remarkable communication

The One Thing You Can't Afford to Blow Off

I have lots of friends who are entrepreneurs. Some of us have day jobs as well, others are making a full-time living in their businesses. Some think they "aren't really entrepreneurs" because they run schools or nonprofits.

Some are successful and some are struggling, but we've all got one thing in common. We've maxed out our personal resources. Not our checkbooks or credit cards (although sometimes those too), but our creativity, our time, and our productive energy.

Scheduled maintenance

Ever work with a big, high-volume copy machine? High maintenance doesn't begin to cover it. There's always something wrong with the damned things--they start having hourly paper jams, or they get into the habit of sprinkling cheerful ink confetti on your documents. And of course they have pricy ink and toner that need frequent replacement.

The only way to keep these things running is to get ahead of the problem--to have the fix-it-up-chappie come out on a regular schedule to keep everything aligned and in good shape. If you're "too busy" or "too broke" to make that happen, the karmic law of disasters guarantees that the machine will break down spectacularly at the exact moment the FedEx guy is waiting for you to print out the biggest RFP of your career.

Scheduled maintenance is critical for any complex piece of equipment that's working at or close to its maximum productivity. And the fix-it-up chappie will tell you that delicate equipment is a lot easier and cheaper to maintain than it is to repair.

How to get anything done

There's a lot of verbiage out there about productivity, but most of it boils down to one central habit. If it must get done, you must carve out dedicated time for it. Twitter, gossip and television can all be fit into the spaces left over from real work. Returning client calls, hard thinking about business strategy and any kind of writing all need to be on your calendar. And in there for real, not just an Outlook appointment that you snooze every 15 minutes until you dismiss it, undone, at the end of the day.

You, my friend, are a high-maintenance machine. You're the complicated invention that can't be replaced. Your work relies on your energy, your creativity, and your enthusiasm. And you can only fake those things on a very limited basis. Starbucks is a crappy substitute for creativity and life force.

By now, I suspect you've gotten my main point. You have to schedule maintenance on yourself. And you probably need to do that daily. (Sorry, workaholics. I don't make the rules, I just write them down.)

You are too busy for a psychic breakdown. You are too broke to be forced into taking a week or a month off to repair your damaged nervous system. So start taking care of your machine every day. Starting today.

The maintenance program

Figure out one or two times a day when you have a decent level of mental energy. Mornings are good for lots of people, but they might not be right for you. Don't use "junk" time for maintenance--it's too important. It doesn't necessarily have to be your absolute peak performance time, but don't use time slots when you have the creative capacity of a flatworm, either.

If you have a fabulous life, take an uninterrupted hour every day for maintenance. If you have a life like the rest of us, take 20 minutes in the morning and, when you can, another 20 before bed.

Use this time to do something just because you like it. It should be pointless and highly satisfying. Stupid is optional but not bad.

Read trashy books. Color with crayons. Take a hot bath, preferably with puppets or bath crayons. Make pornographic origami or models of Star Wars spaceships.

The one unbreakable rule: there must be no practical application whatsoever to maintenance work. Writing blog posts doesn't count. Reading business books doesn't count. Painting your toenails is iffy. Baking cookies is fair game, but only if you eat them all yourself.

Unless you are already magnificently sane and productive, and the words "homicidal rage" are quaintly foreign to you, nothing you regularly do now counts. Working out is great, meditation is great, but if you already do them and the machine is still making that funny grinding sound, you still need some stupid fun time.

The more uncomfortable this post makes you, the worse you need it. If you're mentally shrieking that this is pointless advice that only an irresponsible bonbon-eating slacker could give, you are in crisis. Your machine is just about to break, leaving you with a smoking pile of springs and burned gears and no way to get your work done.

Keep going the way you are and your work is going to start to get worse. The machine starts to disintegrate from the inside, corroding the parts that are very, very hard to see. You won't notice it right away, but once the rust takes hold, it's hard as hell to get rid of.

A broken machine means no work, or lousy work that quits getting results. It means crappy money, crappy success, crappy momentum. It means significant pain for the people who rely on you, whether they're your clients or your kids. A broken machine is frustrating, massively inconvenient and painful as hell.

Step away from your to-do list. Buy a watercolor paintbox and some glitter before it's too late. Srsly.

Photo from icanhascheezeburger.com

5 Recipes for Success (and 1 for Tomatoes)

By Sonia Simone

Seth Godin did a great post on how to read a business book, in which he pointed out that good business books are 95% motivation and 5% recipes for acting on that motivation. My own struggle with Godin's books is that I come out of them motivated as hell, but then I lose steam trying to translate the big idea into a recipe I can act on.

In fact, you could probably classify a lot of what I do as writing recipes people can use to act on the motivation they get from brainy strategists like Seth Godin or Tom Peters.

Anyway, here are some terrific recipes for your own professional and communication success. Plus one for when you have not-that-great tomatoes, because hey, we've all been there.

• Cold Calling: Destined for Failure. If you're doing any cold calling, this great post gives specific suggestions for tactics that will get better results with less pain. It's also an excellent example of how to do a little seat-of-your-pants marketing through conversation, also known as the anti-elevator-pitch.
  
  
• The Pocket-Sized Guide to Blogging. Skelliewag hasn't posted much lately, but she's back with an excellent comprehensive (and succinct) guide to what makes a blog work well. Follow this advice and you will see results in your blog. Nice to see her return!
  
  
• How to Handle Customer Email. Terrific post about the right and wrong way to handle email from your customers. Yes, it's common sense, except no one is doing it. You could be.
  
  
• If you ever have to present information to anyone, allow me to grab you by the lapels and recommend that you pick up the book Beyond Bullet Points. While you're waiting for Amazon to deliver it, check out the slide show How to Avoid Death by Powerpoint, which will whet your appetite and get you thinking in the right direction. You don't have to actually use PowerPoint to use this--it's a killer recipe for any kind of talk, speech or presentation you might make.
  
  
• While we're on the topic of PowerPoint, go see James Hipkin's post about the Thread of Steel. He happens to tie it to PowerPoint, but it's an important exercise for any communication--an ad, a newsletter article, a blog post.
  
  
• You know how you get tomatoes from the store and they look like they will be amazing, and then they're . . . not amazing? The charming and witty food writer Casey Ellis has a solution. The Tomato Wars.

Creative Commons Flickr image by jackie-dee

Some Good Free Resources for Online Marketing Newbies

There is a scary amount of information out there about Internet marketing, and a lot of it is garbage. In fact, probably 95% of it is garbage, beating out even Sturgeon's Law.

But some of it is very worthwhile, so I thought I'd share the best links I've found over the past six months or so. The latest fad from successful (and rich) marketing gurus is to give away a ton of good free stuff to entice you into buying their (generally very expensive) paid stuff.

Now I can't tell you if any of these people is worth buying a product from. (Except Caroline Middlebrook, who strikes me as insanely honest.) But I've found solid, usable advice in each of these. None of the links below is an affiliate link, by the way, in case you were curious.

Also, I haven't found any of these folks to be too horrible about sending 20 emails a week, a practice I cannot stand. If they do go a little overboard with the email, you can always unsubscribe.

• Frank Kern's Mass Control blog. I think I received more frantic emails to sign up for this expensive (and now theoretically sold out, although something tells me we'll get an opportunity to spend more money down the line) e-course than I get for Viagra, Canadian lottery winnings and philanthropic Nigerian millionaires combined. Not from Kern, but from the army of affiliates he lined up to promote this thing. However, I will say that the guy puts a hell of a free series together. There is a tremendous amount of useful stuff here. I AM NOT TELLING YOU TO BUY HIS PRODUCTS, which might be great and might be mediocre, I have no idea. But the free stuff is good.
• Thirty Day Challenge. I'll be honest--I think there is an awful lot more to creating an Internet-based business than you're going to learn in the Thirty Day Challenge. But the information given is mostly solid, especially for beginners, and the technique they use to research keywords (for free) is the best I've seen. It's day 7 or 8 of last year's training. Well worth a look. (After you sign up, click the Training link.)
• Caroline Middlebrook's How to set up niche marketing sites on WordPress. I've linked to this before, it's a very handy free little resource and everything I've seen from Caroline tells me she's an honorable person who likes to help people. You can use this to set up any kind of blog or static site on WordPress, it doesn't have to be a money-making or niche marketing site.
• Ken McCarthy pre-seminar interview series. My new friend Laurie Weiss turned me on to Ken McCarthy. I haven't bought his stuff and I don't know if it's good, but Laurie can vouch for his seminar and I can vouch for the quality of this free audio series. Lots of in-depth material with minimal shilling for the seminar. Classy series from someone who seems like a classy guy.

Linky Saturday: Resources for February 2, 2008

Image by LittleGoldWoman

Here's another collection of interesting and useful resources for you.

How to be Creative on Gaping Void. This is Hugh Macleod's signature manifesto on creativity, risk, integrity, success and doing what you were put on this earth to do. The original posts are several years old, but he adds to it frequently. How to be Creative is required reading (and bookmarking, and re-reading) for anyone looking to expand their professional, personal and creative lives.

11 Top Secret Recipes for the Aspiring Copywriter Chef, a guest post by Dean Rieck on Copyblogger. I'm not sure about that chef metaphor, but this is a good list of 11 copywriting "recipes" that describe the points you need to touch in order to write persuasive copy. It starts with AIDA, a formula most of us have heard of, Attention, Interest, Desire, and call to Action. Reick then gives 10 variants, each of which can be useful in different situations. A nice reference for folks who want to write better Web pages, blogs, or sales material.

Are scrapers stealing your content? If your content has been ripped off by some jerk who's passing it off as his own, you do have (some) recourse. This post walks you through filing an official DMCA complaint with the scumbag dirtball scraper copyright infringer's host.

When Seth Godin Isn't Seth Godin. Do you follow Seth on Twitter? Actually, no you don't--you follow someone who has borrowed his name and his photograph in order to post pointers to Seth's blog. The actual Seth Godin has no connection with that person. This is an interesting little article on Problogger about the importance of registering your Web identity on all the major services, even if you don't necessarily intend to use them.

The Starfish Story. Yes, this has been passed up and down the Web quite a lot. That doesn't matter. What does matter is that the principle behind it will help you find the right customers and take the right actions. Do what you need to help one starfish at a time. Freaking out about the size of the beach doesn't do anyone any good.

Tips for Joining the A-List by Robert Scoble. A fascinating (two-year old) post with tips for joining the blogging "A list." Not just for bloggers--there's some good advice here on writing better headlines and getting yourself noticed, especially online.

Linky Wednesday: Resources for January 23, 2008

Here are some smart and useful posts I've found this week that I think you guys would enjoy. Drop a comment and let me know, should I do more link posts? I've avoided them in the past, but I'm coming to think that they can be pretty useful in themselves.

Chris Brogan's Social Media Tool Kit. Ever wonder what tools to use to actually do all the social media stuff? What readers, what blog platform, etc.? This is a great basic tool kit that describes what the different tools do and gives you a good option (or two) for each function.

Confidence: The Networking Strategy that Works Every Time. A nice and genuinely useful post about how to muster up the courage to make a connection with someone.

Savile Row, Three Years On. If you want to know how new social media can combine beautifully with small and emphatically old school business, read this post carefully. This is the flip side of the Meatball Sundae--if you combine the pieces thoughtfully and retain some agility, old and new can complement each other beautifully.

AdAge's Power 150. If you want to make a study of professional marketing, advertising and PR, these are the 150 most important blogs to be reading. Time to make friends with your RSS reader.

Why People Subscribe to a Blog. The always smart Dosh Dosh sums it up this way: "Readers subscribe to blogs when they provide an informational or entertainment value so great that it would be a loss to not subscribe to it." Maki then goes on to unpack how he got to 10,000 subscribers (hint: it was all about beneficial content). If blogging or social media are part of your communication strategy, Dosh Dosh is always worth reading.

Ready to Start a Blog? Check out this Handy Resource

I downloaded this free ebook by Caroline Middlebrook, and it's a wonderfully helpful resource if you want to create a blog. It walks you through creating a WordPress blog on your own hosted server (which I would have done myself if I had known it was this cheap and easy). You don't need to have an actual physical machine, or a geeky nephew who understands computers, or really anything at all other than the $7 a month for the service she recommends.

The ebook is aimed at creating static sites for niche affiliate marketing, but it will work just fine for a blog, or for a simple informational site for your business or project. If you want the absolute quickest and easiest way to create a new blog or simple Web site (other than Squidoo, which is even easier but doesn't have as much flexibility), this is a great way to go.

Thanks to Caroline for putting such a useful resource together. She doesn't even ask for your email in exchange. (Which she should, but that's another story.)