Kenneth Grahame

Returning from a visit to see my mother today, we decided to put on a tape of Kenneth Grahame’s ‘The Wind In The Willows’. (It’s the only way to get my car radio to stay tuned into the traffic news without having to listen to the radio). I read the book as a kid, enthusiastically encouraged by my mother, and I was always in two minds about it. I quite enjoyed it, and the pictures were fun, but I never re-read it like I did some of the other classics, such as Black Beauty and Treasure Island.

As we listened, I was totally captivated by the poetry of Grahame’s writing. It’s lyrical, evocative and enchanting. It’s also quite funny. As a child, all this passed me by. For me, it was just a story about woodland animals, not unlike ‘Tales From The Riverbank’, a children’s TV programme from the ’60s narrated by Johnny Morris. In fact the two got muddled up in my 7 or 8 year old brain.

As an adult, I find myself appreciating and enjoying it as a piece of well-written literature, although the fact that Kenneth Williams is reading it probably helps!

It got me thinking though, about how fabulous it is to read and hear beautiful prose. While I’m not convinced that business writing has to be lyrical, I do think it has to be evocative: to evoke the organisation and what it stands for in the mind of the reader, just as Kenneth Grahame’s writing evokes the world of these small furry animals, and creates such clear mental pictures of each one. And it helps enormously if the text sounds right when you read it out loud.

Then I found myself wondering whether my prose style evokes what I want it to. Is this my voice, or have I borrowed it from someone else? It’s easy enough to speak in your own voice in a blog post, but what about the rest of the site? Ho hum, better go take another look: this is the downside of helping people create good website copy – you have to keep checking your own is up to scratch.

Of course, all this pondering is the fault of the Dark Angels course I went on in October. The notion that you can be creative with your business writing, and allow space for poetry and linguistic flexibility is a powerful one. It feels to me as if the language becomes malleable, like a piece of clay (or even plasticine) that you can mould into shape, breathing life into it, and taking it out of the dull, dead form that characterises so much business writing online and offline.

Since blogging is a key tool for my business, then I always want to let my Twitter followers know when I’ve posted a new blog. In the past I have used Twitter Tools. However, Twitter changed the way it worked with plug-ins (the Word Press euqivalent of an app), and the Twitter Tools set-up became too complicated for my little brain.

Bravely, I have decided to have another go, because Twitter Tools is a great way of ensuring that Twitter knows when I have written something new. It does it automatically, so I don’t have to waste time ensuring all the links are correct and that I have sent out the right messages in the right directions.

So this post is a test, to see if I have set it up right.

It’s also a reminder of the benefits of automation for getting your business known across the internet. Unfortunately there are too many people who overdo it. Tweets every 20 minutes, or some such foolishness. As a customer, or a Twitter follower, I never have time to read everything that appears, and I get very irritated when people tweet just for the sake of it. Or rather, for the sake of increasing their scores on reputation indices such as Klout or Peer Index.

Automate? Absolutely, but do it with care. Consider your reader. Don’t swamp them – it might make them fall out of love with you!

Someone asked me recently: ‘What is a content strategy?’  Since one of the services I offer is to help business owners develop their content strategy, it seemed a good subject to discuss in a blog post.

When I use the term ‘Content Strategy’ I’m talking about how you use written content to support your business aims – particularly on your website.  This presupposes you know what your business aims are, and it inevitably leads to a conversation about the purpose of the business, its customers, its products and services, its long term goals and the image it wants to project. Because content doesn’t exist in isolation: it should serve the needs of the business, not the other way around.

Back in the days before the internet, business owners didn’t have to worry about such mysteries as keywords and SEO (Search Engine Optimization). You needed to know what category your business fell into for a range of purposes, including advertising in the yellow pages or the classified section of a magazine. You also needed to know what themes and phrases were important to the business, to give consistency to your business messages, but you didn’t have to worry whether an advert, brochure or article matched some mysterious algorithm, guarded closely by a huge, faceless organisation.

Unfortunately – or perhaps fortunately for people like myself – SEO has become a dark art which many entrepreneurs and small business owners would like to understand and practice well, but lack the time (or money) to do so. Time and again you can see website gobbledegook, where the desire for SEO has won out over common sense. Fortunately, Google has changed its rules. This change, or set of changes, is known as the Google Panda: a great name, but doubtless an acronym. Websites need to talk human, at last!

Nevertheless, websites also have to talk a bit of google, or at least use google-friendly logic, and this is where keywords come in.

Keywords are pretty much as their name suggests – words and phrases that are key for your business. For example, if you run a company that is all about weasel wrestling, weasel wrestling is going to be a key phrase for your business. You want to attract visitors with an interest in weasel wrestling, so you need to spend some time thinking about the sorts of things such folks are interested in. In the dog training market it might be types of dogs, or dog training in a specific location. It could be a type of training such as stop barking training, or be nice to the postman training.

But here’s the thing.

If you haven’t spent time thinking carefully about what your business is about, then you may find it difficult to come up with good keywords that are relevant for your site. And you can waste ridiculous amounts of time trying to seek out the keywords of your choice, when what is really needed is a bit of good business thinking. If you’ve ever gone to a website where it somehow feels wrong, where the language is all corporate-speak when what they are doing is selling wool to knitting circles, or you can’t get a feel for the people behind the site, the chances are they haven’t done that fundamental piece of business thinking. Or they have done the thinking, then ignored it when the time came to create a web site.

A lot of coaches and consultants are guilty of this. Visit their site and you will see the imperious ‘we’ in every other sentence, despite the fact that ‘we’ seems to be one woman and dog. Alongside this, they use extremely formal language, which only serves to distance you from the person or people offering the services. Some of them may repeat the same word or phrase over and over at different points in the text in the mistaken belief that this is sufficent to give them google-points.

Even if you have related your keywords to your business purpose, keywords of themselves are not the whole SEO story. You also have to think about who you link to and, more importantly, who links back to you. Where do you place your carefully crafted words of wisdom, so that they build your credibility, both in a real-world and a google sense? You also have to think about the purpose of your website. What do you want it to do for you?

And this is just the website aspect of your content. There is still the off-line content to consider.

Here again, it needs to be tied into the business strategy and the business values. It’s a strange fact that many businesses feel an overwhelming need to write formally, irrespective of whether their customers are other businesses or private individuals. I’m not suggesting they need to come over all folksy, or start calling everyone ‘dude’, but too many businesses assume that they will only be taken seriously if they write in tortuous sentences, and that four syllables carry infinitely more gravitas than a mere two. Funnily enough, gravitas doesn’t come with syllable length. It comes with authenticity, expertise and real knowledge. If you don’t believe me, take a look at a book such as Authentic Leadership by Bill George.

I rather like this Wikipedia definition of a content strategist (ie someone who creates the content strategy): someone who “approaches a business’s content as a medium that needs to be strategically selected and placed to engage the audience, convey a message, and inspire action.”  Does your content do that for you?

Fun exercise: pay attention to the various bits of business writing that come through your post box, or arrive on your desk. Which ones make you want to read them, and are easy to read and understand? Which ones use convoluted, unnecessary sentences – perhaps with a dash of legalese thrown in for good measure? Which ones give you a sense of the business behind the communication? And do you really want to do business with that company, given the tone and culture their words seem to express?

Puzzling Marketing Material

There’s a creeping kind of desperation spreading across some corners of the Internet Marketing world, which is resulting in some appallingly bad business writing. And the problem with bad business writing is that it turns off potential customers. I have recently received two stunning examples of poor business writing, both through the post, but both trying to sell me a course about Internet Marketing.

Back in the mists of time, perhaps 10 years ago, when the internet still had some mystique, there were plenty of examples of websites which had simply lifted written material from the printed page, and stuck it up on the net, without realising that we read differently when we are looking at a screen, as opposed to a piece of print.

Gradually people ‘got’ that you need shorter paragraphs for screen-reading, and you need to think about the dreaded ‘fold’ – the place where the screen cuts off the rest of the page below.

Internet Marketers also began to understand that online customers use different contact information. If I find you online and I like what you are selling, I will probably be happy to buy your stuff online, although a phone number is handy in case it all goes wrong, and my question isn’t answered in your FAQs. (On a point of order, how often do find your questions ARE answered in the FAQs?)

If I find you offline, I will probably want to buy in an offline way.

Because the Internet Market has become crowded of late, Internet Marketers are looking for alternatives. Three currently top the list: local area marketing (teaching people how to market to their locality), mobile marketing (getting at people when they are on their phones – a major growth area), and offline marketing. Yup, good ol’ snail mail. That’s why they want you to include your address when you sign up for that nice free webinar.

Unfortunately, people who are used to writing for the web haven’t realised that writing for an offline audience requires some different strategies. Neither of the examples I have mentioned above had a return address on the outside. The first one gave me no phone number, nor a postal address, nor even a contact name (although there was a photo of a guy who – I suppose – was sending me this material). Just a web site. But it’s offline marketing, for heaven’s sake! Give me offline tools.

What they had done was to print out their website copy and send it without editing it first. Including all the web site typos, poor grammar, hectoring tone, assumptions that I am like them and thus frustrated about life, and other  bits of general awfulness which managed to persuade me that there was no way in the world I would want to buy from them.

A couple of weeks later, I received the second example. Here the authors had attempted to do something different, and they had at least included a phone number, and the names of people for me to contact. The problem lay in what they had done. Photocopied handwritten sheets, purporting to be rough notes, advertising some seminar about internet marketing. You can see for yourself.

They Expect me To Buy This?

The handwriting, while very neat, was almost impossible to read, and the first page was too faint. They wanted £849 (that’s about $1100) for me to attend a 3-day seminar about niche marketing using the internet. As prices go, that’s not too bad, but they had done nothing to build trust with me, and their own marketing output was uncovincing. So when they promised ‘no pitch fest’, I didn’t believe them: I expected a lot of hard selling throughout the three days.

Writing good business copy isn’t easy, particularly if writing was never your thing at school. However, with patience, thought and application it’s perfectly possible. Internet Marketing may not be as easy as it used to be, but pushing bad online copy through peoples’ letterboxes isn’t going to generate sales.

If the people producing bad business copy don’t have a passion for it, or find it too time-consuming, then there are plenty of us who are willing either to teach them, or do it for them.

Moniack Mhor Writer's Centre

For a long time, I have had difficulty separating my business coaching and marketing services, and the personal coaching and therapy I offer. It always seemed as if I had to keep the two apart, because these are two totally different client groups. Good marketing practice says I should be clear which segment I am talking to, and I should make sure my communications are appropriately targetted.

I’ve had that view challenged recently. In part it’s come about as I have a new coach (I definitely believe in the physician heal thyself philosophy, so having a coach myself is important). In part it’ s come about because I recently attended a Dark Angels Creative Business Writing course up in Scotland, at a wonderful converted croft called Moniack Mhor.

There are 3 Dark Angels tutors. On the recent foundation course we worked with two of them: John Simmons and Jamie Jauncey. ‘We’ were an eclectic group of 10 writers, with varying degress of writing experience. Some people were already published authors, but for many of us the course brought the realisation that we were really are writers already. John and Jamie gave us the space to explore and expand our talents through a mixture of exercises, readings and tutorials.

There was a kind of magic that came about during the 5 days we were there.  We’ve all remarked upon it. None of us can quite pin it down. But that’s what makes it magic. Some of it came from the tutors, some from Moniack Mhor itself which has a serene energy, and is set in a beautiful part of rural Scotland. But alot came from our interaction as a group.

I’m not just talking about the boozy evenings where we caterwauled, sorry sang, our way through the karaoke songbook, courtesty of 2 ipads (for the words) and some wee iphone app which gave Jamie all the chords he needed to accompany us on the piano. The time delay on the wi-fi meant that we were often on to the next song before the words for the previous one appeared. Half the time I was too paralysed with laughter to participate, and I ‘ve never been an Elton John fan, so I never learned the words to his songs.

There was also the spirit of the support, encouragement and friendship, which has continued after the end of the course. It was a piece by Neil Baker, one of the other participants, that got me thinking again about this question of separation. I’ve come to the conclusion that if you can make it work, all well and good. But if you can’t do it without experiencing significant amounts of angst and cognitive strain, then don’t.

In my career coaching work I see people tearing themselves apart as they try to be ‘themselves’ at home, and a corporate being at work. Clients even tell me it is not possible to be true to themselves at work, because Work wouldn’t like it, or they would miss the next promotion, or they would have no authority, or they would suddenly lack credibility. And in the next breath they explain how stressful this is.

How interesting that I have being doing something similar without even realising it.

I’ve long been an advocate of  Martins Avis’ Kickstart newsletter. Now Martin has started to offer a brilliant series of PLR products. PLR – Private Label Rights is a way of buying pre-written copy and making it your own. Basically you are buying the rights to use the copy. It’s a technique used by a lot of Internet Marketers to create both site content and saleable products quickly and easily.

The downside of many PLR products is that they can be extremely badly written.  People often outsource the writing of these products to non-native English speakers without testing whether they are capable of stringing two sentences of intelligent English together. Martin – an excellent writer himself, works with his wife, Delia, who is a former English teacher, and also has a way with words.

Even when they do outsource, it will be to someone who is an expert is the topic. The results still get passed to Delia for editing.

Martin also provides software tools to help you ‘spin’ the articles and do keyword research. And there are other resources on the site to help you make money online using PLR.

Current, recent topics Martin and Delia are offering include: camping, Halloween, dating, weight loss and stop-smoking. He is also offering a hypnosis MP3 download you can offer alongside advice on stopping smoking.

To learn more, take a look at Martin’s PLR Membership Site. This link will also tell you how you can buy individual products if you don’t want the full membership service.

Depending on where you are in your online journey, you may or may not know what Google Analytics is. If you have a web site and you don’t know, then I really recommend you find out! GA or Analytics, as it’s affectionately known, is a great free Google tool which helps you understand who is visiting you web site, how often, and many other things besides. You need a gmail account to get at it, but that’s free. And once you have that, there is a whole world of handy little Google tools available which will help you with things like SEO and much more.

Now, if you DO have Analytics installed on your site, then you should definitely read this post from Leslie Samuel, guest blogging for Yaro Starak. In it, he talks about how to use GA to understand what people search for when they visit your site.  As he puts it, how to read the mind of your visitor: how to find out what visitors are interested in.

Mind you, I am still curious as to how s=kidney (and you’ll have to read the post to know what I am talking about!)

Currently, my little London garden is full of birds. A family of blue-tits is nesting on one side, and a wren family on the other.  The magpies are in full chatter in the early morning, the black birds dig for worms after the rain, and the occasional robin drops by. It’s a constant source of delight for me and for a neighbourhood cat who terrorizes the nester by lurking on a nearby roof and staring at them.

Watching the blue tits, I was reminded of a story from the business guru, Arie de Geus. He was one of the team of hot shots at Shell which brought Scenario Planning (the technique of asking off-the wall, what-if questions to help deal with business risk) to the attention of the business world. He’s also a personal hero of mine.

Some years ago I had the chance to go and listen to him speak at the London Business School. The talk was all about Knowledge management – how businesses can share and spread knowledge and learning across the organisation and beyond. I was beside myself with delight. The talk started slowly, and I found myself dozing, until I heard Arie mention that, in his research on Knowledge Management, one of the sources he had consulted was a specialist in bird behaviour, bird communication and how birds learn.

This sounded sufficiently quirky as to be interesting, so I paid attention.

According to the expert, different types of bird learn from each other in different ways. Before World War II, milk was delivered to homes in the UK in open containers. It was a common sight to see robins and blue-tits having a quick drink from the containers. Back then they didn’t do skimmed, or semi-skimmed. Milk choices were pretty much restricted to full fat, and the birds loved it.

After the war, the UK dairy companies moved over to supplying milk in bottles with a tin foil top. It was more hygienic, particularly as the mild bottles might site around on the door-step for several hours. At first the birds were foiled (excuse the pun), but the more enterprising ones soon figured out how to break through the foil and get back to their old habits.

Within a generation or two, in most areas across the UK, blue-tits could be found treating themselves to doorstep milk from these new bottles. I can remember my mother’s irritation when she went to take the mil in, only to discover the blue-tits had been there before her. But the robins failed to work it out.

The experts asked themselves why this might be. After all, both birds obviously liked milk, individuals in both species had learned how to deal with the new technology, yet only the blue-tits had gone nation-wide on breaking through the bottle tops.

They came to the conclusion that the reason for the differences in behaviour lay in the different social habits of blue-tits and robins. In the autumn, after the breeding season, blue tits flock and come together. New behaviours can be shared, and learning spreads quickly through the blue-tit population.

Robins, on the other hand, are solitary, territorial – even aggressive – little birds.  No flocking for them. The lonesome robin soldiers on, ignorant of how to deal with the new technology, and fiercely defending his right to stay apart from the rest.

I’m sure you know people who are like that too!

So here is the question, when it come to you and your business, are you a robin or a blue-tit? A flocker, or a solitary little bird? How do you develop your knowledge and stay ahead of the challenges and opportunities present by the new technology?

As  a follower of Perry Marshall, I really enjoyed his recent Ezine, ‘Google and your Ex-Wife’. It’s a humorous, racey read, but it makes the point clearly: if you think of Google as anything but a business tool, you are a sucker. Here are a few of Perry’s well-chosen words.

‘If you’re a thin affiliate, you don’t have a business. You have an unpaid market research internship at Google where you take all the risk and they gather all the intelligence. And store it permanently on redundant servers.

If you think Google is your Messiah, you’re just like the guy who thinks they built Vegas so he can make a fast thousand bucks this weekend. He’s gonna get screwed.

If you understand that Google is a TOOL, and only a tool – if you understand that it’s YOUR job to build a business that’s so irresistible that publishers everywhere are going to want to sell you traffic – then you’re going to be just fine.’

Ryan Deiss goes a step further – check out his video proposing that internet marketing as we know it is dead. Ryan reckons that ‘thin guys’ – that’s small advertisers – on Google and Facebook and the like will soon be squeezed out altogether. Google will stop selling direct to us, and we’ll have to go through a middle man. He predicts that the Internet will soon be ruled by 10 or so Walmart-like companies, and he uses some compelling arguments to back this up.

Add to all this the fact that Google have recently changed the rules of their algorithms so that SEO tactics which used to work no longer do, and we start to see see several new trends emerging.

What does all this mean for the business owner wanting to marketing online? If nothing else, it serves to emphasise the importance of having a really robust business model. If your whole online marketing strategy is geared at getting to number 1 on Google, you might want to question whether it’s really a good model.

I recently had an email from Rich Schefren of Strategic Profits, a highly successful entrepreneur turned online marketer and online business guru. Schefren talks a lot of sense about business models, and his argument is that content marketing (where you write loads of articles, and tweets and blogs) has its place, but is not a good strategy for generating leads.

Firstly because its time consuming, even if you use automated tools to propagate your message, which Rich counsels against. Secondly because – in his view- content marketing is best used to create credibility and though leadership, rather than to generate leads. SEO marketing to generate  leads is, in his view, a hugely mistaken application of resources.

It all adds up  – get the business model right and use the Internet to support it, not the other way round. Even if yours is an online business.

I’ve always been fascinated by business, and I’ve been advising business owners for most of my working life, so I enjoy TV reality shows with a business slant, like ‘The Apprentice’ or ‘The Restaurant Inspector’ (where an expert restauranteur turns round failing restaurants). But it was a recent episode of ‘The Hotel Insepector’ that really got me thinking.

On this show, the Hotel Inspector was helping a hotel owner who saw his hotel as being upmarket with a ’boutique flavour’. One of the questions Alex, the ‘inspector’, asked him was what his costs were. He had no idea, and could soon be seen phoning a supplier to find out the cost of bacon, saying ‘there’s a resident tyrant who says I should know what everything costs’. His approach to pricing was to decide what he thought the market would bear, and charge accordingly. Grumbling bitterly he made a half hearted attempt to gather the information needed, but soon got bored.

After giving him various tasks, the hotel inspector left him to it for a while. It quickly became obvious that the most important thing she had asked him to do – get his head round his accounts – was the last thing he had in mind.  He could be seen on his hands and knees polishing the floors, servicing the rooms, hoovering, doing the garden.  Anything except go near the accounts. ‘I don’t have time for that – I’m too busy, I do everything myself, and there are more important, urgent things to get on with.’

The sad thing is, his attitude is typical of many entrepreneurs and business owners. Back when I used to advise garages and gas station owners, I found that several of my customers simply stuck all their paperwork in a large box, unfiled, unsorted and unread, and handed the box to the accountants at the end of the year.

These tended to be the customers whose businesses lurched from crisis to crisis, and had to pay cash in advance for their tanker deliveries because the oil company couldn’t trust them.  The people who couldn’t understand that if you want to run a business, you need to understand basic business management principles, as boring as that may seem.  Either that or hire in someone who does have this knowledge.

And it’s just as important for business success in an online business as an offline, bricks and mortar enterprise.

Do you know what you should be measuring in your business? What do you measure? And how often? Do you know if you are making a profit or a loss, and by how much? How well do you understand concepts like working capital, cash flow, assets, liabilities and debtors? Do you know what a balance sheet is and why it is important?

If this all sounds likes gobbledygook to you, then do yourself a favour and get some basic training or coaching around business finance.  There’s plenty of good information to be found just by googling ‘free business finance information’. According to an article in USA Today, around 85% of businesses fail within the first year of existence. Some statistics suggest that it’s nearer to 60%, but even so, that is an awful lot of failure, and pain. So what’s the main reason small businesses fail? Because their owners don’t spend enough time understanding what they need to do to manage the businesses.