I love antiques. I really love them a lot. I love the smell of an antique shop and letting my mind wander to where some of the objects may have come from.

A couple of weeks ago my husband and I were driving along and passed a shop I wanted to check out to see if there was anything interesting inside (I have been there before and always find something cool).

Problem was, we couldn’t tell if it was open. (If you’re reading this in a reader, you might want to check out the actual blog to see the picture and get the full meaning here!)

Now…I don’t claim to be some marketing genius (okay sometimes I do) but this is clearly not a good move.

We stopped to take a picture and once we got closer we could see a dimmed out “Open” sign so we assumed they weren’t operating that day.

I’m not going to pick on this place too much. Obviously someone forgot to take down the open sign – or the closed sign – but we all do the same thing in our businesses in one way or another. It’s just not as obvious.

When you operate a business in this day and age, your website has a major role to play. Like it or not, people are looking for you online and unless you want your competitors to do better in your market than you, you have to cater to web surfers.

Website visitors have no attention span and they have a million options thanks to Google.com to find a better site than yours to get what they need. If you’re lucky enough to get them to your site in the first place, that’s great but you have to keep them there.

That means you have to:

• Have content optimized so web surfers can find you.
• Have content written in a “web-friendly” manner (with headings and  easily scannable copy)
• Keep your online information current, compelling and engaging.
• Narrow in on their pain points as much as possible.
• Make no assumptions.
• Tell them what to do.

See, you never know which page of your website a visitor is going to land on, so you have to give a piece of your story on every page, and make it clear what you want them to do. Should they contact you for more information? Should they visit your blog? Peruse your services?

You have to make it easy for people to do business with you because a web visitor’s attention span is not long enough for them to bother with you if they don’t have to. Lay out your information concisely and clearly because unlike a retail store where you can be assisting customers, your website content and navigation has to do it all.

Imagine how you would have felt if you were me, standing in front of a shop you wanted to visit but there was an open and closed sign in the window at the same time.

Now imagine someone visiting your website for the first time. They look at the “Welcome to our website” headline, the standard “hope you enjoy our website” content and are bored to death. You don’t stand out, they don’t know if you can solve their problem and the information you do provide doesn’t have any logical sequence to it.

Be engaging, be compelling and be clear and concise with your message. If you can’t do those things, hire a copywriter to do it for you

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As I write this, I can not believe it’s April 15th – I’d like to know what happened to the first half of my month.

Do you ever wish you could pause everything happening around you so that you could get everything done in a day that you wanted to?

I wish I had a pause button, I’ll tell you that much.

On Wednesday night (one loooong week ago) an unwanted stomach virus made it’s way into our home through our eldest daughter. This normally would be a bad thing, of course it would, but this was bad timing at it’s very best…or worst. I’ve just started working hard with a personal trainer at 6:30 every morning, am still dealing with a toddler that won’t sleep through the night, have a home freshly listed on the real estate market which needed a deep spring cleaning for its first showing, had two Easter dinners (we had to skip out on) and…what am I forgetting?….oh yes. That thriving business I’m running!

The flu quickly spread to my husband and then our youngest daughter and it did not leave until yesterday. What a wild week! I have to say, I have no idea how parents who work outside of the home deal with these situations when they arise. I feel very lucky to be a freelancer at a time like this because my schedule is so flexible. However, I was totally thrown for a loop when all this started happening.

I’d planned to take a long weekend away from my work but having lost a significant amount of time thanks to the flu a couple days before my break, I lost a lot of ground.

I’ve read tons of articles and blog posts, books and whatnot about contingency planning and having a back up in place for when disaster strikes and I do have a plan. Sort of.

I know what to do if I lose my power, get sick or have a *eek* hard drive crash. But nowhere in my list of procedures do I have a plan for what to do when the arse goes right out from under my life for a week.

Luckily I have amazing clients and even though I had to miss a couple of deadlines they were understanding and nothing caught fire or anything because I was late.

There’s one thing that saved me, having to be away from my work for so many days at a time without planning to, and that’s the buffer I build into the time estimates I give for projects.

I used to be a “I’ll have it done for you on Friday” kind of person and I said that to everyone. But the problem was, I would literally have a dozen things to have done each Friday and by the time Thursday would come around I’d be going nuts trying to get caught up.

The thing is, it’s not smooth sailing in my life 24/7. When you’re a working parent, whether you work from home or outside in the “corporate world”, things are never going to go according to plan ALL the time.

I am so happy that I saw the light a few months back and started giving more reasonable time lines for project completion because…well…you just never know.

If you’re a service provider constantly overextending yourself, I hope you’ll be able to take something away from this.

Give yourself some breathing room – build in a buffer because sometimes life just gets in the way.

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This morning at 6:30am instead of pecking away at my computer or sleeping which is what I’m normally doing at that time, I was at the gym doing many squats, hammer curls and painful things with a medicine ball.

As I was getting in position to do my first set of dumbbell rows, my trainer mentioned how the exercise would work my back and my abs which I thought was funny since I’m pretty sure I don’t have abs anymore.

She assured me that I still do, and that they’re just hiding there behind some fat just like everyone elses. She said, “It’s up to us to determine how much fat stays in front of our abs.” (That’s exactly what I was doing at the gym this morning doing a boot camp style workout – I’ve determined that I want to see more of those muscles.)

While I was driving home, I kept thinking back to what my trainer said. It’s true that for the most part, our skeletons are all basically the same – bones covered with the tissues and muscles and stuff. It’s how an individual maintains their body that determines how much junk gets stored in the trunk.

Then (because I think in blog posts) I realized that most of our businesses probably have some “fat in front of their abs” if you will. Something that’s built up gradually and is slowing down how efficiently we work.

My business just lost an entire belly roll after I moved from hourly pricing to charging a flat rate per project. I love this model because:

a) my clients know exactly what they’ll pay – no surprises if I go ‘over’ because I won’t. It’s a flat rate.

b) I don’t feel like I should be billing for time I spend playing with my kids.

c) I don’t have heart palpitations if I can only bill for a couple hours on a hectic day.

As I continue to define my ideal client, my business’ metabolism improves because I’m doing work I love for people I love working with. When I’m working on projects I don’t enjoy, I can almost feel my business running more sluggishly.

These are just a couple of examples but the truth is, I think sometimes we get lazy with our businesses, just like we do with our healthy eating and fitness goals.

When something’s not working in your business and you continue to let it go without doing anything about it, it’s kind of like stuffing your face with potato chips every night and wondering why you keep getting flabbier.

My copywriting business is so new, it hasn’t had time to develop a gut yet, but we’re not at abs of steel status just yet. That will come with a consistent effort, just like if I keep meeting with that evil trainer woman every morning I will see results and God willing, I’ll live longer and better for the effort.

How about you? How’s your business’ gut?

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The English language is a funny beast, isn’t it? I mean, I love words more than anyone, but we have one complicated dialect. I do not envy the teachers who have to explain to children (or adults) trying to grasp this language why proves is spelled with one o but hooves has two.

Even though I’ve been steeped in the English language for almost three decades now, there are words that trip me up every day and they do it over and over again.

I always have to think about whether I want to use the word “affect” or “effect”. Do I want to “inquire” or “enquire” about something? The word “peek” always trips me up and my fingers try to type “peak” even when I mean “pique” or “peek”…I could think of lots more examples but it sort of makes my head hurt.

The thing is, when you’re writing for your business and you misuse a word, it can distract (or detract?) from your message. Spell check is great, but it can’t prevent you from misusing a word that’s spelled correctly. I suggest investing in a proofreader before you put an important piece of writing out there in the world, but there’s a really great tool I came across the other day that can help in a pinch.

ConfusingWords.com lets you enter a word that confuses you and it spits out the proper use for it and the word it’s commonly confused with.

Check it out! It’s free.

What words do you find confusing?

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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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