Friday Musings… 30 November 2018

Random comments on thoughts, ideas, things seen, or things overheard .

Anybody who knows me and has read my blog before knows I LOVE Fridays. Happy Friday!

Do you ever feel housebound or stuck in an office? How do you deal with that feeling?

I work from home so for me the feeling is housebound.

Usually when it happens to me I get restless, have trouble focusing and even feel a little anxious.

Today I pulled myself together and went to a coffee shop. It worked at first but it is lunch time and the lunch crowd is rolling in. Students, people who work locally, friends meeting for lunch and the odd person (like me) working.

I enjoy the energy of the people around me but when the shrillness of the voices and the volume goes up as everybody tries to talk over everybody else it overwhelms me.

Since I sat down I was able to organize several writing projects, get some quotes out, follow up on some invoices, do some research and complete the rough draft of a project I started on. A very productive few hours but it’s time to go. I can hardly hear myself think and thinking is important when you make your living from converting thoughts to printed words.

In closing here is something to think about;

“The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter – ’tis the difference between the lightning-bug and the lightning.” Mark Twain

Until next time,
Dan

Newsletters… Have you seen the big change in them?

Newsletters… have you caught onto the big change in them?

I’ve noticed a big change in newsletters over the last year. I like it.

What change you may be asking?

The biggest change is that they are getting easier to read because they have less images.

At one time you couldn’t send a newsletter without loading it with pictures to entice people to read it. Now it appears that images are on the way out.

Why?

It could be that roughly 90 per cent of people read their email on a mobile device. Images slow that down and eat data.

It could be that people want real information and a real story instead of glitz and glam.

It could be the fact that more and more newsletters are ending up as in the spam bucket because mail servers don’t trust them.

As a writer and newsletter producer I like this change. I used to spend hours laying out images in newsletters and then testing the newsletter before sending it. Some clients wanted more images than content which made them hard to produce and very time consuming.

How will this change affect newsletters?

After careful consideration I can see two improvements to newsletters because of this change.

  1. Headlines will get better.
  2. Content will get better.

A good headline or title grabs your interest and makes you want to read more but a great headline or title won’t make up for lousy content.

Two of my favourite newsletters are text only. No images, great headlines, very few links and well written about things I am interested in. I did an experiment with a newsletter I read every week. It only takes me a few minutes to read and it always makes me think I copied it into a word document and counted the number of words.  I was surprised to see that it had over 1000 words in it. The word count did not include the disclaimer, the contact info or the author’s bio.

So to play on an irritating television commercial “What’s in your newsletter?”

Until next time,
Dan

 

(p.s. Have you ever thought of how a well written newsletter could help you earn referrals, grow your business and strengthen relationships?)

Lost and found…

It’s been a while since I posted anything.

Like the song says…”I was lost but now am found.”

I’ve done more writing than shows up here. I’ve written website content, an email marketing piece, built a bunch of websites, half written over a dozen poems, drilled away at a bunch of short stories and punched keys on the book I am writing.

The biggest thing I have been struggling with is the loss of motivation because I haven’t been out networking and building relationships.

A short while ago I discovered that as I became less and less busy I became less and less productive.

I realized I was lost…

but now I am found.

What does that mean?

It means I am writing again. I have written more in the last sixty days than I have in the four months before that.

In March after neck surgery I lost the use of my right arm. I have some use back but am still limited.

I have found different ways to do things that I was able to do without thinking.

I have learned to accept help when it was offered.

I have been humbled and then I turned that into self-humiliation felt worth less (yes two words because I didn’t feel worthless I felt that I was not as valuable or an asset).

I developed some very bad time wasting habits because I was so unlimited by time and had such a loss of self worth. Those bad habits took control and I would spend a great deal of time being non-productive.

But my creativity has never stopped. My mind still functions and when I use it it functions better. It takes a lot of stimulus and effort to break bad habits. I had to create the habit of creativity. I had to work a few minutes at a time to push away the time wasting habits and transform creative thoughts to production.

I was lost but now am found.

In other words I am back! I have a new attitude and a wonderful appreciation of writing.

I am going to keep develop the writing habit I had and make it a strong again.

Over the last few years I spent a great deal of time networking, building relationships, meeting people, trying to grow a business but during the last few months of isolation I realized (actually it should be admitted not realized) a few things. Here are some of them…

  1. Not many people like me. They don’t dislike me but I am not on their “Let’s go for a coffee,lunch, drink etc. list” I am a fount of useless knowledge that most people don’t care about.
  2. I am not a warm and cuddly personality. I am a bit reserved (some people say aloof) and not a good let alone a great conversationalist.
  3. I am an introvert. I enjoy being alone. I find it hard to be out and be social because I am terrible at keeping up with conversations and knowing the various things happening in the world that people talk about.
  4. I would rather spend three hours writing a paragraph until it conveyed the right message for a client than risk saying the wrong thing (thankfully the clients who hire me want the right message). I am better at project billing than hourly billing because if I went hourly my clients would think I was ripping them off by billing like a lawyer.
  5. Even though I like the knowledge of building a website I would rather just supply the content. (Sadly people value the look of a website more than the content. People see looks but serious buyers and search engines search content.)
  6. I am a “techie”. I love knowing about technical things and am fascinated by equipment, software, technology, anything electrical, energy saving, energy generation, and recycling just to name a few things. I bore people when I start to talk about these things.
  7. I enjoy writing about things and for clients where I have to learn about them and there products or services.

I was lost but now am found…

I am writing again. Stay tuned.