Yesterday, I ran across an ad for a job in my Facebook stream. Pretty much everything about the position appealed to me, and I spent several minutes reading the posting and thinking about who I knew at the organization and comparing my experience

with the qualifications listed. Then I just sat there feeling conflicted. This has happened a few times in the recent past. 

 

I’ve said several times that I don’t want another full time job. I love writing, working from home and having the ability to be choosy about my who I work with. There’s no dress code and no schedule, I don’t have a commute, and I get to play with my dogs or dig in the garden whenever I need a break. So, why would a job opening raise such turmoil?

 

At least a couple of my clients have struggled with the same question. Would a position with a company give me some stability while I continue to build a business? Could I still do a good job of running a business while working somewhere else? Should I be thinking about winding my business down and start looking for a full time position? These are the questions that haunt my darkest professional moments.

 

For me, so far, the answer to all of those questions has been no, and for a long and varied list of reasons, not the least of which is that I know the grass is NOT greener anywhere else. I’ve never had a job that I enjoyed as much as I have enjoyed Smiling Tree Writing. That doesn’t mean that there are not hassles and aggravations, but for the most part they are small, and overshadowed by the good stuff.

 

If you are a business owner, do you ever contemplate taking on another job, either part time or full time? Even if you don’t seriously consider it, do you indulge in fantasies about working in an office, and watching those lovely, regular paychecks flow into your bank account?

 

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The list of social sites that I use is getting long:

Twitter

Facebook

Google+

LinkedIn

Spotify

StumbleUpon

This Blog

SparkPeople                                                                                                                       * image by Patrick Hoesly

Goodreads

 

Believe it or not, each of those sites offers individual benefits, and I use them to meet different needs. If you were so fanatically impressed with my amazing writing skills that you wanted to connect with me in all of these different places, you would rarely, if ever, see the same content duplicated. I do provide links to my blog from several other sites, in the hopes more people will come here, but that’s about it.

 

You may be thinking, “That’s a LOT of content.” You’re right, it is, and sometimes I struggle with what to post where. Would this link work better on Twitter or Facebook? How many more people are likely to respond to this question on Google+ than on LinkedIn? Where should I share this in order to provide maximum exposure?

 

The thing is, I’m not really normal – in the way that I use social media. It is part of my job to offer my clients insight and advice regarding these various platforms. If that weren’t the case, I’m not sure I’d be active in quite so many places. Also, if I had a job that didn’t involve marketing or social media at all – if I were still a teacher, for instance – I would certainly be slower to get involved.

 

This run down of my own social media habits has a point: Any normal person would be overwhelmed.

 

That overwhelm usually leads to a handful of reactions. People link their feeds together so that the same status update or link or whatever appears everywhere at once. Sometimes, business owners simply ignore the latest and greatest and stubbornly stick to whatever has been working for them (know anyone still relying on the Yellow Pages?). Other folks just hire it all out to an agency.

 

Linking your profiles and pages together is a bad idea, for several reasons. One is that you miss out on the particular benefits each platform offers. The reason all these sites can coexist is that they don’t do the same things. The jokes and chatter that work perfectly on Twitter fall flat on LinkedIn.  I’m certainly not the first person to offer this advice, but I do think the temptation to link accounts will grow along with the number of platforms that could be linked.

 

Not taking the time to even learn how the next big thing works is a mistake, too. You need to at least have some idea of what each of these sites can do before you can decide where your business should be. Twitter might not be right for your business, but if you never check it out you will never know. Lots of businesses have found new customers through Twitter that never expected to be able to. Lots of others have tried and flopped – either because the people they were looking for weren’t there, they lacked an understanding of how that community works, or they were inconsistent or impatient.

 

Hiring an agency might seem like a good idea, especially if you listen to a well written and delivered pitch. But, unless you or someone who is extremely knowledgeable about your company works closely with the agency, it could be a disaster. In order for marketing through social platforms to work, you have to be personable and responsive to what your customers want. A representative from an agency cannot do that nearly as well as someone who lives and breaths your business. I’m not saying that an agency is NEVER the right idea, but you (or someone you trust) will have to spend time making sure the agency knows your company well enough to represent it.

 

I’m curious as to how the people who read this blog handle the overload. Do you wait to see how everyone else is going to use the latest new thing, or do you jump right in? Do you link your profiles together? Do you use different platforms to share different sorts of information or is one place as good as another?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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In the last month or so, several people for whom I have lots of respect, have asked me questions about generating ideas for blog posts. As a writer, I’m fairly good at thinking up things to write about so am going to share one technique that works pretty well. If you are just thinking about starting a blog or if you are trying to establish a new direction for your blog, you might find this post helpful.

 

Keep the idea of an umbrella in mind when you think about your blog. Choose a big topic – in my case it’s running a very small business – then write about whatever you want as long as you can connect it in some way to your big topic. In other words, make it fit under your umbrella. The best blogs out there do this extremely well. Copyblogger is probably the best. They have managed to connect everything from training dogs to The Princess Bride in some way or another to the topic of content marketing, and every post is relevant, entertaining and full of good information.

 

If you don’t think of yourself as creative, this might be hard. There are ways to make it work, though. You could try making a list of random observations throughout the day. Just write down things you observe – a crazy lady at the post office, a toddler pitching a fit, a jogger, someone making a complaint about your business, an angry co-worker, a sporting event, just anything you see or even thoughts that cross your mind. Don’t think about why you are writing them down.

 

Ignore your list for a few days, a week or even a month or more. Then get your list out and choose 3-4 of the events, observations or random thoughts and write them down on separate sheets of paper. You can go all English 101 and write them in the middle and circle it and do a textbook brainstorming session or, if you are more linear-minded, fold your paper in half and make two columns.

 

Then you just start making connections between the items on your list and whatever your umbrella topic is. It’s okay to really stretch here. Your connections can be completely tenuous. You aren’t writing at this point. You are just thinking and capturing those thoughts loosely. This should be a no-pressure, fun thing to do.

 

After your paper is full, or your brain is empty, or both, you are ready to start looking for something that might make a blog post. You might have already found a topic, or you might need to take one or two of the most interesting connections and repeat the brainstorming process in a more specific way.

 

The next part is easy (hahaha!): You write. Don’t worry about spelling, grammar, punctuation or any of that at this point. Just write out your thoughts about your random topic and how it fits under your umbrella topic. Then put it away. Don’t look at it for a couple of days, a week, a month or however long you can wait.

 

After some time has passed, get out your very rough draft and read it. If it still makes sense, start smoothing out the edges. Correct any obvious grammar or punctuation errors, make word changes, move sentences or paragraphs around if necessary. If it doesn’t make sense, put it away until the next time you go through this process. If it doesn’t make sense by about the third time, just delete it.

 

I normally either polish the draft up and post it or put it away one more time at this point. If you go through all these steps once a week for a while, you’ll eventually have a rich source of ideas and posts just waiting. Some people end up with a nice backlog of fully written posts that they can schedule to automatically go up, and others (like me) just save a bunch of drafts and pick one that reflects my feelings on the day I post it.

 

If you don’t enjoy the processes of brainstorming and drafting, you probably are looking at this thinking that it seems a bit much. But really, it doesn’t take that much of a time investment, maybe an hour or two a week, to make it work. I am also a member of a group that meets to talk about blogging and those meetings help to generate ideas as well. I will write more about how that works later.

 

Do you have a sure fire method that helps you generate ideas for blog posts? Would you find a process like the one described here cumbersome? Do most other people write multiple drafts, or is it more common to write and post immediately?

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I am of the “just suck it up and do what you’ve got to do” camp. In other words, don’t just sit around crying about it, get up and do something. A very close friend once told me that she won’t call me when she’s down unless she’s ready to be told to suck it up and get on with life.

 

One of the things I dislike most about Facebook is the tendency of so many people to just whine and complain all the time. I mean, a healthy rant now and then is all good and fine, and of course everybody needs a little cheering once in a while. But if every other post is of the my-life-is-so-hard variety, maybe you should consider making some changes, both to your life so that it isn’t so hard and to your attitude so that you can recognize the good stuff.

 

It’s not just Facebook, either. One of the reasons my social life has become severely limited in the last few years is that I lack patience with adults who just cannot seem to keep themselves together. I understand that people lose jobs, kids throw fits, unexpected debts hit you right at the worst time…those things happen to everybody. If you tell me a sad story every time I see you, I’m going to start avoiding your company.

 

Lately, I’ve been reconsidering my position on these issues. Maybe I’m too harsh. Maybe my expectations are too high. Perhaps I should work toward being more forgiving and more helpful and kinder to my fellow humans. After all, you never know what’s what until you walk a mile in someone else’s shoes.

 

“But…but…” the little voice in my head stutters. “Is it really too much to expect people to be responsible and marginally courteous?” After much thought, the answer is no, it is not too much to expect, either in personal or professional situations.

 

You might imagine that courtesy in business is a given. You wouldn’t want to be rude to a prospective customer or worse, someone who is already a customer, right? But stop and think about it. I bet that without trying too hard, you can think of three or four instances when a company treated you poorly. Phone companies are renowned for poor service, and most everyone has a story involving terrible customer service at various retail establishments.

 

To me, it’s worse when the folks at a small business are rude. I seek out independently owned companies and will often choose to pay more in order to support small businesses and the sting of discourteous behavior is worse when it comes from the owner of the company. It’s sort of expected when you are dealing with a conglomerate — after all, it’s hard to get mad at the cashier at Wal-Mart who is earning $8.00 an hour, with no health insurance and bad hours, for not caring.

 

But when you know that the person being rude owns the business and needs customers to survive, you have to wonder. And this is where I usually end up questioning myself: Am I being a client from hell? Have I over-stepped some boundary? It sucks to find yourself questioning your own behavior because someone else has been rude, but that is my first reaction. Once I get through the self-analysis, I begin considering other possibilities: Maybe she’s having a bad day? Was the last person she talked to hateful?

 

Most of the time, I will even go back, at least once, if I have a relationship with the business. Like I said, everyone has bad days. More than once, though, and I take my business elsewhere, regardless of convenience, price or whatever. There just isn’t an excuse.

When businesses wonder how they can compete with big corporations, there is one answer regardless of the type of business and that is good service. Common courtesy should be just the beginning.

 

 

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Several months ago, I was at a Chamber of Commerce breakfast. The presenter asked the crowd how a business owner should go about pricing services besides looking at the prices of competitors. No one said anything, and since I’ve never even thought about what my competitors charge, I said, “Well, if someone agrees to pay what I ask without qualms, I raise the price just a little bit for the next person. If that person agrees, I raise it just a little bit more for the next person, and then just a liiiiittle bit more for the next one and so on. No one has argued with me about price yet…”

 

Everyone laughed – except the presenter, who said, “You’re all laughing, but she’s right. You just keep raising it until somebody says no. Then you tell them you made a small mistake in estimating, and quote them the price you quoted the last time.”

 

In other words, you keep going until you’ve gone one step too far, then you back up.

 

It worked well for me. I’m now confident that my services are well worth what I charge. It took quite a long time for me to feel I had reached a good, stable pricing structure, but approaching it slowly allowed me to gain confidence.

 

I do this with all kinds of things. We have pets. Lots of pets. Two birds, four dogs. We have also had frogs, pigs, cats, fish and lizards. It seems like there is always room for one more critter. Until there’s not. It’s obvious when we have gone one step too far with our menagerie, but not quite so easy to back up.

 

A couple of days ago, I went for a run first thing in the morning. It was HOT. Since I haven’t been running regularly for a while, I kept having to walk for a few steps, then run some more. I kept doing this until I could feel my hamstrings shaking. Several hours later, the evil heat exhaustion headache made its ugly appearance. One step too far.

 

Taking things just a little too far is a good way to find your boundaries, so that you can push them. It is probably the best growth strategy for cautious people because you are constantly testing the waters and rarely diving in. There’s not much danger involved because you go forward about an inch at a time, and it’s perfect for people who like to take small steps.

 

There are dangers, of course, and alternative methods of progression. Peter Shallard wrote a great post about the difference in the tortoise and the phoenix methods of transformation. Peter recommends getting comfortable with both types of change, and makes good points in favor of that recommendation. It’s possible that, by pushing your boundaries slowly, you miss out on opportunities. There’s no telling how much money I “left on the table” in those early months of business.

 

It’s not a good strategy to use in relationships. You generally don’t want to go a step too far with people. Sometimes it’s not possible to back up.

 

Do you ever purposely go a step too far to see what will happen? How do you handle it when you have to back up?

 

 

 

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