As I help develop productivity systems and procedures for entrepreneurs and small business owners, I’ve found myself developing another type of project management system – one I call the “self-direct project management system” – for business owners who need to share their projects with staff.While most small business owners run their own businesses, they often bring in others to work for them. For example, they might have a virtual assistant a few hours a week, or they might have a web development freelancer take care of their website, or they might outsource some of the preliminary work performed for a client deliverable, or they might have a couple of staff members. Even if you are a solopreneur running a sole proprietorship, you’ll still probably have some kind of “employee” or outsourced vendor at some point in the future. In all of these cases, it’s handy to have a system that is visible for each person so both they and you can see what is going on. That’s why I call it a “self-directed project management system”, because your staff can manage their own project management and you can keep an eye on everything.

(By the way, I’m going to use the term “employee” throughout this issue but be aware that I could mean employee, virtual assistant, freelancer, outsourced vendor, or whomever you might hire to do the work).

There are several project management programs out there and many of them are pretty good. If you wanted to just use one that already exists, and if you were willing to invest the money for it, you might consider some of the following, which I’ve used:

• BaseCamp
• Wrike
• Intervals
• Zoho Projects

I’ve tried these and there are good points and bad points about each one; it really depends on your business and your work style. Also, in a lot of cases, these only give limited access for free and you need to pay to create more projects or use more features.

One complaint I have with a couple of these systems is that there are too many bells and whistles for some entrepreneurs. Some of my clients want a really simple, straightforward system that is easy to use, easy to share, and easy to customize if necessary, and they don’t want to pay money for many of the extra features that they may not use. And that’s the system I’m going to show you in this issue of Tips In Ten.

The system I’m going to show you can be set up in moments, it only takes ten minutes a day to manage all of your projects, and it is free and really simple to use. Not only that, it is far more customizable to your business than the project management systems I’ve listed above. It’s very light, and although there are no bells and whistles, it works. (And I’ve discovered that something nice and simple that works is far better than something you pay for with lots of nice features that you never use.)

System Set-up (Duration: 10 minutes)
Setting up is really easy and only takes two minutes.

Sign into GoogleDocs and open a new spreadsheet. Save it as your Master Project Management Template.

Edit it like this: In the “A” column, write “Project” then “Goal” then “Measurable” (x 2) then “Task” (x 20 or so), as I’ve done below:

Save it and you’re done.

You’ve set it up in less time than it would take you to search for and buy a piece of project management software and try to figure it out!

Apply to roles (Duration: Varies. Only a few seconds per role)
When you bring someone on board in your business to get them working for you, just open the spreadsheet, click “File” and select “Make a Copy” (which is like “Save As”). When you’re prompted to name it, give it a name related to the project team or employee it is for.

If I was going to use this for a web developer/internet marketer I’ve hired, I would save it with that role as the name: “Web Dev and Internet Marketing”.

Then, just share it with that person by sending an invitation via email.

Creating projects (Duration: Typically less than 10 minutes)
When you’ve assigned and shared a project management document with a particular employee, you can quickly and easily add projects.

Step 1: List projects: Open the file for that role (“Web Dev and Internet Marketing” in the example I’ve given) and list the projects you want them to work on across the top (“Projects”) row. In the example I’m giving, let’s say that I want them to do 2 projects – design a new website and do some internet marketing.

Step 2: Write down your goal: I like giving people the big picture of whatever project they are working so I try to put down a goal for each project.

Step 3: List measurables: Measurables are important ways for people to know if they are being successful or not. Certainly not every project has a measurable – some are as simple as “just get it done” but I’ve suggested 3 spaces in case you want to put something in.

Step 4: List tasks: This is really easy to do. Just write the due date and the task in one cell and put them in order.

Other tips
Easy color coding: When your employees use this system, all they need to do is highlight the particular project they are working in one color (I’ve used yellow) and then highlight it in another color when they are done (I’ve used red). You might also want other colors for “on hold/waiting” but try to avoid introducing too many other colors into the system. Just keep it clean and simple.

Comments: If you need to give more instructions, just use the comments features (Insert > Comment) and type your comment for that field.

When finished: When a project is completely done, just delete the whole column to keep your space uncluttered.

Using the system (for employees)
All your employees have to do is open up the file when they do your work, highlight the project they are working on, and do the work.

Using the system (for you) (Duration: Typically just a few seconds per document)
Using this system is really easy and will rarely take a full ten minutes each day, even if you have several staff. Just sign in and check for the yellow-highlighted cells.

• Are they on track?
• Is the project they are working on going to land on your desk for review?

If there is a project with nothing highlighted in yellow, follow up – they’ve either forgotten to highlight it or haven’t started yet and a quick phone call or email will resolve that.

That’s it! It’s a nice, clean, simple system that allows your employees (even if it’s a distributed workforce of temporary freelancers) to manage their projects and for you to give some oversight to it.

Related posts:

1. Project Management in 10 Minutes
2. Project management best practice: The report
3. Project Management Success Requires Flexibility

I showed you how to select a keyword rich, search engine friendly domain name and how to select a content management system that you can use to add content. And, I showed you how to create a plan that you can use to add content to your site.

In this article, the last article on the topic of informational sites, I’m going to fill in some final gaps so you can create information sites that are successful and can help grow your business over the long term. This issue is very much a “pick up the pieces” type of issue where I tie up some loose ends so that you have everything you need.

Your niche

When you are creating your niche, work hard to narrow it down to a tightly defined group. Here’s the tricky part: You need to narrow it down so that the group is focused enough to be able to be targeted appropriately, but you need it to still be a large enough group that there will be a consistent supply of content about that topic.

I can’t give you an exact description of how narrowly to define your target market, but I’ve found this rule of thumb to be helpful: If there’s a magazine published for that group of people then it’s about the right size for you. Find a list of trade journals and publications for your niche to see if it has a group large enough to merit having a magazine. If it does, you’re on track. To give you an example, if you are creating an information site for people who knit with blue yarn, you’ve probably narrowed the field too much. But if you are creating an information site for people who knit, you’re good!

Building a following

The marketing you do drives people to your site but ultimately you want those people to come back again and again and to see you as an expert so that they will contact you to buy from you. So, once you have people on your site, you want to create a following of those people to entice them to take an interest in what you have to say. There are a few ways to do this:

• Invite them to leave comments and then interact with those comments (in a positive way, of course!)

• Invite them to have their name posted on the website in the blogroll to link back to their site. That will give them a sense of ownership over the site.

• Invite them to submit guest articles to your blog. This eases the burden of writing off of your shoulders and broadens the “voice” of the blog. It also encourages more backlinking because they will likely link to your blog after that.

• Make sure you offer RSS feeds. Many blogging platforms will do this automatically for you.

• You might also want to offer a newsletter or ezine. This helps to create an audience of pre-qualified contacts (prospects!) but it also means a lot of extra work and expense for you so make sure it’s worth it before you put in all the effort.

Obviously, you will want to link back to your business’ website so that your newly generated traffic (who respects you!) can find you.

More search engine optimization

I mentioned that these sites are search engine friendly, partly because of their informational (non-commercial) nature and partly because of the keyword domain name. But there are other ways that you should optimize the site for search engines:

• Make sure that you have at least one keyword in every title.

• Throughout each blog include subheadings and make sure that each one contains a keyword.

• Add tags and categories and make sure they are keywords.

• Aim to write naturally and then go back after and add a couple more keywords throughout the content. A keyword density of 4% is an ideal density but it’s not very readable for humans so if you write first and add a couple keywords after, you’ll probably end up with 2% or 3% which will be good.

• Link to previous blog posts you’ve written (this is called “internal linking”).

• Make sure the links, alt-tags, and anchor text for other parts of your blog (such as graphics, outgoing links, etc.) contain the keywords you want to hit.

Writing content

The content you create needs to be helpful to your readers. That’s the only way they will come back again for more. That doesn’t mean it has to be long but it should be long enough to provide value. Aim for every article to be between 250 and 1000 words. It can vary in length, depending on the subject matter. If you have a choice, you may find it easier and more effective to write five 250 word articles – one every weekday. That will ensure rich content for your clients and can help you to stay motivated through the process without taking up too much of your time.

Some bloggers take the easy way out and just republish articles that were posted on other article distribution sites. Google may “punish” your site for doing that, though, because they are working hard at addressing issues of duplicate content.

If you start running out of ideas, ask your audience what they want to read about!

One trick that works really well

One trick that I’ve found can work well to create a consistent attraction to your site is to release regular reports. Make these brief, downloadable pdf files. They don’t have to be long and you don’t have to publish them really frequently. But a five page report every quarter should be sufficient. Choose a topic that is of interest to your audience and explore it in-depth, offering advice and some valuable ideas, and perhaps linking back to your blog. Not only are pdf’s indexable by search engines, they also help to contribute to your credibility.

Two success tips

Success Tip # 1: Start and don’t stop. Your information site can do really well if you work hard at it and don’t give up. And, the longer it remains online and the more valuable content that gets added, the more successful it becomes and each success grows upon the next. The secret, though, is not to give up!

Success Tip # 2: Once you have some momentum with your first site, start up a second one. Run that one in much the same way. Over time, that one will gain its own momentum and then you can start a third… and a fourth… and a fifth… etc. Eventually, you may not need to market anywhere else because of the volume of customers that you get from your information sites.

Wrap-up

Information sites can offer you very good business growth opportunities. By following what you’ve learned in this Tips In Ten issue and the three issues that came before, you will have all the pieces you need to be successful. The only other thing you’ll need to do is mixing in diligent consistency!

Related posts:

1. Success with Informational Sites – Part 2
2. Success with Informational Sites – Part 3
3. Success with Informational Sites – Part 1

But, as I mentioned at the end of the last article, informational sites can fall flat if the site owner doesn’t have a plan. The reason is this: We live in an instant culture. We want everything and we want it now. In general, I like that I can shop 24/7 on the web or go out in the middle of the night to the convenience store if I want to. However, some things still require patience and building a successful informational site is one of those things.

Without a plan, you will start your informational site with great excitement and passion and you’ll pour hours of work into it. But 3-6 months in, you’ll start to get frustrated at the lack of results and you might also run out of things to say. So you let it lapse for a day. Then a week. Then two weeks. Then you find yourself not having touched your site in a month. All that work at the beginning was wasted and just when your site had the potential to break through to success, you let it go.

Creating your plan

A plan will help. You may still feel frustration but you won’t run out of things to say and you will have a framework that you can stick to, to help you keep moving forward. After all, if you want to have a successful informational site, you need to give it time. For niches that aren’t very big or popular, you might see results in 3-6 months of diligent, consistent effort. For really big niches that are very popular, you might need 1-2 years of that same diligent, consistent effort before you start seeing a return.

To help you add helpful information day-in and day-out for months, you need a plan. So, what should be in your informational site plan?

1.    Start by writing out a paragraph or two about your target audience. Who are they? How do they find your site? What’s on their mind when they get to your site? What are they hoping to come away with?

2.    Next, list all of the keywords you want to hit. You’ll have a bunch that you want, and you’ll want to make sure that they are integrated in. I’ll talk about how in the next issue. Keeping them listed altogether in one document is helpful.

3.    Then, start writing down ideas that you want to write about. I’ll talk more about creating content and building links in the next issue and you can use that information to finish building out your plan. However, to give you an estimate on what to aim for, I’d suggest that you publish at least once a week (and preferably 2-4 times a week) and I’d suggest that you create enough ideas to last you for 6 months. So if you decide you’re going to publish 4 times a week and you want to create 6 months of content ideas, you need to end up with 4 x 26 weeks… 104 ideas. If you can create more ideas then do so! For some of my work, I try to get an entire year of ideas ahead of time. Of course, you don’t have to publish them in order or on specific days, and there’s no rule that says you HAVE to publish one of these ideas if you suddenly have a better idea, but this gives you a bank of ideas that you can draw from. Also, be sure t o set up a threshold so that once you’ve gone through half to two-thirds of the content ideas, you site down and do another 6 months’ of ideas. That way, you’ll never run out and you’ll always stay ahead of yourself.

4.    Next, decide what the workflow is. Are you going to write the content yourself? Are you going to hire someone else to do it? Are you going to start the articles and pass them to someone else to polish? If you hire someone else to do it, what is your budget for this? How much are you willing to invest? Since the idea is to help you position yourself to sell more, and perhaps to generate some advertising revenue, it might be worth hiring someone to write the content for you. That will let you focus on your business while you delegate this marketing project to an assistant.

Once you have a plan in place, you can start to write. I would write at least one month’s worth of content ahead of time and schedule it to publish. Obviously, this won’t count if your content is time-sensitive but most informational sites don’t have a lot of time sensitive content. So if you can write and publish content ahead of time, and always stay ahead of yourself, you’ll be able to maintain your momentum on your site for even longer.

Marketing your site

Once you’ve created content and have set it up to start publishing, you will want to start generating an audience. There are a few ways to do this but I want to first address the question of when you should start marketing. Some people might start their content first and let it grow for a while before start marketing, under the assumption that people should only come to the site once there is actually content there for them to read. However, I would argue that both your site and your marketing will take time to spread out through the internet so marketing now isn’t going to send such a huge influx of people that it will hurt you. In fact, some of the earliest adopters of anything (not just informational sites but any product or service) are among its best proponents and evangelists and they will “go to bat” for you and help to promote you.

Here are a few ways that I would recommend marketing your site:

• AdWords. These will cost you money, but it could be what you need to create that initial burst of an audience. Set a budget and turn it off after a while, but just get some people there early to see what they do on your site: How long they stay, what the most popular content is, etc.

• Articles. Creating and distributing articles around the web with a backlink to the informational site can help to get traffic from very targeted searchers who are looking for more information beyond what your article provided. This won’t cost anything, although it does take up extra time.

• Email signature line. I think this is a good way to share your site’s domain without heavily marketing it.

• “Just blogged” announcements, which you can set up on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Squidoo, FriendFeed, StumbleUpon, and a bunch of other places. If every time you publish some new information, you push out a link to all of these places, you’ll help to market your site.

• Search engine optimization. In my opinion, this is the informational site’s real strength and you need to make sure that you are optimizing your site as much as possible so that it searches well and appears high in search results.

We’re nearing the end of our discussion of informational sites and how to create a successful one that can help you in your business. In the next issue, I’m going to fill in a bunch of gaps and provide you with a bunch of ideas and tips you need to know about in order to create a successful informational site.

Related posts:

1. Success with Informational Sites – Part 1
2. Success with Informational Sites – Part 2
3. Success with Informational Sites – Part 4

In this article, I want to give you some details on getting started with your first informational site. I’m going to talk about choosing a domain name and setting up the site. But in order for you to get the most out of this article, you’ll want to have done the steps I outlined in the previous article:

• Identify your sub-niches
• Find the intersection between what they are looking for and what you provide
• Plan your format (such as a blog).

If you haven’t done that yet, you’ll want to do it now. Even if you’re not 100% sure what target audience you want as a niche, it’s a helpful exercise to start. Then, when you will be ready in the future to work on this, much of the legwork will already be done.

Find a domain name

Once you’ve decided on those things, you can now think about your domain name. Domain names have gone through an interesting metamorphosis since their early usage in the internet’s earliest days. Today, businesses will often pick names for their corporate site that reflect the name of the organization. My site, HeatherVilla.com, is a good example of this. I do this because I want to brand my name so that when people think of me, they can type my name into their browser’s address bar and get to my site.

But informational sites are going to be really keyword friendly and highly targeted to your niche. People are rarely going to remember and type the name of the site into their browser. Instead, they are going to search for information on whatever your topic is and click on whatever comes up in the search engine results. If it’s really helpful, they will bookmark it and visit again. There is rarely a time when they will actually type in the domain name into the address bar.

Because of that, you can choose domain names that aren’t easily necessarily memorable or associated with your brand, but are instead chosen because they are search engine friendly. These domain names can be longer as long as they have the keywords you want in them. So, let’s build off of the example we started last week to show you what I mean: Let’s say that a sales coach is going to build an informational website for soon-to-be entrepreneurs. Instead of using a branded name that is borrowed from the name of the company, they may choose something that is far more keyword rich and search engine friendly. Off the top of my head (and I haven’t checked to see if this actually exists), that business might consider something like sales-coaching-selling-coach.com. This might be a long and annoying domain name for prospects to have to type in under normal circumstances but they will very rarely (if ever) type in that name. However, it can search reall y well for the keywords that are contained within the domain name.

To choose the best domain name, start by looking at the list you made from last week’s Tips In Ten in which you identified what content your target audience would be looking for. From that list, try to figure out what they would search to find that information. (Make a couple of test searches yourself to see).

Then, go to the Google Keyword Tool and type in some of those search terms. Google will give you an approximate number of people who search for that keyword every month. You should get a big list and you can pick several of the keywords or a combination that makes sense. The example of sales-coaching-selling-coach.com illustrates a few potential keywords – “sales coaching”, “selling coach” – that were squeezed together to create a long domain name that is keyword rich.

Choose a platform

Choosing a domain name is only part of the process. You also will want to find a platform to publish your content. You may want to choose:

• A regular site (which might be commonly created in html)
• A wiki
• A blog
• A Squidoo site (Note: You cannot get a custom top level domain name for Squidoo.)

I like a blog because they are easy to create and use and fresh content is always visible to your audience without them having to hunt around. As well, blogs are often automatically set up with RSS feeds and other widgets that can improve a user’s experience. Most importantly, I like blogs because they are a content management system: You can upload content and manage it from a central dashboard, allowing you to prewrite and schedule content or edit content without having to jump into the code to do it.

WordPress is my favorite platform - it’s the one I use most frequently – although Blogger is another favorite for website users. To create a WordPress blog for your informational site, buy some hosting and a domain from a web hosting company and download WordPress from www.wordpress.com. Upload it to your server and get started.

Yes, I realize that I’ve just described a fairly complicated process in one sweeping paragraph but everyone will have a different experience, depending on who they buy their web hosting from. For example, GoDaddy.com gives customers the ability to automatically upload WordPress to their host without having to go to WordPress.com. And if you use a platform other than WordPress, you may have to do completely different steps.

So, the bottom line is that you need to find a content management system (like a blog). Choosing and uploading your content management system can be time consuming and is obviously critical to your informational site’s success, but it is only one step in a much larger process.

Create a plan

Once you have chosen your CMS system, and you’ve got everything all working together (i.e. the domain name correctly takes a user to the website) then you need to put together a plan.

In my experience, people start these information sites with great dreams, but very little planning, and then they get frustrated and stop working on their site after a while. Next week, I’m going to show you what you need to do to create a plan for a successful informational site.

Related posts:

1. Success with Informational Sites – Part 4
2. Success with Informational Sites – Part 3
3. Success with Informational Sites – Part 1

So, over the next 4 articles, you’ll read about information sites (some people refer to these as Content sites) and I will guide you step by step through the process of setting them up and succeeding with them. But first, I need to make sure we’re all on the same page so let’s start by talking about what they are and why they are important.

Informational sites are exactly what their name implies: Sites that are rich in information. In many cases, they are presented in the form of a blog (and that is how I tend to use them) or they contain other ways to communicate information, such as articles, reports, wikis, links to other sites, etc.

What separates information sites from other sites is that they don’t sell anything. They are information only: Just informative content as far as the eye can see! However, just because they have lots of content but don’t sell, don’t write them off as money-losing, time wasters. On the contrary! Information sites can generate you a lot of money and I will show you how.

Think of information sites as resource centers for a niche market to visit in order to get the information they want about a specific topic. They need to be rich in the subject matter that your audience is looking for.

So, the next big question you’re wondering is…

Why would I want an informational site?

Good question! And, if you’re not sure about informational sites in general then you might be wondering why you’d want to pour your efforts into a separate site… after all, why not just make your own business’ site an informational site, right?

Informational sites have some advantages over building a resource base on your own site:

• Informational sites give the appearance of being an unbiased resource center. In general, I’m sure that the information you provide would be unbiased, regardless of whether it’s on your site or on an informational site, but the customer’s perception can often be mistaken. They’ll think “of course the business is saying that; they’re trying to get me to buy something.” Even if it’s not true, that’s consumer psychology: They tend to trust more the information that seems “separate” from the business. So an informational site creates a “one step removed” site that makes it easy for you to provide information without seeming biased.

• Informational sites help to position you. Which business would you trust more: A business that sells something and that’s it, or a business that sells something AND selflessly provides a learning center? Of course the learning center business tends to be positioned as an expert (and therefore more trustworthy and able to command higher rates). But for reasons given in the previous bullet point, that needs to take place on a different site.

• Informational sites give you a “laboratory” where you can express your ideas and try out different things. Because of the volume of material you post, you can create content and try out different ideas and see how they are accepted. If you develop a great new coaching technique and all of your informational site readers love it, then maybe you can think about marketing it on its own. Or if your readers hate it, then you know that you should cut it out of your processes and move on. This laboratory helps you create and disseminate and test thought-leadership.

• Informational sites that have regular content also help you to generate an audience who might not normally follow a business’ site or blog but who do crave information. So, you get a bigger share of an audience.

• Informational sites are also very search engine friendly – for a few reasons that we’ll be talking about in upcoming Tips In Ten issues – so they help people to find “you” even if your own business’ website doesn’t turn up that well in search results.

For these reasons, informational sites are highly valuable assets that every business should own. But I would add yet another reason that informational sites are so valuable (but let me first clarify that this reason should NOT be your primary reason for starting an informational site, though it can be an important secondary reason):

• nformational sites can provide valuable ad revenue from people who click through ads placed on your informational site.

How should I start?

Here’s the process that I use when I begin an informational site:

1.    Start by thinking about who your target audience is for your business. Remember that whatever you decide to do for an informational site, you want it to be related to your business somehow because you are attracting your target audience so you can hopefully serve them some day and because this site can help to position you as an expert. (Besides, why would you want to split your focus between the subject matter of your business and some other subject matter? It’s less productive that way). So start by listing your target audience and try to narrow the niche to very specific audiences. For example, you might be a sales coach for small businesses but you can probably narrow it down further than that to “would-be entrepreneurs”, “MLM entrepreneurs”, “recent start-ups”, and “small businesses that are about 1 year old”. There, you’ve got 4 niches that you might want to consider creating informational s ites for.

2.    Once you’ve thought about your target audience, now it’s time to think about what information they are looking for. You want to find the “intersection” between what you do and what they need. Once you find that “intersection”, you’ll need to focus all of your content there. So, let’s say that you choose to start with an informational site for would-be entrepreneurs. The “intersection” between your business and their needs might include information about sales basics, the importance of sales to various aspects of the business, the sales process, etc. I would list as many topics as I could think of, aiming to have 100 or more topics. You might actually end up with a couple of different ideas for sites for a single niche. Just pick one and work on it first.

3.    Plan the format that you want to use. We’ll talk more about this in an upcoming Tips In Ten, but in general you need to decide if you are going to create a blog, a Squidoo lens, a site that is full of articles (but with a different structure than a blog), a wiki (which only you update), etc. There are lots of options and in an upcoming Tips In Ten I’ll talk about why I prefer blogs.

Okay, put your pens down! You’ve done enough for today. Watch for the next article of Tips In Ten when we talk further about informational sites and the business-building opportunity they provide you.

Related posts:

1. Success with Informational Sites – Part 2
2. Success with Informational Sites – Part 3
3. Success with Informational Sites – Part 4

Squidoo is a site in which users generate content on their pages – called “lenses” – using customizable modules that can be engaging and interactive. They are not quite blogs, which are like constantly updated online journals, and they are not quite like websites which tend to be static. Instead, they are sort of a cross between the two: Good lenses are constantly updated but tend not to have a journalistic format. Squidoo is informative but fresh and gives information from a specific point of view.

Why am I telling you all of this? Lots of people haven’t heard of Squidoo or they chalk Squidoo up as being “just another site”. However, Squidoo has a PageRank of 7 out of 10 (that’s pretty good) and according to Alexa they are one of the 500 most-visited sites in the world (and they are one of the 300 of most visited sites in the US).

So, you might be thinking, “creating a lens means just one more thing to think about in my marketing”. In a way that’s true but this is a project that you can easily outsource or you can do it yourself in just 10 minutes a day.

The first ten minute Squidoo project: Take a look around

So, here’s the first thing you should do. Go to http://squidoo.com and visit some of the lenses. Some will be garbage (just like lots of blogs or websites out there) and some will be great (just like lots of blogs or websites out there). Click through a bunch, search for topics that interest you, and see what people are saying in your industry.

The second ten minute Squidoo project: Brainstorm the possibilities

Next, think about what you want to do on Squidoo. If you want to improve your website’s search engine optimization with great anchor texts pointing to your site from a high PageRank site, this might be one good use for a Squidoo lens (or ten Squidoo lenses). Think about how you can create high quality Squidoo lenses on various topics. Brainstorm all of the topics you can do:

• Create a lens about you
• Create a lens about your business
• Create a lens about each of your products or services
• Create a lens about your industry
• Create a lens about your target market

There you go! I’ve started you off by giving you five types of lenses that should help you create ten or more lenses.

The third ten minute Squidoo project: Think about modules

When I first got into Squidoo, I would go from the brainstorming stage (the previous step) right to the building stage (the next step) and didn’t end up with lenses that I really liked or that really generated a lot of traffic.

Since then, I’ve added another step in between and that has made a world of difference for me. In this step, you should decide what you want to accomplish with your lens:

• Do you want high ad revenue?
• Do you want lots of click-throughs to your website?
• Do you want people to pick up the phone and call you?
• Do you want people to email you?

Be specific and this will help you to create a lens that drives your audience to do what you want them to do.

Then, go check out the modules you can create in Squidoo (there are lots – some will be relevant to you and some won”t be relevant to you) and decide what you want to do with your lens. If you don’t have an account in Squidoo just yet, don’t worry; you can see a big selection of modules here: http://www.squidoo.com/module.

So, take a look at the modules and think about which ones will contribute to your lens goals. Maybe you want to start with some information about your products and finish with a description of your business and somewhere in the middle have a link to your portfolio. If that’s the case, you know that you need 3 text modules. But maybe as you think about it, you realize that you want to position yourself as an expert so you want to reference books from Amazon that you’ve read. So you need an Amazon module as well.

Continue with this process for as long as it takes, but expect to spend about 10 minutes per lens. If you want, write notes to yourself on sticky notes (such as “Text module: Info about business” and “Amazon module: Links to top books”) and rearrange them into a way that makes sense. Squidoo makes it easy to drag and drop them wherever you want on the page but doing it ahead of time on paper helps you to create better lenses faster. You may find that you just don”t have enough content to create a compelling lens so you can drop that one or set it aside for later.

The fourth ten minute Squidoo project: Create a lens

So here’s what to do: You can sign up really fast. Less than ten minutes. More like 30 seconds. During that time you can decide whether you want collect money from ads or donate the ad revenue proceeds to charity. (I have no idea how much people generally make from these as it is not my purpose for using Squidoo. I’ve heard claims that people make hundreds or thousands of dollars but I’m into Squidoo for the marketing benefit.)

Once you’ve signed up, now it’s time to build your lens. Build it the way you’ve designed it, using the really simple drag-and-drop function to move each module where you want it. Add your text, etc. Okay, so this might take longer than ten minutes if you went really crazy with the modules. If you’re pressed for time, break it up over a couple of days.

The fifth ten minute Squidoo project: Stay active

Squidoo lenses are good if the content is relevant and fresh. Spend ten minutes a day (or at the very least, ten minutes a week) tweaking your lens and keeping the content current. If you have lots of lenses, consider rotating the effort so you touch each one at least once a week. At first, it might take you ten minutes to work on one lens but over time you’ll find that the time you spend on each lens will diminish and you might work on a few lenses in just ten minutes.

Wrap-up

There are lots of marketing opportunities out there and Squidoo offers another opportunity for businesses to promote themselves. Use this ten minute program to create compelling and action-oriented lenses to promote your business and generate an audience.

Related posts:

1. Success with Informational Sites – Part 1
2. Success with Informational Sites – Part 2
3. Success with Informational Sites – Part 3

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.

No related posts.

Why would I say this? Because failure is healthy; it’s important; and it can help you grow personally and professionally.

Someone who achieves all of their goals every day is setting goals too low.
Someone whose business is often highly profitable is probably not making additional business investments (some of which succeed and some of which fail) to strengthen their business for the long-term.
Someone who is always “great”, day in and day out, is trending towards the average and not branching out into the scary unknown.

Failure IS an option. Failure makes us pause and rethink what really matters and develop new innovations. It’s why children learn language so fast – because they’re not afraid of getting most of the words in a sentence wrong; eventually people will understand what they are saying.

Failure can happen on a number of levels:

• It can be a complete business failure. I know a few people whose first enterprises failed and now they are on their second and third enterprises, which are very successful because the first one failed.

• It can be a delivery failure. If you get an irate customer who doesn’t appreciate the service you’ve provided, you will make changes in the future and eliminate the possibility of a repeat performance.

• It can be marketing failure. A poor response doesn’t necessarily mean that you start over; just that you rethink how (and to whom) you are positioning your offer.

There are many more ways that failure can inspire new opportunities. The value of failure, though, only happens when you learn from it and build on it rather than continuing to do the same thing over and over.

So, what can you do today to excel in the face of failure? Here’s what I suggest:

1.    Write down a recent failure, whether big or small.
2.    Break it down into distinct parts – perhaps the process or the pieces of the deliverable. Just something more manageable so you’re not looking at the whole thing.
3.    Look at each of those smaller elements and perform a SWOT analysis on them.

You should start to see a cascading impact that one element had on another or you might see how a previously unseen problem sunk the whole ship. Get someone else’s opinion, too, just in case you aren’t seeing things clearly. Once you have this information, you have a recipe to move forward! Play off of your strengths and opportunities; mitigate your weaknesses and threats; start over again.

While we’re on the subject of failure, you really should read this great article by Peter Bregman, CEO of management consultant firm Bregman Partners Inc. Why You Need to Fail. This article talks about how to build failure into every day, which sounds counter-intuitive but is exactly the right thing to do.

And now, I’d like to invite my readers to tell me – if you’re bold enough! – how you have failed and what you learned from it. Don’t be shy! Failure is nothing to be ashamed of if it has helped us to grow.

Related posts:

1. A Great Innovation Strategy
2. Does Your Newsletter Suck? 10 Reasons Why It Might
3. The Building Blocks of a Successful Company

“Heather,” they say (or sometimes they call me Ms. Villa… just kidding, most of them don’t), “I’ve got a business and I want to market it with social media. What do you suggest?”

In the past, I would enquire about their business and then look pensive for a moment before making a recommendation. After a while I found that I was recommending the same things over and over and over. Not because I’m lazy but because, through trial and effort and research and experience, I found what worked and what didn’t. To be honest, I’m always reluctant to make recommendations to these folks because it’s on-the-fly and who am I to know, in just a few moments of conversation, what would really work for them? There’s a reason I charge money for this stuff with clients… because I take the time to figure out what’s best for each person.

And then I found a social media framework mindmap that basically lays out a lot of the things I recommend (plus other stuff that might not be right for everyone). You can find it at MindMeister. (If it looks tiny, you can zoom in with the zoom tool in the bottom right corner).

This framework outlines various social media marketing outlets and methods you can use. You’ll notice after each branch in the map there are a couple of grey dots. Hover over one of those dots to get a definition about the topic. Hover over the other one and you get a thumbnail of a resource site. It’s comprehensive and has links to sources and resources that you might find helpful.

Over the next few months I’m going to choose one of these topics and blog about it in detail, talking about some smart ideas, best practices, and things I’ve found that can help you to leverage that particular social media technique for greater success. I won’t be blogging about it in every single blog, but check back frequently because I’ll likely cover one topic a week or so.

Want to get started right away and don’t want to wait for me to blog about it? Here’s what I would suggest:

Start by making a list of the things you do from this list already and what gives you the best return. (If you don’t do anything, or if you do a lot and don’t get any return, that’s okay; at least you’re starting the process of acknowledging it so it can be fixed). Be sure to measure how much time you take in each one. If necessary, track your time over the next few days to get an average.

Once you have your list of stuff you already do, the return it gives you, and how long it takes you, pick a couple more that you want to do… but be sure to choose them from different branches than what you are already doing. (So, if you’re already blogging, don’t choose another blog). That’s a good step one. Step two is to check back here each week to read some ideas and tips on these topics.

Happy Blogging!

Related posts:

1. Recommended social media tool for your business
2. What’s Your Social Media Plan?
3. Lessons to Learn from Starbucks and Social Media

In a couple of days, my calendar is going to ping me with a reminder. It’s going to say “One month in – how’s it going, Heather?” This reminder is for me to review the new business strategies I intended to integrate into my business this year.

Each year, I list out a bunch of strategies I want to integrate into my business. Some are marketing strategies, some are productivity strategies, some are customer service strategies; that kind of thing. I always have a really bold and vibrant vision of the year ahead and it’s easy for me to actually create so many strategies that I simply can’t implement them all effectively.

What I find is that over time, some strategies simply can’t be done in the day (because I don’t have time, for example) while other strategies become quickly integrated into my daily routine.

I was speaking with a colleague of mine who does something similar. She had developed several strategies she wanted to integrate into her year. For example, she wanted to increase her article marketing and she wanted to do more blog commenting. We usually chat about our strategies from time to time so I asked her how hers were going nearly one month into the year. The blogs were easily integrated in and are now a habit for her. The articles, however, are not. We talked about the reasons that could be and what she and I discussed might be helpful for you, too:

• Integrating new strategies into your daily schedule is important to do from time to time, but not always easy. I’ve found that if you want to be more successful at making them habits, you need to do everything possible to make it super-easy to do. The easier they are, the more likely you’ll do them and the more likely they will become habits.

Take exercise as an example: Lots of people make a New Year’s Resolution to start exercising… and then they fail. One of the reasons is that exercise might be an hour or two commitment a few times a week: Driving to the gym, working out, showering, driving home. It adds up so it’s not compelling to do. The secret to integrating it into your life is to make it really easy at the very beginning. Start with a 5 minute workout at home; have a friend call to remind you. Then, increase your workout to ten minutes. Then to fifteen. Then twenty. Eventually you will find yourself at the gym doing a full workout, but by then it will be a habit. To get there, though, it had to start easy.

It’s the same with my friend and her articles: Instead of writing an article a day – her original goal – she should start with an article a week. Or, split the work between herself and a freelancer. Eventually, she can increase her own effort. And she should decide ahead of time what the article will be about, rather than staring at a blank page.

And it’s the same for your 2010 goals. The goals that easily integrated into your business – celebrate them. And the ones that you’re struggling with one month in – take baby steps and make them easy. You may not start out as boldly as you had originally dreamed but making them easy will help to make them habits.

Have a great time!

Related posts:

1. It’s March. Do You Know Where Your Resolutions Are?
2. First Things First
3. Mastering the First Ten Minutes of Your Day