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One Easy Way to Listen to Your Customers
Are you listening? One of the most important ways you can use social media to build your business is to LISTEN. Listening is the perfect place to begin. To get started today, I suggest that you sign up for Google alerts relevant to your business or industry. One great...
Give Yourself Permission to Dump the Flat Coke
Last night, while baking cupcakes with my daughter, I realized something about social media. If you're not having fun or enjoying yourself when you post to your fan page, no one is going to have fun reading your updates either. How many times do we post because: we...
Push the Start Button
Whatever you’ve been meaning to work on needs your attention right now. It’s time to stop with the excuses. Push the start button. If it’s a new website you know your business needs, Push the start button. If it’s an e-mail newsletter you’ve been waiting to design...
Defining Moments
Early morning and my littlest girl asks for a snuggle. I'm already dressed, I've been up for hours, but she's sleepy and a little whiny so I pull back the covers and climb into bed beside her. I can't stay long. The other girls are waiting for breakfast, packing their...
What Do You Miss Because You are Standing Too Close?
When I returned from my vacation, I wrote about some lessons from my disconnected days. If you missed it, you can read that post here. While away, I exchanged text messages with Jennifer Miller, a friend I have known through social media for a couple of years. Though...
12 Ideas to Help You Celebrate Social Media Milestones
The next post I write for this blog will be the 100th. I pay attention to social media milestones: passing big numbers of fans and followers on Facebook, Twitter, and Google+. I don't do it because I think the numbers are anything special. I pay attention because of...
One of the Coolest Stories from Our Summer
School starts in two days. At the beginning of the summer, the girls and I made a list of the fun things we wanted to do during their break from school. They wanted to swim a lot, have lots of friends over, go to the library regularly, and go to a waterpark. They...
Take a 12 Minute Vacation
Set the timer for 12 minutes. Read this whole article first. Then, close your eyes. Picture your favorite place in the whole world. Imagine you are there, right now, with your favorite people in the whole world. Or all by yourself if you prefer. Think about the...
Two Years Past Forty: Happy Birthday, Mr. Becky
Today is my husband's 42nd birthday. Two years ago, when he turned 40, I wrote a blog post about him for Mountain State University LeaderTalk. It is reposted here with permission. Those of you who have read my posts here before know that we call my husband "Mr. Becky"...
A Good Blog Post Doesn’t Have to Take 2 Hours
This week I discovered Martyn Chamberlain — the Two Hour Blogger. His premise is that any writing worth reading in the blogosphere must take two hours to create. "You need to spend a minimum of two hours writing every article you publish," he writes. Later: "In order...
Five Observations from Nine Disconnected Days
My family and I just returned from 9 days away on vacation. This is the first time since I started doing freelance blogging and social media back in January of 2009 that I have taken a trip and left my computer — and my work — behind. I mentioned to my husband how...
12 questions to ask yourself before/during/after you write an article
The next time you're going to write an article, take 12 minutes (or maybe a little more) and go through these questions: 1) Why are you writing this article? Is it to instruct people on a new way of doing business or of using your product or service? To increase the...