chelseagirl's shiftlog

Wow, I can't believe it's been a month since I last posted! Life has been really busy - over the last four weeks I've spent hours on the phone telling people about the magazine, more hours meeting people, showing them sample mags and trying to persuade them that mine will be much better, and a whole week putting together editorial and adverts - and after all that my magazine has now been published and I've even managed to make a very small profit from it! I ended up with 16 advertisers in the first issue and so much local editorial that the only pages I included that the main company supplied were the puzzles and a charity event feature that they requested everyone ran. Everything else was local interest stuff - event previews and reviews, news and interviews. More

I'm about a week into my new career now (as it was half term last week so i took a couple of days out to spend with the children) and it's going slowly, but reasonably successfully so far.Although my background is in publishing it's been more on the admin side so sales has always been my big worry - how would I sell any advertising space? I must have made dozens of phone calls over the last week and have had such a range of responses from people, from very positive interest in what I'm doing to out and out rudeness! Getting through the door has proved to be the hardest part - as soon as I mention advertising on the phone 8 out of ten people lost all interest. I did get a couple of appointments booked last week and found that, when people knew I was coming and knew what I was doing, they were really happy to talk to me and very interested in being part of my magazine - and out of two visits I booked two ads on long term contracts! More

I've actually made a little bit of a head start by selling my first advert!! I made a few introductory calls and set up a couple of meetings and the very first one yielded me a quarter page ad for the first six issues. A great start, but I'm going to need plenty more like that to make this profitable. More

I was toying with the idea of setting up my own Virtual Assistant service working from home, and had even got as far as designing a website .... but then I went to the One Life Live exhibition in London and everything suddenly fell into place. More

So there you have it, my background in a paragraph. There's a bit of a theme there ..... media and cleaning .... and if you ever see my house you'll see that cleaning isn't my strong point!! More

Come with me on an adventure - I'm about to embark on an exciting journey, begin a new chapter in my life - which, to be honest, has had its fair share of changes already! More