Kristie T’s Home Business Blog Fun, mom-geared work-at-home tips and advice on making money on the net.

One of the tough parts of business is sometimes dealing with difficult people who are intimidating, aggressive, or even downright mean. And isn’t it hard in a situation like that not to just shrivel up and want to fade away?

As a quiet, compassionate person, I have had difficulties in the past with some rough and tumble types in my business dealings. And admitedly, I have let a few people walk all over me because of that.

For example, recently I was dealing with a gentleman in business who was a strong personality that really asserted himself. He kind of told me how it was in an “I am right and that’s the way it is” manner. And I sat that shrinking in my chair and taking it.

Thinking back on it, it’s my fault for not standing up for myself. And in talking with my business coach I picked up some great tips to hold your own and embrace your personal power.

Here are some tips for building your confidence and owning your personal power in business:

Step 1) If someone yells at you or steps on your boundaries, hold up a mirror by saying,
“Do you realize that —— (you tell them what behavior they are exhibiting)”

It could be

- Do you realize that you are yelling at me?
- Do you realize you are putting me down?
- Do you realize you are talking about someone behind their back?

Sometimes people don’t realize they are exhibiting these behaviors and simply pointing it out in a calm, direct way will get them to stop. And you definately have a right to be treated in a manner that is just and fair. But it is your duty to let people know if they treat you in a way that crosses the line.

Step 2) If they toss that down and don’t acknowledge their behavior, then move to step 2, let them know not to treat you that way. “I won’t stand for people yelling at me, and if you don’t stop it, I’m going to have to leave.”
Hold up your boundary and give a consequence if they don’t change their behavior.

Step 3) If they still refuse to change their behavior, then take the action you said you would. If you said, “I’m leaving”, “We’re through”, “I’m hanging up the phone.” be prepared to do that and show them you won’t tolerate that behavior.

Have you ever been bullied in business? What happened to you and how did you handle it? Share your story of how you were bullied in business here.

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Do you have a pink spoon? Followers of Andrea Lee know that a “pink spoon” is the freebie that you use to entice people to subscribe to your mailing list. These days you have to market the free stuff as much as you do the paid stuff.

Good branding of course involves inventing your own terms that become the industry standard. That’s how Kleenex became the word for tissue, Fed X became the name for overnight delivery, and Xerox became the name for making a copy.

I watch the Disney cartoon Kim Possible with my kids and they use the term Booyah. Now all the sudden this term has found it’s way into news. Jim Cramer, host of Mad Money now has Booyah Mad Money stock picks. Is CNBC now taking cues for show names from a children’s cartoon show featuring a naked mole rat?

I looked in the urban dictionary and sure enough, Booyah has made it’s way officially into our language, see here.

Booyah - an exclamatory statement, often said when someone is extremely overjoyed. Often people do a hand movement simultaneously as they say ‘Booyah’ (clinching fist and thrusting their elbow downward vertically) I got an A on my chem final. Booyah!

What’s your pink spoon? How can you coin a term that perfectly describes on of your unique methodologies and puts you on the map as the clever one behind it all?

Do you have any fun terms that you either use in your personal life or in your business? Share your terms here.

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What eats good billable time out of your day? What are your distractions and time sucks?

The 80/20 rule says that 80 percent of your results come from just 20 percent of your efforts. This means that 80 percent of the things we deal with during the day are wasting our time or not making us money.

So it makes sense that the more you can do to minimize these things, the more billable hours you get. Plus, being able to fend off would-be time stealers allows you focus and get more done. Less stress, more money. That’s a good thing.

What are these time sucks?

1) Tiny tots wanting snacks while mommy is working - prepare a snack tray at the beginning of the day. Some healthy do-it-yourself snacks include cubes of cheese, fruit snacks, little peanut butter and jelly sandwich fingers, yogurt, Skippy Squeeze, granola bars. And have pre-filled juicy cups and/or juice boxes ready in the fridge.

2) Phone calls - Seriously, caller id is your best friend. I simply gave up answering my phone to anyone other than people I know. My virtual assistant answers the phone once a day. She sends me an email what who calls, what they want, and their number. This saves me a ton of time. Plus I don’t have to fend off those pesky sales people. If you can’t afford a VA, just check your messages once or twice a day during preset times.

3) Emails - This is my all-time personal worst offender. I love email. I am totally addicted. I am getting ready to hand this over to my VA too. Getting a good spam filter helps a bunch. Cancelling email newsletters you don’t have time to read or don’t enjoy cuts down on the clutter. Best practice is to check email a couple times a day and not to leave it open all day.

4) The overwhelming email inbox - This builds up like crazy during the week. Every Sunday I sit and clean thru the inbox. Every email gets sorted and goes into a bin based on what I need to do to it: call, send, do, read, file, etc.

4) Messy office - If your office is a mess, I don’t care who you are, it’s just hard to focus. I do the 5-minute tidy every morning. If you go in any CEO’s office, you’ll see that their office is immaculent. Every weekend I spend 1 hour totally cleaning my office so everything is perfectly in place. The peace of mind that gives me is tremendous. I can find anything at all in a few minutes.

5) Housework - Reject the desire to take a break by washing dishes. The dishes can wait. During your work day is not a time to fold laundry and clean house. In fact, if your hourly rate is $75-$200 an hour or more, you seriously might want to hire someone who can do it for you for $30 or so an hour. Otherwise, housework can be done before or after work hours.

6) Surfing Aimlessly - We’ve all done it. You can an email with an interesting article, you surf to the site, you dig thru their website and before you know it 2 hours have gone by. Ouch! That’s an expensive way to let you time slip away. Granted learning new things is important. Set aside 30 minutes or a preset amount of time for surfing.

7) The great idea that hits you - when a WOW idea hits you and you are in midstream doing something else, write it down and tend to it later. A lot of time is wasted starting a project, getting interrupted, and then trying to regain your thoughts.

Outside noise - My husband works from home too. Sometimes he will turn on the tv and I can hear it from my home office. Other times the kids have a day off and I need to focus. I have a CD of relaxing music that I listen to with headphones. It mentally takes me away.

9) Family and Friends - There are people who love you that don’t realize that working from home is a profession. They don’t realize that when they stop by with a plate full of cookies or call you to see if you are coming to Aunt Suzie’s retirement party during your work hours it costs you money. You need to be gently firm and remind them that you are working and that you’d be happy to deal with this after work hours. It can take repeat reminding, but over time, they’ll get the picture.

10) Reduce time spent in meetings and conference calls as much as possible - when you are in a meeting, you are handing the control of your time over to someone else. Whenever possible see if they can send you the notes and let you know what your assignments are.

Do telemarketers drive you crazy? Are you an email addict too? Share your biggest time sucks here?

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I am reading a great book now by Dan Kennedy, “No B.S. Time Management for Entrepreneurs: The Ultimate No Holds Barred Kick Butt Take No Prisoners Guide to Time Productivity & Sanity”.

And one of the things he talks about is how to calculate your hourly rate as an entrepreneur. He explains how you really need to start with the end number you want to make for the year in mind and work your way backwards to calculate what your hourly rate should be.

Here’s the formula to calculating your base earnings target for the year according to Dan Kennedy.

Here’s an example for someone who wants to earn $50,000 this year

So, assuming that only 1/3 of your hours are billable hours of the hours you spend working a day, you need to bill $85.20 per hour to make $50,000 per year.

Knowing this number allows you to make better decisions about how you use your time. Would you spend half an hour or your own time going to the post office knowing that it costs you $42.50 to do it yourself? What if you could get a neighbor kid to do it once a day for $10, that would give you more billable time wouldn’t it?

Do the math and let me know what your billable hourly rate needs to be to hit your target. I did and I see that I am overdue for a raise! *grin*

Share your hourly rate that you need to charge to hit your target for the year here!

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You know how when you see someone with something cool you just gotta have it? Well, tonight I was checking out my favorite blogs tonight from my personalized My Yahoo page and noticed that several of my favorite blogs had cool little icons beside their listings all the sudden. I sort of squinched my eyes and looked and thought, “How did they do that?” And then I thought, “I want one!” And then I was determined to find out how make my own favicon too!

And sure enough, my blog coaches, Patsi and Denise had the whole scoop.

And if you’d like your very own favicon on your blog (or web home page) here’s how to do it so you can be the next cool kid on the blogosphere!

How to add a Favicon to your home page of your website

1) Create your icon with a free favicon creator tool makes it sooo easy!
http://www.html-kit.com/favicon/
Relax, you need not be a tech, geek, or artist to do this. The cool part is you can just upload your logo, a picture, whatever and it will turn it into a favicon for you.

2) Upload the favicon to your main public html directory of your web server

3) Edit your index.htm page of your website to add this code in between your head tags

How to Add the Favicon to your Wordpress blog

1) Step 1: Create your icon with the cool favicon tool - http://www.html-kit.com/favicon/

2) Edit into your WP Admin, go to presentation, theme editor, header template, and edit your header.php file and put this code right after your opening head tag

3) Upload your favicon to your main public html directory

How to Add the Favicon to your Typepad blog

Laura at Six Apart wrote such fabulous directions are here for your Type pad people to add a favicon - check it out!

So everyone, go make your cool favicon and show me where I can see it when it’s done! On your mark, get set, go!
Then come back and show us your brand spankin’ new favicon!

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Would you like a little tip to take your website testimonials waaaay to the next level? Here are some ways to really punch up your customer testimonials so they pop up and have great impact.

Tips to boost your raving customer reviews on your website:

• Make the table border around the testimonial box red to make it stand out.
• Make the table width around 75% instead of 100% so that it is skinnier and indented from the main text.
• Center align the testimonial boxes.
• Give the testimonial a red “header” pulling out the top most impactful phrase of the testimonial like “It made me $1000 in extra sales the very next day”
• Add a little introduction before the person’s quote that explains the situation and how you helped them
• Add a little note before you add the testimonial like “Here’s What Judy Had To Say About Product Name And Your Name”
• Highlight the WOW words in yellow or make the bold so they pop.
• Add photos next to your testimonials to make them come alive.
• Add audio or video clips of the testimonials to kick it up another notch.
  Here’s a great tool to help you record audio easily for your website testimonials.
• Make the background shading of the testimonial box be yellow so it visually pulls your attention.
• Make your testimonials stand out with “fun” with big exaggerated pull out quotes like on my speaker marketing site here
• Put the person’s name, city, state they are from, and website address

What’s your best method of getting testimonials? Click to share your tips for getting good customer testimonials here.

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I have seen plenty of new entrepreneurs put up a slick website with their book as a one-shot-wonder, hoping to make it big on the net. But what they fail to take advantage of is the fact that people that buy once from you, are likely to buy again from you. What else do you have to offer? I mean, they want the whole enchilada! They dig your approach, identify with your voice, want to go deeper. What else do you have for them?

Introducing, mulitple streams of income - the key to being a well fed entrepreneur.

• infoproducts (reports, books, ebooks, audio programs, videos, teleclasses)
• coaching/consulting - (indvidual and group coaching)
• services
• keynotes
• bootcamps, workshops, seminars
• affiliate programs
• advertising (ezine ads, website ads, Google Adsense, solo emails)
• membership sites

So if you are ready to double or triple your income, create a stream of products to help your prospects go deeper.
What’s the next product you are working on for your funnel? Share your product development goals for this year!

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One of the biggest shifts for me this year in my thinking has been moving from the mentality of “I need” to the attitude of “Ihave”. And while surfing around in Ryze, I found a hillarious mantra that really summed it up for me..

How’s this for our new mantra this year.

“Abundance is chasing my ass.” (and there’s nothing I can do about it!)

I love that! It’s funny, it’s positive, and it shows that we don’t have to chase success, we just have to embrace it!

What’s your mantra? Click here to share your mantra!

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Business Week working parents blogger Amy Dunkin, confesses that she sometimes works in her bathrobe. While mentioning Webmomz, “Doing Business in Your Bathrobe Day“, Amy shares how working at home from the kitchen table has allowed her to really be there for her kids. Although she jokes that working that close to a refrigerator can put you at a disadvantage.

That makes me laugh. I actually find that I eat healthier since I started working from home. Now, I have time to prepare meals. Before in my former corporate life, I’d dash to a fast food joint, shove down a burger, and rush back to the office to finish my proposal I needed for our afternoon business meeting.

I am curious, do you find that you are tempted to much on chips, bon bons, and other snack items because you work from home? Have you gained weight because of it? Click here to let me know how working from homehealth and diet.

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