Captive Mommies

by Kara Kelso

In the summer months, rarely do we think about the children going back to school or what we plan to do when September gets here. But if you are in business, summer is the most important time to start planning since many of you may be experiencing the “summer slowdown”.

So let’s take a look at what you could be doing right now to prepare for the fall months when business picks up.

1. Organize
Take a few days to organize yourself. Clean off your desk, file your paper work, etc. Don’t forget to organized your online files as well!

2. Study trends
Now that you are organized, take some time to go over those files you have sorted. What sells best? What doesn’t ? What customers haven’t ordered in awhile?

3. Follow Ups
Since you have your papers out and are studying them, now would be a good time to follow up with some of your past customers. They might be too busy to hold a show right now, so ask if by fall they would like to host a show and would like you to call them back. Be sure to keep good notes!

4. Update and Improve Your Website
If you still don’t have a personal website, now would be a good time to build one. If you do have one, make some changes. Those files you studied a bit ago - use them to make your changes and highlight certain items on your website.

5. Start Your Christmas Marketing Plan
Are their products you know your company will have during Christmas? Do you have a design in mind for your website or personal catalogs? How about your mailing list, is it in order? Mark down dates in a calander for the best time to mail and contact your customers.

6. Plan Events
If you weren’t involved in any summer shows, start calling around for information on indoor fall and Christmas events. These places can fill up fast, so be sure you have the details first and can get the best spot!

There are other tasks you can do to help you get better prepared for the fall and winter, use this only as a guide. As long as you keep busy, your profits should rise come September!

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About the Authors: Kara Kelso & Anita DeFrank are two busy wahms, and the owners of Direct Sales Helpers. For more Direct Sales Success Tips, visit: http://www.directsaleshelpers.com/newsletter.html
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Article Source: http://www.wahm-articles.com
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by Arlene Pellicane

Is it unreasonable for your husband to want a sexy wife? What if you just had a baby and it seems like an impossible task to lose that baby belly? The stress of being a new mom can be overwhelming without thinking about losing weight and counting calories. You may be thinking, “He should love me just as I am!”

On one of my Losing Weight After Baby podcasts, I talked about the husband’s need for an attractive wife. Men are visually stimulated and it’s very important to them to feel physically attracted to their spouses. Dr. Willard Harley says it best in his excellent book, His Needs, Her Needs: Building an Affair-proof Marriage:

“By calling for a wife to be attractive I mean she should take pains to look something like the woman her husband married. After all, that was the woman he fell in love with, not a movie star or some other fantasy. Does this mean a woman must stay eternally young? Of course not, but getting older provides no excuse for letting weight creep up and up, not fixing your hair, and dressing like a bag lady.”

Did you hear that ladies? Getting older and having a baby is no excuse for:

1. Letting weight creep up and up
2. Not fixing your hair
3. Dressing like a bag lady

How’s that for hitting home? The good news is that you are not a helpless victim. A box of twinkies will not attack you when you wake up. You can take charge of your health and look your best for your husband (and yourself too!).

You don’t have to spend one hour primping in front of the mirror. Hello, moms don’t have that kind of time! Just take 5-10 minutes to put on makeup, comb your hair and wear something that flatters your figure (I know that’s a post-pregnancy challenge!).
So how are you doing mom? Do you look like the bride your husband married? Of course, if you just had a baby, you’ve gained some extra pounds and rightfully so! But are you working hard towards getting that pre-baby body back? To look like the woman in your wedding pictures?

Today’s Action Step: Take out your wedding album. Look at the photos of you and your husband. Do you look like that woman he married? Are there changes you need to make to look attractive for your spouse?

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Want to lose your baby weight once and for all? Get FREE tips that work at Arlene’s website http://www.losingweightafterbaby.com or blog at http://losingweightafterbaby.wordpress.com
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Article Source: http://www.wahm-articles.com
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by Nicole Calhoun

When my son Jordan turned ten, we wanted to do something fun, yet inexpensive, for his milestone birthday. After all, the kid was growing up. He would no longer be in the single digits, anymore, and we wanted to celebrate in a way we hadn’t before.

My husband and I both have large families, and there is a great mix of ages. There are grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, nieces, nephews and all range from the late sixties to two years old! In order to have a party that would not exclude anyone from being able to enjoy themselves took real creativity on our part, but we pulled it off!

We wanted to have a celebration that would be memorable for our son and still be able to make sure that everyone would have an activity that would cause them to feel appreciated that we considered them, as well.

So, what did we do? We thought about the times we had gotten together as family and tried to remember when everyone had the most fun. That simple exercise helped us remember the perfect venue for holding our son’s 10th birthday party.

The park! But not just any park. This park had it all: barbecue grills, a tennis court, a basketball court, a sandy volleyball court, a playground, a walking trail, numerous picnic areas and huge shade trees scattered abroad!

I mean there was something for everyone! The tinier tikes played tirelessly at the playground that had equipment suitable to their needs. The ‘tweens (eight to twelve year olds) enjoyed everything! If they weren’t playing on the playground, they were on one of the sports courts.

The teenagers played basketball and volleyball and made new friends with the others who were their enjoying family time, as well. The folks in their early twenties to early thirties enjoyed playing against the teens…just to show them that although we’re older, we could still kick their butts in a sporting event! And for the record, we whooped them in every sport…but the next day, we were all feeling it!

The more mature adults, our parents and aunts and uncles, chitchatted at the picnic table over hot dogs and hamburgers that had been grilled to perfection!

So, for a child’s birthday party, the park is a great place to hold the party to rival all parties. It’s free to use, and it comes equipped with everything you need for everyone in attendance to have an enjoyable time.

Our son and lots of his guests (young and old) tell us to this day what a great time they had at his birthday party. Everyone’s excited to see what we have in store for him, this year!

You know what? We figure, if it’s not broke, we won’t try to fix it. I’m thinking the park is going to make a great place to hold number eleven, as well.

So if you’ve been painstakingly thinking about where you could hold a party for your precious little pumpkin, the park is a fantastic location. All your guests are guaranteed to have a good time!

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Nicole enjoys spending time with her son, Jordan and her husband, Muri. She loves to travel, work her home-based business, shop and meet new people. If you would like to spend more time with your loved ones, please contact Nicole. http://www.fulltimefamily.com
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Article Source: http://www.wahm-articles.com
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by Audrey Okaneko

If you are in business, then you want to create sales. If you’re marketing online, then you want people to come to your website over and over again.

In order for customers to keep coming back, you need to provide them a reason to come back.

Let’s start with some design basics. Use a standard font and a standard font size. People won’t stay if they find your site hard on the eyes. Keep your site music free. Again, you want people to stay and music tends to chase people away. Keep your graphics and colors very easy on the eyes. Have you ever visited a site that had orange and green stripes? Did you leave? Keep your site simple on the eyes. Double and triple check your spelling and grammar. I just visited a site today with so many typos, there is no way I’d order or go back. I make typos too, but I take the time to have my pages proofed and proofed again. I have a second set of eyes look at a lot of what I publish. It’s very hard to catch your own mistakes. If you are working with a budget, find another writer and offer to exchange proofing with them. It’s so much easier to catch someone else’s errors.

Each of these ideas will help keep people from leaving your site.

Now, let’s get them coming back!

Add new content regularly. People want to see something new. Give them what they want. If they always see the same content when they visit, they quit visiting.

Offer a weekly tip, a weekly idea or some other weekly something that keeps them coming back to view the new piece of information. Think of the sites you have bookmarked. Why do you keep going back? You go because the site offers you something over and over again. Consider letting people know when the next update will be. Let them know when they can expect a new idea or tip.

Change your online sales. Offer a weekly special. Not only does this keep people coming back to see what the special is, but it offers a reason for people to order from you.

Provide fresh new articles on a regular basis. Or offer a selection of ebooks that you add to regularly. Or offer a selection of ecourses that you add to regularly. People want to learn. All of these give you a way to teach others.

Offer a contest or sponsor a contest. Either way makes people look through your site and tell you what one item they’d like to win, if they’re the winner. They don’t necessarily have to win that prize, but this gets people to look at what you offer.

Make sure your site offers a way to reach you. People want to know there is a real person behind the site. They want to know that if they have a question or even a problem, there will be a person they can contact.

Consider offering message boards on your site. If people are posting daily, you’ll have more opportunity to send them to your home page.

There is no one right way to keep visitors on your site or to keep them coming back. Find the right combination for you with the above tips.

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Audrey Okaneko has been in direct sales since 1983. She can be reached at audreyoka@cox.net or you can Become a Tupperware Consultant
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Article Source: http://www.wahm-articles.com
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by Myla Madson

When I first got interested in writing an eBook, I scoured the Internet looking for instructions on just exactly how to do it…they didn’t exist.

I found a ton of advice on writing about what you know, how to discipline yourself to write and even schedules for writing. All of that was fine, and even useful, but I needed to know how to actually publish one of the eBooks and nobody was giving me that information. If you are in the same boat, here’s how you do it:

First, you must use Microsoft Word to write your eBook. Make sure you start each new section on a new page. Include a table of contents and a title page. If you are not familiar with this program, search for a tutorial online.

Once you have your eBook written and formatted correctly, you need to get it in PDF format. This is what everyone writing an eBook does now. It’s safer than an .exe fie because you cannot put a virus in it and Internet users are aware of this fact. Also, Mac users can read PDF and you don’t want to exclude anyone.

Adobe Acrobat has a free trial version you can use to publish five eBooks. Go to Adobe Acrobat and set up an account, all you need is an email address.

Click on the button that says “create PDF”. You will see a browse button that allows you to locate your file in your documents folder. Make sure you click on the “Publish as an eBook” selection and then list the pages you want to convert (1-how ever many pages there are).

You will need to select how you want to retrieve your eBook when it is done. I always have them email the link to my eBook. You have five days to pick it up.

Click on the link in your email to pick up your eBook. You will be given the option to view your eBook, which is what you will want to do to make sure everything worked properly. You can then hit the save button within the document and save a copy to your computer. I always save it into my pictures folder for easy upload to my website.

That’s it in a nutshell.

I would certainly recommend you get a detailed instructional course on this subject if you plan to write an eBook to earn money. I have a very in depth Ebook on how to write and publish your eBook on my website. It is free of charge and should be extremely helpful in not only writng your eBook, but marketing it as well.

eBooks are often given away free to build your list of future potential buyers of your products. Make sure you give them value or they will never spend money on something else you have produced. This is why it is so important to do an excellent job writing and formatting your eBook.

You do not have to make it a long ebook, but it needs to answer the readers questions and leave him or her feeling they did not waste their time and can realistically apply what you have taught them.

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For more information on writing, publishing and marketing your eBook, pick up a free 168 page copy of my latest eBook titled, “eBook Marketing Revealed…How to Write, Publish and Market Your Own eBook”. http://MylaMadson.com/friendsofmyla
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Article Source: http://www.thewahmshack.com/articledirectory
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