you do yourself, and if you find the right people you can duplicate yourself and thus serve more clients. For instance, this is true with virtual assistants. Say your expertise lies in setting up shopping cart solutions for clients. As there are only 24 hours in a day, you can hire others who are also good at setting up shopping carts to increase your business.

3. End Repetitive Tasks – Any daily repetitive tasks that you do you can totally eliminate by outsourcing to someone else. This again frees up a lot of time for you to be able to focus on other things that will move your business forward.

4. Build an Empire with an Exit Strategy – By outsourcing to others, you can actually build up a business that depends less on you. This can feel scary to some people, but the truth is, this is a good goal to have in mind because your family will still be cared for if your business can ultimately run without you, or if it is sellable.

5. Expand Your Capabilities – Is there a skill that would add to your business that you do not have? For instance, maybe you’re excellent at technical skills and coding but you’re not that great at marketing or writing. You can find an expert to take care of these aspects so that you can get more clients and get more work.

6. Focus on Your Efficiencies – When you outsource work that is not your expertise, you can focus better on what you do best. If you’re not sure what your expertise area is yet, you will need to discover that so that you can outsource almost everything else and focus on that one thing. For example, public speaking; you can’t outsource that, but you can outsource everything surrounding public speaking so that you can focus on being the best public speaker possible.

7. Grow Your Business – As you find ways to outsource, you can grow your business beyond what it can be with just you working in it. A corporation often has hundreds of employees, but with outsourcing you can look like a big corporation while simply being a sole proprietorship who outsources to experts in any area ripe for growth.

8. Pay As You Go – The great thing about outsourcing is that the cost is flexible. It only goes up when your income goes up and you get more jobs. Therefore, each time you outsource, you will actually increase your income rather than reduce it.

So, if you want to grow and improve your business, you will learn to outsource to experts. It’ll make your business better, it’ll help you earn more money, and it’ll solidify your business to continue to grow without you. 

Written by Doreen Dilger, The Home Based Business Coach

How To Stop Overcomplicating Things and Letting Your Assistant Handle It.

Many business owners have a really hard time letting their assistant handle various tasks. This is because many business owners have the feeling that if they let their assistant do things they will lose control. Additionally, they feel like no one can do “it,” whatever “it” is, as well as they can. But, most of the time the truth is if you’ve hired the right assistant they can do it as well as or even better than you can if you let them.

1. Define the Tasks – Be clear about the tasks that you want done and the results you expect up front so that your assistant doesn’t have to ask you too many questions throughout each day. They need to be able to make some decisions on their own or else there is no point in having an assistant.

2. Focus on Deliverables – Instead of worrying about the process and how someone does something, create checklists based off deliverables for every project that you’re involved in so that you can provide some guidance without micromanaging.

3. Hire the Right Assistant – Interview assistants based the type of projects you do so that you will know up front what you want them to do. That will help you hire people with the right expertise so you’ll feel confident turning over things to your assistant.

4. Use a Project Management System – There are many different project management systems such as Basecamp.com, Asana.com and others. It’s imperative that you and your assistant use something like that and not rely on email to keep track of the things that are to be done each day, week and month.

5. Set Milestones and Deadlines – Within the project management system and in concert with your assistant, set milestones and deadlines based on the expectations of what you want them to do. If you turn over work to your assistant that they automatically do each month without too much input for you, so much the better.

6. Check in Regularly – You don’t want to bother each other too often but you can check in for five minutes each morning or once a week; whatever works for you. It will make you feel better and make your assistant more confident to have regular contact with you so that they know what is going on.

7. Provide Adequate Support – Whether it’s a budget to work with, or access to software that makes their job easier, it’s important to provide them with what they need. If you want someone to be your true assistant, they’ll need access to the things you have access to in order to better help you.

8. Motivate and Reward – Provide feedback on a regular basis to your assistant, including positive feedback. That is a good way to motivate and reward him or her. The happier an assistant is, and the more secure they feel within their position with your business, the harder they’ll work on your behalf.

Finally, it’s important to let go of perfection and allow people who are experts in what they do, do what it is that they do. You can’t do everything. No successful CEO does. In fact, most successful CEOs mostly do nothing but delegate tasks to the smart, capable experts that they hired. 

“Tips For Finding or Connecting With Your Niche”

Written by Doreen Dilger, The Home Based Business Coach

Pinterest is pretty much just like every other social network when it comes to being able to search the network for people to connect to. Only, it's easier. Simply go to Pinterest.com and use the search bar to search any keywords or keyword phrases about people, places or things that you already know are part of your niche.

Conduct a Search

For instance, if want to connect with virtual assistants, just do a search for virtual assistant, choosing "all pins". You'll get a lot of results for that search. You can see amazing pins that other VAs have put up such as pictorial resumes, work samples, quotes and more. Choose some that are relevant and re-pin them, follow them, and even send them to others who may be interested.

See Who's Following the Competition

Like a particular person or business on Pinterest, follow it, then look at who is following them. You can easily follow all the people who are following your competition too. Don't follow hundreds per day, but do pick out a few standouts and follow them each day. More than likely some of these people will follow you back and now will get updates from your pins.

Use Keywords and Keyword Phrases

You want people to be able to find you when they do a search too. Therefore, be sure that you use keywords in your profile, and use the space provided to give as much information as possible about you and your business. When creating boards, use keywords in the descriptors and titles. These keywords will help your audience find you because you are showing that you know your niche by using the right words.

Share Motivational Images

Pinterest is a great story-telling mechanism. A great way to connect with your niche is to share motivational quotes and images with others in that niche. For instance, if you sell Tupperware, you could do a before and after image of organizing your own kitchen cabinets using Tupperware. Add a nice quote about the benefits of organization and you've got a winning combination that may motivate your customers to buy what you've just shared.

Share Your Accomplishments

Receive a certificate, diploma, or award? Share a picture of it on Pinterest with your followers. People like feeling as if they're connected to you and even part of your success. By sharing it on Pinterest you become even more human. People like doing business with people they know, like and trust, and by sharing publically your accomplishments you become even more trustworthy in the eyes of your followers.

Brand Your Pins

It's important to realize that anyone can take your images from Pinterest and you can lose the link back to your website. Therefore, brand all your pins with your logo and URL. That way, if it's removed from its context people can still find you and connect with you no matter how it gets shared.

By making yourself an integral part of the Pinterest community surrounding your niche, you will easily find ways to connect with and engage with your niche.

Written by Doreen Dilger, The Home Based Business Coach

As a service provider or work-at-home provider who only gets paid when working, you're going to have times that are slow due to your clients' need to take a vacation. Everyone needs vacations, but you'll need to be able to fill the void while they're gone so that you still earn money even when your customers are on vacation. There are ways to fill the time and/or avoid the issue entirely.

Ask for Advance Notice

Put into your contract a request for a minimum of a 30-day notice if your client plans to take a vacation without continuing to pay you or provide work for you to do. Explain that you will fill the time with short-term work and projects. Most people are happy to provide notice because they understand that this is so that you can fill the income gap.

Have a Short-Term Sale

As soon as you have a client tell you they're going to take a vacation, arrange to have a short-term sale to fill the time. Make the sale limited, focused, and based on the time your client will be gone so that you don't end up overworked instead of just filling the space. You can create sale packages that you only send out to your contacts each time a client goes on vacation.

Build Your Passive Income

All service providers should consider building up their passive income so that when one client takes a vacation or some time off, it doesn't matter. Start a side blog with affiliate sales, create a paid eCourse or membership site, or write a book. There are many options to help you create side work that creates recurring income.

Avoid Anchor Clients

An Anchor client is any one client who pays you 40 percent or more of your monthly income. Anchor clients are tempting, but they are a bad idea because you are going to be too reliant on the income from that one client. If none of your clients comprises more than 10 to 15 percent of your income, you can easily cut back on expenses and use the free time to work on your own projects without worrying about money.

Work Only on Retainer

Another way to avoid issues with clients going on vacation is to require a contract that is based on a monthly retainer fee being paid by subscription on an automatic basis. The fee can be made so that it is a minimum amount with a minimum set of hours you make available to the client that does not roll over. Without the paying of the fee, your client can't request work from you.

By using these tips, or a combination of these tips, you can avoid losing money when your client goes on vacation. Create solid contracts, be ready to have a sale, build up your passive income, avoid anchor clients and if you are in high demand, consider working only on a paid in advance retainer basis.