Many small, micro and home-based business operators are well aware of the benefits of networking with other businesses. Along with meeting new people and perhaps learning from networking event guest speakers, other benefits include building professional relationships with potential clients, suppliers and resources, colleagues, fans and friends. Not to mention getting yourself and your business known in the community.

With all of the technological advances in communications, people are now becoming ever more connected, particularly on the Internet.

And with this advancement in Internet technology comes the ability for businesses to network online too. This could be via:

• social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook
• forums and groups such as the Small Business Forum, Business Women Unite, Business Mums Network or Flying Solo
• attending webinars (web seminars)

Online networking boosts the variety your network

Online networking gives entrepreneurs a chance to develop relationships with several other entrepreneurs at one time. They can meet several people and communicate in a wider way than face to face networking. In online networking, many different industries and companies are represented within the group.

Online networking saves time and effort for busy entrepreneurs

Entrepreneurs are able to reach the world from their own computer through online networking. Utilising the Internet allows professionals to attend online networking avenues much easier than if they attend physical events … all from the comfort of their own home, often at any time of the day from any location and without the need to get dressed up (unless you’re using videos and web-cams!)

Along with benefiting an entrepreneur’s professional and social growth, online networking offers flexibility. Not only does this make it easier to manage how you prioritise your time, it’s also ideal for business owners in small towns and regional or remote areas who may otherwise find business networking a challenge.

Online networking can also be a viable alternative for parents who work from home while caring for children. It’s often difficult for this group of business owners to attend face-to-face networking events without also having to arrange suitable child-care. The cost and effort involved sometimes limits the number of events that they can physically get to.

I’m not suggesting that online networking should entirely take the place of face-to-face networking events, but there are some definite advantages for most businesses to incorporate a little of both.

If you know any worthwhile online networking sites for small, micro and home-based businesses, please share them with us via a comment post 

The Benefits of Online Business Networking is a post from: Donna-Marie Coggins

If you’re running a small business and meeting with clients or associates frequently, you probably make appointments almost daily.

Some people, particularly in larger organisations, may be fortunate enough to have an assistant who is assigned the task of ensuring that no double-bookings occur and no appointments are missed. This method is somewhat time consuming and inefficient when it comes to canceling and rescheduling appointments, and even more so if you’re responsible for managing your own appointments along with so many other duties.

This is where an online program can be so handy.

Once you setup this software or your online account, you’ll find many appointment-setting programs also give you the options of selecting email (and possibly phone call) reminders.

Online appointment setting programs generally work in a similar way.

You can log into your online calendar and select the times when you’re available for appointments. You then send a link to those clients and associates whom you’d like to make an appointment time with. These people can then easily visit the website by clicking on your link, then click on the appointment button. A calendar appears, showing your available dates and times,  and your customer or colleague can choose one of your available appointment times that best suits them.

That’s it! Your appointment is there … booked and saved.

Online appointment-scheduling programs have certain benefits and advantages such as freeing up staff (or yourself) for more important tasks.

Just think about it … what more productive tasks could you do in the time you would generally spend scheduling (and re-scheduling) appointments?

Here are 4 of the best online appointment-setting programs I’ve found:

1. Tungle
2. Web-Appointments
3. GenBook
4. Appointment Plus

Forgetting appointments or poor scheduling techniques could put your organisation and business at a clear disadvantage. So have a look at these online appointment-setting programs to simplify the way you manage your appointments.

Top 4 Online Appointment Setting Programs is a post from: Donna-Marie Coggins

If so, it’s time to organise your email system before it takes over your life!

Email is an extremely convenient mode of communication; perhaps too easy, as it seems to invite people to contact you for sometimes barely any reason at all.  With all that email coming in needing attention, it can be hard to get anything else done.  So how can you get a grip on your business emails before it gets its grip on you?

Gaining Control Of Email

Success in small business relies on discipline and good time management. Often, however, necessary tasks like checking, reading and responding to emails can start to overtake productive work time and decrease your productivity – and in turn, your profitability.  That is why it’s important for you to be managing emails, rather than letting emails manage you.  Here are some pointers from the experts:

• Schedule time for checking emails; this can be once, twice, or three times daily at times that fit into your schedule.  Block out time and when the time is up, move on to other pressing matters.
• Do not use email for emergency contacts; inform clients and business associates that you are not available immediately via email, and that they should phone or contact you via instant message, etc, for pressing matters.  This makes it possible for you to handle emails in chunks rather than constantly dealing with them throughout the day.  Be careful who you give emergency contact information to, though, so that it is used for its intended purpose.
• Turn off automatic alerts – both audio and visual – so that you are not tempted to immediately respond every time a new message comes in. This breaks into your productive work time.
• Deal with emails during your ‘down time’; do not schedule your most creative and productive times of day for organising emails.  Put email management into your schedule where it makes sense – those times of day when you need to slow down, or that do not take away from more complex activities.
• Use tools for organising emails; get to know the features of your email client and use them to prioritise emails.  For instance, use the ‘rules’ or ‘labels’ function to automatically separate emails into folders according to priority levels, clients, or subjects.
• Respond to emails when read; many people will read all emails before responding, and then go back and start with the most important ones. But this only multiplies the time it takes to get through the lot.  espond to emails as they are read, and you will not have to begin all over again sifting through them.
• Separate business and personal emails; do not give out business email addresses to friends and family that do not have a business reason to contact you.

Email is a very useful and important business tool, but if you don’t learn how to efficiently manage your emails they will begin to take over your life.

Of course, everyone’s situation is going to be different and it may take a little while to find what works best for you, but if you start putting some of these tips into practise you’ll soon get control over your email. If not, perhaps it’s time to consider getting an assistant to help you respond to emails.

Are You Drowning In A Sea Of Never-Ending Emails? is a post from: Donna-Marie Coggins

Do you ever submit a support ticket, anticipating the quick reply to some issue that you’ve tried in vain to solve yourself … only to be disappointed with the reply? Perhaps they didn’t fully answer your questions or they replied with more questions?

I’ve encountered some pretty dodgy support desks, but I must admit, 99.5% of the support tickets I’ve submitted have been answered promptly, friendly and – most importantly – they’ve solved the issue.

But there are a few key pointers in HOW YOU ACTUALLY ASK FOR HELP that will assist in you getting a useful reply:

1. Be as clear as possible and give all the necessary information, including relevant URLs or site names. For example, “I can’t get the HTML to work right!”, or “Keep getting error messages with my website” don’t give enough information. Although you know exactly what website or task you’re referring to, the support staff reading your message may not know. The only way they can help you is to find out precisely what the problem is.
2. If you receive a specific error message or number, include this in your support request.
3. When you have multiple questions, begin each question on a new line, or even leave an extra space between lines. When you have several questions one after another, all in the one paragraph, it can be difficult for the support team member to read and questions can be easily missed.
4. Keeping points 1, 2 and 3 in mind, don’t ramble. Keep your request as concise as possible while giving the necessary and relevant facts. Quite often, dot points or bullet points are fine, so long as all the information is there.
5. If you need to register your email address in order for the support ticket response to be sent to you, please check that you’ve entered the correct email address. Then double-check it! It’s incredibly frustrating when someone asks for help and you give it, but then the email notification that their ticket has been answered bounces back.
6. Although you may be frustrated by something that’s not working the way you think it should, support staff are there to help you … not bear the brunt of your frustrations. Try to remain calm and work with the support team to resolve the issues at hand.
7. Before submitting your support ticket, check that you’ve followed instructions correctly – sometimes we try to do things quickly and mis-read the instructions. (Or think it’s so simple we don’t need to read them). It’s also possible to miss the fact that there even are instructions available. Often you’ll find sites will have tutorials or ‘Frequently Asked Questions’ pages available. Remember to check for these first as you may find the answers here quicker than waiting for a support ticket response – particularly if you are looking for solutions outside of business hours.

An additional tip … remember that support desks are staffed by people, not robots. Politeness and ‘please’ and ‘thank-you’, while not essential, are usually smiled upon. It’s also nice to be able to address the reply to a specific person, so please remember to sign off with your name.

7 Things To Remember When Asking For Help is a post from: Donna-Marie Coggins

If you’re like most business owners, you’ve seen many presenters at various seminars, workshops and events. And I’m sure you’d agree that these presenters or speakers come into three broad categories:

1. The WOW! presenters
2. The okay presenters and the
3. The ‘I’d-rather-be-at-the-dentist-right-now-than-listening-to-you’ presenters

At some point in your business career there may come a time when YOU are required to speak to a group of people, even if it’s only a 5 minute talk at a networking event. So it’s good for you to be prepared and know some of the things that will help you fall into the first category above rather than the third one!

I’m not going to go into a lot of detail in this post but after hearing a highly respected professional business coach speak (and fall disappointingly into the third category) earlier this week, I thought I’d share what I believe to be his biggest downfall … his inability to read the crowd.

There’s no doubt that this speaker had spent a lot of time preparing his spiel. In fact, he seemed to have memorized every single word – and joke – and I’m sure he spent countless hours rehearsing. While it’s great to prepare your presentation and to practise it, the problem was that he wasn’t reading the audience at all. Or if he was, he had no idea what they were silently telling him nor how to adapt his presentation to remedy the issues at hand.

As I looked around the room I saw the majority of attendees sitting with notepads and pens on their laps … but virtually nobody was writing anything down.

Many were sitting with their arms crossed and in such a way that they were telling him, “We don’t believe you. We’re not sure that we agree with what you’re saying. Show us why we should listen to you, let alone sign up and pay to be coached by you.”

Others were fidgeting, sighing, wriggling or whispering to the person next to them … these people were bored or not interested.

Then he really came unstuck when he asked for some audience participation and he didn’t get it. Although he pushed and pushed for it, the audience didn’t want to participate and the speaker appeared at a total loss as to how to continue.

I don’t think he’d planned for this, yet their participation was crucial to the point he wanted to make. So in pushing a bit more for that audience participation … he snapped and his frustration showed.  I strongly suspect that raising his voice to criticize his audience probably didn’t win him any fans.

Now the thing is, it’s natural to be nervous when speaking in public, especially if you’re very new to it. But this guy promotes himself as a professional speaker with years of experience so I really did expect more.

For the average business owner who needs to do the occasional presentation, I highly recommend you read up on body language and learn how to read your audience. Then have a few strategies up your sleeve as to how you might encourage them to warm to you, show them that you’re credible, get them to participate and so on.

An excellent book for this is The Definitive Book Of Body Language by Allan and Barbara Pease.

You’ll find that understanding body language can help in your day to day interactions with others too.

And while it’s important that you plan and rehearse what you’re going to say, don’t be so stringent that you can’t be flexible too.

Why Memorizing Your Spiel Is Just Not Enough For A Good Presentation is a post from: Donna-Marie Coggins

One of the blogs I love to read regularly is Claire McFee’s Organize Your Life.

It’s full of straight-forward tips and Claire’s personal strategies for being better organized in all areas of life.

Claire’s recent post on Gratitude is one that really resonates with me. I truly believe that what you focus on is what you will get. In this post Claire talks about Dr.John Demartini, author of “The Gratitude Effect”, and his belief that, “What you think about and thank about, you bring about.” She then goes on to discuss how this theory works with your moods, thoughts and feelings, and how your current mood can be reflected in those around you.

So if you’ve got a minute to spare, I encourage you to pop over and have a read of this post. Then, next time everyone around you seems to be grumpy or snapping at you, perhaps you need to stop and look at your own mood.

The Gratitude Effect is a post from: Donna-Marie Coggins

Twitter has really taken off recently with more and more people, including business owners, joining the Twitterverse every day.

And every day I send off a series of links to help new twitterers to understand how to RT, reply, hashtags, DMs and various other applications that will help them make the most of the experience.

I decided that rather than sending off 25 links to my favourite resources, I’m going to list them here. Makes sense, right?

So, here are my suggestions for compulsory reading for new Tweeters:

General:

• The Ultimate Guide For Everything Twitter (I LOVE this page)
• Just Tweet It – another brilliant resource for all things Twitter
• Search Engine Journal – The Ultimate Guide To Twitter Hashtags

Applications To Help Manage Your Tweets:

• Tweetdeck
• Twhirl
• Nambu – for Macs
• Tweetie - for Macs
• Twitterrific - for Macs

Applications For Mobiles:

• Just Tweet It: Mobiles – a whole page of Twitter resources for mobile devices
• Tweetie – iPhones

Blackberry Applications:

• Blackbird
• TwitterBerry

Free Background Templates:

• Tweetstyle
• Twitbacks
• Twitterbacks

Twitter Graphics:

• Siah Designs
• Randa Clay Designs
• Vincent Abray – while the site is written in French the buttons’ text is in English and they are all absolutely gorgeous! (Not to mention the gorgeous language – I LOVE French… a bit like Morticia Addams whenever Gomez started speaking in French, for those who used to watch the Addams Family)

Ahem… getting back on track here…

Other Useful Applications:

• TweetBeep – an alert system similar to ‘Google Alerts’ but for Twitter
• Splitweet – a good way to manage multiple accounts
• Twibs - Twitter business directory
• TwitPics - share your photos on Twitter
• Just Tweet It: Business - a page of resources for using Twitter for business
• Twitter Counter – check your Twitter statistics
• Twittersafe - back up your Twitter

These are my favourite applications and sites. I hope you find them helpful. Happy Twittering!

Don’t forget… you can follow me at Twitter.com/DonnaMarieC

Twitter Tips For Beginners is a post from: Donna-Marie Coggins

I just went to the Business Mums Blog to check the dates of their up-coming Business Mums Conference but was quickly side-tracked reading through some other posts.

This one really caught my attention as it’s something I’ve been dealing with a bit over the last week… “You didn’t get my email? Did you check your junk mail folder? Is it caught in your SPAM filter? Oh, you missed it in amongst the other 794 emails you’ve received today. Well, at least we know it did arrive.”

Yep, the saga of the missing email. Anyway, here’s a post that Melissa wrote recently about what to do when email fails.

Oh, and I did eventually get to the details for the next Business Mums Conference. If you’re interested, it’s on in Melbourne from June 21-22.

What Happened To That Email? is a post from: Donna-Marie Coggins

When it comes to building strong customer relations it’s often the little things that count.

This week I’ve received two pieces of mail that left me a little disappointed. The first was a magazine I had requested as I was considering advertising in it and I also thought that the members of my local business group might be interested. I sent the magazine publisher an email requesting a copy and stating my interest (this very small, very new publication is available by subscription only but they do offer a free copy to prospective advertisers).

Although I didn’t receive a reply to my email, the magazine arrived about two weeks later… with no cover letter, with compliments slip or anything. Just the lonely magazine.

Now this would have been the perfect opportunity for the publisher to make some effort to build a relationship and encourage my support of their magazine. Firstly, a quick reply to my email along the lines of, “Thanks for requesting a sample copy of xyz magazine. I’ll pop one in the mail for you today.”

This could have been followed up with a brief note or even just a with compliments slip in the envelope.

But… there has been no personal interaction from this publisher at all and I’m not sure if they even want my business. They’re certainly not trying to win my confidence in them.

The second piece of mail was a booking form for a series of workshops. Again, the sender went to the trouble to hand-address an envelope to me and pay for postage, but there was no cover letter – not even a generic letter photocopied for all recipients. And there was nothing to say how they knew me. In fact, how did they even know I might be interested? (Truth be told, I wasn’t. It’s not something even remotely related to my interests).

Apart from the 1,001 Direct Marketing mistakes we can get side-tracked by here, if the sender had spent two minutes introducing themselves it would have made the world of difference. I may have even passed it on to someone who may have been interested… instead of putting it straight into the recycling bin.

So, if you want a successful small business, remember to pay attention to the little things and the personal touches that go a long way in building strong customer relationships.

Building Customer Relations is a post from: Donna-Marie Coggins

You’ve no doubt heard about social networking sites such as Twitter, Facebook, Stumble Upon and literally 100s – if not 1000s – of others. Well I was active on quite a few of these but around the middle of last year I found myself so busy that the social networking sites went down towards the bottom of my priority list. Which meant I never got back to them.

But… I’m back. With my new business direction and lots more fresh products coming throughout 2009 I decided to start getting into social networking again. I have to admit, these forms of networking were fantastic when I could commit a few minutes every couple of days to them.

This time, rather than trying to keep up with 10 or more different networks, I’ve decided to start being more active in one at a time. So today, I’ve deleted my old Twitter account and started afresh… just like my business plan and 2009 goals.

When it comes to face-to-face networking I’ve always recommended quality over quantity – aim to join AND PARTICIPATE IN a small number of groups fully, rather than trying to get along to every network and function that’s available. So I’m doing the same with my social networking. I’m going to fully participate in a small number only.

So, if you have a Twitter account already, you can find me at http://twitter.com/DonnaMarieC. And if you don’t have an account yet, visit Twitter.com and to find out more about it.

Warmly,

Donna-Marie

Simplifying small business…

Finally… I’m Back On Twitter is a post from: Donna-Marie Coggins