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If you are a woman following your dream to create your own business and your own financial independence, you should consider joining the race at Make Mine a Million $ Business.

For the $100 entry fee, you can have access to a number of business advisors, a network of fellow entrepreneurs, events and teleseminars designed to encourage and inspire you. You could even win $100,000. Join the race here.

This is the brain child of Nell Merlino,and Count Me In.

Count Me In for Women’s Economic Independence is the leading national not-for-profit provider of resources, business education, and community for women entrepreneurs.   We believe in you, and we believe in the ability of women entrepreneurs to create jobs for our communities and provide thriving environments for their families and future generations by achieving and surpassing their goals for business growth.  We also believe that to grow your business, you have to grow yourself.  Count Me In is dedicated to providing inspiration, resources, and the community support women entrepreneurs need to scale their businesses to a million dollars in revenue and beyond.

Count Me In was founded by Nell Merlino, the creative force behind the groundbreaking “Take Your Daughters to Work Day” initiative.

Women are growing businesses at a remarkable rate. Small businesses are the key job creation engine in the US economy. Stories abound of women in developing countries taking control of their lives and their children’s lives through entrepreneurship. We can change the future of the world.

If you can help other women reach their goals, consider being a sponsor for Make Mine a Million $ Business. Other ways to make a difference are through micro lending with KIVA, and donations to foundations like SEVA and Heifer International. Women empowered will change the future for us all.

Filed under: Empowerment, Women | Add Comment →

Managing your contacts, customers, sales force and pipeline are an important piece of any business, online or offline. The choices are overwhelming, the costs are high and the learning curve off-putting. Now there is a good alternative for the solo-prenuer who wants a CRM (customer relationship management) system with some SFA (sales force automation.) Take a look at Tactile.

If you are just starting out and want a web-based tool to use with your VA, there is a free version allowing two users and 250 contacts. It grows from there. I plan to test it out. I would love to hear your experiences if you give it a shot.

I am a big proponent of Freshbooks for online invoicing and Tactile and Freshbooks work together.

Here’s what they have to say about their service:

Easy Contact Management

Tactile CRM lets you easily record every email, telephone call, note, activity and meeting, so that you and your colleagues can quickly see every interaction.

Tactile CRM also lets you:

• Easily search contacts – organisations, people and recently viewed
• Set up activities to remind you of outstanding actions against each organisation, such as calling them back.
• Assign organisations and activities to other users with optional email notification.
• Share information on clients and contacts with others in your organisation by using our simple access control, or let everybody see everything.
• Categorise your contacts by status, source, classification, rating, industry
• Import and Export data from csv files, vCards, Google, Microsoft Outlook and more
• Download into Excel at the click of a button.
• Create mailing lists to send mail-merged letters or emails using the powerful tagging system.
• Work with the email client of your choice with its easy-to-use email integration – including Outlook, Mail.app and GMail.

Remember Tactile CRM is an easy to use CRM sales tool that means even occasional users can get up and running without training on this simple web CRM.

The only downside I see so far, once you move to a paid account, is you’ll have to figure out the conversion from pounds to dollars. To do so, go here.

Filed under: Productivity | 1 Comment →

A year or so ago I heard about a service from google called Grand Central. A number of my clients used it. But when I looked – it was closed. Google was beta testing the service which they have now renamed Google Voice and have invited their Grand Central clients to start using.

“Google Voice Basics: About Google Voice

Google Voice gives you one number for all your phones — a phone number that is tied to you, not to a device or a location. Use Google Voice to simplify the way you use phones, make using voicemail as easy as email, customize your callers’ experience, and more.

Google Voice isn’t a phone service, but it lets you manage all of your phones. Google Voice works with mobile phones, desk phones, work phones, and VoIP lines. There’s nothing to download, upload, or install, and you don’t have to make or take calls using a computer.

Google Voice will let you define which phones ring, based on who’s calling, and even let you ListenIn^TM on voicemail before answering the call. We use smart technology to route your calls. So, if you’re already on a Google Voice call, we’ll recognize it and use call waiting to reach you on the phone you’re on.

Note: At this time Google Voice is only available in the U.S.”

As a virtual assistant, I like to be available to my clients no matter where I am and I have been using RingCentral with moderate pleasure. I can’t wait to give Google Voice a try and see if it will serve me better.

The exciting news is that the service will soon be available to all of us. You might want to get on the list so you know when it is released.

Filed under: Productivity, iPhone | Add Comment →

I have been using Evernote for a while now. If you haven’t tried it, you really should take a look. You can use it on your desktop and your iPhone. Their moto: Capture. Sync. Find.

Evernote lets you capture just about anything, a web clip, a photo, a business card, a napkin doodle and save it, sort it and even read it.

You can watch a video here: A Quick Introduction to Evernote

One of the problems I have found is getting close enough to get all the details. Griffin Technology has solved that with it’s new Clarifi case for the iPhone.You can see the difference here. This is a must have.

Filed under: Mac Tools, Uncategorized, iPhone | Add Comment →

I’m giving a little talk to a community college class on entrepreneurship and I created a Keynote (Mac speak for PowerPoint) and needed to time my talk. I discovered a cool new app for the iPhone (I love my iPhone) called iTalk from Griffin Technologies. There is a free version or a premium version, without advertising, is available for $4.99. There is also a free download that allows you to sync the recording to your computer. I can think of a million ways to use this. Best of all – when I have great inspirations in the middle of the night, I can record them before I forget them.

The bad news is my talk is twice as long as it should be. Time to chop it down.

I am planning on recording as I talk through my presentation and figure out how to combine the two and put it up on my website. When I figure it out, I’ll let you know.

Filed under: Mac Tools, Productivity, iPhone | 1 Comment →