Business

Well, a couple months back, my new guru, Perry Marshall, put the idea out there to unsubscribe ruthlessly from everything you don’t read in your inbox.  I just wanted to circle back to that post, and let you know how that went.

Now, for the first few weeks, it took me just as much time to keep unsubscribing from every little thing that kept popping into my inbox.  After about 2 weeks though, I did start to notice a difference.  I won’t lie, initially, I felt a little sad.  I didn’t have emails in my inbox to tell me I was important or someone was thinking about me 🙂  By the time I was doing this for a month, I was getting maybe 1 or 2 emails to unsubscribe from a week.  My inbox went from getting 30-50 junk emails a day, down to one or two.

Now, the real change came to my realization that the email inbox is NOT my top priority.  I don’t wake up first thing in the morning and check my inbox.  Instead, I just go about my daily routine of hanging out with the family, getting breakfast ready etc.  My inbox doesn’t get looked at for at least an hour or two after I wake up.  Now, this might sound like no big deal to you.  But just a few months ago, the first thing I did when I woke up was roll over, grab my phone and start deleting/reading emails.  Now, it’s something that I often forget to look at for several hours at a time.

IT’S FANTASTIC!!!  it is so freeing to not be addicted to my inbox, constantly checking for emails.  Just this one little trick not only bought me time back in my day, it taught me that the inbox isn’t my master.  Talk about a Win-Win.  Anyway, if you haven’t tried this experiment, just do it for 2 weeks.  It could change your life, and a minimum, it will at least buy you back a 1/2 hour of your day that you normally spend deleting junk 🙂

Thanks for reading,

Have you ever got an email or a phone call that manages to haunt you all day long?  I recently had one of those experiences, and in retrospect it’s making me angry that I let it mess up an entire day.  There will always be things that just slap you in the face.  What it all comes down to is how you deal with it.

If you let that conversation replay over and over in your head, then you relive that anger, frustration, pain or whatever feeling you felt over and and over.  Essentially building in your mind those bad feelings 10 fold.  So…  now how do you reverse that???

I’m certainly no expert, but I’m finding that I just deal with it, and move on.  But to dealing with it, can be a pretty vague task.  For example, you don’t want to tell the person off, because often it’s a misunderstanding, so you need to deal with it appropriately.  A couple of things tend to help…  it’s not foolproof by any means, so if you have a suggestion, I’d love to hear it.  But in the meantime, here’s what i do…

1.  Take a walk and listen to some of my favorite music or podcast.  It helps me shift my focus away from the event and take a fresh perspective.

2.  Write a blog post.  Sometimes for me, writing is my venting.  Once I get it down on screen, it helps me move past it.

3.  Play with my kids.  This is always a winner, even if I’m having a good day.  For example, I ended the day watching a 1/2 hour of Star Wars with my favorite little man.

I’d love to hear how you handle a situation like this.

Thanks for reading,

Well, perhaps you’ve noticed I’ve been on a bit of a hiatus lately.  There were multiple reasons (borderline excuses, I admit :)).  It’s summer, so like everyone, there are always extra things going on, and I also had aspirations to do weekly “BIG” posts, rather than daily posts.

Well, what I found is that distributing the time into one big post, turned into an easy way to not do it at all.  So, the lesson learned for me is that staying consistent works so much better for me, than trying to one big post.  In general, I think this means that I might do more “series” going forward.  This will give me the big posts, but still force me to stay on track.

anyway, I wanted to apologize for my lack of posts.  It’ll take me a week or two to get back into swing, but I plan to be posting more 🙂  Stay tuned, and as always, if there’s something you’d like to hear about, please let me know.

Thanks for reading,

Well, a friend of mine recently sent me an article.  The basic idea behind it is for blogging, is it better to do high quantity?  or high quality?  In a perfect world, it would be both.  But let’s face it.  Most of us don’t get paid to blog.  It’s something we do in our “spare” time.  For me, it’s generate awareness of what I do, increase credibility, and maybe even attract a potential customer for my products.  That being said, I’m going to switch things up.  I’ve been doing posts Mon – Thursday for a past couple years.  Initially, I had a lot to talk about, and numerous topics to discuss.  Lately, I’ve noticed that many of my posts are just to post something.  I’m trying so hard to put out 4 topics in a week, that I don’t have the time to make them in depth, or really valuable.

After talking with my good friend Justin, I came to the realization, that if I spent the time writing one good post a week (at least that’s the initial plan), that it would be far more valuable than writing 4 posts, and would take me the same amount of time.  So to my loyal readers who look forward to my daily words of wisdom. (ha ha), I hope you’ll stick with me through this transition, and i welcome your feedback.  I do promise, that as I learn little tips or tricks, I’ll still drop in a quick post about them, but in general, I’m going to strive for greater quality, which means that it will be a lower quantity.

Thanks for reading,

Well, I signed up a few months ago with a company to help expand my linked-in presence.  They have done a great job of increasing the number of times someone searches me, as well as getting me connected to a vast number of a people.  The problem is that I now of all of these connections…  but what do I do with them?

The concept is that I can eventually get quality through quantity.  A theory that seems sounds.  However, with all that quantity, comes a great deal of “noise”.  The idea behind increasing my linked-in connections was to get me connected to people/companies using SAP.  In particular, to help me connect with the decision makers and the people that can write the checks.  Well, right now, I have no good way sort through the people that I may want to speak directly with.  I did recently find a cool option that I didn’t know about, and that is the option to tag contacts.  This is great, if my contacts had been “tagged as I went”.  Now, the shear volume would take me days to get through to tag everyone.

So, what I will likely end up doing, is searching my companies that I know run SAP.  Then for each of my first connections, I can go through and tag them.  The problem with this approach is that it still leaves all the companies I’m not aware of, thus losing me the connections I was really looking…  But like everything, I need to start somewhere.

But, if you’re connections are manageable, and you are trying to use Linked-In for business connections, the tag is a good option.  If you might have any suggestions on how to better sort my connections, I’d love to hear it.  In general, I’m a linked-in novice, so any advice is greatly appreciated.

Thanks for reading,

Not long ago, I did a post, encouraging you to find out from your friends what you are truly good at.  Well, I did this exercise, and it really helped me.  But, keep in mind, it’s not everything that you’re good at.  While the people close to you might be able to help you see things you didn’t think of, rarely will they know what really sparks your creativity.  Hell, even I don’t know what really sparks it.  I’ve been reading/listening to a lot of Perry Marshall lately.  I love the possibility of going on vacation, meditating on a beach, or reading a fun book alongside the pool and having my best ideas come to me…  Mostly, I like the idea of vacations 🙂  But I just had another lightning bolt hit me tonight.  A lot of my creativity actually comes from writing.

Now, don’t get me wrong.  I don’t fancy myself a writer, I don’t expect I to make my fortune writing novels.  But what has been happening is as I write, ideas start to flow.  Now, I tend to suffer from constant writers block.  I feel like I’m always struggling for something that will actually provide you, the reader, something of value.  I know how valuable time is to all of us, so if you’re going to take the time to read my stuff, I want to give you something worth your time.  I know that I may fall short, but trust me, I’m trying hard 🙂  But tonight, I saw that I needed to get some posts written before I head out of town.  So I searched through my notes, and looked for a topic that I wouldn’t have to spend a week researching.  I noticed some more ideas on the ROI that I haven’t typed up.  Those posts have been entirely off the cuff.  I truly just came up with a point to talk about, and pulled the ideas out as I started to type.  I used to think this was rare for me, but I realize that when I start to write/type, things will often just flow, new ideas will hit me (and I apologize, might often take you on a complete tangent).  But in the end, I look back and realize that I didn’t know I knew some of this stuff.

When I look at the ROI posts I recently put out, this is a perfect example.  It’s all stuff I should be using in my marketing, but I never put 2 + 2 together until I started typing.  Now my real lightning bolt moments don’t come from writing.  Those usually hit me for no reason.  I decided to start this software business one night on the airplane coming home from who knows where.  The trick for us all is to figure out when creativity hits you.  And then do more of that.

For me, I need to keep writing, and take more time off.  How about you???

Thanks for reading,

Well, if it’s one thing I’ve been getting drilled into my head about marketing, it’s that it needs to be constantly measured.  What do I mean by that?  simple.  You need to know what works, what is driving new leads, new customers, and ultimately revenue.  If you’re sinking a lot of money into marketing for “brand recognition”, or if you’re told that you can’t put a value on the current approach you’re using, well, then you’re probably throwing your money away.  If you’re a big player, maybe you can afford to throw money at fancy ads and random billboards, but if you’re like the rest of us…  if you sink $5k into something, you better see some returns.

I’m currently at a crossroads with one of my current marketing approaches.  I really like the company, I like the people.  But ultimately, it comes down to results.  I’m 4 months into a campaign, and I can clearly see how my “audience” has grown.  The problem is that I have this huge audience of people that aren’t in my industry, will never buy my products, and likely only want to sell ME something.  The initial pitch was dead on.  You need to get quantity to get quality.  I can buy that.  It’s all about finding the right connections, and sometimes you need to take a round about approach to get there.  The problem is that after 4 months, I have 0 new prospects, most of the people at the conference still aren’t connected to me, and I’m $5k in the whole.

In order to help me gauge a little better, I just spent the night doing a little prospecting of my own.  First, I picked a company that I wanted to target.  I found all the people that might want to hear my message, hear more about my products, or might benefit from my blog posts.  All in an effort to find out if I could work my way up the chain to someone with the checkbook.

My second experiment was to work my way through the list of people I met at the tradeshow.  I have full names, emails and companies.  So it should be pretty easy to reach out to all of those.

Depending on the results I receive, will directly determine if I can afford to keep my hard earned marketing dollars flowing, or if I end up taking over this responsibility myself.  A prospect I certainly don’t want…  but ultimately could be outsourced to pretty much anyone if my instructions are clear enough.

The good news is that I don’t regret the money I’ve spent.  However, I’m really questioning the value going forward.  Especially if I can carve out 1 hour a week, and I can find the same contacts, or perhaps, I look to other ways to find my prospects.

The moral of the story.  You have to measure your marketing.  Don’t take for granted that it’s working.  Obviously, things like adwords are easier to measure, but at the end of the day, prospects, customers, dollars.  If you aren’t getting them, you’re wasting your money.

thanks for reading,

Well, on top of everything else I have going on, it’s time to start one more thing =)  I was recently hanging out with my good friend Justin, and we go to talking about new ways to promote the business.  He mentioned that it might be good to look at a cheaper customer base and look at selling a small e-book.  Well, like everything in the universe, the ideas come at the right time…  and often hit you from multiple directions.  It was just the day before that I was listening to an audio program from Perry Marshall that said the same thing.  Be the person that wrote the book… literally.

Well, of course, the bad news is that this add just one more thing to my to do list, but this could be another piece of marketing gold for me…  or it could turn out like the white papers…  just another file on my HDD 🙁  Well, to be honest, the White Papers need more work, and with the feedback that I’ve received, could also work for me…  everything is a work in process when you’re small business guy.

But I digress.  So, the e-book is my latest marketing method.  Now, writing a book on it’s own sounds overwhelming, time consuming, and just plain hard.  Well, this isn’t entirely false.  However, the good news is that with all of my blog posts, I have a good chunk of material that can be converted into a book…  Like everything though, it will need a lot of editing, it will need some fresh content to go with what I’ve already given, and it will take some serious effort to make it usable.  So, don’t be surprised to see more posts about this latest adventure.  In the meantime, if you have any advise for me on writing a book, please comment on this post 🙂

Thanks for reading,

Since I’m hoping to be relaxing a bit (as much as you can with 2 kids under the age of 4) tomorrow, I wanted to wish everyone a great July 4th.  Today try to remember exactly what our founding fathers fought so hard to provide for us.  I know, there are BBQ’s, picnics, parades, etc…  But just think back about where we might be today if those people hadn’t fought a revolution.  We could have King Obama or King Bush right now…  well, maybe sometimes it feels like that’s how things turned out anyway, but I digress.

In my opinion, what they really wanted was liberty.  They wanted the ability to do what they wanted, when they wanted to and not pay a whole bunch of money for “protection” or to fund the machine across the ocean.  And as long as that didn’t hurt anyone else, it seemed fair, after all, they were the ones risking their lives on the frontier.  So all those those traitors to the crown, terrorists, or whatever they were called back in the day, gave up everything to help start the most free nation in the world.

Unfortunately, if you look at our government today, it looks a lot like that same government we freed ourselves from a couple centuries ago.  Maybe it’s even worse, because technology increases the reach and power.  Anyway, take a minute and be thankful for our freedom we still have, be thankful for those founders that fought to give us this nation, and remember to NOT take that for granted, and don’t give away anymore of your freedoms.  Be like the founding fathers, and do whatever you can to take back your liberty.

Thanks for reading,