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15 Ways to Zig When You Want to Zag

November 14, 2013 by Rosemary 5 Comments

When you woke up this morning, did you grab your robe, shuffle to the kitchen, and press the Brew button? (Mine was a Starbucks Verona K-cup.)

How to zig when you want to zag

Most people spend their entire lives in that same state of semi-aware robot sameness. They do the same thing every day, say the same things, write the same things, look the same way.

And then they expect something to change.

They’re stuck.

My suggestion is: zig when you want to zag.

  1. Have tea tomorrow morning instead of coffee.
  2. Wear an acid green shirt.
  3. Drive a different route to work (or hitch a ride with a colleague).
  4. If you always write about marketing, write a post about neuropsychology or ant farming.
  5. Practice a new response to “how are you?” Instead of “fine, how are you,” what if you said, “I’m FANtastic!”
  6. Floss tomorrow.
  7. If you’ve been afraid to submit a guest post to your favorite blog, just do it.
  8. When you normally would say “no thank you” to something, go for it and say “sure, thanks!”
  9. Go for a full day without typing minimizing words in any emails (like “just” or “sorry”).
  10. Have lunch at a place you’ve never been.
  11. Have you become afraid of talking on the phone? Call three clients out of the blue.
  12. Mail a handwritten thank you note to someone.
  13. If you have a habit of checking email first thing in the morning, wait until noon.
  14. Pick a new habit to incorporate into your routine (listen to this awesome podcast from Michael Hyatt for some help with that).
  15. Choose one task you need to get done, and ask someone for help with it.

Get unstuck. Out of the rut.

Things will change if you change them.

The Successful-Blog community is here to help. What can we help you get unstuck from?

Author’s Bio: Rosemary O’Neill is an insightful spirit who works for social strata — a top ten company to work for on the Internet . Check out the Social Strata blog. You can find Rosemary on Google+ and on Twitter as @rhogroupee

Photo Credit: purplemattfish via Compfight cc

Filed Under: Checklists, Inside-Out Thinking, Motivation, Successful Blog Tagged With: bc, inspiration, Motivation, Productivity

How to Avoid the 6 Most Common Business Blogging Mistakes

August 23, 2013 by Rosemary 7 Comments

By Landon Lourell

If you have your own business, then you’ll definitely want to make sure that you use all of the tools available to you in so that you can reach as wide an audience as possible and start building up a platform. One of the most powerful platform building tools out there today is blogging.

Before you jump in and unleash your first blog on the business world, you’ll want to make sure that you’re doing it the right way. Put your excitement to the side for just a moment and do some research to see what makes a blog popular and what makes a blog a complete waste of time for you and your audience. There are six mistakes in particular that a majority of bloggers seem to make that can tarnish your business blog.

1. Neglecting to Include a Bio

It doesn’t matter how magnificent, insightful and informative your blog posts are, readers want to know who you are and what kind of business you have. Be sure that you have a full ABOUT US page somewhere on your blog, preferably in a location that’s easy for readers to see. On the ABOUT US page, include a bio and either a picture of you if you’re the sole proprietor of your business, or a picture of you and your staff. Doing this allows your readers to connect with you and your business instead of you just being a faceless, nameless blog.

You should also be sure that you have either your name or the name of your business prominently on your blog. The header is one of the best spots for this. By including your name in the header, you’ll make it easier for search engines to find you and your awesome blog posts. Your name and the name of your business are your brand, always remember that.

2. Lack of Contact Information

Think of what it’s like reading one of the best blog posts you’ve ever read and wanting to get in touch with the author only to find no sign of contact information. Readers shouldn’t have to spend time going over your blog with a digital fine-tooth comb trying to find an email address, website address or phone number where they can reach you or a representative of your business. You never know how many valuable business connections you can make with your blog, but you won’t make any at all if no one can reach you. Be sure to add contact information on your ABOUT US page.

3. Lack of Information About Your Services

Let readers know what type of services you offer. Be as specific as possible when describing your services, so that you don’t confuse anyone and make sure that your blog posts are relevant to the kinds of service you offer and the industry that you’re in. You’ll get a lot of raised eyebrows if you’re an economist writing blog posts about how to put antique cars together.

Your blog should be a place where you share information, interact with your audience/potential customers, and offer free tips. Readers don’t want to feel like they’re reading a sales ad for your business every time they visit your blog. There’s nothing wrong with a plug here and there, but focus more on giving than getting.

4. Having Too Many Blogs

There’s no need for you to have multiple blogs if you have multiple services; all that does is give you more posts and things to write about on the one blog that you have. If you decide to have multiple business blogs, one or more of them is sure to be neglected. Some blogging platforms give you the option of having more than one page for your blog where you can post about different subject areas. Readers don’t want to have to bookmark all three of your business blogs when it’s better and easier for the both of you for you to just have one blog. If your readers receive an email notification every time you post a new blog and you update all of your blogs on the same day, you’ll clutter up their inbox, which is a huge no-no.

5. Not Including a Link to Your Website

Be sure that you include a link to your business website on your blog. Think of your blog as another chapter in your novel. Give your readers a table of contents so they know exactly where to go when they’re in need of a certain type of information. With links, you’ll want to be careful that you don’t have too many of them as this can potentially scare readers off. In today’s fast paced world where most people have a short attention span, who has the time or the desire to click through ten different links? Besides a link to your business website, include links to any articles or guest blog posts that you’ve written or that your business is mentioned in.

6. Making Commenting All But Impossible

Making readers jump through a variety of hoops just to leave a comment will more than likely frustrate them and cause them to abandon the whole thing. When you get a sizeable audience, you might have to be more diligent about keeping out spambots, but in the beginning you don’t really have to worry about them too much.

While these are the most common blunders to avoid on your business blog, a few more you’ll want to avoid include filling your blog with unnecessary graphics, having long load times for your blog and blogging inconsistently. Have fun with your blog and make it your own, but make sure that you have a few ground rules in place before you start.

What are some of the most glaring errors and missteps that you’ve noticed on other blogs, business or otherwise?

Author’s Bio: Landon Lourell is a marketing associate with MonsterDisplays, an online source for trade show displays. Landon is passionate about all things business marketing related and enjoys sharing his knowledge with others through blogging.

Filed Under: Blog Basics, Checklists, Successful Blog, Writing Tagged With: bc, business-blogging, commenting., Content

How to Get Customers to Open Your Email

July 30, 2013 by Rosemary 3 Comments

By Mark Saghy

Email is, has, and continues to be, one of the best ways to retain customers. It reminds them you’re still around. It reminds them they need to purchase something from you that they may otherwise forget about. It is often the single greatest way to highlight a new product, promote a new brand, or inform about an upcoming sale or event.

How to get your email opened

A person’s inbox is, for many, a sacred space; for most of us, we check it daily, hourly, or even more frequently than that. The advent of smartphones makes it impossibly easy to stay connected to our flow of email coming through.

Despite the benefits, sending your customers an email can be a very sharp double-edged sword. With the increased ease of email use and access can often come a heightened sense of intolerance about the amount of business or advertising that flows through it.

Even with your most dedicated and loyal customers, there is a fine line between informing them and annoying them. One extra email, one unhelpful or confusing title, one tiny mistake noticed at an otherwise bad time, and bam–that customer has deleted the email without even opening it, or worse–they have permanently unsubscribed from your mailing list.

Here are some ways to keep that to a minimum, while encouraging customers to open as much of your email as possible.

Remember the Value of Quality over Quantity

Clearly, one of the best ways to lose customers is to inundate them with email. Again, a customer’s inbox is their personal space; they don’t want it being tied up with marketing campaign after marketing campaign. Unless the customer has specifically requested to receive a particular quantity of email from your company, it’s pretty safe to assume that you should pick and choose your battles very carefully when sending out a message. Consider the following:

  • Think about why you are emailing-is it a friendly “hello”, or do you have very important news you feel your customers would like to know?
  • When was the last time you sent an email out, and why? Is your message informing them of something new or exciting, or has business slowed down a bit, prompting you to send out a communication?
  • The last time you sent an email, did you check the number of mailing subscribers afterwards, to see if you lost any? If you did, how many did you lose, and what percentage of the total was that?

Each of these questions should be analyzed, a clear answer formulated, and those answers compared with one another. This should typically be done before every email you send out. Remember, you want to focus on the quality of emails being sent, while also keeping a close eye on the quantity emailed over a period of time. Even the best-crafted emails will start being ignored if you send too many of them.

Personalize

No matter how far we have advanced technologically, some of the basic tenets of sales and customer service still apply to the business world today. Even though email cannot create the same kind of in-person relationship that a brick-and-mortar store can have, you can still try to recreate a perceived sense of a personal relationship with your customer. Done right, this can still be one of your most important retention tools.

One great way to help personalize emails is simply to use names. “Dear Customer” is one way to ensure the customer knows you don’t care enough to address them by name-even if their name is sitting right there in your mailing list database. Why not use “Dear Shirley” instead? It’s a simple fix and, presuming there is indeed a database of names, it can be computer automated.

Furthermore, consider having a name in the “from” portion of the email, too. Rather than yourcompany@yourcompany.com, consider using “Paul D. in Sales” or “Maggie, yourcompany.com’s VP”. In addition to encouraging the customer to open the email, doing this makes it sound more personal, more relatable, and less like a standard form letter-even if you send this same exact email to hundreds of your customers.

Keep It Simple, Keep It Clear

People are busier than ever before, and as such, people are more connected to their inboxes than ever before. Mostly gone are the days of walking out of the office and leaving that world behind until the next morning; for many of us, we are expected or required to maintain email communication with our jobs, no matter where we are-including a the dinner table, while traveling, or while watching our kid’s baseball game. Therefore, it is arguably more important than ever to keep the emails you send your customers as simple, clear, and effective as humanly possible.

You will need to use a little bit of psychology here: instead of thinking about the message from your company’s perspective, consider it from the customer’s point of view. Answer the one very important question your customer is often thinking when staring at your email: “why should I open this?” Whatever you want the answer to be, make that the primary focus of the message.

  • Want to pitch a new product? Make the title pop, give as little background information as is needed in the intro, then pitch that product immediately.
  • Upcoming sale? Make sure the customer knows it within the first few seconds of reading.
  • Just checking in to say hi and keep in touch? Do it quickly; skip the fluff.

Keep your email as short as you can, and get your point across in as few words as possible. After you have composed your email, a great way to edit it for clarity is to go back and remove anything that isn’t absolutely relevant or necessary. When possible, bring in a second set of eyes to help with editing and whittling down the language.

Want to share some of your best email tips? Do you have a favorite subject line?

Author’s Bio: Mark Saghy is a marketing executive at ExhibitDeal.com. He is constantly learning and finds joy in sharing his knowledge with the blogging world. You can find him on Google +.

Image credit: http://us.stocklib.com

Filed Under: Checklists, Marketing /Sales / Social Media, Successful Blog Tagged With: bc, Content, email marketing, Writing

4 Key Time Management Tips for Even the Busiest Business Owner

July 19, 2013 by Rosemary Leave a Comment

By Jennifer Dunn

Owning your own business is amazing, but there are times when it’s practically a nightmare. Sometimes it gets so hard you just want to give up and go back to a 9 to 5. This usually comes after you’ve tried and tried to catch up on tasks but can’t seem to find any time to keep your head above water, much less actually get ahead.

It doesn’t have to be like this! With a few simple tips you can turn your frazzled brain into a relaxed center of productivity. Don’t give up on your entrepreneurial dreams just yet – check out the following tips and see if any of them can help you.

Get Organized

This seems like an obvious thing to say, but it’s an important point to make nonetheless. Most business owners waste so much time searching around their office, store, or home for a paper or object that should’ve been properly stored away (think: tax time). Eventually you’ll waste so much time on this that other tasks fall to the wayside as you struggle to keep up.

Get an organizational process in place for whatever’s driving you nuts – for example, receipts should all go into a folder so you can find them easily. Alternatively you can use a service like Shoeboxed to digitize receipts for super easy retrieval. Are you always searching for files on your computer? Create a digital filing system. Do you spend hours resetting your passwords? Check out a password management system like LastPass.

Once you have this organization in place, keep it up! Don’t let it slip or you’ll go right back into your old habits.

Don’t Multitask

If you want to get more things done, common sense tells you should just do more things at once. This way you get done with tasks quicker, right? In fact, the evidence says otherwise – multitasking does more harm than good.

It’s all about spending energy – if you give 33% to three tasks, they may not turn out any better than if you spent 100% on one thing at a time. If something gets messed up, you just have to start over again anyway. Learn how to tackle one thing at a time properly so you don’t spread yourself thin. Welcome to “unitasking.”

Get Apps to Help

Tired of doing everything yourself? You may not be able to hire any help, but you can certainly afford to acquire some robots to aid you. Oh, you don’t have a connection to someone at a robotics factory? Then settle for the next best thing and grab some apps.

Whether you have a smartphone, a tablet, or laptop, there are hundreds of applications (and other software) you can grab to help you do simple tasks that eat up your time. Whether it’s financial tracking, task management, shopping lists, or a thousand other things, there’s a way to streamline it.

Step Away

Another bit of “common sense” that can get you into hot water is attempting to power through a task that’s driving you nuts. Once you get into the habit of doing everything yourself you tend to want to get it all out of the way as quickly as you can. However, like multitasking, this can actually do more harm than good.

Instead, take a nice break once in a while. Go outside, take a walk, play a game, read a book, or just stare at the wall – as long as it’s not about work. This break can not only give you a nice physical stretch it can free up your brain to come up with solutions to your problems quickly.

What are your time management tips for time strapped business owners?

Author’s Bio: Jennifer Escalona Dunn is the owner of Social Street Media where she writes about small business, tech and finance for sites like WePay and Outright. You can find her on Twitter @jennescalona.

Filed Under: Business Life, Checklists, Productivity, Successful Blog Tagged With: bc, Productivity, small business, time-management

10 Step Half-Year Blog Checkup – How YOU Doin?

June 6, 2013 by Rosemary Leave a Comment

It’s almost the halfway point of 2013–time to take stock and make sure you’re putting your best foot forward. Remember those shiny dreams and goals you came up with in January?

To quote my favorite Friend, Joey, “how YOU doin?”

Let’s find out by running through 10 quick checkpoints. There’s still the whole second half of the year to do a course correction and kick butt.

10 Step Half-Year Blog Checkup

  1. Go into your Google Analytics and find your most popular post. Use that as a jumping off point for more content. Update the topic, do a “part two,” or simply re-promote it via your social channels. You might be able to get more juice out of it.
  2. Run a poll or send an email to get feedback from your readers about what they need. Use the results to guide your writing for the rest of the year.
  3. Make sure you are up to date with your software and plugins. When’s the last time you updated your WordPress? Are there better plug-ins you could be using? Do you need to renew any licences?
  4. Check current best practices for your sidebar, ads, and extra content. Is it time to delete some of those old conference badges, test removing your social profiles, or add a promo for your new e-book? There’s a great blog/community review video at Live Your Legend.
  5. Do you need to update your logo, tag line, or branding? When is the last time you refreshed your graphics?
  6. Is your editorial calendar set for the rest of the year? You don’t have to have a headline for every day of the week, but it might be good to sit down and come up with broad topic areas for each week or even each month. You’ll be sitting pretty if you feed your stockpile of headline ideas at the same time. How is your blog draft “slush pile?”
  7. Check in with your goals from the beginning of the year. How have you done? Do you need to make any course corrections? Pat yourself on the back if you’ve checked any big goals off the list already. It’s so important to take time to celebrate your wins. If there’s something on the goal list that you haven’t accomplished, think about whether it was a good goal to begin with.
  8. Update your social sharing tools and make sure you’re taking full advantage of new developments. All of the major social networks have undergone major changes since January. There are now verified Pinterest pages for your business, Facebook has changed its cover photo policy to allow more text, and Twitter now has interactive “cards” available to embed in blog posts. Have you looked at List.ly yet?
  9. Get up to speed on disclosure regulations. Are you compliant? It might be time to take a moment and read the updated FTC guidelines.
  10. Is your mobile experience optimized? Check your Google Analytics again and note how much of your audience is reading your blog on a mobile device. My guess is that it’s a big chunk! Take time to ensure that your site is mobile-ready.

Let’s use the rest of 2013 to inspire each other to success!

Author’s Bio: Rosemary O’Neill is an insightful spirit who works for social strata — a top ten company to work for on the Internet . Check out the Social Strata blog. You can find Rosemary on Google+ and on Twitter as @rhogroupee

Filed Under: Blog Review, Checklists, Strategy/Analysis Tagged With: bc, Blog Review, goals, strategy

3 Tips for More Customer Referrals

April 30, 2013 by Rosemary Leave a Comment

By Jennifer Dunn

You need more clients, but what’s the easiest way to get them? Simple – through clients you’ve already done business with! However, what isn’t simple is obtaining customer referrals when you don’t know how to go about it. Here are three things you can do to ensure you’ll get a great referral at the end of a job.

1. Knock Their Socks Off

There’s absolutely no way you will get a referral from your client if you don’t do the job they wanted correctly. Would you give a carpenter a referral if they only fixed 3/4 of your floor? Of course not – it would severely hurt your reputation as a business owner and as someone to be trusted.

Make sure you’re doing absolutely everything your client wanted you to do. You may think you’ve completed a job but later discover you forgot a few things. These “few things” can be disastrous – not only to your chances of a referral but also to the client ever knocking on your door again.

2. Follow Up

Most jobs end when the client pays and you go your separate ways. The work is done and the client goes to see if what you’ve done will improve their business, life, or both. You go and try to find someone else to hire you so you can keep paying the bills.

However, that’s not really the end of it all, is it? The client doesn’t really know if what you’ve done has worked until it’s been road-tested. If you’ve created a new front page for their website, they could experience severe backlash to it even though it’s amazing. Their customers might rail against it for a myriad of reasons and you don’t know until it’s out there.

If you follow up with your client, it shows you’re actively invested in their business and not just a passing face in the crowd. Ask them how things are going and if they need any further help. If you see some interesting news they could use, send it along. It shows you care about them and your relationship with them, which can lead to good things down the road.

3. Ask and Offer Incentives

Your client probably has no clue you would like a referral. You can’t just assume they can read your mind no matter how heavily you hint. You just need to come out and ask.

Timing is key, though. If you haven’t completed the above two steps don’t even think about asking your client to refer you to his or her colleagues. On the other hand, waiting too long can be just as bad. The client may not even remember you if you wait half a year to contact them about it!

Sometimes incentives can do the trick. For example, offer your client a discount for the next job they need done if they refer a friend or two. If they’re a repeat client and they regularly bring in more work you can up the ante even more. Rewarding them for maintaining a good relationship with your company is never a bad thing!

Do you regularly ask for client referrals? How do you do it?

Author’s Bio: Jennifer Escalona Dunn is the owner of Social Street Media where she writes about small business, tech and finance for sites like WePay and Outright. You can find her on Twitter @jennescalona.

Filed Under: Business Life, Checklists, Customer Think, Marketing /Sales / Social Media, Successful Blog Tagged With: bc, customer-service, marketing, referrals

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