A trusted employee can leave. A marketing strategy that’s worked for years can suddenly stop sending you new business.

Whenever things go bad, you have a choice – to be a thermostat or a thermometer. A thermometer reports current conditions – what’s the temperature right now. That’s all it can do.

A thermostat however, controls the temperature. Too hot? Turn the thermostat down. Too cold? Turn it up.

If the economy tanks, your employees leave, your best customer decides to work with someone new don’t just sit and complain about it. Be a thermostat and make changes. Do more marketing, be more creative, try something new.

“When life hands you lemons make lemonade” isn’t just a cliché. It’s a blueprint for how to run your business. You can’t control everything that happens. You can only control what you think, say and do.

So go out and be a thermostat!

Andrea J. Stenberg

I’d love to hear what you think. Please leave a comment.

It’s a simple and free marketing tool that will give you a big boost in Search Engine Optimization (SEO). SEO is one area of online marketing that many small businesses do little about, mainly, I suspect, because they don’t understand it. And while Google+ is growing by leaps and bounds, too many small businesses, local businesses and solopreneurs have not yet jumped on the Google+ bandwagon.

If that sounds like you, it’s time to change that. Go to Google+ today and set up your account now.

Here’s a short video produced by Google about what you need to know about setting up your Google+ profile.

Andrea J. Stenberg

Are you on Google+? Share a link to your profile or a comment about how you’re using it.

I find that the beginning of each quarter is a good time to pause for a moment and look at your goals and results so far this year. Are your goals still relevant or have you made a decision to go in another direction?

If your goals are still relevant, have you been working towards them or did you get distracted by the bright shiny object and forget about your main objectives? I’m convinced the majority of people who start a business are at least border-line ADD and we easily get distracted by something new.

If you found you did get off track, sit down and create a plan for the next 90 days: what are you going to do each week that will get you moving towards your goals. Write them on your calendar.

Too many times we lose track of our major goals because we become over focused on the day to day minutia of our businesses. But if you schedule your major goals on your calendar, you’re more likely to remember to work on them.

Now is also a good time to look at your stats: traffic to your website, incoming links, sign ups for your email newsletter, Facebook page likes, Twitter retweets and whatever metrics are important to your business. In reality, you should be tracking these each week or at least each month. But I know the truth, you’ve probably been neglecting this.

Create a spreadsheet, a chart in Word or even a handwritten note that you post on your bulletin board. Commit to recording them at the very least each quarter. Keeping track of your stats will show you which areas are growing and which are stagnating. Know this will help you tweak your marketing over time.

Since you’re in business, you need to look at the money. Are your sales in line with what you projected for the year? If they are, celebrate. Give yourself a small treat. If they’re not, figure out why that is. Did you neglect to do enough marketing? Did you forget to follow up? Do you need to rethink your offers?

Finally, make note of things that are going well so far. Congratulate yourself for your successes. And make a commitment to keep going in the second quarter of 2012. Let’s make this year the best one yet!

Andrea J. Stenberg

Please leave a comment and share how you track your business and your goals. Tell us where you are so far and what’s coming up in the future.

5 Things you  must do now to get ready for March 30th

If you have a Facebook Page (also known as Fan Pages) for your business, you need to know that Facebook is making changes once again. On March 30^th all Pages will be automatically converted to the new Timeline format.

Many businesses have voluntarily made the switch (check out The Baby Boomer Entrepreneur page). This is good news for you if you haven’t because you can see what others have done and use them as a model for your conversion.

Timeline is much more visual and while it takes some getting used to, I think it holds a number of advantages for businesses. If you get started before March 30^th you can preview your page in Timeline before you publish it. This gives you a chance to make changes and adjustments.

Create & Upload a Cover Photo

First thing you’ll notice is the Cover photo. It is much larger than what was allowed previously. It needs to be 851 pixels wide by 315 pixels tall. And this should be a high resolution photo. This image is large and you want it to be as clear as possible.

One word of caution about the cover photo: you can’t include blatantly promotional copy, contact info or calls to action. For example, you can’t ask people to Like your page in your cover photo. See the official Facebook guidelines here.

Choose a Profile Photo

Your Profile photo, which becomes the thumbnail beside your posts, is 180 x 180. It can be a photo of your, your logo or something else.

Rearrange Your Apps

Under your cover photo at the right are images of four of the apps you’ve applied to your Facebook page. The first one is always Photos and you can’t change that one. You can rearrange which apps appear. Just hover over the app and a pencil icon appears. Click on it and you can swap places with another icon. What might these icons be? A page where you offer a free report, your YouTube videos, events, your blog etc. You can even change the image that shows for each app. Just make sure the image is 111 pixels x 74 pixels.

Edit the Past

Because Timeline allows people to go through your Facebook history much easier than before, you’ll want to edit what you’ve posted. Because this is your page and not your personal profile, I assume you’ve been professional in your posting. However, when you were first learning how to use Facebook for your business, you may have posted things that you’re not so happy about now. Delete them before you publish the Timeline.

Milestones

When you’re using Facebook as your Page, you’ll see a drop down menu appear at the top of the page. Click on the Milestones button to add major events in your business, even if they happened before you started on Facebook.

Include things you might want people to know about your business – your start date, the day you won an award, when you started selling a new product. These will add some interest to your history and act as promotional items for people who want to look through your history.

If you still have questions or want to know more, please join me for a free Webinar I’m hosting on March 27^that 2 p.m. eastern. I’ll walk you through some of these steps as well as showcase some additional features of the new Timeline. Just click here to register.

Welcome to a new feature here at The Baby Boomer Entrepreneur: Motivational Mondays. Since I work from home, I know how important self motivation is. There’s no boss looking over my shoulder to see that I get my work done.

People who start their own businesses tend to be a highly motivated group. That’s why we started a business in the first place; we weren’t content to be following someone else’s agenda. We have goals, dreams or ideas we wanted to pursue and we wanted to pursue them in our own way.

On the other hand, I also know that sometimes motivation can be a challenge. When you work for someone else you get up and go to work because you have to or lose your job. When you work for yourself, you have to find a different way to stay motivated.

That’s what I hope to make Motivational Mondays about: how do entrepreneurs motivate themselves.

This week I asked Kathleen Gage, the Street Smarts Marketer how she stays motivated. Keeping an eye on her goals and the results for her clients is what keeps her going. She says, “What truly motivates me is knowing I am changing lives for the better, one person at a time.”

However, just keeping going day after day isn’t always the answer for business owners. Kathleen adds, “Some days the best thing to do is stay in bed and read a book. To always be going, going, going can be counterproductive. We have become such a “doing” world that often it is best to simply be.”

This is great advice. I know it took me a long time to “allow” myself to have a day where I play hookey and have some fun.

Andrea J. Stenberg

Please leave a comment and share your thoughts on Kathleen’s advice. Or let me know who you would like to hear from in future Mondays.

A bright spot in the book is Hill`s assertion that most people don’t become a success until after 40 or even 50. In fact, he says “For the average person the greatest capacity to create is between 40 and 60”. I suspect that if Hill were alive today he’d expand that upper end.

Why are people not able to achieve before their 40s or 50s? According to Hill, it’s sex. We’re too focused on it in our youth.

At first I laughed at this quaint notion written by a man from another time. But then I started looking more closely. Maybe he’s right. And it’s not just sex, it’s all the things that go along with it. I’ve been married for two decades so dating etc are out of the way. I no longer have a toddler under foot, demanding my attention. When my teenage son comes home from school he can pop a pizza in the oven all by himself; he doesn’t need my help or permission. Maybe Hill wasn’t so crazy after all.

Mark Walton, author of the book Boundless Potential: Transform Your Brain, Unleash Your Talents, and Reinvent Your Work in Midlife and Beyond
agrees with Hill. Walton writes “neuroscience has revealed that we are hard-wired for reinvention through the emergence of extraordinary new creative and intellectual powers in life’s second half”.

For those of us who are starting or building a business in the second half of our lives, this is encouraging news. We may be competing against young people with more energy, but we have the advantage of more knowledge, experience and apparently creativity and intellectual prowess.

As we continue this transition into the knowledge based economy – where are brains not our brawn are what powers the work – age will not be a factor in your ability to do the work.

Employers seem slow to recognize this fact as we can tell from the unemployment numbers for people over 40, as well as anecdotal evidence I’m sure you’ve heard. However, since many of us are turning our backs on the corporate world and becoming Baby Boomer Entrepreneurs, we may find that successful companies will be those that embrace mature workers.

Regardless, I find both these books encouraging. Although I haven’t achieved the level of financial and business success that I want, I know I’m on track. And I have decades ahead of me to continue to expand and grow my business.

What do you think? Please leave a comment and share your thoughts.

Andrea J. Stenberg

Here's why my Cover looks like today

The most noticeable change is the cover photo. This large image is eye-catching. You can change and update it at will.

Here's a great cover - created using an App

For best results, your cover photo should be 720 pixels wide but I’ve been seeing reports that tell us the ideal dimensions should be 850px wide by 315px high. Higher resolution photos are better so the image is clear. The nice thing about the cover photo is it’s easy to change so if you don’t like an image, choose another one.

In addition to the cover, how your posts and uploads appear on your profile page have changed. It looks more like a magazine with more emphasis on images.

If you want to edit your posts, there are a number of ways to do so.

Click on the globe icon just below your name to choose who sees this post – everyone or certain groups of people.

This is where having lists of your Facebook friends can be useful.

For example, when I’m promoting a local event or story, I often change the setting to include only my list of local friends.

By doing this people who can’t participate aren’t inundated with posts that have nothing to do with them.

You can also choose to have only specific people see certain posts. The control is in your hands.

Click on the “pencil” icon in the upper right of the post to edit the post – change dates, add locations or hide it from your timeline.

The “star” icon lets you change the size of a post. If you want to highlight something to visitors, you can make a post become the full width of the page.

The biggest change however is the “Timeline” feature.

Seen on the right-hand side of your profile, it gives clickable links to past posts – going all the way back to when you started Facebook.

Want to see what I did in 2008? Click on that date and you’ll be taken to my posts from that year.

This is what has many people worried.

Until now, it was tedious to search through someone’s Facebook archives to see what they’ve posted in the past. If you said or did something that doesn’t reflect you today, it didn’t matter so much because the odds of anyone bothering to look was slim. Now it’s dead easy for anyone to find your past.

This is why you need to convert to Timeline today. When you convert, you’ll have seven days to go through your past posts and decide what items you want hidden from view.

Other than looking pretty, is there any up-side to the new timeline? Yes! You can add important milestones from your life to your timeline, even if they occurred before you joined Facebook. Your wedding, university graduation, a prestigious award can quickly be added. You can choose to highlight the events that you want. Including a photo with the event will add to the impact.

What should you do now?

First, upgrade to the new Timeline. Add an interesting photo for the cover or choose one from your Facebook photo albums.

Second, start looking through you Facebook history and hide or delete anything that no longer reflects who you are.

Third, add live events you want people to see. Think the date you started your business, important anniversaries, awards you won. Don’t forget to include some personal life events too – things that you don’t mind sharing with the world but show who you are as a person. Include your wedding date, a memorable vacation – use your imagination.

Andrea J. Stenberg

Have you seen some interesting uses of the new Timeline features? Are there tips and tricks you’ve learned? Do you have a question? Please leave a comment and share your thoughts.

An automated DM in Twitter is when you use software to automatically send a direct message to new followers. I was (and still am) against them because everyone knows they’re automated and are often annoying to the receiver. They do nothing to help the receiver get to know, like and trust you better. Getting people to know, like and trust you is your main purpose with marketing.

However, I recently received this automated DM and this is the exception to my no auto-DM rule. Why? Because it made me laugh – which is clearly the goal. It is poking fun at how most people craft these types of messages and instantly made me like the sender a little more. Therefore, it did the job.

What do you think? Leave a comment please.

Andrea J. Stenberg

I know because I’ve done this too – waited for the time/situation to be just perfect before getting started.

But then last week I was reading Prince Charming Isnt Coming
: How Women Get Smart About Money by Barbara Stanny. In this book, Stanny talks about how women often wait for a man to look after their finances for them. There is one particular passage that jumped out at me.

“Please note: “Mr. Right” or “Prince Charming” need not be a man, or even a person. Our prince could be an ideal job, an insurance settlement, the lottery jackpot, or just an amorphous “something” – anything that we fantasize will save us financially. To become genuinely smart with money, we must get to the point where we can say with total conviction, I can do it myself.

This passage really grabbed me by the throat and made me realize that there are a number of projects I’ve had on hold because I didn’t have everything perfect.  I gave myself a long, hard look and realized I’ve been waiting for my business “Prince Charming”. In this case, my Prince isn’t a man either. Here’s what I’ve been waiting on and what I’m doing about it:

Schedule time

I’ve been waiting for more time to finish writing a book and several ebooks. Well, guess what? The free time is never there.  I need to schedule it to make it happen. How did I solve this? I booked several three hour chunks this month. Will it finish all the writing projects I have? No. But it will get me closer to finishing.

Don’t let cash flow stop you

I need some money to implement a couple of my projects and cash flow is tight right now so I’ve been putting them off. Instead of continuing to wait for things to get better, I arranged for some barter with a graphic designer to get one project completed. Then I looked at my accounts receivable and contacted people who owe me money.

Next, I looked out for “low hanging fruit” or ways I can make money quickly to allow me to finance my bigger projects. Finally, I looked for (and found) ways to complete my projects without spending as much money. It won’t be as fancy as I hoped, but it will get to market, which is far better than having a project on the drawing board indefinitely.

Procrastination

There are a couple of things I need to be doing to promote my products and services that I’ve just been putting off. I call it procrastination but really it should be called either perfectionism or fear of success. Either way, I’ve looked it in the eye and started implementation. I’ve created a list and committed to crossing one item off my list each day until it’s done.

If you’re like me, you have some projects that you’ve been putting off until the time is right. I heard a saying: The best time to plant a tree is 10 years ago. The next best time is today.

What are you going to plant today?

Andrea J. Stenberg