When doing email marketing, learn from the spammers!

When you’re setting up your first email marketing campaign, the one thing that you’ll hear from the experts is that you need to ensure that you’re not spamming your list.  Whether that’s adding people without their permission or sending out emails that aren’t relevant or consistent, you need to be doing your email marketing correctly so that you are seen as someone who respects your contacts’ time and information. One way to do this is to learn from the spammers themselves and here are 5 essential lessons that you can learn from spam emails. Mind your language.  One way to [...]

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How to create a distribution list in Outlook

Setting up distribution lists are a great idea if you regularly send emails to a specific group of people.  For example, you might be running a project and need to send emails to your team.  Rather than having to type in each person’s email address every time you send a message, you can just select the distribution list and the email will go to everyone on that list. This obviously saves you a lot of time and effort and ensures that you don’t miss anyone out of important email messages. So read on to find out how to create a [...]

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How to Filter Emails in Gmail

If you feel overwhelmed by all the emails that you’re getting each day and your inbox is getting cluttered and overloaded with messages, then using filters will enable you to spend more time focusing on those emails that require your attention. A filter will apply automatic actions to messages as they arrive in your inbox.  Whether you want to mark your client emails as important, or move any newsletters you receive into a Read Later folder.  By organising your messages in this way, you can keep on top of your inbox with very little effort. So read on or watch [...]

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Are you investing in your time or just spending it?

I came across a quote the other day from Stephen Covey, the author of the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. It said “The key is in not spending time, but in investing it”. It got me thinking about how much we actually invest in our time and how much we just spend it. There is a difference. We can easily give ourselves a big long ‘to do’ list and then happily spend time being busy while we work our way through it. However, being busy doesn’t mean that we’re being effective. That ‘to do’ list may just contain tasks [...]

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7 Steps to Working Smarter in Your Business

I recently read about a survey from Yorkshire Bank that said that small business owners work an average of 15.3 million extra days each year, in comparison to the average UK employee.  They are working long hours and taking few breaks just so they can look after their clients and keep the business going. However, regularly working such long hours can seriously affect your physical and mental health.   We all need to recognise the importance of working smarter in our business and investing our time in our mental and physical well-being. So if you’re feeling overwhelmed by your workload and [...]

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Get More Done With a Do It Day!

One of the main things that can very often stress you out is having tasks on your to do list that you never get round to doing.  This can be a pile of paperwork that needs sorting out, an overflowing email inbox, or perhaps getting information together to send out a monthly  newsletter to your contacts.  Whatever it is, these are things that you’ve been thinking of doing for a  while but have been putting off because other priorities take over, or they’re not really things that you like doing. Well one way to get motivated in getting more done [...]

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How to Flag an Email in Outlook

If you’re sent an email message that requires some kind of action on your part, then you’ll want to flag that email to remind yourself to complete it. Now you can do that by creating a separate task if you want to but it’s far easier to use the flag function on Outlook.  This enables you to add a reminder to the email itself so you can refer back to the message and the actions you need to take. Here are the steps that you need to flag an email in Outlook. Go to the inbox or appropriate email folder [...]

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Having a Vision for Your Business

It’s great having an action plan for your business with goals and deadlines for each project, but how often do we stick to it?  Very often we get all ambitious about what we’re going to achieve and have one of those “I’ll change the world moments”.  Then a few weeks down the line, we have lost that enthusiasm and find ourselves sidetracked on to other projects. So how can we stay aligned and focused on our important goals? Well one way that I’ve found is to start off by having a vision for your business and then set goals and [...]

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How to stay focused in a crisis

Personal issues can derail you when you are running a business on your own.  Struggling to stay focused on your client work while having to deal with a personal emergency can leave you feeling stressed and exhausted. It happened to me recently and here’s how I dealt with it and was able to stay focused on my important projects. If a personal crisis hits you then it can easily make you feel overwhelmed and stressed so that you feel that you can’t deal with the day to day workload.  When it happened to me, I had to cancel meetings, and [...]

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Beware shiny objects

I was at a networking event the other week, and a couple of people were talking about Pinterest and how they’ve found it useful in their business. One was an interior designer and the other person designed clothes. Now I could see that it would be a really good tool for people like that but personally I haven’t actually been on the site yet. I know that everyone is talking about Pinterest at the moment and it’s very easy to feel that you need to be part of the “in crowd” and don’t want to feel left out. However, as [...]

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