June 2014 archive

Motivation Monday: Do single women need a mate to start a business?

By Chanda Temple

Do single women need a husband to start a business? Absolutely not, says small business expert Melinda Emerson. Image by Michigan BD via Flickr/CreativeCommons.

Do single women need a husband to start a business? Absolutely not, says small business expert Melinda Emerson.
Image by Michigan BD via Flickr/CreativeCommons.

I have a friend interested in leaving her full-time job to start her own business. But what’s stopping her is that she’s single. She says she’d prefer to have a husband as a safety net to help with the mortgage and living expenses in case her business fails or is slow to produce income.

When married, she knows she’d love her husband and care for him, but she’d also love the idea of having a mate as a “cushion” in the event her business flops.

My friend’s comments got me thinking: What do single female entrepreneurs think about this? I posed the question to Melinda Emerson, a divorced, Philadelphia mother of one who’s known as “America’s No. 1 Small Business Expert.” 

Melinda, nicknamed the Small Biz Lady, got real in five seconds flat: A husband is not a back-up plan in business.

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Size matters in social media

By Chanda Temple

Build interest in your social media posts by adding properly-sized photos to them. Image by Social Expert via Flickr/CreativeCommons.

Build interest in your social media posts by adding properly-sized photos to them.
Image by Social Expert via Flickr/CreativeCommons.

 

When posting images on social media, size really does matter.

If the images are too small, you’ve lost the battle. If they are too big, you’ve lost the war. The point is to make them just right to keep your followers coming back for more.

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Noah Galloway grows from tragedy to compete in Men’s Health magazine contest

By Chanda Temple

Retired Army veteran Noah Galloway, 32, of Alabaster, Ala. is in the running for Men's Health Magazine's Ultimate Guy Search. Online voting ends June 30, 2014. Image by Jason Maris Photography

Retired Army veteran Noah Galloway, 32, of Alabaster, Ala. is in the running for Men’s Health Magazine’s Ultimate Guy Search. Posing here in a kilt, he’s currently in first place. Online voting ends June 30, 2014.
Image by Jason Maris Photography

Editor’s Note: Noah Galloway won the magazine cover competition in October 2014 and was on the November 2014 cover. In March 2015, he will be one of the contestants on ABC’s ‘Dancing with the Stars.’ The show will debut on Monday, March 16 at 7 p.m. CST.  

In 2010, Noah Galloway took a long hard look at himself and didn’t like what he saw.

It wasn’t that he had lost his left leg and left arm in a 2005 roadside bomb attack while serving in Iraq. (He had already come to terms with that after being mad about it for years.) Instead, he didn’t like how he’d let the tragedy eat away at his very soul.

Once an avid athlete and runner, he was no longer active. He’d allowed what happened to him in the blast, rob him of any desire to work out or even take a walk around the block.

“I had a beer gut,’’ said Galloway, of Alabaster, Ala.

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Motivation Monday: Spinning with Fitness Pro Cherie Fields

Spinning instructors always play the best music in class. Image by Beverly Cromer via Flickr/CreativeCommons.

Feel the burn and the beat. Spinning instructors always play the best music in class. The experience makes you feel like you can conquer anything. 
Image by Beverly Cromer via Flickr/CreativeCommons.

By Chanda Temple

Sometimes it takes an oldie but goodie memory to push you to keep exercising. I wrote this in July 2011. Publishing for the first time today on #MotivationMonday. 

In 2010, my friend Cherie Fields had just started teaching a spinning class. She was so excited about her new endeavor that she invited her friends to try the class. However, I was reluctant.

Me: “Unh-uh. I’ve tried spinning before. I didn’t like it.”

Cherie: “Well, you haven’t taken my class.”

Me: “Umm, I’ll think about it.”

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Twitter tips for entrepreneurs and bloggers

By Chanda Temple

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I recently served as a panelist on a social media panel, where I discussed what has worked for me on Twitter. Everyone is different. What works for Sally may not work for Sam. The main thing is to try and see what works for you. Here are some of the tips I shared:

  • Follow people you like and those that feed your passion and interests

If you have quality tweets that teach people something, make them laugh or inspire them, you’ve piqued their interest. They’ll look at your feed. If you have content that makes people want to keep scrolling down your feed, they’ll likely follow you. I figure that if this is what gets others to look at folks’ tweets, then it is also what may get people to look at me.

Tweet about what you enjoy doing and reading.

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Why PR pros need a YouTube account

By Chanda Temple

YouTube logo

I live in Birmingham, Ala., where tornadoes rumble across the region every spring. On a recent spring night, I huddled in my hallway closet, put on a bicycle helmet and rode out  severe weather until the storms passed. I used my BlackBerry to tweet about the experience. Luckily, there was no damage in my area.

A reporter from Mobile, Ala. saw my tweets and tweeted me the next day, saying he wanted to talk to me about how I wore my helmet during the storm. (It’s pretty common that people wear some type of helmet during a tornado as a precaution against possible head injuries.) He wanted to use my comments for a story.

Since Mobile is about four hours from Birmingham, I figured we’d do a telephone interview. He had something else in mind.

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