How Often?

We all sat down and discussed "How often should I mail out my eLetter?".

Answers ranged from "It depends on your audience" through "26 times a year" to "3 times a year".

I think the best answer is to the question "How often?" will be found by following the path of thought that starts with "What is my goal?"

What is YOUR goal in issuing YOUR newsletter?

Write it down, write down the objectives (or sequence of steps you'll take to reach your goal), and you'll find the answer to your frequency question along the way.

Oh, sorry!

I forgot that you wrote all that down when you were planning your newsletter; just take it out an re-read it.

Again.

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Volunteers are Priceless

A recent tweet said " Volunteers are not paid; not because they are worthless, but because they are priceless." Hats off to those that share ...", but I disagree with volunteering in most cases.

Over my career I've found myself providing services for free to non-profit organizations who save a bundle through my suggestions, but run an office with a staff of ten, salaries, benefits and electricity bills.

A non-profit is not a non-revenue, and I fail to see why I should not take part in the revenue stream.

I quit all this 15 years ago when a non-profit asked me to drive 10 km north to stand by while they did their first mail-merge. Why stand-by? In case it didn't work and they used a few sheets of paper unwisely.

For a few sheets of paper I was to schedule 3 hours of my time, drive 10 km each way, ...

No. My time is worth more than that.

I am NOT priceless; I am worthy of my hire of any organization in the business world that has a revenue stream.

Especially if their revenue stream is greater than my revenue stream.

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Time Blocking

There’s an excellent little article on Time Blocking here, and I recommend you read it. Takes about 60 seconds.

There’s an excellent little time program here, and I recommend you download it.

Then start cheering as your backlog disappears!

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Thank You for Contacting

Thank you for contacting me at IHaveAWebSite. I will get back to you as soon as I can. Many thanks; I’m Me.

I don’t know about you, but I get a tad cheesed off when I am hooked up with an email address which uses an auto-responder to let me know “your call is important to us”.

I think it’s the height of insolence to use a robot to respond to my hand-crafted enquiry.

I think it’s ABOVE the height of insolence to use a robot to respond to my subsequent hand-crafted responses.

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Who is this Guy Chris Greaves? -2

Two months ago in Who is this Guy Chris Greaves? I issued some crude statistics on what a CEO would see if he received a mailing from me and decided to check me out by using the Google search engine.

I have re-issued the search with these results:

Quantities may vary if you repeat the search, depending on the date, and on the size of your monitor screen.

The results can be summarized as follows

Name Only	& Toronto	& Mississauga
4 out 7 or 57%	10 out of 10 or 100%	Top 6 out of 10 or 60%

The only change is in the Mississauga rankings (I live in Toronto, but right on the border of Mississauga), so this is an improvement, but not by much.

The good news is that “Arguments with the 407-ETR” has dropped off the radar; that sort of thing isn’t likely to impress a CEO at first glance.

Over the past two weeks I’ve been working diligently at tweeting my blogs, products and services, but I know I need to get more out there.

It’s a process, not an act!

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You’re Right!

Don’t you just love hearing that?

Don’t you just love it when the other person puts you on a pedestal with those two words?

I know that those two words make me feel just GREAT!

So why aren’t I using them more often to make people warm to me?

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Business Tweeting

Almost a year ago I documented my Introduction to the World of Tweeting, and am gradually getting a grip, as we say in the trade.

One of the subtleties is recognizing that my target audience tends to be online during business hours, and tends not to be so attentive outside those hours.

So I’ve tried to tweet about important topics – new services, new products, strong blog postings of mine and so on - during business hours, and outside of business hours I schedule those tweets to appear early in the next business day.

In the early hours of this morning I realized that I can still keep my name in front of people by using this slack time-of-day to retweet other users tweets, thereby getting myself into their good books (“Thanks for ReTweeting me!”), without cluttering up the twitter space during business hours.

Like I said, subtle but, I believe, significant.

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Getting the Word Out - 2

(Please see also Getting the Word Out )

More thoughts as they arise:

• Thought 1:

No matter what I’m publishing, it’s going public because *I* think it is of value to the world out there. I should, at the very least, Tweet everything I publish. It is up to my Twitter followers to decide whether what I create is of value or interest to them; it’s not for me to decide their likes and dislikes.

• Thought 2:

Some blog items, Clear Thinking is a good example, are immediate candidates to be appended to my “From The Blogs” section in the embryonic next-month’s issue of the eLetter. By appending them as I publish them, I reduce time spent looking for articles at the next publishing date. My function is reduced to that of deleting unwanted items.

• Thought 3:

Tweets automatically get posted to LinkedIn and from there, I think, my LinkedIn groups or connections get notified; I’m not sure how that works, but I do see that LinkedIn notices all my tweets.

• Thought 4:

Most blogs, and Clear Thinking is one of the set, don’t warrant an entry in an updated LinkedIn summary. That area is better suited for new products or service of a major nature.

• Thought 5:

Having begun the process of documenting the procedures for publishing, I find that I discard 50% of my bookmarked news items! They’ve been sitting there for so long that I can no longer recall why I thought that they were important. Dealing with them through my speedy process at the time they arise will mean a better harvest for me.

• Thought 6:

My Twitter audience is business-oriented, and while most of us will glance at twitter during the weekend, the majority seem to be desk-bound, like me. It makes sense to use a service such as Twuffer to schedule tweets on the weekend to appear the following Monday or Tuesday during business hours.

• Thought 7:

My preference is to compose my web items in Microsoft Word and compile them to web pages, then copy from the web pages to the blogs. This gives me a chance to examine, inspect the material, test links and so on before making the issue public. For example, a candidate for Macros In Minutes gets posted to http://www.chrisgreaves.com/MacrosInMinutes/index.htm before being posted to http://macrosinminutes.blogspot.com/ .

• Thought 8:

A working document has been made: Getting the Word Out - 3

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5-Step Method to Cut Down Your Paper Usage

Unload the paper from the feed-bin or paper-tray in your printer.

Place the paper in a tray or shallow cardboard box at least 5 steps away from your printer.

From now on, to print a document, grab a sheet of paper and stand there using the manual feed of your printer.

I guarantee you’ll use significantly less paper.

And get more exercise.

P.S. You can save even more paper by downloading the free utility application ZoomP .

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Who Calls Who?

ME> Hi Victor. What's a good time to call you back (after 2 p.m.)?

HE> I’ll be in the office Thursday morning at 10 a.m.

Gone are the days when the third email would be from Me to He, with Me saying “OK, why don’t you call me at a time convenient to you after 10 a.m.

I have learned that, all too often, something crops up at HIS end and he doesn’t make the call.

So now I initiate the call; that means we have a conversation AND the project moves a step further ahead.

Today!

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Check Your Stress on the Bathroom Scales

It’s no secret that I’m losing weight.

Indeed, the fact that I *AM* losing weight makes me more inclined to tell everyone about it.

Heh heh!

You can ignore the scale on the Left-hand side. I’m using a set of scales that may not be correctly calibrated.

What counts to me is the DIFFERENCE in weight from day to day, and in the chart above you can see that in early September I am about 4 pounds lighter than I was last June.

I have been weighing myself daily for about five years now, and can stretch that chart to cover all five years.

I am fascinated by perturbations; what makes my weight spike at intervals?

The yellow marks are my daily recorded weight values; they fluctuate, quite naturally, by plus or minus two pounds per day.

So what counts is the TREND of my weight, which is outlined in red and also in blue; I use blue when my recorded daily weight is less than my trend, which is a running average.

(Blue is therefore the equivalent of a Gold Star, without the expense of buying gold stars!).

Observe the are bounded in green.

Just over a week ago, Friday 26th, my early-morning weight pegged in at 167 lbs. No cause for alarm, but why on that day? I was taking two days holiday, and was looking forward to it.

Don’t you think my stress would be DOWN that morning?

No. Weight is a function of stress; when we are stressed out we drink beer (calories) or eat ice-cream (calories); we eat to feel comfortable, and if we aren’t comfortable in our daily lives, we treat ourselves.

My guess is that in the three or four days leading up to my heavenly vacation, the PROMISE of a great time in the future felt like pressure in the present.

So Friday morning, before I set off, I had a peak at 167 lbs, brought about by snacking to relieve the stress of waiting for vacation.

Once on vacation I pig out on hamburgers, ice-cream, I treat myself to a can of pop, and generally disregard any heart-and-stroke advice for two days.

And look at how my weight starts coming down again, even though I’m eating what I shouldn’t!

Weigh yourself daily and plot the trend.

Then go back to those peaks and work out what it is that causes you stress.

And get rid of it.

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The Personal Touch

I am asked how much time I spend on mailings.

The mechanical part (click on a button, choose a PDF, choose File, Print, choose “MakeEnvelopeFromSnapshot” and choose “PrintFrontAndBackOfEnvelope” takes less than 60 seconds.

Sometimes the printer gets all sulky and takes over two minutes to reset after printing one side of an envelope. (I learned long ago not to “batch” personalized letters.

The hand-writing part for a generic not takes less than 30 seconds.

But more and more I find myself spending three or more minutes reading my comments on the contact, reading press releases, trying to come up with SOMEthing that indicates I’ve spent some time thinking of what I’ve written.

Because I’m hoping that the recipient will spend some time thinking of what I’ve written.

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Anatomy of a Proposal

This is an appropriate time to write this up on two counts:

(a) I am re-reading “ Documentation and the Nursing Process ” by Lois White; I taught from this slim book about ten years ago and love it for its stress on Goals, Objectives, Deliverables, Measurement and Documentation.

(b) I have entered preliminary discussions with a chap who wants me to develop a system, but I am leery of projects proposed by individuals. All too often they want a full-fledged system for peanuts, and I can’t do that.

So here goes:

1: I want some cash NOW!

2: I don’t want to get jerked around

3: I want to offer only what I can guarantee as a short-term deliverable.

4: I want to proceed in small measured steps

5: I want to minimize the amount of work I do up front by me

6: I want to minimize the up front dollar investment by him

7: I want to minimize the risk for both of us.

My terms will be cash in advance; I don’t know this fellow, and I don’t know how adaptable he is.

Next: My Plan

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