Jeweltastic: Time Management Crisis

Oil on canvas by Jane P. Bowling

I am a homeschooling mommy and managing this business and teaching is becoming a wee bit challenging.  I have a partner but my partner isn't able to invest her full time at this moment.  This all leads to a time management crisis.  If you're a busy mom like me, or even if you aren't a busy mom, here are a few tips you can use:

Set Goals:
Social activist Benjamin Mays States,  "The tragedy in life doesn't lie in not reaching your goal. The tragedy lies in having no goal to reach."

When I wake in the morning I have a list of things that have to happen before anything else.  Feed the kids, clean our area, we use the dining room table for school, pull out books and teach on those subjects.  Required are math, reading, spelling, gym, handwriting, English, Social Studies.  Extracurricular is computer language, Spanish, art, music appreciation, theatre appreciation, and blogging which ties into the computer language.  I have the extracurricular broken up they don't learn about Mozart or Tennessee Williams every day.

Then, we make lunch and if they are in slow mode we go back to school.  We typically end school around 2:00 pm.  Which leaves us with preparing dinner if it isn't in the freezer already.  This ends up being a math lesson with fractions, division, multiplication, addition, and subtraction.  After all of that stuff is done, I have a little free time.  I typically say to myself I'm going to make X amount of earrings today and I work on those goals.

I set daily goals and It helps a whole lot.  I am going to have to figure in social networking and blogging.  I've yet to figure that out.

Save time for self:
If it's 15 minute of an hour, you need that time to unwind.  A home business can have stress and so can family.  You aren't going to get out of having at least a little stress.  If your kids are old enough, tell them you need to unwind you'll be back or wait for bed time.  No TV, noise, and wait until no more whispers can be heard.


Set your priorities:
As previously mentioned my day is planned from the moment I wake.  This also means the education of my children is my priority.  This has to come after family.  It is also an extension of my family.  I am hoping it leads us toward becoming more independent. 

No TV
Unless I've found an educational video or a video that is diet/ exercise or business related, I limit the boob tube.    There are exceptions to the rule.  Kids that have been behaving particularly well, did awesome on school work, helped out and didn't expect it, and movie night.

Keep a calendar:
Pretty self explanatory.  Keep a list of everything you need to do to achieve your goals.   It helps to stay on task.

Set deadlines:
Everything you do has a deadline.  For a homeschooler that would be to try to make sure they are ready for the next grade unless they have special educational needs that can't be met by a standard curriculum.  Deadlines also have to be met for your home business.   I need to make X amount of necklaces before X date.

Get organized:
If everything is thrown about and not very organized it wastes your time.  That is time you could be spending with your family, or working on your business.

Time management expert Peter Turla has a few suggestions:

• Define your key result area (KRA). What were you hired to do?  Or in a the case of a home business, what is it that you do? 
• Ask yourself if what I'm doing now leads to an outcome of  your KRA.
• Give a right brain approach and think to the future. Where do I want to be?
• Give a left brain approach.  Analyze what it is you're doing.
• Overcome procrastination.

Jeweltastic: Jewelry of My Dreams

This is the jewelry making gadget of my dreams.  I can fire precious metal clay.  Which means I would be able to make sterling silver and gold jewelry. 



I can't wait until I'm able to make silver and gold jewelry.  I have so many design ideas and I can't do them yet. 

Jeweltastic: Brandtastic

As much as I love what I do, I'm not willing to get a tattoo over my brand.  The fact that I have two earring holes in each ear, a neck, two wrists,  two ankles, and if need be a waist is enough space to advertise what I do.  I'm not going to over do it.  There's a fine line between classy and tacky.

I do have non-electronic idea for branding.  I want to create t-shirts with our URL and a picture of some of our jewelry.  That will be nifty for those days we do community service and can't wear jewelry.  Jewelry can be a hazard in certain community service venues.

I'm coming up with ideas for business cards.  I really like the idea of sending earrings on my card.  I'm thinking ink pens.  How many people accidentally steal ink pens?  If they "stole" one of ours or I "forgot" my pen and people don't typically toss pens how many people could that ink pen potentially reach?

When I'm able to handle the potential traffic it could drive, I want to send jewelry to people who could boost my traffic, that means those who are celebrities and on national news shows.  I do have a branding/ marketing plan in action.

A good portion of it won't take place for another few months since we are going the way of the dot com.  I don't want to waste money on things like ink until we have that domain name.

I have a lot of plans for branding and I don't mind being a walking billboard for something I enjoy.  That tat just isn't going to happen.  I'm not a glutton for punishment and needles make me nervous besides.

Jeweltastic: Importance of Blogging For a Small Business Part 2

As previously mentioned, we don't have a huge budget.  What we do have is an ability to place our blog on several services.

BlogCatalog Is a service in which you can communicate and learn from other bloggers, find new blogs, and create friendships.  Like any other social networking site it has it's share of characters. 

Technorati  Search blogs by topic. 

Youtube I don't know very many people who don't know what Youtube is.  Youtube is a site in which you make a video, upload it and hope for traffic.  It has a large source of vloggers, advertisers, and more.

Facebook For me has been a great place to hold contests and converse with potential customers.  I can add extra content by being involved with a few other services that do connect to Facebook.

Digg  "A place for people to discover and share content from all over the web."  When you submit an article, preferably not your own, it hits Digg and has potential for extra traffic.

Stumbleupon  Is kind of fun before people begin to ask you to thumbs up an article you could care less about.

Mixx  "Mixx is your link to the web content that really matters. There's a lot of information out there and, let's face it, you don't have all day to find the good stuff (if you do, we're totally jealous). And who knows better than you what informs you, what makes you think, what makes you laugh? So why should some faceless editor get to decide what's important?"

Gather  "Gather is the place where millions and millions of people come for fresh perspective on what's happening now. Gather members can share their own views and join in conversation with others who share their interests."

Folkd "Using social bookmarks with folkd.com will enrich your web-surfing experience.
We provide a simple website and easy to use browser buttons which allow you to:

• Save your favorite links and bookmarks online and access them from anywhere at any time.

• Press our "star"-button to vote up the best links on the web with just one click.

• Search the most popular links and discover cool sites your friends liked.

• Easily recommend the best sites to your friends via email, facebook or twitter.

• Connect to interesting users to follow their latest links.

• post cool links yourself and increase your "reputation-rank".

• Search and organize your collection by tags and keep private things private!

MySpace  has gone through a redesign.  It seems  a little like Twitter and Facebook Mixed together.  It now has a discussion board as well.

These are services that have potential for developing your business further and they don't cost a thing.  If your a business on a budget, that is a wonderful thing. 

Read part 1 Which pinpoints blogging and micro-blogging sites

Jeweltastic: Things to Come

I envy my mom's talent for painting.  I am lucky enough to own one of her pieces and we are lucky enough to have acquired some of her paintings for sale.  Only a few of these pieces will be in our shop.  We're hoping to strike a deal with a store that sells home decor.  I'm hoping to convince her to start painting once more.

Jeweltastic: Importance of Blogging For a Small Business Part 1

Blogging

I can't afford a huge billboard,  I can't buy a spot in my local newspaper, and I can't purchase an ad from Google.  This doesn't mean I can't advertise.  There are so many opportunities for advertising it isn't even funny.  All of the big businesses use it from Home Depot to The Today Show.  If it's good enough for them to get free advertising, why can't I?

Blogs are social networks it's worth your time to have one that isn't connected to a business site unless it's your own.

Popular blogging sites include:

Wordpress.com You can't put advertising on this version.  You can place a donate button but other than that you can't make money off of it.  This is the free version.  I can say, though confusing at first, it's fairly easy to navigate.  You can keep an eye on stats and much more.

Wordpress.org  The same people who brought .com have this version.  This particular version you pay for but you can have advertising on a .org site.

Blogger  This blog is on blogger and it is, by far, one of the easiest sites to maintain.  I can move widgets any where I like without much thought.  HTML and JAVA are no brainers and any site that is worth it's weight has HTML to load videos.  Blogger has the capability of loading videos.  If you're looking for traffic, do youtube.   You may as well kill two birds with one stone.

Tumblr It claims that you can keep a partial private blog.  Which means you can have some of it for yourself and some of it is public.  It can run off Google analytics or automatically tweet your posts.  It even sends your blog feed to Facebook.

Posterous  Can be done via email.  In all honesty, so can Blogger.  This is a free service and whatever you mail, will turn into a post.  Don't understand how to post a youtube video using HTML?  Just grab a link and send it.

Serendipity  "is a PHP-powered weblog application which gives the user an easy way to maintain an online diary, weblog or even a complete homepage. While the default package is designed for the casual blogger, Serendipity offers a flexible, expandable and easy-to-use framework with the power for professional applications."  For those who don't know,  PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor) is a popular general-purpose server side scripting language which can be embedded into HTML to create a wide variety of mini-applications, but can also be used to build large-scale complex applications.

Pixie is located in the UK  To run Pixie you need a weserver that supports PHP and MySQL and your browser needs to be Javascript enabled.  It's a free platform and claims it will always be.

TypePad   Their own blog began in August 2003.  This is a service that you need to pay for but they seem to have blogging help in the background.  You can post from virtually anywhere your iphone, mobile phone, or email.  They Feature blog hosting and site stats.

Compendium  .The claim they make, "Compendium Blogware is the only Software as a Service blogging platform built for businesses and organizations. Compendium offers businesses the ability to effortlessly incorporate blogging into their search marketing program for the purpose of:

1.    Getting found in organic search results
2.    Acquiring new business
3.    Adding a human voice to your organization



Micro- Blogging

FriedEggs.com  How often have you been on a micro blogging site and said "Oh, darn! I have too many characters!"  With FriedEggs that will never happen.

"sometimes 140 characters just 'isn't enough. When you're interested in something or someone, you want to read more, know more or write more. FriedEggs gives you this option. Though again, doesn't require it.

Do you want to add a photo to what you write? It's simple.

What about adding a video? That's easy too.

Now it's all in one place and it can spread to many. It's about choice. Your choice.

At it's yolk, FriedEggs is a hip community of interesting members who share fascinating, funny, and hip stories, news events and entertainment. Sometimes a joke. Sometimes serious. The community is about you."

Twitter  I don't think you can talk about mico-blogging without Twitter.  It is a head scratching 140 characters sometimes requiring a URL shortner.  Nearly everyone uses it which also means people like Maria Shriver and her cool self does friend people on occasion.  

"Twitter is a real-time information network that connects you to the latest information about what you find interesting. Simply find the public streams you find most compelling and follow the conversations."

Yammer  "Yammer is revolutionizing internal corporate communications by bringing together all of a company’s employees inside a private and secure enterprise social network. Although Yammer is as easy to use as consumer products like Facebook or Twitter, its enterprise-grade software is built from the ground up to drive business objectives.
Yammer enables users to communicate, collaborate, and share more easily and efficiently than ever before. It reduces the need for meetings, increases communication across silos, surfaces pockets of expertise and connects remote workers."

Yammer can be used freely or as a premium service.

Present.ly "We don't pretend to know exactly how you will want to use Present.ly in your business. That's why we give you tools to make Present.ly work the way you want. Present.ly's Twitter-compatible API makes it dead simple to create novel ways to interact with the system. And all the tools built for Twitter can be adapted to Present.ly with just a few small modifications."

This is a free service

Jaiku  Is run by internet mogul Google  "Jaiku's goal is to bring people closer together by enabling them to have conversations. It offers a way to connect with the people you care about by sharing updates with them on the Web, IM, and SMS - as well as through third-party applications built by other developers using the Jaiku API."

Cromple  "cromple was created so everyone could start blogging and see what their friends are doing. It's for people who want a simple, no frills blog which they can post to quickly when ever and where ever they want!."

Hellotxt  Can be used on your Android, ipone, ipad, and on the web.  You can even doodle your updates.

Many of these sites provide a way to connect to potential customers.  Don't be afraid to friend people.  If you can avoid shortening URL's then go for it.  If I don't know you I don't click on links.  You need to build trust.  I think that's the first thing.  You can't have customer loyalty without trust.

Read part 2  More social Networks

Jeweltastic: Awesome Necklace

I wanted to share with you this awesome necklace I made. It is made of silver plated maille, White and pink glass beads, silver plated beads and rose quartz.  This is one of my favorites that I've made.  If I could afford to, I would keep it.  I have put it up at my  Jeweltastic store for $40.00.  It took about three hours for me to make (with small kids running around.)    I'm pretty proud of this piece.

Jeweltastic: My Jewelry

This is a sample of the jewelry I can make and I would even consider doing special pieces for you.  Which means completely unique and not another exactly like it.

Jeweltastic: Free Business Stuff

Jeweltastic is running on an extreme shoestring budget.  If we spend even $0.01 it costs in materials to make jewelry.  I've been purchasing supplies $20.00 here, $20.00 there.  Many of the things I use are low cost to no cost.  This is my list of cool things that I use.

I use Microsoft Office but before I used that, I used Open Office which has a lot of the same capabilities as Microsoft Office. 

Photoscape has photo editing capabilities.  If you have a blemish you can erase it out.  You can make videos, a collage, and more.  If you have an online business in which you need photos then this is perfect.

SBA offers free business advice and SCORE offers mentoring.

Contact Office   offers calendars,  bookmarks, notes, fax and more 100 MB are free any more than that there is a charge.

You can get free magazines. 

Online content that is incredibly valuable:

Entrepreneur
Forbes
Business Week
Inc.com
Generation X Finance
Management Craft
Duct Tape Marketing
Score More Sales
Small Business Trends
Starting a Small Business
Weebly     is incredibly easy to use if you've ever used Blogger, Weebly is just as easy to use and it offers business solutions to open an online store.

Jeweltastic: Branding

October first my mom and I discussed a name for our home business.  I Googled it, trademark checked it, researched it forward, backward, and inside out.  Jeweltastic is what I came up with.  On October seventh, I joined a popular crafting community.  The problem with the community is they announce new members and it left me vulnerable to people who would scavenge the name Jeweltastic.

I chose this name for a reason.  I researched it.  I knew what I was doing when I named my shop Jeweltastic.  To do a Google search and find a shop from the same crafting community attached to Jeweltastic was and is an insult.  It's taught me, that I will have to do it all on my own.  I can't trust anyone online any longer.  Jeweltastic is my brand and I have the electronic files as proof.   It's also going to end up trademarked.

You wouldn't call yourself Hershey or your shop Hershey Whatever.  It would be violating a trademark owned by a company.  You can use that name it doesn't belong to you.  This is why it's important to come up with something completely original and not something you saw from a username.  Coming up with something original and unique to you is hard work.  It took days of research before I settled on this one.

Branding:

"The American Marketing Association (AMA) defines a brand as a "name, term, sign, symbol or design, or a combination of them intended to identify the goods and services of one seller or group of sellers and to differentiate them from those of other sellers.

Therefore it makes sense to understand that branding is not about getting your target market to choose you over the competition, but it is about getting your prospects to see you as the only one that provides a solution to their problem."

I had branding in mind when I came up with this.   I make homemade jewelry.  I know there are others who do so.  I admire other people who are creative enough to do so.  I don't admire those who steal other people's ideas.  When you say "That's jeweltastic!"  I want you to think of me.  When I fight for the name Jeweltastic, It is no longer personal, it's business. 

Entrepreneur has a few points that are highlighted for small businesses when it comes to branding.

1. Create branded online destinations.   Luckily, I've done this.  if you see shirleyatjeweltastic or atjeweltastic, you've run into me.  I own Stumble, Facebook, and Twitter accounts and there is more to come.
2. Establish entry points.  They suggest providing meaningful content.  I'm working on that.  My blog posts are all labeled and Google now knows I'm here.  I write like a maniac and I have other blogs.  Perfect!  I can advertise elsewhere.
3. Locate your target audience and bring them back with you.  I believe I am doing this.  Thos who are my friends on social networking sites are into fashion.  I have to work on commenting on blogs but it will all get figured out.
4. Connect with influencers.  I do need to work a little more on this.  I've friended sites like InStyle.  I do hope to mail out free "samples" to various people and companies.
5. Give more than you receive.  I'm working on this point.  This one is a daily work in progress. especially since I have so much to do.

I highly suggest you visit the link.  This has mostly been my personal experience with branding.  The points are all valid though and better explained at the provided link.

Branding is hugely important to any business and a mixture of your own imagination and your own creativity should be what you use, not someone else's.

Jeweltastic: Nothing More Than a Blog

In my attempt to avoid fees from doing nothing more than posting a picture, I've come up with a way to do what I want to do without excessive fees.  I will be removing the shop from here and adding it as a link in the sidebar when I'm ready.

In other news... I will be hosting a giveaway to residents in USA.

This is what I'm giving away.  If you're interested, you can get me at Facebook make sure to leave me a message.  I will hold it on Sunday from 6:00pm eastern to 6:30pm.

Stay tuned for further details!

Jeweltastic: Lessons Learned

As someone who has been blogging for years, I can tell you social media has played a huge role in what I am doing now.  It's taught me some lessons.  Some of those lessons are common sense and some were learned the hard way.

Lesson 1  Personal blogs or a blog with a niche is a good thing.

It's an awesome thing to have a blog before you begin a blog based on your business.  It not only teaches you how to write in a manner that is valuable content-wise, but it also teaches you when you should be quiet.

Lesson 2 Write what you believe.

I believe I can be successful.  There is not a single blog that I own that is falsified or a misrepresentation of me.  All of my blogs are about a life journey or community service.  Since they are mostly personal and this is business, the only link between them is with one social site only.  I'm determined to leave my personal views out of my business.

Lesson 3 Be real.

More specifically, don't spam.  Spamming only hurts your business.  I delete over 200 spam a day from my inbox some are legitimate businesses.  If you got to my blog and you have nothing to say except to drop a link, you're spam and you're deleted.  If you act like a robot, you will be treated like one.


Lesson 4  Converse.

If you are on a blog or a social media site, learn to converse with people.  On the other side of that link is a person who lives and breathes just like you.  They have thoughts, feelings, and ideas just like you.  They are all potential customers, social media followers, and blog readers.  They will never visit your site until you can master communication.

Lesson 5 Learn a little at a time.

Jumping in at once can be overwhelming and can lead to failure.  Pick a site and learn it and use it.  You're going to make mistakes, everyone does.

Lesson 6 Have fun.

If it isn't fun, you aren't going to want to do it.


Timethief from One Cool Site  states, "I believe every point you make is a solid one. What's most important is to be aware that although a new blog is created every 9 seconds another blog dies every 6 seconds. The reason so many blogs are abandoned within a few months and usually in less than a year's time from their creation date because many are motivated to blog only make an income and their expectations fall short of the reality. Unless or until one makes $100. US on Google Adsense clicks by they will not receive a check. My experience is that unless one has an abiding and long term passion for what one is blogging about then the blog won't be "living" for long."