It’s no secret that I am really interested in self publication, and since I’m a writer, it’s no stretch to imagine it’s because I want to write and self publish a book someday. And that is the case. In fact, I’ve written a book. It’s not a cool, sexy book about my life or vampires or anything really interesting like that. Instead it’s a book for people who run businesses, but hate to market, and just sort of fumble along, doing a little here and a little there to market their businesses. (People who are very much like me.)

The book is set up so that you get a tip each week, that should only take an hour or two to put into place. The idea is that if you just spend one to three hours a week marketing, you will eventually develop a solid plan that generates good results for your business. It doesn’t have to be painful, and it doesn’t have to exhaust you.

There are lots of tips that involve testing things, because not every marketing strategy will work for every business, or every personality, or every audience. You might be delighted to find that in-person networking is not a good strategy for you, or if you hate writing, you might be happy to see that blogging generates little in the way of results for what you do. The tips guide you through figuring out what works and what doesn’t.

It’s funny that I’ve written a book detailing exactly how to do something I am not very good at doing for myself. It was almost like writing a marketing plan for Smiling Tree Writing, or like writing down everything I have learned in steps that wouldn’t be hard for someone even as lazy as me to take.

Now that the time to publish and market the book is getting so very close, I should probably start implementing the tips to sell the book. Isn’t that an odd notion? I will use the tips that are for sale in order to sell those tips. It’s like some kind of weird brain teaser.

Of course, the fact that I’ve written a book is exciting for me, but why should YOU care? Well, I came up with a few extra tips, and I’m going to be sharing them with folks who are interested in free marketing advice. If you’d like to get the freebies, just sign up for my newsletter. I promise not to spam you, or sell your email address, or send you an email a day. I’m lazy, remember? Hopefully you will smile a little and possibly learn a little, and if you find that is not the case, you can unsubscribe at any time.

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When you are writing for business, there is this terrible temptation to “be professional.” Unfortunately, being professional is often the equivalent of being really, terribly, horribly dull. Think about suits. Suits are not interesting. To tell an expensive one from a cheap one, you have to look at subtle details. You don’t want your business blog to be like a suit because readers are not going to look for the subtle details.

Several years ago, when Smiling Tree Writing was just beginning, a new client told me to look at her biggest competitor’s web site to get ideas for her blog. Then she suggested I could save time and she could save money if I just “copied everything they did.” Aside from the obvious copyright issues, I tried to explain why that approach wouldn’t work. She insisted that her company did the same thing as this other, bigger company and since they clearly had a marketing department, the best thing to do would be to copy them. In her mind, it was like getting a marketing department for free.

Although this client was not sophisticated in stating what she wanted to do, she was also not unusual. If you choose any industry, in any particular location, then look at the web sites, blogs, and other marketing materials of several, you are going to see commonalities. I am not acquainted in any way with these three businesses, but take a look at how this establishment, and this one, and this one are visually similar. At one time, pretty much every photographer in Chattanooga had music and a flash intros on the landing pages of their web sites. Real estate agents tend to have lists of tag words longer than their posts on their blogs.

It makes perfect sense to look at what someone you admire is doing and emulate it. But, it makes more sense to evaluate what the others are doing, then do something a little different.

Stand out from the crowd. Distinguish yourself. Show your personality.

Standing out can be tricky, though. If everyone else is wearing a navy blue suit and yours is gray, you might stand out. If your suit is purple, you will definitely stand out, but it might not be a good thing. So, there is a balance to be struck. Most people try to stand out in some small way, and it turns into the equivalent of wearing a novelty tie when everyone else is wearing a solid color tie, and that might be enough, depending on your industry and audience. When I was researching photographers a few years ago, if I found one that did not have music that automatically played when I landed on their site, it was enough to make make me look at them closer.

All of this goes back to your uniqueness – your USP, or unique selling proposition. What is special about you? What makes your widget better than the widgets for sale down the street? Why should I choose your business out of a list of forty results on the first couple pages of Google results? You don’t want to copy the marketing department at Competitor XYZ because they are not you, and being you is one of the biggest advantages you have in the marketplace (even when it doesn’t feel that way).

Have you observed any industries where all of the copy reads the same, or all of the web sites look the same? Do you purposely toe the line that exists in your industry in order to be professional? When you are shopping for a good or a service, are you more likely to look for the business that is different, or do you find comfort in working with someone who seems to know what the standard for his industry is? 

 

 

*NOTE: Just in case you are wondering, the first interview with an independent writer will be posted on Thursday. YAY!

 

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Do you know what a seed tick is? If the answer is “no,” count yourself lucky. If you do know what a seed tick is, you are going to understand how uncomfortable I have been for the last week or so.

I live in an area where there are lots of uninhabited, heavily wooded acres. Hiking and trail running are two of my favorite activities. Last week a friend and I went for a hike. We didn’t really have a destination, and the trail we were on ended at the power lines – where there is a wide right-of-way, and the trees are regularly cut down. It’s about a hundred yards wide, and covered in grass and scrub. There is a path along the power lines right-of-way and we followed it, eventually coming to a road. The whole walk took just over an hour.

When we got home we jokingly called the part of the path under the power lines a “hike through death valley” because it was a good 10-15 degrees hotter, and there were some steep hills. That part of the walk wasn’t much fun, but we felt pretty good about doing it. We had been home for probably 20 minutes or so when I noticed what looked like a piece of dust moving along my arm. SEED TICK!!!

Seed ticks are so small that they are hard to see. They are actually tick larvae, and they congregate in groups of hundreds or thousands, usually in grass. When you brush by the grass, they all jump onto you, hoping you provide enough of a meal that they can progress to the nymph stage. Ugh. Gross. If you see them right away, before they start crawling like crazy, you can grab some tape and press it to your skin, and the ticks will stick to

the tape. Lots of people make the mistake of thinking they can wash the tiny demons off in the shower, but that doesn’t work. They dig into your skin and stay there.

I’m fairly certain I got the ticks while walking through death valley, so they were on my body for no less than 40 minutes before I saw that first one. When they first get on you, they are in a big group, but they spread out – quick. The sooner you can get to them with the tape, the better your chances of getting them all. I got the tape and started sticking it to those ticks. (hah!) After about an hour, I figured I’d gotten as many as I was going to find, and sat down on the couch. And found about 10 more. Later, when I showered, I found even more. The situation was not looking good.

That night, I woke up scratching my ankle. The next day I was covered, toe to head, in tiny tick bites. There’s not much you can do about it – I kept a bottle of rubbing alcohol handy and wiped the bites with it. Stinging is better than itching in my book.

Six days later, the bites were healing up, and not itching nearly so intensely. I decided to go for a run, and didn’t want to go back in the woods. I went to my grandfather’s farm and ran along the driveway – it’s a 1/3 of a mile loop, so makes a great place to track time and distance. Since no one lives there now, the mowing is not done quite as regularly as it maybe should be…You know where this is going, don’t you?

More  *^!@!! seed ticks. Not nearly so many this time, but my poor feet are covered in scabs and bites. It’s really horrible – and it reminds me of marketing.

If I have ONE itchy bite, it’s not so awful, just like sending out one marketing query or making one cold call is not so terrible. But 400 (that is not an exaggeration) itchy bites is physical torture in the way that the prospect of having to make 400 cold calls or send out 400 queries is mental torture. Unhappily, there is no way to prevent a seed tick infestation other than staying out of the woods (or dowsing yourself in poison, but I don’t like to do that). But, you can avoid marketing overwhelm fairly easily.

Schedule in a minimum number of calls or emails a day. It really is that easy. Just don’t go to bed until you’ve hit your marketing target. That’s my simple system, and most of the time, it works. Do you have a system to keep you from avoiding the tiny tasks that quickly pile up in your business? Even if you don’t have to do marketing, you probably have some similar thing that can quickly overtake your whole world if you don’t handle it.

Oh, and the common denominator between seed ticks and marketing? They both suck. (I itch everywhere. Forgive my bad joke.)

 

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Somehow despite my best – okay, total lack of – effort, my waistline is 1.5 inches bigger this year than last year. Ugh.

A friend has convinced me to expand my business and begin sending letters of introduction and queries to trade publications. Hooray!

My dad got me chickens. Lots of baby chickens. The jury is still out on whether this falls into the ugh or hooray category, but it is definitely a learning experience and an expansion of my personal knowledge.

All of these things have the concept of expansion on my mind. Sometimes expanding is great, like when it means you might make more money or have more fun with your work. But other times it can be terrible. When the clutter in your junk drawer takes over the counter as well you are looking at a bad expansion. It’s not easy to know which will be good and which will be bad, either.

Clients often come to me when they are considering an expansion of some sort. They may want to expand their presence on the internet, or their services. Sometimes they just want to expand the number of brochures they have available to show prospective customers. Even though I usually want the work, sometimes I advise against the expansion.

When it comes to social media, especially, each expansion should be carefully considered. After all, time is valuable, and is the one real cost to using social media in your business. You cannot “maintain a presence” on any platform without actually spending time there. Being social cannot be automated. It would be like sending your resume to a party and saying you attended.

There are all kinds of promises to help you gain more followers, make more connections, get more likes, and on and on. Some experts promise they will teach you how to “do” social media in 10 minutes a day. It’s all true, too. You really can fairly easily get thousands of followers on Twitter, hundreds of likes on Facebook and hundreds of connections on Linkedin. The problem is, it will all be worthless unless you actually invest the time and do the work to find the right audiences on those platforms.

The same is true of a blog. You can find all sorts of shortcuts to increase the number of people who come to your site and look, at least for a second or two, at your blog. But if they don’t care what you are writing about, they don’t interact with you, or they just plain aren’t buying what you are selling, what’s the point?

Before you decide to expand your social media use, think about why you want to, and what you hope to accomplish by doing so, and what the expansion will cost in terms of your time. If you want to make some new friends, Twitter is a great tool to do so. I’ve made several connections that became important real-life friendships using it. Some of those connections ended up generating some business, but not all of them, and that was never my end-goal in using Twitter.

Most people don’t start with a defined strategy. If you work at a big company and are launching a campaign, or a at a start-up, you might have the luxury of a clean slate on which to state goals and benchmarks and methods for reaching them. If you own a small business and have for years, it’s much more likely that you started a Facebook Page one day because it seemed like a good idea, or you tried blogging because someone told you it would help your Google rank. In other words, you are probably approaching online stuff in a piecemeal, haphazard kind of way, and each new thing getting some buzz gets a little bit of your attention. Or, maybe you are seeing results from one platform or another so you are thinking it might be good to expand those efforts.

The best thing to do is to choose one area for expansion. That way, you can measure your time investment and the results, and you are less likely to get overwhelmed. As always, the best place to start is your own web site because you own it. On other platforms, from Facebook to Tumblr to Google+ to Twitter, you are renting space and everything can be changed or gone in an instant. Even if you don’t write a regular blog, you should be spending some time driving traffic to your web site. You can comment on other posts or in forums. You can put links to other interesting and related things on your site somewhere – under a tab called “trends” or something. You can simply spend a little time each day learning how to use your web site. It’s a powerful tool!

Once you have your own backyard in order, you can move on to something else. There are lots of platforms to choose from and all of them have a different audience, and a different potential purpose. You might make learning about them your focus for a few months, then choose one to expand your presence. After you have it under control, and you know how much of your time it will take, and what kind of results to expect, you can choose the next one. Eventually you will hit a tipping point.

How do approach an expansion, either in your business or personal development? Do you study it first, or jump right in? Does ROI play any kind of role?

While I wait for your answers, I’m going to plan an expansion of my fitness activities…

 

 

 

 

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Many of my clients do not enjoy using the internet. They think Facebook is a “brag sheet,” or a waste of time, or worse, just a way to gossip and cause trouble. They generally know how to use email, but would prefer to talk on the phone, or best of all, face to face. They realize that having a web site is necessary, but generally have no idea how to build one, or even how to go about hiring someone to do it for them. Several times, prospects have said, “I don’t care what you do. I just want it to work.”

Those of us who do enjoy having a world of knowledge at our fingertips often forget that there is this huge class of very smart people out there who don’t understand why anyone would want to use a service like Twitter, what a backlink is, or how one might go about attracting business with Google. People who find that they are comfortable online, enjoy the constant change and development of new technology, and who have skills within a particular industry often find themselves in high demand.

Have you ever thought about how difficult it is for a person who knows very little about technology to establish a presence on the internet? When I need to shop around for anything technology related, I turn to the internet. I read reviews, ask my networks for recommendations, and visit lots of business web sites. If I could not use the internet in that way, I’m not sure what I would do – and the people who are not comfortable with the internet are in that boat, exactly. The phone book is not what it used to be. The number of people who have been in your shoes that you can call is probably limited.

Remember the old Saturday Night Live skit with the IT guy? Unfortunately, there is a reason for that stereotype. It’s bad enough when the crabby IT guy works for a company. It’s much worse when you hire him to provide some service for your company. It’s even worse when crabby becomes scammy.  I’ve met so many people who have either been blatantly ripped off and have no idea, or who have been burned so many times they think that anyone who does anything concerning the internet for a living is a thief. Right now, I am working with a client who has one of the stranger stories I’ve heard:

This person had owned several businesses throughout his life, and several years ago decided to start a new one. He is excellent at in-person networking, at managing, planning, delegating, and all of the other areas one must master in order to

run a business successfully. But he needed a web site.

He found himself in need of a service, with no idea of even what kind of professional he should hire, which is understandable. I’ve asked technology professionals how to refer to what they do and they didn’t even know what to call themselves. On top that, the pricing just seemed crazy. He was hearing numbers all over the place, and had no clue at all what kind of price would be fair, or average, or exorbitant.

Although I am a copywriter, I’ve had several clients who have asked me to find someone who could either build or fix their web sites because they simply have no clue whether there will be any difference in the site that results from a fee of $1000 and a fee of $10,000. I’ve heard, “Can you just explain it so I will understand?” more than once.

Besides the hard, cold numbers involved in trying to find someone you trust to do something insanely important for your business that you do not understand at all, there is the way it feels. No one likes to feel dumb, especially established, successful businesspeople. But when you are talking to someone and you only understand approximately one-fifth of what they are saying, you might feel a little dumb.

Finding himself in this uncomfortable situation, my client did what any smart businessman would do: he turned to his colleagues. He started asking questions, and telling a few people his conundrum. Eventually – probably because he is a super nice guy – one of his connections gave him a phone number and said something like, “This is my tech guy. Give him a call and tell him what you need and he’ll fix you up.” This kind colleague owned a company large enough that the “tech guy” was actually an employee in his IT department, so it wasn’t a referral, it was a favor.

Within a short time, my client had a site that did what he wanted it to do, and, at that time, all he really wanted it to do was show up when someone searched a couple of keyword phrases. Fast-forward four or five years: he calls me and needs some help creating and managing a Facebook Page for his company, and is interested in other types of content marketing. After talking to him for a little while, I suggest that he add a few articles to his site, or even start a blog. And that’s when he tells me that he has no clue how to change anything on his site, that the “tech guy” no longer works for his friend, and that he doesn’t pay for hosting and has no idea what any passwords to anything might be…

Without even knowing it, my client locked himself out, and handed the virtual keys to his business to a total stranger, then watched him disappear into the mists of cyberspace. In this case, nothing terrible happened, but what if the “tech guy” got mad at his former employer and decided to wreak a little havoc? My client didn’t even remember purchasing his domain name, so wasn’t even sure if he owned it or not. If the “tech guy” had decided to start posting pornographic images to my client’s site, there wouldn’t have been a way to stop him.

Eventually, we figured it all out, and I referred him to Ego Systems, here in Chattanooga, and got everything straightened out and secured. I am now working to re-write and update the copy on his site, and will be training him on how to make simple changes in the near future. The thing is, I know that this business is one of hundreds in the same situation – just in Chattanooga. There seems to be a giant gulf between business owners and the technology community, but it would be to everyone’s benefit if there were a solid and easy to find bridge across that gulf.

I don’t have any words of wisdom to offer in this post. Instead, I’m asking you: How can we fix this? How can we connect tech-savvy service providers to business owners? What needs to happen for business owners to trust those service providers?  Please feel free to share your suggestions, or personal stories, in the comments. 

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