Blog – Page 4 – Michele Christensen

Brand new: Strategic Solopreneurs Facebook group!

Want to connect with other business owners rocking the solopreneur business world? Come join this brand new Facebook group that is just for people who love their one-person business.

Who is this for? Anybody who dreams of a successful, sustainable and profitable one-person business. It can be done and it is a joyful way to work. However, just because you’re a solopreneur doesn’t mean you can or should go it completely alone. Share your successes and challenges, get ideas and input and contribute what you do best.

Ready to join? Click the link below and request to join. Your request will be approved within 1 business days in most cases.

Strategic Solopreneurs Facebook Group

Want more information before you join? The group guidelines are in the “About” section at the link above, and a copy is pasted below for your convenience. See you there!

Welcome smart business owner! I’m so excited that you have embraced the simple and profitable solopreneur business model. In this group you’ll find a wide variety of businesses, but we share a common love of running a one-person business.

Here you can find connection and interaction that working alone can be lacking. We’re about helping each other and learning, not spam or promotion.

Questions are welcome! You can ask about best practices, which tools to use, what’s working now, or get opinions on your ideas. Please refrain from posting questions that are easily answered with a Google search. Part of being a successful solopreneur means that you are willing to do research when you need to learn something new.

You may post to the wall at any time, but there is a specific theme for each weekday. If you want to participate in that day’s theme, post your response in the comments of the post showing that day’s theme. Promotion is only allowed on Thursday when that is the theme of the day, and you may only post a promotion in the thread for the theme of the day. Promotion includes both paid and free offers.

Here’s a peek at the weekly lineup:

Metrics Monday – We’ll take a look at one thing you can be measuring to help you businesses
Social Tuesday – Connect and share on other social networks
Strategy Wednesday – Make sure you know why you are doing every single thing you do
Promo Thursday – Post your free and paid offers in the thread for today’s theme
Fun Friday – This will be all about fun and getting to know each other
Wellness Weekends – Thoughts on leisure, recreation, quiet time and time off.

To help you become more productive and feel less overwhelmed right away, I have a free report for you that gives you simple changes you can make to your daily to-do list that you can start doing today! Grab the report here: https://www.michelechristensen.com/daily

Smile and laugh to de-stress, calm down and boost your mood

It’s easy to let stress accumulate when you work from home and work mostly alone. Today, I have a guest post from Certified Nutritionist Trudy Scott on using smiling and laughter to feel better.

From Trudy:

My biggest stress-relief and mood-boosting tip is to smile and laugh! It is one of the many things I encourage my clients to do! And I personally love a good comedy and opportunity to smile and laugh! I almost feel like I need my “fix” of laughter by the end of the day. It really relaxes me, boosts my mood and helps me sleep better.

I was further inspired to make a commitment to laugh each day when I read all the research supporting the many and varied health benefits. Many days I’ll just take a break and engage in spontaneous laughter for no reason at all – just the act of laughing leaves me feeling SO good. I do food-mood presentations around the country and typically end my talks with a laugher session with the audience! It’s a great hit and they leave my talk feeling great!

A 2012 research paper in Physiological Science actually showed that if you smile, you feel less stressed. Also in a 1999 study, “Personality traits such as warmth, calmness, extroversion, and low anxiety were closely related to an attractive smile.”

Laughter falls into a similar category as smiling and is wonderful for improving mood and reducing anxiety and stress and pain. This 2012 paper. showed that laughter “is associated with feelings of wellbeing” and improved mood, likely related to “the release of endorphins.” The release of endorphins also reduced pain levels.

Recent research also shows that the “combination of a laughter and exercise program might have physiological and psychological health benefits for the elderly”. Laughter may also “be an effective strategy to motivate the elderly to participate in physical activity.”

Laughter is actually good for the heart as indicated by the title of a 2009 paper: “The effect of mirthful laughter on the human cardiovascular system.”

Here are some things to make you chuckle: a fun post I did awhile ago about a wonderfully funny and romantic blog called The Musings of a Romantic Comedy Girl and a video of a laughing baby. Enjoy!

And of course, the added bonus: if you eat foods that raise serotonin (like grass-fed read meat and wild fish like salmon), you’ll be happier and more inclined to smile too – and feel even less anxious and less stressed. Tryptophan or 5-HTP will help boost your serotonin levels and are wonderful if you do have low serotonin. You can check for low serotonin levels using this Amino Acids Mood Questionnaire from The Antianxiety Food Solution.

Trudy Scott (CN), Certified Nutritionist is the founder of www.everywomanover29.com, a thriving nutrition practice with a focus on food, mood and women’s health. Trudy educates women about the amazing healing powers of food and nutrients and helps them find natural solutions for anxiety and other mood problems. Trudy’s goal for all her clients (and all women): “You can be your healthiest, look your best and feel on-top-of-the-world emotionally!

Product Review – Business Marketing With Pinterest

My first exposure to Pinterest was through Facebook, where I would see some of what my friends posted. I enjoyed what I saw, which was mainly food, pets and fashion. Given what I was experiencing, I couldn’t see how I could use Pinterest for my business. Pinterest is all about beautiful images (or so I thought), and my business doesn’t readily create vivid images. I held out and didn’t jump in because I have a rule in my business:

I don’t add anything new until I know exactly how it will help my business and how to measure if it is working.

So, I waited and watched Pinterest grow. I saw the buzz and began to see case studies of people with businesses similar to my own getting amazing results. By results, I mean sales, leads and exposure to new people. I did some reading up and thought I understood enough to make Pinterest work for me and so I jumped in. I created my account and began pinning away. When I tried to measure my results, well, I couldn’t. You can’t really measure zero.

That’s right, zero. I got no new customers or leads, and very little traffic from Pinterest at first. I chalked it up as a failed experiment and moved on but kept my account so I could gaze at puppies, recipes I would never make and beautiful home ideas that I would never use. Fast forward a few months and one of my most trusted colleagues starts getting great results (traffic, leads and INCOME) from Pinterest and creates a training to help other people duplicate her success. Ok, now I’m intrigued. What did I miss?

I purchased Business Marketing with Pinterest by Becky Sangha, and committed to watching the entire thing and implementing every step of it. That last part is really important – as with any training, for it to do any good you have to consume it (watch, read, listen, etc) AND implement what you are learning. No training will help you if it sits on your hard drive or bookshelf and you don’t act on it. The same is true with this training.

What I learned was that Pinterest is a traffic driving machine! The very first week I checked my traffic stats after starting this training, Pinterest was in my top ten sources of referral traffic! Keep in mind that I had only just gotten started and hadn’t even done that much. By week two, Pinterest was my #4 source of referral traffic and my #7 source overall, and I still hadn’t implemented the entire system! After using the system for about a year, Pinterest is consistently in my top ten traffic sources every week.

What’s really great about Pinterest traffic is that these visitors are interested in what you have to offer! The very name of the site is a combination of “Pin” and “interest,” and you create pinboards based on interest. A person wouldn’t be following your boards or clicking your pins if they weren’t interested by what they saw. I find that Pinterest traffic tends to stay on my site for longer and look at more pages while they are there.

So the verdict on this training is a big thumbs up! Not only does it deliver great results, it’s laid out in a systematic way that makes it easy to follow and implement. Becky has a great teaching style and does something I think is really important – she explains the reasons behind everything she tells you to do. She also gives you everything you need to get completely up to speed. Even if you have no idea what subjects you could create pins about, she has you covered!

I suggest you grab this product if:

You want to use Pinterest for your business (don’t try to figure it out yourself!)
You have a website that you want more interested traffic for
You have a business that isn’t particularly visual and want to know how you can use Pinterest anyway
You already know how great Pinterest is, but don’t know what kind of pins to create for your business
You enjoy Pinterest for personal use but aren’t sure how to make the leap to using it for business

Check out Business Marketing with Pinterest and let me know what you think!

I’m a proud affiliate for this program, and the above links are affiliate links.

What to do with experts you don’t need now

Ask Me Anything, Segment 5

Earlier this year, I gave my email subscribers the chance to ask me anything about their business. In this video, I give you some ideas about what to do with experts who teach great information that you don’t need right now. I’ll be answering more questions over the coming weeks and months, so be sure to fill in your name and email address in the box below the video so you can get your questions answered in the next Ask Me Anything.

Criteria for choosing which experts to follow

Ask Me Anything, Segment 4

Earlier this year, I gave my email subscribers the chance to ask me anything about their business. In this video, I give you my criteria for choosing which experts to follow. I’ll be answering more questions over the coming weeks and months, so be sure to fill in your name and email address in the box below the video so you can get your questions answered in the next Ask Me Anything.

Save time by automatically pre-sorting your email

Almost everyone I know gets a lot of email. Being efficient at handling your email is a must for many professionals, and in this post I’ll give you one way you can use to save time by pre-sorting your email.

What’s pre-sorting?

One of the reasons that email can be so daunting is that what has to done to take care of an email isn’t always clear. An email might contain something to read, an invitation to decide on, a request for information or an actual task for you to do. You first have to determine the action that needs to be taken, and then you need to do that action. Sometimes, the action isn’t clear and sometimes there is more than one action to be taken.

In addition, emails can have different priorities. Anything from a customer or client should be a high priority. An interesting article may have a lower priority. Any bills to be paid that have to do with keeping you open for business have to be high priority.

Once you’ve established some rules about how to handle certain recurring emails, you can set up rules that separate your emails based on those rules. Anything with no set rule stays in your inbox until you deal with it.

How do I set this up?

Fortunately, Gmail has a simple way to do this using filters. When you find an email for which you’d like to set up a rule (filter), you open a drop down menu and follow a series of menus that tell Google what your criteria is and how to handle emails that meet that criteria. An example of a way you might use this is to create a filter for any email that comes from the domain of one of your customers. Emails from your customers could be labeled “customer,” and get higher priority than other email.

But what if I don’t want to use Gmail?

Gmail is hands-down the best email program I’ve used whether paid or free. However, some people feel that using an “@gmail” address makes them look less established. For the record, I don’t agree but since there are many people who do feel this way, I use an email that ends with my domain (“@michelechristensen” in my case). The good news is you can still use Gmail, the presorting feature and all the other cool things Gmail can do AND use your @mydomain email address.

One way to use Gmail and have your email come from @mydomain is to do a one-time setup that links the two addresses. In your host (where you get your @mydomain email from), set your email to forward to your Gmail account. In your Gmail settings, tell Gmail to use your @mydomain email address as the sender address.

Emails sent to your domain email address “pass through” that address and into your Gmail account, and when you reply your recipient sees an email from your domain not Gmail. Be sure to test this thoroughly to make sure it works and you don’t have any problem getting your email.

Here’s some help for you:

This pre-sorting is one of the automation strategies I share in my book “The Solopreneur’s Success Strategy: Automate Your Grunt Work.” In the chapter on pre-sorting your email, I give much more detailed instructions and you can get that chapter and one additional one for free! Enter your name and email address below and your free chapters will be on their way.

PS – Know someone who spends way too much time on their email? I’d love it if you sent them a link to this article

How Many Experts to Follow?

Ask Me Anything, Segment 3

Earlier this year, I gave my email subscribers the chance to ask me anything about their business. In this video, I answer a question about how many experts to be following. I’ll be answering more questions over the coming weeks and months.

Back of the Bike Video – How to handle the unexpected

https://www.michelechristensen.com
Find out how you can be better prepared for unexpected things that pop up in your life and in your solopreneur business. Being prepared means you can say yes to great opportunities more often whether they are for work or for fun!

Time Management System for Solopreneurs

Ask Me Anything, Segment 2

Earlier this year, I gave my email subscribers the chance to ask me anything about their business. In this video, I answer a question about how to set up a time management system for solopreneurs. I’ll be answering more questions over the coming weeks and months.

If you want more information like this, including a chance to get your questions answered in the next “Ask Me Anything,” enter your name and email below for regular email updates from me.

How to use Timetrade

Ask Me Anything, Segment 1

Earlier this year, I gave my email subscribers the chance to ask me anything about their business. In this video, I answer the first question, and I’ll be answering more over the coming weeks and months. The question has to do with time management systems and Timetrade.

If you want more information like this, including a chance to get your questions answered in the next “Ask Me Anything,” enter your name and email below for regular email updates from me.