I’m asked this question quite a bit; ‘How does ghostblogging work anyway?’

I maintain blogs for several people, so I thought I’d write a post here to explain my process. (As you can see, I’ve even given you a sneak peek of the branding for my soon-to-be-launched copywriting business with the image below I’ve chosen to represent Mann Made Ghostwriting services!)

First of all, I’d like to address something. I’ve heard people argue that if someone hires a ghostblogger, they’re being inauthentic. This is not true, and you’ll understand why after I explain how I blog for my clients.

When I start working with someone, I get busy learning as much about them and their business as I possibly can. There are forms I need filled out to learn specifics such as keywords, target market and the tone they like taken with their blog posts. I read through pieces they’ve written in the past, I study their websites, review their social networking profiles and basically worm my way into their heads.

There’s always a phone conversation (or several) involved so that we can discuss the schedule the client likes to keep for their blog, and we brainstorm topics for future posts.

From there, it can go a few different ways. Some people like me to outline a series of posts, then they review them and set me free to post them in their blogging software and schedule them to be published.

Others like to be much more hands on, giving me rough notes for their posts that I simply polish them up and elaborate on before they’re published.

Then there are other clients where a much more collaborative effort is required. We agree on some topics, I write the posts and put them in their blogging software (by this I mean WordPress or Blogger) where the client then edits posts to add more details and tweak until it sounds exactly like them.

When I work as a ghostblogger, I don’t just take control of someone’s blog and fill it with my own ideas and thoughts. It couldn’t work that way.

I work closely with my clients and either elaborate on a point they want to get across, take their ideas and expand upon them or write something which they tweak to reflect their feelings or view on the topic.

People who hire a ghostblogger to maintain their blogs are not being inauthentic. They are delegating a task they don’t like or don’t have time for. There’s a difference. I would prefer not to ghostblog for someone who didn’t want anything to do with the process, because that’s where it starts feeling a little bit wrong to me. I’m sure people do it this way as well, but I wouldn’t feel right about it so I won’t do it.

What do you think about ghostblogging? I think this topic would make for a great discussion so please comment if you have an opinon!

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This past weekend, my daughter decided to take a box of crayons to the very first page of an old coloring book. She spent hours carefully choosing colors and informing me every few minutes in excited squeals that she was “staying inside the lines!”

As you can see from the photo on the left (which I scanned just a few minutes ago) she did a stand up job for a child who won’t be four years old for another five months.

It doesn’t bother me that the elephant is green, I mean…she’s a little child and that’s what’s fun about coloring – there aren’t any rules. But as I was putting away some toys and other art work this afternoon, I wondered how it would have affected this little child had I told her you can’t color an elephant green.

I think this coloring is so important. Not because my child is a brilliant artist but because it represents what we all have inside of us, or what we all had inside of us at the age of three.

I’m reading a book called “If You Want to Write – A Book about Art, Independence and Spirit“. It’s not only about writing, but you can take the subject matter and apply it to whatever it is you’re passionate about doing.

One of the first pages spoke very loudly to me. Author, Brenda Ueland, talked about how so many of us have our creativity stifled when we’re children. I’m paraphrasing here, but she spoke about children in school who put their hearts into a piece of writing in school only to have the teacher mark it up with red pencil telling them why it isn’t good.

Of course teachers have to teach us, but to a certain child, this could tear them up inside and make them not want to put thoughts in words ever again.

Adults have so much power over children that it’s staggering and many of us (not me, I was very encouraged as a child to be creative) had our imaginations locked up when we got too old to be “childish”.

If I told my daughter that her coloring was done wrong because the elephant was green, who knows what that could do to her delicate creative spirit.

I think we should all take a good look at this green elephant and think about what we’re doing because we think it’s the way it has to be done.

We should look at our marketing materials, our websites, our processes, our systems. What are we doing because we’ve been boxed in to think they must be done a particular way?

What would happen if we all took a few minutes a day to look at the world through a three year old’s eyes? What would happen if we used that time to do something in our life or in our business just because – Heaven Forbid – it was fun and made us happy?

What’s your green elephant?

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It’s Monday morning. Before I start on client work for the week, I usually take some time to go over my schedule for the following five days.

One of my big outstanding to-do items was to do a clean up of my email inbox which I’ve just been “too busy” to get around to. Since Outlook has been crashing about five times a day on me, I figured it was time to do something with the 7000 messages in my inbox.

Over the summer I read David Allen’s fabulous book Getting Things Done, I just haven’t quite applied everything I learned after reading it yet. One of the great things Allen suggests in the book is to apply the 3 Ds to your inbox maintenance: Do it, Delegate it or Delete it. I seem to have a weird phobia about using the Delete key, and I always let me emails pile up.

So here’s how I managed to bring my inbox message count from 7000 to 23 this morning in the amount of time it took me to drink my morning coffee

I sorted my inbox by ‘From’ so all the senders were alphabetized. (I have all of my emails routed to my gmail account as a backup system, so I’m not too worried if I delete something of major importance when I do my regular clean up.)

Then I ruthlessly went through deleting en masse by sender. I had way too much junk to wade through (more than 600 Google Alerts, 400 Twitter messages and hundreds of other social networking notifications from various sites. Delete. I really have to set up some Outlook rules), I moved all messages from each sender to their appropriate folders (easy to drag and drop when they’re sorted by ‘From’), set up new folders, reviewed red-flagged items and found places for them (either delete bin or with a date/time reminder to trigger a look in the future).

The key to doing this is speed. You have to work fast or you’ll get lost in there all day. As I came across emails from new vendors, I just set up a new folder then and there and moved it over. Anything I knew I would never read got deleted. I also made notes about which newsletters and listservs I have to unsubscribe from.

Not sure why I keep getting so buried in emails and why I’m so poor at making new systems stick. I’m going to read Getting Things Done again – more slowly this time – and try to get this under control once and for all!!

If you haven’t read it you should. You can get it here:

Your email management is something that can easily be delegated to a Virtual Assistant. Just probably not this one.

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It was a beautiful day here on Prince Edward Island and my family of four met up with my  husband’s family for an old fashioned sleigh ride in the country. There were seven adults and three ankle biters in our group and after the sleigh ride we went to a local eatery for an early dinner.

We chose a family restaurant called The Blue Goose. It’s popular among locals and families because the food is good, service is great, prices are reasonable and it’s the type of place where kids aren’t sneered at.

Everyone ate until the three children under four years of age became unruly and we decided it was time for dessert. The server was jotting down everyone’s orders, which happened to be identical; the ‘made-on-the-premesis’ coconut cream pie. She stopped writing and asked if we’d like to buy a pie because each slice was $3.75, but a whole pie was only $8.95 (don’t quote me, but I’m 99% sure that was the figure).

(I should mention there’s a bakery on site as well.)

It made sense. The people paying the checks were happy, that’s for sure, but I thought to myself, ‘What would the owner think about this?’

I’ve waitressed many times in my day and it’s always been a golden rule as a food server to upsell desserts. From a former waitress’ perspective, this was a smart move by that gal. She was already charming us by talking with the kids and being so cool under the pressure that’s often involved when you’re serving a 10-top. But this little suggestion earned her some mega tips today.

But let’s do the math. Seven people were going to order a $3.75 piece of pie. That’s $26.25. If the pie cost $3 to make (sounds like a reasonable number) the restaurant would have made a profit on that one pie of $23.25. And they would have been able to sell the eighth slice to the next diner for an extra $3.75.

Instead, we got the $8.95 option so the restaurant made almost $6 on the same pie – which we were each prepared to buy a slice of.

I can just hear Gordon Ramsay now.

However, let’s look at the viral marketing component to this. You can be sure that my in-laws will probably tell their friends about their day with the grand kids and the great meal we had afterward, including the deal we got on the pie.

Do you think word of mouth from this experience will end up making up for the lost profit in our buying a pie instead of the slices? Or if the owner reads this and sees what the waitress suggested would he flip?

What are your thoughts? If that was your restaurant would you call a staff meeting and explain the poor economics involved in this waitress’ suggestion to us, or would you pat her on the back saying it was a great ‘value add’ marketing move and start promoting the heck out of your pies?

Please add your comments here, I would love to have a discussion around this!

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“You learn something new everyday.” How many times have you heard or uttered that sentence?

It’s true. I think we can’t help but learn something new every single day, but what about learning on purpose?

The Internet is full of so many resources to learn from. You can find teleseminars, ebooks, ecourses, articles, white papers and newsletters on any topic under the sun. It can be overwhelming for information junkies like myself when there’s new knowledge coming at you from every direction. I get emails daily announcing another course I should consider or a blog post I should read.

One of my favorite things about Twitter is that I can choose to “follow” the people I want to learn from. All of the experts I admire are right there, leading me to the articles they’re reading so I can learn right along with them. There’s always someone sharing a motivational quote, a great time-saving recipe or some hot industry news that helps keep me in the loop.

One of the most powerful things I’ve taken from Twitter over the past few weeks was a ‘Tweet’ from someone known in the Twitterverse as @unmarketing. It’s funny to think that in 140 characters (which is the maximum amount of space allowed in your mini blog post) someone could share something that would have an impact on my life, but it happened.

His tweet simply said something along the lines of: ‘Before you buy another ebook or course, implement something you already have.’ That’s not an exact quote, and I’m not really prepared to go through his 12,000-ish updates to find exactly what he said – it’s the overall point he made that’s important.

I can’t tell you how many ebooks I’ve bought over the years, but I can tell you how many I’ve read. Two. They were really good. I skimmed the others, but they’re all on a thumb drive waiting for me to find the time to go through them.

It’s ridiculous to keep buying and downloading these things without ever taking the advice inside and applying it to my business.

@unmarketing (Scott Stratten is his real name) inspired me to dust off a copywriting course I purchased a couple months ago and open it up. Until that day, I had consistently been marking off time in my calendar to get to the course, but it always got trumped by work or surfing for new information. I have stacks of books I’ve yet to read yet I continue to buy new ones while the others sit there waiting for their spines to be cracked.

What about you? Are you hording information and stockpiling ebooks without actually implementing anything? I challenge you to take a break from downloading anything new until you put something you already have into practice.

Oh, and if you’re not on Twitter already, you should be!

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