Work Better, Not Harder

Sometimes I take things for granted. For instance, while many have been adapting to working alone, I've been happy as a pig in sh*t. You might think this is because I've been working at home for 15 years, so I'm used to it. Sure, that's part of it. But... I don't always work alone even though I'm at home. A recent comment in MyRevenueRoom reminded me that working at home has never been lonely for me. And it's because of the telephone. One of my best friends lives in rural Saskatchewan. We used to work for the same company, me in Toronto and Danielle in Regina. Our 25-year friendship has always been based on phone calls. Now we both do marketing work from home, sometimes collaborating, and we continue to talk (sometimes for hours) almost every day. And we're not just chit-chatting (although there's some of that) - we work together as if we share an office. Danielle might say, "What do you think of this idea?" and I might say, "What if ...

We're all getting inundated with COVID emails - yes - but I'm glad the companies I do business with are paying attention and communicating their plans. I need to know that my web host and other service providers are taking action to be able to continue to operate. I am glad that local restaurants (Finbars, for example) have staff volunteers willing to help those in need. I'm comforted to know that we're all paying attention. During this time, most business owners are struggling with what to stop doing, what to start doing, and what to keep doing. Communication is more important now. Let's not stop but rather be mindful. Here are 3 reasons why business owners need to keep communicating: #1. To let your customers know you're running business-as-usual or... not. Many bricks-and-mortar businesses are closed, offering pick-up or delivery, or open for limited hours. Even people who work at home (like me) are susceptible to illness and need a back-up plan. ...

If you're feeling - like I am - that you need to get focused for the next quarter, perhaps my list of planned activities below will be helpful. Business development: Continuing to refresh and work a business plan is a top priority, but sometimes it can get lost in the daily grind. I have several activities I'm keeping alive and making progress on by using a simple project management tool (Trello). I recommend reading The Phone Lady's post with advice about how to reach your revenue goals this year. Website refresh and audit: It's a good idea to do an audit of your website quarterly. It's even better if you pay or beg someone else to do it for you - they will see things you won't. Over the summer I've been working with Alison Knott on a brand refresh that you'll see roll out in September. A full audit will be part of that process. Masterminding: This continues to be an important road to business development and growth for me and my company....

Did you know that a third to a half of the total time spent working on marketing implementation projects is spent communicating with clients? That communication usually takes the form of informing, consulting, decision-making and tracking action items. Depending on the scope, it may also include educating and training. That's a lot of communication! And it may be why price quotes are higher than you expect. Effective communication is absolutely essential to pulling off any marketing project successfully. Planning and budgeting for that communication are also essential. You want to work with creatives who will guide you through the process without wasting your time or theirs , who will ask for feedback frequently, who will skillfully mine your ideas and apply them to the project. I  want to work with clients who aren't concerned with hurting my feelings , who will tell me when they don't like something. No one can solve a problem they don't know exists. No on...

(Guest post by Mike Tanner) I recently (like, earlier today) had the pleasure of speaking to a room full of close to 50 people on a topic near and dear to my heart: podcasting. Now I’m not going to sit here and give you a recap of that talk. If you want the VERY basic details you can find them on my website but you’ll never recapture the magic that we all shared in that room that day... Instead, I’d like to talk about three questions that I was asked during the talk and how they relate to running your own business, podcasting or otherwise. How Much Do You Charge Someone To Sponsor a Podcast? Pricing is complicated. It’s a fact. Ask anyone who does consulting or coaching or training or anything where there’s not a defined cost or supply and demand issue, and they will tell you that pricing is one of the most difficult things to figure out. Whether you’re trying to figure out how to price your course or how much to charge for web copy or how much to charge a sponsor to be a...

Guest post by Frances Leary Every business of every size needs a platform that gives it a voice. Social media is just that. It gives every organization, large and small, a voice to share its information, inspiration, products, and services with the world. However, if businesses are only listening to their own voices, it’s like giving a sermon. People can only listen to a sermon for so long. Eventually, they don’t want to listen anymore. Imagine this scenario: You’ve been told you need to “be on social media.” So, you find some content to post and you use an automation tool to get it out there consistently. And then to yourself, you say, “Whew, that’s done. Now I don’t have to deal with social media for a while.” The result? There you are, standing behind your online lectern, giving an unending sermon to an audience of your very-soon-to-be-disengaged potential customers and clients. You just keep on talking. Eventually, they stop listening. It’s like giving a ...

Have you ever sent an email you regretted as soon as you hit Send? There can't be many who haven't felt that in their gut at some time or other, including me. Facts are perfect for email communication; feelings are not. ( Tweet This! ) This is particularly important when it comes to our business communication. While I haven't been completely successful in curbing this tendency, the thing that works best for me is to keep myself from hitting that Send button until the next day . Most often, a cooler head prevails and I end up deleting the draft instead of sending. But there's catharsis in the rant. Rant privately (not on Facebook), then cool off. This is one time I'm asking you NOT to use email.  Emails are not conversations. Click to Tweet this Article

Sometimes it's hard to give honest feedback, especially if it's negative. After all, the other person worked hard to create something and their feelings might be hurt. But the work is just not 'right', and may even be horribly wrong. What do you do? Be honest , and give good direction about what you don't like and what you'd like to see instead. And what if you don't exactly know what you'd like instead? Be honest about that, too. When discussing this with a new client recently, she said, "No bricks between friends." That saying came from her Irish grandmother, Annie, and the wisdom can certainly be applied to our business relationships, too. Communication, by any of the many options available, takes time and costs money. But we are not saving time by withholding critical feedback. Here are two scenarios that might happen if we do: Later in the project, for example, a website, it becomes evident that the work is not pleasing. And l...

Don't you love it when you try something new and it turns out super successful? How about something like getting 41 new subscribers in an hour? Yes, that is possible for small businesses - I watched it happen this morning. East Coast Scares , aka Carnival of Terror, is ramping up for Halloween 2018. This team has been hosting haunted houses in the Halifax area since 1994 and has a loyal fanbase. It makes sense that most of their fans are using Facebook - their Facebook page has almost 2000 likes! But for 24 years they've never had a way to communicate directly with their fans, to give them info about their schedule, location changes, and even ask for volunteers. Until now. Now Carnival of Terror can send messages directly to subscribed fans via Facebook Messenger. No MailChimp or iContact, no complicated subscription forms - just a simple chatbot. When they're ready to start scaring people in October, their fans will know when and where to find them. (And they...

There are many bad newsletters out there... I'm sure you'll agree. In particular, many not-for-profit and charitable organizations lack the time and skills to craft exciting newsletter content. Sometimes it's from lack of strategy - not knowing what they can and want to achieve with a regular newsletter - and how to implement their strategy. I get a little thrill when I hit SEND on a particularly good newsletter, one that I know will deliver value to its readers. I like being a small part of that success. That's why I love working with Dartmouth Learning Network on their quarterly newsletter. Executive Director Alison O'Handley knows exactly what she wants to achieve: Our newsletter helps us to remind our community about the good work we do, and the knowledge and expertise we have to share. It is an extension of our brand and, as such, it is a tool to foster existing and build new relationships. DLN's email newsletter is a communications tool, chock fu...

This email message below arrived in my inbox shortly after sending out my weekly small business event listing (for Halifax, Nova Scotia) . I love it when instant blog posts arrive by email. Hello Linda I've been getting emails from you for a couple of years and, sorry to say, I've always ignored them. Here are two reasons: 1— your subject line is boring. I get lots of emails like these but only open the ones with an interesting subject, e.g. "How to fight your phone fear" or "Learn web design in our latest WordPress meet-up." 2— There is no website that collects these items in an easy to scan format. As a WordPress developer I can set you up with a terrific visual calendar that can easily talk to your personal appointment book. We can talk about improving your business any time. It was a well-intentioned message; here was my response: The subject line is boring on purpose - you can easily ignore it if you're not interested in knowing about events...

Imagine this happened to you earlier today... You chatted on the phone for two hours with one of your favourite customers . You both laughed a lot and enjoyed catching up. It had been a while since you had a relaxed conversation with her. You're smiling as you hang up the phone. Then reality strikes. A quick check of the time and your to-do list confirms you've lost control of your day. Your smile fades. You aren't feeling as cheery as you did a few minutes before. Now you'll have to hustle and compromise the rest of the day. And that's not the worst impact. Your favourite customer is in exactly the same situation. She hung up smiling, too, but quickly realized the impact on her day. (I suspect this story may ring true for some of my customers.) Here are a couple of things I try to remember to do so a friendly chat doesn't go too far off track: Jot down on paper a short list of points to cover during the call. I can use it as a reminder to brin...

How long did you think about the subject line of that email you just sent to your brand new client? Will they be interested or excited to open it? Or will they leave it sitting unopened, floating closer to the bottom of their inbox? I've discovered a little quirk. In fact, it feels more like a secret I shouldn't acknowledge, maybe even a tad manipulative. It didn't start out that way but now I know what I know... well, I can't un-know it. Here it is. If I send an email to any of my work friends with the words 'no rush' in the subject line, it's likely to get opened faster than any other email I send them. Of course, this may not work any longer once my friends read this article. But let me be clear, I've never used that knowledge to manipulate. And that's why it works. When I send an email with 'no rush' in the subject line, I really mean there's nothing inside requiring their attention soon. Usually it's a business idea in ...

When I see double quotes wrapped around a couple of words or a small phrase, I immediately think of Sheldon's air quotes from The Big Bang Theory and the emotion that comes to mind is sarcasm . I absolutely know this is the case for many people - one small impact of popular culture. Now, if you are a writer and intend sarcasm, leveraging this thinking pattern might be a great way to make your point - as long as all of your readers are familiar with "Sheldon quotes". On the other hand, if sarcasm is not your intent, using double quotes might completely derail your intended message. Readers can't see if we actually hold up our hands and tweak our fingers, or if we just think it in our heads, or if we didn't mean sarcasm at all. This is another way text communication can be flat, leading to miscommunication . Yet we don't want to start inserting emojis into our business communication (or at least some of us don't). Why did we all start using so m...

It's been 3 years since CASL came into effect in Canada and the grace period ends on July 1, 2017 . I know, it's an icky subject but I want to keep you informed. There's a lot to know but I'll keep this really brief. Here are the two most important things you need to know about CASL right now. First, if you own a business and use email for business, every email sent is governed by CASL. It has nothing to do with the application you use, or how many people you send to at a time. Many business people seem to think CASL doesn't apply to them. It definitely does! Second, the good news. Even though CASL applies to your email communication, unless you have many thousands of subscribers, you're unlikely to ever garner enough attention to warrant an investigation by the CRTC. There is possibly some new legislation coming that will allow civil cases although I have a hard time imagining the grounds for any such cases. For some businesses, such as mine, it'...

It's that year - the Canadian Anti Spam Legislation comes fully info effect on July 1, 2017. Wait, before you roll your eyes and click away, read the next paragraph. The average small business in Canada has nowhere near the list size to trigger an investigation under CASL. And the reality is most small businesses aren't yet CASL-compliant... and that probably includes yours (and even mine). There's no need to get alarmed. Here are the 4 most obvious ways businesses aren't yet fully compliant. #1. Subscription process is missing a description of what content the subscriber can expect to receive and how often You don't want to be misleading and you also can't be too vague. Simply "Sign up for my newsletter!" is not good enough. Besides, you want a killer call-to-action ; it makes good sense regardless of CASL. Offering a free download? If you plan to add the contact to your regular mailing list, you still need to say that. #2. Maili...

Not everyone is a 'visual' person, by preference or physical circumstances. But many are, which is why you can't ignore graphics as an important piece of your content. Can I convince you? Today we are exposed to about five times more information daily than we were in the mid-1980s - around 34 gigabytes of information, roughly equivalent to 174 newspapers. Out of necessity, our attention spans have become shorter as we attempt to process information faster. Over 50% of the human brain is devoted to processing visual information, and 70% of our sensory receptors are contained in our eyes. This means people are good at processing and remembering pictures . In fact, it only takes the average person one-tenth of a second to understand the content in a picture. It would take that same person over 30 seconds to read a description about the content in that same picture… over 300 times longer. Since 2007, graphic content on the internet has increased by almost 10,000%! We h...

If you Google " CASL and charities " (in Canada), you'll find lots of reading on the subject. I'm not going to repeat all that here but rather give a quick snapshot of how CASL (Canadian Anti-Spam Legislation) impacts charities. CASL applies to 'commercial electronic messages'. This means that most (but not all) communications sent from charities are completely exempt from the requirements as they wouldn't be considered 'commercial'. Soliciting donations is okey dokey, as long as the charitable donation # is included. Things to be careful about ( may void the exemption): paid advertisements (funders/sponsors might be a grey area) promoting programs/courses "offering services to individuals who may benefit, where there is a cost-recovery element (for materials, for example)" internal job advertisements (because there's a commercial aspect, this may also be a grey area) Even if a message is not exempt, it ...

For small business owners, nurturing long term relationships is critical, so keeping in touch with past customers to encourage them to return is a worthwhile activity. Dentists have been doing it for years with their cute cartoon postcards reminding us to book our next check-up. It's time to take that process online and use our bulk email application to automate it. And we can apply it to more than patients. While this process can be handled exactingly by a workflow app, you don't need the expensive software to make it work for you. One of our long time clients, HealthWalks Shoe Store and Orthotic Clinic in New Glasgow, NS, has been sending reminders by email for a few years now. Here's how it works... Initially I created the template based on a postcard HealthWalks had been mailing to customers one year after receiving their orthotics. Now, each month I receive a list of contacts who have just passed the anniversary date of when they received their orthotic...

If your ideal customer is new to social media, your autoresponder messages might be creeping them out. At one time I had this vision of some big guy hunched over his keyboard poised to pounce on my 'Follow'. If your ideal customer is more tech savvy, they'll recognize an autoresponder immediately. (Really? You expect me to interact with a program?) I liken autoresponders on social media to email spammers . Both are giving their medium a bum rap. A recent Twitter following spree on my part resulted in 16 automated tweets (close to 10% of those I followed). At least I think they were autoresponders. There's the rub. Even if you take time to respond to people individually, now they may assume it's an autoresponder. The legitimacy of your action is lost in the sea of spammers. photo by wnstn / Flickr Click to Tweet this Article