I've got this special coaching blog going, and have been advertising in magazines and on craigslist. Where do I get all my clients from? Nearly all of them have been people who read this blog.

I would have never expected that, because, well, I'm not exactly professional when I write here. But I guess y'all love me anyway ;)

So in case there are any more of you lurking out there who are interested in the free month offer but too shy to write, I do have a few more spots left, and would be thrilled to fill them up. So even if you don't think you'd be a good client or can't afford to continue after a month or whatever, I encourage you to give it a try :)

While I would of course like paying clients, I could also just use the practice. Its really hard to keep a full roster in this economy.

As discussed, business is slow right now, so I'm putting out an offer of 1 month free coaching if any of you all are interested. Its free 45 minutes of personal attention every week to talk about whatever is on your mind, from someone who is trained in being helpful. A good deal, seriously! ;)

The pursuits we partake in take on lives of their own.

I call this Ideological Materialism. It can be playing soccer, belly dancing, yoga, solving math puzzles, or knitting. With most things we do in life, there is always room for improvement.

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This is cutting through Ideological Materialism. Realizing that meditation, or belly dance, or cross-country running, are not ends until themselves, but tools for helping you be the person you want to be.

When you remember that they're tools, they lose their grip on you, and you can tell your teacher, and yourself, that the amount of practice you get from going to class once/week is plenty, and you really don't need to practice anymore on your own at home.

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Now that I'm studying up on business marketing, I'm really starting to a huge value in Linked In!

I never saw the value of making connections before, because I dismissed it as nepotism: why go with what someone I meets recommends when the best resource is probably not directly connected to my network?

I've learned that there are some things which that is true for: when someone is relating a perspective on diet, you can often find studies and facts on the internet which that person isn't knowledgeable enough to have taken into account.

But when it comes to the personal services industries, it really is all about recommendations. People can advertise all they want on the internet, but that doesn't tell you that much about how they actually conduct themselves as a life coach, for example. Friends, or people who know you, or have used your services, are the ones who can tell someone: "yes, this person really is good."

Also, personal trainers or life coaches can only take a small number of clients. So there's no go to person who can coach everyone. So its not like Amazon where you can read seventy reviews of a book. The best approximation is what the few people who you have worked with say about you, and someone has to clue them in about your existence to begin with.

The big thing I'm taking away from the business coaching I've gotten is that for small businesses like coaching, networking is a key to success.

Its happening naturally for me as I meet people when doing business related research. I'm learning how to do it in the blog world.

I've been busy over the past couple of days reaching out to friends on linkedIn, so that I can let my friends know when I go live with my coaching blog. In the process, I'm reviewing my friends' profiles, and making mental bookmarks of who I know that has specialties that other people I meet are likely to be interested in.

I've started collecting business cards, and have met people who I'd like to keep in my network -- a really cool personal trainer comes to mind -- but the one time when I was called from someone off of craigslist who I wanted to refer, I wasn't organized enough to pull up my resource in time.

With linkedIn its like having lots of business cards, except that I can't lose them, and there are actually descriptions of what people do and links that I can easily forward.