How do I get started…?
If I had to rank the questions I’m asked at conferences and online, probably the single most asked question I’m asked is in the form of “How do I get started X”, where X is SEO, affiliate marketing, social media, Twitter, Google Analytics, etc. Fortunately, there’s an answer for you (and it’s not “Let me Google that for you”).
The answer to “How do I get started…” is always in the format of:
Why / What / How
Why
Why do you want to do X? What’s the overall objective? What’s the biggest possible picture? For example, a lot of people do ask how to get started in social media. Why? What end does it serve?
A few years ago, I was doing Social Media Therapy sessions at MarketingProfs B2B conference, and this one gentleman asked me exactly that question. He explained that his business was in the business of using massive computing resources to adjust prices in real-time for big box stores to maximize profits. In a word, his company’s function was to make buying something as expensive as the market would tolerate. I explained to him carefully that social media had very little to offer to him – in fact, consumers becoming aware that his company existed to make their lives more unpleasant might lead to things like torches and pitchforks at the front door of his office. Better that he focus on his existing customer base and use the networks of tightly-knit executives to help him grow his business.
If you don’t know why you’re doing something, don’t dare do it. Figure out why, figure out what the big picture is, and only then move on to…
What
Once you know why you’re going to do something, you can start to dig into what to do. The simplest way to begin tackling what is to examine what’s already being done. For example, let’s say you want to get started with SEO. Start your search engine of choice and see what’s out there. Chances are, someone has a guide of even mediocre quality that can be a place to start your inquiry.
One of my favorite tricks to start learning any area is to see what books are available about it. Hit up your local library or Amazon or the book source of your choice and start learning the words and phrases people use. Don’t go leaping into anything just yet – just develop a lexicon of the basic terminology for your area of study. For example, if you’re getting started with SEO, a few easy reads will give you a list of things like inbound links, on-site optimization, link building, keyword phrases, etc.
There is no substitute here for doing your homework. Building this kind of lexicon in your head and learning how the different words interact with each other is absolutely essential and there are no shortcuts you can take that won’t cost you obscene amounts of time, re-work, or money later down the road.
That leads us to…
How
Very often, people do this step first, and that’s totally backwards. This is the last step, where you take each of the lines of inquiry from the What phase and learn the nuts and bolts of making the What happen. If you just start searching in the dark without the Why and What understood thoroughly, you’re essentially hoping that you’ll piece together a working plan. It’s roughly akin to going into your kitchen, getting 5 items out of the refrigerator, and hoping it makes a meal. If you draw lime juice, milk, a piece of cheese, a box of baking soda, and the fridge thermometer, you’re in for a very hungry day.
What I recommend most is that you actually draw out a diagram or a mind map with each phase on it. Start with the Why, then add in the What, and you’ll eventually have enough branches to fill out the How. Doing it this way lets you write very detailed questions to ask search engines, colleagues, and your network of resources to get the insights you need.
Drawing out a map like this also lets you add and remove things as your base of knowledge grows and as you find out what works for you and what doesn’t. As an added benefit, when you’re done with the project or line of inquiry, you automatically have all of your documentation pre-built.
So how do you get started with…? Figure out the why, what, and how!
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10 ideas for your monthly reboot
Every month, I typically start with a few tweets to friends and followers asking if you’ve cleaned out your inbox. Generally, I like to say that if you haven’t read mail from the first of the previous month, just archive it now since you’re not getting to it. However, my monthly maintenance routine is slightly more detailed than that. Here’s what I do around the first of each month; perhaps you have a routine that helps to boost your productivity, too.
1. Archiving old mail. I follow my own advice here and archive everything I know I’m not getting to.
2. Mark all as read. Once I’ve done my morning reading (I typically read for about 90 minutes every morning), I’ll flush out everything and hit Mark all as read in my blog readers. Stuff that’s older and laying around rapidly loses its value anyway.
3. Delete old syndications. I’m subscribed to a lot of podcasts and other digital downloads. I flush out the old ones each month, whether or not I’ve read/watched/listened.
4. Remove barely used or unused apps. This is something relatively new. I go through my apps on my iPad and pull ones that I downloaded that looked cool or something. If I really want them, I can always grab them out of the cloud again, but I do place a premium on a relatively uncrowded iPad.
5. Organize my hard drive. Each month, cruft accumulates, from PDFs and text files to data dumps to office memos. This both slows down my machine and slows down my brain, so I get stuff into folders and get the desktop clear.
6. FULL BACKUP. No excuses. I have a small portable 1 TB hard drive that I do all my backups on. Backups are one of those things you just leave overnight and the next day, you’re done.
7. Full hard drive defrag. I find this really speeds things up for me on my Mac.
8. On the topic of blogs, I remove any that I haven’t read that month and search out five new blogs to subscribe to every month. This is absolutely essential, because if you just keep reading the same stuff over and over again, you stagnate.
9. Review and purge my to do list. Stuff always accumulates in there that I know I’m not going to do. Every month, a good bunch of it heads for the digital dumpster.
10. Desk clearing. Those few folks who have been to my physical office space in metrowest Boston know that it’s not a large office. To the extent that I can throw away anything non-essential, I do.
Those are my 10 things that I do at the start of each month in order to create conditions conducive to productivity. What do you do as part of your regular monthly reboot routine?
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Increase productivity by doing 50% less
I’ve noticed something funny about toilet paper dispensers over the years. Some facilities, in order to save money, switch to really cheap toilet paper that seems to inspire the need to just use more of the stuff. As I’ve never worked in facilities management, I have no idea whether they actually save that much money doing so. The best restrooms have good quality toilet paper but the dispenser rolls much more slowly than at other places. You can’t spin it like the Wheel of Fortune and win an entire tree as a prize. I’d wager they waste less money on toilet paper, not because they buy the cheap stuff, but because they dispense less of the good stuff. Less is more.
Likewise, most of the effective, sustainable diets out there seem to advocate still eating good stuff, high quality, tasty food, just not as much of it. I’ve never seen a credible diet plan that says eat as much as you can of this crappy, low quality, low calorie food. Less is more.
In contrast, there are an awful lot of “productivity” plans out there that seem to encourage binging or switching to exceptionally low quality communication. There are services and plans that encourage you to limit every email to 5 sentences or 3 sentences or 140 characters. There are productivity plans that encourage you to get just as much email as ever, but only respond to it twice a day. Do these plans work? Sure, in the short term, just like you save a bit of money on the cheap toilet paper or you reduce your weight temporarily by binging on 22 pounds of only celery a day. But they’re not sustainable in the long term.
So here’s an idea for you to try. See if this makes sense to you. Instead of switching to ever cheaper “email paper” and dispensing just as much, if not more, what if you switched up to the good stuff and dispensed less of it? Try this. Go to your Sent Items folder. Count how many emails you sent on average in the last 7 days. Let’s say you sent 100 emails in 7 days. Now cut that in half. You’re allowed to send 50 emails in 7 days. They can be verbose, they can be terse, they can be whatever you want them to be, but you’re basically allotted 7 emails a day to send, and not a single email after that.
What might happen?
- You’ll send fewer emails, which means you’ll get fewer replies, which means you’ll have less to send a reply to. That alone will help.
- This should get you thinking about whether you need to respond to an email at all, or you can just let it be archived and filed away. You might, for example, stop hitting reply-all 250 times a day with what are effectively valueless responses like “I agree” or “Got it”.
- This should get you thinking about the content of the messages you do send. By having fewer opportunities to send something, you might have to condense your value into a small pile of highly valuable messages.
- By creating a bit of scarcity in your responses, the people on the other end might even come to value your messages even more. “Wow, he only responds when it’s important, so this must be important.”
If other “productivity” plans haven’t worked out for you for managing your ever-increasing inbox, try this one. See if it changes your habits, see if it reduces your inboxes, and leave a comment with your results.
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Do you have a swipe file?
If you’ve not spent a lot of time around creative advertising and marketing folks, you may never have heard of a swipe file before now. A swipe file is a collection of stuff that has worked, arranged in such a way to inspire you and give you future ideas. Done properly, it can be one of the most valuable assets you can have to jumpstart your creativity.
So how would you go about creating such a creature? I’m a fan of Evernote, though certainly you can use any digital storage mechanism you like, such as Google Notebook or Docs.
Start by creating a simple organizational system designed around your creative blocks. Most folks working with swipe files tend to organize badly (if at all) and create a system that doesn’t solve the root problem of a writer’s/creator’s block.
Create a set of folders, notebooks, etc. labeled by your specific blocks. For example:
- Writer’s block
- Ad copy block
- Ad photo block
- Magazine headline block
- Email call to action block
- Ad layout block
- Blog post block
- Facebook Fan Page art block
- High contrast photo block
This way, whenever you’re working on a project and you can identify what kind of block you’re facing in your own mind, you can very quickly look to your swipe file for solutions. This is why most swipe files fail – they don’t address the actual problem you’re trying to solve, and thus you never learn to rely on it.
Once you’ve got the swipe file set up, start collecting materials. Set aside 5-10 minutes each day to pull stuff you’ve seen from the day (or previous day) into the relevant folders. Saw a great ad on the side of a bus that you snapped in your phone’s camera? Put it in the appropriate block file. Got an email that compelled you to buy something? Put it in the appropriate block file.
The key to a great swipe file is its contents – any time you see something that just makes you stop in your tracks, get it into your swipe file. That’s why I use services like Evernote – the phone app means that if I see a great ad while I’m out and about, I can capture it quickly and get it into the file, and the email forwarding function means I can just forward compelling messages straight to the file.
Set up and use a swipe file for a month to see how it can help you smash those blocks and keep your advertising and marketing efforts moving forward!
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How do you know when to say no?
As life gets busier, there’s no shortage of things that can take up your time, energy, and resources. There’s also no shortage of people telling you to say no, from how to say no effectively to dozens of different ways of saying no. Few, however, address how to answer this fundamental question:
How do you know when to say no?
Let’s look at 3 basic factors that an opportunity presents:
1. Value. Is the opportunity valuable? Does it contribute to your overall personal or professional goals, either as an individual or an organization? Some opportunities may seem awesome but won’t actually contribute to your end goals.
2. Scarcity. How often does the opportunity or one like it come by? For example, authors submit review copies of their books to me on such a regular basis that the review copies now act as furniture. The opportunity there is not scarce. Having lunch with the President of the United States, however, would be a highly rare opportunity.
3. Commitment. How much commitment does the opportunity require? The reason there are piles of review copies of books in my office that have not been reviewed is that reading a book is a fairly serious time commitment if the review is to be any good, so I haven’t done it. Reading someone’s blog post or looking at their business plan can be tremendously resource-consuming. Writing an endorsement on LinkedIn can be relatively quick. Retweeting something on Twitter requires nearly no resource investment.
Take the time to actually score each opportunity you’re trying to evaluate. Award an opportunity up to 10 points for each category above, then set yourself a threshold for what you will and won’t accept for opportunities. Maybe a score of 20 would be your minimum. For example:
John Smith wants me to retweet his blog post about fried Twinkies.
- V: 0. No value to what I aim to accomplish.
- S: 0. Retweet requests from John are nearly daily. He’s kind of a jerk that way.
- C: 10. Easy and fast.
Verdict: 10/30. Decline.
The President of the United States wants to have lunch and discuss social media.
- V: 10. I do a lot of work in SM, so having lunch with the President might be useful to gain insight into his views.
- S: 10. I rarely get lunch requests from heads of state.
- C: 3. Going through the security clearance process and hauling it down to DC is a pain in the butt.
Verdict: 23/30. Accept.
Do you need this level of measurement in order to judge whether an opportunity is worth your time? Maybe. Certainly if you work with others, this opportunity judgement framework is useful for them to communicate with you an opportunity’s value in a very compact, tight way. Likewise, if you are responsible for passing along opportunities to other people, you might adopt this framework to communicate to them the value of something that’s crossed your desk.
Try it out and let me know how well it works for you.
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Knights in shining armor to the rescue
If you’re looking for the next big thing, the next niche, the next area where tons of money is just waiting for you to come over and scoop it up, you’re about to read about it. Ready?
To the rescue.
That’s it.
To the rescue.
What do I mean? Simple. Look around you. Look at the world, look at your business, look at the ever-changing, ever-evolving state of media, at the finite number of hours per day and the dwindling resource known as attention.
Attention isn’t just about too many social networks and too many shiny objects. Attention is all about not getting things done because too much is piled up on your plate. Attention is all about opportunities lost because you just flat out forgot about them, revenue not realized because no one followed up, and system failures because no one has the time or focus to do routine maintenance.
Attention deficits aren’t going to get better any time soon. You need only look at the front pages of Mashable and Techcrunch to see that more and more people are working tirelessly to disrupt and distract you every minute of every day. While you’re distracted and diverted, your business is crumbling out from underneath you.
Those people who specialize in rescues for when you really screw up are going to ride this macro trend to the bank and back, several times. Folks like my personal productivity magician, Michelle Wolverton, who can literally rescue an entire week by being in the right place at the right time with the right resources. Folks like Whitney Hoffman who can foresee and fix all the areas you’re about to totally screw up in contracts because you have the attention span of a gnat and can’t be arsed to actually read the fine print. Folks like Amy Garland who go over every little detail and silently apply exactly the right corrections while the rest of the world runs around like poultry on fire so that the right people get the right messages and things just run.
How will this make you money like crazy? Simple. A regular plumber costs a certain amount an hour. An emergency plumber to come fix your busted water pipe at 2 AM on a Sunday will charge you several multiples of that rate. A regular car costs nearly nothing to go to the hospital. An ambulance ride costs exponentially more. As your attention continues to shatter and fragment, assuming you don’t willfully rein it in, more and more things in your life will require rescuing. There will be more scrambles to replace failed hard drives in servers, more scrambles to get a landing page up on your web site for a campaign you launched but forgot you launched, more flights you dash to the airport for because you forgot you were going somewhere.
If you specialize in rescuing other people from their lack of attention, you’ve got a secure future and with the right client base will basically be printing money as fast as you can. You, the operators, will swoop in to the rescue and patch our screwups and attention deficits quickly, but at an exorbitant price which we will gladly pay.
If you want to protect yourself from those prices, you’ll have to invest now and pay… attention.
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