Work Better, Not Harder

Just because you can Google something doesn’t make you an expert. (I just love those Realtor ads!) That line is so true of anything that involves skill and talent. Recently I learned how true it is of audio recording and voice overs when I had the pleasure of a coaching session with voice actor Natasha Marchewka . I didn't think it would be too hard to make my little recording, but I was a bit nervous when I arrived at Natasha's place. We started by making a recording to use as a baseline. Then Natasha coached me about how to improve my delivery - posture, breathing, intonation and so on. Finally I did 3 more recordings. Those last recordings were so much more difficult than the first one. I was hyper aware of all the things I needed to be doing as I spoke, sounding ‘natural’ being one of them. Here are a few things I learned: Talking in person is way easier than talking into a microphone, at least for me. It’s hard to use my hands and get expressive when my mouth is

*** Click to listen in rather than read Are you confident about your voice? Even an experienced and articulate business person can use help with their presentation skills and could be speaking and communicating in a way that may be hindering their professional image. As a follow-up to my “Adding Audio to Your Content” blogs, Part 1  and Part 2 , I had the privilege of offering Presentation Skills Coaching to Linda Daley of Daley Progress. We took our blog theme of producing audio content one step further to help Linda add audio to her own webpage. What needed to happen before recording her audio was coaching on the presentation of the script she had provided. To Linda’s credit, she easefully recorded the first take of her script as a starting point. You can hear in her opening attempt, that she is reading from a page and that she doesn’t sound as passionate about her script as she probably feels. Listen to the take without any voice coaching. During the initial recording, I cre

The reason for adding a subscriber's name as a form field to your messages is to make a closer connection with them. So what happens when you get something like "Dear {Subscriber}" ? The exact opposite, right? Unless you're prepared to spend time maintaining your mailing list, I usually recommend not to use form fields to insert subscribers' names into emails. First you have to get the name. Asking for a subscriber's name on your sign-up form is possible, but also not a good practice because the more info you ask for at sign-up, the less likely people will be to sign up . You could, instead, use another tactic to get the name of your subscriber. This is an example that came at the top of an email from Swiss Chalet: The only thing wrong with this is it arrived 5 days after Mother's Day. Click to Tweet this Article

Inspiring quotes about getting inspired – no better place to start when stumped. You can simply read this article, but I'd like you to grab a pen now and start a running list of content ideas for your blog or newsletter. Each of these suggestions can be accomplished in just minutes! “I think I'm a born storyteller. Inspiration is all around me. I can read a newspaper article and come up with an idea for a book.”  - Jackie Collins #1. Grab a newspaper, or find one online, and start reading. Scan the headlines for inspiration – a topic, concept or how-to that you can adapt to suit your target market. "Adults are always asking little kids what they want to be when they grow up because they're looking for ideas."  - Paula Poundstone #2. Look at what you do from the perspective of today's children.  What is the future - of your industry, products/services, target market - that they can look forward to in 10 years, or 20 years? Use your imagination and h

UPDATE Dec-9-18: LinkedIn no longer allows exporting of your contact's email addresses. Are you still confused about what ‘consent’ means under the Canadian Anti Spam Legislation (CASL)? There are mixed messages as to whether it’s OK to add your LinkedIn contacts to your mailing list. And there’s a reason for that – it’s only OK in certain circumstances. First, if you sell only to consumers, stop now. You need express consent, so the rest of this article doesn’t apply to you. Implied consent is relevant for businesses that sell to other businesses. There are three key requirements for implied consent: The contact’s email address has been ' published conspicuously ' and has no disclaimer that they do not accept commercial electronic messages. The message you are sending is relevant to their job at the company they work for. (Example: You can email a university professor to sell her textbooks, but not clothes.) There is an unsubscribe mechanism so the recipie

Are you struggling when you sit down to write? Do those first couple of sentences elude you? Recently I learned a powerful technique for dealing with this dilemma. During a coaching session on writing with Neil Everton , I was asking him for help with closing my articles. Neil directed me back to the top of the examples I had brought and suggested we start at the beginning. You want your reader to nod and think “yes” , Neil told me. That first sentence needs to connect with the reader and bring them along for the rest of the article. One way to do this is to ask a question, as I did at the start of this article. Whether it’s a question or a statement, try to elicit feelings about the topic and empathize with the reader’s situation. Did I also figure out my endings? I learned that getting the beginning right made writing the closing so much easier. I simply need to answer that opening question. When you're stumped at the start, write out the question or problem that you w

Want to get people to read more than one post when they get to your blog? There's one tactic that's worked great for me and it's really pretty simple. After you write your article and before you publish it, review it looking for opportunities to add links to past posts. You will see at least one example in this article once I've finished it. Ideally, you'll have several go-to articles for important topics in your industry. You may even want to save these links in a Word doc or Evernote, or use them as a resource page on your website . Once you have written a few hundred posts , it'll be harder to keep track of in the back of your mind. These go-to articles should themselves have more links to other posts. And so you encourage deeper reading . This really doesn't take very long and you will see the impact on  your statistics  very quickly. Aside from starting to use this tactic now, you can benefit by: making a list of your go-to posts for easy