Posts Tagged ‘strategy’

Blogging at its root is simple: it is words on a (web)page, put together and reachable by anyone with internet and your blog address. There are life bloggers, business bloggers, mommy bloggers, pet bloggers, food bloggers, pretty-much-anything-you-can-think-of bloggers, and every single one of them is doing the exact same thing: putting words on a screen for their readers to see. Blogging is not segregated. There is no restrictions to whom can have a blog. It is not picky on what is written or how often. It doesn’t require advanced degrees and (judging by some of the posts I have stumbled across) doesn’t even require a firm grasp on the language it is written in. Blogging is open to the world, and because of that, bloggers seem to be taking over.

But, because there are no set rules for joining or leaving, and there is almost no limit to what can be done with a blog, I often struggle to explain what blogging really is about.

Everyone has their own ideas – Ask 5 people and you will get a different answer every time, depending on whether or not they have a blog, what type of blog they have, or the types of blogs they read. The only comment I hear regularly is that a “blog is a way to communicate quickly with a large group of people”. Which, of course, tells us nothing. Even my own explanation – “A blog is a means to communicate with an audience who is interested in you, your service or your products. It creates a 2 way communication, opening the conversation and allowing you and the reader to learn” – isn’t perfect because it doesn’t incorporate all types of blogs, only the ones I know.

So let’s get talking, I want your thoughts! No matter which type of blogs you read or write, your voice needs to be heard. So tell me…

What do you think blogging is really about?

*image credit to The Glamorous Life’s Shirts

A few weeks ago, we covered strategy questions. Those questions were created to help you determine more about your business in general. But, your business is not just work, phone calls and clients. Your business is you, your good things, your bad things, your personal life and your business life. Learning more about who you are and who you are in your business will help you to figure out how to make it grow more effectively. After all, you are the most important piece of your business puzzle! IN order to get you to open up and learn more about yourself, I am giving you 20 questions to answer. The questions span from personal to business, as you need to understand both sides of you. I would love for you to share the answers you come up with, as many as you feel comfortable sharing.

1. Where do I want to be in 6 months in my personal life?
2. Where do I want to be in 6 months in my business life?
3. What does my ideal day look like?
4. What is my biggest strength?
5. What is my biggest weakness?
6. What part of me do I love the most?
7. What do I dislike about myself?
8. Which tasks to I perform the best?
9. Which tasks should I be delegating?
10. How do I act at networking events?
11. What would my friends say about me?
12. What would my enemies say about me?
13. Does my business make me happy?
14. What is my favorite thing to do outside of business?
15. What is my favorite thing to do in my business?
16. Do i feel supported by my family?
17. Where do I want to be in 10 years in my personal life?
18. Where do I want to be in 10 years in my business life?
19. What do I need to learn about me?
20. What can I change today to make tomorrow better?

Now onto my answers (it’s only fair if I ask you to answer them, that I need to too!):

1. Where do I want to be in 6 months in my personal life? Still happily married, working on 4 days a week, finally getting all my school and debt paid off.
2. Where do I want to be in 6 months in my business life? Hiring an assistant and building my business to the next level.
3. What does my ideal day look like? Sleeping in, breakfast with my hubby, an hour and a half massage, a relaxing afternoon and then dinner at Mastro’s with my hubby.
4. What is my biggest strength? My desire to succeed in my business.
5. What is my biggest weakness? Being afraid to fail so I don’t take a lot of risks.
6. What part of me do I love the most? My personality – I’m strong, and stubborn but also very loving and caring.
7. What do I dislike about myself? My need to please people.
8. Which tasks to I perform the best? Writing, when I have the freedom to write about what I want.
9. Which tasks should I be delegating? Coding and new client phone calls.
10. How do I act at networking events? The same way I act everywhere. What you see is what you get.
11. What would my friends say about me? That I am dedicated and caring, sarcastic, stubborn, very outgoing and a lot of fun.
12. What would my enemies say about me? That I am stubborn, pretentious and a little too sarcastic.
13. Does my business make me happy? Absolutely!! I love it!
14. What is my favorite thing to do outside of business? Spend time with my hubby, family and friends.
15. What is my favorite thing to do in my business? Talk with other business owners and write!
16. Do I feel supported by my family? Yes, they are all awesome and all very willing to help.
17. Where do I want to be in 10 years in my personal life? A mom of two, enjoying time with my hubby, helping with sports and school.
18. Where do I want to be in 10 years in my business life? Still running my business part time, but having my staff mostly manage it for me, just doing the pieces I love.
19. What do I need to learn about me? Where my limit is. I often overwork myself and regret it later.
20. What can I change today to make tomorrow better? Learning to compartmentalize a bit more so I can spend more time with my hubby without work getting in the way.

Are you ready to share?

Can you provide an answer to ALL of the following questions:

• What is your business strategy?
• What is your blog strategy?
• What is your twitter strategy?
• What is your facebook strategy?
• What is your branding strategy?
• What is your personal strategy?
• What is you financial strategy?
• What is your conversation strategy?
• What is your networking strategy?

If you can’t answer them, you need to take some time out of your schedule and come up with an answer. Without these answers, you don’t have a strategy. Without a strategy, you have nothing.

What say you?

Today, I saw @paulttran tweeting about elevator pitches and it got me thinking about mine.

On April 6th last year, one day before my life changed and Wright Creativity became more than just a blog, I was participating in the 31 days to a better blog challenge from problogger. He asked us to create an elevator pitch for our blog – tell our readers what they could expect from reading this. On that day, when I was still just using this site for a creative outlet, the Wright Creativity elevator pitch was: “I write about creativity in business and in life, hoping to inspire one person a day to be more creative. Sometimes, the ‘wright’ creativity is all you need.”

Unfortunately, that elevator pitch just doesn’t fit what I do any longer (and it was a little too short) – so I decided to re-write it and craft an elevator pitch that fit my business, not just my blog. The new-and-improved Wright Creativity elevator pitch is now: “Wright Creativity allows small to mid-size businesses the time to focus on their products and customers by managing their online marketing strategies. We offer blog management to start conversations, web design to create an online brand and copywriting that will entice new customers. The combination of our three services gives you better visibility, a more complete brand, and powerful tools to gain more customers. We make having an online presence simple and profitable“.

When is the last time you worked on your elevator pitch? If you have one, are working on one or want to practice one, share with us, you never know who will be reading it and need your services!

*image from BLMurch on Flickr*

I spelled a tag wrong but it’s already attached to a post, what do I do?

I have received this question about a half dozen times each week, and finally have decided to write a quick post, outlining how to change tags, simply and effectively…

1. On the dashboard, click the “posts” section
2. Click on post tags
3. Either search for the tag you are looking for (partial words/tags will show up) or browse through all your tags to find the one you are looking for
4. Mouse over the tag you want to edit
5. Click “quick edit”
6. Change the name to be whatever you want the new name to be (correct spelling, etc)
7. Change the slug to match the name, only words, with dashes between each word.
8. Click update tag. This will automatically update the tag on every post it is associated with.

Hope this helps to answer the question! What other questions do you have about wordpress that I can help with?

How many of us work on projects, take on clients, or attempt to do things that we know we’re just hurting ourselves trying to handle? *hint: the answer starts with every and ends with one*

When I attempted to hand code html or php, it hurts. So I don’t do that anymore. Instead, I found someone that I trust and I can work with that does enjoy hand coding for me, does it at a great price, and allows me to focus on my own strengths.

If I tried to work in illustrator and create things like Abduzeedo’s #377 Daily inspiration , that would hurt too. So guess what? I don’t do that. I hire someone for those pieces too.

Oh, and if I were required to do all my own accounting? Well, lets just say I’d probably need the Madoff defense…

Instead, I spend my time working with clients on blog management, wordpress and typepad designs and teaching people how to improve their social media strategy. Why? Because it doesn’t hurt when I do that.

I also don’t take on clients that are trying to get work for free, are extreme headaches or that I know won’t be worth working with. While this may sound harsh, not all clients are the same, and money does not make the “pain” worth it. (Freelance Folder has a great article about the types of projects you should turn down).

Bottom line, if you are doing something that causes you pain (mental, physical, emotional), stop doing it. You are amazingly talented at {fill in your own blank} and that is what you should focus on. Leave the extra stuff to someone else, because it is always less expensive to hire a professional than end up hurting yourself by attempting to do something you’re just not good at.

Now onto the fun part: Win a free bag of the oh-so-amazing Portola Coffee – just by adding a comment!!!

Here’s how: Add a comment to the post telling us one thing (or many things) that hurt when you do them. Or, things you have given up that did hurt.

C’mon…it’ll feel good to share, I promise!!

Then, tomorrow (tuesday) at 12pm PST, I will select one of the comments at random, and send you a fantastic bag of your choice, just in time for the holidays!

*extra comment credit to the first person who can tell me from which movie I got the quote and the book*

UPDATE: The winner of the free @PortolaCoffee is: @swoodruff Your comment was picked by random.org Congrats!!

Over the next 25 posts, ending on my birthday, I will be covering an incredibly creative moment or idea from a year of my life AND one creative moment in either the marketing, advertising, technology or media world.

1990 – the year I fell in love with writing and CBS realized their biggest mistake.

In first grade, I made my first book and found my passion for writing. I remember each week, we were given the task of creating a book. The room parents (my mom was usually one of them) would come in and help the kids to create a story, however we could, and then bind it together so it looked like a real book. The first one was just pictures, with the few words I could write. As the school year went on, the books got longer, the words got better and my writing was more like real writing.  I wrote as often as I could, coming up with stories in my off time to take with me to school. In addition to getting to create our own books, we also got to spend a couple hours per week in the library, picking out a book to take home and read with our parents. I would take the stories, and then write a new ending to them. Or add on to the ending that was there. I wrote stories for the characters that got ignored, and created my own characters to add to the story. I feel head over heels in love with writing, and haven’t stopped.

In the world of TV and media, Law & Order premiered on NBC. This marked the moment that NBC took over the ratings hold and CBS realized the greatest mistake they’d ever made. 2 years prior, CBS met with the creators of the show and turned down their pitch idea. CBS thought that the show was dull and would never attract a large scale audience. Luckily for NBC, the creators of the show weren’t fazed and approached NBC with the show idea. NBC took the risk, and the risk paid off. More than 9 awards, 3 spin off’s, 5 video games and millions of viewers later it is now the longest-running prime-time drama currently on American television. NBC – 1. CBS – 0.

A couple months ago, I did the problogger challenge to improve my blog. One post we wrote was about analyzing the traffic to your blog – monitoring analytics. What I failed to talk about in the post was whether or not I was actually using those analytics to make changes and improve my blog (which I am).

One of the most important pieces of my traffic that I look at, and use, are the keywords that people use to find my site.

Here is a screen shot of the top 20 keywords used this month to find my site:

There are a few things that I notice right away, some bad and some good. First, both my name and my business name are in the top 20. This means that a lot of people are looking for me, because of me and my company, not just randomly stumbling upon my site from search terms. This is fabulous because it shows that my marketing and social networking are working the way I want them to. One of the other tests I use is just google searching for myself and my website.  As long as I show up in the top links for both, I know that I am doing good. Second, most of the terms are ways I want people to find my site (creativity, marketing ideas, creative blog ideas, etc). So, how do I use it? Well, since I know that a lot of people are searching for and finding my site using the key terms that I want them to be using, I need to start writing more of those types of articles, so that I reward these searchers with more content that they want.

Now the couple bad ones: There are at least 5 of the top 20 that have absolutely nothing to do with my site, and although I have written a post about the topic, I didn’t really want that to be a search term people would use. For example, #14 is “Alice and wonderland decorations”. This is probably someone looking to find a party theme site, or perhaps a costume site. What they are going to get on my site? One post about Alice in Wonderland, and how a cake I found stemmed a creative idea. Not really what they were looking for. But, the plus side? You never know who will like what they see and decide to stay… So, how do I use this? It forces me to re-think which words I choose to use to talk about my blog posts. Even if the post is about creative proverbs, it may be better to call them “writing block breakers” as I would want people finding my articles in search for this.

Basically, whether the search terms are right for my site or not, I need to take a look at them to make sure that I always know what is going on.

Are you using your analytics?

We must have a theme, a goal, a purpose in our lives. If you don’t know where you’re aiming, you don’t have a goal. My goal is to live my life in such a way that when I die, someone can say, she cared. – Mary Kay Ash

Being the daughter of a Mary Kay senior sales director meant quotes like this were commonly heard in my household. If I was struggling with why I needed to get work done, or the reason behind a task, my mother always reminded me that everything positive we do leads us towards our goals in our lives. She was great with those motivational messages. Not only that, but she always kept multiple goal lists next to her desk, and in turn, I always had them as well (like mother, like daughter). Each list was laid out with 10-15 small goals, and then one large goal at the bottom. This goal was something that would take a long time to accomplish (months, years, decades, depending on the list. I had goal lists for soccer, school and personal life. Each one had an ‘ultimate goal’ with lots of little ones above it that would help me get there. Even after I left home, the idea of ‘goal lists’ was ingrained in my brain. I usually had 3-4 at a time, sitting somewhere on my desk throughout college. After college, when I started working for other people, I began to use my lists less and less. My goals just didn’t stay in the forefront of my mind, because I didn’t fully feel like I controlled my job or future. After I got laid off earlier this year, I decided that I didn’t want to be in a place where my goals weren’t important.

When I told my mom that I didn’t want to take another job working for someone else and wanted to start my own business, she was so excited for me. And of course, reminded me to make my goals list. It changes almost weekly, as I update and achieve goals, so as of today:

A few of my top goals are:

1. Go to BlogWorld and New Media Expo 2009 with a sponsorship
2. Have Wright Creativity making me a consistent income ? what I was making in the corporate world by December 2009
3. Become #1 on the adage power 150 list by my 2 year blog anniversary (July 27, 2010)
4. Make the OC Metro’s Hot 25 list for 2010
5. Rescue a greyhound
6. Purchase a home in Mission Viejo
7. Get my book, Riding with Lucifer published and on the NYT best sellers list

And the ultimate goal that these are all leading to: Stop working completely by the time my oldest child is 8.

If you notice, as you go down the list, the goals get progressivly larger and more difficult. But, If I do each of the goals above them, then the ones down the list aren’t actually that big. it’s like a snowball effect…the more goals I achieve, the bigger the goals I will be able to achieve.

Do you keep a goals list?

Remember, your goals are your goals. While you may have similar ones as someone else, there is absolutely no way that you will achieve them in the same manner. We all have different processes and ways to get to where we want to go – make sure that you are doing it your way, and you’ll find it much easier.