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Archive for January, 2007
January 19th, 2007 by Allen Voivod
You know that feeling … the one where you notice something once, and then you start to see it everywhere? It’s like a little Law of Attraction thing, where the more you start thinking about it, the more you draw it to yourself.
Well, that’s happening with my lovely wife and business partner, who’s got blogging on the brain in a majorly intense way. (See her most recent wowser of a post on it.)
She just pointed out to me that Gloria at The Virtual Wire is asking for feedback on how business blogging is impacting the virtual assistant industry and their clients. She has three simple questions, and it’d be awesome if you joined the conversation there.
Need one last bit of incentive? Go there, and you’ll get to see their list of websites that offer free stock images for blogging use. Yes, free. As Lani might say, “I mean, COME ON, what else is FREE these days?!!”
For FREE articles, tips, and strategies designed to catapult your content and electrify your business, sign up for our ezine, “The Inciter,” at EpiphaniesInc.com!
Posted in Blog Bits, Tools to "A-Ha Yourself!" | 1 Comment »
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January 19th, 2007 by Lani Voivod
 I have five minutes to write this post.
However…
I have hours upon hours - days, really! - of pent-up energy on the subject of why you should be blogging. I’m sitting on the equivalent of a massive nuclear weapon here, or the cure for cancer, and no one’s really understanding the implications…
Ever have one of those dreams when you’re doing everything you can to run at a full sprint, but it feels like your legs are thigh deep in black tar? Or, you’re trying like heck to shout a very important message to someone you love, like “Get out of the way! The train’s coming!” or “Watch out! There’s a giant shark fin right behind you!!!” but all that comes out is strained, laryngitis-ized hot air?
This is what’s happening in my life right now. I sit across from friends and business associates, talk with entrepreneurs and small business owners, and share strategy sessions with larger companies and corporations, and I mention the possibility of them blogging. There’s a universal glazed look, often followed by a shrug, or a nose crinkle. “Eh, I don’t see the point,” or “Yeah, I thought about that…”
I know it’s my job to just let it go, and I do, because every business person knows the “I’m not ready to talk about this” look. Oh, but it’s killing me! Because if you’re serious about your business, career, or professional reputation, there is absolutely no reason for you not to publicize your interest and expertise in the form of a blog.
A blog is conversational. It comes alive with YOUR distinct voice, style, and proclivities. It dies if it’s fueled by the dreaded Corpspeak, stiff language, or totally self-conscious and “safe,” play-by-the-rules drivel.
A blog is FREE. (Or extremely low-cost, depending on how you go.) I mean, COME ON, what else is FREE these days?!!
A blog is a mirror. It’s an organized trail of your ideas, experience, and hints at your vision. It’s ALSO a living, breathing organic organism that grows as you grow. It’s like one of those “smart” computers that develops its own life and personality over time.
A blog is search-engine friendly. It’s PROOF you know your industry or subject matter. It’s PROOF you’re active in your business and niche.
A blog is a way to connect with other like-minded professionals. When you comment on someone else’s blog, or when they comment on yours, it’s like a quick, manly nod that says, “Hey. Saw your post. Liked it. Peace out.”
A blog is a simple, searchable content management system. Why, oh why, are you hoarding all of your industry knowledge to yourself? Are you saving it for posterity? Do you think St. Peter will give you extra points for having a huge collection of inaccessible folders on your computer?
A blog is FUN, darnit! It’s a chance to just be you, and even see and experience your own voice and priorities over time.
Sure, a lot of blogging gurus say there are “rules” - like, “you should blog at least three times a week!” or “be strategic” or “keep posts short; avoid long tangents!” (like this one). And a lot of PAGs (that’s People Against Blogging) say no one reads them, or they’re a waste of time, or all of the above. But to this I say, WHO CARES??!!
No one’s reading your darn internal folders, or going through your file cabinets, but you still throw articles and information in there!
Why not claim your intellectual territory and put a select and steady amount of information, opinions, photos, and energy OUT THERE to be discovered by one or more of the proverbial masses, if and when they come looking for you or the information, knowledge, products, or services you have to offer?
God didn’t just not bother with Antarctica because he figured no one would ever find the frigid continent, right? And now, with advances in technology, we get to watch fine films like “March of the Penguins,” “National Treasure,” and “The X-Files Movie.”
If you have a passion, specialty, niche, mission, or business (and you gotta have at least one of those things, unless you’re a corpse…or Paris Hilton), then START BLOGGING. Don’t worry about traffic. Don’t worry about the nit-picky stuff.
Do it imperfectly. Find your voice. Discover your flow. Loosen up. Be bold. Get yourself out there.
And if you refuse, please answer me one question in the comment field.
WHY??????
P.S. If you’d like a more formal argument for why you should be blogging, check out this article by biz-blogging expert Debbie Weil: “Top 7 Tips to Write an Effective Business Blog.” (Or download a lovely PDF version of the article, packed with additional information and resources, right here!)
For FREE articles, tips, and strategies designed to catapult your content and electrify your business, sign up for our ezine, “The Inciter,” at EpiphaniesInc.com!
Posted in Blog Bits, Tools to "A-Ha Yourself!" | 7 Comments »
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on Friday, January 19th, 2007 at 12:00 pm and is filed under Blog Bits, Tools to "A-Ha Yourself!".
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January 18th, 2007 by Lani Voivod
There are few people who obsess over words and web content more than we do. After all, we are “The Content Lovers,” right?
But one guy kicks our fannies, hands down. His name’s Gerry McGovern.
Gerry has written three books obsessing about web content: Content Critical, The Web Content Style Guide, and Killer Web Content. (Betcha didn’t know there was so much information to be shared about this subject by one person, did ya?!) All of these are must-reads for anyone writing or managing content for sites that mean business.
He has a bulleted list on his site with a few stunning examples of how much the right word or phrase tweak can boost - or bust - your sales and success. Below is just one of the examples he cites:
In the United States, over 80 times more people search for “cheap flights” than for “low fares.” In the United Kingdom, 6,500 times more people search for “cheap flights” than for “low fares”. No, that’s not a typo. It is 6,500 times more! “Low fares” is what the airline industry likes to say. “Cheap flights” is customer language. This an extremely common mistake organizations make on the Web: assuming that their words are their customers words. Never, ever assume that.
C’mon. 6,500 times more? THAT is pretty darn amazing.
Gerry has set up systems to extract “Customer Carewords” for organizations and businesses. Through polling, brainstorming, and good ol’ fashioned market research, he finds that crucial five percent of nit-picky language that converts or neglects your audience. Basically, he makes sure your site is using the words that speak to YOUR audience - that use the language THEY use -and not the ridiculous corpspeak or insider drek so many companies fill their sites and blogs with today.
Interestingly enough, his site’s architecture could use a little user testing. Navigation is inconsistent, information’s difficult to find, and I kept getting lost in a labarynth of secondary pages. Nonetheless, if you want to get hip deep into the world of Web content, Gerry’s books will get you there.
Everywhere on the Web, words are making a difference. Words are making the sale, delivering the service, building the brand. The trick is to find the right words-your customers’ words.
So true, Gerry. So, so true!
For FREE articles, tips, and strategies designed to catapult your content and electrify your business, sign up for our ezine, “The Inciter,” at EpiphaniesInc.com!
Posted in All About Content, Dances With Gurus, Gotta Reads | No Comments »
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on Thursday, January 18th, 2007 at 10:07 pm and is filed under All About Content, Dances With Gurus, Gotta Reads.
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January 16th, 2007 by Allen Voivod
Imagine 11 solo professionals and small business owners in a hotel conference room, all with the fierce determination to improve what they offer to their clients and prospects.
A mentor revealing the secrets to killer presentations even as he weaves one or three of his own.
Improv exercises that train you to link any image - and I mean ANY image - to your main marketing message.
That, in a nutshell, was day 2 of Adam Urbanski’s Platinum VIP Mastermind Retreat in sunny Garden Grove, CA. And if you want an even smaller nutshell, try this one: A 3 minute, 44 second audio recap of the biggest insights from the eventful second day.
(And, no doubt, partially fueled by the wine I had at dinner that night. Thanks for being the founder of the feast again, Adam!)
Posted in A-Has in the Ether, Dances With Gurus, Lessons Learned, Masterminding | No Comments »
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on Tuesday, January 16th, 2007 at 5:20 pm and is filed under A-Has in the Ether, Dances With Gurus, Lessons Learned, Masterminding.
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January 16th, 2007 by Allen Voivod
Two days locked in a room with a marketing mentor (that’s Adam Urbanski) and a select group of savvy business owners. Free-form firestorms of ideas, strategy, and executable plans. Coffee, cookies, and concentrated advice.
Lani had to stay home with our beautiful, increasingly energetic son for this one, so Allen (that’s me) filed this audio dispatch (2 minutes, 19 seconds) from deep inside Adam’s Platinum VIP Mastermind Retreat, revealing the big insights from Day One:
Posted in A-Has in the Ether, Dances With Gurus, Lessons Learned, Masterminding | No Comments »
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on Tuesday, January 16th, 2007 at 4:18 pm and is filed under A-Has in the Ether, Dances With Gurus, Lessons Learned, Masterminding.
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January 11th, 2007 by Lani Voivod
I may have just died and gone to my messy Heaven!
An e-newsletter from Creativity Coach Susan Fuller sent me to an article in Inc. magazine touting the virtues of being messy — er, I mean, being too darn brilliant and wildly entrepreneurial to live by the completely impractical advice doled out by get-organized gurus.
As someone who’s been downright depressed for never being able to keep a clean desk for more than a millisecond (THIS Herculean feat of forced clutter control broke records by lasting for two days!), an anarchical premise like this is DIVINE.
Here’s a sample snippet of the five-page counter-cultural blast:
The business world–indeed, the whole world–is much too biased toward neatness and order and overlooks the benefits of at least a modest level of messiness and disorganization. In contradiction to a hundred years of personal productivity and management wisdom, being somewhat disordered can be quite smart. And this holds true not just for personal neatness and organization but for structuring companies and designing work processes. And it applies to offices and homes and even to science and art and the rest of society.
Let’s take a simple example: the messy desk. Most of us have one, according to the survey, and if you think about it, it probably works quite well. Researchers who have taken the trouble to study desk neatness, like Microsoft senior researchers Abigail Sellen and Richard Harper, generally find that messy desks do a good job of reflecting the way people work–and thus can be more productive than a neat desk. No wonder. To keep a desk free of clutter, you’ve got to get everything that comes across your desk filed away or else processed and shipped to someone else’s desk. That may sound gloriously efficient, but it’s really anything but. For one thing, it takes time to get everything promptly filed or processed, and that’s time you could have spent making decisions or talking to customers. In other words, there’s a cost to neatness, one that people tend to ignore. In addition, by trying to deal with everything on your desk, you’re spending time with papers that could be safely ignored for a while–that’s bad prioritization. And, of course, if you want to retrieve a document, you’ve got to hunt it down in filing cabinets that often seem to eat important papers.
With a messy desk, on the other hand, you’ll end up with piles of clutter in which the more important, more urgent work naturally tends to end up close by and near the top, while the safely ignorable stuff gets buried near the back. You’ll sometimes have to hunt through a pile to find a document, but you’ll probably have a good idea where to look. That would explain why people who claim to have “very neat” desks in our survey report spending 36 percent more time looking for things than people who say they have “fairly messy” desks. Not only will work be at hand and be easier to find with a messy desk, and not only will you avoid the time cost of having to file and process, but you’ll also get the special benefits of serendipity–that is, you’ll occasionally stumble onto a useful document that if filed would have remained hidden forever and perhaps even make an inspired connection between two seemingly unrelated documents that end up together. (A National Institutes of Health scientist named Leon Heppel made such a connection while excavating through his spectacularly messy desk in the 1950s, and it led to a Nobel Prize for a colleague.) That may be why, according to a survey conducted by professional staffing firm Ajilon Office, office messiness tends to increase sharply with increased education, salary, and experience. Yet there are still many companies in the U.S., including General Motors and UPS, where you can get reprimanded for having a messy desk.
If you’ve ever struggled with organization, or felt unworthy because you “prefer” sweeping, plain view, horizontal filing systems to those pristine hidden filing get-ups, check out the whole article. It’ll make you feel so much better about yourself (dare I say, SUPERIOR to neat freaks?), and it may change the way you look at your awesomely creative desk, home, and lifestyle for the rest of your life.
Ditch the stress, own your mess!
For FREE articles, tips, and strategies designed to catapult your content and electrify your business, sign up for our ezine, “The Inciter,” at EpiphaniesInc.com!
Posted in Call in the Coach, Mood Boosters | 2 Comments »
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on Thursday, January 11th, 2007 at 5:03 pm and is filed under Call in the Coach, Mood Boosters.
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January 9th, 2007 by Lani Voivod
I’d like to take a moment to applaud Rob Shultz for starting off his blog’s 2007 with a phenomenal post, “The Pursuit of Product Happyness.”
Based on years of being in the trenches of the audio information product business - as expert, creator, coach, instructor, and cheerleader - Rob lays out the reason why a lot of Dreamers and Big Thinkers never actually manifest their visions, and worse - often give up before they’ve even started. Rob weaves his gorgeous Rantifesto around Will Smith’s newest flick, “The Pursuit of Happyness,” even going so far as to invite JK Rowling to illustrate his points.
A teaser soundbite for you:
I’m all for inspiration. I’m all for triumph over adversity. I’m all for hope. I even cry at movies (don’t tell anyone). But hope is only a starting point. Hope is NOT a course of action.
And unfortunately, it’s the only thing a lot of product creators have going for them.
Excellent post, superb passion, and a fine follow-through, indeed. Way to use your own success vehicles (that’s his list, blog, and writing talents), Rob!
For FREE articles, tips, and strategies designed to catapult your content and electrify your business, sign up for our ezine, “The Inciter,” at EpiphaniesInc.com!
Posted in Insight + Action | No Comments »
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on Tuesday, January 9th, 2007 at 10:29 pm and is filed under Insight + Action.
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January 9th, 2007 by Allen Voivod
Ever hear of a guy named Sean D’Souza?
 He’s the “Chief Brain Auditor” at www.PsychoTactics.com, and works his marketing magic out of New Zealand. I’ve been a subscriber to his newsletter for years, and I recommend it to anyone who enjoys lots of flair, talent, personality, and kick-butt information on sales, copywriting, and marketing strategy.
This week’s article - Why Using Tentative Words Will Reduce Your Profits - is a fine example as any to showcase his practical know-how and infectious style. (And it also offers a simple tip that could increase your profits in a big way this year.)
Warning: Sean’s site is incredibly robust, fresh, fun, and addictive - ESPECIALLY for a biz-focused site. He knows how to communicate, in an “I’m your pal, mate! Let’s go chase a dingo, throw some shrimp on the bahhhbie, and drink Fosters till dawn!” kind of way. You can’t help but adore him. What’s more, I’ve had a few entertaining email exchanges with him over the years, and he’s as approachable and authentic as his style suggests.
In sum, Sean D’Souza is DEFINITELY an “A-Ha Yourself!” master. We can all learn a lot from his voice and verve.
G’day, mate - and happy marketing!
For FREE articles, tips, and strategies designed to catapult your content and electrify your business from another couple of “Content Lovers,” sign up for our ezine, “The Inciter,” at EpiphaniesInc.com!
Posted in All About Content, Dances With Gurus, Fun With Marketing, How do you "A-Ha Yourself"? | No Comments »
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on Tuesday, January 9th, 2007 at 2:17 pm and is filed under All About Content, Dances With Gurus, Fun With Marketing, How do you "A-Ha Yourself"?.
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January 7th, 2007 by Lani Voivod
In 2007, one of the things I want to get better at is logging the “A-Has” I find out in the *real* world (whatever THAT is!). Cuz I DO come across them, often and always. I just don’t always have my handy-dandy blogging machine close by. (Cue melancholy violin solo.)
Anywho…
There’s this AMAZING business woman, Stacy Brice, and her natural penchant for “A-Ha-ing Herself” is downright humbling. Stacy is the brains, brawn, and dare I say, MOXIE, behind the incomparable AssistU - birthingplace of the finest Virtual Assistants on Earth.
She’s also methodically laying claim to one of the best and most underused words in the English language: Moxie. Ohhhh, but it’s a beautiful word! The definition on Dictionary.com hardly does it justice…
| 2. |
courage and aggressiveness; nerve. |
 It’s bigger. It’s bolder. And Stacy knows this. Here’s HER definition:
Moxie. It’s an attitude; a way of being in the world that creates immense freedom. It’s where savvy, committed, smart and highly skilled meet spunky, shameless, gutsy, and brazen.
She’s got a blog called Virtual Moxie, and she’s offers Moxie Coaching to lucky female professionals who earn the privilege of her time and experience. (She’s also an active contributor to several others (including Virtualosophy and The Virtual Wire.)
Through her coaching, Stacy pursues her one-woman mission to make sure other smart, success-minded women get over the crippling Ms. Nice Gal thing and take pride in becoming “too big for their britches.” Not in an “I ate too much turkey on Thanksgiving” kind of way, but in work, life, and vision. I’ve been having some issues with claiming my mojo lately, so I really appreciate that kind of, well, moxie. 
I call all this to your attention simply to demonstrate how powerful an “A-Ha!” - bold insight PLUS joy-filled action - can be. Stacy earns “Epiphanies, Inc. Posterchild” status with a simple sentence she shares on her www.MoxieCoach.com site:
Moxie Coaching was born, as so many of my adventures are, with a sudden spark followed by a flood (and I mean a flood) of creativity.
That’s it, people. That’s the whole game, the entire recipe, right there is a divine little sentence.
Sudden sparks may come and go, but the ones that get that wild OOMPH! of action being them? Oh, yeah. That’s the sweet spot, right there.
Good things are born.
Destinies are met.
The world becomes a better, more vibrant, more moxie-full place.
For FREE articles, tips, and strategies designed to catapult your content and electrify your business, sign up for our ezine, “The Inciter,” at EpiphaniesInc.com!
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