On Words and Business

Do you know what core business goals your product or service helps your customers achieve?

Such as:

• Increased revenues
• Decreased costs
• Improved operational efficiency
• Faster time to market
• Improved customer loyalty
• Increased inventory turns
• Decreased risk
• Improved competitive differentiation
• Increased market share
• Faster sales cycle
• Decreased employee turnover

This is why they’ll listen to you.

Here are four tips before you get started (thanks to Michele Linn at MarketingProfs):

1. Start small. It’s much easier to scale up once you’ve decided the program will work for you. Your customers will notice if you start big and pull back, and they’ll wonder what’s wrong (but never ask about it).
2. Understand opportunity costs. An effective content marketing campaign of any size, takes time and commitment. Figure out if the return on your investment will be worth it.
3. Get help. Same as above–time and commitment. Share the workload and the campaign won’t feel burdensome.
4. Commit. Make a plan and stick to it. Like the shoe company says…just do it.

Not exactly a new year’s resolution, but I’ve just started a new time management system.  Recommended by Robert Middleton, which is high praise in my book.

So far, so good. It seems simple enough in concept to execute. I’m struggling a bit with it, but it’s only my third day (and I promised myself to give it a full month of truly using it). My challenge so far, I think, is understanding the scope of each action item on my daily list and how long it will realistically take me to accomplish it.

Onward and upward!

There are all sorts of things on my to-do list. Many of which I actively avoid. Sound familiar?

Here’s a great model from Robert Middleton’s More Clients Blog on prioritizing projects and time.

A couple items from my Don’t Like to Do and Avoid column:

• follow-up calls and email
• public relations
• creating and actually following a marketing plan

I’m looking forward to some rejiggering and delegating in the new year!

At long last, I decided to hire a virtual assistant. And I decided to use Elance to find the VA. After researching what companies were available that did what I needed, I registered, wrote a project description, and invited a company to bid on the project. They never responded. So I researched a few more companies and invited them to bid. One declined and the others haven’t responded.

So far, I’m not impressed with the responsiveness of any of these companies except the one who declined within an hour of my invitation.  I’m a little nervous about opening the bid up to everyone, because I prefer to vet the company first. But it would appear my vetting process needs some help, since none of the companies I selected based on my criteria even bothered to respond.

The whole idea behing hiring a virtual assitant was to make my life easier. So far? Not so much.

A friend and I were just discussing the way the workplace was portrayed in t.v. shows from the 1960s and 1970s.

Business moved much more slowly when the process of looking through data (via punch cards) was onerous and time-consuming, when there was no fax to send documents instantaneously, when overnight shipping wasn’t available. Now that things move faster, we’re expected to do more with our time.

If you’re feeling overwhelmed or a bit guilty because you snuck out of the office early, remember this: by lunchtime, you’ve probably done more work than your 60s-70s counterpart did in a whole day.