It’s because Seotonie doesn’t blink enough? We need more Seotonie on Youtube! There just isn’t enough.

Seo stripped for me last night but really, Tonie has a long way to go before they will work together!

Seotonie, Tonieseo, Soetinoe, no toe? We will see.

Seotonie smells better than flower, tastes better than chocolate and has a much better turn-around than sex. Really.

Three other reasons Seotonie will make your heart sing:

Germany loves it

Flickr loves it

Wordpress loves it

Seotonie is all you need. So here we go. Have it!

Lessons to be learned:

• Don’t have all your sites (and domains and e-mail addresses!) with one smaller hoster, no matter how cheap they are or how much you are befriended with them. Distribute your sites between hosting companies.
• Always make local (as in: not somewhere in the net) backups of your contents. And keep those backups up-to-date.
• Have one e-mail address independent from your domains, like on Gmail.

This may sound like an overkill, but if you make your money with or via the Internet, losing your domains and your normal e-mail accounts means losing your business. In a heartbeat. So better take care early and often.

It’s just the same for sales, right? It’s never the right time for your ads, your letters, you phone calls. Someone lately posted the following joke into a group:

“A salesman has four enemies - spring, summer, autumn, winter.”

And while that’s funny, it’s also rather true - and not. If you deal in candles, Christmas will be great but summer will be lacking turnaround. If you’ve got a restaurant with outdoor seats, summer will be great but less people will spend their money there in winter time. But for normal office work, the seasons aren’t a problem.

A friend of mine owns a cold call business, and she says there’s no good (= no bad!) time for trying. Okay, before holidays or late on Fridays, you may be unlucky in IT offices - but she has no “no-no” time in her schedule.

So, if you think about improving your sales, it’s primarily about choosing the right methods and the right target groups, not about choosing the right time. Or vice versa - if your sales quota sucks, don’t try to use the time of your sales attempt as an excuse. It’s very likely not the real problem you’re facing.

• Skype more. Saves telephone costs, works face to face with your computer, looks professional (but make sure to choose the right user name for each work field).
  
• Use Bloglines or something similar for your RSS feeds. Though I actually have a lot more websites on the list than I surfed before, I spend less time on them, because it’s so much quicker to filter the contents and read only the articles that interest me.
  
• Use more filters in your mail program. While I’m not an “Inbox Zero” addict, it does help to unclutter the main inbox by filtering mails into relevant folders. It also makes it easier to find posts again later.
• Concentrate on a few business portals. It’s a pain in the ass to update your data when it’s shuffled around in the Internet. Therefore, pick a few favorite places where you keep your information up-to-date and point interested parties to those places.

Didn’t we all have customers already who want to have speciality#1, 2, 3, and later we found out that they actually wanted normal feature#1+2 only? Most people cannot say what they really want before they see the result. It’s so much easier to criticize something that’s already happening or existing as a text or drawing than if it’s only in your imagination.

How to work around this divergence between wishes and real wants? I prefer rapid prototyping. Start quickly with the project and make clear that you’re creating a first level for your customer - and demand feedback on this draft! Customers who are unwilling to have a look at your intermediate results should be taken with caution; they are likely to be unhappy with the final result. Working on a project is a two-way-experience, and any customer who sets you on the track with a “see you at the end” didn’t get that important point.

So start the work week with communication and have fun!

However, once we are asked if we want jam, honey, sausage or cheese, we’re confused. Too many choices! And a bagel has only two halves. Damn.

One of my currently most admired authors, Kevin Hogan, places quite a spotlight on the choice question in his book The Science of Influence - Hot to get anyone say YES in 5 minutes or less. The title’s a little lurid, but Hogan knows his business. And the question is very important for your business.

Too many choices create a cognitive dissonance. We want one thing, but we also want another. The more choices there are, the more likely we’re overwhelmed. We may get paralyzed and, in the end, might choose nothing.

Another effect is that the more choices there are, the less appealing they are. Having many choices makes us wonder if there can’t be yet another choice that totally meets our expectation. Seeing ten beautiful suitcases in a row makes only stick out all those little details on each that hold us back from buying. Having only three to choose from, we’ll probably find an acceptable one and leave happily.

That’s the angle of the buyer/customer. But what does that mean for you as service provider?

• Concentrate on and market only a few of your fields of expertise. This applies to ads, websites and flyers. Nobody wants to know every little detail at once. Don’t try to sell a vendor’s tray, as we say in Germany.
• If you offer a service that’s hard to explain, work with a few interesting showcases.
• Don’t advertise where everyone else does too. While it’s good to be active e.g. in the same web forums as your competitors, don’t hang around in places where they are in the hundreds. Create your own niche where there’s less competition and therefore less choice.
• Narrow down the options, once you find out what the customer really wants.
• If necessary, direct the customer to the choice you think is best for him. (Always nicely, of course - you want him to become a steady customer, right?)

By the way, I’d take the honey. What about you?

One way to overcome this kind of inertia caused by general low energy is to follow those tips for goal-oriented working, like “shut off your messenger and mail program, don’t answer the phone, then start working and STICK TO IT”.

Usually, that’s the way I go. It’s often a hard way that makes you curl your fist and feel like Hamlet, opposing slings and arrows. Not really a fun method.

But today, I tried an alternative*. I kept on irc’ing because it improved my mood to talk to my friends, I read mails, I watched King Kong (1933), all the while slowly working on my project. Of course, it was no comparison in result to a full-fledged, concentrated action. However, the snaily proceedings showed more effect than if I had smashed my keyboard, gone to bed, left the house or done anything else. So…thumbs up from this dungeon!

*Not recommended when the work is overdue!

Well, that’s fine. Even better - it’s completely normal and human to do that once in a while. Especially on Mondays.

However - never let your customer know. Mr. X paid lots of money for your service, so look very concentrated and concerned about his well-being, even if you chew nails behind his back or repair your whip. The customer whose work you should have started yesterday already doesn’t have to know nothing really happened yet - send him a little mail, possibly with “received your mail, starting now”. Or even better, ask him a question that shows your growing expertise in his field but also occupies him for some hours.

The point is that your customer needs to feel that you cherish him (and I hope you do), that you invest your time and energy into what he paid you for, that you keep in contact and that in the end, all will be well. It’s not about telling him about your bad conscience for being lazy on Mondays, or - even worse - coming up with some wacky excuses. It’s about your customer’s satisfaction, not you.

Trainee sees dog, goes down and strokes the dog. My friend says, “Hey, I told you not to do that because he might bite!” Trainee replies, “Oh, I forgot. You’ve got to tell me that more explicitly.”

Which left my friend in a certain WTF mode. After I joked a little about using a whip for learning improvement (on the trainee, of course, never on dogs), I also thought about how such things can be avoided.

For once, it’s always good when the answer to an order is phrased as a full sentence.
Instead of: “Don’t touch the dog” - “Sure” or “yes” (instantly forgotten)
it could be: “Don’t touch the dog” - “Okay, I won’t touch that dog.” (better chance for remembering)

(Same goes if you are unsure what somebody expects from you. Rephrasing the work ahead like, “Let’s see. I should start with A, than do B, and if there’s time, C can be tackled.” makes sure that both sides are talking about the same subject.)

But I also think that in this case, there’s a strong reflex that works against not touching this dog. The trainee obviously loves dogs, and I guess she strokes every dog she meets. There are some numbers around how often you need to do something before an old habit is broken, and they are in the hundreds. So one order against a strong tendency of doing something might not be very effective.

For her own self-protection, the trainee needs to learn to heed warnings and that not all dogs are nice and cuddly. Possibly the best learning effect would have been reached if the dog had bitten the trainee (which it didn’t). As it is, I predict that similar situations will happen again with this trainee…no matter how explicit the order is given.