heartharmony.com.au

Master of your Domains

Ingrid Cliff — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 20:13:23 +0000

Every year I do a few weeks of professional development to hone my skills. This year I have been completing some online internet courses – the Thirty Day Challenge with Ed Dale. I do this one every year to keep current on the latest internet marketing trends (and it is free to do during August each year).

Myself, James Schramko & Donna-Marie Coggins

I have also been studying with James Schramko – one of the good guys of internet marketing. One of his courses I have been taking is the Underground Profit System which I have to say has been brilliant. It is a series of 8 videos with really comprehensive information about websites and traffic that I hadn’t heard elsewhere (and you won’t break the bank doing them). Even if I didn’t get an affiliate fee for recommending James’s course I would be telling all my friends about it … it is that good!

Now if you’re like me you need to lock yourself away in a darkened room for a couple of days to work with new material. My kids joke that when I am studying I descend into my cave like a hermit, only periodically opening the door to get coffee and food and then scuttling away again, while muttering about things like domains, links and traffic. This isolated state lasts until the last DVD is played and I have had a few days applying what I have learnt.

The application is the most important bit. Unless I apply some of what I studied in the few days after the course, the course material becomes the online equivalent of a treadmill sitting in the lounge room draped with clothes and good intentions.

So the past few days I have been living in my bunker and have had some great aha moments – like how to find fantastic domain names, different website models for businesses, brilliant tools for market research (that don’t cost a cent), places to source great products, how to have videos on your site (and not crush your bandwidth), simple ways to split test to see which headlines/content gets the best results, and places to get CDs & DVDs replicated for next to nothing.

I also had a massive whack on the side of the head in relation to some simple systems to keep tabs on my website information. I knew where I could find (sort of) which company my domain name was registered with, and who hosts my websites, but passwords and expiry dates of the subscriptions? This super simple one pager put it all together for me in a super-organised way. I now have all my website details and many domains (including all my kids names .com.au and .coms) in the one folder, neatly sorted.

But my hands-down favourite bit of James’s course has been the software. Last night I put together and published 3 simple websites in 2 hours which would have taken me an entire day to do otherwise. There would have been more but the thunderstorm meant the computer had to turn off. Now you have to remember I have some net knowledge which makes things a bit easier, but in my view even newbies to the net would be able to quickly get a great result.

Why am I telling you this? In business we need to keep on top of new developments. We need to take regular time out to sharpen our saw (as Covey would say), to learn new things and new ways of approaching our business. When was the last time you took time out to study? Yes, we are all busy and yes I have a mountainous backlog of emails and so on to tackle today … but it is worth it!

… And if you want to learn more about websites and the net – the two courses I have mentioned are worth doing.

Until next time

Ingrid Cliff

We put your business into words

Heart Harmony – Freelance copywriter

Ring Ring – Why don’t you give me a call

Ingrid Cliff — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 02:38:03 +0000

For some time I have been grappling with the concept of having a live answering service. You see, I love to be accessible to my clients, but when I am deep in thought or writing then I let the phone go through to our message bank. Having an phone answering service seemed like a great idea, until a friend of mine told me of her experience yesterday.

You see, she wanted to get in touch with her excavator operator. When she called the phone went through to what she now knows was a call answering service.

For starters they go the name of the company wrong, and when she asked if to speak with with the excavator guy, the operator fumbled around – not sure if the guy worked for that company. Once he finally was encouraged to check his piece of paper and found out who his client was, he spun into desperation – ranting about the company, how he was only new at the job and hadn’t been trained correctly.

Now remember, all my friend wanted to do was leave her name and number, but instead she ended up making “there, there” noises to a near suicidal phone operator who had no idea who his clients were. It would have made a hilarious recording (unless of course your business happened to be the excavator one and you were paying for a small business answering service).

Another professional colleague found her lovely local answering service had outsourced their services to India. She only discovered this fact after many of her clients complained about the difficulty in leaving a message with the operator due to their broken English (and after many messages about calls had not been forwarded).

But answering machines and message banks are not immune from problems. I have lost count of the bored and depressed cell phone voice messages I have listened to – people sound like they really hate their job which makes me question if I really want to leave my details.

Others struggle with pronouncing their own name without an um or an ah while sounding like Bob Hawke on a bad day, while some are premature message recorders – ratting off the message as if they were calling the Melbourne Cup.

Then of course you have the children’s TV presenter message banks, with very forced cheerfulness and extreme pronunciation of every letter.

The bottom line is all businesses need to periodically call their phone system and hear what their customers hear. Get a few people to try it out for you and tell you what they think. It may be very enlightening.

Until next time

Ingrid Cliff

We put your business into words

Heart Harmony – Freelance Writer

Success: Why looking back is a good thing

Ingrid Cliff — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 00:02:48 +0000

Have you ever stopped, I mean really stopped to see how far you have come? To celebrate your success? Sometimes businesses do it through a strategic planning process, or as part of your life review questions in coaching, but generally it gets a few seconds of consideration and then you are on to your next thing on your to do list.

This forward focus was hammered home to me this week courtesy of my teenage daughter. She has quite a nice singing voice and has been rehearsing for a Cabaret style show at her school. And when I mean rehearsing, I mean every day during school holidays, two nights a week till 9pm after starting at 7am or 7.30am for choir rehearsals, both first and second break at school for the past fortnight and every weekend for at least 4hours for the past 6 weeks.

Now that is a pretty grueling rehearsal schedule no matter your age – but for a 13 year old that is really extreme. Yet she did it without question. “We want to be the best we can – we aren’t there yet” is what she would say when quizzed. There were days when she was bone weary, and days when she was crying tired. Days when we swore the antichrist had moved into our house and days when she was on top of the world. But she kept plugging away at it.

Tomorrow is performance day, and after a 10.30pm finish last night and a very husky voice today I kept her home from school to rest.

Rachel has been sitting in the lounge this morning watching DVDs of her pre-school and year 1 concerts (we recently had the videos transferred to DVD thanks to Milk2Sugars). While working in my office I heard hoots of laughter during the DVDS, and then she came in to the office to see me.

“Mum, I can’t believe how awful we were. I mean we really sucked. We couldn’t hold a tune, we overacted and you only got a part if you were obnoxious so the teacher would try to give you something to succeed at. I can’t believe you sat through it, clapped and cheered for us. I guess that unless I had done that, I wouldn’t be here now”.

Now, I had been telling her this for years, but it hadn’t sunk in. It took a video of her before to show her how far she had come, to show her her own success stories. Some people need visible evidence of their progress to realise the distance they had travelled. I know I had the same experience when I looked back over some university assignments 20 years later – to see how far my thinking and writing style had progressed.

In my reflections on life, pretty much everyone sucks at things to start with, but over time and with enough practice everyone can improve. If you really want something enough, and invest the time into it, then everyone can get a credible result. You may never be a world beater, but you will produce great outcomes. That after all is one of the success secrets – time plus commitment equals success.

The other part of success is your cheer squad. For Rachel’s case all her commitment meant driving to and from school to meet the rehearsals (buses don’t get to the school from our place at those hours). It meant shuffling my appointments to work around her. It meant doing “food runs” to make sure she had something warm to eat on her 14 hour days. No-one succeeds on their own. When you are looking back at how far you have come – spend a few moments remembering all the people who have contributed to getting you where you are now. This cheer squad is part of the meaning of success – they add love and meaning to your results.

From my side of things, it doesn’t really matter how the Cabaret shows go tomorrow. Rachel has already learnt the biggest lesson of them all – to give it everything you have, to invest time in what you want to do and to celebrate your journey.

What about you – have you really stopped to realise how far you have come? What do you do to help you reflect and celebrate? What are your success secrets?

Ingrid Cliff

We put your business into words

Heart Harmony – Freelance Writer

Coming soon – Designer Snuggies

Ingrid Cliff — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 04:17:00 +0000

You all know how much I love poking fun at the Snuggies – the blankets with sleeves. But somewhere amidst all the laughter and the jokes the darn things sold and sold well. Thousands of people bought the backwards hospital gowns, so rather than being a one hit wonder, the Snuggies blanket manufacturers have now brought out a new Snuggie designer range and chose to launch it at NY Fashion week.

I have my suspicions that a good 50% of all Snuggies last year were bought as gag presents, to be filmed in You Tube videos or to be worn on pub crawls.

The Snuggy fad sort of reminds me of other cringe-worthy niche business ideas/fads over the years – pet rocks, moon boots, roller blades, sea monkeys and hula hoops. Each had their day in the sun after making a mountain of money for the inventors and then slowly faded away only to be found in discard piles at garage sales.

It will be interesting how the new zebra patterns, leopard spots and dog Snuggies actually sell this year. Perhaps the gag will have worn off (we can only hope).

Until that time, I tip my hat to a very quirky niche business (and no … I will not be buying one!).

I give you fair warning though – the first of the designer Snuggie spam emails hit my spambox this morning, so beware the coming spam onslaught.

Until next time

Ingrid Cliff

We put your business into words

Heart Harmony – Freelance Writer

Why good copywriters charge accordingly

Ingrid Cliff — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 23:52:29 +0000

Copywriting, like all service industries, have people at all ends of the financial spectrum. You can find budget writers in India and Indonesia, and you can find $20,000 a letter plus a % of all sales in the USA. In Australia the fees vary dramatically – ranging from the VAs who moonlight as writers, right the way through to highly qualified direct mail marketing writers.

We are unashamedly at the mid-high end of the industry. And here’s a little case study to help you understand why you get what you pay for.

Over the past few weeks I have been working with a very talented and successful natural therapies practitioner on revising her website content. She understands the value of being found in search engines, so we invested time on conducting a range of searches for her so she could get an idea of how many people per day were looking for particular services relating to her industry.

We used this information when creating her copy. This is termed SEO copywriting and includes creating the metatags, H1 & 2 tags and on-page links that her web designer can then just upload onto her site, as well as keyword rich copy. Her copy will be on-page optimised before she loads it – meaning step 1 of SEO has been completed when her site goes “live”. SEO copywriting is a unique niche – and one we love!

But, in researching her copy we found she used two machines in her business. We did a quick research scan to see what other businesses and the manufacturers said about the machines – and found all used basically the same copy. (In most cases the copy was identical. This is termed “duplicate content” and has SEO implications, as well as breaches of copyright implications, but we won’t go there).

We then went back and re-read all the Australian legislation and guidelines from the Therapeutic Goods Administration Act to determine what could be said about these machines.

We did further research to find out the specific wordings of the TGA approvals for each machine – as the wording is unique to each machine. “TGA approved” just doesn’t cut it legally – we wanted to state specifically what each machine was approved to do.

We also checked out legal case law to see if there had been any claims made against the advertising of these machines, and discovered a recent case where the “standard wording and claims” used by most practitioners and the manufacturer had been blasted by the courts. The standard wording and claims had been banned from being used, the person before the courts had to withdraw their ads and print a retraction.

Of course, this also means most of the other websites out there that mention these machines and use the standard wording and claims are in breach of the legislation.

Using all of this data and case law, we presented it to the client, to educate her on the situation. We very carefully crafted her web copy to comply with the legislation, guidelines and case law (… yet still sell her services and use of the machines). Of course we advised her to seek competent legal advice to confirm our draft.

What is the point of this post? Budget basement copywriters or newbie copywriters don’t do the research and don’t “get” the legal and SEO side of things.

Of course in every business you need to adopt a risk management approach to your work – but as one of the USP’s of this client is her wonderful honesty and ethical dealings, we made sure her copy was in line with her USP.

Yes, we do things a bit differently … but we also can sleep at night, comfortable in knowing we are protecting our clients while making their businesses highly successful. And yes, we do charge accordingly.

Until next time

We put your business into words

Ingrid Cliff – Freelance Copywriter