how to – Page 15 – Michele Christensen

How long should a voicemail be?

I tend to leave longer voicemails than most, but let me explain before you hate my habit!

One of my favorite business topics to study and coach on is productivity. I try to always make sure I’m getting the most I can out of every effort I make. For both myself and the person I’m calling, this means that whenever it’s possible I leave a voicemail with all the information in it someone needs to answer my question and call me back. If I’m calling about a bill, I leave my account number, invoice number, my identifying information and exactly what my question is. That way, the other person can research the answer and probably leave me a voicemail with all the information I need. Two calls, problem solved. The alternative is leaving just a name and phone number and playing phone tag for days on end, which I dislike.

I got to thinking about this when I heard an “expert” say that he deplores my type of voicemail and that nobody should ever leave more than a name, number and possibly a subject. What an utter waste of time! People are busier than ever, it’s almost impossible to catch people by phone without an appointment and nobody likes phone tag – how many more reasons are there for leaving enough information to get what you need? Yes, sometimes my messages can go on for over a minute, but it’s voicemail – save it and play it whenever it suits you. I don’t understand the logic that days of phone tag taking much more than 2 minutes is preferable to a 1-2 minute voicemail.

To each, their own I suppose…. but you won’t catch me leaving a vague voicemail unless I’ve been specifically told to.

What kind of voicemails do you prefer? What kind do you leave? Post a comment and tell me about it.

Every day, do something to build your business

As a solopreneur, it’s so easy to sucked into working on what’s in front right now rather than what will help you build the business you want to have later. Always “firestomping” may keep the business from burning down but probably won’t help you get ahead. A certain amount of time to crank out some tasks is really important, but make sure to spend time every day doing something to create, grow and build the business you dream of.

What are these activities? They vary from business to business, but here’s some ideas to get you thinking:

Building your community of people interested in what you offer. This includes social media, real life and your newsletter.
Planning your next projects and long-term projects
Brainstorming
Educating yourself
Creating new products or services to sell

That’s just a few of the things you could be doing to build your business. What else do you do to build your business? How often? Leave a comment and let me know.

Friday Solopreneur News roundup, 3/25/11

Hi and welcome (almost) to the weekend! I hope you’ve got some time blocked out to unplug from your business. If not, do that as soon as you are done reading this post! If you want to see these news items right in your Facebook news feed, click over to my Facebook page and click the like button.

People often try a business promotion strategy and conclude it doesn’t work without giving it a fair try. For blogging, you’ve got to blog regularly to expect any benefit.

Hubspot: Blog Subscriber Growth

We get bombarded with so much information and marketing on the web that we’ve all gotten quite adept at tuning out noise. Make sure your marketing isn’t part of that noise for the people you want to reach.

Winning the New Marketing Democracy

Human brains are capable of magnificent things. Don’t waste the power of yours by keeping track of things better suited to a to-do list, calendar or project list. The world needs you to use your brain to do the great things you are capable of.

Why list is a dirty word

Here’s a slightly humorous but insightful article comparing ducking your business challenges to wearing fat pants instead of hitting the gym:

The Business Equivalent of Fat Pants

Finally, here’s a great list of 10 social media myths that may hurt your business.

10 Social Media Myths

That’s the news this week! My newsletter comes out every other Thursday, so if you want to be included in that use the sign up box to the right.

Have a great weekend, and make sure to recharge your batteries so you can serve your market fully.

3 tips for calculating your hourly rate

If you’re a solopreneur who offers at least some services by the hour, you’ll need need to calculate what rate to charge. This can be tough – aside from just figuring out the dollar amount it usually causes us to bump up against all sorts of mindset issues like “Would anyone pay that much?” Mindset is a big topic all by itself, but here are 3 tips to help you with the math.

Your hourly rate may be a flat $x per hour, or you may have a sliding fee based on how much time they book. If someone books you for a day or half-day, they might get you at a lower hourly rate. This makes sense for the business owner because you aren’t spending any time selling that additional time, and it makes sense to the client as a volume discount. It’s also cheaper for you to deliver a block of hours together instead of one hour at a time because you minimize your switching costs, i.e. time preparing and sending any follow up.
Don’t be intimidated by a number much larger than your comparable salary at a job. As a business owner, you need that rate to cover many things it didn’t when you had a job. Some examples include: overhead, business taxes, specific business expenses and all the time it takes to sign up new clients. Your hourly rate also has to compensate you not only for the hour you work but for all the expertise you bring into the situation. How many years have you been building your knowledge? How many classes have you taken? How many books have you read? Your currently hourly rate should reflect how much expertise you bring to the client.
Post your rates. Or don’t. There’s loads of debate about this, and ultimately I suggest taking it all in and start by doing what feels best and then test, test, test. See if posting or not posting helps you serve more people. I’m on the side of posting my rates right now. I almost never go any further with purchasing a product or service or even reading sales copy if I can’t see a price right away. If my rate scares someone off, then we’re not a good fit and we shouldn’t go any further.

Do you sell services by the hour? How did you calculate your rate? Leave a comment and tell me about it.

Solopreneurs must create work/personal separation

Solopreneurs must create work and personal separation

When I worked at a job outside the house, it was easy to separate my work and personal life. I got up, got dressed in work clothes (which weren’t the clothes I wore outside of work), went to my job, and came home. As soon as I left, there was no connection to work. I never had a remote login or 24-hour on-call status, so it was easy to say “I’m done.”

Now that I work from home, it’s much harder. It’s tempting to just check in when I’m enjoying a quiet Saturday morning or to go down the rabbit hole of checking email. One way I manage this is by having separate work and personal email addresses. I was surprised to learn at a recent Hubspot webinar on email marketing that 88% of survey respondents did not have separate work and personal email addresses!

This is something I’ve had as long as I’ve been self-employed. When I’m out having fun, the last thing I want is work intruding on my time. Don’t get me wrong, I LOVE my business and tend to work too much already but I don’t want to think about work when I’m doing something else. If I’m out hiking or visiting family on a weekend, I don’t even want to know about loose ends that need to be taken care of. If I read an email and need to do something about it, I don’t want that hovering in my thoughts while I’m having fun.

As solopreneurs, we ARE the business and it becomes much harder to separate and take a break than for people who have a job with someone else. But you absolutely have to carve out some time to disconnect or you’ll lose a lot of the biggest benefit of being self-employed – freedom. I strongly recommend separate work and personal email addresses for solopreneurs. Try this tiny step and see if you feel more at ease when you’re “off.”

Do you have separate business and personal email addresses? Why or why not?

What to do about spam email

On the heels of my recent post How not to build a mailing list and my recent newsletter article on clearing your email inbox, I thought I’d give you some information on what to do about those pesky spammers.

First, use the “Mark as Spam” button on your email service provider (Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo, or through your hosting account). Every provider I’ve ever seen offers a way to mark messages as spam so you never have to see a message from that sender. It’s also an important public service because your provider will use that information to improve spam filters. I wanted to include this tip because so many people struggle with getting too much email and with this one step you can help reduce your email volume permanently.

Second, if you feel it’s warranted, report the spammer to the FTC. This is done by forwarding the entire email to spam@uce.gov (link to FTC information HERE). I have done this on occasion, when I’ve felt the the sender was particularly egregious in their violation of the spam laws or they continued to send to me after I requested to be removed. The FTC accumulates this information to build possible cases against spammers, so your forwarded email contributes to their efforts to reduce the spam in the world.

What do you do when you get spam? Have you ever reported it? Leave a comment and let me know.

How not to build a mailing list

Throughout 2010, I did a lot of business networking. My efforts paid off in loads of new contacts, which was great, but not so great was the unexpected side effect of SPAM in my email box! About once a month, I got added to a newsletter without giving verbal or written permission (being in possession of someone’s business card does not mean they want to be added to a newsletter). These SPAM messages usually came from directly from someone’s email address without the use of an email list management service like Aweber (affiliate link). This meant that there was no “unsubscribe” button, and I had to email the person directly and tell them to remove me. If the spammer was on top of their email, I sometimes got removed. Often, it took more than once and I sometimes got added repeatedly after being removed.

This is SPAM as defined by the CAN-SPAM act (easy-to-read guidelines here), and is a great example of how not to build an email newsletter mailing list. It looks unprofessional and slapped together. If people aren’t opting in, the sender has no way of knowing if the newsletter is of value to the recipient of not. Only the recipient can determine that, and if they don’t want the newsletter then the sender is just being a pest by sending it.

There’s loads of reasons why this type of spamming isn’t a good idea, but the main one for me is that I’m irritated that the sender presumes to know their newsletter is good for me even if I don’t think it is. The way to avoid this is simple and not very expensive. Use a newsletter service like Aweber, and only send your newsletter to people that have expressed clearly that they want it. The rewards are huge – I’m still in awe every time I hit send that I have a community of people waiting to hear from me.

The costs of doing business

Do you have a good handle on your costs of doing business? How much revenue do you need just to keep the doors open? How much in costs do you incur each time you sell something?

Lots of solopreneurs don’t have a solid grasp of their cost of business. So often, solopreneurs just want to help others and do what they love. They don’t want to know about or manage the business side of things. In fact, a lot of solopreneurs love their work so much they don’t even think of it as a business – they’d give their services away if they could.

The problem with this is that it doesn’t work. Not paying attention to the costs of business means you are operating in the dark and can’t make sound decisions. Many people start their solopreneur business thinking they just need to print a few business cards, put up a website and start doing their work. Word of mouth and the fact that the world needs their brilliance will handle the rest, right? Wrong.

You are as much as business owner and manager as you are a provider of whatever product or service you provide. You need to handle the business end of things in a manner that supports you and your work. Part of this is always having a handle on the costs of doing business. When I worked for big corporations, the budget was a huge ominous document that took months to prepare and was both revered and feared. I’m not suggesting you do that, but you can start by making a list of the costs of doing business that you incur just to open your doors. These costs are generally fixed, i.e. stable and predictable within the range of business volume you could expect in the near future.

Some examples of fixed costs could include:

web hosting
domain registration
phone and utility bills
rent
ongoing training you are investing in

It helps to know what costs of doing business you have each month so that you know how much you need to cover them. It’s the first step to understanding and managing the profitability of your solopreneur business.

You also incur costs that only happen when you generate revenue. These costs are variable and depend on how much you sell and may vary by product.

Have you ever tallied your costs of doing business? Were you surprised, either in a good way or a bad way?

Update profiles regularly when using social media for business

First of all, if you aren’t using social media for your business you probably could benefit from it. How to use social media for promoting your business is more complex than can be covered in one article, but watch for future articles explaining some of the benefits of using social media to promote your business. For starters, it’s mostly free of monetary cost and has a huge reach. No matter what your business is, your customers are probably hanging out somewhere on the social sites.

If you’ve been reading my articles or been in my community for any time, you probably know I love processes and systems. Any time you have to do a task over and over, it pays to create a simple system for doing it. Make sure to also include an automatic reminder so you don’t have to remember to do the task. I use this strategy for updating the profiles I use to promote my business.

I recommend you keep a simple, clickable list of the social media profiles you use for business, including any you use mainly for personal use and update (or at least review) them monthly. It should take under half an hour unless you have a very large number of profiles you are using for social media. If you aren’t in the habit of updating regularly, this may seem like a lot of updates. I hardly ever looked at my profiles when I first started using social media for business. It seemed like something to do once and then the goal was to provide regular content. Once I started checking monthly though, I was surprised at how often I changed my language, tag lines, current service array and activities. I’m learning constantly, so often I take a look and realize I haven’t put my newest bit of knowledge into a profile. Your profile is a really important piece of your social media strategy, so it’s important to keep improving it.

One month is a good interval to use for updating the social media profiles you use for business. It’s long enough that you’ll have a fresh outlook every time you look, and short enough that you won’t have information out of date for very long.

When using social media for your business, don’t treat your profiles like a one-time task – they are business asset and the first impression your new connections have of you.

Want to connect? I’m on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

3 tips for using your cell phone as a business line

As solopreneurs, we’re always looking for ways to save money and be efficient. A great way to do this is to use your cell phone as your business line. If you continue to grow and expand your scope, there will probably come a time when you need a dedicated business line but it’s great to start with your cell. By using your cell, you’re ready anytime and anywhere to work and you save the expense of a second line. You also save juggling your contacts and managing two phone lines.

The drawback is that it may not seem very professional unless you handle it right. Here are 3 tips for using your cell phone as a business line:

Record a professional greeting that has your business name, hours if applicable, website and any other information you might want to convey. It’s fine for your friends to call your work number, but don’t have your business contact getting a fun but unprofessional greeting better used for friends. Make sure to listen to your greeting and make sure there aren’t background noises or any missed words. Spell any words that may not be obvious.
Use a professional greeting when you answer. I say “Michele speaking,” and it works great. It sounds professional and ready to do business and it saves the person asking for me. One of my biggest pet peeves is when I call a business and the person answering the phone sounds like they are bothered by my call. Make sure you sound upbeat and happy to get the call even if you’re not. Speak clearly and avoid those long messages used sometimes by stores such as “Good morning and thank you for calling ABC shoe store where your comfort is our mission. Come in now to see the new summer styles. Michele speaking, how can I help you?” People don’t hear half of it anyway and are just waiting impatiently for you to finish.
Don’t answer unless it’s a good time for you to take a call. If you get woken up, for goodness sakes don’t answer! Having woken someone up once at 9:45 in the morning, I can tell you it doesn’t make a good impression. If you’re in the car, at the gym, in a public bathroom, in a bar, in a meeting, etc. simply don’t answer. Let it go to voicemail and return the call when it’s good for you.

Have you ever called someone and got a bad impression of them? Tell me about it in the comments.