Business: Cute Beltz, a line of belts and accessories for children 12 months to 6 years young.

Motivation: No existing product was available. “I could never find a belt for my two-year old. My sister had the same issue while shopping for her son. The items I did find were a nuisance as I had to add notches in the belt or use safety pins, which are dangerous for kids,” says designer and founder, Kristen Ford-Stevens.

Outcome:  CuteBeltz was founded and thriving online in a matter of months. “The response I’ve received from parents has been an ecstatic sigh of relief. They are witnessing their child’s self confidence heighten each time they put on Cute Beltz,” says Ford-Stevens.

Business:

Motivation: A need for privacy. “One day my four-year-old daughter came to me with an intimate item that I thought was hidden quite well in my nightstand.  At that point I realized that I truly needed some discreet storage so I began looking online for something I could keep on my nightstand or dresser.  Everything I found had a padlock or required a small key for access, and in that fruitless search, my idea for ToiBocks was born,” says Dawn Tulman, President of ToiBocks.

Outcome: Sales of Toibocks continue to increase and their fan base grows daily. They encourage their Facebook friends to answer the question: “What do you store in your ToiBock?” which brings out a few interesting responses.

• Learn some stealth moves. If you decide to leave the room during the call, make sure it’s during a time when no one will notice. When you’re the next one on the agenda, it’ll be fairly obvious to everyone on the call that you’ve left your computer.

• Don’t post messages on Facebook during the call. When co-workers have access to your Facebook account, they’ll know whether you’re spending more time on your wall than on the call. They may even point it out to everyone during the call, as in “Did you just post something on your wall?” which can be a bit embarrassing.

• If you have a dog, put him outside, send him to a neighbor’s house or give him a Kong filled with peanut butter to keep him busy and quiet. No one wants to talk over a barking dog, especially when the dog barks as loud as mine.

• When you’re waiting for everyone to connect to the online call, make sure others can’t hear you talking on your cell phone. Maybe I’m being picky but I don’t want to hear about what you’re wearing or what you want your spouse to wear (or in some cases not wear) later that evening. Some icky things you hear, just can’t be erased from your mind.

The final thing I learned during the call is that I like audio chats better than video chats. The best part is that I can sit at my desk in jeans and a t-shirt (makeup optional) while I know that the corporate execs on the other end of the line are dressed for work. When you work from home, every day is Casual Friday!

Guest Post by Wendy Sullivan

Podcasting isn’t terribly different from blogging. One of the top touted ways of drawing traffic to your blog is to guest post on other people’s sites. I’ve found, in my experience, that inviting guests to be on your podcast really draws the traffic.

According to a study posted on Podcasting News (which you should be reading!), half the Internet radio audience is listening to podcasts, as opposed to streaming radio.

When I began my podcast back on May 18, 2008, it was small. My blog was a small-medium political site, with about 800 daily readers, many of whom were happy to tune into my little voice experiment. The first four weeks of Brass Balls Radio – now off the air – brought a couple thousand listeners, thanks to friends linking to us on their own blogs.

For my fourth show, I screwed up all my courage and invited author and columnist Mark Steyn to join me. At the time of recording, he had just walked out of a court in Vancouver after fighting a human rights complaint over an excerpt of his book, America Alone. Mark was very much in the news in both Canada and the United States during this time, and scoring him for my now-defunct show Brass Balls Radio was quite a coup.

In addition to merely appearing on the show, he also linked to his episode on his own website. That brought me not hundreds or even thousands of listeners – it brought almost 20,000! Not all of them subscribed, but thousands tuned in week after week to listen to the musings of me and my co-host Mike Williams.

It was time to leverage this information to draw in ever more listeners each week. We used different methods:

• Facebook fan pages
• Twitter
• Interviewing other bloggers in our niche and receiving links from them
• Sending out thank you mugs for special guest-hosts

All of these things resulted in more links back to Brass Balls Radio. Someone appeared on our show, they’d mention us on their website. If they received a personalized mug, they posted a picture of it and linked back to us. People not only wanted to listen to the show, the petitioned us to be on it, too. Traffic grew.

One of the most important things we did was to register our site feed with iTunes. Apple owns the podcasting world, and we just live in it. Ergo, making sure our listeners could get our show on their iPods without a lot of effort was really important. You can learn about sending your podcast feed to iTunes here.

So how do you get great guests to entertain and educate your podcast listeners? You ask them! It’s as simple as that, really. Your momma told you that “if you don’t ask, you don’t get.” Very wise advice. Whether you want a high ranking politician, a famous author or a tenured expert on ecology, you have to keep in mind that they are all human beings trying to promote their own product/idea. In the case of Mark Steyn, he was not only kind enough to appear often as a guest, but also agreed to guest-host for our 1st anniversary show. Rush Limbaugh pays him much more than a personalized coffee mug to do the same, I assure you! Obviously I had to approach him first, and this took confidence and more than a little chutzpah.

Don’t be afraid of people just because they are “experts” or are more successful than you. Most of them will be friendly and outgoing, happy to talk about their ideas on your show. I think that out of all the guests I invited, only one ever turned me down – Lord Conrad Black’s wife, and only because Lord Black was about to head back into court in Chicago.

If you build it – and have the confidence to ask – they will come.

Wendy Sullivan is a freelance writer and journalist based in Toronto, where she lives with her muse – an 8 lb chihuahua named Bug. Check Wendy out at Girl on the Write.

A good way to increase profits, reduce risk and broaden your market is by joining forces with a competitor. Maybe not all of the time, but a project or two may be a good way for both of you to grow your businesses and to see if a long-term association is worthwhile. If you have multiple businesses, the joint venture may be just one of those businesses, and the others you continue to run on your own. There are a few ways to work with your competitor.

• Be creative. For example, if you’re both life coaches, you can offer more seminars in more places for mutual benefit.

• Create a shared company name to help you brand your services.

• Make sure the venture is on an equal footing. It’s probably a good idea to get a legal agreement that clarifies exactly what is shared, who is boss, and other details. A legal document gives you the way in and the way out, if you need to end the venture.

• Create a business plan for the venture. The plan should detail what the goals are and how you’re going to reach them together. You can’t work at cross-purposes if you want to succeed.

Of course, the most important factor in a joint venture is trust. Without mutual trust and openness what could have been a successful venture (the usual result of a joint venture is success) will fall flat on its face.

Lucinda Cross, known as the Business Midwife, is the author and speaker of Corporate Mom DropOuts. The company provides signature online and offline educational marketing strategies and mentoring for mom entrepreneurs. For more information, visit her Web site to receive the Free Business Mom Toolkit.

Unlike Duff Goldman and the Charm City Cakes team of friends I described in another post, not every business works when you hire friends.  Before you hire a friend to join your business team, consider these comments from business owners who no longer hire friends.

When I started my home-based business, I hired friends to help me. Doing this was a huge mistake. You do not get the quality of work or respect from friends that you do from hiring previously unknown employees or contractors to work for you. It is very difficult to work with a friend when there is now a boss/employee relationship. I had to fire my friends who worked with me due to poor performance. This of course led to me losing my friendship with those people.

—Peter Geisheker, CEO, The Geisheker Group Marketing Firm

I have learned that friendship has little to do with whether someone is a good employee. Regardless of being friends, someone either has what it takes to be successful in their role or not. I have been sued by a friend that worked with me and I have established a long-term, trusting work partnership with another. I have hired one friend into a role where they were highly successful and another into the same role that failed. Being friends had little to do with their success or failure.

—Randy Mitchelson, Owner, National Web Leads, LLC

Several of my friends are in the PR business, as am I. Having seen some of their work and work habits, I would not hire my friends. In one case, the writing skills are less than optimal. In another, the attention to detail is so meticulous, deadlines may be missed.

—Reese A. Nank, APR, Reputations PR and Marketing

The decision of whether or not to hire friends may boil down to a choice between your business and your friendship.  Would you hire a friend to work for you?

• Make sure the name on your ticket matches the name on your ID. During my last trip I didn’t realize until I was already at the ticket counter that the name on my ticket didn’t match my driver’s license. My client had booked the flight for me and confirmed the itinerary with me, but I forgot to mention that Lisa is my nickname, not my legal name. After providing everything but a blood sample, security let me board the plane.

• Remember where you park your car. Normally I use The Parking Spot so I can avoid paying more than $20 a day to park. When I was on the bus from the airport to The Parking Spot after another trip, I found two tickets that listed my parking space. I didn’t know which ticket was from a prior trip and which was from the current trip.  After walking through half of the parking lot looking for my car, I won’t be making that mistake again.

• Wear shoes that are easy to slip on and off. Boots with long zippers and cute, strappy sandals aren’t ideal for flying. You’ll look fabulous while your travel but you’ll curse your shoes while everyone behind you in line waits for you to take them off.  A better option is to wear slip-ons and it’s even better if you remember to take them off. Trust me, when the gate agent points at your shoes and shakes her head, you’ll remember to take them off.

Related article: Tips for making traveling tolerable

Guest post by Becky Powell

Social media is just another tool in your box of tactics, but leaving your digital footprint requires a thought-out strategy.

Think Smarter Not Harder. Now, most journalists have their own blogs, Twitter and Facebook, so you may reach exponentially larger audiences, all from sending to one contact. And remember many communication tools are multi-purpose – embed links, photos and videos that direct readers to your web site, Facebook, Twitter and more.

Find Your Audience. Start with your key online news contacts and find influencers through blogs they prefer or followers interested in the same subject. The goal is to not reach out to everyone, but to find your niche hubs.

Strategy. Make it easy to engage your audience by integrating all communication efforts and maintaining a consistent message across communication channels. Keep it real and conversational.

Execution. Flickr, YouTube and other multimedia sites, are some of the easiest ways to reach large audiences and increase traction. Utilize “tag words” to optimize for search engines and encourage reposting by bloggers. Online events and webinars are cost-effective ways to showcase leadership, expertise and personality.

Engagement. No one wants to be a part of a one-sided conversation. Make it a point to respond to comments and messages.

Measurement. At the end of the day, it’s all about results. Agree upon achievable objectives before you begin the campaign. Key performance indicators to consider include: sales leads, sales conversions, market share, sentiment and comments. There are several online tools to help you monitor your success. Here are some of our favorites: Viral Heat, Klout, & Twitalyzer.

Becky Powell is president of The Powell Group, a public relations firm that has built a reputation for creative thinking and sound strategy that delivers valuable results to their clients.

One day I realized that my drive to succeed was creating one unhappy employee: me.  That’s the day I made a few changes.  Consider these tips for making it easier to work for you, the boss.

Take time for lunch. Whether you take 15 or 30 minutes, leave your home office and eat lunch. Time away from your computer and your home office can be a welcome break.

Set a specific quitting time every day and try to stick to it. During my “boss from hell” days, quitting time was 6 pm every day (including weekends!) and then I went back to my home office after dinner to work a few more hours. Now (most of the time) quitting time is late afternoon and I don’t go back into my home office until the next morning.

Take off one afternoon a week. Go to a movie, spend time with your spouse or make plans with a friend.  If possible, shut the door to your home office and don’t go back until the next morning.

Give yourself extra padding for deadlines.  Projects usually take twice as long as you think they will. Add as much time as you can to any deadline, without annoying your client.  When you finish earlier than expected, your client will be grateful, thrilled and may even do the happy dance.

Stop answering your phone after normal business hours. If you babysit your phone (many of us do), it’s hard to ignore an incoming call from a client after hours. Unless you know your client can’t wait until the next day to talk with you, take the call.  Otherwise you’ll train your clients to call you 24/7 and you can say goodbye to your personal life.

My changes have paid off. I’m more productive, more excited about working every day and best of all, I like my boss.

For some people, fear is a motivator.  For others it’s the first step to feeling discouraged. While being motivated is a good thing, being paralyzed with fear and weighted with worry can dampen your spirits and possibly keep you from growing your business.

You can’t get rid of all of your fears but there are a few ways to tame them.

• Don’t quit your day job. Lately I’ve been reading about business owners I thought were doing well but it turns out that they work full time during the day and work on their business at night. When they make enough money, they’re going to quit their job and focus on their business full time.

• Go for the low-hanging fruit. If you left a corporate job to work from home, turn to your old employer as your first client. The company won’t have to train you, pay your health insurance and give you two weeks off each year. If you left your last job on bad terms, skip to the next tip.

• Use skills not related to your business to make money. If you’re handy with a hammer, have an eye for design, or can landscape like nobody’s business, get to work. There’s nothing wrong with taking odd jobs to supplement your income or in some cases to serve as income until your business takes off.

Like Goldman, other folks have been successful when they add friends to their business team. If you’re still not sure whether or not you should hire friends, consider these reasons business owners look no further than a friend to launch or run their business.

Six years ago I hired one of my closest friends as my virtual assistant. While we were both concerned that our working relationship could ultimately hurt our personal relationship, we decided to give it a try. Because she is self-motivated, professional and a complete perfectionist, our relationship couldn’t be better. I’ve even found that she has strengths in business where I don’t and I’ve come to depend on her more and more over the years.

—Debra M. Cohen, Home Remedies of NY®, Inc.

Friends can make good employees because they know how you operate. My advice that I would give to those thinking about hiring friends would be:
1) to treat them as you would any other employee
2) make sure it is clear what you would like them to do and when
3) make sure they understand this is business and not an extension of having coffee together
4) understand that you are hiring an employee and not just “trying to help a friend out” or to have a friend “help them out.”

—Lisa Gehrke, With You in Mind

You already know whether their core values match yours and the company’s. A good friend is comfortable telling you when you’re being an idiot, which leads to better decision-making. Make sure you know their behavior in a work context and make sure you enjoy an open/honest relationship.

—Bill Dwight, FamZoo

I’ve had a wonderful experience hiring friends–though of course you have to pick the right friends! After being told three times in a row while I was pitching a book, “this is a good idea but you need a doctor to cowrite it,” I asked my friend, Rallie McAllister, MD, MPH, if she’d like to join forces with me. I think more than ever, it’s critical not only to choose to work with people who do a great job–but who you also enjoy working with. I’m inviting these people into my home!

—Jennifer Bright Reich, Momosa Publishing LLC