A recent guest on my Des Walsh & Friends program on BlogTalkRadio, Shirley George Frazier, shared valuable insights and tips on marketing and business generally.

Shirley is a Solo Marketing Specialist, Best-Selling Author and Professional Speaker. Shirley is recognized worldwide as one of the foremost experts on marketing strategies for small businesses and independent owners who work without employee assistance.

One of the people in small business I most admire and respect – as well as being a totally delightful person to meet online or IRL – Shirley has been in business since 1990. She is President and CEO of Sweet Survival®, a consulting firm specializing in business and marketing support. She speaks at conferences, trade shows and business meetings worldwide.

In the best tradition of the new world of social networking, our friendship developed first online. We then had the pleasure of meeting face to face, a.k.a. in real life (IRL) in New York City in late 2008.

Some of the topics on which Shirley shared her experience, insights and wisdom:

• How to manage multiple activities effectively, focusing on what you want to accomplish on a yearly, monthly, weekly and daily basis
• How she has traced her entrepreneurial inclinations and talents back to a great-great-grandmother and other forebears
• The wonderful story of how an amazingly successful gift basket business got started
• How someone who has suddenly been put out of work can look seriously and practically about starting their own business
• Practical guidance on how to do due diligence on business opportunities
• How people without special technical expertise can cut through the mystification and get started with a website and a marketing campaign
• Why although offline marketing is a necessity, businesses still need to do offline marketing as well

And much, much more.

[Click here to listen if player above does not appear]

Some details for more information about what Shirley does and thinks and how to reach her:

Solo Business Marketing and on Twitter at http://twitter.com/ShirleyFrazier

If you have a relative or friend who is even vaguely wondering about the possibility of establishing their own business, or who is in business already, I urge you to share the link with them. I know that if you do, you will be doing them a seriously good favor. Know someone like that?

Networking breakfast at the beach and an interview with a champion networker

Just a week ago today I had a reminder that, while it’s great to connect with colleagues and customers globally, via the Web, it’s also very healthy for business to go to live events.

Just before Christmas, at a local Chamber of Commerce function, I met up with a good friend, although lately we have not been frequently in the same place, local businesswoman, coach and superb networker, Kym Kranen, I learned that Kym was running some networking breakfasts in the local region.

I attended one of the breakfasts last week and was very glad I had done so. Good conversation, some excellent business ideas, dynamic people.

Actually, a good touch with these events is that if you don’t want a breakfast as such you can just have a coffee or tea – or water! And there is no admission charge, so for people working from home and on a very tight budget, “can’t afford it” is not a viable excuse for staying away.

It was also good to be able to get a few minutes of Kym’s time and speak with her about what she is doing with business networking in the region and how this can help, especially but not exclusively, people with businesses from home – and on the latter topic she shared some interesting statistics.

Here is the video of the chat we had.

You can find out more about what Kym does and make contact, via her site Solutions4Success.

Do you have a story to share – good or “cautionary” – about the value of attending local networking events?

• Get Started Blogging: Some Tips for Beginners
  Adam Kruser has some excellent, practical tips for beginning bloggers – distilled wisdom – and some good links for more reading
  (tags: blogging, new+bloggers, beginning+blogger)

New Year Greetings!

To tell the truth, I hesitated to post here this new Year greeting picture with me in my board shorts. After all, this blog is supposed to be about business, isn’t it?

Well yes. But it’s not about business as we knew it. It’s about home based business.

And one of the rules – or privileges if you will – of working from home is that we can dress – or “undress” – as we will.

Whether you like the idea of relaxed dress for work, or feel it’s more business like to “dress up” before you face the keyboard in the morning, I wish all the subscribers and other readers of this blog a most abundant and joyful year – and decade – ahead.

And yes, I do have a resolution – to post here more frequently.

Happy New Year!

Wondering whether the world needs another book on home based business

This post is partly confessional and partly fishing for suggestions or advice.

Having a bout this morning of “what will I write about today?” I went to take a look at some older posts, to see if there was something I’d written previously which might do with an update.

In doing that I was taking a leaf from my own book, having spent a lot of time yesterday on another blog updating what had consistently been the most visited post since I wrote it nearly two years ago. That task took longer than I’d anticipated, partly because I had learnt a lot more about the topic and had more to share than with the original post.

So it was with a touch of trepidation that I decided today to go the whole hog here, a bit over five years back to the beginning of Thinking Home Business and the first post in August 2004. Or, as it turned out, the first post and another on the same day.

My trepidation was justified

I found that in those early posts I had declared for the blog an intention or purpose which has not eventuated.

In the first post I wrote:

… I intend to write an e-book to help people setting up and running their home based business.

Then in another post on the same day I went further:

…it is my intention for this blog to chronicle the development of the book and any related outcomes

So much for intentions.

What happened?

Or rather, why did the book not happen?

I can think of lots of reasons, including of course procrastination. But one thing that happened was that as I experimented with blogging and then became more involved in social media more broadly, my focus of attention shifted. Writing a book about doing home based business dropped off the to-do list, it seems.

Mind you, in the meantime I have authored one book and co-authored two others. But none on home based business.

What now?

Actually, the question “what now?” begs another question, which I flagged in the heading at the top of this post.

And it’s this:

Is the world ready for another book on home based business?

Or more to the point, would enough people be likely to get valuable information and insights from a book by me on the practicalities of home based business to make the project worth doing?

There is of course the excellent, comprehensive Undress for Success by Kate Lister and Tom Harnish, which I reviewed here in September. But I’m not even thinking of trying to compete with that book: as I indicated in my review it is full of valuable information and advice, and I commend it highly. But it’s not the kind of book I’m thinking of doing.

If I were to proceed now or in the near future with a book on home based business, I think I would be doing so with my coach’s hat on and with an emphasis on helping home based business owners with the “inner game” of owning and managing a business. How you (we) deal with any sense of isolation from the mainstream of business, how we deal with our own reactions to clients whose demands seem unreasonable. How we balance the big picture for our business with the daily details. And so on.

And I would be hoping to interview some people who have success stories to tell about their home based businesses and sharing some tricks of the trade.

Would there be a perceived need for that, do you think? And not to put too fine a point on it, would people be likely to pay for something like that?

Or is there another book, another topic, that would be of more interest, more useful – and yes, more saleable?