What Does A Test Blog Look Like? Behind The Scenes.

I often sit down to test and discover some things I know nothing about.  I have some kind of an idea of what is happening and what needs to be happening in my mind.  But to truly know what works and what does not, is sometimes only a guess.  So as I prepare a blog for the next subject to post I sometimes experiment with the material and its layout.  I work on some areas to study by going online and visiting some of the top recognized blogs.  I look at their layouts, their conversation, the subject mater, and their payment process in how they display and attract particular advertising mechanisms.

I Had Better Luck As I Played With It More

This post you are reading right now is a quickly typed post that was one of those behind the scenes test blogs.  I typed it quickly for the single purpose of getting material printed in an array of paragraph arrangements.  Of course, it has been edited for spelling and word placement.  When I type too fast I have a bundle of mess-ups on the page.  It looks a lot like first grade English.  That should be no shock to those of you gifted with incredible skills in the area where grammatical poise shines.  My script is usually butchered quite heavily.    

Test this page by working with Amazon Dot Com and finding a pattern of script and advertising blends that will appear better on the blog better than what I have been seeing.  This way I can use the power of Amazon's readership to its maximum potential on the blog.  At present, the inserted advertisements are, at times, disruptive to the original layout of the post and do not seem as though they can be edited very well.  This has presented a challenge in layout, increased the time it takes to prepare a post and caused the post to become confusing as each edit is performed.

Infiltrate, Extricate, Imaginate!

Is 'Imaginate' a word?  According to spell check, no.

However, in the world of advertising we can make it a legitimate word.  We can introduce a new word that helps us get a picture into the mind of our viewers.  Look at some of the examples we can use...

Is My Business Boring?

Does Your Business Look Something Like This?

When was the last time you walked about your business to take a scrutinizing look around?  What did you see?  Did you see tired employees?  Did you see worn out carpeting?  Did you see badly stained walls?  Did you see terrible restroom facilities?  Did you see a boring set of website photos?  Did you see unexciting word sets in your descriptions online?  What did you see?

Were your retail isles well defined?  Is your store front inviting?  Were your signs and price labels current, fresh and professional?  Was your display material on the web balanced, coordinated and does it deliver the necessary sets of continuity for your business?  Take a good look around.  Make a serious effort to find the tired portions of your business efforts.  Be critical of what you see.  Be critical of how you witness what you look like.

Add Exciting Photos To Your Site

Do you need new material on your web page?  Do you need new subject matters that your website delivers?  Do you need guest appearances on your website?  Do you need a new product line in your store?  Do you need to introduce a new service your business supplies?  Take a fresh look at what you might be able to do to add new interest to what you are already doing.

Attack the corners of boredom your business has come to accept.  Give your staff and personnel something they can get excited about.  More importantly, give your customers something they can get excited about.

Why Is It So Hard To Play Fair?

NFL Coaches Use Programs To Shield Their Lip Movements

Professional football teams hire lip readers to see what the other coach is saying when he calls his next play.  That is why they hold their play lists over their mouths when they call the next play.  To the 'broken eye' of view, some would consider this move a 'clever' idea.  It only ensures failure.  Unfortunately, failure is not immediate...only certain.  When you work to gain advantage by some 'clever' move that does not involve the art of playing of the game, you enter the gray area of cheating to win.  When you cheat...you lose.  Oh you might not immediately notice it, but your business will eventually suffer more than you care to manage.  And you will manage the results of your cheating without recognizing the root of your challenges.  Your business challenges will not be fair enough to you to point directly back to the areas of cheating you have considered 'clever.'  It is a very unfair process.

Many Suffer At The Hands Of Cheaters!

Rubbing up against the laws of compensation by cheating to win will only guarantee some losses to occur that will interrupt your long term efforts to succeed.  You are no longer competing with the art of football when you hire a professional to read the opposing coaches lips as he calls his next play.  You are cheating.  Period.  You may win some games because you know what to do before it needs to be done.  But you are violating the laws of compensation and they will turn heavily away from your efforts.  You will eventually fail.  The laws of compensation are real.  Just because they are invisible does not mean they do not exist.  Trust me, they are there and working their magic just fine.  They do not need the cheaters approval to do their magic.  You may call this kind of cheating 'clever' marketing or 'clever' strategy but it still remains a form of cheating.  You are cheating.  Stop it.  You are also killing your business success when you cheat.

Why is it so hard to play fair?  Because your competition is cheating and you know it.  You also believe they are winning due to their cheating.  Your competitions 'clever' ways are gaining your attention and you begin to believe they are gaining an advantage over you for it.  That perspective makes it very hard to play fair.   

This kind of 'clever' thinking has become so normal in the world of marketing that most business owners believe they need to participate in order to compete and win.  Not true, but it is very hard to tell how 'clever' policies eventually cause some serious losing strings of results.  The cause and effect relationship between winning and losing is very gray.  As a result, much of the time we cannot tell what helps us win and what helps us to lose.  Let's list some examples of how we all cheat and consider it 'clever.'

Part 2, Three Best Ways To Spoil Your Customers

So how did some of you leaders do after reading the last post?  Did you get started?  Did you set out to cruise the initiative sunrise all by yourselves?  Good deal, if you did.



Let's Improve Water Use With Less Money!

The first step of this process is to get your focus in line with what you plan to do.  The focus is to develop a laundry list of "spoiling tools" you can initiate into your customer relations efforts that will help those customers develop a feeling that they need to return to get their "spoiling" fix.  If you are an irrigation company that has new technologies to provide more efficient water use, and lower 'power-to-the-pump' costs as a result of using this new technology...how do you plan on "spoiling" your customer?

Part 1, Three Best Ways To Spoil Your Customers.

Each Owner Has Their Own Set Of Trimming Knives

When your customers become spoiled with how well you treat them, they become addicted to using who you are.  It is a good thing to have your customers wanting to come back again.

One thing is for sure, you will not have a lot of competition who will be trying to spoil your customers with improved customer service.  Too many businesses have trimmed away the needed personnel required to increase the time demands they need to devote to increased customer services.  Likely, though, you are faced with the same challenge.  If your budgets are like mine, they are constantly under the trimming knife.



As Good As They Are, Your Employees Have Extra Time Chips To Use

As a result, you will need to move your customer service improvements in areas that do not require large chunks of employee time.  This suggests that whatever you discover to do with your employees to begin spoiling your customers is going to cause a shift in habit patterns each employee brings to work.  Trust me, every one of your employees have habit patterns they perform at work.  In those patterns are hidden jewels of valuable time.  Your trick is to continue to respect the value your employees bring to work but to help them create consistent opportunities for "spoiling" customers with some of those hidden time slots they quietly permit to flow by.  You are now entering to perform one of the great arts to business ownership.  You begin the daunting task of modifying and improving the performance of your staff.  Don't be chicken, here we go.

Trying Your Customer's Patience

Relay Teams Drop Batons

Relay teams drop batons.  Football players fumble the balls.  Baseball players throw the ball away.  Drivers fall asleep at the wheel.  And business operators and employees test the patience of their customers.

The speedsters do not try to miss the hand off in their relay.  The running back does not try to let the football slip away.  The ball player does not plan to release it into the dirt. And the driver of the car does not decide it is time to take a nap.  We do not mean to test our customer's patience...but more often than not, we do just that.  We have grown to remove ourselves from believing that customers want good service.  It is one of the great sickness effects owners and employees have come to protect.  We have grown up too big to stoop below our illusions we formed in egos and pride.  Many people actually believe that only really good people can behave like slaves and servants.  The rest of us have too much dignity to go out of our way and offer more than the extra mile.  Are you kidding me?  Find new employees.  Become a new employer!  If you prefer to win more races in business, you need to quit dropping the baton.  There is an earlier post you can visit...I think it is called something like the "villain."  It might be worth reading here.

We do not actually try to become terrible business leaders...it is an accident.  We just drop the baton once in awhile.  You can be one of those businesses that flourish during hard times.  Look at some of these simple examples.

3 Snaps, 2 Crackles And 1 Pop!

It Is Time You Celebrate In Your Business Affairs

Revelations appear in time to every person who operates a business model.  It does not matter if you are building a simple blog, working in a brick and mortar setting or managing a website that offers products or services to customers.  Sooner or later, you will have moments occur that will deliver some kind of great revelation in your thinking process.  Those revelation moments are usually hard to understand and even more difficult to accept.  They will rub up against your normal patterns of thinking.  That is why most really good revelations come packaged as a surprise.  They jolt us into counter-directional patterns of thinking.  They are the 'ah-ha' moments we can talk about for a long time.

I actually like 'ah-ha' moments.  I am always looking to find the next one.  And to make matters worse, they rarely come from me.

For the sake of simplicity, let's call those moments of revelation as "snap" moments.

"Snap" is when you get a head jerk revelation about something you thought was otherwise.  We need to talk about three really important anchors you will discover in every business that may require major "snap" moments to help you to create healthy new changes in the way you are doing things.  Accepting these "snap" moments will begin your first steps to becoming a better business model.  You will discover in every business a series of moments that will lend a helping hand to expose important opportunities for creating profitable change.  Unfortunately, there are three big anchors you need to address in order to allow your business the ability to promote the value of these "ah-ha" moments.  The three anchors are like parasites that link onto your business affairs trying to suck the life out of your ability to succeed.

Simple To Do Is Not As Easy As You Think.



Choosing A Remote Location Is Not A Good Idea.

Almost every business has the ability to do well.  With some drastic exceptions, most business models have a fair chance to perform well in this day and age.  The exceptions for doing well are simple.  If you are trying to deliver a product that is completely out of touch with the marketplace you may fail.  Another bad choice would be opening your business in a location out of sync with necessary traffic demands.  You may fail.  A few bad choices will contribute to some poor levels of business performance.

The business basics that are required to help your business perform well are often times very clear.  In fact, we can see the value in most business basics when we frequent other businesses.

When we are consumers in another business we know when that business is doing something wrong.  We also know when a business does not pay attention to our needs.  We have no problem identifying how a business could improve its chances for success.  The mistakes we see when we are consumers are simple to identify.  Sometimes we point them out, too!  We are not afraid to let someone know when the front door was locked at 9:04 and the sign said they opened at 9:00.  We let them know.  Of course, we are never guilty of simple mistakes like that in our own business practices.               

When it is our own business, what seems simple to employ in some other business becomes not so easy to do in your own.  Our business will make many mistakes.  Many of those mistakes will happen right under our nose and we will not be aware of them occurring.  Our customers will be dissatisfied with the results we delivered and we may never know.

It May Be Time To Step On The Gas!



The Squeeze Is Still Necessary!



During periods when recession activities are present business responsibilities are mainly centered around budget cuts, lay-offs and belt tightening policies.  This is not only responsible business play but required business decision making for allowing your business model increased survival opportunities during recession periods.

Although budget controls are still critical to maintain, it may be time to find a way to dedicate resources directed at making a stronger "market position" move.  Keep in mind, nearly every business player is stressed financially.  You are not alone.  The business world is filled with models trying to operate with limited capital and reduced levels of human resources on hand.  Most of the competition you face is facing what you are facing.  One of the great 'arts' in competitive areas is to make sure your competition does not recognize how wounded you have become.  Your competition is practicing this same 'art.'  Do not, for once, be fooled by the efforts they employ to convince you they are healthy and strong.  They aren't.

Respect The "Quiet" Hours

When you first thought about going into business for yourself, did you spend a lot of time doing some quiet time thinking?  During that time, did you dream of how you would do certain things?  Did you think about what your business would look like?  Did you imagine how well your business would perform?  Was it a website business?  Was it a brick and mortar venture?  Was it a new discovery?  Was it a new way to provide an old service?  Was it a new way to combine several products together in an environment that you felt people would be open to accept?

These were great moments of "quiet" time.  "Quiet" time is so important.  We live in such a noisy world.  Faster the pace, more the noise.  And as we begin the trek to build our business model we get involved with all of the things we need to do.  Working this and that as we make sure every part is doing what we want it to do.  And before you can feel it, "quiet" time is completely gone.  Who has time for "quiet" time?  We have all of the billion things we need to do in our business that is not getting done.  We have our family and friends to acknowledge, too.  We have life and its ups and downs to serve, as well.  Who has time for "quiet" time?

You do.

It Is An Empty Box...Only You Can Fill It.

When we begin to lead a business, we get that business from the start.  One thing we discover is that the business we begin is very much like opening a new box.  The box may be big or small, difficult or easy to open...either way, the box we open is empty.  Our business does not come with a full box.  It is empty.

There is nothing inside.  It is vacant.  The business we build will be the things we place into the box.  Every little insignificant effort, failed idea, relationship we begin and all of the great things we do will be placed into that box.  As the box becomes filled, it will become heavier with time from all of the experiences we place inside.

Soon we will discover that others will be asked to help us manage the size of that box.  The weight will eventually become too heavy for us to manage by ourselves.  Now we have permitted others to place their items, thoughts, energy, ideas and efforts into that same box.  At that time we discover the box has become a part of more than what we first imagined.  Many things in that box appear without our knowledge and what's more is that some of the contents appear without our complete control.

Who Is The Villain?

Every business has villains.

The smaller the business, the more the villains circle around the owner.  Very few pockets exist for the villains to hide and refrain from disturbing the working process of success when the business is small.  In most small business models...the villain is in the mirror.  Denial of this fact will only limit what success you may be able to realize in the coming year.

As much as this is true, I still find it hard to accept.  However, I have grown to accept my mirror and the person it reflects as I work on building success events in my business process.  Once you arrive at this process level, you too will begin to find wonderful elements in your sphere of influence that will be able to contribute to the potential success events in building your own business model.

Try to refrain from the process of pointing fingers at external factors.  Find the causes you can repair in yourself as you improve your efforts to build a successful business model.  Remember, you are the maker of that model, you are the leader of that model.  Accept that responsibility fully.

This kind of internal acceptance is likely the true first step for you to begin building a strong, healthy and growing business model.  Once you have accepted this truth...go back and read the blog on the 'first things first' ideas and the basic philosophies surrounding the need to improve your 'attraction policies.'  We must learn to cover the basics before we move onto the more complicated business issues and work.  

Failure to successfully manage the simple basics will eventually drag itself into a format pattern of missing necessary steps on the more critical and larger issues you face with your business model.  If you struggle with the basics, you will likely struggle with the more complicated issues.  One does not 'switch on' while the other remains 'switched off.'  The success components of business are all wrapped together, as one.  You do not have the luxury of picking and choosing what you like or do not like to do.  It all matters.  Skipping one will only ensure that the other ones will suffer to some degree as well.

Hang Your Shingle With Increased Pride!

                                       Welcome to owning your own business. 



I Too, Am Guilty Of This Effect



Look in the mirror, now.  Who do you see?  Get to know that person well.  That is the person who will likely do the most to vilify your efforts!  Go back to the 'first things first' and blog on 'attraction policies.'  Do the work and make those changes in your model that are remaining to be changed.  If you skip those, you will eventually skip the coming work as well.  Let us focus on making sure our business basics are up to the levels they need to be.  This work is not work that is about nodding your head up and down and moving on to more important issues.  Go do the work you need to do.  First things First!

See you next time...villain.