Atypical Virtual Associates

If you find you can’t get clients, and you’ve been looking everywhere, and you have acne from all the stress….

Stop hitting your head against the wall.

Do a written inventory of what you have done successfully and what you have not.

• Was your marketing effective? What parts worked, what parts didn’t?
• When are you losing potential clients?
• Did you have anyone that was almost a client?
• How close have you been to working with someone doing anything since you’ve been home?

These certainly aren’t all the questions you should ask yourself, but your questions aren’t the same as my questions or someone else’s. Figure out what you’re doing right and what you are doing wrong.

Then try and stop doing the things that aren’t working.

Before you open your home office, it’s important to have everything together. If you need more complicated equipment like network switches and routers, make sure you have someone that can give you reliable advice on those things.

If you only have one computer, make sure you have a high-speed Internet connection. Working online with dial up is a slow, painful torture.

The right tools and hardware can make your experience faster, more enjoyable, and more successful!

You want to work from home. Or you already do.

You may just be trying to find new ways to increase your income streams.

But if you don’t know where you want to be, there is no way you’re going to be able to take a class or get proper advice on how to be successful, because that answer will differ based on the goal or outcome you have in mind.

Not knowing is like asking people where to buy english saddles when, in reality, you’re looking for a mouse cage. It just doesn’t make sense if you don’t know what you want to end up with at the end of the day.

This might be the coolest thing I’ve ever heard of.

Network marketing is usually seen as a negative, but in this case I can’t imagine anyone not being able to get behind this company.

Stream Energy is an energy company that started with the advent of deregulation in the industry. Now located in Texas and Georgia and through the ignite business lets people sell energy in a network marketing setting. While I don’t know enough about energy deregulation to understand the ignite opportunity in full, I do know that I would be researching how to join ignite - simply because what they sell makes sense.

Grassroots marketing of energy makes sense to me, and I think it would to many others as well.

Interesting, isn’t it? They have a really cool website too, with videos that explain the compensation plan and the history of the Ignite company. I know how angry people are here when they see their energy bills go higher and higher with no end in sight. This might give people a better option while allowing others to have a job lowering people’s energy bills. That would be something personally fulfilling as far as jobs go, don’t you think?

If you visit, let me know what you think. I’m really curious and kind of dissapinted they don’t offer something like this in Illinois!

It’s coming up on that “starting to shop” holiday season.

From gourmet chocolate to Guess watches there are so many options for client gifts, it can make your head spin.

If you are shopping for clients, remember to give them something that will make them think of you and smile. A business mug? A logo on a polo shirt? If you think putting your business logo on a gift for a client is over the top, consider getting logo stickers and using them to seal the gift after wrapping!

On dreary, gray, rainy days like today it can be downright impossible to stay awake in the office.

One option would be to go out and shop for espresso machines, another would be to just start drinking more Diet Coke. The problem with caffeine is that you have to eat to create a base for all that, and I’m not a big fan of eating a lot because (you guessed it) that will make me tired and sleepy!

So I’m looking for solutions.

I’m thinking the moisture on my face is going to turn me into a teenager all over again.

Oh wait. I had great skin in high school. I’m thinking about college, when the stress and the everything started getting to me. I swear during my Freshman year of college I considered getting acne treatment. What else was I going to do?

I didn’t, though, and my skin eventually cleared up. But now, gosh, I hope summer ends soon. I can’t take it much longer.

Since I work in the office, I don’t often notice just how small my kitchen is. I’m wondering if replacing the cabinets or kitchen faucets will brighten it up enough that it doesn’t look so tiny.

I have been doing more cooking at home and having a larger kitchen would give me some more freedom to prepare larger meals. I’d like that.

We got the coolest game to try out. Disney Bingo. It’s an interactive game that helps kids learn colors, letters, and if they’re not there yet they can play just matching characters!

My girls cannot get enough of the game. They’re not too good with letters, but they love matching the color on the screen to the color on their bingo board. They even know how to stand up and yell, “Bingo!!” when they have a row of chips!

I find that it’s not that easy to get both my girls to sit down for “family time” and then getting them to play nice is almost impossible. ScreenLife Game’s Disney Bingo is something both girls enjoy so much they stop fighting while we play. This lets us all spend time together and have fun. I don’t have to tell the girls to quit fighting, the girls get to enjoy each other as well as the game, and we all have a really good time.

You can get a copy of Disney Bingo from Amazon.com or even Drugstore.com – it’s readily available and I highly recommend it. I think this is going to get the girls learning the letters of the alphabet way faster than the flash cards we were using.

Thanks, Disney Bingo. It’s nice to see my kids stop fighting and start playing together!

If I had a corporate job, there is no way I could even consider tattos, body jewelry (other than earrings/bracelets/rings/etc.), or funky hair.

But working from home the world is open to me.

If only I could find a Chicago based hairstylist that would just have fun with my hair, and color, and cut, and make me look the way I want to. But, you know, without me having to draw a friggin picture. Because I want something flattering and edgy and fun.

It shouldn’t be this difficult. Really. I want a hairdresser I can just trust with my hair.