Ladies Who Launch

Ventura Incubator's Sherry Gaba

Life Coach Sherry Gaba appeared on Dr. Drew Pinsky's brand new  Health radio show for one hour on December 13, 2007 in the  Los Angeles and San Diego markets.  Dr. Drew is known for Dr. Drew's Love Line syndicated radio show.  She spoke about parenting, single parenting, the differences between Life Coaching and Psychotherapy and dealing with the frenzy of the Holidays.   

Design/Tech Stuff :: What's in a Signature

by Fashionmista aka That IT Girl, Spammy Scammers, and Katie James

The best hiding places are the most obvious ones, right? Or the best weapons? Candlestick on the mantle. I don't have a fireplace, but if I did... We spend so much energy looking for the best places to advertise and socialize, and then we spend some more energy finding out what worked and didn't work for others - what website is the best investment, but what are their demographics, and do you care if you sold or instead got brand awareness.

Enter the email signature. The guaranteed little placement at the bottom of every single email you send out. It's free. It gets delivered. And it goes to people you know and most likely support you, which means they want to know what you're doing. Plus, you form new contacts all the time, so with your email signature, you are passively selling your entrepreneurial self.

Here's mine:
: website : www.katie-james.com
: blog : www.fashionmista.com
: other blog : www.thatitgirl.blogspot.com
: spam prevention blog : www.spammyscammers.blogspot.com
: etsy : www.katiejames.etsy.com
: stylehive : www.stylehive.com/person/fashionmista/grid
: facebook group Global Mistas Inc : http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=5791719372
: cell : 555.555.5555

See how easy that was? And you can get creative with the layout, add your logo, etc. etc. But remember, this is not in print! So you can change this every day if you wanted. If you needed votes in a contest, include your pitch: "Vote for me in the Super Great Contest I Entered! It's really easy! Click on this link: www...." I've had website clients see an accessory design contest I'm hoping to score in, and they vote! Did I ask them to? No! It's out of the goodness of their hearts kind of thing. And they liked the idea.

The part where it becomes a chore is when you have a few emails. But really, it's a minor chore. I am email obsessed, so I have three ways of answering email from one email account: my Mac mail on my computer for the pretty "ding", gmail for global access and backup, and my iPhone (also Mac mail). If my signatures are the same, you never know if I'm walking down Broadway, sharing a cafe, or dutifully at my desk.

But don't stop at the email address. Include these links in forums you frequent, if you want your information in a totally public place (unless you're in a private forum). Forum members will click on your links, people coming in from search engines into that forum thread, etc. Warning: I wouldn't do this in blogs. Blogs are generally for Comments only - meaning, your opinion. Not your five zillion things you need to market. Just my opinion, though.

If you do this already, do you have any success stories from it? Has anyone bought one of your products, or become one of your blog junkies? Share with us in the Comments below!

Celebrate Your Accomplishments

Hello Ladies!

As I was thinking of what to write for my first official week of LWL blog contribution, I was struck with the dichotomy of beginnings and endings.  Here you and I are initiating a dialogue so I want to start at the beginning, to set the foundation for consciously creating your business with joy and ease.  At the same time, it is December, a time we usually consider to be an end.   So in the spirit of new beginnings and end of year preparations, today we will be looking at celebrating your accomplishments for 2007!

As women leaders and entrepreneurs, being busy, taking it on, and charging ahead are a regular part of your day to day, but how often do you really stop to notice all you have done? 

With new dreams always being created, new projects to launch, it is so easy to get caught up in the whirlwind.  I always find it amazing how without proper attention and care, the very thing you launched, the very thing you love, can feel an awful lot like the rat race that you thought you had left behind.

One way to keep balance, focus and energy as you build your empire is to take time to stop and celebrate your accomplishments.

Whether you have just launched, are thinking about launching or you are in your fifth fabulous year, you have things to celebrate. The fact that you are an entrepreneur, a leader, a launcher, means you are unique and special. You are willing to take risks, go for your passion and follow your dreams. This in itself is remarkable.

So before you launch down a new path; before you run headlong into holiday preparations and dreaming for the New Year, let’s take a moment to celebrate what you have already created.

Action:  Settle in, clear the schedule, grab a fuzzy blanket, get your favorite mug of coffee and let’s get started!

(One thing you will learn about me as we get to know each other is that I am huge on “setting the stage” for intention and enjoyment in everything you do.  I will often invite you to surround yourself with the time, space, and environment to have a great experience.  Some of my favorite accoutrements are anything fuzzy and the perfect mug with yummy tea or coffee. You find what works for you but the point is not just to get through it but to enjoy the ride!)

Write a list of your accomplishments from the past year, big and small:

• Celebrate accomplishments in business – goals achieved, milestones met, financial success (I once celebrated making my first $1.23 in residual income, a milestone for my business.  If making your first $150 as an entrepreneur is a milestone for you, write it down! You get to decide what is worthy of celebrating!)

• Celebrate accomplishments in life – losing that 5 lbs, renovating the bathroom, setting one night a week as date night and keeping it, actually making it through a whole month of daily meditation. Remember, nothing is too silly or too small to celebrate.

• Celebrate moments of courage or extraordinary effort – as a launcher you know you have had moments this year where you pushed the envelope and stepped outside of your comfort zone. This is no small thing and it deserves to be celebrated.

• Celebrate the woman you have become – often our greatest accomplishments do not show up as something that we built or something that we did, but as something we are.  Some of life’s biggest reasons to celebration come from the work we do on ourselves to become the person we imagined.

• Stop, breath, and let it all sink in.  Yep, I knew it.  YOU ROCK!

To get you going, here is a little excerpt from my list:

• Successfully did a 21 day cleanse!
• Somehow actually got my head around the idea of having a baby (Feb 2008 we go for it!)
• Was asked to be a monthly columnist for “Inspire” with Pure Romance, bringing inspiration and insight to 10,000 + female entrepreneurs each month.
• Invested in a sailing cruise line with Jeff (my husband).
• Found an awesome graphic designer for the LIVLOUD! Newsletter so I am really proud of each issue I send out.
• Created a spot in the sun for reading and meditating to support me through the dark, cold Cleveland Winter (dark and cold relative to AZ anyway.)
• Kitchen renovations complete! (12 months late but done done done!)
• Checked out Austin, TX, Los Angeles, CA and Sedona, AZ and decided none of them are quite the place for Coach Joelle to call home.
• Sent out the holiday party evite! (Planning the first real celebration since I moved to Cleveland is a huge step to making Cleveland Home.)
• Started painting again….

Alright Ladies!  Have a blast celebrating yourself!

As a bonus: share your list in the comments below! We would love to help you celebrate!

Huzzha to you!

Coach Joelle

Rocket Launchers: Ladies Who Launch In The News

• Boston Leader LYNN TOOMEY, Founder of Art to Gogh (www.arttogogh.net), recently won the grand prize in the third annual Mount Wachusett Community College’s (MWCC), third annual business plan competition. Way to go Lynn!   The competition rewards the business plan that best portrays a unique and innovative service or concept.   Check out some of the great press this distinguished award has led resulted in.  Mount Wachusett Newsletter, http://www.mwcc.edu/info/news.html#first,  and a cable TV program where she did an interview, http://www.wccatv.com/soapbox/583. 

• LA Incubator MINDY DAVIS, founder and owner of Peels on Wheels, was featured in the New York Time’s Thursday Styles section.  The article, entitled Hello, Day Spa?  This Order is for Delivery, highlights the frequent frustrations people have with booking and getting to a spa service and how there is a new trend in ‘home delivery’ spa services.  Mindy’s mobile spa brings the spa treatment directly to the client; in fact, her employees travel up to a 70 mile radius to meet a client.   

• Our new DENVER INCUBATORS are making news!  The Daily Camera Boulder Colorado newspaper highlighted LWL, the “savvy network for women business owners,” and noted it’s arrival in the Boulder area. . http://www.dailycamera.com/news/2007/nov/26/briefcase/   Also, Colorado Incubator leader RICKI BOOKER is profiled in The Family Groove in their segment called, “The Family Groove’s Profile of a Mom Who’s Making it Happen.”    It highlights her series of children’s books called Change is Strange.  http://www.thefamilygroove.com/dec_MotherNature.htm  In addition, Ricki was featured on Book Launch Café and interviewed about her book series.  http://booklaunchcafe.typepad.com/booklaunchcafe/change-is-strange.html

• NY Incubator leader JANERA SOEREL is the Founder & Editor of www.JANERA.com,The Voice for Global Nomads.  Her organization just held their third Immigration Salon in D.C., and it was covered beautifully by Delphine Schrank, a writer at The Washington Post.  The Global Nomad Immigration Dinner Salons are evenings where experts and guests meet to talk about Immigration. Janera further explains that “the experts facilitate the discussion that starts after I open the conversation with the question, ‘what if we were to have free movement of people, as we have free movement of goods and capital.’” The events are meant to be fun and connect interesting guests and experts. http://www.janera.com/janera_editornote.php

Quiet Riot: Congrats to Sweet Riot!

Clare Nehra sent us news about Sweet Riot coffee business. Sweetriot was the national top 3 winner for the Fortune Small Business Competition 2007

Design/Tech Stuff :: Social Networking 101 with Bookmarks

by Fashionmista aka That IT Girl, Spammy Scammers, and Katie James

Social Networking is huge. It's huge in concept and it's huge in people who use it. What is  "social networking," and isn't networking social anyway? Yes. "Social Networking" as a term that in this day in age means to have a presence beyond your website on other websites that are built specifically to bring people together to share resources, tips, thoughts, whatever. Not too long ago, it was said that having a website was as necessary as having a business card. Still true. Now you need more. There are so many websites in the world, and so many ways to promote them, both free and paid, that your website needs to become larger than itself and work for you when you're sleeping.

Social Networking can be done for free in many ways. "For free" means that your fingers are doing the flying across the keyboard and clicking the mouse, so it's actually your own time that you're spending. And with anything, especially online, manners are very, very important. You could be a huge company, or you could be a little person with a website, and get slammed by online egomaniacs, or highly praised as offering something special and unique. The benefit of social networking, if done organically and with sincerity (although that can sometimes backfire), could mean that you are getting new eyeballs onto your website, onto your logo, reading about your brand, trusting you as a source of great pieces of information, etc.

This article is going to focus on one form of social networking: bookmarking. "Social bookmarking" has taken the old habit of bookmarking something in your own private browser (Internet Explorer, AOL, Firefox, etc.) and moved it to a shared environment. People have created websites that you can go to, freely create an account, and start bookmarking your favorite pages that you find on the web. These can be news articles, pictures, products, videos, and anything else that gets invented to live on the Internet.

Some such websites are StumbleUpon.com, Digg.com, del.icio.us, and many, many more. These started out, and remain, a place for people to simply keep track of their websites online, so that they could be accessed from any computer. But now, everyone can and wants to see what everyone is bookmarking, and read, sort of, a specialized newspaper. For this post, we are going to talk about StumbleUpon.com and Stylehive.com.

StumbleUpon.com

Years ago, I created an account at StumbleUpon.com to keep track of articles that had to do with "graphic design" or "seo" or "marketing" or "designer" or anything I wanted to find later that had to do with a topic. Then an online friend turned me onto "photo stumbling," which means I could right click on an image, and because I had an account with StumbleUpon.com and had downloaded it to my browser, a little tool appeared in my list of tools called "Photo Stumble This!"

Suddenly my page of links at StumbleUpon was not only useful to me, but others found it useful too, and now it was pretty because I was photo stumbling photos and products. And then I looked one day at my account, and saw that I had some "Fans" who had pressed a button saying that they liked me. If I liked them back, we could be "Mutual Friends" and then I could see what they were stumbling and learn all about their stuff.

Here's what my Stumleupon page looks like. The latest link is a "photo stumble," so a tan image is showing up there with links and my review of it. To the right are people who have visited my page recently:

The other night, I Stumbled my own article on how to create a Flickr widget/badge thing. But I don't only Stumble my own things. That would be not benefit greater good because there are lots more articles out there. I tend to Stumble articles on tech news, fashion news, designer news, and of course photos whenever I can. So, to keep and build credibility, I stick with the idea on which Stumbleupon was created, which is to share pages, and share as many pages as I have time for - other people's pages, with my own pages mixed in.

Tip: I find that usually when I "photo stumble" a picture at night, that picture can generate about 100-200 hits to the site that I did it to. As proof, go to my burp cloths Etsy page and look to the right to see how many views it got - about 250. That happened in one day. Now visit my photo envelope things, which I did not photo stumble, and see how they got about 20 visits so far. I posted both of these products on the same day.

Stylehive.com

I first learned about Stylehive through a Google Alert I set up for katie-james.com. A girl had "hived" my chocolate brown checkbook covers. Nice of her. Well, later on, I got a sale for a jewelry bag. Sometimes people say where they heard about Katie James when they place their order (thanks to my shopping cart, ZenCart), and this girl did. Stylehive.com. So, a free post that I did nothing to create, for a $24 checkbook cover, landed me a $52 sale of a jewelry pouch. I was so grateful, that I contacted the Stylehive person who hived me (she had a blog linked from her Stylehive page, and I tracked her down), and I offered to send her the brown checkbook cover she liked so much, and she accepted my offer.

Common Sense Networking

What is crucial to all of this is honesty. Which as I mentioned, though, can backfire. So "organic" might be a better word. Serendipitous. Create your own luck sort of thing. But for the most part, if you are going to do something publicly online, like thanking someone, or giving props to a blog by leaving a comment, you'll probably be fine and spreading awareness about your web presence if your profile is linked to your website or blog. However, if you drop a resource that just happens to be yours on a blog comment, be very careful. Bloggers, and now people with these social networking accounts - basically anyone with a voice online - will pick up if you are solely marketing without meaning it. Look at this article (which is stumbled on the LWL Stumbleupon page), which brings to light the touchy subject of "thanking" Stumblers when they stumble one of your web pages. So, you just want to tread carefully.

I did thank a blogger for including my jewelry pouch in her Christmas top 10 list last year (I should have checked my records first though, because she had just bought it!). The preferred method of doing this was to privately email her, but her email wasn't listed anywhere. I thanked her on her blog via a comment, which was all about her pregnancy (and is now about her newborn). Very discreetly, and sincerely, I offered to send her my burp cloth to see if she liked it. Keep it, toss it, whatever. She did blog about it and sent a ton of traffic.

This post has been long enough! There will be more on this type of marketing, but I think this can get you started. There are different ways to use these tools, which is really up to your imagination. And this post title is not unique. Here's a Google search on "social networking 101" to get you more info.

Bara Sapir's Test Prep New York Featured in Women's World

Test Prep New York is featured this week (Dec 4 - 11th) on page 7 in Women's World magazine. The article features a Full Potential Audio Series success story by reporting on one of our clients who reclaimed her confidence and life direction after using our product. The Full Potential Series is a 5.5.
commercially available audio program created to optimize test-taking potential by enhancing retention, recall, concentration, and confidence, for the test and for life.

Interview With Stephanie Richardson, Dietician

New Incubator graduate Stephanie Richardson is registered dietitian and holistic health counselor. She sent us this interview of her from the Cleveland Plain Dealer.

Stephanie Richards, 49, of Pepper Pike, has the body of a teenager, a fit teenager. So when this registered dietitian talks about healthy eating, people can she see follows her own advice.  No matter the audience- a lunchtime group of professionals or a class of eight graders- the message from this mother of four is consistent: Drink lots of water, avoid artificial sweeteners and trans fats, and be vigilant about portion sizes.  Richards, who delivers her tips with the timing of a stand-up comedian, talked to Plain Dealer reporter, Evelyn Theiss about why she loves her work. This article appeared  Sunday, September 23, 2007.

What exactly is a registered dietitian and how does it differ from being a nutritionist?
A registered dietitian is like a registered pharmacist- you can’t just call yourself that. There are strict educational requirements, and you have to maintain them with continuing education.  Whereas anyone can call themselves a nutritionist.

What do you like about talking to kids?
Kids don’t let anything get past them.  They see inconsistencies. Like the middle-school student who asked me, “How come companies are allowed to use trans fats in their foods if they’re bad for people?”

What did you say?
I said, “Do you think these companies are more interested in your health or their pocketbook?”  I’ll tell people, “Take a look at the company making the food.”  The mission of Newman’s Own, for example, is to feed people healthy food.  This is not the mission of say, Kraft Foods.

Question: Tipping For The Holidays

An incubator member asks:

It´s that time of year again when I go through so many different versions of who to tip (re: business and personal life) , how much to tip or if a gift is a more cost efficient solution for some of the service people in my life. If anyone has an opinion (professional or personal opinions welcome) or if
someone is on the "receiving" end, and can office some advice.Some people on my list to tip or gift are the following:
Dog Walker
Hair -(blow outs, colorist, wash)- how about the girls in the salon who just fill in for when your regular person is not there?
Nail Salon- not a regular with any one person- do I bring a box of chocolates or cookies?
Doormen
Building Maintenance

Office:
Cleaning Lady
Building Doormen
Building Maintenance guys (who also help me put my office furniture together
Parking garage....used near the office but not on an everyday basis
Gifts- who should we be including on the list to send baskets to:
Graphic Artists?
Rep groups?
Vendors/Suppliers?

I did a simple search and found some great information about tipping from an article from Money Magazine. Read the full article to find out more.

• Babysitter:   One night's pay, plus a small gift from your child.
• Full-time nanny:   One week to one month of pay based on tenure, plus a small gift from your child.
• Au pair:  One week's pay, plus a small gift from your child.
• Day care service   $25-70, plus a small gift from your child.
• Teacher   $25-100. A gift certificate is always appropriate. If you know the teacher's hobbies or interests, then a gift certificate would be nice from the local movie theater, hobby shop, mall, fine restaurant or day spa. If you are unsure, ask your principal first.  
• Coaches, tutors, ballet instructors, music teachers:   A small gift from your child.
• Housekeeper/Cleaning Service: One week's pay. If you use a service and never know who is coming out, don't tip at all.

If you any suggestions, please leave a response in the comments.

Can You Be Too Happy?

Below is an excerpt from a Newsweek article based on a compelling new study about happiness. Can you be too happy??  Feel free to express your opinion in the comments.

clipped from www.newsweek.com

But is it really a good thing to be ultrahappy? Nobody thrives on sheer misery, of course, but might there be perils in endlessly striving for more and more good cheer and sunny days? Or, put another way: is happiness overrated?

A growing number of psychologists are thinking it might be, and one team in particular has been conducting some large-scale, data-heavy studies to test the point. Shigehiro Oishi, Ed Diener and Richard Lucas decided to compare people who see themselves as being extremely happy with people who describe themselves as being only moderately so. Surprisingly, this had never been done before—at least not this thoroughly. They studied men and women, young and old, students and working people, hundreds of thousands of people from all over the globe. After all the data crunching they came up with some consistent and surprising insights.