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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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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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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Several months ago, my daughter’s beloved Dachshund  died. Her name was Babe and she and my daughter were best friends. Babe was supposed to have been my dog, but it was love at first sight for Babe and Stevie. We were never sure exactly how old Babe was because she was given to us by a friend, who got her from someone else, who’d gotten her

from an old lady, who’d gotten her from the pound.

 

Babe was always a stinky dog, and she got stinkier with age. It took me years to house train her, and even then she hated to go outside if it was cold or rainy. In other words, she was quite a lot of work. She was worth it though, because she was loyal and sweet. Babe lived with us for about 12 years.

 

Stevie, of course, was devastated. She almost immediately started reading ads on craigslist, saying that she didn’t really want another dog, but liked reading the ads and looking at the pictures. Her younger sister, Jodi, was sure that Stevie needed another dog right away, so she also started reading classifieds and breed descriptions and thinking about what kind of dog Stevie should have.

 

Eventually, of course, they read an ad they couldn’t resist because they are soft-hearted teenage girls. It was an ad for a poodle that had been rescued. They decided to just “go check it out.” Right. They came home with the funniest looking poodle I have ever seen. She was mostly blond, with a black tail, black ears and just enough black on her nose to make it look huge. The rescuer had been calling her Dawn and Stevie promptly renamed her Sparkles, which she answered to immediately.

 

Sparkles didn’t have any teeth, and had apparently never had too much affection. I petted her a little and she became very attached – like wouldn’t get more than about a foot away from me. At first, I tried to ignore her, in the hopes she would become attached to Stevie, but Stevie is rarely home and left for Bonnaroo a week after bringing Sparkles home.

 

So Sparkles became my dog. I’ve had lots of dogs, but never one who was quite so attached as Sparkles. She cried when

I left the house and slept by the door until I came back home. She slept under my desk all day and sat with me in the evenings. One day, she got covered in grass trimmings and was completely green because she followed me while I was weed-eating. When she went out she usually walked to the driveway, did her business and came back to the door. She didn’t seem to have any desire to run around and explore.

 

Yesterday, my husband came home for lunch and let her out, (I didn’t realize she was outside) and we haven’t seen her since. I’m sure that she wandered down the driveway, then got lost and confused. I’ve walked up and down the road looking for her and have asked a couple of neighbors if they saw here, and still have some hope that we will find her. She couldn’t have gotten too far. We will post lost dog signs this afternoon and ask the rest of the neighbors if they have seen her.

 

Thinking about Sparkles wandering around in the world lost got me to thinking about being lost – and finding your way – in all sorts of situations. Whether you are lost in life, lost for a minute, or you’ve lost direction professionally, just the sensation of not knowing the way is scary. (Poor Sparkles!)

 

If you are feeling lost in your business it is especially scary because (usually) your business is your livelihood. Plus, you want to appear confident to your clients, customers and competitors, right? You don’t want the world to know you’re lost. So, you try to hold your head up with a bright, happy smile and at least try to appear to know where you are going.

 

Sometimes projecting confidence is all it takes to get you headed in the right direction. Sometimes you need a map – a to do list or a business plan or an evaluation by a professional – to help you find your way. The important thing is to acknowledge your lost feeling, then do something about it. If you let yourself get too far off track, you might not find your way back.

 

I find that constant evaluation works best for me. Setting up a plan, then revisiting every month or quarter simply doesn’t work. I need to look at it everyday, sometimes multiple times a day, and ask myself, “Is what you are doing right now part of the plan? Are you getting closer to your goals?” Other people are able to head in the general right direction and get where they want to be without such rigid adherence to a written plan.

 

I need to go now, and make some signs that might help Sparkles find her way home, but I’d love to know: What do you do when you feel lost? Are you a go-with-the-flow kind of person or do you need a set of accurate directions?

 

 

 

 

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Are you taking care of the basics? The stuff you know you should be doing, and that only rookies or arrogant suckers fail to do?

 

If you aren’t, you are going to see a slow slide, followed by a painful THUMP. Then you are faced with the daunting task of climbing right back up.

 

I can tell you because I’m there. Rubbing my business bum and wondering how in the world I let this happen.

 

For months, I had a comfortable client list. Each of my clients was pleasant and the work was challenging, but not stressful. A few referral jobs here and there filled in any gaps in my schedule, and I had plenty of time for lunches with friends and working out and all sorts of other good things. So I left “marketing” on my to-do list week after week, and didn’t think too much about it. Yes, I’m hanging my head in shame. Such a common mistake! Who hasn’t read (or written!) a post about the importance of marketing even when things are going great?

 

Of course, even with the greatest client list on the planet, you are going to have some attrition. Things change, people move, businesses close and life generally happens. And such was the case for me – all at once, of course, because of some law written by some guy named Murphy.  Now, I’m scrambling with no one to blame but myself.

 

It was easy to let marketing go for several reasons. I didn’t really want to be too busy through the summer. I wanted to make sure my existing clients were well-served and happy. I wanted to see if it would be possible to work by referral only.

 

Excuses. Lame excuses.

 

If you are running a business that involves attracting customers (and what business doesn’t?) you have to keep on marketing. If your business is big and successful your marketing activities might take the form of networking, maintaining your brand, or simply responding to emails. For the rest of us, marketing is probably a much longer list of activities.

 

Over the weekend, I wrote a new plan. This one includes a heavy dose of daily marketing – but also a few “built-in” ways to market so that later, when my roster is full again, it will be easier to stay in the marketing habit.

 

It is difficult to publicly admit to such a silly mistake, but really, everyone messes up. Make me feel better: share your common business errors. Have you let your accounting go for too long? Stopped marketing and paid the price? Failed to respond to an inquiry? Surely I’m not the only one feeling the sting of embarrassment! 

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