Work Better, Not Harder

My good friend and business collaborator, Anita Kirkbride , has been doing keynotes recently about how to embrace being #flawsome . It's a hard lesson for someone like me with perfectionistic tendencies. But around mid-May, I made a conscious decision to let a few things suffer so that others could flourish. Here's one of the things that suffered: Fewer people read my blog. That tells me my own marketing is working when I'm maintaining it. I know exactly what happened: I wrote fewer posts and one of the scheduling apps I use conked out for 2 weeks. (Thank you, Google, for continuing to send readers.) I decided to live with it because other things, like Social Media Day Halifax 2019 , were more important. And yes, I felt a bit guilty because I teach this stuff and setting an example is important. No one ever said running a small business is easy. Sometimes we have to make tough choices... and move on. And really, while seeing my blog readership increase instead ...

Social Media Day Halifax 2019 was an amazing day of learning and networking. I've been spending hours on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram reliving the day through other people's posts... laughing, crying, and feeling the love. ( Cue the angles... er... angels singing. ) There is so much I want to write about but, oddly enough, first I'm going to write about one of the sessions I didn't get to attend - Mike Tanner's Beyond The Mic: The Real Work of Podcasting . Here's the thing - Mike recorded his session and posted it to his podcast (the same day!) Mike talks about starting a podcast in the same way I talk about starting a newsletter... What's the best way? What do you want to do? What can you do? Taking on too much can be a quick path to failure. If you can figure out how to fit it into your regular activities, you'll have more success. It's an important message for all of our small business activities. I encourage you to li...

Change is a wonderful thing - it keeps life interesting. It allows our businesses to evolve and do better. When we can plan and drive change successfully, it can be very rewarding. Then there's the change that's forced on us. You know, like when your website hosting company goes belly up. Or your PC dies at an inconvenient time, precipitating an unplanned but long-thought-about change to Mac . Or when the bulk email application you've been using for 10 years keeps dumping functionality that you and your clients need. (OK that last one is me.) Forced change is rarely pleasant and it's hard to get excited about how things will be better when we're buried in the work of making the change. And, of course, it never happens at a convenient time! Managing risks can be complicated. I wish I had acted sooner. I'd like to think I'll learn from this experience and act sooner next time. Procrastination is sometimes convenient, and sometimes worthwhile, b...

What's a goal of business blogging that will never be a goal of email marketing? Search engine optimization (SEO), of course. For email, it's all about subject line optimization . (Is SLO a 'thing'?) Crafting a compelling email subject line can achieve better and more immediate results than writing a whole blog post that is well optimized for SEO. After 9 years, over 600 blog posts, and more than a thousand email newsletters, here is what I know to be true: email beats blogging hands down for tangible and measurable results... faster . Writing for your newsletter means writing for people , which is way more fun than writing for search engines , whether it's your blog or your whole website. You don't have to be concerned with tediously repeating keywords and phrases, for one thing. Sure, your email newsletter may include your blog posts. And it should... because your newsletter will get people reading and clicking through to your website much faster ...