Quora


A website devoted to answering people’s questions on a variety of subjects. The twist with Quora is that it allows you to interact with others on the site and develop relationships while also giving a sense of fun. Two reasons to use it: to build your expertise and to get answers to questions. Click here to try it out.

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This Useful Process Helps You Teach with Your Writing

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If you do any amount of training or facilitating work with customers, you may already be familiar with adult learning models. Teachers use them to prepare insightful learning experiences. The one I'm familiar with is Kolb's Experiential Learning Cycle but there are others equally useful: Learning can start at any stage in the cycle: Concrete experience - encounter a new experience or reinterpret an existing experience Reflective observation - reflect on an experience from a personal perspective Abstract conceptualization - form new ideas (or revise existing ideas) based on reflection Active experimentation - apply new ideas to surroundings, test for changes in the next experience The next time you sit down to write an article intended to teach, consider following this process. Pick the most obvious stage at which to start for the topic you have in mind. Work your way through the cycle, perhaps having a paragraph or two for each stage. Your writing will fl...
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This is Why People Who Subscribe Don't Get Your Stuff

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You work hard to attract new subscribers who find value in what you're offering. Someone makes a decision to sign up to your mailing list expecting to receive that great value and... they don't hear a thing from you. I'm not talking about businesses who have sign up forms yet never send a thing - that's a different blog post (and hopefully that's not you). Delivering your precious content to your fans has always been a challenge - what with spam filters, corporate gateways, and then trying to stand out in the inbox. What you may not have realized is that Google has become society's censor, whether you use it yourself or not. Google decides what gmail users see in their inbox , and what gets (sometimes arbitrarily) moved to the promotions folder - out of sight, out of mind. Even if you want to receive newsletters from your clients, or get this week's sales at the mall, Google may decide you don't. This is interfering with: satisfying your subsc...
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Why and How to Do a Wrap-up Article

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A wrap-up article is a logical and unique grouping of pieces of content where the grouping provides value to the reader beyond the individual pieces on their own. You might think of it like a themed gift basket. There are several reasons we need to be creating these wrap-up articles. They... serve as a great resource - valuable information grouped together use commonly searched keywords and phrases (good SEO) encourage deeper reading are often faster to create provide a process to repurpose past content remind us of what we've written and provide inspiration to write more Wrap-up articles serve us better than just about any other content we might create. Of course, we have to be creating content on a  regular basis  to be able to wrap it up. There are lots of different ways to group pieces of content : by topic - e.g. content idea generation, writing tips by use - e.g. how-to, conceptual, tips by thing - e.g. infographics, videos by user - e.g. for begi...
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Oh, Look! There Goes My Goal

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I don't need to tell you how hard it is to stay focused. And that's why it's so important to have goals that we can refer to that will keep us on track. Goals are sometimes quite removed from our daily activities. Once they're determined , a strategy is built around them. And then plans are made to execute the strategy. Next plans are broken down into action items and finally, we do or delegate specific tasks. When we're in "task mode" our goals may be completely out of mind. That's not a bad thing... as long as we're doing the things we planned to implement the strategy that will achieve our goals. Deviating from our plans is where we can get into trouble , and one way that happens is called "scope creep". That's a project management term - what is running a small business if not an ever-evolving project? Scope creep can happen accidentally but also "on purpose" and we need to be cautious of either. It's ea...
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REAL Twitter Users Don't Schedule Tweets

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PHOOEY on that, I say! I’m tired of hearing that to use Twitter ‘properly’ you have to be there to have conversations. Apparently some people have no problem being there 16 hours a day. Those are the Twitter divas… the ones who look down their noses at the rest of us who can only spare a half hour a day from our busy schedules to have these deep conversations. They’re also the people who have found a way to make money by being on Twitter. Or they’re unemployed and have nothing better to do with their time? Anyone with a REAL job surely can’t spare all that time. These Twitter divas assume that the rest of us are there for the same reasons they are. And if we’re not, maybe we’re supposed to be somewhere else? See, not everyone I want to connect with is on Twitter during that specific half hour I can spend there every day. Even if I spend 2 half hours, I’m still not going to reach very many people. Let’s get real. How many people can you have deep conversations with in a half hour ...
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Little Things Can Have a Big Impact on Your Business Success

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Seth Godin's post today -  We’re still clueless about lifetime value - got me thinking, as his posts usually do. (Take a minute to read it.) I love his line, "Torrents are made of drips." He's referring to the long-term impact of small, seemingly inconsequential, actions - like when I have to call Netfirms three times before I get a resolution to a domain problem. That company will never get my referrals for website hosting, even though I get asked regularly for referrals to good website hosting companies. That's not business lost - it's business they'll never get... but could have. Now think of the website hosting company that I do refer people to - SiteGround Hosting Ltd. (aff) . I have sent them 8 referrals in the last 6 months. And I bet some of those people have gone on to refer SiteGround, or will. Those people will refer more people, and so on. By treating me well in every interaction I've had with them, they've earned my loyalty...
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How to Build an Audience (Almost) Instantly

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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...
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Prove by Deeds, not Reasons

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Intentions don’t make a bit of difference. It’s perceptions that matter. Intentions can get us motivated and keep us honest. But those things are about us, not the other person. The other person often doesn’t know or care about our intentions. My intention might be to do an excellent job. If there’s a spelling error, that intention won’t mean a thing. The perception will be of a sloppy job. Having good intentions is, well, good. But they only point us in the right direction. Intentions need to be translated into actions that ‘walk the talk’. Demonstrating our intentions is the only way to influence others’ perceptions. “In art, intentions are not sufficient and, as we say in Spanish, love must be proved by deeds and not by reasons. What one does is what counts and not what one had the intention of doing.” - Pablo Picasso - Intentions might pave the way but success in business is all about perception. Click to Tweet this Article Originally published in Work Better,...
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The Biggest Mistake You Can Make in Your Small Business Newsletter

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It happened again today. I am blown away by how often I see this particular mistake. I received an email newsletter from a business I wasn't familiar with. That's OK but I wanted to go to their website to investigate more. And there was not one link in that newsletter that went to their website! Granted, there are times when you may not want to distract readers from another goal for your email. But a newsletter is definitely a place where you want to encourage click-throughs to your website. There's a very direct correlation between the amount of text, the number of links available to click, and your click-rate - the more links, the more clicks . There are many ways to insert links to your website into your small business newsletter. Here are a few suggestions. Insert links behind images. ☺ Always insert a link to your Home page behind every iteration of your logo. ☺ If your photo appears in your newsletter, link it to your About page. ☺ Behind product/ser...
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Blog Posting Frequency

There are many reasons to blog for business so it is important to determine what your goals are with a business blog. A blog is the same as any other business process. You need to determine your end goal and plan a strategy that gets you there. For those of you blogging to gain new customers, here is an interesting statistic from a  hubspot  survey they shared in a recent webinar. 100% of those blogging multiple times a day received a new customer contact through their blog. 90% of those blogging daily will achieve the same result. However, when you go out to those blogging weekly, only 58% received a customer and out at monthly blog updates it drops to 13%. This does not mean that a business blog cannot serve multiple purposes but it does show that if your primary goal is to gain new customers, blogging has to be a commitment in terms of content relevance, frequency and promotion through social media tools.   Click to Tweet this Article
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