The Women’s President’s Organization (WPO) doesn’t consider itself a networking group but rather a group that offers useful programs to its members, including seminars, podcasts, meetings and conferences.  The Women’s President’s Organization is made up of an elite group of female entrepreneurs.  To become a member, the applicant’s company must have a minimum revenue of $1 million for a service company or$2 million for a consumer products company.

There are currently 75 WPO chapters throughout the United States and Canada and over 1,000 members.  New chapters are in the works with international chapters coming to Saudi Arabia and the United Kingdom.  The first international chapter is already operating in Peru.

You can follow the link to read about the member benefits of the WPO.  It sounds like an interesting organization for successful female entrepreneurs.  What do you think?

This week I joined the growing team of business writers at Corporate-Eye.com.  The goal of Corporate Eye is to provide information from business experts to help readers gain insight into best practices related to corporate communications. 

Stop by when you get a chance and read some of the great content, including my first three posts:

Branding in the Spotlight: What is Branding?

Branding in the Spotlight: How to Develop a Brand

The 6 Hats of a Chief Brand Officer (CBO)

Martha Stewart’s “Dreamers into Doers” contest is on for the second year in a row.  If you turned a hobby into a business or nonprofit, then you could win $10,000, a vacation at a Wyndham Resort and a trip to New York City to appear on the “Martha Stewart Show”.  Ten finalists will also get $1,000 each as well as a 1-week vacation to Puerto Rico.

All you have to do to enter is write a 250-word essay describing how you turned a hobby into a career, and submit your entry by July 11, 2008.

You can get all the details by following the link to the Martha Stewart contest page.  You can enter or nominate a friend through the contest web page.

Good luck!

I’m back from vacation and back to blogging!  Time for another round of Women’s Words Weekly where I take a look at what businesswomen bloggers were talking about during the previous week.

First, I’d like to highlight two posts I wrote for the new blog I’m helping to author - Corporate Eye - Branding in the Spotlight - What is Branding? and Branding in the Spotlight: How to Develop a Brand which give some basic information about what a brand is and how to begin creating your brand image, message and promise.

Donna Marie Coles Johnson of Indie Business Blog brings us Wow I Coulda Had a VA where she interviews virtual assistant Ginger Derrickson.  Have you used a virtual assistant?  It’s a great option!

Traci Anderson at My Happy Place Designs gives us PhpBay Review: Add eBay Auctions to Your Blog/Website with PhpBay Pro where she tells us how to add an eBay store to your blog with the new phpBay Pro plug-in for Wordpress.

Kelly Phillips Erb of TaxGirl asks How Much is Your Mother Worth? where she challenges the value of intangible labor, specifically - motherhood.

Shannon Cherry at Start Up Spark gives us Success Secrets: Marley Majcher where she provides an audio interview with the owner of The Party Goddess, one of the top catering businesses in Los Angeles, California.

I received an email about an interesting webcast that’s coming up later this month.  Aquent is hosting a free webcast, Web Design for ROI - How Design Impacts the Bottom Line, on Thursday, May 22nd at 1:00 (Eastern). 

The webcast will explain how:

• Design effectively for different types of Web pages
• Increase Web sales/leads 
• Increase overall site effectiveness
• Change your company’s perceptions of Web design

The webcast will be hosted by Lance Loveday and Sandra Niehaus from Closed Loop Marketing and will explain how design directly impacts your bottom line; identify which elements have the greatest impact on Web page effectiveness; and provide a practical, how-to approach to Web design.

You can follow the link to register for the Web Design for ROI webcast.

Today on Women On Business, I’m happy to welcome guest blogger Jacquelyn Butler of JackiesBizBlog.com who brings us the following guest post, “Raising Entrepreneurial Children.”

I recently was reading a post on a forum about raising children to be entrepreneurs and I was grateful for the fact, that I, myself as a parent do NOT want to raise my child to think that she has to go and work for the Corporate world in order to make a living.

For those of us who were not raised to be independent from working outside the home, we now have that opportunity to mold our children into thinking for themselves and living their lives passionately and freely to do whatever it is they are set out to do. Educate them not only through school or what is right or wrong, but educate them to actually live their lives free from 9-5, time away from family and the morning commute. Continue reading »

Ever since I left the corporate world in 2004 to be a stay-at-home mom to my triplets, I’ve wondered something.  It’s not rocket science.  In fact, this thought seems so simple to me, so obvious and makes such sense that it’s beyond my comprehension why more companies haven’t considered it.  Ready for my genius?  Here you go:

Why don’t more companies hire stay-at-home moms as consultants, freelancers or as telecommuting employees?  Many of us have an enormous amount of experience and knowledge in our respective fields garnered from our years working prior to choosing to stay at home with our children, and if you let us work from home and make our own hours, we’ll probably be willing to work for a lot less money and produce superior results.

What?  Mr. CEO says that he needs employees who are available to be in the office during business hours.  I call bull! 

What?  Mr. CEO says that he can’t trust someone with kids around to complete work on time.  I call major bull!

I could go on and on with the arguments against hiring stay-at-home moms to take on management and executive roles in companies from the comfort of their own homes, but I’d have a counterargument for every single one of them.  It just makes sense to leverage the knowledge and experience of these women.  What an incredible, untapped talent pool!

And I’m not talking about hiring assistants and customer service representatives here.  I’m talking about hiring experts in their fields.  The women who left their careers by choice when they were working in management and executive level positions in order to be at home with their children.  Most of these women are very capabable of meeting the needs of a corporate position around their duties at home if given the opportunity to telecommute with a flexible schedule.  I work until 2:00 or 3:00 in the morning many nights each week to complete the necessary work for my business - the business I started to meet my unconventional schedule but that I run professionally and successfully despite my odd hours.  Imagine what a corporation could get from me or other women like me if they let go of their traditional ways of thinking that work has to be done in the office during conventional business hours.

So again I ask, why aren’t more companies noticing this pool of talent available to them at a lower than expected price if they were willing to make some concessions in terms of telecommuting and scheduling?  I just don’t get it.

Of course, there are some companies who are catching on.  Check out this article from the Wall Street Journal to learn the details.  It seems to me that the companies who tap into this pool of talent sooner rather than later will position themsevles quite well in the short and long term.

What do you think?

If you agree, please Digg this post, Stumble it, write about it and link to it.  Do anything you can think of to spread the word!

Small and medium-sized business owners might not know how to get celebrity endorsements for their products, services or companies.  I read a great article today on WomenEntrepreneur.com by Margie Zable Fisher, president of Zable Fisher Public Relations and author of the Do-It-Yourself Public Relations Kit that explains how anyone can get celebrities to endorse their products by using five simple tips.

In her article, Margie suggests you do the following to secure celebrity endorsements:

1. Send free samples.
2. If you see an opportunity, grab it.
3. Just ask.
4. Barter.
5. Donate to the celebrity’s charity.

You can read all of Margie’s suggestions in her complete article, You Can Get Celebrity Endorsements.  It’s enlightening and makes you realize that it securing a celebrity endorsement doesn’t have to seem unattainable.

Time for another round of Women’s Words Weekly where I take a look at what businesswomen bloggers were talking about during the previous week.  Sorry for the delay this week.  I had some Wordpress issues that put me behind schedule!

Lahle Wolfe of About.com’s Women in Business gives us Job Fields Business Women are Dominating In and it’s not a pretty picture when it comes to bridging the gender gap.

Roberta Rosenberg of The Copywriting Maven tells us that Copywriters Aren’t the Only Ones Getting Dissed - a great look at marketing professions that are underpaid.

Shai Coggins of Just Make Money Online shares How to Get Focused Traffic to Your Blog - great tips you can use on your business or personal blog.

All I can say is, “Wow.”  Check out this info from MomsRising.org, a website dedicated to workplace discrimination issues:

Yesterday, the Senate failed to pass the Fair Pay Act, which would allow women to demand equal pay for equal work. Senator McCain (R-AZ), who didn’t even come to vote, said that instead of legislation allowing them to demand equal pay, women simply need “education and training.” Not only is his information wrong — women still are all too often paid less for the same work, even though they have the same education and training — he’s also sending a message to our nation, to our sons and daughters, that this pay gap is okay, and it’s women’s fault for being paid less.

So to send a message to Congress, and specifically Senator McCain, [women are signing] this petition for Fair Pay and sending Senator McCain their resumes — to show that women have plenty of education, what we need is Fair Pay. You should send yours too!

http://www.momsrising.org/fairpaymccain

Don’t worry if you don’t have your resume perfected — you can just write a quick note.Women now make up 58% of college graduates and nearly half of the labor force, but still earn less pay for the same work as men. Worse yet, mothers only make 73 cents to a man’s dollar, for the exact same job. College graduate, high school graduate, law school diploma, nursing degree, whatever your training; women should make equal pay for equal work. Don’t you agree?

Unbelievable.  How could Senator McCain make such an ignorant comment?  It’s incredibly insulting and demonstrates the problem quite clearly.  Let’s try to make a difference by signing the online petition at MomsRising.org.  You can also paste your resume or include a bio outlining your credentials along with your petition submission.  If you can’t get the petition to submit with your resume pasted into the provided box, you can delete the resume text, and your petition submission should go through fine without it.  Then you can email your resume separately to resumes@momsrising.org.

It just takes a second to sign the petition.  Go do it now …. here’s the link again, http://www.momsrising.org/fairpaymccain.

Hat tip to Kristen King at BizChicksRule.com for this one! 

You can read more about the Senate vote and John McCain’s comments in the following articles:

Republican Senators Block Pay Discrimination Measure (New York Times)

McCain Opposes Equal Pay Bill in Senate (Associated Press)

And I just wrote about the gender gap in pay on Women On Business: Women Make 77 Cents for Each Dollar Men Make in the U.S.