Archive for October 2007
Mom Creates Dolls As An Example For Her Daughter
The Californian: Bratz are everywhere. Yet Kristi Necochea has no plans to buy her 5-year-old daughter one of the dolls popular among girls for their funky clothes, but decried by some parents for their short skirts and heavily made-up faces. Now, the Temecula mother of three has an alternative: her own dolls. This month Necochea, [...]
Moms-for-Profit Taps Two Executive Publishing Hounds And Prepares for Growth
PR Web: Moms-for-Profit, the continually growing mom empire that leverages their mom consultant base against their mompreneur clients, today announced an expansion of its executive team filling two important positions. The two positions are: Chief Marketing Officer, Joni Silverstein and Publisher of Hybrid Mom magazine, Meryl Otis Kessler. Both are well established professionals who will [...]
Salinas Californian: Two Salinas-area moms have found a fresh way to cover unsightly flesh exposed by low-rise jeans. Combining the powers of innovative thinking and the Internet, best friends Christine Meeks and Kelley DeSerpa have launched the hip-T, an article of clothing designed to counteract rear-end exposure. Akin to a tube top in design, the [...]
USA Today: Jerry Alonzy figured he’d be working into his 70s at least. As an independent handyman at the mercy of weather patterns near Hartford, Conn., he’d always made a decent income that rarely grew. Then he found Google and his life changed. Alonzy, 57, now makes $120,000 a year from the ads Google places [...]
Retirement Accounts For The Self Employed
WorkHappy: In addition to the faithful ROTH and Traditional IRAs, here’s a nice overview of various other retirement options: Simplified Employee Pension IRA (SEP-IRA) You qualify if you do a Schedule C or F or guaranteed payments from a partnership. The Solo 401K You qualify only if you have no employees. The Simple IRA This [...]
Halloween Sales Get Bigger Each Year
Savannah Morning News: Although many think of Christmas when the term “holiday shopping” comes to mind, the National Retail Federation projects that total Halloween spending will reach $5.07 billion this year. The average American consumer is expected to spend $23.33 on Halloween costumes, including outfits for adults, children and pets. But the tale of the [...]
22 Year Old “Flips” Costume Website
While other 22 year old college students are swimming in debt and working minimum wage jobs, Matthew Peschong is running his own web design company and flipping websites on the side. This Minnesota State University Marketing major has recently taken a $350 costume website and turned it into a $2,000 a day venture. While others [...]
Fastest Way to Find New Customers
Entrepreneur: If you’re a startup, the fastest way to get the cash registers ringing is a little-used method that involves forming “host-beneficiary” relationships with established businesses that cater to a target audience similar to yours. Then you promote yourself to their database with a special offer presented as a gift from the older business. The [...]
Blogging Stocks: Back in the 1990s, Google Inc.’s cofounders — Larry Page and Sergey Brin — played to their own drummer. Instead of taking gobs of venture capital, the dynamic duo did it on the cheap by themselves. For example, they built a sophisticated server platform using old PCs and free Linux software. And, when [...]
Holiday Gift Giveaways At Mama's Musings Blog
eMediaWire: Santa Claus is coming to the blogosphere this holiday season. Expat writer and mom blogger Christine Louise Hohlbaum is hosting a Mama’s Musings Holiday Giveaway every Tuesday and Friday until Christmas. Sponsors such as ESPN, Scholastic, Schoolzone and DaBib will be giving away fabulous family-friendly prizes twice a week. From books to DVDs to [...]
Idaho Entrepreneur, Lisa Manyon, Appointed To National Advisory Board For Mompreneurs
eMediaWire: According to the organization Moms Making Money, 80 percent of work-at-home moms fail at their business within 6 months of start up. With statistics like that mompreneurs need solid and practical business advice to help them succeed. That’s exactly why Moms Making Money is in existence and why advisory board members from across the [...]
Entrepreneur’s Guide to Second Life
CNET News: One of the things Daniel Terdiman has been doing for the last seven months is working on a book, and it was published on Monday. The title is The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Second Life: Making Money in the Metaverse, and, as the title implies, it’s a guide to planning, building and maintaining a [...]
Women Entrepreneurs Flex Their Muscles
SeacoastOnline: Women own nearly half of the privately held businesses in the United States, says the Center for Women’s Business Research. That translates to more than 10.5 million businesses that generate more than $2.5 trillion, the center reports. For many women — particularly moms — the flexibility that comes with owning their own business is [...]
Inventor’s Board Game Pays Off
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution: Wendy Hampton hasn’t quit her day job. Yet. Her first royalty check hasn’t yet arrived yet, either. It’s for a board game the Lawrenceville inventor created. A national inventor talent search discovered Hampton and her board game, Befudiom, in 2005. Since then, the public television series “Everyday Edisons” has turned her idea [...]
Mary Paulsell At The Columbia Tribune: Someone asked me the other day what makes entrepreneurs different from other people. I think it’s in how they see the world. Where most of us might see a challenge or a problem, entrepreneurs see an opportunity. And when most of us might assume the current way of doing [...]
positivityblog: Lee Iacocca said, “You can have brilliant ideas, but if you can’t get them across, your ideas won’t get you anywhere”. One of the trickier things about social skills is to get your message across. One reason why people have difficulty with this is because they use more words than needed. 1. Clarity. Obviously. [...]
Mom Creates Scrapbooking Alternative
Inside Bay Area: As a self-proclaimed “victim” of traditional scrapbooking, Cathy Bennett knew there had to be an online alternative that would provide the classy look she was going for in a baby book. Dissatisfied with mainstream photo Web sites, Bennett took matters into her own hands. Bennett, who lives on the Walnut Creek-Alamo border, [...]
InRich.com: The best inventions often spring from real life. So when life handed Kim Newlen breast cancer, the infectiously upbeat founder of the monthly Sweet Monday ministry drew on her cancer experience to help other survivors look better than they feel. The former teacher’s pretty, yet practical, post-surgical camisole for mastectomy, lumpectomy and reconstruction patients [...]
Mom Of A Special Needs Child Publishes First Book – A Birth Journal
eMediaWire: Author Marla J. Murasko has published her first book on Lulu.com. The book is a journal of her son Jacob’s journey from birth through the first six months of his life. It will take you on a faith-filled journey of when the couple was told that their precious baby has Down Syndrome and a [...]
100 Ways To Brew Up a Great Idea
Marketing Profs Daily Fix: 10. Alphabetize your refrigeratables. 9. Find a new word in the dictionary. 8. Think like a child. 7. Take Spot for a walk. 6. Write out the problem with your opposite hand. 5. Doodle. 4. Go for a drive with the windows open. 3. Think about it before you go to [...]
Forbes: Cory Doctorow: “I’ve been giving away my books ever since my first novel came out, and boy has it ever made me a bunch of money. When my first novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, was published by Tor Books in January 2003, I also put the entire electronic text of the [...]
KENS 5 Eyewitness News: In the tiny town of Troy, an eight-grader came up with a big idea. “One day I saw my sister putting her shoes on the wrong foot, so I decided to invent something,” Joel Williams said. Williams, 13, was only 9 at the time. But after turning his parent’s garage into [...]
Fortune Small Business Magazine: Q: My friend and I are getting a small online T-shirt business off the ground. We plan to sell our products on eBay and advertise by wearing our products and passing out business cards and fliers. Can you offer any other suggestions? Verne Harnish, CEO, Gazelles, Ashburn, Va. answers: As Seth [...]
Small Firms Driving Job Growth
Inc.: Small businesses have employed more than half of the nation’s non-farm private-sector workforce in recent years, according to updated data from the Small Business Administration’s Office of Advocacy. In 2004, the latest year studied, small employers added nearly two million net new jobs to the U.S. economy, the data shows. “Small businesses are America’s [...]
Bizymoms.com Launches New Section For Mom Entrepreneurs
PowerHomeBiz.com: Bizymoms.com knows firsthand how hard it can be to get a home business off the ground. After all, they are all home business owners themselves. Everyone at Bizymoms believes that all a woman needs to make her home business dream a reality is determination, motivation and a strong cheering section. This is why, over [...]
Business 2.0 Magazine: Some people can’t stop thinking about food. Bill Gross can’t stop thinking about new businesses. One of the world’s great serial entrepreneurs, he’s launched more than 50 startups through Idealab, his incubator in Pasadena, Calif. His track record includes both winners (CitySearch, Cooking.com, NetZero/United Online) and losers (eToys, Eve.com, Free-PC). But he’s [...]
Niche Biz: Freeze-Dried Burials
Springwise: The pharaohs built pyramids to help protect their mummified remains for millennia. But these days an opposite trend has taken hold: low-impact burials that enable a body to naturally revert back to the soil as quickly as possible. In the UK, for example, well over 100 special cemeteries permit the burial of the deceased [...]
User Generated Content Doesn’t Work For Everyone
ReadWriteWeb: Denver, Colorado-based ManiaTV was launched in 2004 as a video destination based around quality, professionally produced content. When YouTube exploded onto the scene, though, ManiaTV tried to jump on the bandwagon by launching over 3000 channels of user generated content (UGC). Curiously, however, even while YouTube thrived and eventually grew to a $1.65 billion [...]
Money Magazine: Being your own boss has a lot of advantages, but making the transition from the traditional corporate world takes work. Give yourself financial padding Most people need to set aside a year’s worth of income before they cut themselves loose. You’ll know within eight months whether you’re developing a sustainable business. To boost [...]
BusinessWeek: Advanta Bank’s Ideablob.com invites visitors to submit their business ideas for feedback and enter a monthly contest to win $10,000. Prepacked lunch boxes is one of the most popular recent ideas. Two others: a real estate Web site “that finally rids the world of real estate brokers” and a Web site to search for [...]
Baby Swags Entertainment Marketing Celebrates Its First Anniversary
eMediaWire: One year ago, September 9, 2006 while sitting in an oversized chair watching a Hollywood Baby Boom special, entrepreneur mom of three, Phyllis Pometta thought about her own marketing experiences and how she could utilize her talents and her marketing degree to work for others. It was in an instant that the name “Baby [...]
Bringing 100% User Generated Content And Social Media To Moms
PR-Inside.com: Modern Mom Media Corporation, a distinctive lifestyle magazine publisher for moms, today announced that it will launch its magazine and website for Loudoun County. The new publication, Modern Mom Magazine, is the only lifestyle magazine that connects moms to the community with 100% reader generated content that reaches over 20,000 moms in the local [...]
OrlandoSentinel.com: Working mom Michelle Stevens, 37, didn’t have time for play dates with her two sons and was searching for another way to connect with mothers in Central Florida. “I came up with an idea of doing an Internet radio show because I had looked at radio shows but it was expensive and I couldn’t [...]
LA Times: G.T. Dave’s company began in his mother’s kitchen. His family had been drinking kombucha, a little known Asian elixir, for years believing it increased energy and cleansed the body of harmful toxins. Convinced the sweetened tea had helped his mother beat back advanced breast cancer, Dave thought he could sell the drink, which [...]
New Ways to Think About Selling
The New York Times: Want to sell more? The best advice may be to talk less. The biggest mistake in selling is thinking that “if you just get the chance to ‘make your case’ — your prospect will be compelled to buy,” says Lenann McGookey Gardner, president of YouCanSell.com, a marketing consult in Albuquerque. “Selling [...]
Niche Biz: Painting Grass Green
TreeHugger.com: A new kind of lawn service has emerged in response to the water drought in the US Southeast. Always Green Grass Painting in South Carolina paints the lawns of homes and businesses for $250-$700. The paint is non-toxic, environmentally friendly and depending upon traffic can last up to 90 days. John Imand’s business is [...]
BusinessWeek: Fewer than 3% of businesses owned by women hit the $1 million annual sales level, while twice that percentage of men hit $1 million. “That astounding statistic…drove me to write this book,” writes Susan Wilson Solovic in the introduction to The Girls’ Guide to Building a Million-Dollar Business. Why the discrepancy? One problem is [...]
Need A Tax Break? Fund A Start-Up Idea
Inc.: A network of Oregon public universities is hoping to tap a new pipeline for entrepreneurial funding through a program that rewards donors with considerable tax breaks. A 60 percent tax credit is available to Oregon taxpayers who contribute to the newly formed University Venture Development Fund, designed to help the state’s eight public universities [...]
Single Mom Announces Massage Franchise Now Open in Costa Rica
PR Web: Michele Merhib, occupational therapist registered (OTR) and certified massage therapist (CMT), is the founder of an International franchise selling over 50 locations in the U.S. This single mom of two teenagers has reached a level of success most only dream about, after recently announcing the opening of her first therapeutic massage franchise in [...]
Entrepreneur Mom Helps Home Business Owners Tap Into The Food Industry With PLR Content
PowerHomeBiz: Internet Marketer Wendy Wood recently launched the first ever, private label rights content membership site http://www.plrfoodcontent.com created specifically for business owners targeting the food industry. “As an online marketer I’m always on the lookout for quality PLR content for various projects that I am working on,” says Wendy. “And it was through research that [...]
TrendHunter: A growing number of people now work from home. Jelly is a business model that sets up collaborative work spaces for those not working in traditional work spaces, yet still craving social interaction. Sure you could work from a local cafe, like Starbucks, which offers wireless internet connection, but those americanos add up fast, [...]
Small Business Ownership Fun, But Long Hours
KMBC.com: According to a new poll, one of the biggest ways for Canadians to find satisfaction in their work is to open a small business. The Ipsos Reid Study, which polled 900 Canadian small business owners on behalf of HP Canada with the results reviewed by the Canadian Federation of Independent Business (CFIB), found that [...]
Washington Post: The following is adapted from a blog posting by Seth Goldman, co-founder of Honest Tea, a Bethesda beverage company specializing in organic and socially minded products. I have come to realize that my years as a Red Sox fan have shaped me as an entrepreneur. Like any good Red Sox fan, I have [...]
Emerging Qualities of Leadership?
BusinessWeek: In a recent book, Apples Are Square (Kaplan Publishing; July, 2007), the “control and compete” approach of many entrepreneurs is replaced by a softer set of leadership qualities: service, humility, compassion, transparency, and inclusiveness, among other traits. Authors Susan Smith Kuczmarski and Thomas D. Kuczmarski gain credibility by virtue of having interviewed leaders ranging [...]
Springwise: As the season of gift giving draws ever nearer, so too does the Herculean challenge of penning countless holiday cards, letters and notes to family, friends and colleagues near and far. Pre.vu is offering a digital-age alternative that could make such tasks a little easier by allowing consumers to record a personalised message onto [...]
Bumper Signs Makes Driving Easier For New Drivers
The Bay City Times: They say necessity is the mother of invention, so the mom of a heckled teen driver figured out a way to get other motorists off her daughter’s back. Julia Compton founded JC Enterprises New Driver Signs, a company the sells green and black banners for parents of young drivers to place [...]
The Geelong Advertiser: Mother, author and businesswoman Sonia Williams believes home-based businesses run by women represent “the coming of a new age”. The creator of Show Mummy the Money, which Williams published herself, and the new book Raising a Business is at the forefront of a new wave of parents looking to capitalise on niche [...]
Mom Blog Network Launches Website To Promote The Fast-Growing Niche Of Blogging Moms
PR Web: Mom Blog Network™ proudly unveils the world’s first site developed exclusively to unite and showcase the growing category of influential mom bloggers and their audiences worldwide. Much more than just a directory, the site connects readers and bloggers who might otherwise not find each other, and provides the venue for active participation. Mom [...]
Business Wire: Earning an MBA may not be an option for all potential mompreneurs, so the Small Business division at Capital One Financial Corporation, and Victoria Pericon, founder of www.savvymommy.com – an award-winning online resource for mothers, have joined forces to provide mompreneurs-to-be with tips on entrepreneurship in hopes of establishing the next best thing: [...]
Hidden Business Ideas This Week
Starting this week, we’re going to feature each new issue of the Dien Rice’s The Hidden Business Ideas Letter. The Hidden Business Ideas Letter is all about little-known, unusual, profitable businesses that people are running right now. Most of the business ideas you’ll see here are also low-cost to start. In this week’s issue, you’ll [...]
