Today my guest is Linda Gorin, The Best to You. Linda and I will be talking about her business and next weekend's celebration of Mother's Day. 

The Best to You began as a hobby in 1984. Soon, creating festive gifts for special people became a passion. Back then, the dining room table was the design area and a big order was more than six baskets at one time. It’s fun to remember when the thought of having their own gift basket company seemed like just a dream. It started to become a reality when they opened our first little shop in 1985. As the business grew, Linda celebrated six expansions. Today, The Best to You enjoys a reputation as one of the finest gift basket companies in the industry. They have been featured on Channel 8 and Channel 10 numerous times.  The Best to You is in the business of delivering memories!

The Best to You team takes that very seriously. We deliver joy and good will. We build grand displays of appreciation. We send "you can do it!" style encouragement, and "we’re all thinking of you" style comfort. We deliver "work of art" welcomes and memorable farewells. We deliver fun and excitement that create impromptu celebrations. We send morale skyrocketing with our employee thank you gifts and deliver warm, fuzzy feelings of home with our college care packages. We’ve been responsible for expedited wedding proposals, rekindled romances, and when someone’s having a horrible day, we can change tears to smiles.

Our team of creative imagineers is constantly thinking of new and unique designs to thrill and delight. They are master memory makers! If you ever have a custom request, a question, or just need some additional information, feel free to call. We love hearing from you!

Today we'll dive into the basics of email marketing. You'll discover how email marketing can help your maintain your client relationships while also reaching out to bring new peeps into your tribe. You'll hear some of the best practices in email marketing, how to intice peope to opt into your email marketing and a few of the things you don't want to do.

I have a friend who speaks professionally. She has been using Facebook ads to increase the number of fans on her business page. Apparently, that's what event planners and speaker sites want to see, a large following. In years gone by, there was a trend on Facebook called "Fan Page Friday." You would post a link to your business page and everyone would like it. It was an artificial way to increase your page likes, but is that really a good strategy.

In this episode, I'll share with you how we are being measured on our influence by various sites like Klout, Kred, Brandify and PeerIndex. I'll share why I think this is how you should measure your influence, rather than the number of followers, fans, etc you have on each of your social media sites.

In this episode I'll share with you what an autoresponder is, why you would consider using one and how you can use an autoresponder.

If you are a business men or woman you understand how busy life can be, this is especially true when it comes to internet marketers. It can feel at times like there is no time for yourself and you will often times find yourself too short on time to complete all of your tasks for the day.

Luckily there are things that can help you with this problem such as autoresponders. These tools are extremely effective and they can free up a great deal of time for you. With the help of an autoresponder, you will no longer have to spend hours of your time responding to emails from clients and customers. You probably do not realize how much time you actually spend each day replying to emails. If you take the time to think about it, you will surely be surprised by the amount of time it consumes.

Autoresponders are exactly what their name suggests. They are an automated system that’s sole responsibility is to send automatic reply’s back to people who send you emails. Before you decide to use an autoresponder, there are some things you need to be aware of and well informed about.

Autoresponders work very quickly and responses to emails will be sent out almost immediately. This is one way of keeping people happy because it will make them feel as if their emails are very important to you.

Today my guest is Laurie Sodetani. Laurie is a custom clothing designer and the owner of Carlsbad-based, Seams Fashionable. She works one-on-one with women interested in having comfortable clothes that fit perfectly and make them feel like a million bucks.

For more than 25 years, Laurie has been the “go to person” for traveling business women who appreciate her ability to create interchangeable pieces as well as for ladies tired of full closets and that perpetual feeling of having “nothing to wear.”

In the past, Laurie traveled the U.S. holding trunk shows for clients around the country. Today, she works with clients one-on-one in her bright and friendly studio in State Street Marketplace, creating clothes her clients really enjoy wearing.

Lucy has lived in Southern California with her amazing husband of almost 14 years.   They met while training in Aikido, a Japanese martial art almost 20 years ago.  They now own our own Aikido dojo (school) where Lucy teaches children’s classes. She became a trial paralegal right out of school but decided to change careers about 8 years ago.  Lucy went back to school to become a teacher.  After 5 years of teaching 3rd and 4th grade students, she decided to take the leap and become an entrepreneur!

Lucy works with DIYers as well as small business owners and entrepreneurs to help them stand out in the business world. She helps them with their customer retention and customer appreciation programs.  She does this through two wonderful companies that she is an Independent Consultant for:  Close to My Heart and Steeped Tea.  Close to My Heart is a company based out of Utah and is celebrating its 30th year in business.  She is celebrating her 10th year as a consultant with them. Their mission is to show you how to celebrate relationships through discovering your creativity, to preserve and share the moments that matter most. She’s also a consultant with Steeped Tea, a Canadian-based company that specializes in loose leaf teas and tea accessories.

Vavavida is a line of ethically made fashion jewelry items that give back. We only retail ethically made pieces of gorgeous high-quality hand crafted artisan jewelry from all over the world. But we don’t stop there because 10% of our revenues goes to non-profit organizations such as Project Concern International where our investments go to help empower women around the globe. When you empower a woman, you empower a community.

Vavavida was founded after a long conversation between Antoine and Dan --two of the co-founders-- seeing eye-to-eye about things that could be done in the world to enrich people’s lives. Vavavida was created to help prevent events like the tragic collapse of the Rana Plaza sweatshop from happening again. If Vavavida can be part of the conversation in proving that healthy profits don’t have to come at the expense of the mistreating of other human beings, we will have won our “Fair Fashion Coup.”

Antoine Didienne is the president of Vavavia.com, an ethical and unique fashion and accessories retailer that focuses on empowering women, fighting poverty and creating change in the fashion industry.

It happened again. A client needed a new website because of the situation she found herself in with the developer she hired. Don't let this happen to you. Learn what you need to create your website, and more importantly, what you want to make sure doesn't happen to you!?

In this episode I'll share the structure of a website, what you need and how it all fits together.

Today my guests are Rebeca and David Randle. Rebeca & David are singer/songwriter, recording artists first and foremost, and are also extremely active in many areas of the music business world including music education, music production, and custom song creation. They are at the forefront of music education with their companies, Singing Lesson Expert, Guitar Lesson Expert, and My Songwriting Coach. They were featured on Fox News 5 for their custom songwriting business, and David has received critical acclaim for album projects he has produced, while Rebeca is an incredibly respected vocal producer.

Come along with me and discover what an interesting business Rebeca and David have in the music industry.

Today my guest is LC Scott, owner of eFrog Press. We'll be talking about writing that book you've always wanted to write. Tune in and hear what a seasoned publishing professional has to offer in the way of guidance.

LC Scott has a B.A. in English from UC Berkeley, an M.A. in Education from Stanford, and a doctorate in educational leadership from UC San Diego. During her freelance writing career she wrote dozens of magazine feature stories, chapters for textbooks, study guides for educations films and newsletters for the San Diego County Office of Education's reading tutoring program. For many years she created websites for small businesses and children's authors. She has taught at the high school and university levels. She founded eFrog Press in 2011.