I just read a post by Rhea Perry over at the Internet Based Moms Expert blogs and I couldn’t agree more. Rhea’s family not only get involved in business from a young age but they’ve also learned to diversify into several different areas.

I think this is very important. I personally don’t ever feel comfortable putting all my eggs in one basket. I’ve just started to look into real estate investing and this is something I’m hoping to accomplish in the near future.

I’m hoping to be running the London Marathon in April 2008. I’ll find out in late or early November… but anyways, since signing up I’ve received letters from like 10 different charities asking me to run in support of them.

I’ve had a hard time decising between them all because really how do you say yes to one cause and no to the other, when they all need help… know what I mean?

But today I got a letter from the Children with Leukemia foundation that really stood out. All the letters I’ve received from other charities have just said run for our team, help a good cause, blah, blah but this letter was different. Here’s a small excerpt:

A few days ago I was reading Dan Kennedy’s newsletter and he mentioned that ugly and clumsy websites almost always outperform sleek and pretty ones (he’s tested this many times).

This would explain why people like Matt Furey, who sells millions of dollars of products online, have such so-so sites. In fact, Matt’s just had his site revaamped — it was actually uglier before.

And take a look at Dan’s own website, it’s certainly not flashy or sleek. Dan and Matt can easily afford to pay something to build them any kind of website they want… yet they deliberately keep their sites shall we say “home-made.” You get a sense that there’s a real person behind the site rather than some cold and perfect entity.

As you probably already know Harlan Kilstein is an awesome copywriter and just so happens to be my mentor… I’ve learned so much from him in just a few short months and I look forward to growing and learning even more in the future.

Now this Saturday Harlan is hitting the big Five-O and has a special free gift for you….

A no strings attached, free teleseminar on making money as a copywriter.

Harlan’s already said that nothing, zero, zilch will be pitched or sold on the call… just amazing information I guarantee you won’t want to miss. I pay a lot of money every month to coach and train with Harlan so consider this call very valuable.

Lynette Chandler of TechBasedMarketing.com asked me this question a few days ago:

How do you suggest to create a good experience online since most of it is hands off? I’ve always tried my best to make things straight forward and simple… what else? Would love to pick your brains on this

I’ve been in the service industry a long time and have strong thoughts on how to deal with customers.

If you’re selling products and don’t have direct one to one dealings with the customer there are a few fundamental things you should be doing….

We just got back from a week trip to the Lake District and had a great time. It felt good being out in the fresh air and away from work… of course, I still had my permanent marketing hat on picked up a few lessons along the way.

Marketing Lesson One:

We stayed in a lovely Bed and Breakfast run by a really nice family. They do it all - They make the breakfast for all the guests, clean and set up the rooms, provide information about the local area, fix anything that goes wrong and look after three kids of their own in the process.

I’ve just put together a getting started guide just for work at home moms.

The guide walks you through the content, information and resources over at Internet Based Moms and also gives you a good starting point for building your online business.

click here to download your free guide here

Enjoy! And please feel free to pass this one to anyone who could use a little help in their online business… This was written with work at home moms in mind, but really anyone can apply this information to their business.

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Unfortunately, this is the price of doing business online. I decided to post about this because my friend has had a stalker pursuing her and posting nasty comments on her blogs (of course all anonymously).

I have another friend who had a stalker on her blog last year and that one was actually less creepy and even funny (I think he owned up in the end).

In all seriousness though it’s very easy for some crazy person to come out of the woodwork and try to discredit you online. This is what is happening to my friend and that’s just not acceptable.

Early this morning I listened to Alice’s interview on Wahm Talk radio. In case you didn’t know, just recently I took over Internet Based Moms, which is a great resource site for work at home moms founded by Alice.

If you’re at all curious as to why Alice made this decision, in this interview she shares her reasons for selling the site and the new plans for marketing and the future.

I read an interesting post on Lynn Terry’s Blog a few days ago about how to find your passion.

A lot of us seem to set out to really cut out that perfect niche for ourselves and can actually spend quite a bit of time trying to “get it right.” I know because I’ve been through the very same thing, until one day I decided to just go with the flow and keep growing and learning in my business until I truly found what I wanted to do.