How I Can Cope With 2 Careers At A Time

I think there are many people out there who have more than one career or one business. The question is, how to cope with all of them? How can we be focused on two or more careers at the same time with balanced attention between both careers? I am sharing here my own experience in having two careers at the same time, and keep balancing both of them!

Starting July 2008, I joined a sales organization, serving machineries and parts for industrial business. This is my full time job, while since end of last year, I am also building an internet business. Up to now, I own and manage 3 websites by myself. From writing contents for the websites, I have found my hidden talent in writing. That encouraged me to build a virtual assistant business back on May 2008, to serve copywriting needs. Well...sounds very hectic! But how do I cope with both full job and online (freelance) job?

Setting Main Goal

Firstly, I had to decide what would be my main goal in this life. That is very important, because having busy with many things in life can sometimes make us forget ‘what we actually want to accomplish at the end?’ In my case, I decided to earn money for my family living with a firm full time job, while at the same time run my internet business for my future career. At this stage, being my own boss would be my main target, and for reach it I need to work as hard as I could.

Life Balancing

After deciding my main destination, I started to look into my present life. How can I improve my life to achieve the goal? This is where I re-manage my personal life. I tried to make a list of what I believe is the most important things in my life. Here is the list in priority order:

My relationship with God. Although I’m not a very religious person, but providing my most qualified time for Him is always a must.

My health. Nothing I would achieve without a good health. Sports, nutrition, supplement and good sleep must be included in my top list.

My family. Communication with family is very important. No one denies that family support is everything for our career. Besides, we work for our loved ones, right? So, spending times for family conversations of gathering must be slipped through my busy schedule no matter how!

My personal life/hobbies. The advantage of having a career from your hobby is, you don’t have to spend more time for your hobby. You do it while working! But anyhow, I also spare my times for relaxing, usually on weekend.

My social life. No one can live alone. So I keep spending my time to just say hello to old friends sometimes. Anyway, internet has made communication much easier!

Time management

Using that ‘my important things’ list, I begun to arrange my time schedule. My PDA helps a lot in this process. I always write my plans in daily basis, and adjust it time to time. The more important jobs will come first and got bigger portion in our 24-hours-only-a-day. Tip : always slip one hour everyday without any plan, as from my experience, I always need more time to do one of the plans.

But what if things don’t go like I had planned it?

I would re-arrange my plans, by sorting all plans based on priority. What can’t be delayed must be put earlier, and less important things can be re-scheduled to next time available.

Arranging a plan is easy, but how to keep sticking with it? That’s why I need to have...

Strong commitment

Sometimes I feel like my PDA has run my life, not the other way! It keeps telling me I have to A until next one hour, then B for 2 hours, and so on. At this critical moment, I always look back to my first commitment to live the life I have created, keep remembering my final destination, and reasons why I take the path I am taking. And all those times, it worked.

It only means that, strong commitment will help you in difficult times. It will make you stronger, tougher, braver, plus it will clear your way to your destination.

Enthusiasm

Lastly, enthusiasm will always make your days easier. It can also delay your fatigueness. However, resting is still a must. No matter how enthusiast you are, your body cannot resist a good sleep for recovery, so that you can fight again on the next days.

Good luck !

5 Reasons Why Industrial Business Need Copy Writing

Actually every business that need promotional techniques to develop the business, need copy writing. Which means that ALL kind of business need it. Today I write about industrial business, as it has been my career background for the last 15 years.

So, why does industrial business need copy writing? Most of them build the business from quite long time, engaging with most of the people in the same industry. In other words, they know the customers (most of them have the same ones), and sometimes competitors can become suppliers or even customers.

The main players of industrial business include :

• Machine manufacturer
  
• Tools and parts manufacturer
  
• Distributors of machine and/or tools & parts
  
• Engineering workshop
  
• Machine user in many manufacturing industries
  

And when the competition is becoming tighter, promotions become more and more important, even for industries where most of the players know each others! Copy writing is a massive promotional techniques that can uniquely separate us from competitors. If you agree to at least 3 of these points, then it's time to put copy writing in your daily tasks as a business owner, business manager or sales person.

Point#1 - Do people outside your area know you ?
With the presence of internet, everybody can get everything he wants from every part of the world easily, just by surfing the internet. Location is no longer a limitation to a business. People can buy from you even if they live across the country. If you want your business to keep growing, you must expand it. The problem is, expansion is expensive! The solution? Let more people know you, come to you, and finally buy from you. How? By driving them to your website or blog through the SE.

Tips :
SE loves sites or blogs with frequently updated good quality contents. And when they love you, they will put you higher in their search results everytime people search for your products. To get fresh and good quality contents, hire a virtual assistant specializing in copy writing services.

Point#2 – Why do they buy from you instead of your competitors ?
If your prospective customer can find you in the internet, there's a big chance they might find your competitors too. So, how to make them turn to you on the first chance? By ensuring them that you are better than your competitors.

Tips :
Good quality and well written website or blog content will help you to attract your prospective customer and to get their respect and trust. Therefore, make sure you hire someone with good track records to write your sales copies.

Point#3 – Can you detect every new industry in your market ?
In this fast growing industry era, you must keep up-to-date of new industries that might be your prospective customers. Don't let your competitors find them first. But how can you detect every newcomers in the industry all the time? Relaxed ! You already have a reputable virtual assistant to manage your website or blog. Or...you haven't ? Then, hire one!

Tips :
Hire a VA with an expertise in copy writing to produce qualified and interesting contents for your website or blog to attract more new prospects to give you more businesses!

Point#4 – Does your targeted market knows about your product ?
So, you have attracted people (traffic) to your website/blog. That's good. But it will be no use for you if they just come and read your contents. You need their business!

Tips :
To persuade them to do a business with you, a persuasive sales copy will be needed. Not everyone has such talent, so make sure to outsource the sales copy writing to a good VA.

Point#5 – Do you have all the time needed to build relationship with your targeted market ?
Now that you have convinced yourself of the urge of high quality sales copy writing, next problem is when will you write it? Writing needs material, and to get material you'll need research. Oohh...seems so complicated!...

Tips :
Yes...you can guess it...hire a good VA to do the research and write the sales copies for you. As often as you wish!

Still wondering how you will get a VA that can do such things for you? Ehm...without much increasing your tight budget? Congratz...You have found us! Just write down your name, company and phone number. Send it by e-mail to fanda.vixiova@yahoo.com, and relax. We will do the rest!

P.S.
Need a sales copy in Bahasa Indonesia? Find the samples in one of our clients blog!

Bad Business Attitude Can Kill Your Business

Of course, no business owner in this world can afford to lose their business. Many policies and strategies are performed to protect (and grow) their businesses. Some will enjoy a big growth, some will stay as it is, and some will suffer from bad strategies. I will only talk to one specific point that can kill your business if you do not apply it very well : business attitude.

This is a clear example of how a bad business attitude can put a succesfull business in danger...

During my 15 years career in industrial sales and service business, I happened to know one trading company selling machines and parts to many industries. For years they enjoy fruitfull relations with their loyal customers, as well as successfully build new cooperation with many other industries. All are built on the base of terrific service value, or in trading business we called it: after sales service.

After sales service is what makes a business owner can continuously run his business, and even bring it to a higher level. Because once we made a sales to a customer, we don’t just deliver the goods, collect the payment, and credit it in our journal, then finished. No! We want the customer to enjoy the goods and in the future do another transaction with us again. Or, if he/she is satisfied, he/she can refer our product to their friends, which means more customers for us. But how? By providing after sales service! There are people who think that after sales service is another profit center besides the product. So, every service that they provide related to the product will be charged. That is normal, as business goal is gaining profit. However, if we charge for our after sales service, then what will be the added value we will provide for customer in order to keep them buying from us ?

So that trading company has a good after sales service tradition for years, and enjoy a fast growing by keeping the old and loyal customers. The customers are guaranteed with free machine service guarantee for life, machine back up when their machine got problem, and friendly and flexible approach to solve every problem.

Unfortunately, one day the boss decided to take control of the after sales service division. He changed all the previous policies, no more free services, no more free back up machines (they do provide back up machine but in terms of ‘rental’), no more friendly approaches. Everything is counted only on money basis. Customer gets something from them, customer must pay for it. Period.

So the company has transformed from ‘always ready to give’ to ‘must receive for all that we give’...Receiving first, then giving. I found this good opinion in an article about business attitude written by Homebiztools, ...growth comes from giving more use value than you receive in cash value…. It emphasizes that, if you want to grow a business, build a long term relationship by giving more use value to everybody (customers, suppliers, brokers, business partners, and even your competitors). Of course, without sacrifying the business itself!

No need to describe it in detail, but that new policies definitely become a shock for the trading company’s customers! Honeymoon is over! Complaints will keep coming. And what is going to happen with the business? Nobody knows now, yet. But from the story, we can learn one important thing : not an overpricing products, or delayed delivery, or broken parts over delivery, that can kill a business (you can revise, redeem or replace all the failures). But bad business attitude can!

To get some tips on how to build a business with attitude, read more this article and implement them in your business starting today! Don’t wait until your customers start running away....

Sharpening Writing Skill

Sharpening writing skill...that’s what I’ve been doing for nearly two months now. Last order for VixioVA is a translation job for a website, and after that I was busy of adapting in my new full time job. It is a sales organization, selling printing and packaging machineries and spare parts. I will write a lot about this in my next post. Anyway, besides my new full time job and my websites to take care of, I took the free time to sharpen my writing skill. Of course, keep doing the writing is the best way to sharpen writing skill, however I thought I must learn also from other parties who are experts in this area.

So, I decided to join E-zine Articles (the best article submission site from my research through internet), and has now become one of their expert author. Besides publishing my articles, I can also learn how to write good articles from E-zine Articles newsletter. Alice Seba is also my mentor with her Internet Marketing Sweetie. What I like from her is the way she writes her newslattesr, simple, compact but nice to read. I learn a lot not only from her theories, but also from her writing style.

And as theory must always be followed by practice, so I am now writing many articles for my newest website : 1st Asthma Treatment. This is also exciting, as I am trying to write about health subject using a friendly and familiar styles. Hope my readers will both enjoy the reading and get useful information at the same time!

Virtual Business Without Social Media Networking = Dead !

Whether you are an internet marketer, an affiliate business owner or a virtual assistant, social networking is a must! You might said ‘I have worked my social networking by joining my local business associations and participating in meetings and gatherings’. You have done it right, yes, and I’m pretty sure that you have got your clients from those events. But when you are internet/virtual business people, offline social networking activities are not enough. If you want to get more and more clients, you can rely on the social media networking, thank’s to the Web 2.0!

Yes, we are now the generation of Web 2.0, where blogs and social media become the most effective marketing tools for any products. You can start your virtual business by having a website. But if you just stop right there, who will visit your website, while there are millions of other websites out there that offer the same products that you sell? How will you get the audience that will get you your business? Social Media like Wordpress, Facebook, Myspace, Digg are the answer! Because when there are a lot of people with the same interest that related to your product, are connected in one media, you can automatically improve your brand or product awareness.

Compared to offline networking such as meetings and gatherings, social media networking is more simple, as you don’t need to travel or meet and speak with so many people you don’t quite know (for some people – just like me, it’s not comfortable). However, working on social media networking can be time consuming too. Just take look at some of these jobs you have to do :

• Topic research for your blog
  
• Write content for your blog
  
• Submit your blog to many blogs search engines and news sites
  
• Reading and leaving comments on other blogs
  
• Write articles/press releases periodically
  
• Article submission to social news sites
  
• Join conversation in forums or news sites
  
• While at the same time trying to promote your product in a natural way through your blog posts, comments or articles.
  

Whew....so many tasks, and you still have to think and develop the business itself! That’s where the presence of a Virtual Assistant is important for you. You can outsource your social media tasks to a VA that posses the related skill and experience. The VA will do all the daily tasks for you, and will provide a detailed report about it. That way, you can focused your time and mind to your business, while keep reaching your targeted audiences.