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How To Find The Right Nanny

There’s nothing more important than making sure your child is in good hands when you’re not there. Here are a few steps to help you find the perfect nanny for your family.

Special thanks to College Nannies and Tutors of Walnut Creek for sharing their advice. You can watch a great video about them and their Walnut Creek nanny services.

First, make sure you understand your priorities and requirements. Do you want someone older with lots of experience? Or perhaps a younger (although well qualified) nanny full of energy who’s willing to get on the ground and play with your child. Ideally, what types of activities do you want your child’s caregiver to provide?

This may extend beyond basic childcare services. If you’re a working mother, you might want someone willing to help around the house or cook. Those requirements might reduce who is interested in your position, and it might be a bit more expensive, but these types of needs must be met to ensure your happiness.

Next, you need to decide if you’re going to be the nanny’s employer or if you want that responsibility to fall to someone else.

Yes, employer. If you have a childcare provider in your home, they are someone’s employee. And if not someone else’s, that obligation falls on you. With all of the requirements to withhold taxes, file payroll reports, and ensure you have adequate insurance in case something happens.

Or, you can hire a professional nanny agency who not only helps you find the perfect professional, but serves as their employer going forward. This is slightly more expensive, but well worth the cost to transfer all of the legal requirements and liabilities to someone who actually knows what they are doing in this area.

When interviewing prospective candidates, whether searching independently or working through an agency, take your time to make sure that they have the right credentials, qualifications, references, and personality.

Are they First Aid and CPR certified? Do they have any related degrees? What type of professional training have they completed? What do other families say about them? Have they undergone a thorough background check? And will they both get along well with your child, as well as helping your child develop?

This relationship is one of the most important ones you’ll ever have in your life. It could make the difference between a happy home and well behaved and developed child, or misery.

Take the time to make the right decision.

Women Run Local Businesses And Need SEO

: seo: Written by admin : 03-29-2014

According to the 2013 State of Women-Owned Businesses Report, commissioned by American Express OPEN, it is estimated that there are 8.6 million women-owed businesses in the United States. Most exciting is that this number is increasing – a LOT.

Between 1997 and 2013, women-owned businesses increased by over 59%. This was much higher than the overall growth rate of businesses which was at 41%.

It’s also important to look at what types of businesses women own and for good or bad, they tend to be smaller and locally focused rather than large, national companies.

And this opens up a huge opportunity to provide search engine optimization (SEO) services on a local basis to these women-owned businesses.

Cairn Marketing is one such company that provides local SEO services in the Walnut Creek and San Francisco area. Here are a few tips they recently shared:

Include your business’ name, address, and phone number on each page of the site. This can be in the footer.
Include both the name of the service or product you are providing and your geographic location in the page URL.
Create a Google Places page and make sure you link to your website
Consider setting up additional pages on major directory and citation sites such as Bing Places, Yelp, Foursquare, and other similar sites.
Make sure that your company name, address, and phone number (often abbreviated as NAP in SEO terms) is consistent and the same on every web page you create.
If you belong to the Better Business Bureau, Chamber of Commerce, or other local organization, try and get them to link to your website.
Make sure your writing web pages and blog posts that include the cities you work in and the products you sell.

Google is making it easier for small businesses to compete with large companies when it comes to local SEO. They realize that products that people buy and services that people use are often done so locally from small businesses. So those businesses often show up in search results versus large, national, and especially online companies.

So it’s a great time to be a woman owning a local business. More and more of us are leaving traditional careers, or returning to the workforce after getting our family up and running, and turning to being our own boss as an alternative to going back to boring jobs.

And with good marketing, including effective search engine optimization techniques, the success rate of starting your own business has never been higher.

Ladies It’s Time To Sell

: sales: Written by admin : 12-15-2013

Let’s face it. We are incredibly busy.

We’ve got children to raise. Husbands to mold. Houses to make perfect. And in our “spare time” we are expected to bring in additional household income.

How can we do it all?

Well, if you’re in a sales position, there are automation tools like Rocket Notify that can make your life so much easier.

Sales automation tools are software applications, either installed on your desktop or run from the “cloud”, that can help you be much more productive. They can automate routine tasks that you do day after day. And they can be used to increase your productivity by performing certain tasks like cold calling and keeping in routine touch with your clients and prospects on your behalf. So instead of you having to spend a considerable amount of your day doing mundane tasks over and over, automation tools can do those things for you and free you up to spend time doing more important activities.

Let’s take the example of cold calling. It’s dreadful. Few sales people love cold calling. But at the same time it can be a great way of increasing your customer base.

Enter a sales automation tool. Instead of you looking up the contact, doing research on them, dialing them, talking to them, and then taking dubious follow up notes – use software to do some or all of that for you.

These tools can easily do research on your behalf. Enter the criteria of your ideal customer and produce a list of prospects that meet that criteria. Click a couple of buttons and pull up everything about them on the web – their site, reviews, social media profiles – everything you need to arm yourself for a good conversation. Auto dialers can call these prospects with another click of the button freeing you up from something as simple as dialing and saving you a lot of time in the long run. Hate cold calling? Well there are automation tools for that as well. They’ll make calls on your behalf and connect you with people that actually want to hear what you have to say.

Being in sales is very rewarding, and it’s something that women do extremely well. But using automation tools is just plain smart. It makes us more productive and allows us to spend time doing those things that we absolutely must do. Or those things that we absolutely love to do.

Why settle for anything less?