But it’s easier said than done! Choices aren’t always clear, which fogs up our ability to decide intelligently, and then that delays our ability to act (at all, let alone act in the right way).

In this article of Tips In Ten and in the next one, I want to talk about how to make faster decisions and I’ll give you some tools to do that better. One “tool” is a series of mindsets that you need to adopt if you’re going to make faster decisions and then I’m going to give you 2 tools to transform decision making into a fast, accurate path to success. I’ll give you two tools (plus examples) in this issue and one more tool (plus examples) in the next article.

And I should also say this as a type of disclaimer before we get too far into the issue: The length of time you take to make decisions should correlate to the importance of the decision. So if you take ten minutes to sell all of your belongings and move to Antarctica, I don’t want you emailing me later to complain. Let’s say that, in general, many of your business decisions can be made in less time than you’re normally taking, and that you can probably make a lot of them in ten minutes or less.

Tool #1: A mindset for better decision-making skills

The first “mindset” tool isn’t a “do-this-in-10-minutes” thing. It’s something you need to embed as a way of thinking and when you do that, the use of the 2 other tools will take ten minutes (or so).

I would define decisions as our personal commitment to act after weighing a choice. Because of that decisions don’t always get made because we either can’t easily weigh a choice or because we are reluctant to act. So, the first “tool” I want to introduce you to is a mindset of decisiveness. Commit to make decisions with the following qualities:

• Quickly: It is possible to make decisions quickly. To do so means that you trust yourself and you are willing to act on the best information you have available to you at the moment. Make it a time-limited to-do on your schedule when it comes time to decide on something. Don’t just add into your schedule “think about topic for my Chamber of Commerce speech”; instead, make your to-do something like: “Decide on a topic for my Chamber of Commerce speech” and limit it to ten minutes. That’s a huge difference and you will notice the difference.

• Fairly Accurate: We live in an age where accuracy seems important. But it really isn’t as important as we think it is. The decisions you make don’t need to be 100% perfect and they don’t need to be based on the full picture. This is where the sayings “analysis paralysis” and “a good plan today is better than a perfect plan tomorrow.” Instead, the decisions you make need to be based on sound information and should be generally in the right direction but don’t have to be perfect. You won’t be far off course if you are off course at all, and most things we do can be easily adjusted. Adopt this quality and you’ll find it freeing to make far more decisions quickly.

• Actionable: Decisions get cloudy when we forget to assign an action. We think about things. Then we think about them some more. But we don’t always act and that makes the decision unclear and it feels like it’s never complete. Solve this by assigning an action to every decision you make.

• Mitigation: Even though we don’t have to be perfect doesn’t mean that we can ignore the consequences. Instead of trying to come up with a perfect plan, you’ll make faster decisions if you develop a good plan and recognize and mitigate potential consequences.

• Trust intuition/Don’t fear failure: Your intuition is an underappreciated muscle that needs to be developed and trusted. It won’t always be right but if you accept that some failures will happen and you follow your intuition anyway, you’ll discover that it is right more often than it is wrong.

• No regrets: Regret will slow you down and the fear of regret will keep you from making and acting on decisions. Once you’ve made your decision, blaze ahead, accept the consequences, and work hard.

That is the fast decision-making mindset you need to adopt. Once you’ve adopted it, you’ll find that your decisions will be made much faster. But to make them even faster, I’ll show you 2 more tools to use:

Tool #2: Restate the problem or decision

This seems overly simple but you will be surprised at how powerful it is. When you have a decision to make, sit down and restate it in 3 or 4 ways. It might feel redundant and when you’re done you’ll wonder why you made a list of what amounts to synonyms, but your decision-making muscle will appreciate it.

By restating your problem or decision in different ways, you are unlocking yourself from one way of thinking. You are forcing yourself to reframe the problem from a different perspective and one or more of those restated phrases might be enough to inspire a solution.

I’m going to give you 2 examples: One in which the decision is already clear and one in which you have a problem and you know you have some thinking to do but the decisions themselves aren’t clear yet.

Example 1 (a clear decision): Let’s say that you find yourself with some spare time in your work schedule and you have a choice to make between two options: You might write your initial decision like this: “Should I take on more clients or spend my extra time writing a book to be published?”

From here, you would restate your problem in a few ways. For example, you might restate your problem like this:

“Should I increase my client base or should I write an ebook?”
“Should I hire out more of my coaching time to existing clients or should I focus instead on passive income?”
“Should I work indepth with a segment of my clients or should I develop another product or service to sell?”

Do you see the value of doing this? You are breaking your thinking, which was either more new clients or a book, and instead considering other possibilities. In cases like this, where I know the distinct choices in a decision, I will not even bother writing them out in a sentence as I’ve done here. Instead, I’ll write each choice into a column (so I’d have 2 columns here, but I have done this with more complex choices and had 5 or 6 columns because there were 5 or 6 choices in the decision). Then, I write down synonyms and related ideas for every choice. At the end, I’ve got a whole bunch of potential ideas and can start making my choice having fully explored the options.

You can do that if you want, and it’s a useful way to organize your thoughts, but you don’t have to. It works just as well to use sentences as I’ve done in the initial example.

Example 2 (unclear decision): Sometimes a decision isn’t as clear as two (or 3 or 4 or 5 or 6) choices. Sometimes you have some decisions to make but it’s in the form of a problem or single issue to be resolved. This method still works.
For example, let’s say that you want to meet more leads and you’ve been thinking about offering a seminar. But how do you get people to your seminar? What should your seminar be on? So you would start by writing: “I want to get more leads by offering a seminar at a local community center”. But then you can restate it in a few ways, generalizing or switching out some of the words for others:

“I want to meet more people by offering a hands-on workshop at a local gathering place.”
“I want to network with potential customers by being at a meeting in a nearby business event.”
“I want to connect with people who might eventually buy from me by delivering a speech at a trade show.”

Suddenly, one problem, which contained a few decisions, becomes clearer while new opportunities surface. You might consider different locations (like a trade show or a business networking event) and you might consider different methods of communicating rather than a seminar.

This method will help to crystallize a decision and make it even clearer. And often, you might end up with more decisions than you first realized. That’s not a problem because doing this will help you to mitigate any problems and erase any regret that you might feel in the future. And, in the next article of Tips In Ten, I’ll give you an additional tool to make decisions even faster.

Related posts:

1. Ten Minutes to Faster Decisions – Part 2
2. Make Bookkeeping Faster & Easier in Less Than 10 Minutes a Day!
3. Master Your Day in Just 10 Minutes – Part 1

I’ve recommended sites like Guru and Elance for this purpose. I like these sites because they provide business owners with an efficient way to get several quotes on their project at once. This is a good use of time and a great way to find the right freelancer at the right price. Of course, there are other sites out there (vWorker and Odesk come to mind) and these ideas apply to most of those sites, too.

In a previous Tips In Ten article, I listed a six step process that you could use to find freelancers or contractors to work on your projects. Step three was creating a request-for-proposal and I talked in more detail about that in the last issue. And that’s where we left off: You had taken ten minutes to post a project on Guru or Elance and proposals (or bids) were starting to come in.

In this article, I’ll talk about comparing proposals and sorting them to ultimately hire the right contractor.

In general, the early stage of finding the right contractor is basically a sorting stage. You’ll have a big list of freelancers who have submitted bids for your project and you need to sort them. The fastest way to start sorting them is into a “definitely no” pile and a “maybe” pile. If you do this electronically, you might be able to just delete the “no” people right away while you keep the “maybe” people.

And how do you choose the “definitely no” people to delete? My advice: Start by eliminating:

1.   People who clearly are not proposing a solution to your problem. Yes, you’ll get some people who will make you wonder: “Did they even read my proposal?”
2.   People whose lack of talent is apparent. This will be easy to spot: If they send you samples that are of extremely low quality, get rid of them.
3.   People with poor feedback. You should be able to see feedback that people have received. If they have bad overall feedback, get rid of them.

After you’ve done that, it’s now time to take that group of remaining “maybe” freelancers and cut them in half.

At this stage, people often look to price as a key indicator, especially if they have never worked with freelancers before. It seems to make sense because it’s an easy metric to observe. However, you’ll find that there is a broad range of talent and it doesn’t always mesh with price: You can find talented freelancers in a range of prices and you can find untalented ones in a range of prices. Automatically sorting by price (at this stage) is a mistake.

So, how do you cut that pool of “maybe” freelancers in half? I’d suggest this simple exercise, which you should do periodically throughout the proposal process: List the names of all of the “maybe” freelancers on a piece of a paper (or in an Excel spreadsheet) and then review their proposals against the following questions, awarding either a 1 or a 0 as a score for each question:

1.    Do they show that they understand the project and have the expertise and samples to back it up?
2.    Do they make proactive recommendations or provide guarantees? (Good professionals will provide these things).
3.    Can they communicate in a way that you understand and can work with?
4.    Do they provide clear financial AND timeline parameters?
5.    Do they fit with your financial AND/OR timeline requests?

You’ll notice that question 4 and question 5 are similar. This is why you need to ask both: Question 4 makes sure that the freelancer understands, communicates, and commits to both financial and timeline parameters. Question 5 compares their view of the project with your own. (It’s possible that you have under-estimated or over-estimated the budget or timeline).

So, by assigning a simple 1 or 0 to each question for each of your professionals, you’ll get stellar rockstars who have scores of five and you’ll find a bunch of mismatches who have scores of zero… and a bunch of freelancers in between. This will make it really easy to eliminate half or more of your freelancers. (I’d suggest that you eliminate any freelancer who scores three or less. If you’re still left with a whole bunch, then eliminate any freelancer who scores four or less. And there’s a very good chance that you’ll end up picking someone who scores four or five out of five on this list.

If your project’s proposal acceptance period has expired then you should have a small pool to draw from. (That’s why doing the above exercise periodically throughout the process will help you to manage the amount of time you spend sorting the professionals).

I keep saying that price shouldn’t be used as a sorting tool, but you will at some point need to think about price. I believe it’s better to do it towards the end, once you have a list of freelancers culled down to a few. But even then, don’t make your decision based on price alone. Instead, make your decision based on the balance between price and return on investment. You might find that one price will give you one level of return but a slightly higher price can give you a disproportionately higher return. In that case, you’ll want to revisit your budget and see if you can rework something to get the return that is better.

As you narrow the field, contact the freelancers and let them know that they are on a short-list and then give them an approximate date that you will have reached a decision. Do not invite them to do anything else to further compete. Just thank them for bidding and give them the brief heads-up. This will do two things:

1.    It will make sure that they set aside the time. Freelancers who are busy will appreciate the notice. (This can help to make sure your project gets started sooner and completed on time).
2.    It will also help you to identify really good professionals who might sweeten the deal or offer additional resources or information for you. (By letting them be proactive, you’ll see who from among your shortlist most wants to work with you).

By using this simple sorting method, it is possible to find the ideal freelancer in less than ten minutes a day.

Bonus Tips:

• Once you know who your freelancer is, give them a timeline to start. Many projects are awarded but never get past that stage so your chosen contractor will be more prepared when you give them a timeline.
• Stay in touch with your contractor. Make sure that they are equipped with all of the information they need to do the job.
• Treat the freelancer professionally and courteously.
• Provide constructive criticism during the review stage. This is far more helpful than “looks good” or “needs work”.
• When the project is complete, pay them promptly and leave feedback.

Some freelancers or contractors might seem like order-takers who simply do the work you need them to do when you need them to do it. Sometimes these freelancers are the kind we want. However, if you find the right freelancer who is a proactive partner, and you treat them as a professional colleague, you will get higher quality work and a long-term peer who truly wants to see your business do well. When they understand your business goals, they can provide a more valuable contribution to your business.

Related posts:

1. Creating Requests of Proposals that Get Results…
2. Get More Done with On-Call Help

In this Tips In Ten article, I’m going to show you how to submit your article in just ten minutes.

Which article distribution sites to use?

There are many article submission sites. If you Google words like “articles” or “article submissions” or “article distribution” or “ezine articles”, you’ll find a large selection of article sites to submit your articles to.

Some of these article sites are free, others require a small fee. I actually use a combination of free and paid sites that I’ve found over the years. About 3 days after you receive this Tips In Ten, I”m going to send you a free bonus Tips In Ten issue which will have a list of my favorite article distribution sites for you.

There are so many article distribution sites out there – and you’ll find several in the bonus issue I send – so how do you know which ones to use? There are a few different ways that you can decide. Here’s what I recommend.

• You may want to pick one or two sites and become prolific on those sites, publishing all of your articles there.
• You may want to select several sites and spread the articles around in the hopes that you”ll reach a broader audience.

I’ve seen success in both ways but let me tell you about a colleague of mine. He carefully selected four distribution sites and has chosen to publish specific topics on each site, depending on who his intended audience is and what he wants to accomplish. He is a business coach and here is how he has broken down his distribution across multiple sites:

• He uses one to write specifically about business growth strategies.
• He uses one to write specifically about business start-up ideas.
• He uses one to write about specific industries.
• He uses one to write about general topics of interest to his customers.

That might be more work than you want to do. So, at the very least, start with one or two article distribution sites and focus on those.

Guidelines

Every single article distribution site has its own guidelines – they might be called “author’s guidelines” or “article guidelines” or “terms of service” – and it’s important that you follow those guidelines or else your article will be rejected.

Using the article writing instructions I gave you in the last Tips In Ten, your articles will be suitable for most article distribution sites (assuming that you wrote about an acceptable topic and you didn’t promote your own business in the article).

Most guidelines are easy to follow and they’re generally standard across all article distribution sites (with some small variances, like in word count).

Sign up

Sign up at the article distribution site(s) of your choice and get ready to submit your first article. Most sites will want the following things input into separate boxes when you submit an article:

• The category of the article so they can categorize it within their library of articles.

• The title. Don’t forget to include a keyword!

• An article summary. Not all distribution sites ask for this. Don’t copy and paste something from the article; write something new just for this summary. It doesn’t have to be long – just a sentence or two is okay.

• The article itself. Don’t paste from Word into the online text box. That’s because Word uses “smart characters” (like curly quotation marks) which don’t show up properly online. If you copy from the Word document and paste it into a Notepad document and then copy from Notepad and paste it into the online text box, you’ll “clean up” all of your smart characters and the article will show up properly online.

• The resource box. We talked about this in a recent Tips In Ten issue and you should have it saved somewhere. Paste it here.

• Keywords.  Here, you can paste the keywords you used in your article (which should be in the Excel spreadsheet document).

Submission details: Formatting

In some article distribution sites, you’ll be allowed to do some really basic formatting. They might give you formatting functions in buttons (like you might find in Microsoft Word) or they might require you to use html.

If you have to use html, this is what you need to know:

• Most sites that require html coding will only let you use about 3 kinds of html: Bold, italics, and hyperlinks. (They may give you more options but these are the most common 3 and the ones I use most often). I’ll show you how to create the code for these right here.

• To bold something, use <b> at the beginning of the section you want to bold and </b> at the end to “shut the bold function off”. So, if you wrote: Heather Villa is a <b>business</b> coach, it would look like this: Heather Villa is a business coach.

• To italicize something, it’s very similar to the bold function, except you use the letter “i” instead of “b”. So, if you wrote: Heather Villa is a <i>business</i> coach, it would look like this: Heather Villa is a business coach.

• Hyperlinks seem slightly more complicated, but you’ll get the hang of them. (And you saw them already in the Tips In Ten issue where we talked about the resource box). You simply write the code <a href=” “> and put the URL in the quotation marks. Then, you write the name of the website and follow it up with a </a>.
  
  So, if you wrote: Heather Villa is a <a href=”http://hireheathervilla.com” >business consultant</a>, then it would look like this: Heather Villa is a business consultant.
• Just remember, everything has an open tag and a close tag. The open tags are <b>, <i>, and <a href=”…”> and the close tags are </b>, </i>, and </a>.

There aren’t rules to using these throughout your article, although you should always be consistent with whatever you decide to do. I like to use bold for subtitles and I like to use italics for emphasis and book titles. Some article distribution sites put a limitation on how many hyperlinks can appear in your article.

After inputting

After you’ve input your article, proof-read one more time! It doesn’t hurt. It will just take a moment or two and it will help to ensure that you copied and pasted correctly and that the line spacing looks okay.

Then click “submit.”

And then you’re done! That should only take a couple of minutes.

And then…

After you submit the article, it usually goes into a queue to be read by editors who make sure that you didn’t break their guidelines. If they find something that doesn’t comply, they will usually send you an email to say that your article is rejected and they may tell you why. If they approve your article, you may get an email to let you know. (Many of the article distribution sites I work with will tell you that they’ve approved your article… although some might not).

Once you hear that your article has been approved, you should do the following:

1. Promote it! Link to it on Twitter, on LinkedIn, on Facebook, and anywhere else you have a profile. That way, people might click to it because the topic is interesting to them and then they might click to your website.

2. Reference the article in other situations (such as a blog or a press release).

3. Periodically search for the article on Google to see who is publishing it and what their website is about. (This will help you to know who is sending people to your website and what their audience is like).

4. Sign in to your account at the article distribution site because they might offer basic metrics (suchas article views) that you can use in tracking.

That’s it! By doing this, you can submit an article in less than ten minutes. And, if you follow the system I outlined in the past few Tips In Ten issues, you’ll be submitting one high quality article each week in just ten minutes a day!

Stay tuned! Next article will outline some of the of the top article distributions sites available.

Bonus Tip:

Whatever you choose, you will want to be careful that you only publish your article at one or two sites. Many distribution sites will make sure that the article isn’t plagiarized by scanning the internet for similar content. If they see (your!) content at the other article distribution site, they may reject your article. So just submit it once, or submit it to two sites that have flexible publication guidelines.

Related posts:

1. Bonus: Article Submissions in 10 Minutes
2. Article Submissions in 10 Minutes a Day – Part 1
3. Article Submissions in 10 Minutes a Day – Part 3

Sometimes that audience is made up of loyal visitors to your blog. They’ve bookmarked your blog and they visit everyday or read your RSS feed to see what you have to say. Sometimes that audience is made up of newsletter subscribers: They’ve left their email address in the hopes that you send them high value content on a regular basis.

There are plenty of tools and resources to help you create the infrastructure to communicate with that audience, whether through blogs or newsletters (or many other ways). In fact, in previous Tips In Ten articles, we’ve talked about those very things: I’ve shown you how to create regular blog content. And, I’ve shown you different autoresponder tools you can use to upload content and distribute it to your audience.

But the question is often asked: How do I get an audience?

You might have great information on your website. And you might have the audience-capturing and audience-communicating infrastructure already set up. But you need eyeballs! You need email addresses. You need people reading your content and thinking about you as the expert.

So how do you get that audience?

Well, as you can tell by the title of this issue, I think you need more than an audience. I think you need a fanbase. I’ve seen people generate an audience: I’m sure we’ve all received email and snail mail that seemed unsolicited and turned out that our email address or postal address were sold to someone. In other words, we were an audience but an unwilling one.

I think you need a fanbase: Where every audience member (whether they click to your blog or they read your content in an RSS feeder or they see your newsletter in their inbox) is a fan. Someone who has sought you out.

These fans are the most loyal of audiences because they appreciate what you have to say and they respond with purchases or referrals.

So, how can you create a fanbase in 10 minutes a day? It IS possible. And before I tell you, I want to reference someone who has a similar idea: Gary Vaynerchuk. If you’ve never heard of him, I’ll give you a short bio: Gary Vaynerchuk owned a wine store in New Jersey. He wanted to build his brand so he started creating video blogs showing his unconventional wine tasting. They are compelling, and if you ever get a chance to view one or two, you should. You can see them at http://tv.winelibrary.com.

Using a very similar method to what I’m about to describe here, he built up his reputation and now is a noted author, speaker, and a go-to authority on branding and on wine.

To build up a fanbase, here’s what you do:

First, find relevant sites. Relevant sites include blogs, forums, Facebook fan pages, and Twitter accounts that are somehow connected to your business or industry. So, for example, when I do this, I would look for blogs, forums, fan pages, or twitter users who were in the small business, entrepreneur, coach, and freelancer segments. When Gary Vaynerchuk does this, he looks for blogs, forums, and fan pages on wine.

Second, I would go there and leave comments, participate in discussion, follow, friend, tweet, talk, converse. I would say things that were relevant (and NOT self-promotional). For example, if I found a blog post that talked about productivity, I would comment with something like “that’s great. I’m going to implement that suggestion” or “you’re exactly right with your idea, I’ve been doing something similar for years” or “Thanks for the tip. I’d also recommend…”

Vaynerchuk says (in a video that I will link to shortly) that he would go to a Facebook fan page about merlot and comment with something like the name of his favorite merlot.

The idea here is not to blatantly self-promote but rather to engage the writer and his or her audience and participate with them. You can sign your name and leave your website address but don’t overload your comment with self-promoting content.

Third, I would repeat this process. I would do it again tomorrow and the next day and the next day and the day after that. Ten minutes a day, each and every day. I would keep finding relevant sites and I would keep commenting and participating.

Here’s what will happen: Occasionally, someone will click on your link. They’ll read what you have to say. They’ll become a fan. Then someone else will do the same. And so on. Those occasional people will build up. Over time, you’ll pick up a following; a fanbase.

I love how Vaynerchuk says it in this video, so check it out for yourself: It takes 2 cents to GROW a wine show. (Note: I’m not sure why he’s filming this one from his bathroom, but the content is good even if the setting is weirdly irrelevant).

In one area where I don’t necessarily agree with Vaynerchuk is in the time this takes. He suggests hours. I think that’s a great idea but I don’t know many businesses where that kind of time is feasible to spend. Quite simply, we need to grow our business but we don’t have hours to spend doing what I’m about to describe. Unless you outsource some of it, you need to find the time to do it and I believe you can do it in ten minutes. Of course, if you have hours to accomplish what I and Vaynerchuk are suggesting, by all means spend the time. But if you only have ten minutes (as most of us do), then use those ten minutes wisely.

That’s it! That’s all you need to do. And it works. I can attest to its success and certainly the infamous Gary Vaynerchuk can as well. If you have hours to spend leaving your two cents on related sites around the web, then by all means do so. But if you are busy (as many of us are) and you only have ten minutes a day, start there. That should give you enough time to read and comment on 2 or 3 blogs or Facebook fan pages. And if you only do 2 a day from Monday to Friday, you’ll have commented on 10 by the end of the week and about 5,200 by the end of the year! That will have a big impact! If even 1% of those people become fans, that’s 52 more people by the end of the year.

A couple other things to note:

I would be remiss if I didn’t mention a few other important elements: I believe you need two other things here in order for this to be successful:

• First, you need good content to drive people to. If you’re going to entice people to your site/blog/whatever, you need to deliver with good content. This might mean hiring a writer if you don’t have the time or skill to create the content yourself, or hiring an editor if you have the time to put something together but you don’t have the time to polish it.

• Second, you need to have the infrastructure set up to “lock in” your fanbase. This might mean regular posts on your blog. Or, it might mean that you have some RSS functionality. Or it might mean that you have a subscription newsletter. Whatever you do to engage your audience, you need to be able to deliver on that engagement consistently.

Ten minutes a day for a fanbase? It IS possible. Start today and build your fanbase!

Related posts:

1. Building and Maintaining a Compelling Website in Just 10 Minutes a Day
2. The Power of a List: Part 1
3. Comments and How They can Make You More Successful (In Just 10 Minutes) – Part 2

Although bookkeeping isn’t an activity you’d prefer to spend your time doing, I’m sure you realize how it important it is to have good, clean books: It makes tax time easier, you can navigate audits if they happen, and (most importantly), you can make better business decisions when you have a clear understanding of your financials.

This Tips In Ten article is divided up into 2 sections. The first section is a list of ideas and things to have in place so that when you get to part two of this issue, you can do your bookkeeping in just 10 minutes.

Part 1: Master your bookkeeping with these preparatory steps

Tackling your books
Part of the problem is that bookkeeping feels like an arduous task so people put off their bookkeeping and it piles up and then they have to devote a couple of frustration-filled days to navigate through it all. What feels like an arduous task becomes an arduous task! So the most important thing you can possibly do for your business’ books is to schedule 10 minutes a day every single day to stay on top of your bookkeeping. Eventually, you might be able to cut that back slightly but a daily 10 minute look at your numbers will make even this challenging task a lot easier.

If you have a backlog of bookkeeping tasks to do, you might want to spend a day or two catching up but it will feel better to just break up your catching-up effort over 10 minutes each day for a while. Do a solid 10 minutes of work and then stop for the day. It will feel considerably better and you will tackle your books faster than you think, especially when you use some of the other bookkeeping mastery techniques I’ve listed below.

So, set aside time right now in your schedule to spend 10 minutes doing your books.

Use online bookkeeping software
If you are using the old fashioned pen and paper approach to bookkeeping, or if you are using simple software like an Excel spreadsheet, there are a lot of options out there that you should look into. Thanks to some serious advancements in online technology, you can automate so much of your bookkeeping to make it even faster and easier for yourself: There are some good core online bookkeeping solutions that will sync with many of the popular web applications you use in your business, which means you can automate a lot of your business processes!

Start by looking for an online bookkeeping solution. I’ll give you a couple of examples here and I’ll be speaking generally about them for the rest of the issue (and they might or might not have all of the features I describe).

• IAC-EZ (Disclosure: I started this company and although I’ve sold it, I still have an affiliation with it).
• Clarity Accounting
• QuickBooks Online

There are others but these are the big names in the business. They come with a subscription fee and there is usually some entry functionality, calculation and reporting functionality, and exporting functionality (so you can send files to your accountant or tax preparer).

(On a side note: Sometimes business owners point out to me that a free Excel spreadsheet seems preferable to the monthly subscription cost of online bookkeeping. My advice is to consider the hours of time you’ll save by using these automated systems, especially in conjunction with the ideas I’m about to list below, and you’ll quickly see how these solutions will pay for themselves each and every month).

So, before you go any further, investigate the solutions and choose the one that makes the most sense for you. Take the time to set it up. It won’t take long and consider this time an investment into much easier bookkeeping in the future.

Take advantage of other software
Once you’ve chosen a core bookkeeping solution and started to use it, you’ll eventually want to move some of your other processes into compatible solutions. For example, Freshbooks is an online invoicing software that syncs with many bookkeeping solutions. When you enter an invoice in Freshbooks, they are automatically entered into your bookkeeping software. Or if you have a compatible automated shopping cart solution, purchases made through the shopping cart will be automatically applied to your books.

Another tool you may find helpful is Shoeboxed.com. Shoeboxed.com takes all of your receipts and scans them. Then you can get scanned images of your receipts to attach to bookkeeping entries and Shoeoboxed will even enter the data into a file so you can upload that to your bookkeeping system without manually entering everything.

Part 2: Mastering your bookkeeping in 10 minutes a day

So, you’ve got your fancy new bookkeeping system in place and you’re ready to start using it (while only spending 10 minutes a day… which you’ve already scheduled, right?).

Catch up
One of the fastest ways to get a lot of bookkeeping done in just 10 minutes is to use a CSV file (which stands for “comma separate value” file and can be opened in Excel) and enter several entries quickly then upload it to your bookkeeping file.

Here’s how to do that:
Open an Excel spreadsheet or Google Docs Spreadsheet and set up each column with the information you’ll need in your bookkeeping system (like Date, Contact Name, Amount, Category, and whatever else you need to include). Then, sit down with your big stack of bills and receipts and just type in the data really quickly into the appropriate column. (Or, better yet, spend only 1 minute a day instead of 10 minutes by passing this data entry off to an assistant). Save the file as a .csv and upload it to your bookkeeping software. The system will review the entries, have you quickly double-check to make sure that everything looks right, and then it will enter the data for you.

Automate
Where possible, automate the entries. For example, if you have a bill that comes out on the same day every month, and it’s the same amount each month, just create a recurring bill into your system so you only have to enter it once, at the very beginning, instead of each time you get the bill. Some common examples of these kinds of bills include:

• Rent or mortgage
• Flat fee telephone or internet plans
• Subscriptions

This also works for incoming entries, too: If someone pays you the same amount of money every month (as in a rental situation or a membership site), you can set up a recurring entry for them.

Automate as much as you can and schedule one of your 10 minute bookkeeping segments in each quarter to review your automated billing and make corrections if necessary.

Do the rest in ten minutes a day
By now you’ve set up your bookkeeping, caught up on your bookkeeping, and have automated as much as possible. Now it’s time to move forward with 10 minutes a day.

I’ll give you two options and each one should just take 10 minutes each day (and might end up taking less, depending on your business).

Option 1: Batch your weekly entries. Sort all of your week’s data into individual piles and enter one pile per day using a CSV file (as I’ve described above). For example, input all of last week’s money-coming-in entries on Monday; input all of last week’s money-going-out entries on Tuesday; input all new contacts on Wednesday; then spend Thursday reviewing anything you might have missed. (Yes, you can take Friday off! Or, use Friday to do other bookkeeping-related work like reviewing your reports). With this option, I like being able to quickly batch things; it feels faster and you can handle a lot more data. But you do end up with a week’s worth of entries sitting in a pile, which can sometimes feel daunting.

Option 2: Input the previous day’s bookkeeping. If you have a lot of entries, you might want to use a CSV file but if you only have a few entries it might be faster to just enter them into the bookkeeping system’s interface manually. With this option, you feel totally up-to-date and there aren’t papers sitting around for very long. However, if you miss a day or two, it’s easy to get behind quickly.

So, to summarize, here are my 10 minutes-a-day bookkeeping best practices:

• Get up to date as quickly as possible with a good online bookkeeping solution
• Automate as much as possible
• Sync business processes
• Stay on top of your bookkeeping and keep strictly to 10 minutes a day

Bookkeeping doesn’t have to feel as painful as many people think it is. It’s just a matter of minimizing how much work you have to do and staying on top of the rest.

Related posts:

1. Ten Minutes to Faster Decisions – Part 1
2. Ten Minutes to Faster Decisions – Part 2
3. 22.5 Minutes is all You Really Need to Make a Big Difference

There could be any number of reasons why we have to extend some form of credit to our clients: Perhaps all of your competition is doing it and if you didn’t, you’d be out of business; perhaps you are a freelancer who requires payment when the project is complete and not before; perhaps the customer cuts a check on a certain day of the month; perhaps you offer a service in which you collect a fee at the end of the month for usage; perhaps you’re a consultant who collects payment based on the ROI you deliver (and thus need to wait for it to be measured first); perhaps you delivered your product or service and the customer realized that they simply couldn’t pay it all right now… I could go on and on.

Whatever the reason, in most cases, giving customers the option to buy now and pay later comes with the territory. As soon as you extend credit and your customer owes you money, you step into the world of receivables. For many business owners (especially the new ones) this is an uncomfortable place to be. You don’t want to have to send reminders. You don’t want to have to make collection calls. You NEVER want it to get to the point where a customer simply doesn’t pay and walks away with your product or service. As a business owner, it’s easy to take that personally because you pay all of your bills and you treat people fairly and put your heart and soul into the business, so when someone who takes your product or service without paying, it FEELS no different than if someone stole from you.

And yet, you can’t escape it: You need to offer credit. So, what can you do to manage the situation, to avoid people from becoming “deadbeat” clients, and to collect the money that is rightfully owed to you?

The good news is, the work doesn’t have to be as unpleasant as it seems. And it doesn’t have to take as long as it seems, either. In just ten minutes a day you can manage your receivables, and because you are managing them you’ll be more likely to collect more money owed to you.

Get Started

Before you can manage your receivables effectively in 10 minutes a day, you’ll need to have a couple of systems in place first. Set these up and the 10 minutes a day will be time well spent. Setting up these processes might take a week of 10 minutes a day just to work through on their own. That’s okay. These are extremely valuable systems to have in place and they will put you in a good position over the long run to minimize bad debt and maximize the credit you collect.

First, you need to have a list of money owed. Some like a paper list, printed off regularly; others like an Excel spreadsheet; others have a bookkeeping system or invoicing service that will generate a list for them. Pick whatever works for you but at the very least you’ll need a list of people who owe you money, no matter how old that money is, and it would be nice to have it sorted by date. If it’s electronic, it will be refreshed constantly. If it’s in paper format, print off a new list each week. This is your receivables list and you’ll use it when you read the next Tips In Ten issue. So, take ten minutes and get the list and put it in order.

Second, you need to know what your average operating expenses are and how your income is split between immediate payment and receivables. Figure out the maximum amount of credit you are comfortable giving out in a month. This is your monthly risk threshold number. Divide this number by the average amount of credit you give to each customer and that will tell you how many customers you can give credit to. For example, if you determine that you don’t want to give out more than $5,000 worth of credit in a month, and customers are granted an average of $500 credit, then you can’t have more than 10 customers at a time on credit. If you want to give credit to more customers than that number, you’ll need to start collecting a security deposit from each one. By figuring these numbers out, you will avoid over-extending the credit you provide and that will help you to avoid scrambling to cover your operations with loans and credit cards while you get customers to pay. Many businesses fail in their first two years, not always because of a lack of customers, but many times because they over-extend the amount of credit they give and then don’t have enough money to cover operating expenses. Take 10 minutes one day (or over a couple days if you need to) and make sure you know these numbers. As long as there is cash flow, from old receivables being paid and from customers who pay cash, you can extend some credit but you need to find the balance for your business.

Third, put good processes in place including a consistent invoicing process, some payment terms, and a credit approval process. Obviously you don’t want to make it impossible for people to buy from you, but here’s what I would suggest:

• You should have your terms already set out. Know what they are and don’t shoot from the hip. And, if you have to extend a lot of credit, offer incentives to people who pay early or who pay on time or who pay within a certain period. This is much easier and way more positive than charging interest on late payments (although you might have to do that, too, and that’s okay).

• The more someone buys from you, the more information you should expect from them. Verify their phone numbers and email addresses.

• Do some research about them online, if appropriate. Do they have a web presence? Even something simple like seeing how many followers they have on Twitter, how many connections they have on LinkedIn and how many blog posts they have in their blog won’t mitigate every receivable issue but it will help you to know how long they’ve been around and how easy it is to get in touch with them.

• Create thresholds of amounts owing and connect those with payments you expect from them. For example, if you’re going to give someone $1000 credit, require a minimum payment of $250. A security deposit, for example, might be the right choice for your business. And the more credit they need, the more security deposit you require.

• I don’t need to tell you that you shouldn’t extend credit to everyone every time they ask. For example, if someone doesn’t pay one bill for a long time, then pays it and expects credit again – they shouldn’t get credit. Or another example: A brand spanking new client from a business you’ve never heard of before, who approaches you with a huge order and demands full credit. – that’s a no-go in my books.

This might seem like it will take more than 10 minutes but you probably already have some of this in place, it just needs to be formalized.

Lastly, managing your receivables actually starts long before you deliver your product or service, and even before the customer contracts your services. It starts with a relationship. Build one. You don’t have to be best friends with your clients but you should try to connect with them, empathize with them, and be friendly with them. It’s good for all aspects of your business. It helps them to be more loyal, it helps you to understand them better when you need to sell them something, and it helps to diminish the likelihood that they will not pay. On the occasions in which I’ve had non-paying clients, of the ones with whom I never had a relationship, I know that income is gone; but of the ones with whom I’ve had a relationship, I’ve actually had “troublesome” clients call me back a year and a half later and pay me based solely on the foundation of my earlier relationship with them.

When you have these things in place, you’re ready to manage your receivables in ten minutes a day. That’s what I’ll cover in the next Tips In Ten article.

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1. Manage Your Receivables like a Rock Star – Part 2: Execution

Unfortunately, generating business often costs money – and depending on the channel you’re marketing through, it can cost a lot of money. You might need advertising support, staff, and phone lines, just to name a few. As the potential for added revenue rises, so can many of your expenses.

But there are a few ways that you can generate more business without an equivalent spend in costly advertising or time-consuming cold calling effort. One very effective way to get inexpensive business is from repeat business – that is, getting previous customers to buy from you again (and again and again).

It costs less because, obviously, you don’t have to perform all the same steps to take them through your sales cycle from “never-heard-of-you-before” to “ready-to-buy”. Of course, there will be some relationship building and marketing effort, even with repeat buyers, but it is quite a bit less.

There is another advantage, too: Improved cash flow. By generating repeat business you can usually accelerate your sales cycle to have them buy sooner. For example, if it takes you six months of continuous contact to convince a cold prospect to become a customer, it will probably take you substantially less (one-half of that time, or better) to reconnect with a customer and sell them something else.

And it can be done in only 10 minutes a day.

You’ll need to plan what you want to sell. (And some of you may need to find something else to sell!)

Once you have a plan in place, you’ll need to implement it. This doesn’t have to take more than 10 minutes a day, but you can spend longer on it if you want, or you might want to delegate some of the effort.

The Plan

Here’s what to do in the first ten minutes:

Start with a list of your customers and rank them from best to worst. I realize that this is a subjective ranking. For most of you, it will be “most profitable”. For some of you it might mean “most frequently buys from me”. For some of you it will be “most dollars spent in a purchase”. And for some it might mean “most loyal”. Whatever you measure as being the best, put them on top. (BONUS: I have included a spreadsheet template to list this information – feel free to download it now.) Include a list of their purchases, if possible. You should have something like this in a spreadsheet somewhere already (and if you don’t, maybe that should be your first step!)

That’s enough for the first 10 minutes of day one. When you return the next day to spend 10 more minutes on the project, do this: Divide up your customer list into 5 segments of 20% each. Mark the segments A, B, C, D, E. You now have a segmented list of customers – from best to worst – that you can use in all kinds of marketing efforts.

Put down your pens because you’ve done enough for today.

Start Implementing!

You have a plan; it’s time to do something with it. Now, take 10 minutes each day to contact your customers through email or phone. Before you reach out to them, figure out how you can add value to their lives. Is there a relevant article you saw somewhere that they would find informative? Did you think of a new way for them to use your product? Did you meet someone who might be able to buy from them?

It may seem that finding this high-value information is a lot of work per contact, but when you keep this “adding value” as your constant mindset, you’ll soon discover that you stumble across information and resources and contacts all the time that you can pass along to add value to your customers. Not only that, if you find a few good pieces of value-adding ideas that you can share with numerous contacts, there’s a good chance that it will still be less time per contact than if you were to pick up the phone and start cold calling!

Once you have some value-added material to pass along, contact your customers. Reach out to 2 or 3 “A” list customers and 1 “B” list customer each day. (If your list is really big, there’s a good chance that other people in your organization have had more contact than you with these customers and they might be better suited to take on some of the task). Each day, work through your 2-3 A-list customers and your 1 B-list customer.

Once a week dial in a couple C-list customers. Once a quarter contact your D-list customers (and you can probably contact them just through email). There’s a good chance that your E-list customers are not going to be profitable enough for you to get more business from them. (In fact, I’m willing to bet that you looked at many of the customers on your E-list and thought “I hope I don’t have to contact them!”).

As you work through your list, always be on the lookout to move people from one segment to the one above it. In other words, add value to people’s lives and aim to move them up the list. When you’ve contacted everyone within a segment, start over. Based on the timing, you will probably get through the A-segment twice as fast as the B-segment, which you’ll probably get through twice as fast as the C-segment. Once you’ve added some positive value to your customer’s lives, you’ll be in a position to make an occasional offer.

Have conversations with them! Explore their purchasing habits and see if anyone else is providing them with the products or services that you could provide them.

A lot of this can be automated (which will take more than ten minutes to set up but less than ten minutes daily to maintain) if you use an autoresponder or email marketing system. Systems like AWeber.com, Streamsend.com, iContact.com, and ConstantContact.com are sites you can count on. I wouldn’t use this as an exclusive way to contact your A or B segments, but it would work to mix it in with some face-to-face or over-the-phone contact.

Now a couple words of caution:

Don’t spam your contacts! If you have less than a couple dozen contacts, it will seem strange to suddenly start calling them every week, week-in and week-out, especially if you sell smaller-ticket items. Use your judgment here and think about a reasonable about of time to contact someone. Then, contact the A segment that much, your B segment slightly less, and your C segment slightly less still.

And, make sure that you add value! If you’re “just touching base”, that’s okay but not a great sales tactic. It might be okay to do that from time to time, but make sure that you are legitimately taking an interest in your customers and what they are doing. More importantly, see if there is a way to help them do their job better or run their business more effectively. Do this first, and occasionally offer them additional sales, but keep your focus on helping them.

Related posts:

1. Solve Your Business Problems in Just 10 Minutes
2. Business Growth in Ten Minutes a Day
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Entrepreneurs are faced with innumerable marketing opportunities to grow their businesses. Speaking from experience, I have so many options when I’m looking to market my business and I’m frequently approached by business owners with a giant list of internet marketing to-do’s that they want to pursue. Blogs, social media, social bookmarking, articles, press releases, AdWords, ebooks, you name it! Being able to market your business in all of these different ways is exciting…but it can also be overwhelming. And I’ve found that when business owners are faced with a lot of choices, they end up trying not to do too much at once and they don’t do any of those choices very well.

So here’s what I would advise:

If you are marketing by yourself…
Let’s say that you are considering some of the standard internet marketing opportunities out there: Social media, blogs, articles, press releases, and reports. It can be tempting to dive into all of these but you’ll just end up doing a sub-par job. Your social media won’t necessarily connect with your readers, your blogs will be few and far between (and will often begin with the sentence “I haven’t blogged in a while…”), your articles and press releases won’t get pushed out as frequently as they need to be, and your reports will just get delayed. I see this happen so often from businesses that try to take on too much at once.

If you are going to do your marketing all by yourself (without any outsourced or delegated help), you should pick just a couple options and become consistent at them before building outwards. For example, start blogging. Once you’ve become consistent with that, add Twitter. Once you’ve become consistent with that, write articles. Once you’ve become consistent with that, add reports.

This system works because you’re developing good marketing habits one at a time, which will help you to succeed far more effectively than if you tried to add a whole bunch of marketing habits at once.

If you are marketing with help from others…
Of course, it’s a little different if you get help from others because you can outsource a lot of your internet marketing and there are less consistency habits you need to manage. However, you’ll still want to build methodically and strategically, adding a few at a time. Otherwise, you could end up with a lot of loose ends that need to be managed.

So, for example, you might manage your own Twitter account but you might pass article writing and blog posting off to an assistant. Later, add reports and press releases. Because you’re paying someone to do this, it’s not a matter of building up good marketing habits for you; rather, it’s a matter of managing someone else to do the work and remembering to follow up with them.

The web offers so many great marketing opportunities and it will continue to do so as new technologies develop. You can take advantage of these opportunities but you should do so in a methodical way to ensure that you do each one with excellence – and make sure it’s entrenched in your schedule – before moving on to the next one.

Happy Marketing!

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Getting stuff done: Oh how business owners and freelancers everywhere love a to-do list that is completely crossed off! I know that I always sleep way more soundly at night when I’ve actually crossed everything off my day’s to-do list!

Each day, business owners face a variety of tasks to be done. Some are fun and easy, but not all of them are! There might be boring projects or very challenging projects, or projects that seem big and unwieldy. No matter what kind of project you face, the fastest, easiest, and most efficient way to get stuff done is when you…

Achieve critical mass quickly.

Critical mass is a term used in science to describe the amount of fissile material needed to sustain a nuclear reaction. For us non-science-types, it’s basically the amount of something you need initially in order to facilitate the creation of the rest of that thing.

Every project you do has a critical mass. It’s the amount of work that you expend at the beginning to bring the project to the point where you can coast a bit – where you can do the work quickly and easily (and even enjoyably) with a lot less effort than it took at the very beginning.

Each project will be different and everyone has a different idea of when they achieve critical mass on a project. But, every project does achieve critical mass at some point! I’ve found that e-books tend to achieve critical mass at the 50% point while blogs tend to achieve critical mass after the first or second paragraph. As I work with clients, I’ve found that some businesses (like coaching and freelancing that rely on the skills of the owner) achieve critical mass much faster than those businesses that rely on a lot of up-front development (like technical or web development). Even your day will hit a point of critical mass. If you start your day at 9 in the morning, you’ll likely hit critical mass at about 10am and sustain it through to about 2pm or 3pm when you start to slow down a bit.

Here’s why it matters to you:

The faster you achieve critical mass on something, the easier it will be to get that thing done. Find your peak work time when you’re most focused and energetic and start on a whole bunch of projects. Get critical mass as quickly as possible. (Yes, you might go back and have to revise something later during editing; that’s okay. The point is to get as far as you can as fast as you can). Once you’ve achieved critical mass, the rest of the project will go very quickly. If you want, have your assistant or colleague help you achieve critical mass on a project before passing it off to you to run with it.

Think of each of the projects you work on in the day. Over the next few days, figure out what the point of critical mass is for each project and work to achieve that. Critical mass achievement is a focused, creative, intense burst of effort that will result in the core of whatever you are trying to create. Later, you’ll add more but the effort will be faster and easier.

It’s like an airplane: It takes more fuel to get off the ground than it does to fly through the sky. Likewise, your projects will require a lot of fuel to get off the ground, too, but once it gets airborne, you’ll glide smoothly.

Good luck!

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2. Good ideas… on paper
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Confessions of a Twitter Virgin – I tweet, you tweet and we all tweet. Or do we? Ali has many great points on how twitter can expand your business potential. However, the best practice is humanness first, business second. As Ali found out, Twitter can not only help with business it can also help on the personal side.

Tips on Persuading Effectively – Persuasion vs. Manipulation do they both mean the same? Many may think they are closely related. The two differ in many ways. This is a great read with some pertinent tips on how to better your persuasive skills.

What I Learned From My Broadband Blackout – Christine has the right mindset here. In today’s high tech world more often than not we forget to unplug. Even if it’s only for a few minutes each day it’s a must for everyone. What a great story!

Is That Client Legit or Just a Tire Kicker? – Don’t waste your time with clients who are not serious. When anyone starts a new business they welcome all potential clients. Why not? You need the work right? Don’t fall into the shopper trap. You will find some really good points on how to keep the tire kickers at bay.

Remembering How to Relax – Leaving work behind can be tough at times. . How effective can you truly be if you’re tired, stressed and your family is not speaking to you? Just one of the many great points in this read. I recommend this to everyone, not just business owners.

010 Virtual Assistant Podcast – Tech Tools For Collaboration Part 4 – If you’ve read most of my blog posts then you know I’m all about outsourcing and using virtual assistants.  If you’re looking to hire a VA or have ever just thought about it, I highly recommend these podcasts. Cliff continues to provide some great insight in the client side of this growing industry.

Catching Lightning Bugs – Laurie puts a fun twist on how to look at marketing. We all differ on our view that’s human nature. Her main point here is simplifying the way you interpret things. I have my jar ready, how about you?

There was a lot of good reads this week. Be sure the check out HeatherVilla StumbleUpon for a full list of my favorites.

Have a great weekend and don’t get sunburned at the beach!

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