Heather Villa » Colleague

Article Submissions in 10 Minutes a Day – Part 4

Heather Villa, CMA, MBA, MSM — Thu, 14 Oct 2010 12:38:48 +0000

In the past few articles of Tips In Ten, I have shown you how to create articles for online distribution, which I think is the best way that business owners have to promote themselves online. There are other good ways which accomplish a variety of business promotion goals, but articles give great value.

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 at the beginning of the section you want to bold and at the end to “shut the bold function off”. So, if you wrote: Heather Villa is a business 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 business 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 and put the URL in the quotation marks. Then, you write the name of the website and follow it up with a .

So, if you wrote: Heather Villa is a business consultant, 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 , , and and the close tags are , , and .

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.

Creating and Managing a Marketing Plan

Heather Villa, CMA, MBA, MSM — Wed, 29 Sep 2010 18:45:39 +0000

It seems like every time you turn around there is another “amazing marketing opportunity” for businesses to invest in. Depending on the business and the market they serve (as well as other factors like their budget) these can range from billboards to business cards to Twitter to websites to viral campaigns to email newsletters to podcasts to proposals to television commercials to publicity stunts… and the list goes on and on.

There are so many things and each one takes some kind of investment – a combination of time, money, and/or effort – to bring it to fruition. Which ones to pursue? Which ones to avoid? And how do you decide?

In this Tips In Ten, I’ll show you an easy way to create and manage your marketing plan so that you will be able to instantly judge which marketing opportunities are right for you, and which ones you currently use are working for you.

Before we get to your marketing plan, you’ll need to do some preliminary work first. You’ll need to figure out how your sales funnel works. Different businesses have different processes to help a customer progress from being a prospect to being a satisfied customer.

For example: A freelance writing colleague of mine knows that his business is based around a simple sales funnel of (1) researching a potential topic at a magazine or writing need at a business; (2) querying or proposing projects to the magazine or business; (3) delivering his work.

Or another example: A local fashion store uses this sales funnel. (1) It applies a variety of advertising to attract customers to its location; (2) its highly trained sales staff interact with customers and sell to them; (3) customers find the clothes they want and purchase them.

These two very different sales funnels illustrate how different businesses get business in different ways. Knowing this empowers these two businesses to market more effectively.

The freelance writer, for example, knows that he doesn’t need to use advertising to attract clients to his website since he actively searches for work. The local fashion store knows that it can’t easily tie pay-per-click marketing to a specific in-store sale so it doesn’t need to include that marketing channel.

Disclaimer: Of course, it’s okay to try other forms of marketing, and it’s possible that your business has more than one sales funnel. But knowing what it is can help you to eliminate what you don’t need and maximize what you do need.

Now, here’s what you can do in just ten minutes a day to create and manage your marketing plan:

Week One

On the first day, spend 10 minutes writing down what your sales funnel is and where various marketing efforts fit in. If you have several steps to turn a prospect into a client, some of your marketing might be appropriate for cold prospects while other marketing might convince warm prospects to become hot prospects. There’s a good chance you’ll have a few marketing efforts left over that you don’t know where to put. It’s likely those are wasting your money, time, and effort.

On day two, spend 10 minutes to tie each marketing effort to a metric related to the part of the sales funnel it’s in. If you use Twitter, for example, to drive warm prospects (i.e., your Twitter followers) to your site, your metric will be measured in your site analytics – specifically, your traffic sources. This metric-creation will be easy for some elements and hard for others. Do your best and I’ll admit that it’s not always possible but it should be possible for a majority of your marketing.

On day three, spend 10 minutes creating a goal for your metric. Your goal needs to take a couple of parts:

First, it should be to improve the metric to some specific amount. It should be measurable. For example: “I want to increase Twitter-sourced visitors by 15% next month”.

Second, it should be tied to an activity that you do. You might say, “I plan to increase my Tweets to 10 a day” (and then, of course, you’ll want to track that because if 10 Tweets a day drives only a 5% increase in Twitter traffic, you might need to consider 30 Tweets a day to get a full 15% increase).

On day four, spend 10 minutes to think about what specific step your customer needs to take to move from one part of your sales funnel to the next. For example, once your Twitter-source traffic gets there, what should they do? If “Follow me on Twitter” is the most prominent thing on your page, you’re in danger of having that traffic fall out of your sales funnel because they’re already following you. If you get no outside traffic and most of it is from Twitter, minimize your “Follow me on Twitter” button. (And the reverse works, too, of course: if your goal is to create followers on Twitter and your website gets lots of search engine traffic, then maximize your “Follow me on Twitter” button.) Make sure that you know what each step is, ALL THE WAY THROUGH your sales funnel. You’ll have gaps where you do not have enough (or any) marketing. In the example I’m using here, let’s say that this exercise has sho wn you that you are not building relationships with hot prospects to turn them into customers.

On day five, spend 10 minutes to think about how to fill in the gaps you’ve identified earlier. In the above example, you might think about a subscription email newsletter.

Okay, week one is done! Now you’ve done the hard part. Now you can move on to the next step which will be maintaining this model.

Week Two (and Following)

Spend 10 minutes a day to review your current marketing. Ask yourself:

Is it delivering what you need it to deliver? (i.e., are you on track to get a 15% increase in Twitter-source traffic?)

Are you fulfilling the “action” part of the goal? (i.e., are you Tweeting 10 times a day?)

Is it still contributing to your sales funnel in the same way? (i.e., is that traffic still warm prospects and, if so, are they moving to the next step in the funnel?)

When you encounter an additional marketing technique, spend a moment during your daily ten minutes to ask yourself:

Does this new marketing technique improve something I currently have? If yes, then consider investing in it; if no, then decide whether it will send you the same amount of the same kind of traffic. (For example, if something purports to be the next Twitter, you need to decide whether it will send you the same warm prospects that Twitter is sending you now.

Now, in only ten minutes a day, you have a marketing plan that is closely tied to your business and it will help you to evaluate all future marketing techniques against what works for you.

Definitely NOT going to work! (Surprising Reasons)

Heather Villa, CMA, MBA, MSM — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 00:31:53 +0000

I had my first day today at an attempt of a Polyphasic Sleep Cycle. Unfortunately it is going to be very short lived. However, not for the reasons I originally thought.

Everything I had read spoke about the crash and burn, the crankiness, the inability to begin sleeping when you first try, the difficulty of waking up, the being worn out and tired.

That was not the issue for me for the most part.

So early AM I went to bed at 2:30am and was supposed to get up at 3:30am, but my alarm clock failed. I ended up waking up at 6:30 and then resumed the pattern correctly again. I slept from 7:30 to 8:15, that cycle went fine. Then I slept again from 12:15pm to 1pm and that cycle went fine. I also slept again from 5pm to 5:45pm and that cycle went fine. When I say fine, I mean in regards to waking up, falling asleep and feeling okay during the awake periods.

The issue at hand for me was having to ‘go to sleep’. Since the whole objective of this experiment was to see if the Polyphasic sleep cycle would permit me to be more productive, by allowing me to manipulate my schedule around my most productive times, having it impair my productivity proves the experiment futile.

The issue was, at 5pm when I needed to go to sleep, I did not want to. Not because I was not tired, but because I was in the middle of amending a tax return for a client, had a colleague I needed to call back, a potential client I needed to return their call and a half a dozen emails I needed to review.

The problem with Polyphasic Sleep, especially using such frequent cycles, is that you have to stick to the Regimen and you cannot deter from it or you will crash and burn and your body will not get to adapt to the program like it needs to.

I never had a problem sleeping, nor do I have a problem meeting deadlines, I just wanted to see if using an alternate sleeping method would permit me to work during the night a bit, as well as work during the day a bit. Unfortunately, this program is not for me.

I am not completely against it, as a matter of fact, I think in a few weeks I might try a biphasic sleep schedule which is dividing your sleep into two parts (in other words, sleeping shorter at night time and having a nap in the day), however a five sleep cycle polyphasic system limits your ability to work or be up for a continuous period of time, and this affected my productivity more so than giving me extra hours in a day will increase my productivity.

I do think that this could work for many people and I have read plenty of success stories, however, for me – when I am preparing a tax return – nothing can stop me! Not even Sleep!

Polyphasic Sleep Experiment Begins: Pre-Day or Day 1.

Home Office: Post 3: 50% Done

Heather Villa, CMA, MBA, MSM — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 00:11:11 +0000

It has been awhile and I have been a bit sick with the flu, but I wanted to update my readers on my home office (post 1 here and post 2 here). We are about 50% completed.

The new AC has been installed.

The new desk has been installed.

The two 24″ monitors were swapped out for two 27″ monitors (and a beefier video card and power supply to boot – thanks @dszp).

The curtains were installed.

Still pending:

3rd 27″ monitor (my colleague Scott is calling this my Space Shuttle Pilot Cabin)

The ‘back up of my back up’ solution (which is still undecided).

New Chair (mine is 6 years old)

What I am going to do with the South East Corner which currently has the ‘utility shelf’ – I am thinking of a built in corner bookshelf w/ a little sitting bench or something similar.

As usual check out the picture feed below.

However, I wanted to take a minute to tell you all – that this new office (apart from the files of work that I have loaded on my desk due to being sick) has made me feel more productive.

Going to work in the office, no longer seems like a chore, my office has become my sanctuary in a way. I am being more productive, more organized and have space to expand and stretch (even with a file mess) without feeling cluttered.

I know many of my clients (and readers) work from home, and many of you have children (and I am currently raising my niece, so I now know how it feels), but investing in your own area – your own working space that the door can be shut and you have everything you need (remember my office was a second master bedroom, I have a bathroom and a mini-fridge in the office) can enable you to shut the door and shut out the distractions.

Just an idea!

Get the flash player here: http://www.adobe.com/flashplayer

Getting Organized and HAPPY,

Update on Home Office

Heather Villa, CMA, MBA, MSM — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 00:08:15 +0000

Just a really short note to let you know that the Ductless A/C unit got installed today. A colleague of mine is coming to take the portable unit off my hands tomorrow

If you don’t know ‘what’ I am talking about, check out my earlier blog post here.

Otherwise – this is just a quick update to let you know where we are at. This may all get done much quicker than the three months I thought it would. Thanks to great readers like Erson, Leo and David, I have all my technical questions sorted out and am ordering my Video card and new power supply (evidently it is better to be safe with a more robust power supply with the new video card) tomorrow!

I added some more pictures to my gallery:

Get the flash player here: http://www.adobe.com/flashplayer

Getting Organized and Happy,

The mirage of perfectionism

Heather Villa, CMA, MBA, MSM — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 13:47:19 +0000

Perfectionism sounds like a great ideal to strive for in business and in project management but it is a mirage – a hazy image on the horizon that will never be achieved.

It doesn’t matter whether we’re talking about a large business, a small business, a start-up, a department, or a project that is being managed within an organization – businesses need to work towards high quality completion but NOT perfectionism.

Here are some great examples (“war stories” from colleagues, mostly) that illustrate why perfectionism should not be the end-goal:

On a project for a large organization, one shareholder wanted to strive for perfectionism. Their seemingly small changes/recommendations/demands/improvements (intended to turn a great project into a perfect project) cost just as much to make at the near-to-finished stage as the rest of the project cost to do, and doubled the timeline. Their changes were minor – a period here an extra line there, another review, a semi colon instead of a comma, etc. Their effort to take “great” and make it “perfect” doubled the budget and timeline… on a project in which the audience would not notice the changes that were made.

A marketing website meant to capture the attention of prospects could have been rapidly deployed with effective results, getting prospects signing up quickly. Unfortunately, the company went through hundreds of drafts by dozens of writers because it wasn’t perfect. At the time of this writing, six months after the project was supposed to be live, it is not live yet.

Back when the housing market was better than it is today, one colleague was waiting to buy a house. He patiently waited through the tiniest of interest rate changes, calculating that one more point might be the perfect time to buy. He was not impressed when I pointed out to him that the months of high rent he was paying in the meantime would surpass any savings he made on the single point of interest.

Here’s where I see it most frequently… and where it is most relevant for small business owners: If you are in sales or have a sales department where you work, I predict that this is one of the biggest challenges. If you put all of your sales people into a room and ask them about their sales, the ones who are less successful will tell you that they are still working on their pitch or their presentation material or trying to perfect the marketing brochure or PowerPoint to use. And the most successful ones? They have material that is “good enough” – it is high quality, there aren’t glaring errors, and it’s accurate – but it’s not perfect. And yet they are successful because they know that these elements do not have to be perfect.

You might notice something else I’ve hinted at: The cost (of money, time, and effort) to take something from poor to good and then from good to great can be equivalent to (or even less than) the cost to take something from great to perfect. In sports, an amateur athlete needs to do less work to go from good to great than an Olympic athlete needs to do in order to go from great to perfect. And if business is a sport, no one is expecting Olympic-style performances. They’re costly and only come once a year. What people really want is consistent business wins, day-in and day-out.

Business owners and project managers: Take a look at your list of projects (especially your to-do’s related to marketing and sales). How much of it is “good enough” but currently unused because it is not perfect? Try using it anyway and see what happens. I believe that your “good enough” material can be made great on-the-fly as you interact with your marketplace. And because you didn’t invest disproportionate amounts of time and money up-front to make it perfect, you’ll be willing to make changes if the marketplace tells you that it needs something different.

Trust me. It works. Perfection is a myth. Aim for great, achieve it, and succeed. Leave perfect for fairy tales.

Happy Blogging!

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Meetings: Maddeningly Mundane or Massively Meaningful?

Heather Villa, CMA, MBA, MSM — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 18:29:37 +0000

“A business without meetings is… an enjoyable place to work”.

Haha, okay that might be a serious anti-meeting sentiment but I know that most of you chuckled because deep down you feel the same way. Meetings are rarely an enjoyable experience. And yet, we have them and can’t imagine doing business without them.

In spite of my little joke, I don’t think that we need to get rid of meetings altogether. However, I think that they wouldn’t hurt to be a little more palatable.

A colleague of mine used to work as a reporter in a daily newspaper and he tells me of the apocryphal rule of newspaper writing: That the editor takes a pair of scissors and starts at the bottom and cuts off paragraph by paragraph until the article fits the space available in the paper. Thus, the most important stuff needs to be at the front. While this is (hopefully) an exaggeration, it gives us some inspiration for when we are creating agendas.

Put the most important stuff at the beginning of the meeting. Leaving it to the end is a common habit because people know that it’s a big issue and will take a lot of time so they want to spend “the rest of the meeting” on something. Unfortunately, by that point in the meeting, no one wants to spend the rest of the meeting on anything!

Also, think about whether your agenda items are informational or discussion oriented or analytical or require brainstorming. These are four very different types of activities that are often jammed into the same meeting. My advice? Put the informational stuff into an email and send it out. (And 3/4 of you are saying “But Heather, no one will read that email”… which might be true but then it’s your job to remind them that they either read the email or show up at a meeting). If you HAVE to have a meeting about informational stuff, aim for a 2 minute meeting at the start of the week to get it all out. Or, do what they used to do in school sometimes: write a memo with everyone’s name at the bottom. Pass it around and have each person initial beside their name once they’ve read it. Again, it’s elementary but if you tell people that they can either do it this way or attend another meeting, a majority of your staff will initial the memo without another word of complaint.

For your other agenda items, group discussion and analysis together in one and hold those periodically. It’s okay to have several items on the agenda, provided that they don’t take a lot of time. Set a limit on each item because discussion will often fill the amount of time allotted and if people know there’s a limit, they’ll say their piece and shut up.

Lastly, pick a good time when everyone feels smart and juicy with brainpower and pick a topic and brainstorm. In fact, it might not hurt to have a Monday morning brainstorming session from 10 to 11:30. It’s not too early for people to hate it, but early enough to get people pumped up. And if you don’t have a specific item to brainstorm, then create a topic like “How can we be more efficient in the office?”. A lot of the collaborative, creative energy and ideas that comes out of that weekly brainstorming meeting will carry many of your staff through the week.

No related posts.

When Business Growth is Bad – Part 2

Heather Villa, CMA, MBA, MSM — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 17:22:42 +0000

When entrepreneurs start a business they hope and pray that their business grows. Of course! They should! And as a consultant, I take my role very seriously in helping them see growth in their businesses.

But in my last post I mentioned that not all business growth is good. Growth that happens too fast, for example, without any warning, can cause financial, manufacturing, warehousing, and customer service problems galore.

In this blog I want to talk about another problem of too-fast growth.

Problem 2: Rapid growth that is unpredictable may decline and leave a burden on the business. I’ve seen this recently in a colleague’s business. Just two years ago, business was inferno hot for him! He was so busy he couldn’t keep up with orders for the product his business created. Then the economy slowed. Today, his business is sound enough to pay his bills and allow him to put a little away for the future so he’s not worried about feeding his family. But he is concerned about his tax bill. The spike was unexpected and when he pays taxes this year on last year’s income, he’s paying taxes out of less money this year than he was earning last year. Not only that, as a manufacturer of goods, he has a small storage unit full of unsold items. That’s because he ramped up production quickly during that busy season, but he didn’t anticipate the decline… so he was still producing a high number of goods when the slump struck.

Solution 2: When your business grows, manage it carefully. Don’t just ride the rapids with an oblivious smile. Be aware that it may eventually slow down. Make sure you have money put away for taxes and other expenses that might lag into a slower period. And, watch the warning signs very, very carefully to make sure that your production doesn’t match today’s demand… but rather, that it matches tomorrow’s demand. Warning signs might include slowing orders, but even that might be too late. Get in the habit of proactively calling your customers and estimating capacity into the future. Offering discounts on bulk orders, even when times are good and customers are willing to pay top dollar, can help you keep your finger on the pulse of your customers’ needs.

So, business growth that is not carefully managed and spikes, then falls, can also be costly for a business in inventory and warehousing, taxation (and other lagging costs).

In the next blog, I’ll talk about one more business growth problem I’ve seen.