Cathy Stucker - The Idea Lady

Attract Customers and Make Yourself Famous

Little Known Tip for Building Facebook Fans

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This is a guest post from Ann Baker, CEO of Publicity Pros.

You show me yours, I’ll show you mine.  It’s an age-old attention grabber that goes back to childhood days.  Apply it to your Facebook business page, and you’ll build Likers in rapid order.

Here’s the concept:  When a visitor comes to your Facebook page (more on how to make that happen in a minute), you lure him to a special tab you’ve created – one that offers something of interest or value that your visitor will want.  The trick is, you don’t just give the item to the visitor straight out – you show a screen that offers to show or deliver the item when the visitor clicks ‘Like’ for the page.  The offer could be for something like a tip, access to an article or video, a coupon code, or simply placing a vote for something fun – like a thumbs up or down on a recent event.

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11 Reasons Coworking Might Be for You

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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!

  1. 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.

  2. 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.

  3. 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).

  4. You don’t have to make the coffee. smile

  5. 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.”

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

  7. 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?

  8. 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.

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

  10. 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.

  11. 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

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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.

  1. 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.

  2. 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.

  3. 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.

  4. Delegate. Delegate.  Delegate.

  5. 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).

  6. 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).

  7. 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.

  8. 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.

  9. 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.

  10. 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).

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

  12. 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.

  13. 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.

  14. 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.

  15. 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.

Productivity, Stress and Meditation

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Are you burned out and stressed? Perhaps meditation will help. This is a guest post from Tom Von Deck of www.DeeperMeditation.Net

Whether you work for yourself or for a company, stress is a productivity killer. In fact, it is estimated that stress costs USA businesses about $300 Billion per year in absenteeism, insurance claims, sick leave, illness, poor communication, low energy at work, office politics and more. If you do the math, that’s a couple thousand dollars per person per year.

Meditation is one of the best ways to truly go to the root of stress by making life much easier to process from moment to moment. However, many people try to beat stress with meditation techniques, then give up.

You may have even tried meditation as a form of stress relief and failed. This is not necessarily because meditation is not your thing. In fact, meditation is for everyone because it is your natural peaceful state of mind when you’re not resisting experience. Resisting experience means clinging to comfortable experience and pushing away undesirable experience.

The key to a successful meditation practice is compatibility. There are many teachers and centers out there pushing the “best” meditation technique. Maybe you tried some and found that they were not for you. Regardless, there is a technique for you.

The first step to beating stress with meditation is to find an “object of focus” that you find deep, loving absorption in. This is something constant or repetitive that you can fall in love with easily. Examples include the breath, a visualization of Jesus or Krishna, a line of a peaceful song, a mantra and images of a familiar waterfall. Once you find your object of focus, choose a consistent time each day to meditate on it. Fall in love with it. It does not matter how “deeply” you fall in love. Your capacity for concentration will rise and fall in the short run and expand in the long run.

When thoughts come up, just take note of them like they are clouds and you are the sky. Practice observing thought and emotion in a detached manner. Then bring your attention back to the object of focus. This builds equanimity and reduces stress.

Meditating at the same time every day builds a momentum of peace behind the scenes regardless of the amount of time you spend doing it. If you’re busy, 5-10 minutes is ok. If you can aim for an hour, even better. Keep that consistency going and it will have a cumulative effect that greatly banishes stress from your life.

Another momentum builder is the wise use of “elevator time”. You have 20 seconds in an elevator to do whatever you wish. Why not do those yoga stretches, conscious breathing, spiritual song, gratitude work, prayer, etc? You know what “turns you on” on a deep level. Do those things regardless of the abundance or lack of immediate results. You will notice profound results in time.

If you properly follow this advice and develop a solid meditation program that slips into your time schedule, then stress will easily roll off of you and productivity will soar.

Tom Von Deck is an internationally available workplace meditation trainer, stress management speaker and author of Oceanic Mind – The Deeper Meditation Training Course and The Deeper Meditation Audio Course. His website is www.DeeperMeditation.Net

Blogging For Business: Does it Make Sense For You?

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This is a guest post from Gail Z. Martin, author of 30 Days to Social Media Success: Making the Most of Twitter, Blogging, LinkedIn and Facebook.

If you’re in business, you’ve probably already been advised to create a blog for your company.  Odds are, that advice didn’t include much in the way of explanation on how to use a blog for business, or how to fit one more activity into your busy day.  Yet it’s true: a well-conceived blog can encourage customer loyalty, entice new buyers, and attract media interest, all goals that can be worth the effort.

What’s the benefit in blogging? Here are some of the most common benefits for business:

  • Because a blog is easy for you to update, you can add new content frequently without paying high fees to your webmaster for changes.
  • Blogging creates a way for you to comment on business, trends and issues that impact your field.  This helps to establish you as a leader in your industry.
  • Blogging is a way to let your personality shine through and create a more personal connection.  People like to do business with someone they know.  Blogging deepens that relationship.
  • Your blog can extend the information you share through articles, books and speeches, and invite comments and dialogue.  Customers and prospects appreciate it when you share valuable content without a heavy sales pitch.
  • Many bloggers have received national recognition based on the value of their content.  Your blog post could attract local, regional or national media attention.
  • Good blog posts increase the Google search results for your name and company.
  • Prospects who aren’t yet ready to buy may use your blog to learn more about your product, services, and company, positioning you at the front of the line when they’re ready to commit.
How can you use your blog to increase your Internet visibility, improve your search engine results and drive more traffic to your web site (which stands a good chance of increasing your sales)? Here are some ideas:

  • Comment on headline news from your professional perspective. If you’re a relationship coach, celebrity split-ups are good case studies. A financial consultant might provide real-life ways to reduce debt and save money. Talk about what everyone’s already talking about.
  • Extend information you’ve already provided. If you’ve written a book, provide extra related material. If you write a column, go into additional details on a subject you’ve recently covered.
  • Share short case studies or brief tips.
  • Keep it fresh, current and fun. Avoid long lags between posts and try to post at consistent times so readers know what to expect. Stay positive, and realize that going on a rant lasts forever on the Internet, long after you’ve cooled down.
  • Choose snappy titles to increase readership, and write in short paragraphs.
  • Make it easy for your readers to share posts they like by adding bookmarking icons from AddThis.com.
  • Consider getting together with a group of three to five other professionals in non-competing businesses that share the same target audience and share a blog so no one has to do all the writing.

How many readers do you need?  Don’t get caught up in the “more is better” frenzy.  Your readership goals depend on your reasons for blogging.  If you create a blog focused on helping your customers get more value for their money from the kinds of products/services you sell, then you want to attract the majority of the people with whom you’re doing business, as well as prospects.  If your focus is on outreach, then you’ll want to attract newcomers by putting your blog site on your business cards, marketing materials and website.  It can take a few years for a blog to build a following.  Don’t worry about the readership numbers.  If you’re using your blog to share good information and update your main website, you’re already getting plenty of value for your time investment.

Excerpted with permission from 30 Days to Social Media Success, by Gail Martin, new from Career Press in September, 2010.

Gail Z. Martin owns DreamSpinner Communications and helps companies and solo professionals in the U.S. and Canada improve their marketing results in 30 days. Gail has an MBA in marketing and over 20 years of corporate and non-profit experience at senior executive levels. Gail also hosts the Shared Dreams Marketing Podcast. She’s the author of The Thrifty Author’s Guide to Launching Your Book and 30 Days to Social Media Success: Making the Most of Twitter, Blogging, LinkedIn and Facebook. Find her online at www.GailMartinMarketing.com, on Twitter @GailMartinPR and check out her Facebook page at 30 Day Results Guide.