I’m not the world’s greatest self-promoter, which is why I think that the work I do resonates with my (right) clients: they feel a little funny about getting out there and mixing it up themselves.

Like cold calling, though, some of the work of marketing (and I’m including self-promotion under the marketing umbrella, at least, for indie biz types) can be critical to your growth even though it feels awkward or downright unnatural to your soul (and I’m including indie biz types under the umbrella of “people who have souls”—at least, some of them.)

Favors vs. consideration

Asking can take a couple of different forms. Well, tons, probably, but a couple that leap to mind:

1. There’s the asking for a favor
2. There’s the asking to be considered

Asking for a favor includes…well, any kind of having to ask someone for something: a retweet on Twitter, a plug on their blog, a set of eyeballs for the draft of your promo piece—you get the idea.

Asking to be considered is a whole nuther animal. That’s where you put yourself out there, looking for the gig. When I put myself out there and “jokingly” (as if!) said to Pam Slim that I should present a bit on branding at her Escape from Cubicle Nation workshop in Chicago, that was asking to be considered; when I very seriously asked her to submit a piece of video for my Southwest Airlines contest entry last year was a favor. (A big one, too, since I was asking for a super-quick turnaround.)

I look at both favors and considerations as debits in the capital department, albeit mild ones (we hope!). I don’t have a formal ratio for my ask-to-give ratio, but I know that anything more than 1 (ask)-to-5 (give) gives me hives, and 1-to-10 is probably more like it for me. (This is down from 1-to-1,000, so easy on me, please.)

I’m not 100% sure about this, but I think part of my problem to date with this asking stuff is that I was confusing asking for a favor with asking for consideration. Cold calling aside—because (a), there the line is pretty clear, and (b) I loathe talking on the phone in general, anyway—asking for consideration when it comes to jobs, gigs, or other types of work-related inclusion with acquaintances or colleagues is probably too hard, and something I need to examine.

In the meantime, I thought I might start by looking at my “asks” for this week. They’re work-related, because that’s the thrust of this blog, but I’ve been noting my other “asks”, too.

Favors I asked for this week

• Help from colleagues with writing I’ve finally homed in on what my first “real”* book will be, and both because it’s kind of a hot topic and I’m hot to get started, I reached out to several friends who have either published what I feel are great books or who are smart and have landed decent deals. My request? To share their proposals with me. I have a couple to look at, but I figured that these will make it more real to me. Plus I know these people pretty well, as well as their books and ideas, so it’s easier for me to tease apart how they did it.
• Help from colleagues with accountability I love my little mastermind-esque group. In addition to their weekly insight into my stumbling blocks and progress, I asked if they could review my card and marketing scheme for the upcoming Creative Freelancer Conference (still a couple more days, West Coasters—sign up! Don’t miss it! Add “CW9″ at checkout for an additional $25 off!
• Help from my readers in getting published I’d read about a publication looking for essays from bloggers a while back. Finally, I screwed up my courage and put my request front and center, on my blog. (I’ll do it again: if you like my writing and have a few minutes to enjoy some curated best-of posts, please nominate one for me! Or come back and do it by August 31st!)

Consideration I asked for this week

• To speak at the upcoming Twitter Conference LA I’ve already decided to attend anyway, as there are several people I know who will be speaking there, and a few more I’d really like to meet. But I saw the note about submitting yourself as a speaker and thought, “What the hell?” If nothing else, it was a chance to write a creative self-promotional letter.

I feel pretty good about my favors. Not that they were easy to ask for—the proposal requests took me two weeks to get off my to-do list, and I gave myself a stomach ache screwing up the courage to post that request to the blog. But I do a lot of favors for other people as a matter of course, both friends and strangers, mostly because it makes me feel so damned good. (Don’t worry—I do my fair share of acting like a idiot asshat to balance it out.)

I feel like a grade-A boob looking at the “consideration” list. That’s where opportunity lies, and I need to start jumping on it. I do like it when projects just come to me, but like counting on referrals to keep your pipeline full, it’s a fool’s game as a business strategy.

To that end, I would love your help in figuring out how to go about the “ask” in a better/stronger/faster (and, god willing, funner) way. My copy of The 25 Sales Skills They Don’t Teach You in Business School came in the mail this week, so maybe I’ll start there for inspiration. But for all I know, you might have the “ask” all figured out—or at least, are further along that path.

And yeah—that’s a favor I’m asking…

xxx
c

*Where “real” is “published via traditional means, not DIY”—I have plans for that, too. Say a prayer for me; it’s gonna be a busy Q4.

REGULAR MARKETING ACTIVITIES for the week of August 17, 2009:

• WEB: six blog posts (one here, five at the main blog)
• WEB: “twitterview” with Bryn Mooth about Twitter, on Twitter, in preparation for the upcoming CFC
• WEB: updated several posts on my site, added tweaks to sidebars and one new page (you’ll see it next Monday, but if you’re at the CFC, see me for a sneak preview)
• WEB/Real Life MKTC: Researched new communications services to improve Full Monty experience.
• WEB: wrote & submitted my monthly column for the Networker, LACasting’s member newsletter
• PRICING: (remember: it’s marketing, too) Brainstormed/sketched out new pricing structure for consulting I’m launching in September (for my birthday!)
• EMAIL MKTG: wrote one item for next month’s newsletter (I’m learning!)
• REAL-LIFE MKTG: picked up new business cards! yay!
• NETWORKING: one-on-one meetup with my good friend (and social networker extraordinaire), Chris Guillebeau. Hoo boy, did we talk shop!
• NETWORKING: hosted/attended Chris Guillebeau meetup in L.A.
• NETWORKING: catch-up call (mmm…ketchup) with my friend/colleague, Matthew Cornell (we met through the interwebs!)
• …and the various and sundry daily tasks (have you seen Chris Brogan’s great Daily Chores list?): Facebook, Twitter, email, etc.

If you’re working the Veteran’s Calendar literally, you’ll be drafting your first press release this week. While I don’t doubt the value of press releases nor the wisdom in learning to draft one well in advance of actually needing it, my recent trip to SxSW netted me a couple of huge potential projects that would actually require leveraging the press, and I need to at least get them underway first. Cool? Let’s move on!

This week was the first where my energy felt like it was back to something resembling normal. As I mentioned last week, big conferences can be useful—and, if they’re South by Southwest Interactive, fun x 10—but they do take it outta you.

For the most part, my marketing efforts this week once again went into the blog: I’ve doubled down on the posts, in a way, writing more of the personal essays that I like writing, that I’d like to get paid to more of, and that my readers seem to like. In fact, the more the world turns to short-form social media messaging like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc., the more I feel that there’s real opportunity from a marketing perspective in getting your mother ship (that’s the main site or blog you drive all your other social media traffic to) in outstanding condition. Here’s how I worked on that this week…

Feeling the Force in Marketing

(or, “Hold onto your seat belts, my hard-core rationalist friends: it’s going to be a woowoo flight!”)

The longer I have a hand in this marketing stuff, the more I realize that there are two methodologies. They’re both mutually exclusive and inextricably linked, depending on the practitioner, but I think that the finest in the land have perfected a mixture of both, with an entry point in one or the other.

The first is nuts-and-bolts marketing. That’s you, on the ground, building up your marketing machine piece by piece: starting a blog; making dreaded cold calls; creating an email vehicle; connecting with other networkers. I liken this to a beginning cook learning the trade, mostly because I was very much a beginning cook for years. I had to learn how to chop and how to slice, which flavors worked and which didn’t, which parts of a recipe could be omitted or changed up and which would render it unfit for dog food, and a million other often-tedious tasks and tricks. I washed a LOT of dishes; I ate a LOT of mistakes. But if you do the work and do it regularly, you will become a competent cook and be able to eat well.

The second type is intuitive marketing. These are the people who take to some (or many, blast them) parts of marketing like a duck to water. They are the types whom others are naturally drawn to, making them killers at networking (and, often, leadership). They are the natural sales people for whom cold calling is as easy and vital as breathing. They are people who have ideas that bowl over the rest of us with their singular brilliance and innovation.

If I were to analyze myself and my own style, it would definitely be “intuitive marketer”: I love to entertain and have always been drawn to writing and art as means of expression, so I got away with a lot for a long time.

What’s interesting to me is that the real superstars are those who have a fusion of both: they either learn the nuts and bolts and have it become so second-nature, they’re drawn to explore the “softer” aspects of it, or they’re arty-farty types who, when shown there’s a method to this madness, start learning the techniques that will take them to the next level.

I bring all of this up because I have always thought there was a “right” way to do things, even as other people tended to marvel at what I considered my messes. Working this calendar—doing things methodically, having the accountability force me to examine the “why” behind my resistance, seeing the cumulative benefits of this rather (sorry) tedious process—has opened my eyes to the possibilities behind fusing art and commerce. (What—you didn’t know I was a big commie pinko hippie?)

This week, in bullet points

Like I said above, while I’m all for creative freedom and room to express oneself, I have made myself accountable to you all for a reason: I’d like to get stuff done! So here are the nuts-and-bolts stuff I did this week:

• I sponsored the third monthly networking event for the LA Biznik community. It should be as easy as phoning the manager at Jerry’s Famous Deli and showing up with name tags at the appointed time. But I’m an introvert and a worrywart and—yes—a Virgo, so there are other things I like to do. Like…worry. (Don’t laugh; it’s a full-time job.) This month we got off to a rocky start when a computer glitch kept the event announcement from going live on the main L.A. page until days before the event itself, so we had a much smaller turnout (albeit still a delightful one). But as with every time, I’ve learned some other good items to add to my prep checklist, which will make the next event go more smoothly. One of those things was adding a co-host, my friend, Heather Parlato; consider a buddy yourself if you’re feeling overwhelmed. (BTW, if you want to join us, please do!)
• I revised the “consulting” page of my website and took it live. My slow march towards self-employed legitimacy continues. This week I did an overhaul of my consulting page and placed a big button link to it in the sidebar. (Feedback, please! Please!) There’s still more work to do, but I feel much better having stuck my flag in the ground for all to see.
• I added a Twitter Policy Page. You heard it here first: at some point, someone will get ticked off at you if you don’t follow them back. I’ve been keeping an eye on my unfollows at Twitter, and also checking the temperature regarding follow ratios in general. While most of the people who are on Twitter for any length of time get that it’s a really flexible tool and that there’s no one “right” way to use it, we’re at a point where more and more people who have no idea are jumping on, with an attendant possibility for misunderstanding and worse, hurt feelings. I’m a big, squishy, earnest heart who wouldn’t want to hurt anyone. I also use Twitter very specifically, plus I have the attention span of a gnat. I’m hoping that the Twitter Policy will serve as friendly boilerplate to cut misunderstandings off at the pass. Plus, I’ve been meaning to create some pieces on social media usage beest practices based on the content from my speeches, and this was a good start.
• I updated my newsletter archives page. With a new one coming out this coming week, it’s good to have the archives ready to go. And they are!
• I wrote my marketing-for-actors column. The column is the entry point for a lot of actors to the rest of my material. Not all of them will stay, but a few more do each month, and every little bit brings me closer to my goal of 1,000 True Fans.
• I worked on two book proposals. Yup, you heard right: I’ve got two, count ‘em, two books I’m gearing up to write this year. May not have both accepted by publishers; may not have either. But I’m getting the material in shape so that I can write at least one. It’s as essential to my growth as a writer as it is to marketing my services as one.

Here’s me being honest: I blew off my cold calls AGAIN this week. AAAUGH!!! What’s up with that? Well, I know: I like them the least, so I’ll jump on the smallest excuse to avoid them. This week, it was—don’t laugh—a dead phone battery. Yeah. I know.

I bought a new one and am all charged up this week. Wish me luck.

Oh—and seriously, if you have any feedback about my revised consulting page or my brand new Twitter Policy page, I’d love to hear them.

And while you’re at it, feel free to throw in any questions you have about Twitter in general. It’ll be big-time helpful as I gear up to write the how-to pages.

If you’re working the Veteran’s Calendar literally, you’ll be launching your site this week. I’ve been tweaking mine, adding pages and features and thinking about some long-term plans for making it more manageable (and fun, which will keep it more manageable for me).

It’s been a full week since I got back from my biggest conference of the year, South by Southwest Interactive, and I’m still playing a lot of catchup. (Mmm…ketchup….) I have yet to follow up with everyone I met, or even to get them into my system, but I have this project to keep me honest, so I know I will.

This week has been mostly about me recovering from the excitement and crazy expenditure of energy, and yes, even grappling with the little bit of depression involved in coming down off of a high. SXSW is a mentally energizing experience, but translating that into day-to-day work and maintaining the “high” on a long-term basis can get tricky. There’s even a panel on it at the conference, so I know I’m not the only one dealing with this issue. Here’s what I’ve set up to help me so far…

Behind Every Accomplishment Lies Accountability

For me, at least, it really helps to have systems in place to keep me motivated and on track. That’s what this calendar is about, and that’s what all my meetups, accountability partners and support groups are about. I have several things I put in place immediately to help me deal with what look like some pretty big self-directed projects ahead:

My marketing coach, Ilise, is the accountability thread that runs through everything. Sometimes I hate our weekly talks—when I’m stuck or frustrated or have been lax—and sometimes I love them. Sometimes I go into them hating them and end up loving them. I’d almost call this a luxurious resource except that for me, it’s a necessity (or at least, it has been) for keeping me focused, calm and productive. I can be all of those things by myself when I have to, but I’m more likely to let myself off the hook if no one is looking.

And I can’t overemphasize the importance of a common thread. Ilise helped me get my design business off the ground a few years ago; without her, I’m positive I might have made a go of it but I would probably not have met my financial goals (hell, knowing me, I probably wouldn’t have set any!). Then she helped me make the transition to my more marketing-focused business of consulting and speaking. Now, since a revelation at SXSW, she’s helping me focus it even more tightly by pushing me (gently) to stick to a writing proposal schedule. (I made some headway with a good publisher in Austin; not ready to spill it yet, but I’ll keep you posted.)

I can see the value in having serial coached (mmm…cereal…) but having that thread means she’s able to see my strengths and weaknesses more quickly, and to hold up examples from the past that may have bearing on the present. I wish for you someone in your business life like Ilise.

My friends are helping me with another accountability task. I really want to dial up the (paid) writing, and I started putting it out there. At SXSW, when I finally met my friend Gretchen Rubin in person, we talked writing for almost two hours. She drew my book idea from me and liked it; I asked her to help me with accountability and she agreed. (My first deadline is April 1st, for a Table of Contents.) Another friend who’s in book PR has been funneling me ideas and gently pushing me to keep going, which—surprise, surprise—does!

I bring both of these up not to toot my horn but for two reasons: to point out the value of asking very specifically and respectfully for the help you need, and to point out that I know both of these ladies via the Internet. Gretchen is a new-to-me friend, and Gigi is an old high school friend who reconnected with me via Facebook because—hear this, Twitter deniers!—she loved my updates.

My other friends are helping me stay on the enthusiasm train. I have a small group of women friends who meet up semi-regularly, and have been for the past four or five years. We talk about all kinds of things, but we definitely include our work projects. It’s incredibly helpful to just have support in general, but also really useful to recount to someone what you’ve accomplished in the past two or so months since you’ve seen each other. It’s easy to forget day-to-day what you’ve been able to do over a whole lot of days; these less frequent meetups help remind me and keep me encouraged.

My friend makes me hold her accountable. In a twist on that “if you want to really learn something, try teaching it to someone else” thought, being the one who holds someone else accountable can help keep you honest. When I get that weekly check-in, it’s a shot of inspiration and a humbling reminder of the value of consistent work. I love my phone calls from my aspiring writer friend at least as much, if not more than, my own calls to my peeps.

Taking care of bread and butter stuff

Of course, while I took it a bit easier this week, I still tried to stay on track with some of my tasks and goals. I’m sorry to say that once again, I bailed on cold calls, but I did manage to take care of some other bidness:

• I got back on the local networking train. It would have been easy to blow off my Freelancer Friday meetup (or anything else) this week, having just gotten back from meeting a slew of peeps. But I live here in L.A., and really want to keep building my ties to this community. Glad I went, because I met a super-interesting serial entrepreneur (and fellow smart-a**) whom I think may end up being a good friend, not to mention a good influence.
• I added yet more pages to my main website. I’ve been meaning to add a policy page for some time, and I finally did it this week. The impetus was a decision to join an affiliate network that would let me recommend audiobooks and music downloads; they require a privacy policy linked to from the front page, ergo I made one. I also added a navigational column to the front page which gives people yet another way to find what they’re looking for faster.
• I added a new feature to my website. The Make-a-Referral thing that John Jantsch started is starting to take on a life of its own. I’ve had a brief initial email exchange with him about ideas for getting something going on a bigger, more official level, but for now, I’m instituting my own “Referral Friday” feature on the site. It lets me do something cool and gives me a topic to write around every Friday, which reduces psychic load. Win-win! (And take THAT, economy!)
• I caught up on some backlogged items. I was two podcasts and many, many reply emails behind. I’m not all caught up, but I got the podcasts done, chipped away at the email, and also did some behind-the-scenes admin stuff I’m hoping will make my communications go more smoothly. More on that once it’s in place.

The biggest, most delightful—and yes, surprising—discovery of the past couple of weeks has been seeing how the work I’ve put in so far pays off in mysterious ways.  A lot of the discussion at SXSW (at least, among the people I respect and admire) was about just doing really, really great work and putting it out there, and trusting that eventually, the right people will find it and you’ll start seeing some success.

There’s no question that putting myself out there again and again by writing a lot of articles, meeting a lot of good people, getting into a lot of interesting conversations and all kinds of other interactive things has made a difference.

It’s helping me get through what feels like a natural dip in enthusiasm three months into this game. (Yikes! Three months!?!) At least, I think it is.

I’m curious to know where everyone else is at. Is your mojo flagging? Are you still on track with your goals? Are you seeing any return on your investment? Is it what you thought it would be, or something different?

The good news is that a website is never done. With modern content management systems (I’m a fan of WordPress, but there’s also Expression Engine, iWeb and lots of others), there’s no reason you have to wait until you’ve saved up enough items (or money) to call your webmaster: most small biz types can be their own webmaster, as well as designer, content producer and editor. Not that I recommend you do that indefinitely; there’s much to be gained from bringing in outside professionals. One of the ideas I’m toying with is extending a particular flavor of service specifically for marketing pros and designers, since it’s hardest of all to look at your own stuff with a critical eye.

So what did I do to my site this week?

Testimonials: plague on the Earth, or useful marketing tool?

People who know me well—Ilise and Peleg, included—know that I am the world’s worst self-promoter. Ironic, n’est-ce pas? Here I am, getting hired to help other people with their marketing and branding, and speaking to groups of business types and actors about social media and other high-falutin’ communications tools, and I am about the lousiest horn-tooter there is.

For myself. For other people? No problem! I love recommending other providers, blogs, resources and tools. Never happier than when I’m pointing people in the direction of the things they need to make their lives better, happier and more focused. So historically, my big plan when it came to promoting myself was to be so freakin’ awesome, other people would do the promoting for me.

It works, to a point. I have actually amassed a really heartwarming collection of recommendations from a variety of interesting, smart and talented people for the stuff I do, from writing to speaking to consulting. But how to display them?

Humor, my shield and my stallion!

I have never had any problem being a clown. Even when I was uncomfortable having attention drawn to me in other ways, I was fine with being front and center provided I was being self-deprecating and/or entertaining (preferably both!).

When Ilise urged me last week to put up some kind of testimonials, she suggested a post on my blog. Anything would be fine, she said, and far better than nothing. I knew she was right; I always enjoy seeing testimonials when I’m on the fence about something, or even just curious. They not only help sell: they help define the parameters of service, and tell me that I’m in the right place (or not).

So I finally settled on using a mix of quotes—some funny, some ridiculous, and some just earnest and nice, because hey, I’m basically a pretty earnest, nice fella under all that clowning around. I have a few quotes I put on the business card I made for last year’s South by Southwest conference, and they’ve always gone over well with my target. I grabbed them and about 11 others (for starters), found a WordPress plug-in that would randomly rotate them in my sidebar, designed a nice template for them in Photoshop, and now, I have roughly 15 rotating comments that link out to the people who gave them, so I can share the link love. (There are a few REALLY goofy ones that don’t link. You’ll understand when you see them.)

I’m a special case because so much of my brand is tied up in being a goofball, albeit a reasonably smart one, but anyone can steal the idea and do the same. In fact, I wish people would! I’d love more goofy, funny, self-deprecating testimonials to stumble upon as I wander around the web.

You can see the results on my blog, here. Hit “refresh” a few times (or several) and you’ll see the quotes change.

More fun and networking games this week

Of course, that’s not ALL I did this past week. I also…

• Changed up the side nav buttons on my blog Another great suggestion by Ilise, now I have a separate button to take people to a speaking page or a consulting page. Well, the “consulting” page takes you to my main “hire me” page for now; can’t do everything at once, but my next major web to-do will be putting up a main consulting landing page. The good news is that the more of these consultations I do, the more I really get how to describe the service to prospects. So huzzah, and stuff.
• Went to a great breakfast networking event I’ve been doing a lot more alumni-related stuff, which is nice because we already have some common ground, yet we all landed in different fields. Some interesting ideas about the direction we should take future events came out of this one, so I’m even more excited about continuing to meet up with my Cornell brethren.
• Met with another alum/friend who is BRILLIANT at sales He picked my brain about his new business venture, and I picked his about cold calling techniques. We both had a blast, a nice lunch, and left smarter than we came. Win-win, baby!
• Gave my Social-Media-for-Actors talk here in L.A. It went great, we all had fun, I came early and stayed late to answer a ton of extra questions, and I learned more, again. Like about how to do it even better AND about how much I love it. I LURVE it. I could talk and talk and talk.

The overwhelm check-in

Still having juggling issues. I missed a day of guitar and of hooping this week, which bums me out. But I also took some more leisurely walks with The BF and Arnie (the dog), only worked a half-day on Saturday and had a lovely night out, dining with friends. It seems like everything takes me more time than I expect it to, and something always comes up to pull me away from a task. This week it was a full day with my bookkeeper to clean up last year’s messes (I’m particularly bad about money, did I mention that?) and an old job reared its ugly head on Friday, sucking three hours out of my day. But I made it, and got my cold calls done, too, even if I didn’t get the follow-up attended to.

Where are you at with your plan? Where are you getting stuck? And speaking of not being able to see things, if there’s stuff you can see I could be doing more efficiently, by all means, speak up!

This week’s official task was to pull together samples of great newsletters in preparation for putting together your own or, if you already have a newsletter, to aggregate past issues into an archive on a page of your own website. My own tasks this week centered around updating and adding to my online content as needs arose, in addition to keeping up with the relentless, now-regular cold calling duties.

I’m sort of a militant fanatic-maniac when it comes to newsletters.

They have such tremendous potential to deliver great information (to the reader, your prospect or future fan) and they are such a great resource for you (hard to get an email list off of a blog), it horrifies me to see them abused. And they are—so much so that I wish there was a better name for them than “newsletter” (and no, “ezine” is most decidedly not better) so that I wouldn’t have this uphill climb to get other militant fanatic-maniacs to at least test-drive mine.

The archives page is a good way around this. As I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, I’m in the process of moving all of my back issues from my old design site to my new home base, communicatrix-dot-com. If you’re in a similar situation, I’d suggest at the very least setting up one page on each site you think people might find the newsletters on; I have one on the old site and one on the new, with a note on the old saying—you guessed it—to go to the new for latest versions.

Before I did so much as sketch out a list of ideas or daydream about names, I read dozens (no, really!) of newsletters to see what I liked and didn’t like. You can read my findings here; they’re old, but they stand.

With two years of monthly lessons under my belt, there are some additional things I’d address. I’ve learned a ton from producing 22 monthly missives. (And please let me know in the comments section if that’s something you’d be interested in reading, and if you have particular questions you’d like to see answered.) The chief one, though, is to allow yourself enough time, so you’re able to maintain a regular publishing schedule. Along with rich content, I think that’s the key to building a loyal list of readers.

Planning vs. creating on an as-needed basis (i.e., marketing whack-a-mole)

While my newsletter is pretty much slotted into my schedule at this point, I’m discovering plenty of stuff that needs to be similarly corraled and scheduled. I’m finally starting to get the point behind the individual dates on the calendar (the Veteran’s version says horrible things like “1 Hour Calling”—an HOUR!?!).

Most of my other long-range, nothing’s-on-fire stuff—improvements to the website, adjustments to the website, updating of print marketing materials, etc—I tend to put off until, well, there’s a fire.

South by Southwest (SXSW), the conference I’m heading out to in a couple of weeks, is one of those fires. Having it looming and having made a promise to my friend (and first-time attendee), Gretchen Rubin, that I’d write up a how-to-prep post, finally got me to craft and post something last Thursday. (You can read it here, and do let me know if you’ll be there!)

Similarly, a follow-up on a query for speaking materials forced me to finally put up a page dedicated to speaking: topics, testimonials, video, etc. Sadly, the potential gig fell through when the whole conference was axed because of this crazy economy, but it’s far more important that I got the page up than that I landed one particular gig.

For the next few weeks, I have a list of individual webby tasks I created during my weekly call with Ilise. They’re all about clarifying the information for new visitors and prospects, reducing “noise” and making it easier to find what they’re looking for (and, hopefully, hire me!) They include:

• Streamlining the main sidebar navigation Despite it being a little off-beat, the stuff I do for actors and the stuff I provide for Crohn’s and ulcerative colitis sufferers is a big part of who I am. I plan to keep it, but to craft smaller buttons to sit in the far-right column, so the commerce-type stuff stands out. Also, at Ilise’s suggestion, I’m going to create separate buttons for consulting and speaking. That means…
• Revising my consulting pages, and creating one main landing page for consulting The individual pages will stay “supersecret” for now, as I continue to work on my pricing, but it’s time for one solid landing page that describes my consulting philosophy and technique, along with my ideal client. For the record, I ordered Mark Silver’s mini-course on writing your website to give me ideas. I think he does a great job of letting people know they’re in the right place, and I was curious about his process.
• Testimonials! I have a ton of great ones from all kinds of happy readers and clients. I’m still struggling with the best way to display them; my ideal solution is some kind of randomizer that displays different, funny/excellent quotes with each click. But maybe for now, just a blog post or separate page? What do you think?

Dealing with overwhelm

These are some crazy times, and it seems like we have to work three times as hard to stay in the same place, much less get ahead. It worries me that this pace may not be sustainable. I went to two back-to-back networking events on Wednesday evening, one of which I hosted, and while I had fun and think that both were worthwhile, I was wiped out the rest of the week. On Sunday, after more running around, my body finally succumbed to the cold I’ve been dreading. (On the other hand, a friend’s movie was up for an Academy Award—there’s no way I was going to miss that celebration!)

I try not to get discouraged. I understand it’s a process, and eventually, like everything else, things will fall into place and only need minor upkeep for a while.

In the meantime, I’m doing what I can to pace myself, get things done, and not beat myself up for (always) falling short of what I think I could be doing. What do you do to keep yourself sane these days? And who’s got some tips to give me an extra two hours per day?

This week, Part 2 of Optimizing Your Online Presence: Getting your site to do the heavy lifting

Before I get into the meat of this, I need to address a couple of things. First, the stated task for this week of the Veteran’s Calendar is to choose three projects to write up as case studies. That’s great, but it’s not what I needed most, so I decided to tackle another online-related task: getting my “hire me” pages up and running.

Second, working this calendar out loud has been nothing short of monumental in the amount of stuff it’s enabled me to finally get done towards accomplishing my goals—some of them quite longstanding.

Take, for example, my “hire me” page. I’ve been semi-officially retired from design for over a year  now, but up until this week, all of the “hire me” links on my site redirected people to my old (and outdated) design portfolio site. I’m not embarrassed by the work, nor am I trying to hide my background as a designer, however brief it was. But I knew it had to be confusing to people—the email queries asking “What do you do, exactly?” and “How do I hire you now?” were a big hint—and I was overdue for getting something more concrete up there.

How I pulled together my “Hire Me!” page

The first thing I did was to block off the entire weekend. In my experience, any web-related project not only takes a lot of time, but a lot of time in a row. Also, I like the immersion technique, and I didn’t want to get into it and then immediately get pulled off of it to do something else.

But you can pretty easily chunk the tasks themselves into smaller, more digestible portions, as follows:

• Research other sites for inspiration (anywhere from 5 minutes to 1/2 hour at a time) You may or may not be looking at competitors’ sites, and think loosely about the term “competitor” anyway.
• Review your site for “missing” pages (1/2 hour) I’ve been keeping a wish list of stuff I want to do to my website, but I still took one more pass with my “prospect” hat on. If I was looking for help with my marketing and I came to this site, what would I want? How would it be easiest for me to find? It helped me realize which pages I needed to add, and the order of the information within them.
• Scour your files for copy that already exists (1/2 hour – 1 hour at a time) I don’t know about you, but there’s a wealth of usable data buried in my emails to various clients, prospects and just queriers (which isn’t a word, apparently, but should be!). I’ve gotten in the habit of tagging emails with “boilerplate” and “keepers” and other cryptic codes, so they’re easy to pull up when I need them. But even if you’re starting now, search functions have gotten so much better that you could probably pull up a lot of info from a well-picked set of keywords, looking in your sent mail for stuff to clients, etc.
• Write pieces of your “hire me” page (1/2 hour – 1 hour at a time — less if you’re fast!) Again, I like to collect info a little at a time, then write all at once. But you could break it out into pieces if you hate sitting down for a long time: your philosophy, your list of services, your process, etc.

Nerdy details that bear mentioning on creating new web pages

In my case, I also wanted the page to be as easy to read as possible, which got me to do something else I’ve long put off: tweak the text size, line height (or leading) and formatting of my entire site. I’m not great with coding, so I made sure to attack this while I was very fresh and full of energy; NEVER CODE TIRED!! Also, save your work often, and keep a clean backup so that if disaster strikes, you can go back and restore things easily.

I’m definitely going to do a “do as I say” thing, here, and suggest you draft your work in a text editor, then bring it into your CMS (content management system)–WordPress, Expression Engine, TypePad or whatever else you use. If you’re handing it off to a developer, you pretty much have to do this, but a lot of us DIY-with-WordPress types get in the bad habit of doing our content creation and our design testing at the same time. Mea culpa is all I can say; I realize the process would have gone much faster if I’d written all my text, THEN imported it, but I just like seeing how things are gonna look right NOW.

Research call follow-up and other marketing housework for the week

One side effect of not having my online ducks in a row was postponing my email follow-ups to the research calls I’ve been making. Ilise was alarmed when I told her I’d not followed up on a single one, and urged me to follow up with just an email reiterating what I’d said during the call (or the voicemail), so that I’d make the contact.

I was bummed; I really wanted to have a nice, shiny packet o’ stuff to send before I replied. But she insisted that I could create things as people asked for them, so I swallowed my pride and started firing off follow-up emails. I didn’t get them all out, but I’m making headway. That’s what all this is about, right? Making a little headway every day, not doing it perfectly.

I’ve also been playing with my contact management system. I’m doing a trial of BatchBook right now and so far, I’m really liking it. It could be a little prettier (sorry, BatchBook—I’m picky!), but it’s packed with useful features I’m discovering as I go. One of my favorites is being able to bcc all my follow-up emails straight into BatchBook, where they’re automagically added to that contact’s history. Niiiice! There are also some really robust tagging and sorting functionalities I’ve only begun to play with. More on that as I use it.

A list of pages I created for my site, and a request!

To recap, this week I created…

• A landing page for acting-related searches This replaces the page with all my LA Casting columns on it as my acting-related landing page. I’ve left it up, but you now have to click on something else to get to it.
• A “hire me” page for all the services I currently offer It’s not exactly right yet, but it’s getting there. On it is a section about my mission and philosophy, a section for civilians (i.e., non-actors) and a section for actors or acting-related queries.
• A contact form page As queries grow, I need to have some way of sorting things to help keep me sane. I’m test-driving this particular WordPress plugin; if I like it, I’ll have it coded to match my site better, and toss the developers a few bucks, as well. (Most WP plugins are free, but it’s good karma to share some material love, I think.)

I would love any feedback you can give: suggestions for improvement, kudos, pointers to broken links & stuff. Also, it would be great to get a feel for what’s still missing. I have ideas, of course, but I’m so close to it at this point, I have zero objectivity. It’s time to step away, work on something else for a bit, and see how people respond to what’s there now.

Next week: For most people, eNewsletter stuff; for me…well, any idears?

This week: Sharing knowledge wisely

This week is all about generating helpful stuff to share with people who come to your site—specifically, a page of links and resources that will be of use to your market.

I already collect and point people to information in many ways—via delicious bookmarks, a StumbleUpon blog, and a trio of resources in each issue of my monthly newsletter (which you can sign up for here). I also have a page of links to blogs I like on my main site, communicatrix-dot-com, and helpful blogs and tools for fellow marketers broken down by category in the sidebar of the Virgo Guide to Marketing (a.k.a. the standalone blog that accompanies this project.)

In fact, I’m in so many places pointing out so much stuff, one of the first things I did with the relaunch of my site was to create a big “aggregator” page with all the places I live outside of communicatrix, and what I offer in each space.

So while I can and will keep refining the pages I use to point people toward The Good Stuff, I thought a better exercise for me this week might be to corral and update some of my own information more neatly—namely, my newsletter page.

How my newsletter page got all messed up

For those of you who are new to the blog, I had a brief, previous incarnation as a graphic designer. In fact, I still do a smidgen of design now for some remaining clients, but as I’ve turned my focus toward consulting and speaking and writing, I’ve let my old design portfolio site molder away.

Worse, while I created a duplicate “round-up” page, I never moved the newsletter archives themselves to current HQ, a.k.a. communicatrix-dot-com. There were a few reasons, but it boiled down to time and technical difficulty—WordPress does not make it easy to embed HTML inside its pages, and it took help from a skilled dev friend and a great plugin to finally make it happen. And as long as I couldn’t get the pages loaded onto the right site, I just let the task slide…until I was a dreadful five months behind in getting the issues up: not a great look for any potential subscribers dropping by to see what the last few issues look like; for all they knew, I’d not published any since August of 2008!

I’m happy to say that as of last night, I’m current, and the last five of the issues are up on the mother ship. I’ll set up a recurring task to upload the previous month’s newsletter once the fresh one is published, and until they’re all up there, I’ll load one more (or two, if I’m feeling ambitious) onto the new site.

How are you customizing the calendar?

This is just my way of making the calendar work for me. You might need to go ahead and do it by the book; if you don’t have a list of resources on your site, I’d at least think about it. One of the things I’m learning about how people get hired (or how they sell stuff) is the whole funnel thing: a free page of resources shows you know your stuff, gives people an idea of the kinds of things you find valuable, and, in a way, lets them work with you on the most fundamental, no-strings-attached level.

Besides, it’s good karma!

Some other ways I used the calendar as a guideline, not gospel:

No networking!

Well, not strictly true. I did a webinar for 100 of my closet alumni last Monday, so I “met” a bunch of new people. (Check out two of my new favorite people, a kickass lawyer in Silicon Valley and a real live Santa Claus! We talked social media shop for two full hours, we had us so much fun!) I could have gone to a bona fide networking event, too, but I’ve doubled up for weeks now, due to circumstances and opportunity, and I needed a break.

I didn’t schedule this week’s event, either…because I’d already done it!

Five cold calls, not ten

Frankly, that’s still all I can muster. I’m pleased with my progress: even though I’m leaving voicemails, I’m much more comfortable doing it; this week, I even used cold calling to procrastinate on some other tasks (namely, writing this post—I’m kind of written out, to tell you the truth.)

I have to keep telling myself it’s not about doing it perfectly, but about DOING it. Which I am. Which you are, right?

Dealing with life

Friends contact me with their own marketing problems they need help with. A stranger knocks off my side-view mirror and I have to deal with it (although happily, I didn’t have to pay for it.) A weird potential job opportunity pops up and I need to take time from my regular schedule to check it out.

I confess to a feeling of disappointment with myself when I do things imperfectly. And yet, as I said in my own recent newsletter—which, happily, I can now link to—it’s critical to remember that perfect is the enemy of the good.

I didn’t get as much done this week as I’d have liked. (I’ll probably never get as much done in most weeks as I’d like.) But as Ilise says, the important thing is to do something anyway. And if you don’t do it, not to beat yourself up over it, but to get back on track the next day.

Where are you in your odyssey? What kinds of things are hanging you up?

And—be honest!—is there a particular task you’re avoiding altogether? What could you do to get the tiniest piece of it done?