Work Better, Not Harder

"What will I write about this week?" Wouldn't it be great if content ideas popped into your head just when you need them? (Cue the light bulb!) You’ll find the best content ideas amid your daily business activities – but you have to be alert for them... and jot them down. For example, let’s say you… have a discussion with a customer or prospect. Content ideas: a success story, answer a question, describe a service/product, define why you're different, an anecdote, how to solve a problem, local news. receive an inquiry by phone or on Facebook. Content ideas: FAQ, describe a service/product, benefits and features. learn something new . Content ideas: teach your fans, describe the learning process, give a review/opinion, share the source. find a quote you love on Twitter. Content ideas: why you like it, how it's relevant to what you do. do some online research . Content ideas: share what you found, how you found it, what it means to your readers. try...

Over the last 10 years or so I've built close to 100 websites and landing pages. In the olden days, clients would send me Word docs with the text for each page. I would add the pages, insert the text, and insist on a call-to-action for the bottom of each page . Sometimes those CTAs were different and sometimes they were all the same. Often they included wishy-washy words, like 'feel free', and asked people to 'get in touch'. Last fall when I was rebuilding my own website , my WordPress mentor asked, "What do you really want people to do on your website?" I opened my mouth... and realized I didn't really know the answer. How did I want people to get in touch? Who did I want contacting me? I started with what I didn't want. Receiving unexpected phone calls during the day can cause havoc with my workload and lead to mistakes. And sometimes I work nights and sleep mornings. The getting-in-touch part couldn't be by a spontaneous ph...

Consider how likely you would be to open/read articles with these titles: How to Be a Politician Small Business Marketing Healthy Foods for Everyone Dressing for Work The Benefits of Travel How to Find Any Job How to Be a Millionaire Nothing much exciting... been there, done that. How useful can any of those articles be? First, it would take a really hefty article to cover any of these topics well, and still, it wouldn't be enough. Each of these topics has too much detail to cover in a useful way. Much like we talk about finding a niche for our business, if we apply this to our articles they will be more concise and useful, will draw a more specific readership suited to our business. Also, if we're hoping people will find us through search, broad topics like these won't put us on page one... they've already been done over and over. Think about it like an apple tree. Instead of writing about the whole tree, pick only one apple to write about. Narro...

Do you enjoy doing your own marketing? The answer has a big impact on how successful you will be at it. Stop and consider: Do you like doing marketing work? Do you have the needed skills? Are you good at it, really? Is what you're doing yielding desired results? No? Beware. Negativity and stress will rain all over your marketing activities, dampening your results. It can be daunting to give up control and money for marketing help. I do marketing for clients, charities and myself... and I still hire experts for my own marketing. I'm happy to get fresh and creative input from other pros. And I've learned I'm much better at other people's marketing than my own. In recent months, I've had marketing help from eleven different people. Some was consulting, some training, but a fair bit was doing things I do for my own clients. Even though I love marketing, I still delegate. Instead of trying to convince you it will be a good thing, how about a li...

When I teach marketing courses, the group eventually tires of seeing this list come up on the screen in every class: Build relationships, community Grow your reputation, sphere of influence Be seen as an expert Share valuable info, products, services Increase your social media following Give value to your customers, prospects and colleagues on a regular basis Get found - SEO The items on this list are key reasons for publishing a blog or newsletter . Yes, of course, the ultimate goal is sometimes - but not always - an increase in sales. The problem is, you (and me) can't meet all the goals on that list at the same time. We'd become unfocused and demotivated. So I 'force' these small business folk to pick only two goals  to focus on. Last week I noted the two goals each person called out as we went around the room. I added my own two goals, as well, to round the group off at a dozen. Seven of us chose #2 - growing our reputation - as one of our two ...

I like to joke that I'm a great example of how someone who can't write can still have success with a blog . The fact is, in my past career I did a lot of writing: job descriptions, standard operating procedures, workflows, and reports of all kinds for all levels. And I had to un-learn every bit of it for blogging. None of it prepared me, other than good grammar. I had to learn to stop using words of many syllables ending in 'ion'... like implementation and clarification. All that un-learning didn't help me be a better writer. Writing , and watching how others' wrote on their blogs, and paying attention to readers' responses - those things help me be a better blog writer. I'm still not a great writer. But being a better writer isn't why I write. Writing is the absolute best tool I can use to share important info that my target market needs to know. Click to Tweet this Article

Since when does being busy have to be a bad thing? It's easy to find articles about how to avoid busy-work and how not to wear 'busy' as a badge. My first inkling that 'busy' isn't always good came in the form of a phone call from my (at-the-time) boss. We worked at different locations and he asked how things were going. My answer included the word 'busy' and he said, "Linda, you shouldn't be complaining." At the time the business group I worked in was weathering a period of slow business, and things had just started to pick up. To me, being busy was really a good thing and I was (failing at) sharing our good news. That was over 20 years ago but it stuck with me. Now I'm a small business owner and I don't feel any different. Why is being busy shameful? And why can't we wear our busyness like a badge of honour? When I'm busy, I'm making money - what could be better than that? It's a big part of why I work. ...

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...

There are many marketing benefits to regular blogging or writing for a newsletter. But other - perhaps more important - benefits may not be clear until after you've been doing it a while. Regardless of how much you know, sooner or later you're going to need to do a little online research. Does that article you just wrote really include all the important facts or items? Especially for checklist type articles, you want to make sure to include everything relevant. An item missed from a list of items to take camping in the winter could have dire consequences, not the least of which is your reputation. Does your article agree or disagree with others' advice or information? Finding other references that support your message is good - you can grab quotes or link to it. Finding others who disagree is important if there are a lot of them - you may need to justify your message in that context. Do you know the latest developments in your industry or affecting your target ...

"Everybody knows who you are. How do you know so many people?" I hear it every so often... and my answer is really easy. It's not because I'm such a charming person. It's absolutely because my name shows up in their inbox every single week. The thing is, people don't know me - they know of me, whether they open my emails or not. (Or even if they think my subject lines are boring .) Repetition and consistency do pay off but, by their nature, the results take time . There is no shortcut, so start now. Click to Tweet this Article

There have been many good things about moving my website to a WordPress platform late last fall. And there have been a few frustrating things. I'd been doing a pretty good job of ignoring some of those frustrating things until I received an email from Google Search Console with the subject line:  Increase in "404" pages on daleyprogress.com . Oh no! That sounded pretty ominous. The accompanying graph was even more so. Here's the backstory: all my website links changed with the move . Previously my pages all ended with '.html' and now that's truncated. There's a plug-in for redirecting when people click on an old link out there somewhere, so I set that up for every current page. I also had to move several documents and files hosted on my old site to the new one, and then go change all those links on my various blog posts about them. Tedious, painful work but I thought I had it handled. It turned out I was so very wrong. These '404 errors...

Looking for a unique and easy content idea for your blog or newsletter? It will even improve your networking at the next event you attend. Think of a survey question where the answers of many people will give you market insight . Make sure: The results will be useful to you in understanding your market. The results will be interesting to your readers, and perhaps be useful to them, as well. The question is simple and can be articulated easily in a networking setting. The possible answers are easy to record so you can tally them up later. Here are some examples: I might ask, "How often do you send out a regular email newsletter?" My article might be something like: 45% of Small Business Owners Surveyed Don't Send Out Newsletters , with the results of the research (and how it was gathered) within. A health coach might ask, "How many times during a week do you skip breakfast?" His article might be something like: Skipping Breakfast is Rampant Among ...

(guest post by Corinne Boudreau) The reason you as a business owner or leader should care about copyright is that it protects your intellectual assets, which are an important piece of growing and scaling your business. Think licensing, franchising and creating an online brand. The points below summarize the main things to understand on copyright: What is copyright? - Copyright is the legal ownership and right to copy and reproduce "works" as these are defined in the Copyright Act, a Canada wide piece of legislation. Works include literary, dramatic, musical, artistic and products of digital technology. Literary works include books but also websites, blog posts, presentations and proposals. Fixed and Original - The creation must be in a fixed, tangible format to be protected (not an idea), and must be original and not copied. Timeframe - A work is protected on its creation in a fixed, tangible format and lasts for the life of the author plus 50 years. After that...

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...

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...