I arrived at an event being held by a local industry group and looked in vain for my name among the pre-printed name badges. I’d booked for the event last week but apparently my name was still “in the system”.

So I was offered the usual substitute name badge, my name scrawled in marker pen on some flimsy paper.

Not a great look.

At least it came with a transparent, clip-on or pin-on holder. Better than the stick-on ones which are more often than not “fall-off” tags.

But even with the pre-printed tags there can be a problem for those of us who don’t have 20/20 vision and can only read smaller print with the benefit of spectacles, or by peering at the person’s tag in a not very elegant way.

And I hate having to fumble to get my specs out while attempting to balance simultaneously the whole glass of wine and canape and shaking of the hand routine.

Which is why I spent a few dollars to have a personal name badge made, no logo, no picture, just my name, in large print, black on gold.  Easy to read and with a good strong magnetic clip so I don’t have to damage my clothes or prick my thumb with those safety pin arrangements.

They are not expensive. I’ve seen them advertised for less than $10 and more fancy ones still under $20.

Even with postage, which is not always added on, it’s still a modest investment to have an easily readable name badge. You should be able to get them from a local office supplies store or online.

You can get your logo included. My aim was legibility and a logo was going to take up reading space, which is why it’s just my name. (The name actually stands out more than is evident from the rather dark photo here)

It’s also got some “stand out from the crowd” value.

And a tip. Put the badge somewhere which will make it easy to find when you are off to an event, not something you have to look around for and finish up going without. Maybe leave it the glove box of your car: it won’t take up room and it will probably be easier to find when you want it.

By the way, although technology transforms our lives and our businesses with astonishing speed, there are some business challenges where the solution “back when” can also be the solution for today: a thought prompted by the fact that I first posted about the name badge issue back in 2005.

Other tips for handling the name badge challenge will be welcome.

The links that were in that post were by now way out of date, so I’ve just removed them, but I felt the basic points made in the post were worth repeating and expanding upon in the new world of social media. These were that you can:

• use your blog as a journal, to map where you are going and track where you’ve been
• use it to get known
• use it to link and share with others in your line of business
• use it instead of a fancy web site – for which you may not have a budget right now anyway

Using your blog as a journal

This of course goes back to the origins of blogging (“blog” as short for “web log” etc) but still works.

I’m going to generalize wildly here, but I believe it is generally true that when we start a new business we are usually excited, inspired about what we want to achieve and how we aim to do it.

If not, why would we do it? To make money? That’s fine, but I doubt that the momentum can be built or maintained without some passion (as I indicated in a recent post).

So writing about what you are doing, sharing your excitement, sharing photos if you have them, is one way to build awareness of your business and to provide a reference point for friends and family to share with their circles of connections the word about what you are doing.

And you don’t have to blog just about your successes. Not that you have to share everything that goes wrong – that in fact could be a very bad idea – but by sharing some of the challenges you remind people that you are human, something a lot of businesspeople make the mistake of being unwilling to admit to.

I see it as a bit like those restaurants where the diners can see right into the kitchen, see their meals being prepared. And like the people in the kitchen, if we decide to share via our blog how things are going, we will need to be on our toes!

As with the chefs who open their kitchen to the patrons’ view, this one is probably not for the faint-hearted. But if you are good with that idea, you could make it a feature of your blog.

Use your blog to get known

Even if you decide to skip the previous suggestion and not use your blog to chronicle publicly your ups and downs in getting your business moving, you can certainly use it to get known.

In fact, that was my main motive in starting blogging back in 2003 and that decision has not only helped me promote my business locally, nationally and internationally, it has led to book deals, public speaking in Australia, the USA and China and, by no means least of all, a whole raft of friends and colleagues across the world.

There has been more to all that than just writing blog posts, but setting up the blog was a crucial step and continuing to blog has helped me maintain momentum and helped keep me up to date in my key areas of professional interest.

Through a blog, you can provide your clients and your prospects with a better understanding of your grasp of your field of expertise and also your style of communication and your values, than they are likely to get from one meeting with you, say at some networking function, or from a PR style brochure (offline or online version).

Use it to link and share with others in your line of business

One of the many great things about blogging for business is that it enables multiple conversations with your professional colleagues and peers. Even with your competitors!

The whole system of hyperlinking from and to blog posts, the use of RSS, and more recently all the cross-platform sharing with LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and so on, give us unprecedented opportunities to share with others and learn from them in return.

I like to think of this feature of blogging as being part of an ongoing, international, virtual think tank.

And while there are many things we can share via other social media platforms, the long form style of blogging gives us, in practice, the opportunity to share at greater length, and in greater depth, than more instant forms of communication, notably Twitter with its 140 character limit, or Facebook, where the short and sharp usually trumps more extended communications.

Use it instead of a fancy web site

Actually, with the evolution of blogging platforms since I wrote that post back in 2004, it’s possible now to have a quite fancy site, but the key point I wanted to make back then is still relevant, namely that blogging software gives you the ability to have a perfectly good web site, even if you do not have a budget to pay a local web site developer the thousands of dollars they might indicate it will cost you to have a functioning web site.

Explaining how you do that, and particularly what it might cost, is a subject for another post.

In 2004 I suggested you might not have to outlay any money on the process, which was true in a sense, but could have benefited from a bit of explanation.

Even now, assuming you are going to pay for a web site to be hosted somewhere, it might cost you – even with a quite ambitious plan for a home based business, such as the HostGator Baby plan with unlimited sites – less than $7 a month.

Add to that a domain hosted by, say, Namecheap for under $10 a year, and you have a budget commitment of literally less than $100 for a full year’s operation.

That presupposes a lot of work by you to learn how to set up your site, configure it and manage it. If that bothers you, we can get you set up, through colleagues of ours, for under $1,000 provided you have a reasonably simple set of site requirements, and still very competitively if you have more complex requirements.  Just get in touch via the Contact page here.

Where to next?

Back in 2004 I was able to recommend some sources of advice and guidance on getting started with blogging. All the links in that original post are out of date so I’ve removed the links. Now I feel I need to provide some more up to date information to answer the “where to next?” question.

So I’ll be providing some information and links on that in the coming week. Watch this space.

In the meantime, any questions on the subject will be welcome.

Image credit: Hellenic Republic restaurant kitchen, by avlxyz via Flickr, Creative Commons licence

Since 1990, Shirley has been amazingly successful at starting and growing her business, gaining print and televised media attention along the way, and speaking at business and trade shows throughout the USA.

She also wrote the book Marketing Strategies for the Home-Based Business: Solutions You Can Use Today

The Solo Business Marketing blog makes great reading, not just for solo professionals working from home, but for anyone in business who is looking for practical, experience-based advice on marketing.

Shirley has a lovely, easy style of writing, which is actually a perfect reflection of what you would experience if you were to have the benefit, as I have, of a direct conversation with her.  The warm, friendly and down-to-earth style of her blog posts can be experienced readily in such posts as:

Five Ways to Get Your Marketing Plan Back on Track

Yesterday evening I escorted a relative to the hospital. He had not eaten for two days and was feeling poorly.

Tell me you don’t want to read on.

Why Falling in the Street is a Great Marketing Lesson

This week, during one of my fitness walks through town, I found myself tumbling onto the concrete. My right foot turned slightly inward, and that’s when my body met the pavement.

“I cannot believe this is happening!” I shouted in my head, wondering if I’d get up and keep going or call on my cell phone for medical attention.

More (don’t know about you but I had to know where all that was going!)

I interviewed Shirley on my Des Walsh & Friends show on BlogTalkRadio back in February this year. You can hear/download the recording of that here.

Solo Business Marketing – Top Site. Check it out.

It is my intention to feature a new Top Site every week. If you have a favorite site on home based business or which would be of direct benefit to professionals working from home, please let me know so I can consider it for inclusion in the TopSites section of this site: please note, only sites with original, quality content and authored by a home based business person will be considered.

In over twenty years of being in business I’ve had a lot of good business advice. My only regret is that I wish I’d followed more of the good advice, sooner.

I’ve also had plenty of bad or unduly self-serving advice and my regret there is in having followed some of that until I had enough experience to see through it.

Sound familiar? My guess is that if you are in business and are not super omniscient and always amazingly successful you have had both of those experiences too.

So is there something to be done, when embarking on a business, or when re-starting our existing businesses, to cut through the fog of theories and advice that are not going to serve us and get to some good, practical advice which will enable us to get on with the business of business, with confidence as well as optimism?

Yes there is. And, believe it or not, it is provided by government!

The heading to this post says “free” resources. That’s not completely accurate, because these resources have been put together at taxpayers’ expense. But they are freely available on the web for anyone who wants to use them.

As a taxpayer, you can say, “At last, something useful from the government!”

If you are one of those people who believe nothing good can come out of government – what do they say, one of the great lies is “I’m from the government, I’m here to help you”? – then I ask that you put aside your skepticism for a moment and check out the resources listed below.

Because what has happened in several countries is that governments have paid some people to put together “starting a business” checklists and resource lists, with lots of links, to save people having to do all that themselves.

In this post I’m just including links to sites provided by federal/national governments – USA, Canada, UK, Australia. I know from previous research there are other such sites provided at State/ Provincial level. And maybe even at local government level although I have not looked into that yet.

The US Government’s Small Business Administration provides a Small Business Planner.

From the UK Government there is Practical Advice for Business: Starting up .

The Canadian Government’s Canada Business site has Starting a Business.

And the Australian Government’s business.gov.au site has Thinking of Starting a Business .

One note of caution. I have found sometimes with such sites that you can be clicking on a link to resources that are really third party ones and which do promote products and services commercially. If that is the case with a particular government-provided resource, it should be clear from the site: it’s a while since I have researched such sites so I don’t know the current situation. Just be aware.

If you know of other such national/federal or state/provincial government provided free resources for business, do please share them. There may even be regional or local government sites that you know of and have found helpful.

Compare Bankwest’s great range of award winning low interest rate credit cards and find the credit card to suite you.

In conversations I have from time to time with other people who work from home,  the distinction between working in their business and working on their business seems to be common parlance. I think it’s fair to say the most of us know why it is a good thing, actually a necessary thing, to aspire to working more on the business and much, much less in the business.

Getting all the ducks in a row, so as to achieve that, is another story.

Anyone who has read Tim Ferriss 4 Hour Work Week – is there anyone left who hasn’t? – knows that one of the ways we can move more into the “on the business” plane is by outsourcing things that others can do, more economically and often better than we can.

Many of us are also aware, from conversations with support desks if from no other source, that the Philippines has become a key provider of outsourced services at highly competitive prices.

And it’s not only telecoms companies and call-center providers who are outsourcing to the Philippines.  Many small and even micro businesses are doing so too.

I’m probably treading on a toe or three

On a previous occasion when I have written about outsourcing I have drawn some criticism on the basis – as far as I could figure out – that I was somehow encouraging people to use less than “quality assured” services. But if I can get quality services provided, within a budget and on terms that are reasonable for both parties,  from whatever country, I’ll feel ok about that.  After all, I’m in an international market myself, where some competitors charge a lot more than I do and some a lot less: it’s up to me to show I can provide value for money.

Mass Outsource

Here at our two person company we have been exploring the possibilities for outsourcing some of our business processes to the Philippines and we have spent some time and money doing that.

In that regard, one of our best investments, of time and of money, has been on a course and system developed by Tyrone Shum, under the heading of Mass Outsource Mastermind Program.

It has been and continues to be a good experience and definitely value for money.

For anyone interested, I would recommend taking advantage of the opportunity available just now to get access to ten free videos in which Tyrone explains how the outsourcing process works. It’s effectively a free e-course, which provides valuable, experience-grounded information about the outsourcing process and how it can liberate us to do the things we really want to do and which will reward us better.

In a world of fast-talking, over-promising “gurus”, Tyrone Shum is a refreshing change – his dedication to providing quality information, advice and support, quietly, thoroughly, is impressive. He doesn’t over-promise and he delivers generously. And I like that when he asks “Are there any more questions?” he means it – and welcomes the question.

Is this an affiliate linked post? You bet (see next para), but I’d be happy to do it anyway as I really respect what Tyrone has achieved and how he shares.

Here is the link to the free Mass Outsource video e-course.