Michele – Page 21 – Michele Christensen

A simple strategy to generate blog content ideas

I was working with someone recently who wants to start a blog, but is concerned about having enough content. “How do you come up with ideas to blog about consistently?” she asked. We talked about a few strategies for having consistent blog material, but I decided to share my best one, which is actually one of the simplest.

Here is the strategy, summed up in one sentence:

Keep a list.

It really is that simple, but there are some caveats that make it really work.

First, keep your list on your computer in an easy-to-access format and location. If you’re a big fan of paper, you could use paper but the computer works better because of the ability to change, add and remove things as well as the ability to back up your list. You might start with one idea, and that one idea spawns off several other ideas. By keeping them together, you’ll have the makings for a series. You can use a spreadsheet, document or list-making software, just make sure it’s something you love to use. The list should be kept in a way that removes all barriers from using it regularly. If you want to use paper, make sure you use something nice that inspires you to update your list. Don’t use random scraps, and keep it all in one place.

Second, use your list. This is the one and only place blog ideas should be stored. Every time you have an idea, put it here. If you’re not near your list when you get an idea, make sure to capture it so you can add it later. Be ready to grab an idea wherever you are: dictate a voice note to yourself, send yourself an email, call your voicemail, even jot it down on a piece of paper you know you will deal with later.

Third, cross off or strikethrough ideas once you’ve used them but don’t remove them from the list. Someday, that already-used idea might trigger a new one, and you’ll have a sense of what you’ve written about.

Why does this simple strategy work?

By having an inventory of blog topics, you’ll be under no pressure when it’s time to write a post. Having a system to capture and store ideas allows your mind to work at your leisure, not under fire. It capitalizes on your awareness, i.e. by creating a system you’ve created a new area of focus for your mind. Did you ever have the experience of a friend buying a new car in a model you’ve never heard of and all of the sudden you see that car everywhere? It’s the same idea – creating a concrete system to store blog ideas helps focus you on those ideas and you’ll see them more often.

Do you keep a running list of blog topics? How does it help your blogging?

The key to implementing a lot of things

When I talk to new solopreneur business owners, a common theme is overwhelm at all there is to implement and later maintain. These new solopreneurs are right, there is a lot to implement and maintain to create a successful business. Just to name a few, there are:

A website
Other components of web presence such as social media profiles and directory listings
Banking, payment and billing systems
Print material such as business cards, brochures and flyers
An email newsletter
A physical filing system
Bookkeeping

These are just a few of the projects that new solopreneur business owners need to tackle – there are many more, which is why it can seem like a daunting work load.

There is one critical key to getting all of these projects implemented, and that is to do things one at a time. If you are anything like me and most people, you’ll want all of this done right now. We see people with robust, established businesses and start trying to create that for ourselves yesterday. The reality is though, that people with established businesses didn’t get there overnight. They started somewhere and chugged away at adding things to get where they are today. No matter where you are in building your business, this is one of the best ways to make sure you get where you need to be.

I realize that this is not a glamorous, exciting take on building a business. Some people may be able to jump right in and have all of this done fast but that’s not the norm. When you see a business you’d like to resemble, see how long they’ve been around before you start thinking you’re coming up short.

Along the way, it might be tempting to jump into things too soon. If you are drawn to entrepreneurship, you probably have “bright, shiny object syndrome” which means new ideas and projects pull you like a siren song. It’s especially tempting when you are in the thick of implementing something and it’s gotten boring but isn’t done. Along comes the next new thing and it’s fresh and exciting, and we’re tempted to abandon the half-done project for the new one. Don’t give in! Anything you take on will only produce results when it’s done, so if you keep jumping to new projects without finishing the old ones you won’t get the results you want.

Have you been tempted into a bunch of half-done projects? How did you get some of them done? What’s worked for you in building your business? Tell me about it in the comments.

Save time when scheduling

(Update: 10/9/13: Several items in this post have changed since I originally wrote it. I still use and love Timetrade, but it’s now offered on a freemium model and the pricing is different than I describe. It also integrates with iCal now and they’ve added a lot more features. The general reasons I love this tool are still the same.)

If you work by appointment, you know that scheduling can be tough! In the early days of my business, someone would request an appointment and I’d send them 3 or so choices. Then, I’d have to hold those choices open until I heard back from them. If another client wanted to schedule, I’d have to come up with a set of different choices for that client or put them on hold until I heard from the first client. In the meantime, client number 2 has to put his or her appointment setting on hold until they hear from me. What a mess!

I’m so much happier with my scheduling process now that I use an automated scheduling tool. What is an automated scheduling tool? It allows anyone to whom I’ve given a link to self-schedule their appointment at a time when they know I’m available. I get great feedback on my scheduling process and I can’t even guess at how much time it’s saved me and the people looking to schedule with me.

There are several choices for an automated scheduling tool, and the one I use is Timetrade (timetrade.com). After a free trial, it’s about $30 per year and well worth it. Once you sign up, you link Timetrade to your Outlook or Google calendar and set up some rules for appointments such as the days and times you will accept appointments. Timetrade will then offer appointments that follow your rules and are not already taken by another appointment. Visitors do not see what you are doing when you aren’t available.

I work in 15-, 30- and 60-minute sessions by phone or Skype, so each of these choices has its own scheduling page (called “activities” in Timetrade). If a person has purchased a bundle of 30-minute sessions, I give them the pages where they can schedule a 30-minute call or Skype session. Because of the way the system is set up, the visitor can only schedule a 30-minute session which leads to fewer mistakes and rescheduled appointments.

Another great use for an automated scheduler is to avoid playing phone tag! People are so busy and a lot of productive people I know don’t answer their phone whenever it rings to it can be really hard to connect. If I want to talk to someone, I send them to a page where we can schedule a quick phone call at a time that works best for both of us.

There are other great scheduling tools available, so look for the one that will work best for you. The one feature that was non-negotiable for me was using a tool that eliminates back-and-forth. One scheduling tool I tried requires visitors to send you two options of when they want to meet. You then have to get the email, review it and pick one before the appointment is confirmed. This defeats one of the main purposes of using a scheduling tool. I much prefer that my clients and callers can book and confirm an appointment on the spot. Timetrade also sends a confirmation email without requiring your visitor to have an account.

Timetrade is just one of 32 resources I share in my Solopreneur Success Rolodex. Grab your own copy by clicking here and save yourself some headaches!

How to get people to respond to your calls to action

As solopreneurs, we are often asking people to take action in some way. The most obvious way is to make a purchase, but there are other things we want people

How solopreneurs can encourage responses to a call to action — How solopreneurs can create a compelling call to action

to do such as enter an email, download a report, answer a question or take a survey. How do you get people to respond to a non-sales call to action?

First, make it obvious what you want them to do and why they should do it. I cringe when I see someone I’ve never heard of saying “Like my Facebook page.” They got the first part right – it’s very clear what they want. But why would I do that? If I’ve never heard of the person why would I waste even a few seconds checking their page out without more information? A better choice might be something like “Like my Facebook page for daily tips on training your rescue dog.” Now I know what they offer on the page and can make a quick decision as to whether it’s for me. The only exception to this would be celebrities, sports figures, politicians, etc who are innately interesting to their fans.

Second, make it easy. People don’t have the time or attention span to read complex instructions on your calls to action. What you are asking them to do should be easy – click a button, enter an email, fill out a survey, etc. The most difficult request I’ve seen was someone asking for 5 questions to be submitted via Twitter direct message. The person was gathering information, so other than helping him or her there was no incentive to the reader. They didn’t ask for only 1 question, they wanted 5. Twitter direct messages are one of the more inconvenient way to submit questions as well. If you’re asking for help or feedback, make it really easy for people to jump in and do it.

Third, offer a thank you for their help. Don’t make it too enticing or you may get people doing what you ask just for the reward. If you are trying to survey your market, this might skew the results or you might get people just slopping their way through whatever you ask for just to get the reward. For ideas, you could offer a free downloadable product or one of my favorites, offer to mention them in a tweet. I was thrilled to complete a survey for someone who offered to thank you in a tweet to her tens of thousands of Twitter followers.

Don’t be afraid to ask people to help you or to do something. Just make it obvious, easy and rewarding for them to do so.

Have you ever had a successful call to action? What made it a success?

Contact management for Solopreneurs

Michele Christensen explains how solopreneurs can manage contacts for free — Solopreneurs need a way to collect and organize their contacts

As a solopreneur, your contacts are a very valuable business asset. By contacts, I mean all the people you know and have relevance to your business such as customers, prospects, networking contacts, colleagues and opt-in subscribers to your newsletter. Some of these groups should be handled by specific software such as a newsletter service for your subscribers and a shopping cart or subscriber list for your customers. But what about all the rest of the people you meet? You probably have hundreds of people you’ve met at networking events, trade shows, live training events and just being out and about, but what do you do with them?

For starters, DO NOT add them to your newsletter without their permission. It’s possibly illegal under the SPAM laws, makes you look bad and generally annoys people.

You do need a way to keep track of these people though. You may need to make a referral for a client of yours and you don’t want to be searching scattered piles of business cards trying to remember where and when you met that one guy who might do what that customer needs. You also may want to occasionally touch base with this network of people you’ve worked hard to connect with. Otherwise, they’ll forget about you and you’ll never even have a chance of being the go-to person when they need what you offer. You may need a service yourself, and want to hire that really great person you met if only you could remember who it was.

There are lots of free and paid CRM (Customer Relationship Management) tools, but you may not need one. I’m a fan of using simple, free tools as long as they suit your needs. Unless you have specific requirements that indicate otherwise, I recommend Google contacts. It’s what I use and I’ve been in business for 3+ years. Here’s some of what I love:

It’s free and syncs with my Google email account, which I use to manage all the email that comes to my domain-specific email address
It works great with my Android phone
It’s simple to use, and you can add any fields you need
There is a generous notes section where you can write freeform notes to help you remember someone, e.g. “Talked with her at the bar at the September networking event. We both have rescue mutts and like kayaking.”
Your entire contacts database is searchable so if all you can remember is that they had the word “Yellow” in their business name you can search on that
When you are ready to upgrade to a different contact management or CRM tool, your entire contact database can be exported into several formats with just a few clicks, or add on one of the free or paid tools available

Should solopreneurs say yes to every opportunity?

Strategy helps solopreneurs choose events wisely — Think strategically when choosing which events to attend for your solopreneur business

I was with a friend over the weekend, and she mentioned an event that she was going to and thought I’d be interested in attending as well. She had told me about it a few years ago and I checked it out and decided it wasn’t for me at this time. When I told her so, she was absolutely stunned! Here she was, presenting me with what seemed like a golden opportunity and I was turning it down. Her thinking was that my business must be at capacity or otherwise I’d be going, but that wasn’t my reason.

The reason I wasn’t going comes down to the #1 thing business owners must have to succeed: strategy. Strategy is everything in a business. It means that everything you do is intentional and has a purpose that contributes to your success. For live events, strategy doesn’t mean going to any and every event that is open to you and hoping that it will help. Strategy means having a specific aim in mind for attending events, and a specific type of person you want to meet. To show how having a strategy guides decision making, I’ll tell you why I turned this event down.

For my business strategy, if I’m going to an event to meet potential clients then the event audience should have some correlation to what I do. There should be something about the event that attracts people who have or want their own solopreneur business. The event my friend invited me to was more or less a random assortment of the public. There was no attraction specifically for the people I feel most called to serve, solopreneurs.

The second factor that led to my decision is that this event required 5 to 8 hours on a Saturday plus prep time. This is a massive chunk of time to spend in an untargeted manner. There was also no guarantee you’d actually get any time in front of anyone. The event is run in a very free-form manner, and people may or may not enter your room when you give a talk and they can come and go as they please during the talk. This isn’t conducive to sharing anything of value with anyone.

The final factor to consider is that I live in the Los Angeles area, and there are dozens of events every week. I haven’t even begun to attend all the events I could that would possibly have people interested in what I do. Until I’ve made a considerable showing at those events, it simply doesn’t make sense to go to an event filled with random people.

It’s easy to pulled off course if you don’t have pre-set goals and strategy. Having those in mind helps guide your decisions and give you something to measure your success.

Have you set your goals for the year and your strategy for achieving them? Tell me about it in the comments – I’d love to hear how strategy helps you or if it doesn’t. If you don’t have a strategy yet, let’s talk and start setting one up. Click here to schedule a call with me.

Realigning my solopreneur business priorities

Solopreneur priorities will evolve over time — Your priorities as a solopreneur will change over time

Over the long haul, your solopreneur business will change. You’ll go through phases, changing interests and maybe even a change of focus. Instead of being surprised, try to expect this and know that it’s normal.

On of my ongoing evolutions is how I prioritize my time. I’ve spent many, many hours learning in the last two years. I absolutely love to learn new things, and as a coach and consultant it’s vital to my business that I keep my knowledge current. I’ve sampled the work of dozens of coaches and mentors with both paid and free information. Something has shifted for me in the last few months though. I’ve become impatient and felt a tug to be doing more. When I looked at how I spend my time, I realized that I was spending too much time learning and not enough time implementing. Sound familiar?

Many solopreneurs fall into this trap. Sometimes it’s fear of moving ahead because we think we don’t yet know enough. Sometimes learning can be a procrastination tool – it’s easy to sit and listen to a webinar or recording but actually creating something can be hard and tedious. For me, I think learning is just so exciting and inspiring that I want to do a lot of it because I love it.

When I first started to prioritize learning about 2 years ago, it was the right choice. I did need to up my skill set and knowledge both for my own business and for my clients. There came a point in the last few months though, where I would get impatient during my daily study sessions. It was almost a feeling of “enough already, go do something!”

It wasn’t until I set aside some quiet time and took a look at my time and priorities and did some realigning. The main thing I shifted was to change the balance between learning and doing. Up until now, it’s been mostly learn with a little doing. Now I’m aiming for mostly doing with some learning.

The reality is that you’ll never know everything about running a solopreneur business. There will always be lots more to learn. There will come a point though, when more learning needs to be balanced out with more doing. Continuing to study without using what you are learning will not help your business. I think sometimes the sheer volume of information available to us plays on our insecurities. It seems like since we know such a small portion of what we could know that we couldn’t possibly know enough to run a business. Don’t believe it though!

Have you been learning without doing? Is it time for a shift? Tell me about it in the comments.

Solopreneurs, study up before you hire out

Solopreneurs will benefit from being informed before outsourcing — Solopreneurs should gather some knowledge before hiring outsourced help

Being a solopreneur doesn’t mean you can’t ever have help. Many people who run their own solopreneur business have outside help for things like bookkeeping, web management, social media, etc. I’ve seen more than a few people get burned though, so I want to encourage you to do some research before you hire anyone for any task. You don’t need to be an expert – one of the reasons to hire help is so you don’t have to become an expert. However, knowing enough to ask good questions and to assess whether your potential new hire knows their stuff is invaluable.

For example, if you are going to hire out a social media marketing consultant it pays to know something about the subject. One thing this consultant may do is discuss whether to link your accounts and post the same content across various sites like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc. Not only should they be able to make a firm recommendation as to whether you should do this, they should be able to tell you why they are making that suggestion. By delving into this subject and understanding the pros and cons of linking, you’ll be able to ask probing questions, understand their answers and see if they can support their reasoning. It’s not enough just to suggest a practice, they should be able to give you reasons for their recommendation. If you haven’t gotten informed on the subject, you might be in a position where you just accept what they say and don’t even know that you should be asking any questions.

Another benefit of being informed is that you’ll have a good idea of how long something should take. If the estimate you get is way beyond what you think it should be, you’ll be in a position to ask why. There may be a good reason, but if not then the person under consideration probably isn’t a good fit for you.

Getting informed before you hire out also allows you to see what level of person you need. I’m getting ready to hire out some very simple tasks that can be done from checklists I’ve prepared. Because I’ve taken the time to see exactly what goes into these tasks, I know I don’t need a highly experienced person with a wide skill set. If I was getting ready to add a big web store, I would need a much more skilled person with experience in shopping carts, payment systems, online stores, programming, WordPress, etc. I would only know this though, if I took the time to research and see what goes into building a store.

One trap to avoid – don’t rely on the person you are considering hiring to school you on what you need. Any information that person gives comes from their knowledge and you have no way of assessing if there is any bias or gaps in that knowledge. It’s up to you to learn enough to spot those gaps yourself and make sure you get good advice and make a good hire.

Have you ever made a bad hire? What went wrong? What would you do differently next time? Do you get informed before you interview people? Post a comment and let me know.

Solopreneurs, is your focus in the right place?

As I go through life, sometimes I get reminders of things I already know but maybe got a little rusty on. Recently, I was reminded of the power of focus, as in what

Solopreneurs can have better growth by having proper focus — Solopreneurs must make sure their focus is in the right place

you focus on tends to become more prevalent in your life. To be clear, I don’t believe in any sort of magic behind this, it’s more like having a clear focus drives you to make decisions that support that focus. For example, if you get clear and focused on losing 10 pounds you will make different choices than if you weren’t focused and make the weight loss more likely to occur. If you constantly talk about how bad the economy is, you’ll see signs of that everywhere. It’s like when a friend buys a new car in a model you’ve never heard of or seen and suddenly you see it everywhere.

Last week, an acquaintance pointed several people to someone’s blog saying it was a “must read” and “really funny.” The blog in question was written by a 27-year old single woman in search of love and marriage, but the topic and title was all about the bad dates and low-quality men she had met. I was immediately struck by how out of line with her stated goal publishing such a blog is. To be certain, seeking love and marriage is a worthy goal and even something to be blogged about. My concern with this particular blog is that she is putting time, energy and focus into remembering, chronicling and preserving the bad dates she had been on. Talk about putting your focus in the wrong place!

I have my own version of this mistake. As I talk about often, my husband and I are about 6 years into renovating our house, which looked like an abandoned drug den when we bought it. In the course of our renovations, I’ve had the misfortune to deal with a lot of bad contractors and very few good ones. For some reason, many people seem to want to hear the horror stories. I often find myself being goaded into regaling a crowd with my awful contractor stories. It took me a few years to realize it, but every time I allowed myself to be the entertainment, I would feel sucked right back into the bad emotional place those experiences put me in the first time around. As a result, I spent many more hours being upset by these bad experiences than was necessary. It took a few years, but I eventually got clear that entertaining other people was not as important as my well-being so now I have a full stash of ways to share that experience without being harmful to myself.

How can you apply this in your business? Do you focus too much on all the things you haven’t done instead of celebrating your accomplishments? Do you talk too much about how you have too few clients instead of what a delight your existing clients are? It’s important to acknowledge the gap between where you are and where you want to be, but watch your focus at the same time.

Have you fixed a focus mistake in the past? Tell me about it in the comments.

Solopreneurs, what’s your theme for 2012?

Solopreneur business owners can focus on one theme for the year — What's your theme for your solopreneur business in 2012?

What is next year about for your solopreneur business?

Like many successful solopreneurs I know, I choose a theme for each year. Some people pick an inspiring word like growth, action, or fearlessness. I’ve been choosing one big, overarching area that needs improvement for my big project of the year. In 2011, my theme was “expand my online business.” Before this effort, I had a website that functioned as more of an online brochure and newsletter sign up. I was getting one-on-one clients and group gigs mainly via personal connections. Beginning in 2010, I began to learn how to use the internet to promote my business. By the time 2011 rolled around, I was ready to get to work.

It’s been a great year and I’m really happy with the results. I’ve got a full website that functions well, my online presence is fleshed out and ready for more, and I’m finishing my first information product that will be sold from my website. Mission accomplished!

Even though I help others improve their business, I regularly get help too! Nobody can be as successful by themselves as they can with the guidance of a coach or mentor. Expanding my online presence was something I definitely wanted help with and I used two main sources for that help.

The first person I got help from was Kathleen Gage in the form of her 1-year Street Smarts Marketing VIP Club. You get one lesson a week covering just about everything you need to know about online marketing, and the lessons build on each other. At $27 per month, it’s very affordable and the value is great. If you’re interested, here is the link: Street Smarts VIP Club.

The other person I got help from is Alicia Forest. I first purchased her “21 Easy and Essential Steps to Online Success” in the spring. This is like a handbook for setting up the online part of your business. I had so much success with that program that I attended her live event the “Online Business Breakthrough Workshop.” This was an inspiring, motivating, action-oriented 3-day workshop where we learned in-depth strategies to building an online business. By the way, I’m an affiliate for both Kathleen and Alicia since I love their work so much.

2012 is the year of my signature system. I first sketched out my unique signature system at the Online Business Breakthrough Workshop in the fall. Since then, I’ve added lots of details as they come to me, but this year the goal will be to write all the text and have it for sale. Once that happens, I’ll probably add some more products and programs that use my signature system. If you’re curious, my signature system lays out the steps to set up a successful solopreneur business, i.e. to take what you know and make a profitable business with it.

If you’re not familiar with the idea of a signature system, it’s a way to package the knowledge you use with every client. Some of what you do is unique to each individual, but if you give it some thought, you’ll probably find that you say and do some of the same things with each person you work with. It was really enlightening to discover those steps in my work. Now when I’m working with someone, I can often see more clearly what they are missing in their business.

If you haven’t already done it, why not pick a them for 2012? I’d love to help you with this – click here to schedule a Quickcall with me. If you have a them for 2012, share it in the comments.