Work at Home Grandmothers

We haven’t had a “featured grandmother” in quite a while, so it was wonderful to hear from Debbie Johnson today and have a chance to share her story with you.  I hope you enjoy reading it…oh, and if you would like to be featured, please write to me at claudiascorner[at]gmail.com.

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After receiving a legal secretarial degree from Bryant and Stratton and working at GE for engineers for six years, I quit to raise our two boys, born exactly one year and three weeks apart. (My husband said, “We’re not going to have your mom watch TWO, are we? Mind you, I was sobbing at the time as he went out the door with our oldest.)

Seven years later a third son arrived on the scene and I worked at a quaint little local restaurant an evening or two a week to bring in a little extra cash. (And, admittedly, to remind myself that I still could “process thoughts” – Oh, the stories I can tell!!)

I’m thankful to have been able to work around our family, but where does a closing-in-on-40 year old woman go to find a job? For me it was an Oral Surgery satellite office 20 minutes away which I managed for two doctors. They kindly allowed me the opportunity to work while updating my computer/office skills. Six years later, with one son in college, another a senior in high school and the third closing in on high school, I needed a full-time job to help with college expenses and high school extra-curricular activity bills. And that is how I ended up at a local business as a sales coordinator for nine years.vI know – trained for lawyers and worked for engineers, doctors and salesmen – nothing “relates”, does it?  Plus, nobody needs “secretaries” anymore – everyone does their own thing on computers! And, NOW I’m closing in on SIXTY!!

After we were blessed with 6 (yes, six!) grandchildren, with two more on the way, I left that job two years ago. In hindsight I am even more thankful because my father went to be with the Lord (and mom) this past Dec. 26.  These past two years were filled with many medical appointments for him that I am SO thankful I could do.  (I was thankful at the time, but even more so now!) I LOVE being with my grandchildren, but I’d also like to help my husband financially. Plus, they say our brains “go to mush” if we don’t use them.

Ameriplan®, USA, offers the chance for me to do it all. Yes, it’s network marketing and I’m learning, learning, learning – which is FUN! It’s VERY affordable to begin your own business. Plus, this company provides things I NEED in addition to a paycheck – discounts for dental, vision, prescription and chiropractic needs, as well as help with child ID, legal fees, medical expenses, identity theft (the fastest growing crime in America) and much more.

If you’d like to check out what this company has to offer, please visit one of my websites at:

www.freedomathometeam.com/DJohnson70 or

www.IBOPlus.com/DJohnson70 or

www.mybenefitsplus.com/DJohnson70 .

Or I’d love to hear from you via e-mail at DJohnson70@ameriplan.net or by phone at 716-355-4223.

We women need to STICK TOGETHER!! And we aren’t getting older, we’re GETTING BETTER!!

God Bless you all!

Debbie Johnson

The latest Twitter statistics are out, and even though I’ve had a love-hate relationship with Twitter this week due to outages caused by the hacker that shut down Twitter for a day or two, it’s still one of my favorite ways to network. 

I thought I’d share some of statistics with you, and a thought or two on how they might affect your business communications on Twitter…now realize the study was done over a 10 day period…and I hope not within the past week - just kidding

1. 40% of tweets are pointless statements of fact, stating what the person happened to be doing at the moment, like “I’m eating a cookie”, “I’m watching television” etc.
2. 39% were conversational tweets, and take place between 2 - 4 pm…what time zone I don’t know, but the report I heard was on the east coast.
3. % of Spam and self-promotion is quite low
4. News Media tweets peeked at about 2 pm Tuesdays
5. Retweets took place most often on Monday mornings

I’m not sure how relevant all of this Twitter trivia is, but knowing when the most conversation is taking place was surprising to me.  I tend to spend my time on Twitter in the evenings, perhaps it would be better to visit during the afternoon hours when there is conversation going on.

One thing I know for sure is that if you want to promote your business, you have to first take time to share yourself, and I mean sincerely, not just to get, people will see right through that.  

A mistake I made early on was to set up my blogs with “Twitterfeed” so that each post to my blogs was automatically posted to Twitter…and I never conversed at all…definitely wasn’t a good idea, any more than blasting out phrases like ”Made $1000 in my first week” etc…posts like that may bring in some, but don’t appeal to me at all.  I still use Twitterfeed, but spend a good bit of time conversing, too, and only have Twitterfeed tweet my posts every 24 hours.

It is possible to converse in 140 characters…take some time watching conversation,  ”follow” people you enjoy and hope that they will follow you back, you can “tweet” a person that is not “following” you, but you can’t send them a Direct Message.  Jump in and say hi.  Check your “replies” (if you tweet from your Twitter home page, you’ll find your “replies” in the right column where you see your username with a @ in front of it, in my case that would be @happynutrition) and “Direct Messages” regularly and respond…you can reply any time, even if the person who wrote to you isn’t online tweeting at the moment, they’ll see it when they check in again.

Do you have a Twitter business success story to share?  Please share in a comment!

Related Posts:

Networking With Grandmothers on Twitter

Wall Street Journal Article on Twitter

Twittering Grandmothers

Maybe you are a grandmother who is a retired nurse, and like to keep up with the current news in the field because you loved your work.

Maybe you have a daughter or son who is a nurse and might enjoy a site full of wonderful information just for nurses.

Maybe you even have a grandaughter or grandson who is considering the field or in the field, who would be encouraged by the things they will learn at the site I was introduced to today.

The site is appropriately called Scrubs, which I believe is the term for the clothing or uniforms that nurses where when on the job.  As a matter of fact, as the widget on the main page was scrolling through with pictures and associated articles, I found one about a daughter who inspired her mother to become a nurse at the age of 60…it’s a great story as are MANY of the stories at the online magazine…right down to stories about your favorite, or maybe not so favorite, TV-program nurses!

The site has been updated since I last looked at it some time ago for the summer season…with articles about:

• Summer cloths, summer scrubs
• For the female nurses, makeup and beauty
• Tips for night nurses on how to schedule your meals and naps so that you can work at your best

A story I enjoyed was about the featured “nurse of the week”, a gentleman named Kerry Jeanice and his work during the aftermath of hurricane Katrina. You can nominate a nurse to be featured.

I am not a nurse, but still enjoyed the site very much, stop by and visit, you’ll find it helpful and inspiring!

I made a discovery today while I was working/playing with a Squidoo lens. Do you know what Squidoo is? It’s another way of quickly and easily getting your “presence” out there on the web. You can make what they call a “lens”  about things that interest you, things you’re working on, just about anything you can think of. You can see what I have done if you visit my profile page on Squidoo.

One of the pages I did was “Find a Grandmother or Grandmothers on Twitter“.  Stop by for a visit and learn more about using hashtags (#) and which word, “Grandmother” or “Grandmothers” is the best search term.  I hope to add more helpful information, and perhaps more about how to use Squidoo to your benefit on this blog.

Yes, it’s free!

I’ve signed up to take part in this event and wanted to share it with you as I know it will help you build your business.  It runs from April 27 - May 1st.

Even if you are seeing this a day or two after the event starts, please sign up and be there for what you can….you can’t get any less expensive than FREE.

This is a week long EVENT that will help you in the following ways:

• Learn to use Facebook, Twitter, and Blogging to your advantage for maximum results.
• Stand out from your competition using video marketing.
• Learn to keep yourself motivated while your business is growing no matter what.
• Grow your clients, your lists, your sales.

Do you want to know the “business failure” statistics that you want to avoid?  Please click here.

Do you want to know how to avoid being one of those statistics, and enjoy the process? Click here.

This isn’t hype, it’s a wonderful event with a great lineup of successful speakers, I’ll see you there, I need this as much as most of you reading this do.

Please click any of the links to visit rapidprofitboosters.com and sign up right now…only takes a minute.

This is a blog tour, you can visit the following links for a different perspective… yesterday the blog event tour was with Sandra DeFreitas, Tech Coach for Coaches

Tomorrow, this will be continued with Wendy Y. Bailey of Group Mastery & 33min Group Coaching Program

Today I found an article in the WALL STREET JOURNAL written by Julia Angwin with some nice tips to add to the ones that you will find in my previous post on the subject.

In the article she shares a “Twitter Glossary”, some were shared in the previous post, but here goes in my own words:

• @ is the symbol you put in front of the name of someone you are replying to, if you are working directly from the twitter site (not using software like TweetDeck, etc.) you can “click” on this symbol next to any “tweet” you want to reply to and the symbol and name will go into the message window, in my browser you can’t see the @ until you “hover” your mouse pointer over it to the right of each “tweet”.
• DM or direct message is a message you can send privately to a person, usually you have to visit their page and click on “message…” in the right column.
• RT stands for “retweet”.  If you like something someone said, you can copy and paste their message and put RT in front of it…you’ll gain friends/followers if you “retweet” their posts, but make sure they are worth “retweeting”….be sure to include their username w/ @ in front of it.
• # or the “hashtag” is something you put before a term you want to be searchable.  The advantage is that the term after the hashtag will be “clickable” and anyone who clicks on the word/letters/etc. following the hash tag will be taken directly to a page with all the other posts that have the same info.  You can also go directly to http://search.twitter.com and use the advanced search to find tweets on favorite topics.
• A “nudge” is something you do to get someone to tweet who hasn’t been tweeting for a while.

I am still learning how to make my “tweets” enticing…Angwin states that “without a point of view, my updates were pretty boring.  So, for instane, I changed ‘eating strawberries during a snowstorm” to “eating strawberries during a snowstorm, not carbon efficient but lovely”.

Any tips to add? Please feel free to comment!

Are you Afraid of Public Speaking? I can assure you that I am, and am not ashamed to admit it. I think that’s why it’s so nice, to be able to network and do presentations online, because you don’t have to be facing your audience in the same way as you do if you’re making a presentation publicly.

I have spent many a time in front of a group of people, but never like it, so am a bit envious of people who, at least from appearances, seem to be so at ease with it.

One of the biggest challenges is figuring out what to say, and putting the words together in a way that sounds appealing, presentable. What if there was something that could make that process a LOT easier for you?

If you are looking for help with public speaking may I suggest you click here for a collection of articles on the topic. I think you’ll find the information helpful.

I spend more and more time in the wonderful world of twitter lately, how about you?  Twitter is a unique networking site, a place where you “follow” people and they “follow” you, a great way to connect and make friends, potential customers and clients.

If you are “following” someone, you can see their messages, called “Tweets” listed on your Twitter page. The best way to start “Tweeting” on twitter is to post friendly replies to people, not just “spam” like messages promoting your service or product. Twitter is fun! Enjoy it and learn by watching how others communicate.

On Twitter, your messages are called “replies” or “direct messages”.  To “reply” to someone, you put a @ in front of their username, OR, you point your mouse next to their message, and a “reply” option will appear for you to click on.  A “reply” is seen by everyone.

If you don’t want everyone to see your response to someone, then you send them a “Direct Message”.  This is done by clicking on their username and visiting their “home” page, and then looking down the bar on the right for “message (username)”.  Click on that to send a message privately.

You can view your “replies” or your “direct messages” by clicking on the appropriate link in the sidebar.

It’s not hard at all…the only trick is that your messages can only be 140 characters long…it’s fun to think of ways to say what you want in a short “tweet”.

This is a great way to network and meet people.  I’ll be back with a few more tips later this week!

Oh! By the way, if you’re already on Twitter, follow me at http://twitter.com/happynutrition and be sure to send me a message letting me know you found me here on Work at Home Grandmothers.