Some days, words will just flow onto your blog, but there are times when it is harder to know what to write about. It’s normal to have days where we’re less creative, or are tired, or overwhelmed or a multitude of other things that get in our way.

A week or so ago, I looked at a new blog - well, newish as it replaces a previous blog by the same person - and noticed a few spelling errors. Knowing the blogger, I let her know about them and thought nothing else of it. A few days later, I noticed that Melissa had added a new post in which she talked about fixing those errors I had pointed out and the importance of proof reading.

This reminded me of how we can find blogging (or article or newsletter, etc) topics from the simple events that happen in our business and personal lives. Small events can remind us of important things or create a useful learning tool. So here are some suggestions for next time you are stuck on what to write…

• questions clients have recently asked you - e.g. I recently explained bleeds to a couple of clients and I have been asked if I do editing of articles (which I do!), and both of those could become a blog post
• tips you come across from other business people - for example, I shared some decluttering tips I gained from a workshop I attended
• mistakes you see in others’ work - not as a means of criticising others, but as a means of learning from their mistakes
• turning points and changes in your business - either just to let people know of them, or as a means of teaching others alternatives

By including little things in your list of ideas is a good way to increase the amount of topics you have to write about.

Use your words wisely!

Don’t rely on your spell checker. Even if there are no language differences, it won’t always catch your errors.

Both “the buoy is floating” and “the boy is floating” are correct, but they mean different things. Of course, if you live in the USA you pronounce buoy as boo-ey so this pair of words doesn’t seem quite so similar as it does to those of us who prounce it the same way as boy.

boy: a male child
The boy was excited about his birthday.

buoy: a floating device that marks significant spots in water
The boats kept outside of the circle of buoys during the race.

In a traditional job setting, it’s fairly clear to see the difference between work and home - until you start bringing work home anyway! But when you run a business or have a remote job, it can be harder to spot the difference - and harder to manage things.

Of course, the big question is HOW to manage time! I think the simplistic answer is to set boundaries to maintain control.

From talking to various people, I see two main groups of at home workers - those who get distracted from work by the need to tidy the kitchen, hang out the washing, vacuum the floors and so on, and those who work a lot and find it hard to manage much of the house stuff at all. Which group do you fit into? I have no trouble (well, generally speaking!) getting on with work but end up working too hard and letting the housework slide…

Here are some of my ideas on creating boundaries between business and home, but I’d love to hear your suggestions, too…

• physically separate your working space from your living space as much as possible - if you are sitting in your work space, don’t do home things and vice versa. My article, separating your home office, may give you some new ideas
• separate phone lines if you can - then only answer the business phone during business hours, and the home phone during personal hours. Before you assume this is too expensive, consider a VOIP phone as this is much cheaper than renting a second landline
•  tell clients your expectations/limitations - for example, “We work 10 to 4″ or “we don’t answer phone calls in busy periods”. Kylie of Tilda Virtual went further and actually sacked a client to gain back control of her business and family boundaries!
• set clear business hours and stick to them most of the time - if clients see you work outside those hours, they will start expecting you to do so. If you do work out of your usual hours, make it clear it is unusual or mask the fact - sometimes I work late at night but program the email to go to my client the next morning so I am not advertising the fact of when I did the work.
• if possible, use a different email address for friends and family than for business. Set up filters for incoming emails and just concentrate on business emails during business hours.
• learn to say no to clients or extra work - or at least say it won’t be done straight away. Know how much work you can deal with in a day/week and refuse to overload yourself
• if you have people visiting you during the day, try putting a sign on the door that says “Business in operation - please call back later for a personal visit” so people can see you are serious about your business hours. If you want, you could leave a pencil and notepad by the door so they can leave you a message

Sometimes it seems impossible to make those boundaries, but the reduced stress and lost time is well worth the effort. Good luck with it!

Use your words and time wisely!

I have received emails/letters that include ”thanks for your patients” where I’m sure the writer didn’t have  the slightest idea that they really meant “thanks for your patience”. Do you know the difference?

patience: bearing or enduring difficult or trying circumstances, usually in a calm and accepting manner
The audience’s patience was rewarded with a wonderful concert.

patients: people receiving the services of medical practitioners - often ill or injured people but not always
The doctor had a queue of patients waiting to see her during the epidemic.

Given that patients refers to a group of people, it is no surprise that the word ends in s, the common plural ending.

Contingency planning and being prepared are important steps for a business owner - but steps that are not urgent so can easily be left behind in the day to day busyness of business and making a profit.

I was reminded of this topic today when I read an article called ‘When bad stuff happens’ - being about small business owners needing to think ahead to potential problems. And having procedures in place to cope when problems do arise.

Back in 1999, I had a contract to prepare some contingency plans for a major Australian company. We did various things, but one key task was preparing a checklist and contingency plan for the morning of 1 January 2000 - the day computers were going to fail and planes fall from the sky! The checklist included things such as ‘turn on a light switch. If it doesn’t work, try a second switch. If it still doesn’t work, look at neighbouring buildings and street lights - do they have power?’ We thought ahead and gave staff options to get all the information before emergency procedures were put into place.

So what sort of things do you need procedures for in your business? Obviously, that depends on your business, but some simple procedures you could start with are:

• make sure someone else has a list of key contacts in case you are suddenly out of action. For example, my key clients and contacts are on a list with my husband so they would not be left wondering about me if I disappeared for a while
• give someone else access to your PO box, or at least permission to get your mail redirected
• prepare a list of essential business passwords so someone else can manage things - for instance, passwords for your blog, email and online shop administration
• if you send out products, writing a procedure on how to package and send them is crucial for another person to be able to pick it up for you
• if you are a service provider, establish some relationships now so there are people you can refer clients to or outsource work to if you can’t complete promised work
• give your bookkeeper, accountant or a trusted person the means to be able to complete IAS/BAS statements for you, including how to pay any tax owing, so you avoid fines and problems with the ATO while you are ill or unavailable
• prepare some standard responses to emails so the same message can be sent out even in your absence. Think about adding some of that common information to your website, too, to reduce how many people ask the same question - much easier for someone trying to fill in for you, but also a great time saver for you in the mean time!

If you start implementing some of these plans into your busienss, I’d love to hear about it - although I hope it never becomes necessary to use the procedures for a negative problem (using them because you win a trip around the world is a different story!)

Use your words and time wisely!

Altogether: completely or totally. Overall.
He was altogether mad!

All together: the entire group at the same time or place.
We were all together when we got the news.

Think of altogether being one word and meaning complete compared to all members of a group being separate even when together.

Think about why you use the internet for business. Sure you look at the graphics and pictures, but the main activity is collecting information, right?

So, does it make sense that one of the best ways to pull people into your site is to give them information? Selling your product or service is your main business aim, of course, but if you give people information they will trust you – and they’ll stay on your site long enough to learn your name.

How can you use information to get people to visit your web site?

By far the easiest way is to submit informative articles to various web sites and ezines. That doesn’t mean you submit an article about you or your business as that will bore and annoy your readers. What you have to give them is good information about something relevant to your business, something they can use and appreciate you for.

If you are a mechanic, you could submit articles explaining what fuel injected means or how to jump start an engine; a wedding planner can write about how to decide on a guest list; an accountant can explain negative gearing or claiming GST inputs; and a butcher could write about the different cuts of meat.

You also need to make sure the article is interesting and basic enough for your potential clients to understand and finish. It must be accurate and presented professionally as well,  if it is to promote your business positively.

At the end of the article, you include a short bio about yourself and your business. You can see the bios I use at the end of business and health articles.

If you have a web site or email address, make sure the bio includes this information so it can be hyperlinked back to you. Thus anyone reading your article and wanting to know more or use your service can contact you instantly.

I mentioned the value of promotional articles a few weeks ago, and I will cover ways to make use of them in coming posts.

Surfing some of my favourite blogs today, I came across a post by Donna-Marie about choosing suitable fonts. As well as being a good summary of which fonts work well in different media, it reminded me of someone recently asking about using different sized fonts - and recent experiences of unsuitable font choices.

 I remember doing school assignments where I’d use different fancy fonts for each heading and changed the text to suit the amount of information in each section, and so on - and I was proud of being so versatile! But looking back (or at children’s work now) I can see that it looks childish and puts the focus on the fonts rather than the content. It isn’t very professional to give the impression you are trying to minimise the content!

As a general rule, it is better to stick to one font style and size in a single document. It is consistent which makes it easier to read (the eye doesn’t have to keep adjusting to different fonts) and it also looks clean and professional. And to be honest, it is also easier to prepare than swapping fonts all the time!

The common exceptions in font sizes would be:

• heading and sub-headings are often a little larger than the text font
• labels on diagrams and tables are often smaller to work with the labelled items
• the ‘fine print’ such as a disclaimer, a copyright notice or unsubscribe information - this text can be smaller but it must still be big enough to easily read so less than 8 point is getting too small in most cases. I recently edited a document which had footnotes to a table in a 7 font and it was too small to read and also looked out of place amongst the 11 font table and general text.
• fonts within an ad design may show more variation, but be careful to not overdo it

If you are tempted to change font sizes to break up a chunk of text, consider bullet points, italics, bold, more paragraph breaks and page layout as alternatives.

Assistants: two or more people who are helping
His assistants were busy preparing the report.

Assistance: the help being provided
I really appreciated your assistance yesterday.

The use of -ants and -ance is often confused because they sound exactly the same despite the very different spelling. The easiest way to remember which is which is to think of ants (yes, the insects!) as doers and use that ending when you are writing about people doing something.

Everyone I have spoken to enjoyed the conference I attended in July and that got me wondering why - and thinking about other conferences I’ve been to and heard of. So I want to know what makes a good conference?

Knowing what makes a good conference is very useful if you ever have to plan one, but it can also be useful in deciding whether or not to invest your time and money into a particular conference. Business events can be a great resource - but they can also be a waste of time and money if you don’t choose carefully.

Some of the features that I think helped make the Business Mums Conference good are:

• It was fully catered (morning tea, afternoon tea and lunch) so no one had to leave the venue to find food. That meant we all stayed together, had networking opportunities and time to visit the expo stalls
• Sessions went for about 75 minutes each which was long enough to get useful information but not so long everyone was restless and loosing concentration. Longer sessions also means more people get up and leave the room which is distracting
• more than one session was run at a time for most of the conference - everyone was together for plenary and forum sessions - so we had choice. That meant I didn’t have to attend any workshops aimed at beginners and no one had to struggle with irrelevant or overly advanced topics if they didn’t want to
• we got a handbook which included notes from all presentations - so I can read about the sessions I missed as well as not gathering single handouts that are easily lost
• the presenters covered a variety of topics which seems appropriate for small business owners (as we have to know about so many topics to succeed!) Of course, a conference may not be as varied and still be good depending on the overall topic of the conference
• all presentations included practical ways to use the information so it was easy to implement it straight away - and we all know that if you don’t use new information quickly, the chances of benefiting from it later are much less. This was actually promoted as part of the conference which wouldn’t always be the case

What features have you particularly appreciated about a conference or business event?  Do you agree with the features I listed as being valuable (especially if you were at the BMN conference!)?