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Networking Highlights

March 30, 2008 Leave a Comment

It was quite a week last week, as I was running all over the Triangle area for meetings, putting new services together, trying to keep up with all the usual work, plus buying a new car (a Prius!)  before the awesome deal the CarBargains service had arranged for me expired. This is the second time I’ve bought a car through them and they just can’t be beat for saving you time and money.

On Wednesday, I attended the local NAWBO event with John Costigan on The 5 Things Successful People Do. If you’re curious, the 5 things were: 1. Have SMART Goals 2. Participate in Ongoing Learning 3. Adopt a Good Attitude 4. Leverage Your Strengths and 5. Share Your Vision. While none of these ideas were new to me, his enthusiasm and interesting take on them made it the event worthwhile. My favorite was probably the Attitude element, which he says can be as simple as changing “I got” to “I get” in both words and thoughts. For example, “I’ve got to finally finish that project today” becomes “I get to finally finish that project today.”

Thursday, it was out to RTP for the local Glazer-Kennedy chapter meeting. Jonathan Munsell (Premiere Catering, Bakehouse Bistro and Jumping Jonny’s) who talked about his success with changing his marketing to bring in and retain more business.  Jonathan had two interesting statistics I had not heard before: every month you’re not marketing to past clients, you’re losing 10% of their interest and it’s 16 times more cost effective to market to people who know or know of you. So if you haven’t done so yet, it’s time to get that email newsletter going!

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Make the Most of Your Marketing Time

March 26, 2008 Leave a Comment

This week I’m trying two programs that will hopefully help make the most of your marketing time. The first is Rescue Time, a free new program that tracks your computer movements and shows you exactly where you are using your time–without having to a log anything in. It even let you set goals for where you want to spend it. While I already use something called TraxTime to track time on client projects, this should give me a better idea of where all that non-billable time is going. Elizabeth Potts Weinstein has a terrific video about its on her blog.

The second is Dragon NaturallySpeaking, a program that lets you talk instead of type into your computer. While I’m a pretty fast typist, I’ve had a lot of neck and shoulder pain lately (exacerbated by too many hours at the computer!) and thought I would give this a try. I’m actually dictating my post right now and I’ve had to make a few corrections, but it is getting better the more use it. One benefit I didn’t expect is that it may be helping me compose e-mail faster. I sometimes spend way too much time tweaking a response before I send it, and I do notice that I haven’t been doing that as much. But there are a few quirks to get used to, so I’ll let you know what I think in about a week.

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Marketing Means Nothing

March 20, 2008 Leave a Comment

When you tick off your customers. I was all prepared to write another post this morning before I ran over to the vet. While there, a woman came in cradling a trembling border collie. She said she had found the dog loose without a collar while out walking and was trying to find her owner. Someone had recently shaved one of the dog’s paws, so she was contacting all the vets in the area.

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What’s Your $50 Card?

March 18, 2008 2 Comments

So last week I went to the Triangle Internet Marketing Meetup about making your marketing more effective. I had just seen the speaker Ron Rosenberg of QualityTalk at a Glazer-Kennedy Inner Circle chapter meeting and he gave a lot of good info on another topic, so I wanted to see what he had to say on this one. And although nothing he covered was new to me, I enjoy seeing things presented in a fresh way–which he certainly did. Highlights include:

The $50 Card. What can you do to get a prospect to stop what they’re doing and call you right away? (Think of sending your fresh-off-to-college child a greeting card saying you’ve enclosed a $50 bill for anything you didn’t manage to get beforehand–and not including the $50 bill. No matter how bad they usually are at calling you, you will hear from them ASAP about the missing money.)

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Who Decides Newsworthiness?

March 17, 2008 Leave a Comment

As you groan at the latest Britney news clip, you’ve got to sometimes wonder, “Who the heck decided that this is news?”

The answer is us–the people who watch, read or listen.

Quite simply, the more viewers, readers or listeners they have, the more the station or publication makes from advertising. So they spend a lot of time analyzing their audience and figuring out what they (we) want. They look at the numbers to see when their audiences go up and down, but they also look at what people take the time to write, call, or email about–good and bad.

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Masterminding for Fun & Profit

March 17, 2008 Leave a Comment

Sorry that I’ve been MIA. I was preparing for, going to and then recovering from a meeting of my mastermind group in West Palm Beach, FL hosted by member Roxanne Pennington of www.DiveTravel.com and her wonderfully patient husband!

 

Masterminding is quite a powerful experience. How often do you get to sit down with 6 other entrepreneurs and examine your business from the inside-out? The input and honest feedback is simply invaluable. Think of it like driving a car and having a passenger that’s keeping an eye on your blindspots (which aren’t necessarily bad–sometimes it’s just as hard to see good things or opportunities). As the owner, you’re simply too close to your business to look at it (and you!) objectively. And let’s fact it, friends and family can’t always give us the answers we seek.

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They’re Bringing Sexy Back

March 2, 2008 Leave a Comment

Our first Get a Clue! posting goes to Victoria’s Secret, who made news this week when a stock analyst asked CEO Sharon Jester Turney whether the company will be hurt by Abercrombie & Fitch’s new, more wholesole lingerie store since VS has gained more of a “tawdry image and a somewhat bordello feeling in store.” Turney essentially replied that their parent company (Limited Brands) has taken notice and wants to return VS to “a higher taste level.” She also said that she feels restoring some of the feminity and “sophistication” would help them become “more relevant to their customers” and bolster falling sales.

You think? What took them so long? I’ll admit I’ve never been a big VS fan because a few purchases I made back in college didn’t seem to be well made and certainly weren’t comfortable to wear. But I knew plenty of people who shopped there. [Read more...]

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