Success in Sweatpants

As a vpreneur working from home in your sweatpants, being able to connect productively with your market, your clients, and your network is critical to your sucees.

The tools you use to make these connections need to work well. In many cases, this means staying up to date with your technology. It also means understanding how you present yourself to the web-connected world.

Let's talk about technology. What vintage is your computer? If it is more than a couple of years old, it might be worth considering biting the bullet and buying a new system. This is the core of your business, your lifeline to your customers and peers. Your computer is the filing cabinet of all your documents, forms, research, correspondence, photos albums. Losing your hard drive or having your system fail suddenly one day would be a bad thing.

How about the software you are using? I hate to tell you this, but if, like me, copy writing is a core revenue generator for you, you need to have the latest version of Word in your system. Yes, you may have to "save as…" to an earlier version for a bit while everybody else catches up, but that's no big deal.  Use the latest versions of whatever your key programs are–Photoshop, Quark, Word, etc.–so that you have the most recent features available to you. And there's a branding element to this–clients who know that you are up-to-date on your software tools will unconsciously give you a gold star because to them this means you are a successful, smart, tech-savvy provider.

How do you present yourself to the world?  Do you have an email that has your own domain name after the @ sign? If you are using an aol, yahoo, msn, or earthlink address to do business–STOP IT! Purchase a domain name (try your own name if you can get it…I own trishlambert.com, for example) and use that for your email. It conveys an "I am in business and will be here for many years" message; the generic email addresses don't give prospects a warm, fuzzy feeling.

Speaking of email, are you using an email signature at the end of each message? If not, come up with a maximum of 5 lines that will capture interest. Could be your tag line, could be a short pitch line, should always be your web or blog URL, may be your phone number (I don't usually include phone numbers on my emails because I prefer to be contacted in writing). If you are using a signature line, does it work? Don't make it too long–mini-ebooks as email sigs can be irritating, especially in threads that keep repeating the sig every time you respond. Do you have the right info in the sig–does it speak effectively for you?

I could go on and on about tools we use in our businesses….but I'll stop here for now. Hope this has provided a little food for thought.