My journey – Page 4 – Michele Christensen

Be up front with your opinions

I’ve been writing and posting web content for business in various forms for several years. When I first started, I was shy about causing controversy. I didn’t want to offend

anyone or go on record saying something that someone found offensive. I was striving to be accurate and useful but not necessarily bold in my work. Over the few years I’ve been writing for business, I’ve gotten just a little bolder and in the last few months I’ve really begun to write about what I believe, what I value, what I’ve learned and what I think. It has been a bit unnerving to be so up front when you know that lots of people could read it and that your writing could exist forever. My own business has undergone some big changes in the last year and some things were just bubbling up and needed to be said.

The surprising result is how much more successful my writing is! I’m getting more Tweets, comments and emails from people reacting to things I’ve written. My community is growing. Believe me, nobody expected this less than me. It felt a little self-centered to be honest, spouting off about what I think and feel. I kept thinking that I should be sharing what the big name gurus say, not what I say. Results don’t lie though, and I’ve changed my thinking to reflect that this is how I can provide value. Here are some ideas you can use to be more up front in your business writing:

Pay attention to what people ask you. Even if just one person asks a question, chances are more people have the same question.
If something happens that you feel strongly about, see if you can use the experience to generalize a larger point.
Conversely, if you are writing about a general rule try to use some specific points to illustrate it. Including your own experiences can be great!
Don’t be afraid to show your mistakes. Successful business owners do make mistakes, they just react to them differently than unsuccessful business owners. Be sure not to undermine your authority when sharing your mistakes.
If something disturbing happens, by all means you can use it in your business writing but take some time to react to it privately first. Don’t use your business writing to process your feelings.
Sharing yourself is great, but {opinion here!} I don’t appreciate hearing the gory details of someone’s personal issues when I’m part of their community to read their professional work. Everyone goes through things, and sometimes you can illustrate coping skills and fortitude by sharing some of your personal life in your business writing but keep it in check.

If you have great things to share, try being a little more bold with your opinions. You can be strong in your beliefs without making others wrong for disagreeing.

Product review – Google calendar

The basics

Google calendar is included with all the features you get when you open a free Gmail account. In spite of being free, it’s really robust and loaded with features. I’ve used Outlook and Blackberry calendars before, and I can’t find anything that’s missing with Google calendar. If you have an events calendar for your company, you can use Google calendar to get it published on your website without any programming skills.

What’s to love

Here are just the top 5 features that I love. There’s many more, but this should give you enough incentive to check it out. There’s also some newer features being tested at Google labs which you can enable as well (check under the Labs tab of calendar settings).

It syncs with my Timetrade (timetrade.com) account so clients can schedule their own appointments. Timetrade only shows when I’m available, not my appointments or what I’m doing when I’m not available.
Custom privacy settings make it easy to share as much or as little data as you want with your spouse or assistant.
You can invite other Gmail users to events and when they accept it shows up on their calendar. This is great for getting things scheduled with no confusion.
You can specify multiple calendars to see in your main view. Mine shows appointments in red, birthdays I’ve entered in blue, US holidays provided by Google in blue and business tasks or reminders in purple. This is helpful because I know at a glance what appointments I have and can look just at that if I want. You could use this feature for various family members or company functions.
I love the seamless sync with my Android phone.

I could go on and on (and often do!), but you get the idea – it’s a great product that happens to be free. This is one of 32 resources I’ve compiled in my Solopreneur Success Rolodex, which you can download by clicking here. The entire rolodex is a pdf with links to the best resources I’ve found for solopreneurs. See a preview of some of the resources and grab your copy today by clicking below:

Michele’s recommended resources

Pricing – just say how much will ya?

Michele Christensen on pricing for solopreneurs — Just say the price, please

Most solopreneurs I come in contact with love what they do and want more than anything to help people. They aren’t born salespeople and can feel uncomfortable with talking sales or pricing. I didn’t like sales at all when I first started, but now I know that sales doesn’t have to be high pressure or manipulative and I like it a lot more. I now think of sales and marketing as presenting myself and my services in the best possible way to assist people in deciding if I’m a good fit for them.

In the last few weeks though, I’ve read some articles that suggested tactics I’m uncomfortable with. The theme of these articles is that when talking to a new prospect that you duck any question involving price until you are ready to present the issue. At least, that’s how I describe the techniques in my words. They presented various ducking tactics but none of them simply answered the question “How much do you charge?” Most sales trainers would disagree with me, but if someone asks you that very direct question I think you should answer them with a dollar amount when they ask. The only time I would say something different is if I’m not sure which package or pricing plan would be best for a person and if that’s the case I tell them so.

I know if I asked the direct, simple, clear question of “How much do you charge?” and got a song-and-dance instead of an answer I’d feel all sorts of things and none of them point to signing up with the person. It feels condescending to me to assume I know better than my prospect what they need. I almost always have a price ceiling in mind when I’m considering a purchase and if we can establish in the first 5 minutes that the service exceeds that ceiling then there’s no point in wasting any more time. If someone didn’t answer my pricing question, I’d be concerned that it must be a huge figure or they would have stated it. I also think it gets in the way of a deep conversation where you can be of service regardless of whether the person buys or not. If I’m wondering about pricing and the person ducks my question, I’m going to be thinking about price not what we are actually talking about.

Am I unique in this? How would or do you feel when you ask about pricing and get an evasive answer? Have you used this technique with your prospects?

Using Facebook as your Facebook business page

If you use Facebook for business, you’ve probably heard about the feature they introduced a few months ago that lets you use Facebook as your page. For example, instead of using Facebook as Michele Christensen I can use it as Michele Christensen, Business Strategist. Any comments I make, things I like, content I share, etc all are attributed to my page name not my personal name. At first, I didn’t think much of this feature but now that I’m fully using it I think it is genius. This ability to change how you use Facebook allows you to do some great things.

First, it allows you to separate your business and personal use of Facebook. For some business owners, there’s a lot of overlap between their personal and business use. For me, I the two worlds only have a little bit of intersection. On my personal page, I post the not-so-interesting minutiae that my friends and family are interested in, and just once or twice a year I might post a business item if it would seems relevant. On my business page it’s just the opposite – almost all business with a little bit of personal news tossed in for interest. Being able to do almost all of the same functions as your page instead of your profile lets you pick how much your two Facebook circles overlap.

Second, you can like other business pages as your page now. This is great because I can keep my personal likes – restaurants, vacation spots, causes I’m involved with, etc. on my personal page and my business page can like businesses that I’m interested in. It’s great to be able to focus exclusively on business or personal when I’m looking at my news feed. It’s also a great way to share with your fans the businesses you think warrant a like.

Third, you can comment, like, post and share all under the name of your page which means great exposure for your page just for doing what you would do anyway. If you’ve made an interesting comment, someone can click right over to your page and see your professional presence rather than pictures of your pets and last vacation.

I’m probably more in favor of separating personal vs. business use of Facebook than a lot of people are but I’m sure there’s loads of ways for anyone with a business page to benefit from this new feature. How do you use this feature? Do you think it’s important to separate your personal and business use of Facebook?

Why I love my email newsletter service

Today is the first post of many on services that I recommend for your solopreneur business. I’ll also be introducing a brand new resource that will allow you to get a comprehensive listing of all the products and services I use. Today I’ll tell you about the email newsletter service I use and why I love it. If you want to get on my email newsletter and test the service I use for yourself, use the signup box at the right.

I’m going to start by assuming you already know the value of an email newsletter for your business. If you’re not familiar with how an opt-in email newsletter can benefit you, stay tuned because I’ll be discussing that in future posts. If you want to have a newsletter, than you need a newsletter service. Don’t try to do it from an email provider like Outlook, Gmail or from the email address provided by your hosting account. You’ll save the service fee, but in the long run it will probably cost you money because you’ll have to handle things like subscribe and unsubscribe requests by hand. Since I’m committed to giving you good information for you business I feel compelled to tell you that not using a service makes a poor impression as well.

I use Aweber for my email newsletter service. I’ve been with them for over a year, and I’m very happy with the service. They do well with the basics like stats, reports, subscribe and unsubscribe requests, social media blasts, list segments, web forms, etc but that’s not why I love the service as much as I do. On top of the basics, there are 2 things that make Aweber stellar in my opinion.

First, they have a strong anti-spam stance that is woven throughout the entire customer experience. It’s not that you get one anti-spam message in your introductory materials and then it’s done. They obviously value preventing spam greatly so they do all sorts of things to encourage you not to spam and to make sure you don’t do it accidentally. Numerous times, I’ve been added to a newsletter by someone who assumed because they had my email address it was okay to add me to a newsletter and this has never happened to when the sender used Aweber. When I’ve done live events, I manually enter the names of people who fill out a form stating they want my newsletter and even in that situation the software reminds you to only send to people who want you to.

Second, they have great customer service. Their online information base is great, but when you need a person you call or live chat their Pennsylvania offices during business hours and get a live person right away. They figure out who you need to talk to and get you to them without making you jump through hoops just to talk to a person.

These features have made it easier for me to have a spam-compliant newsletter that goes out regularly which has been a boon to my business. Oh, and yes they have an affiliate program and yes the links here are affiliate links!

This is the first of many resources I plan to share with you. If you can’t wait for the rest of them to be revealed, you can grab my entire rolodex by clicking here! This is a brand new resource and as you can see I haven’t even set up a proper opt in page for it but you can still grab it right away. It is updated for 2011 and contains 32 resources I use and love.

Have you “arrived” in your business?

Have you reached your business destination?

Every once in a while, someone asks me a question that throws me for a loop. In the moment, I’m usually just trying to think of something to say other than “Huh?’ but after thinking about it I usually find that the reason it throws me is that it’s not the right question to ask. A few weeks ago, an acquaintance of mine asked me one of those questions.

I hadn’t seen this person in about 2 years, so he didn’t know what was going on in my business. When I told him about it, his response was “So, is this it? Is this what you’re going to do with your life?” At the moment, I just told him the truth which is that I loved my business and the people I work with and felt I was doing important work. What I later realized is that the reason the question seemed off to me is that it doesn’t line up with the way I see people evolve and change over the course of their life. For many people, particularly the solopreneurs I work with, there’s an ongoing change of focus. We don’t suddenly wake up one day and say “Yes, this is it, what I’m doing forever.” We continually learn and grow, and interests wither as we find new passions. The underlying assumption I heard in his question was that everyone is on a one-way journey to a certain place where they will park their career until retirement, and that you’re either there or not.

The solopreneur journey is often very different from this linear path. We start with a grand idea, and from then on the business undergoes steady or sometimes sudden change. My own business is in probably it’s third focus since forming in January 2009, and I’m still learning and growing. Since you’re the boss, don’t be afraid to change your mission. In fact, expect that your mission will change. Not many solopreneurs stay with the same business they start with, so give yourself permission to grow and evolve over time. If you’re drawn to something new, it’s probably because someone needs that from you.

Leave a comment telling me how your business has changed since you started it. Were you surprised? I was.

No news roundup today

One of my core success strategies is to experiment, measure and revise my business activities. I also like to share those results and the thought process I use with my community. In this post, I’m sharing what I learned from my Friday news series.

I regularly share news and links that I think are valuable for solopreneurs on my Facebook page. A few months back, I started using a Friday blog post to summarize the news for the week and do a quick reminder to carve out some time for fun over the weekend. My logic was that it’s important to give people what they want in the format they want. Some people don’t like getting news on Facebook, so doing the blog post gave those people another option to get the news. As with everything I do, it was an experiment. I think I’m ending that experiment now. The post took about 20 minutes to write, and it didn’t seem like I was providing enough benefit to my readers to justify 20 minutes of my time. I could use that time to write a whole new post which would be of much greater service to my community. I also felt a little hemmed in by the whole thing. I like to share news and links I think are exceptionally valuable and being obligated to post one every day made me sometimes spend a lot of time finding something that day. All told, I think it’s something that doesn’t pay off for my community or me.

I will take this time to remind you to create some time to recharge this weekend, with the emphasis on “create.” Don’t wait for “spare” time to drop into your lap to recharge. The world needs your work, so make sure you take care of yourself.

If you think I should keep the Friday Solopreneur News Roundup, leave me a comment to that effect. If enough people want this feature, maybe I’ll rethink it.

Have a great weekend!

Lessons learned from a bad experience with Ikea

Lessons learned from a bad experience at Ikea

I had a blog post planned for today, but yesterday’s experience just was too full of great lessons to ignore. For those of us in the US, yesterday was a holiday and that means some stores are closed or have shorter holiday hours.

Among other things I had planned yesterday, I decided to brave a trip to Ikea to keep some home improvement projects moving ahead. Since it’s quite a trek to get there, I wanted to make sure they were open into the evening. I started with their website and there was no mention of holiday hours. I then entered into phone menu purgatory which was an endless nested maze of options, none of which was “at any time press zero for an operator.” Those phone menu set ups are a horrible way to treat customers. Does any customer feel valued when that’s what they are greeted with? I think by now most people are used to the phone menu hazing they have to go through to get service, and know that if they do choose to speak to a live person they may have to wait. I was surprised though, at how difficult they made it and that there was no obvious way to get to a live person. I finally did get a live person through one of the many combinations of keys I pressed, and of course he couldn’t answer my question but put me back on hold for 7 minutes until someone picked up. Needless to say, this was extremely frustrating and a big waste of over 20 minutes of my time. It made me, an interested customer, way less interested in buying. In fact, if I didn’t need something I could only get there I wouldn’t have gone at all. It certainly made get in and out as fast as possible and thus they lost any other sales they might have had with me. A company like Ikea can get away with this – the one near me is almost always jam packed with a lines of 20 people at each of a dozen registers. They don’t need to change anything about how they treat their customers, but what about the rest of us? What lesson is there for a solopreneur business in this? I came up with 3 things we can take from this experience.

First –

Don’t make it hard to buy, in fact make it as easy as possible. I suspect Ikea would have lost a lot of people in this situation who were less determined and in need than me.

Second –

Don’t make it hard to contact you. Give clients and customers options for how they contact you and make it easy to find that information.

Third –

Anticipate and reply to obvious questions. Think about what big, obvious questions your clients may have and answer them before your clients ask. Don’t make them work for basic information – most won’t and you’ll lose sales. If you get the same question more than a few times, put the answer in your materials.

What are some of the ways you help customers to buy? Share them in the comments.

Choose your business confidants carefully

In the last issue of my newsletter (sign up here or in the box to the right) I shared a story about a colleague asking how many hits a day I get on my site. When I told him the somewhat modest number, he could barely contain his disdain. I didn’t really understand his reaction – I had just gotten done telling him how pleased I am with my business growth this year so why the reaction to my traffic? It wasn’t until later that I realized that he was asking the wrong question. In his business strategy, big traffic is really important. In mine, it’s not. That led to a post on how it’s important not only to measure your results but to make sure you’re measuring what really matters.

I’d like to add one more thing I learned from this, which is to be very careful in choosing whom you share business ideas and information with. Had I not had a clear vision of how my business model works, I might have been dismayed by his reaction. I might have run home and gotten right on the “bright, shiny object” of getting big traffic. Fortunately, I do have a mentor I’m following and I trust her greatly. I’m following her business plan for growing your business via the internet and it’s working. It’s easy in the early stages to get lost in following whatever advice and opinions you can get, and right there is the problem – opinions and advice are easy to find, but someone who understands your business and can give appropriate advice is much more rare.

We have a natural, almost unavoidable tendency to view the world through our own point of view and to assess new ideas based on our experience to date. This means that not everyone is suitable to give you feedback on your business. Make sure you choose your confidants with intention and high standards. Of course you can have colleagues and friends who don’t meet the requirements to be a confidant, but choose your inner circle carefully. If you’ve gotten advice or feedback from someone you haven’t vetted for the role of confidant, make sure to take their comments with a grain of salt and run it through the filter of what you know is right for you. Their advice might be good, but then again it might not have any value, so be open to that possibility as well. People are very willing to provide feedback, but make sure it’s someone in a position to give valuable feedback before you take their comments as valuable. I would advise listening to your customers though – they always have valuable feedback which, since they are your customers, is right on the mark.

Solopreneurs must create work/personal separation

Solopreneurs must create work and personal separation

When I worked at a job outside the house, it was easy to separate my work and personal life. I got up, got dressed in work clothes (which weren’t the clothes I wore outside of work), went to my job, and came home. As soon as I left, there was no connection to work. I never had a remote login or 24-hour on-call status, so it was easy to say “I’m done.”

Now that I work from home, it’s much harder. It’s tempting to just check in when I’m enjoying a quiet Saturday morning or to go down the rabbit hole of checking email. One way I manage this is by having separate work and personal email addresses. I was surprised to learn at a recent Hubspot webinar on email marketing that 88% of survey respondents did not have separate work and personal email addresses!

This is something I’ve had as long as I’ve been self-employed. When I’m out having fun, the last thing I want is work intruding on my time. Don’t get me wrong, I LOVE my business and tend to work too much already but I don’t want to think about work when I’m doing something else. If I’m out hiking or visiting family on a weekend, I don’t even want to know about loose ends that need to be taken care of. If I read an email and need to do something about it, I don’t want that hovering in my thoughts while I’m having fun.

As solopreneurs, we ARE the business and it becomes much harder to separate and take a break than for people who have a job with someone else. But you absolutely have to carve out some time to disconnect or you’ll lose a lot of the biggest benefit of being self-employed – freedom. I strongly recommend separate work and personal email addresses for solopreneurs. Try this tiny step and see if you feel more at ease when you’re “off.”

Do you have separate business and personal email addresses? Why or why not?