For the last three years or so, I’ve been having breakfast with my grandfather a few times a week. When I told him I was not going to be looking for another “real job” after getting laid off, he approved and told me that it is possible to work for yourself, but it takes a lot of discipline. He was a first class mechanic, with specialized knowledge about hydraulics and welding machines. Even though he hasn’t taken on any jobs at all during the last few years, people still call occasionally and ask for his advice.

A few days ago, he went into a little more detail about why he chose to work for himself, despite the fact he was offered several tempting jobs. He said:

I was convinced that not knowing how much money I would make the next week was the best way to accumulate the things I wanted. And it worked. I did.

This is a whole new way to look at the idea of “feast or famine.” Most people see the cycle of making plenty of money and making almost no money as a barrier to running a business, an aspect of entrepreneurship to fret about and to try to avoid. My papaw raised five children and had many adventures and not only didn’t mind the booms and busts of running a business, but looked at those cycles as an advantage.

He went on to explain that if you know you are going to earn $300 next week, you will probably spend $298, but if you aren’t sure how much you will earn next week, you will most likely hold on to more of your money, just in case. Modern day experts tell you to build an emergency fund, but very few people ever tell you that the specter of a bad week or a bad month could be the way to riches.

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I have been playing Words With Friends lately. I like it because it’s a fun challenge to see what kinds of words I can come up with. That’s how I have always approached Scrabble – as a word game. This approach means I get beaten pretty frequently, usually by people who play it as a math game.

 

For me the fun is in figuring out the most interesting word I can make using the letters at hand. I don’t use a dictionary, and will admit that sometimes I put letters together in an order that seems like it should be a word and hit “submit” just to see if it actually is a word. That’s how I found out that “za” is a word. (Webster’s says: “an old solfeggio name for B flat; the seventh harmonic”)

 

People who play Scrabble as a math game take a different approach. They look for the spaces on the board that will yield the most points, then check to see if they have any letters that can go there. It is a subtle difference, but spells defeat for me more often than not. Pondering my frequent Words with Friends defeats made me think about how the word game vs. math game lesson could be applied to a copy writing business.

 

If you see yourself primarily as a writer, you probably fall into the “word game” category. Writing is your first and most important task, and you likely fit the “writer” stereotype – creative, bad with numbers, usually late, a loner, etc. To be successful, your writing will have to be much better than average, and you will probably need help on the sales and business side of things. If you write fiction, look for an agent and a publisher, and if you write non-fiction, look for a partner who excels at sales and networking.

 

If you primarily see yourself as a business owner, you probably fall into the “math game” category. You probably handle customer service and sales activities first, you may have chosen your niche based on market demands rather than what you are interested in, and you might find yourself squeezing writing in at the end of the work day.

 

There’s nothing better or worse or wrong or right about either way of looking at a writing business. Personality, ability, training, and habits all go a long way to determining how you conduct your business, but if you aren’t happy with what you are doing or how you are faring financially, you can take deliberate steps to change your approach.

 

If you are more a of a “word game” business person, but you’d like to make more money, or write about a wider variety of topics, you can begin to pay more attention to the math part of your business. If you are a “math game” type, but you long for more creative freedom and you’d like to spend less time dealing with the administrative part of your work, then you can begin to block time out of your schedule to work on creative projects.

 

Most people who make a living by selling creative services feel this pull between running a solid business and doing what we love. It’s important to remember that there is no right or wrong way to run a creative business, but there are ways that will allow you to make more money faster. Identifying your own strengths and playing to them will help you find the most comfortable place for you.

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Early in my copywriting-for-money career, I had a client who was a dentist. He was (and still is) a great guy – friendly, funny, good at his job and always paid on time. He wasn’t particularly comfortable with technology, which was a big reason he hired me. In many respects, he was my ideal

client.

 

Like many medical professionals, his staff guarded him closely. I couldn’t call his office and get through to him, and he never responded to emails. At first I figured that I could generate ideas for his blog and Facebook page by doing adequate research. I quickly realized that more would be necessary in order to do a good job.

 

I needed to know what kinds of questions his patients asked him regularly, what products he recommended most frequently, what he saw as wrong with his industry, and his thoughts about trends and fads. Any time I found a link to an article related to dentistry, I found that I wanted his opinion before posting it.

 

He also used a company that provided a suite of services to dental offices, and that included a public relations packet each month. Their packet had a blog post, a press release, a letter to patients, and promotion suggestions and materials. My client said that he basically wanted me to make sure all that information was being used and that I wouldn’t need to actually write much at all.

 

The problem was, most of that material was rubbish. The blog post, the press release and the letter to patients were all basically the same.  In August, the materials were about making sure kids’ teeth are healthy before going back to school. In October, the dangers of sugar were addressed. The American Dental Association has a theme for each month and these PR materials followed those themes – just like every other dentist does.

 

For the first few months, I tried augmenting the existing materials, but quickly found I really needed the doctor’s input. His opinions and thoughts and ideas would have infused my work and made the marketing effort much more effective. I tried every way I could think of to get a line of communication open. Email, voice messages, messages left with his staff, messages for him left with his wife (she owned an art gallery and was also a client), all went unreturned.

 

Finally, I realized that he wanted the whole process to be automated. He wanted to write checks and have it all taken care of. It took months for me to admit that it just wasn’t going to work. He was a great guy – besides not wanting to lose his business, I didn’t want to let him down. But that is exactly what happened.

 

As time went on, I felt increasingly frustrated by the whole situation, and so pushed it to the back burner. Posts, newsletters and press releases went out a few days later each month. I dreaded doing research for him, and avoided calling his office because I felt so annoyed that my messages didn’t seem to be getting through.

 

Now I know that all of this could have been – should have been – avoided before I ever agreed to take him as a client. Now, I ask prospective clients if they are willing to talk with me on the phone weekly for a few minutes, or if I can attend monthly staff meetings. I cannot ghost write for a person if I don’t know what they think. I cannot help with branding and  marketing without knowing a little something about the day to day operations of an office or a company.

 

While the whole experience was no fun, I’m glad that it happened. I learned a lot about what is required from a client in order for what I do to work well. It would be nice to be able to say, “I can take all your marketing headaches away, and all you have to do is write me a check each month,” but now I know that will never work. It would be easy to write the dentist off as a “bad client” but, really, at least part of the blame lies at my doorstep.

 

Did you make a pivotal mistake early on that saved you heartache later in your career? Have you ever taken on a client only to learn later that you should have passed for one reason or another? Sometimes sharing eases the embarrassment. A little.

 

 

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Running a business requires creativity. You need to be creative to devise and implement systems that work. You need to be able to think creatively to solve problems – and solving problems is essentially what business owners do. Effective marketing requires creativity. Regardless of your industry or area of expertise, as a business owner, there will be times you need to generate creative ideas.

 

The problem is, that an over-worked, stressed-out, problem-beset business owner isn’t always a fountain of good ideas. Never fear! According to the Clifton StregthsFinder test, my greatest strength is “ideation,” which means I’m good at spouting off ideas. Unfortunately for me, I am not an Activator, which means most of my great ideas never come to anything.

 

However, I am happy to share a few of the things that help me come up with fabulous ideas:

1. Look at photos. Just browse around on flickr, or go visit your grandma and look through her photo albums. I find it particularly useful to look at photos of people I don’t know. I start wondering about who they are, what they do, what happened to them if the pictures are old and all that wondering seems to activate the creative part of my brain.

2. Doodle. Draw stick people, kitty cats, frownie faces, weird shapes or whatever. Again, this just seems to unlock something in my brain – coloring books work just as well, if you don’t like the idea of freehand doodling.

3. Do some word association. Make it like a game, though, not all formal. Start out with a word, any word, and write it on a piece of paper. Then, write other words that seem related all around or in a list or whatever you want. Do it with two or three words that are not at all related to your problem, then try it with a few words related to your current issue that demands a creative solution.

4. Crowdsource. This one can be tricky. There have been times that other people come up with such great ideas my own seem to just dry up, but other times other people fuel my own creativity.

5. Play with a toy. Those little desk toys and tiny zen gardens are popular for a reason. Doing something with your hands really can help free your mind. I don’t know if it’s a meditation thing or what, but it works.

6. Make lists. This one is probably not as much fun as some of the others, but it often works for me. As with the word association, I start out with a list that is unrelated to the problem at hand. Usually a few ideas relevant to the current problem will start popping  into my head, so I start another list to keep up with those ideas. Most of the time, I have to keep working on unrelated lists (groceries, chores to be done at home, items of clothing I’d like to buy, just whatever) in order to keep the random problem-related ideas coming. It’s almost like I’m tricking my brain into solving thinking up useful ideas.

7. Be open. When you are generating ideas, it’s important to think up as many possible solutions as you can. They won’t all be good or practical or at all useful, but don’t focus on that. Just think up as many ways to approach your problem as possible. You can go back later and cross off the silly ones.

 

This is a short list. There are probably a million more ways to spur your creativity when you need to come up with original ideas that can solve problems. Do you have any tried and true methods to help you prime the creative pump? Or, conversely, is there anything that stops the flow of ideas every time? 

 

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Everyone dreams of being able to build up an audience, create some products, set up some affiliate marketing deals and then make money while reclining

on the beach.

 

It is a false dream. Even if you get all those things in place, you cannot just kick back and watch your bank account get fatter. There will always be more work to do.

 

I have never had a big following on this blog, for lots of reasons, the main one being that gathering a large audience was not/is not my main goal here. The folks who read Smiling Tree Writes may not be many, but they are mostly people I think of as friends and that I would like to know better. This is the place where I write in my own voice, where clients can read samples of my writing, where I can ask other professionals open questions, and where I share thoughts about life and owning a business.

 

Even with a very small following, traffic on this site suffered in a big way during the last 2-3 weeks. My father in law became gravely ill in mid August, and passed away on August 27. During those few weeks, we were traveling and staying in Eastern KY, where internet service is spotty at best, and besides, my mind was occupied with family concerns far more than with business worries.

 

It was interesting to take a look back at the traffic here, though. There were several things in place that probably helped keep a few visitors dropping in, but for the most part there was very little activity  around here. A grand total of two comments were left in my absence, and the number of visitors over two weeks was about the same as I would usually see in one normal day.

 

Here are some prematurely drawn conclusions based on my statistics from the last few weeks:

Social media matters. Under normal circumstances, I spend a fair amount of time each day participating in conversations on Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and a few other networks. In fact, most of the traffic here comes from those social networks. There is a direct correlation between blog traffic and social media participation.

 

Commenting makes a difference. In late June/early July, I set a schedule for leaving comments on other blogs. My plan was to leave a minimum of 20 comments on other blogs each week to try and find out if that would increase traffic here. Turns out, that is harder to do than it seems. I had trouble finding enough blogs to read, and then, some didn’t leave room for comments, I couldn’t think of anything relevant to say, or other people had already said it all. However, I was beginning to see a slight increase in traffic here that was probably attributable to all that commenting.

 

Even tiny gardens need water. This is a tiny blog, but if I don’t respond to comments and post new content with rigid regularity, the itty bitty following it has taken a couple of years to build disappears. Quickly.

 

There are millions of blogs, and only a fraction of a percent of them are well-known. You can bet that the owners of those few big names don’t spend the majority of their days taking it easy while the money rolls in. Blogs require work, and when you stop working, people stop visiting.

 

What’s the longest period of time you left your blog on autopilot? Did you see a major difference in traffic? Have you found anything specific (social media, commenting on other blogs, etc.) that impacts your statistics more or less than you expected it to? 

 

 

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