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Why You Should Have Three Months of Blog Posts Waiting
I read somewhere that anyone serious about blogging should have three months worth of blog posts waiting – written, ready to go. I think I read that idea and filed it for future reference. Then the future came, and it became now, and I wished I’d headed that suggestion.
I was merrily blogging along, writing articles for Ezine about marketing, planning my newly revised Art of Social Networking book and another new book for a fall launch. Then BAM! Life got busy. Not just a little busy, but where did today go? And yesterday? I was in the thick of a project, and barely had time to eat, much less blog. I had to force myself not to work on Sundays; my carpal tunnel symptoms were kicking up thanks to too much typing.
Well here I am, back from two weeks crunching away at a deadline. The deadline was met and now we wait. And in the meantime, I’m seriously considering working on those three months of blog posts.
Having a few weeks, if not months, of content at the ready makes good sense for the small business owner using content marketing strategies and SEO blogging and article marketing to attract clients to a website. If your primary source of marketing is your content, then not posting for a while can really hurt your marketing efforts. People were just beginning to look forward to your posts and suddenly they stopped. Sort of like when I find a new television show to like and they cancel it unexpectedly. I’m just starting to think of Tuesday nights at 9 as my ‘date’ with the show and BAM they start showing reruns of something else.
Here are some ideas to create your backup file of blog and article posts:
- When you write one juicy blog or article, write two. If you find a topic that readers really seem to respond to, can you break it into two pieces instead of one? File the second away for a rainy day.
- Collate your content. Make a spreadsheet and list your best blog posts, articles, videos and whatever else you share as part of your online marketing strategy. Then when you find yourself beset by illness, looming deadlines or an emergency, do a ‘best of’ series on your platform. Schedule posts with a brief into and a link into your ‘best of’ piece. You’re still in touch with your audience, and you’re giving them content that perhaps they haven’t seen yet.
- Mark an hour per week on your calendar and schedule writing time. Then, use that time wisely, creating not just new content but backup content, too.
Make a plan. Illness, emergencies, and sudden deadlines all happen unexpectedly. If you have backup content, you won’t lose the momentum your previous marketing efforts gained.
Make the Most of What You Have
One of my favorite sayings is “bloom where you’re planted,” and I think you can tell from the images I’ve chosen for my website that I love to garden. The reason I love this saying, however, is that for me, it means to make the most of what you have. And for you, entrepreneurs, micro business owners and small business owners, that’s an essential part of your marketing success.
Most entrepreneurs, micro businesses and small businesses have limited or no marketing budget at all – but they’re the ones who are hungriest for customers. Many enter competitive business fields without the capital to properly promote their companies. Every bit of capital must repay shareholder loans, or go towards buying new products, or pay salaries. It’s a tough situation to be in.
But you have talents, my friends, and they can be used to promote your business. My own particular blend of talents lean towards writing and speaking. I harness those talents to promote my work by writing frequently about marketing, from blog posts like this one to articles, books and more. I teach marketing through my free audio recordings (podcasts) on Blog Talk Radio as well as in teleseminars, public lectures and seminars and private seminars for clients.
I’m not very skilled at graphic design. Perhaps if I was, I would create gorgeous brochures and sales sheets. I don’t own a video camera and probably wouldn’t know how to work one if I did. It took me a few years to get really comfortable with my professional-grade digital camera.
I make the most of what I have. I have a talent for writing and find it easy to write. Not everyone does. I have a talent for speaking. I told a friend today the story of how a former boss literally pushed me on stage in a ball room at a company-wide meeting to present a new marketing program. I stood and spoke extemporaneously before 250 colleagues for 10 minutes and got a standing ovation when I was done. Okay, so maybe the marketing brochure got the ovation. The point is that I was nervous but okay doing that. Many of you reading this would rather be burned at the stake then speak in front of anyone, let alone speak without preparation before 250 people, but I’m an actress at heart. I can do that.
Bloom where you are planted. Use what talents you have as your starting point. Know where you’re strong and where you are weak. Fill the weak spots with people who are strong in that area. If you have no head for figures, don’t try to keep your own books. You’re likely to make a big fat mess. Hire an accountant. If you can’t write, for goodness sake hire me or another professional copywriter to write your website. And so on and so on….
Make the most of what you have. Plant your seeds, and bloom where you are planted.
(C) 2012 by Jeanne Grunert, president, Seven Oaks Consulting. Visit our website and learn more about my marketing writing, SEO writing, consulting and teaching about all things related to direct and internet marketing.
Things They Don’t Teach You in Business School: Curiosity
Among the things they don’t teach you in business school, curiosity is one of those attributes that’s so important to my business success that I wonder sometimes how it could possibly be taught. I cite curiosity as one of the reasons for my success in life. I watch children of my acquaintance grow up to be adults, and those who were curious as children end up being go-getters in life.
Why? Why is curiosity so important to business?
- Curious people ask HOW. They aren’t content with just getting something done. When they flip on a light switch, they want to know HOW the light bulb works. Others just turn on the light and go on their way. Curious people turn on the light and wonder “How does this work…?”
- Curious people RESEARCH. They want to know the answers. They aren’t content with what their teachers tell them. They investigate and research. And that leads them into new pathways, until they’re saturated with knowledge and far ahead of their incurious neighbors.
- Curious people LEARN. They love to learn. They remember facts and tuck them away for future reference. Woe to anyone who plays Trivial Pursuit against the curious….
- Curious people never cease to wonder. Wonder forms their lives and their attitudes towards life. They wonder why, how, when and where. They wonder what will happen if you put peanut butter and chocolate together. And that is how great inventions are made.
Be curious. Don’t settle for less. Wonder why. Investigate. Don’t just ask someone the answer. Research it yourself. Be curious.
Five Social Networking Tips
Use these five social networking tips to improve your ability to communicate, engage, and attract clients and customers using the major social networking websites. Take a deep breath, because it’s not too hard, and it won’t take a lot of time. I promise. I don’t have a lot of time, either, but I use these tips almost daily and the result is a steady stream of new people joining my social networking circles, new potential customers, and business leads. Try these five social networking tips today!
- Check your social networking profiles, particularly on the “big four”: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Pinterest. Is your message consistent, or are you putting a difference spin on each network? Don’t be two-faced! Make sure you are consistent in how you describe yourself and your business on each network.
- Schedule 15 minutes per day to check each network. Yikes! But you promised me this wouldn’t take a lot of time! Yes, but like the Lottery slogan says, “You’ve got to be in it to win it.” You can put some social networking stuff on auto pilot using tools like Social Oomph and Hoot Suite. But you can’t put them all on auto pilot or it defeats the purpose of social networking – networking, making friends, helping people get to know, like and trust you. If you can’t devote 15 minutes to each, then rotate them. On Mondays, spend 15 minutes in the morning and 15 minutes in the evening on two social networking sites; Tuesday, visit another, and so on.
- Interact with people! I don’t like it when people connect with me on sites such as Facebook then just post picture after picture of some cause they feel passionate about. I might agree with their causes or perspective, but just posting things like that is not what social networking is about (and it won’t help you get new clients.) Interact with people. Ask them how their day is going. Give them words of encouragement. Be a positive force in their life and be rigorously honest and sincere.
- Avoid pumping out links to products, events and the like with nothing else to say. Be judicious about what you say and to whom. Don’t send blast event invitations out to something that is local. Why should I care about your wine tasting event in California if I live in Virginia? It’s unlikely I can go.
- Make an idea file for social media shares. That’s right – an idea file. See a great article about your area of expertise? Start a bookmark folder on your computer and bookmark it so you can share it later. Jot down ideas and quotes you love in a notebook. Keep the information handy so you can share it later.
If your social networking tasks feel like a chore, trying these five social networking tips. You don’t need to spend hours and hours per day on social networking, but a little bit of time invested into any marketing activity helps it be successful.
Connect, share, and remember – what you share stays out there. Don’t say ANYTHING you don’t want everyone in your business, personal or family communities to read.
I keep in mind my friend”s wise words when she said, “I typically have a young child on my lap when I check Facebook. If it’s not something you would want my five year old to see, DON’T SHARE IT.”
Happy posting and pinning!
PS: I am broadcasting live on Blog Talk Radio today at 2pm with my new “Five Minute Marketing Tips.” Just fifteen minutes of informal podcasting, hanging out here in the offices of Seven Oaks and chatting about ideas for your business. Can’t catch it live? Listen to the recording at no charge any time you like. Link to the podcast is in the margin of our website or follow us on Blog Talk Radio.
Five Minute Marketing Tip: First Things First
I had the best intentions when I walked into the office this morning. I had a nice to-do list, my white board was updated, I was fortified with coffee and relaxed from a fun Sunday afternoon. I turned on my computer and glanced down the to-do list. Item #1 seemed like a quick, simple project and so I decided to just take care of it quickly while waiting for my emails to load so I could knock it off fast and work on a project I’d set aside most of today to tackle.
I began working on Item #1. Within 10 minutes it turned out that Item #1 was NOT a simple task – at least not today. It turned into two hours of telephone calls, website checks, more phone calls, people needed to be briefed, tons of frustration and more problems begetting more problems, and so on. I wanted to scream, cry, strangle someone and dive head first into the plate of chocolate chip cookies on the kitchen counter that I’d baked yesterday.
Instead, I took a deep breath. I vented to my husband who, thankfully, listened patiently. Because he wasn’t feeling the surge of anger and frustration I was feeling, he was able to logically walk me through the steps I was taking to fix the problem I had encountered, and he could calm my urge to strangle the person responsible for the problem. I made a cup of plum spice herbal tea instead of diving into the chocolate chip cookies. I fixed the problem by noon.
I had originally planned to complete a few small tasks on my week’s to-do list when Item #1 blew up and derailed my morning. I had most of today earmarked for my Big Hairy Task of the week. The BHT (Big Hairy Task) is a project that requires extensive research for a client and a lot of writing. BHT needs a calm mind, a working internet connection and periods of quiet focus. I lacked two out of three and an afternoon thunderstorm put a kibosh on the third, the working internet connection.
BHT is NOT due tomorrow or else I would clearly have to pull on my big girl pants and get it done. Fortunately, because I had made my task list not just for today but for the week, I could do some creative juggling of tasks and find something to fill the afternoon hours and something that my scattered concentration could tackle.
I looked down my weekly list. Yes, there were tasks I knew I could do, spotty internet connection and all -
- Blog posts? Check. I could write those. Writing two gardening posts did not take up much time, but it did get my writing juices flowing.
- Edit a blog post for a client? Check. Done.
- Contact a client for information for her website project? Check, done. I was feeling better already.
- Lastly, an article written for Hub Pages and I felt like at least I had accomplished something today.
My five minute marketing tip for you today is this: Make your task list for today and for the week. Group your tasks so that you have small ones you can knock off the list easily and big hairy tasks that require chunks of time in separate groups. When you run into a problem like I did today and your big chunks of uninterrupted time are used up problem solving, turn to the small task list and tackle as many as you can. You’ll feel a sense of accomplishment and the day won’t be a total lost. Then, make sure you move the Big Hairy Task to tomorrow…and work on it first thing, before anything else gets in the way!
First things first. MAKE YOUR TASK LIST!
Monday Mornings and the Seven Oaks Team
Thought you might appreciate this image of the staff here at Seven Oaks Consulting, hard at work first thing on a Monday morning -
They are reason #3 of why I love working from home and living the life of writer, marketing consultant and creative entrepreneur.
Things They Don’t Teach You in Business School: Patience
Remember patience? Remember waiting for your favorite movie to air on television? Now we have movies on demand, DVDs on demand, everything on demand.
Remember waiting for a letter to arrive from your best friend at camp? Each day you’d race to the door when the mailman delivered the day’s mail. It took days or weeks for letters to reach one another. Each day was filled with anticipation and the potential for joy. Now zip emails back and forth without a thought.
Remember waiting for film to come back from the photo developing shop? You’d take your vacation pictures, wait a few days, drop off the rolls of film at the drug store or special photography store, then wait a week or more for the pictures to arrive. And then once they arrived, you’d spend hours pasting them into a photo album. Today, I can take an image and instantly print it out on my computer printer or share it with friends.
The world has changed and feels so sped up today that sometimes I feel like I am on a whirling top, with 20 different things vying for my attention at once. Patience seems to be a lost virtue. In business school, we were taught to demand everything NOW, kind of like Veruka Salt in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory: “Daddy, I want it NOW.”
Yet the old adage, “Good things come to he who waits” is often the case in business.
We must be patient and wait for an account to close. Calling and pressuring the potential client into signing on the dotted line can drive them away.
We must be patient while the newly optimized pages of our website are found and indexed by the search engine spiders. You can get quick results, but not instant results.
We must be patient while the graphic designers work their brilliance and create a beautiful image for our company. You can’t rush creativity. You can give it a deadline, but you really can’t demand it happens now.
Patience may be a virtue that’s quickly lost in today’s world, but it is one thing they should teach everyone in business school. With patience, water wore away rock and formed the Grand Canyon. With patience, your marketing can attract clients and build your business.
But you’ve got to have patience!
How To Turn Off Your New Client
You’ve just landed a new client, customer or project. Congratulations! Here’s a lesson from the dentist’s office on how to turn away prospective customers…
Many years ago, I needed a lot of dental work to correct some problems. Long story short, I found a wonderful dentist and I was happy with the results.
Flash forward several years. One of the teeth my dentist had fixed broke without warning. I’d recently moved to a new area and didn’t know a soul. I made an appointment with a dentist someone recommended as it was an emergency.
The fellow confirmed what I had feared – that the tooth could not be saved. However, he then launched a diatribe against the dentist in New York, claiming that the work done on my other teeth was shoddy, that he would not have tried to save the teeth, that it was a waste of time and money, etc. I felt trapped in the dental chair on the receiving end of a lot of vitriol. ”Hey,” I wanted to say to the dentist, “What’s your gripe against this guy? You don’t even know him. And why are you busy telling me his work is bad, when it seems just fine and you agree there’s no health problem here? What’s the point?”
Was he having a bad day? Trolling for new work (I half expected him to try to sell me on another round of procedures!). I left and vowed never to return to him.
How’s that for a first appointment with a new dentist and a first impression for me, his new patient?
Here’s the moral of the story: don’t rant and rave about former employers, former clients, or bad experiences when you are just starting a new business relationship with someone. You may disagree with how things were done before you showed up on the scene, but there’s a right way to convey this information and a wrong way.
The wrong way is to rant, rave, blame and point fingers at the guy who did the work before you.
The right way is to focus on the work and what you will now do to improve it and get the results your client wants.
It sounds so elemental. You’re probably saying to yourself, “Jeanne, this is like kindergarten stuff…I know I shouldn’t make bad statements about my predecessor’s work!”
In the past week, I had not one but two of what I call “dentist experiences” where a new client proceeded to rant and rave on the phone with me about…
- The lousy experience he’d had with one of my competitors, who he named by name and called lots of other names I can’t repeat here. Was the work really bad? There were things the other consultant did that I’d do differently, but marketing is part art and part science, and I think some of what the other consultant did fell under the umbrella of art….different choices than I’d make, but overall, fairly sound.
- The bad results he’d gotten from a previous marketing experiment. Were the bad results the fault of the agency? Probably not. To my trained eye, they’d completely under estimated the marketing investment needed to accomplish very lofty goals.
- A copywriter who charged triple what I charge and didn’t write well. I charge in the mid-range for writing and provide excellent writing and service. I also have a very unique writing style and if it’s not a good fit for you, it’s not a good fit. I didn’t like the other writer’s work but that’s just me – and I can’t speak to his prices. He charges what he does because he thinks his time is worth that. It’s up to his clients to agree or disagree by signing or declining his proposals.
Of course, I want my clients to tell me what problems they need solved. Absolutely. But a problem isn’t a 15 minute diatribe and personal attack against another writer, another marketing professional, or another company.
In each case from the dentist to the potential clients, I was left with a creepy feeling. What would they be like to work with? I didn’t trust the dentist after he excoriated the other professional for the work he’d done. As far as I was concerned, the work was fine. Did anything need to be fixed to improve my health or appearance? No. He reluctantly agreed that no, nothing was really wrong, he just didn’t agree with the other guy’s approach. Okay, fine. But why did he feel so compelled to tell me, and in such harsh terms? If that’s his personality, it’s not a fit for me. Time to move on (and I found a great new dentist, thank you, who is skilled, professional, polite and friendly. Perfect.)
I’m never sure how to take these personal attacks and long rants and raves. Should I ignore them? They always leave me with a creepy feeling, like I’ve been slimed somehow even though I’m not the one being bitched about.
Listen, if you want to turn off a potential new client, customer or someone you’re working with, talk badly about your previous encounters with other professionals. Mention them by name. Go on about the stuff that bothered you.
If you want to be proactive about it, share the situation without naming names, and without the emotional involvement. Explain what the outcome was and how you’d like to change that.
- If you’ve had a poor experience with a marketing consultant and you want to tell me about it to explain what you want fixed on this go-around, articulate the problem. Was it poor results? Slow execution? Too much talk and not enough action?
- If your previous copywriter’s work wasn’t up to speed, why not? Was it filled with grammatical errors? Totally missed the mark on the right brand and tone for your company and products? Used a lot of cliches?
It’s fine to articulate specifics, but it’s not okay to slime the previous guy verbally. Not with me, at any rate!
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(c) 2012 by Jeanne Grunert. All rights reserved. Let’s not get stupid here – don’t copy my work without permission, attribution and a link back. That will make me and your readers happy.
The Secret to Attracting More Customers to Your Website
The secret to attracting more customers to your website is simple. Doing it well is not simple. The secret is this: create content that people want and need, update it frequently, and add more value with each passing day.
Told you it was simple. But it’s not easy!
Most of us are so wrapped up in what we do that we forget why we do it. We forget what it’s like to stand in our customers’ shoes day after day. We forget what keeps them up at night, what worries them, why they came to us in the first place.
If you can capture that feeling…if you can use your imagination to stand in your customers’ shoes for one minute and see the world through their eyes…you’ll quickly come up with ideas for content, blog posts, white papers and more that provide them with things they want and need.
Now for those of you who make your living by service, by sharing your knowledge and expertise, how do you do this without giving away the store, so to speak? Talk more about the “why” of doing things and less about the “how.” For example, a nutritionist may talk more about the need for eating more healthy fats in the diet, but she’s trying to get people to make an appointment for a personal consultation. Someone looking to improve her health by eating a better diet may find the article on healthy fats and learn something. She’ll feel empowered with knowledge yet still need a personal consultation to tweak her own diet. You’ve provided her (and other readers) with material online to attract people to your website….now your site must encourage an appointment with you. In marketing-speak, we call that a “conversion.”
Part of the online marketing battle is getting people in the door. Good content that solves problems, engages and informs readers attract people to your virtual door. Once they’re at the door, however, it’s up to you to invite them in for coffee….
Things They Don’t Teach You in Business School: Gratitude
You hear a lot about strategy, tactics, accounting, marketing, financial management, human resources and technology, but rarely do you hear about cultivating an internal atmosphere of gratitude. Yet gratitude is one of the hallmarks of a great business person.
With gratitude comes humility. The grateful person realizes that any successful business is a team business. Even sole proprietors have a team of some sort behind them – a supportive spouse or partner, friends, family, teachers, others.
With gratitude comes serenity. A serene, calm mind helps you listen better to your customers and clients. If you’re agitated and upset, you can’t focus. When you’re grateful, you’re calm. You can focus and listen. People know it when you focus and listen.
With gratitude comes plenty. Just by being grateful for what you have, you tend to attract more good things into your life.
- Make a daily gratitude list and write it down.
- Take five minutes each morning to look around your office or home and say “I am grateful for…” and list as many things mentally as you can, big or small.
- Say “thank you” to someone today and every day.
