Tips for Working from Home
These tips for working from home may help you be more productive, especially if you aren't used to telecommuting.
Working from home isn't everyone's favorite. Some people do love the social atmosphere of the office; others need the structure. It can feel strange, exhilarating, or even scary to work from your kitchen table. Below are my five best tips for working from home during the national COVID-19 crisis.
The COVID-19 Crisis and the Workplace
As of today, March 17, 2020, almost the entire United States has issued a warning to stay at home and enact social distancing policies to prevent the spread of coronavirus (COVID-19).
What began as the new flu from the Wuhan area in China has now swept the globe, straining healthcare systems and making many sick.
Most companies in the United States have asked employees to work from home. Some reading this are shrugging; it's nothing new. They've worked from home during previous disasters including Hurricane Katrina or Hurricane Sandy, for example, or like me, after 9/11. (I was in New York City on 9/11.)
But for those new to working from home, you may feel like you're losing your mind without the structure of the typical workday. Where's the commute? The line at Starbucks? Dropping your kids or your dogs off at daycare? It's gone. Normalcy is gone!
I've worked from home for the past 13 years. And, although I don't have children, I do have tips for working from home that will apply even if you do have kids. These tips will help you remain productive despite the lure of Netflix binges, the ever-present refrigerator, and everything else calling your name.
5 Tips for Working from Home
Tip 1: Establish a daily routine.
This is so important! Routine and structure are what people rely upon to get through their days. Even if you consider yourself a spontaneous person, your days do have a structure to them when you commute to a job outside of the home. Among my tips for working from home, finding your own personal schedule is of utmost importance.
Tip 2: Get dressed as if you are going to work.
Among my tips for working from home, this one might seem silly, but it works. Dress as if you are going to work for the day or at least going out of your home. Shower, dress in business casual or nice casual clothes, comb and fix your hair, put on jewelry and makeup if you wear it. You're ready to be productive, greet the mailman, or hop onto a video call without a problem.
Tip 3: If you can, set "quiet hours."
Quiet hours are the time slots in my day when I might ask my husband to look after the dog. These are the hours when I have to jump onto a conference or video call and I don't want Zeke to start barking or jumping onto my lap (a 100-pound German shepherd leaping into the video conference can be distracting.) My spouse takes him outside and looks after him (he also works from home.)
If you have children and they are old enough to understand, enforce quiet time. Close the door to your office or the room you're in; if you're working from the kitchen table, put up a sign that says QUIET TIME and let them watch a movie or whatever with headphones on.
Tip 4: Take breaks.
When you're new to working from home, it's often all or nothing. You may be all work and no play or the opposite -- you can't focus on your work and just want to enjoy that book or movie.
Schedule blocks of time for yourself during the day. It's okay to get up and walk around your house or apartment or step outside (keep to the social distancing requirements though!). Make a cup of tea or coffee. Rest your eyes.
It's okay to take care of yourself and not be a slave to your computer.
Tip 5: Stay connected.
Working from home can be lonely. Before the COVID-19 outbreak, I looked forward to my weekly choir practice session and church service. It was my time to be around people I liked in a place I love doing things I love. Now, however, I'm at home with my husband, dog, and seven cats. I work alone except for a handful of freelancers and right now, none of them are working on a project with me.
So what do I do? I stay connected with friends, former colleagues, and family. I make it a point to pick up the phone or Skype someone daily. It's a great time to reach out and check on someone especially the elderly and vulnerable.
Make it a point to stay connected. Tips for working from home may include utilizing channels like Skype or Slack to drop quick notes to colleagues, video hours when you can all collaborate or just be there for each other, or phone calls.
Just because you must physically distance yourself from others doesn't mean you need to be emotionally distant, too.
The Bottom Line: This Too Shall End
Just like you, I'm eager to know when this whole thing will end and the world will return to normal. None of us have a crystal ball, so any predictions you read, hear or see about when the "stay at home and don't go into crowded places" rule is relaxed are just guesses.
If you're working from home for the foreseeable future, it will soon feel normal. Not everyone will enjoy it. Some will yearn to return to their daily commute and the structure they once enjoyed. Some people love the socialization of an office; I'm one of them, actually, and often miss working with colleagues I know, like, and trust.
But in the long run, we don't have a choice. To keep others healthy and safe, we must make concessions.
We Are Making Small Sacrifices for a Larger Goal
My dad was a World War II veteran, drafted at age 18 into the Navy. He spent his 19th birthday aboard a Navy communications vessel in the Pacific Ocean, far from his family and friends.
He never complained about the sacrifices he made during wartime and often looked back with pride at what he and the others had accomplished during that time of global crisis.
Someday, we'll look back at the coronavirus outbreak with the same feeling of pride that my dad had for his war contributions. We'll be happy that we contributed to the solution, not the problem. We stayed at home and became telecommuters. It's not much of a sacrifice compared to blood, sweat, and toil of the Greatest Generation during wartime.
But it's something, and it will save lives.
Do You Have an Accountability Issue or Another Problem?
"We have an accountability problem!" Craig* fumed as he paced around the office. I sat on the hard-backed metal chair, pad balanced on my knees, pen in hand, ready to take notes on the looming problem that had prompted Craig's call to me.
On the phone, he'd said his team lacked accountability. He wanted me to come in and teach his junior marketing managers a seminar on being accountable.
But how did he define accountability at the agency? And was it really an accountability problem or something else?
B2B Content Marketing Writing - Sell the Story First
When it comes to B2B content marketing writing, you must sell the story first. Here's what that means to your business and brand.
B2B Content Marketing Writing
Tell the Story First
Everyone loves a good story. From the time we're able to understand the world around us, the words "once upon a time" transport us to new worlds.
This is the power that we tap into when we tell brand stories. Unlike product descriptions or sales copy, brand stories shape perception by engaging the imagination.
Scientists tell us that information flows in different directions in the brain depending on whether we engage our imagination or reality. Sales copy which focuses on product descriptions engages the reality centers. Stories, on the other hand, engage the imaginative centers of the brain.
Despite the difference in how the information flows through the brain, imagination is perceived as reality by our minds. What this means to content marketers is that encouraging consumers to imagine themselves using a product (videos or stories) or facing a similar problem in which the product solves (case studies) brings people one step closer to actually owning the product. Engaging the imagination feels real; the next step is to make it real by owning the product.
Content Marketing Writing Storytelling Basics
Like all good writing, good B2B content marketing writing includes the basics of strong narration:
- A hero
- A villain
- A challenge to overcome
- A beginning, middle, and end
Let's look at an example: manufacturing ERP software. ERP, or enterprise resource planning software, is a business process management software. It integrates many areas of business knowledge, including accounting, finances, manufacturing, supply chain, inventory, and more.
Companies researching ERP software have a problem. Perhaps that problem is siloed information, a common problem faced by manufacturing firms that add software piecemeal over time and find that it's no longer working well for their needs.
Our hero, in this case, is the software. Let's name it Software X. Software X challenges a villain. The villain is the proliferation of software across the company. The challenge to overcome is how to synchronize information across multiple departments and plant locations.
One Narrative, Multiple Formats and Channels
I love writing B2B content marketing writing stories because one story can turn into multiple formats for a variety of channels.
Once I have the gist of the story and a hero, villain, and challenge in mind, I can then spin the story in many ways for different audiences.
I might:
- Write a series of blog posts about the "villain" or problem of older software not communicating with one another. The bad guy in this scenario is lost profits and time.
- Narrate it as a story using illustrations of a child's game of telephone where messages get lost as they are passed along. Removing steps in the transfer of information maintain data integrity and accuracy.
- Choose a different angle on the problem, such as how much time is wasted by gathering raw data and inputting it into spreadsheets in order to make it usable by the organization.
Once the basic story format is known, you can spin so many narratives and formats from it that it starts to fill an editorial calendar by itself!
In every case, the B2B content marketing writing begins with figuring out the story angle.
Every brand tells a story. The implicit promise, the problem solved, the villain conquered. Figure out the characters in your story and you'll engage the imagination of your customers, motivating them to take action.
Why Experience Counts: The Benefits of Hiring Older Workers
Experience counts in the business world. There are tremendous benefits of hiring older workers that many companies leave behind in their quest to be young and hip. If young, hip and millennial doesn't fit your brand, why go for it? Go for talent first in your quest to hire the best.
SEO Expert Reveals 3 Secret Optimization Tips
As an SEO expert, especially in the realm of marketing writing, I have my 'secret optimization' tips that I use to really grab Google's attention in the SERPs.
These are my three most powerful SEO tips.
SEO Expert Tips
These secrets aren't some arcane knowledge available only to a powerful few. They aren't really secrets, either -- just search engine optimization techniques that the average site owner or blogger doesn't bother with using.
- Optimize your images
- Use plenty of internal links
- Write in a natural, conversational style
1. Optimize Your Images
Images are the unsung heroes of search engine optimization. Many people use Google Images to find out more about a topic of interest. Just the other day, I used Google's Image search to identify a bug, check on a rash on my cat, and find a map of a city I used to live in. Okay, weird searches to be sure, but a Cooperative Extension website, veterinary hospital site, and a town website each received search engine traffic from those images.
When optimizing images, be sure to incorporate several best practices:
- License images properly and be sure to follow use and attribution requirements or take your own pictures
- Resize images from your camera to minimize the file size! This is super important. Big images slow down your website and Google hates slow sites. Resize as JPGs to the proper size for your site.
- Use a compression tool such as the Smush WordPress plugin to further shrink image file size and make them load faster.
- Rename the file with your keyword phrase.
- Add an alt tag that accurately describes the image and utilizes a keyword phrase or synonym if appropriate
SEO experts agree that optimizing images may help boost your posts!
2. Use plenty of internal links
I love internal links for SEO for a variety of reasons. Not only do they link to other content on your site as a helpful resource to readers but they give Google's crawls more pathways to follow to find and index additional pages.
Use plenty of internal links but be sure to link from a keyword phrase or at least a useful phrase. Avoid "click here" and "learn more." Yes, I know, this SEP expert has indeed done that on this website, but I do so only when it is a simple call to action. Blog posts like this one are linked from within to juicy keyword phrases.
3. Write in a natural, conversational style
Have you heard of BERT? BERT is Google's new natural language processing code and it is driving an enormous change throughout many industries. It's an open-source code, which means that Google has shared it with other companies, too.
BERT processes language in context. It can read the words both before and after a phrase to understand a search query better. Unlike other artificial intelligence language processors that look at words in sequence, BERT can understand everything in context...so it knows when you mean the past or present tense of the verb "read" for example.
More people search using voice-activated tools than ever before and that trend is likely to continue in the future. The more natural your online content sounds, the better.
Avoid stilted, outdated SEO writing that uses rigid rules to infuse keyword phrases into the content. The days of writing X keywords Y number of times into the content and calling it a day are over and have been since 2012.
Natural writing, conversational writing, and writing that matches a user's query exactly carry more weight with Google than ever before.
Revise, Refresh, Keep Writing
Revise and refresh old blog posts. Keep writing new ones.
One of the beautiful things about the internet and search engine optimization is that it's never-ending. I used to think of it as "once and done" but it's really an ongoing, evolutionary process.
As you learn more about SEO, use what you have learned to improve old posts..
If you need help, we're running a Winter Blogging Special to help you produce SEO blog writing that gets your blog noticed.
Should You Start a Blog?
Did you know that February 7 is international Start a Blog day? Plan now to begin the blog that's been on your to-do list forever!
It may seem crazy to encourage people to start a blog. After all, there's a ton of blogs out there covering almost every topic you can imagine. Mom blogs, cooking blogs, business blogs, gardening blogs, you name it, there is a blog for it.
Even though the internet seems saturated with blog content, there's still room for more blogs. If you have an original idea and are willing to invest the time and energy into creating unique content, blogging may be a good way to generate site traffic and content for your digital advertising programs.
5 Reasons to Start a Blog
- Search visibility - blogs enable site owners to post multiple pages with keywords associated with their site. Think of each blog post like a page and you'll see what I mean. Each post acts as a potential entry point into your website, adding plenty of places for Google to find, index, and serve your site to searchers.
- Branding - a blog provides your company with a unique opportunity to share your perspective on business issues. A well-constructed blog filled with content that supports your brand style offers another excellent branding opportunity.
- Social shares - blogging provides fresh content links to share across multiple social media platforms. Such links may reach new audiences, people who may not otherwise have found your site.
- Expertise - sharing your expertise on a topic helps boost your digital persona. A digital persona is an online impression people receive from all of your online interactions. Blogging around a topic of interest provides a focus to find experts on such a topic, and others may seek you out based on your posts.
- Profit - yes, blogging can be profitable. A good blog can earn money through advertising, affiliate programs, product sales, and more. Some bloggers do earn their living solely from their blogging work and related products, such as books and courses, they sell from their blogs. How profitable a blog can be depends upon the skill of the blogger, the audience, and the topic, of course, but I do know two people who make their living solely through blogging. It can be done.
Two Popular Free Blogging Platforms to Try
Today on this "start a blog day" check out the two most popular blogging platforms.
WordPress: WordPress remains the most popular blogging platform despite a steeper learning curve than its competitor, Blogger. A free WordPress blog offers an excellent starting point for any content and can be upgraded to a paid site. (We recommend Web Design of Palm Beach if you want to upgrade. They host our sites and do a great job.)
Blogger: I started most of my blogs on Blogger. It used to be independent but is now owned by Google. It's difficult to create pretty blogs using their outdated templates but it is an easy, intuitive way to start a blog. Plus because it is owned by Google it is easy to incorporate Google AdSense and track your posts.
Now is the time to start a blog. If you'd like help starting a blog or creating unique content for your blog, please contact Seven Oaks Consulting. We provide consultation and writing services with an emphasis on SEO writing, including blogging.
Facebook Business Pages: The Dangers
Many small business owners rely on Facebook business pages for their online presence. "I don't need a website," they tell me. "See, I get this free Facebook business page and I can promote my company as well as share information with my customers."
Our local health food store has a business page...the dog trainer I follow for tips to train Zeke has a website and a Facebook page, but he rarely updates his website. Local companies often spend time and effort on their Facebook presence without a website.
It's a huge mistake. Marketing misinformation is rampant, especially around setting up a presence online. Be smart and avoid these mistakes.
She Lost Everything When Her Facebook Business Page Was Hacked
I felt like a broken record telling small business clients, "Don't do this" but it wasn't until an email reached my desk today from fellow marketing consultant Sandra Martini that I saw firsthand the chilling effects of what happens when a Facebook page is hacked.
Sandra's email detailed a nightmarish story unfolding on her Facebook account. Sandra's business account generated $50,000 of sales (her business books and consulting packages) yet she lost it all in one day.
Here's what happened.
Someone hacked her Facebook account. That person began charging advertising to her account to the tune of $1,600. Then, they reversed the charges and took the money. Facebook immediately canceled her accounts -- all of them -- for suspicious activity.
Sandra lost:
- Her business Facebook page, which she had spent a decade building
- Her personal Facebook account, which she used to keep in touch with family and friends
- Access to several clients' Facebook pages which she was responsible for managing
Her words of advice: Never have only one administrator on the account. Always have a backup. And never rely solely on Facebook pages for revenue, customer contact, or your business presence.
Why Have a Backup Administrator on a Facebook Business Page?
When Sandra's account was hacked, the company notified her of suspicious activity. Since she was the only person on the account, however, when they locked the account, she had no way of recovering the information.
A second administrator unlinked to her personal page may have been able to salvage the account and with it the decade of hard work that she'd put into building her social media presence.
Granting someone else in your company admin rights to your Facebook business page is a smart idea.
Websites Are Essential for ALL Businesses
It sounds strange to have to say this but yes, a website is essential for all small businesses today. It should be built for mobile-first as the majority of people now use mobile devices to access the web. It should also be properly optimized for search engines. Even if your business relies on local traffic only, people still search online for your address, phone number, menu, hours, or other information.
When you build your own website, you own it. Unlike a Facebook business page, which can disappear at the whim of Facebook, your website is your own property and a valuable asset for your company. Purchasing the domain name and setting up a simple hosted WordPress site may take a few days, but it is well worth the effort and gives you a prime piece of 'online real estate' to call your own.
If you're not sure how to set up a website, please contact Seven Oaks Consulting. We'd be delighted to help you build a permanent online "home" for your business - aka, a website.
More Free Marketing Articles for You
Marketing Case Study: Mailing List Fail
Direct mail continues to produce strong results with an average response rate of 9% for house lists. A house list is a list of a business' customers or people with whom the business has a connection.
Prospect lists also do well these days with an average 4.9% response rate. Prospect lists can be sourced from other companies, compiled from public directories, gathered from subscribers of magazines, or rented from sweepstakes and coupon companies. The results of a mailing using either a house or prospect lists depend, of course, not just on the list, but on three additional factors: the offer, timing, creative.
This marketing case study looks at how a company got everything right...except for the mailing list.
It's a company you may have heard about: Chewy.com.
Marketing Case Study: Pet Product Company Mailing List Fail
Chewy.com is an online retailer of pet products selling everything from dog training equipment to goldfish food. They are known for great customer service, fast shipping, and competitive pricing.
A few months ago, we received an offer of $15 off of our first order. With seven cats and a new puppy on the way, we gladly used our coupon and were delighted with the entire ordering experience. We purchased cat food and continued to hope for more offers from the company via email, but the offers we received were for specialty products and gourmet foods, which our rescued cats don't get. (Sorry, fellas, but y'all just showed up here...you get what you get, and that's Friskies and Meow Mix.)
Marketing Case Study: Direct Mailing List Failure
Then in July, we received another mailer from Chewy.com. This mailer touted $15 off again. We held onto it knowing our new puppy, Zeke, would arrive in August and need some items.
We tried to utilize the coupon this week only to find we could not - it was for first-time customers only, and of course, we were returning customers now.
It was supposed to be our second order. We did not place the order.
Always Suppress Current Customers from a Mailing to New Customers
Chewy offers excellent customer service, but somehow, their marketing department neglected to update their mailing list against their customer list.
An offer for a new or first time customer should NEVER be sent to current customers.
Mailing lists can be compared using specialized software so that any potential duplicates are flagged and removed. If Chewy purchased a list of pet owners or people who own pets, for example, they could then send this list to a mailing list company or data provider and have any potential duplicates suppressed from the final list.
Why bother spending the money to suppress duplicates?
Because customers like us, eager to order again, left disappointed and annoyed at the fine print on an offer that we thought we qualified for but didn't.
If a company mails us a coupon, we assume we can use it. It should never be incumbent on the customer to get out a magnifying glass and check the fine print on the offer. And it is deadly to your e-commerce business to have customers get all the way to the checkout and as a last step, enter a coupon code only to be told the offer isn't valid.
We abandoned our shopping cart and bought the cat food and dog harness from Amazon. No, we didn't get $15 off, but we got free shipping and didn't feel cheated by the offer.
Key Takeaways: Direct Mail Basics
DO...
- Create a compelling offer. The Chewy offer was great. So was their timing and their creative execution.
- Be 100% sure that offers for new or first-time customers ONLY get sent ONLY to new and first-time customers. You can do this by sending your list data to a mailing house who runs it through a computer program and compares the prospect list to your customer file and suppresses any duplicates.
- Provide a way to honor the coupon if you make a mistake. Don't just turn customers away.
If Chewy woos us back with a great offer, we may consider shopping from them again. But with Amazon so convenient and accessible, and no feeling of being screwed over by them as we did when we were disappointed at finding our coupon didn't work, we may not.
Good Management Is An Art
Good management is an art rather than a science.
Indeed.com, like many websites, offers skill tests. I've taken a few. Some are crazy hard, some aren't what you think they are, and some, like Goldilocks and the Three Bears, was just right.
The marketing tets - just right. The SEO test - just right. But the management skills test? Difficult to say.
The test included multiple choice questions as well as audio clips that you listen to and then choose the correct response. The audio clips were strange. They were supposed to be a manager talking to her team. You're then asking to evaluate her management skills.
Why the Test Is Flawed
My issue with the test is that I believe management is a nuanced skill. No two situations require the same approach. I once had an employee who was chronically late for work and showed up clearly hung over. His tardiness differed from another employee who also showed up late and seemed hung over. Her issue, I later learned, wasn't overindulgence in the party lifestyle but rushing to drop off a cranky child at daycare every day.
Should I have immediately judged both employees similarly? You can't apply the same response to each person. I knew, for example, that Employee B was a single mom. I suspected Employee A had been hitting the bars and dance clubs too often and too hard. But the only facts I had to deal with were 1) they were both showing up for work after 10 a.m. when business hours required them to be at their desk at 9 a.m.
My preferred approach is always to sit privately with someone and ask what's going on. If I've built up enough trust with someone, they will tell me what's going on. In all cases, I try to find a happy medium.
For Employee B, we agreed she could work through her lunch hour to make up the hour she missed. Her job required her to be on location, at the office, but whenever we could allow her to telecommute, we did. It seems clear to me that single parents, male or female, may need a little more flexibility to handle unexpected childcare needs.
For Employee A, after our discussion, he admitted he was having trouble with drugs and alcohol. That was a punch in the gut for me as I cared for him very much as a person and a friend. I'd worked with him for a long time and it was hard to hear him tell me some things. In the end, though, I worked it out with human resources to find him the assistance he needed to get treatment for his addiction problems. It was tough.
Good Management Is an Art
Good management is an art and a learned skill than a science. I've attended management courses throughout the years and all have been helpful, but the most helpful management training I received was direct mentoring from one of the best managers I have ever worked for in my career. He took me under his wing and coached me to be the manager I am today.
I would never say that I'm a perfect manager, by any means. But I successfully manage teams I've never met through remote, telecommuting work, because I ask the right questions, build rapport, and hold people accountable.
These are things that can be difficult to measure in a multiple choice test. But when all is said and done, no two people manage the same way. It's really all about fit with a company's style, culture, and the manager's approach.
Making Virtual Teams Work
How do you make a virtual workforce a thriving part of your company?
Many companies need extra help during peak season. Some require specialized skills or a temporary opening filled. In these cases, a remote worker, also known as a virtual worker, telecommuter, or telecommuting freelancer, may be the answer.
So why don't more companies avail themselves of the miracles of technology and find the absolute best person for the job, allowing them to work remotely?
For the past ten years, I've managed virtual teams. I began managing editors and writers for a major website. In that role, I didn't choose who I worked with--I inherited teams from the previous editors. The company had strict working requirements, provided specialized software, and offered clear guidelines and quotas for monthly content.
In this example, a virtual workforce worked very well for the company. Not only did they achieve their revenue goals, but they were able to expand into multiple content niches because they drew from an enormous pool of writers scattered geographically far from their headquarters. They didn't care if you lived within 10 miles or 1,000 miles from headquarters.
How did they achieve what other companies fail to do?
Clarity. Communications. Accountability. These are the hallmarks of happy, healthy virtual teams. Layer in some flexibility and its sister, creativity, and add to it the notion of reliability from both the company and its workforce and you've got a winning recipe for a happy, healthy virtual workforce.
In my latest article for Medium, I distill ten years of virtual management wisdom into an eight-minute read. For those looking to expand operations or improve the talent pool, consider a virtual workforce. Not only can it work well, but it can also work exceptionally well for your productivity, profitability, and service.
Ready? Let's go virtual. Read the full article: How to Build a Healthy, Happy Virtual Workforce.