This serves three purposes:

• It lets Membership, the Vice President and Visitor Host know that you will have a sub in your place for a certain meeting.
• It gives you credit for having a sub and not an absence for that date – even if the sub oversleeps, can’t find the restaurant, gets sick or just forgets (believe me, we’ve heard all of these excuses).
• It alerts everyone who your sub will be for possible referrals.

Here’s a sample email:

SUBJECT LINE: Please welcome my sub for (Date): (Firstname Lastname)

Dear Everyone:

Please welcome my substitute for next week, (name) with (company), (what the company does).

Sincerely,

(Your name)

From blog.intuit.com, April 27, 2011.

Do you call a life coach to navigate life’s challenges or help with career issues? Does a life coach help you understand your goals, how to reach them, and prioritize them? Do you need a life coach to boost your self-confidence?

We called Kenji Oshima, AKA Coach Kenji, of San Francisco, to find out the answers. He said, “All of the above!”

ISBB: What does life coaching focus on?

Coach Kenji: Life coaching focuses on an individual’s entire life as it relates to goal setting, outcome creation and change. In coaching, the assumption is that individuals are capable of generating their own solutions, while the coach provides a supportive, discovery-based framework. While positive emotions are typically the natural outcome of great coaching, the primary focus is on creating strategies for changing your work or personal life.

In addition, the true emphasis in coaching is on action, accountability, and follow-through; it supports personal growth, professional growth, and development based on individually-initiated change, since coaching is forward moving and future-focused.

Coaching is for self-actualized people who have known success in their life, and choose to add that extra edge in order to move forward to make the changes they want in life.

Read more.

Once you have more than three people to gather for a call or meeting, email is no longer an efficient tool. Instead of saving time, you’re wasting time – your own and that of everybody else. If you send email to poll your group on possible dates and times, you end up sending and receiving an endless string of messages. Ugh!

Thank the admin gods for a nifty (and free!) online app from the folks at Doodle. Go to www.doodle.com and follow the simple instructions for polling your group for good days/times to meet. The set up is super fast and easy. Once you’ve done that, you receive two emails from Doodle.

One message includes the link for the poll. Simply insert that into an email to your group. It will lead them to the online poll where they check the days/times that work for them.

The second message includes a link for you, the administrator. This allows you to see, in real time, the responses. Once you know which days/times have the best response, you can easily schedule the meeting and send a note to your group.

That’s it! One email to poll the group. A second to inform them of the meeting date and time. So simple.

Running a successful small business requires you to make the most efficient use of your time. This free application does just that. Now go! Schedule your next big meeting. And prosper!

Though this was already a WordPress site that was first written years ago, the wanted to have it updated  with new graphics and more recent activities.

So Gil Zeimer of Zeimer’s Advertising Shoppe again worked with Bradley Charbonneau at Likoma who found the template that features a slider on the home page that can accommodates five different images and captions, along with three main copy blocks on the bottom of the home page.

Have a look and please donate if you’d like to help children around the world read English literature: www.BookBankUSA.org.

BEFORE

Bike commuting and bike sharing offer so many benefits – to employees and employers alike – that soon, no company will be without a comprehensive program. And now it’s getting easier.

We help make bike commuting and sharing such an easy and viable alternative, it could become the norm. Find out how and why at Bikes Make Life Better.

Why would I post this question on this website and not just email the question to the relevant people? (our accountant and our bookkeeper) The reasons are multifold.

1. Referrals
   Someone out there might be doing a search for “pay or barter” when they have a question for an accountant or a bookkeeper. Maybe they’ll come across this site and see my question. Now if Deborah and/or Wayne answer the question in a comment in a manner that shows their deep understanding of the accounting and bookkeeping worlds, said visitor might just think, “Wow, they know what they’re talking about. Hmm, I could use a good bookkeeper and an accountant, maybe I should contact them.”
2. Google
   A posting on this site means more traffic (activity) on this site. This is a good thing. If Google’s spiders (search engine robots) come to the BNI site and they see it’s all the same as the last visit, they won’t come again as often. More postings mean more reasons to come back–for Google and those who use Google (read: the planet).
3. Link Traffic
   This is getting a little technical, but still very relevant. So say Pamela posts her brilliant comment on the site. Because she signed up with this site and gave a URL for her own site, that will provide a link from her name on the comment to her own site. This has two benefits: (1) a visitor could easily click that link and get to her site. (2) maybe more important, the Google spiders will see that link while scouring (indexing) this site and might thus go index her site. This means better rankings for her site on Google and more traffic to her site.
4. Knowledge Base
   So when Gil has the same question that I did, he doesn’t have to ask our accountant or our bookkeeper, he can just go to our site and read the answer.

Still need more reasons? Because I’m asking nicely. ;-)

- Bradley

Say I’m doing business with someone and we decide that our services will cost about the same, say $999. For tax and accounting and income and expenses reasons, should we barter or pay each other? In other words, should we both pay nothing and consider it even and a done deal, nothing in the books, no money changing hands or should I pay them $999 and they pay me $999?

Thanks for any advice.

- Bradley

As you all know, it’s better for the search engines and our own site’s appeal if we post content onto our site and then email that to our members. Using “subscriptions” it even takes one step out of the mix. Just post an entry to the BNI site (an event, a piece of news, a blog, or a company description) and a notification email will go out to all of the members. That’s it, done.

If you, as a member, only want to receive the News and Company Descriptions from everyone, you can choose to only receive those emails. If you’re signed in, click on the link below (it’s also in the upper right sidebar under Admin) and you’ll get to your personal Subscriptions admin page where you can choose which updates you want to receive. I suggest you at least choose the News and Calendar updates so we stay in the loop on those topics.

Subscriptions

Questions? I bet. Please use the comment form below this entry to submit your questions. You’ll need to be logged in.

Best regards,

- Bradley

I just registered the last of us into the new website (thanks to all of you who had already registered). For those of you who did not register, you can now log in using your first name (with first letter capital, e.g. Holden) and this high-tech password: ” bni ” (no quotes, just the three letters). You can log in by going to http://www.bniembarcadero.com and clicking on “Login” in the upper right sidebar (under Admin and above Search). Once in, you’ll want to click on Users which will bring you to your Profile where you’ll want to change your password.

Why log in? You can then:
(More help on how these things all work later.)

1.) Send an email to the group.
(http://www.bniembarcadero.com/wp-admin/post.php?page=mailing-list.php)

2.) Write a post (entry) with a question to the group, as an event, a news item, or a blog entry.
(http://www.bniembarcadero.com/wp-admin/post.php)

3.) Write something about your company (tip: give it the category “Company Description”).
(http://www.bniembarcadero.com/wp-admin/post.php)

4.) Comment on someone else’s post (Why? Builds traffic to the site. Who cares? Google cares.)
(example: http://www.bniembarcadero.com/google)

5.) Copy another member’s contact info to send to a referral
(http://www.bniembarcadero.com/roster)

6.) Send a referral the “Company Description” of one of our member’s via email
(example: http://www.bniembarcadero.com/telepacific-communications, click on the email icon under the title)

Have a question about all of this? Post a question as an entry in the “Forum” category (http://www.bniembarcadero.com/wp-admin/post.php) on the site and I’ll answer it. That way others will see the question (and the answer) and it’ll build traffic to the site and start to turn the site into a resource.

Best regards,

- Bradley
Likoma
http://www.likoma.com

You can also post a comment right below this text–if you’re logged in.

Rather than emailing me, I’d like to use this site (and this post in particular) to gather suggestions for how we can best utilize this website. You’ll see below this post there’s a spot to post comments. Please log in and post a comment about an idea you may have for the site. Even just a quick note, “How about a photo gallery?” is helpful.

For the daring ones … one thing that helps me even more, but is completely optional, is to have a look at the long list of WordPress plugins and give me the name of one you think would be good for this site. While you’re at that long list, think of your own website and features you’d like to have there. For example, there’s one called “WP-Polls” that allow you to create a question or topic and have people vote (poll) on it. For our group, we could use that for “Should we go to Napa or Santa Cruz for our party?” There’s another called “WP-Email” that puts a button on any page and allows anyone to email that page to anyone else (would be handy for this site so I could email Gil’s blurb about his work to a referral).