Category Archives: entrepreneurship

Five Reasons to Have Someone Else Write Your Business Blog

I recently spoke with a business owner who admitted she loved having a blog to promote her business but that she doesn’t love having to write blog posts. This woman is amazing–an expert in her area of business, an educated and talented business owner who provides great products and services.

Is her dilemma common? You bet! In the past twelve years, I’ve met hundreds of entrepreneurs and small business owners who excel at running successful businesses but have made the decision to hand off writing their business blogs to someone else.http://katefeatonwriter.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/NaNoWriMo-Computer.jpg

Here are five reasons why it makes good sense to have someone else write your business blog:

TIME is of the essence to any business owner, isn’t it? You’re probably serving your business in multiple roles, especially if you’re just getting started. You may be handling finances, marketing, web design, product selection and, most of all, providing the services your customers require. And that’s on top of your roles outside of business–mother, father, partner, coach, friend, and so on and so forth. Handing off the writing of your business blog is one thing you can do with confidence to relieve the pressure for making your company succeed.

 

MONEY earned and money saved are the two ways a business succeeds. If you’re charging by the hour for your services, consider the amount of time it takes for you to write each blog post and multiply that time by your hourly rate. Add in the business-running, business-building tasks you’re not able to do when you stop to write. Chances are, the rate charged by a professional writer will still save you money when you consider the true cost to your business.

 

STRENGTHS, your personal and professional ones, are the best building blocks for establishing a successful business. Like to sell? Fantastic! Make sure you’re able to do that for your company. Love to meet new customers in your store? That takes a special kind of person. Excel at finding solutions for your customers? Then that’s the thing you should be spending the most time doing. If writing blog posts is a chore, not something you enjoy and at which you excel, why not hire someone who loves to write and is an expert at making your business look good in print?

 

CONTROL of your blog content is still your prerogative, even when someone else is providing the posts. Any professional content provider should give you the final say over blog posts, articles and other marketing materials written on behalf of your company. Useful, interesting content, written in your voice for your audience, is the goal when working with a copywriter.

 

PROFESSIONALISM is enhanced when your blog posts are well-written (or well-edited) to avoid typos, awkward sentences and confusing information. You can provide the basic information and theme for each blog post on your marketing calendar, and trust that your copywriter will provide the content that builds your company’s professional image.

Working with an experienced content provider can save you time and money, allow you to work from your strengths to build your business, let you maintain control of all marketing content and enhance the professional image you’re hoping to project.

Don’t those sound like good reasons to stop agonizing over your company blog and allow a copywriter to make your life simpler?

If they do, you know where to find me!


Hot Cars, Great Business Owners

For this week’s post, we’re taking a quick field trip to explore something dear to my heart – custom cars. These beauties not only please the senses, they’re also the nectar that feeds custom builders, pinstripe artists, performance engine builders and a tankful of small business owners who help create these works of art.

My favorite part of attending shows like Wichita’s  Blacktop Nationals (tied with the hot cars, of course) is meeting these savvy business men and women. When hundreds of street rodders, rat rodders and their cousins, the custom bike builders, come together, plenty of vendors are sure to follow.

small business owner

Creeped Out Customs Creation

Our pick of the night?  Mark Robinson of Creeped Out Customs. His low-slung creations, dark and just a wee bit creepy, definitely captured the crowds. He wisely chose prime display space in the center of the car show action and brought two trucks, two bikes and some kick-butt T-shirts to snag the eye.

We saw every kind of vendor, inside the “Million Dollar Car Show” and outside on the sizzling August street. Creeped Out Custom Cars, in particular, combined location, novelty, technical genius and consistent branding. I hope he made plenty of solid contacts and goes on to build edgy creations for years to come.

And that brings up a topic that’s perenially discussed on business blogs  – the ROI of attending trade shows and exhibitions. Is it possible to know whether the cost of displaying your products will be rewarded with increased sales?

The answer is as variable as the vendors who populate trade shows. Your company’s transportation, space rental, increased inventory, physical display and staff time expenses all go into the mix.

Weigh that against the potential of being in front of a large number of people at a single show, some of whom may need your product or service. Sales, no matter how large the trade show audience, aren’t always a given. But there are several ways you can increase the odds that contacts made at shows and exhibitions turn into sales.

One obvious factor in whether or not trade show leads turn into sales after the show is whether or not your company’s presence was memorable. That’s why I believe Creeped Out Customs will see sales result from last weekend’s show. Their unique, well-branded displays and obvious expertise as custom car builders should stick in the minds of many show-goers.

The rest of the equation for creating sales from trade show leads is up to your sales force. Here’s a quick list of tips for making the most of contacts made at trade shows:

Capture the leads in one place –  a spreadsheet, your CRM program (NOT in a stack of sticky notes)
Follow up on all trade show leads within a couple of days
Include new contacts in future marketing campaigns
Track which trade show leads result in sales
Use the information gathered at this show to calculate your ROI for the next one

I wish that I could say all of the above is obvious post-show strategy, but I’m still surprised how many companies fail to deliberately capture and follow up on show leads once everyone’s back in the office.

Being out among the population, especially a population primed for your kind of product, can be a big boost to this year’s sales. As a business owner, it’s up to you to calculate ROI on shows and events, decide whether it is worth the extra expense to attend and, most of all, to make sure that your sales force is maximizing the leads you gain if you go.

 

So – what’s been your trade show or event experience? Has it resulted in increased sales? What new strategies will you employ at your next show to improve the possibility of new sales?

Creeped Out Customs Slammed Chevy

Creeped Out Customs Slammed Chevy

 

 


Are You Waiting for Perfection to Start a Business?

I knew a woman who lost her husband at age twenty five and never remarried. She feared anything new would be less than the ‘perfect’ marriage she’d enjoyed for less than two years. She never risked dating or even connecting deeply with men until she died at age seventy-four.

Take a Risk

Take a Risk

Here’s the part of the story that causes a dull ache when I think of my friend. She confessed when I met her late in her life that she’d hated living alone all those years. Her fear of imperfection caused a lifetime of loneliness.

Now, choosing to live alone isn’t always  a bad choice…I know plenty of folks who have lived full, vibrant lives without a partner. But a life lived in unresolved fear is not vibrant and it won’t  accomplish what we’re put here to do.

At this point you may be asking how any of this relates to starting a business. Here’s the thing: if we fear being imperfect, we may never start a business that could have real impact on the lives of others. Refusing to risk that your business won’t perform perfectly to your projections keeps your product or service out of the hands of people it could benefit.

Same goes for freelancing. If we fear we won’t create the ‘perfect’ manuscript, we may not write at all. But what if our story was supposed to be read by a specific person at this exact time so that they were encouraged, challenged or enlightened? Not only are our lives diminished by our fears, that reader may not be moved in the same way by someone else’s writing.

About Perfection and a Lot More about Reality.

Perfection is always, always, always in the eye of the beholder. Maybe in Olympic gymnastics we can get a ‘perfect’ score, but the rest of life is flooded with imperfections. The salesman who seems to give a ‘perfect’ pitch is really just someone who has found a way to relate deeply and persuasively to his customers.

The small business owner who seems perfectly in tune with the needs of his customers is actually someone who has watched and listened and shifted to meet the needs of his audience.

The writer who writes with  ‘the perfect blend of mystery and edgy cynicism’ probably is spot-on with prose, but is her writing really ‘perfect?’ What if the reviewer didn’t care for edgy mysteries? Would a less-than-perfect review invalidate her months spent writing? Should she no longer be in the business of writing? Or could it just mean that particular audience wasn’t moved?

Let’s make our way back to letting fear of imperfection prevent us from starting a business. When we’ve done our research and found our funding and perfected our product offerings, can the fear of a less than perfect product launch keep us paralyzed? It could, or we could choose reality. And the reality is that every single thing a human being has ever created, launched, dreamed up or built could be nitpicked. But the really good things, the things we’ve done our best to perfect, need to be released to the world anyway.

So let’s just do it. Let’s focus on ‘excellence’ rather than ‘perfection’.

Let’s encourage those we know who’ve let fear freeze their dreams to do their very best and watch what happens. And you know what? It may not turn out perfectly.  But those stories, not the ones about what was never risked, are the ones I want to hear.

 

I’m curious…what fears have you allowed to keep you from starting a business or career? In what ways has the pursuit of perfection, rather than excellence, hampered your success? What kind of help do you need to move forward with your dreams?

 

photo credit: Greg L. via photopin cc

 

 

 


About ADHD & Entrepreneurship…

On this morning’s walk with the dogs, I had some time to think about the static that keeps us from succeeding as entrepreneurs. With a little thought, I decided that the same traits that keep us from succeeding in the corporate world may be the very things that get in the way of making it on our own.

Entrepreneurship & ADHD

Bored Employee

Here’s what got me to this point: I was thinking about how many of us leave the corporate world because of boredom. We may have uber skills in our chosen areas, but we find the environment stifling. We twitch and shiver and maybe stir the pot all day long in an attempt to relieve the anxiety that’s destroying our focus.

I’m convinced that many of the talented adults I’ve seen failing in highly-structured work environments are undiagnosed sufferers of Attention Deficit Disorder. We want to play well with others. We want to contribute. We simply can’t function in the same enclosed space, on the same old work details day after day without feeling the fallout of anxiety. Insomnia, compulsive eating, irritability, stress-related illness. Bosses aren’t happy, we aren’t happy. And then we leave and start the cycle over somewhere else.

That brings me back to the whole reason I’m writing this post. If we go through this frustrating cycle of starting and ending employment often enough, we may wonder if it would be better to work for ourselves. Freelance. Start a new business. But if we can’t figure out what’s triggering our anxiety about work and how to structure our lives in a way that reduces it, we’re back in the same muddle of unhappiness before too long.

So what to do if ADHD (or general anxiety about work) and entrepreneurship aren’t mixing well? I’ll give you my cure in one sentence: we structure our lives in ways that make sense for us. After all, we’re working for ourselves. We’re responsible to create the product or service that pays our bills. So it makes sense, doesn’t it, that the structure we create has to fit who we are, ADHD symptoms and all.

One of the biggies in my self-structuring list is that I don’t work in the same place every day. If my focus is wandering badly and I have a deadline to meet, I pack the laptop and walk to the corner coffee shop. That change in environment always puts me back on track (and the Mayan Latte adds spice to my writing!)

Another important way I compensate for what I refer to as “the buzz” is to work shorter blocks of time. I find I am more productive when I break up the day into two hour blocks – writing, walking, writing, working on website, etc. Maybe for you, it means walking out of the place of business you’re running and forgetting about it for thirty minutes. Could mean playing basketball at the Y in the middle of the day.  Maybe you take a nap at 2 p.m. or do fifteen minutes of Zumba.

Whatever it takes to break up the day and relieve the anxiety of maintaining focus, it’s okay for us to do it. We’re the boss, we know what makes us tick and we are not flaky. We have gained the self-knowledge to know how we are most productive. No apologies necessary.

I’ll ask a question to end: if you’re having trouble maintaining your focus during your adventure in entrepreneurship, what can you do to reframe your time? Here’s a bonus question: what will you build into your workplace as it grows to allow your employees the same freedom? It could become a movement – can’t wait to hear your ideas.

photo credit: RBorello via photopin cc