Guest Posts Archives - Cathy Stucker

What Does Your Customer Want From You?

October 19, 2011 by Cathy Stucker

This is a guest post from Kirk Ward of http://secrets-of-marketing-accounting-services.com/.

Does your prospect know what business you’re in? Do you think they care?

Your prospect doesn’t give a Snail’s Hoot about you, or what business you are in. All they care about is getting their needs met. Contrary to what you think about yourself and your ilk, human’s are a very selfish lot. We really don’t care about your great credentials (unless we need someone with that particular credential), and we certainly don’t care about your beautiful packaging (unless it is one of our needs). [Read more…]

B2B Copywriting – Writing for the B2B market

July 20, 2011 by Cathy Stucker

This is a guest post from Mitt Ray of The White Paper Blog.

When you write white papers, website copy, brochures or any other marketing material for the B2B market you need to keep certain factors in mind.

Writing for the B2B market has many similarities with writing for the B2C market. But there are certain factors you always need to keep in mind.

Some of these factors are:-

1. Always address the reader as you: Many people make the mistake of addressing the company as a whole or addressing them as many people. This is not how it should be written as your copy is normally read by one person at a time.

These people are normally sitting alone in their office or cubicle and reading it to themselves. So always address them as a single person using “you”. This will make them feel a special personal connection with your copy.

2. Write using the simplest words: It is important that you write using the simplest words. I have seen writers use complicated terms sometimes to make their copy sound more sophisticated. This is because many people think that using complicated material will make the company look sophisticated. But using these sophisticated words could actually work against you.

When you write for the B2B market you are usually writing for busy people. These people don’t have the time to read a document that is full of words that are hard to understand, as this will take up a lot of their time. They want to read something that is easy to read, something they can finish quickly and get back to work. If they find it hard to read, they will just give up reading it and read something else, that is easy to read.

Therefore it is important that you keep everything in the copy as simple as possible, so that your client can finish reading the document quickly. Keeping it simple improves the chance of it being read completely.

3. Mention all the benefits businesses look for: One person or a group of individuals will be making the decision whether to use your service/product or not. What you need to keep in mind is that they are not making a personal decision, but they are making a decision for the entire company.

They’re looking for ways to save the company money, time, improve profits, reduce staff etc. So make sure that you work on these benefits and include them in your copy.

You also need to keep in mind that though they are making a decision for the entire company and are mainly looking at the welfare of the company. There will be certain personal benefits and emotions that will be involved in their decision.

If they make the right decision, their chances of getting a promotion or a raise go up and if they make a wrong decision it could cost the company’s future and their job. You need to keep these factors in mind too.

So whenever you write white papers, brochures, emails, or any other marketing materials for the B2B market always keep these factors in mind, as it will help you write a copy that works.

Mitt Ray is a copywriter. He specializes in writing and marketing white papers. He regularly posts articles on writing and marketing white papers on his blog at http://www.imittcopy.com/Thewhitepaperblog/what-is-a-white-paper/. He’s also the author of ”Understand and Write White Papers” which is a white paper on how to write white papers.

11 Reasons Coworking Might Be for You

February 9, 2011 by Cathy Stucker

This is a guest post from Randall Davidson of Audio Transcription.

Coworking spaces are often home to freelancers, small startups and consultants. Here is why you might want to try coworking.

In our early days, my company, Audio Transcription, was located in a coworking space, which is essentially shared office space. Unlike executive suites, however, coworking spaces generally do not require you to sign a long lease and they generally have more of a community focus. Coworking spaces are often home to freelancers, small startups and consultants. As someone who benefited immensely from coworking, here are 11 reasons coworking might be for you!

It creates a routine. If you work from home, you probably know exactly how difficult it is to establish a daily routine. Coworking naturally does that for you because it forces you to get out of bed, shower, change (get out of your PJs) and travel to an office. If you value structure, coworking could be for you.

You’ll meet people fascinating people. When you work alone, you only learn from yourself. When you work with or in the same space as other people, you learn all types of things.

It creates work/life balance. You’ll actually be able to relax when you get home because you’ll have left work at the office (as opposed to working from your living room).

You don’t have to make the coffee.

You’ll be surrounded by other people. Not only will they likely be interesting (as discussed elsewhere in this list) and potentially helpful to your business, but they’ll also just take the loneliness right out of “working alone.”

It’s a cheap way to get office space. This one is quite obvious, but I’d be remiss to leave it out.

You’ll get an impressive address. While this sounds odd, your business address matters. It matters to local search, so having an address (that you post on your website and register with Google Places) in a big city means you’ll get a boost in ranking in search engines for terms related to that city. Having a business address that is not your home address also helps add credibility to your business. What looks better to a potential client, an unrecognizable address or one that is located in a high-end neighborhood?

You’ll see other people bootstrapping it, just like you are. This is very important. There are many times in an early stage startup that you’re likely to doubt yourself or what you’re doing. At those moments, it’s helpful to be around other people who are also weathering the startup storm.

You’ll get some of the perks of working for a larger office like access to training events, corporate discounts, holiday parties, etc.!

Unlike working in a large corporate office, you’ll get a lot of exposure to a variety of industries. In one of our employees’ first coworking experiences, he frequently sat between a forensic accountant, a software engineer and a sex therapist. It’s a diverse crowd.

You’ll free yourself of distractions that you find at home. Do a side-by-side comparison; try coworking for a day and try working at home for a day. See which environment yields better results for you.

Randall Davidson is the co-founder of Audio Transcription, a San Francisco transcription company that offers focus group transcription and conference transcription services. In Audio Transcription’s early days, the transcription company was located in a San Francisco coworking location. It benefited immensely from the space in the ways described above. In fact, Audio Transcription even found new transcription services clients among their coworking peers.

15 Ways Your Small Business Can Save Time

January 19, 2011 by Cathy Stucker

save-time

The following is a guest post from Randall Davidson of Audio Transcription, a transcription service.

During the recession, businesses had to figure out how to do more with less. One investment many small businesses didn’t consider was investing in productivity training for their workforces. By teaching time management tips to your employees and learning some yourself, your business can attain that elusive goal of doing “more with less”—in good economic times and in bad.

Always put a time frame on your questions to coworkers. Ask, “Do you have 20 seconds? I just need to ask you a short question.” That way, your coworkers will know the “size” of your request and will be far more willing to entertain your question, as opposed to having to ask them several times or having to schedule a meeting with them, both of which waste time.

Anytime you’re considering integrating a new system into your business, consider whether or not that system’s data will sync with other systems. For instance, you don’t want to use an invoicing system that won’t sync with your accounting tools. That would mean you would need to manually move data between two systems, which will lead to a lot of wasted time.

Be blunt and to the point without being disrespectful. If you make it known regularly that you care about your employees, they’ll understand if you take a more direct than usual approach to dealing with business issues. Don’t beat around the bush if you can avoid it.

Delegate. Delegate. Delegate.

Don’t track truly unnecessary data. While you can track your operations from every which angle, as soon as you think of a new piece of data you want to track (i.e. sales of a particular product on Wednesdays), unless the tracking of this data is 100% automated, always wait at least a week before delegating the tracking of this data. There’s often a huge operational cost to tracking data and waiting a week will cause you to stop and reevaluate just how important collecting that data is to you (often you’ll find you don’t really need this data).

Consider completing your legal paperwork quickly with legal assistance websites like LegalZoom.com. Websites like these allow you to take care of your routine legal documentation needs (like incorporating a company, filing for a trademark, etc.) for a fraction of the price of hiring your own lawyer. The forms are easy enough to fill out that you’ll likely save a lot of time compared to shuffling to and from a law firm. Though there’s no substitute for the professional help offered by a trained attorney, because of time and money constraints, such help is not an option for all small businesses (especially those just getting started).

If you’re involved in management (not customer service or sales), don’t answer your phone. Have callers leave a message and have one of your employees screen the voicemails.

Encourage your employees to write internal emails only using bullet points. This not only makes emails quicker to write and read, but it illuminates the main points of the emails.

Explore how form letters can play a time-saving role in your organization. Can 50% of your customer inquires be answered with boilerplate letters? If so, start using canned responses to respond to frequent customer concerns. A customer service FAQ will also save you a great deal of time.

For simple graphic design work, go with a graphic design company like 20dollarbanners.com that has a very defined purpose and a streamlined process. Don’t solicit bids from lots of different designers and review their past work. Another way to save time sourcing your graphic designer is to go with a graphic design crowdsourcing company like 99Designs.com, a website on which you submit your graphic design needs and designers submit their work. You only pay for the one you select (and you don’t pay anything if you don’t select anything).

Purchase cash registers that automatically disperse the correct amount of change.

Get to know the programmers in your organization. Anytime you’re carrying out a repetitive computer action (i.e. a lot of copying and pasting), ask your friend if there might be a quick way to write a script to perform the action.

Learn everything you can about crowdsourcing. Crowdsourcing can be illustrated by the idea that instead of having one person do 100,000 tasks, you could have 100,000 people do one task each. The leading crowdsourcing websites are Mturk.com (Amazon’s crowdsourcing service) and CrowdFlower.com. I’d be surprised if there wasn’t a way that you could integrate crowdsourcing as a time-saving element of your work flows.

Tackle problems head on. Never assume a problem (with an unproductive employee or an irresponsible vendor) is ever going to just fix itself. Deal with it early, because these problems just tend to grow otherwise.

Be sure that you’ve given your employees the power to make routine decisions.

Randall Davidson is the lead project manager at Audio Transcription, a small business and general transcription company. With a client base that is very deadline-sensitive, Randall and his team integrate many of these tips into their daily operations. Of the various transcription services offered by Audio Transcription, small businesses tend to utilize Audio Transcription’s business transcription services in order to save time.