Kathy Hendershot-Hurd

80% Discount To Celebrate Successful-Blog’s 3rd Birthday

October 28, 2008 by Kathy Hendershot-Hurd

For those of you who don’t know her, Liz Strauss is a MASTER of building community through blogging.

When a blogging client tells me that he or she wants to build an active and alive community with their blog, Liz’s blog is at the top of the list. When Liz Strauss blogs – people not only listen, they respond as well.

One of the reasons Liz is such an ICON in the blogging community is her spirit of giving. She writes in her post, Celebrate Successful-Blog’s 3rd Birthday with me and 718 SOBs!

I’ve been putting up that list for 157 weeks of Successful and Outstanding Bloggers! In last week, I’ve combed over the SOB List. What a memorable walk that was. I got the full impact of how many blogs had grown and how many were gone.

She then lists 719 links to bloggers who have participated in her previous “celebrations”.

See, celebrations are nothing new over at the Successful & Outstanding Blog. Liz is always looking for new ways to “celebrate” other blogger’s blogs! For her blog’s third birthday, she’s having yet another celebration where she shines the spotlight onto other people’s blogs. As for gifts, she wants people to bring gifts to share with all.

Due to recent reader questions, I’ve just added a whole new case study to the Fast Track to Blogging Success to make it even BETTER. Even blogging beginners can understand how to effectively find and use the best keywords for your blog using free tools on the internet!

To celebrate the Successful-Blog’s third birthday, from now until October 31, when you enter the code “SOB”, you’ll get 80% off this informative eBook which looks at finding and using the right keywords for your blog. To celebrate Liz’s blog’s third birthday, Instead of $24.95, you’ll get it for only $4.95.

Remember, enter the code SOB to get 80% off this informative resource.

HAPPY BLOG BIRTHDAY LIZ!!!

Steps to Starting a Small Business: #1 – The Idea

October 27, 2008 by Kathy Hendershot-Hurd

The topic of starting a small business is ALWAYS a popular one. If you are a small business owner and you meet someone who is toying with the idea of starting a small business, you’ll probably hear the question asked, “How did you get started?”

Too many times, this question leads to a very dry discussion of accounting methodologies and business structure issues.

YAWN!

Here it is from someone who has “been there, done that” I’ve not only bought the T-shirt but I’ve worked with HUNDREDS of people in helping them to achieve the dream of marketing and promoting their own small business.

The first step to starting a small business is NOT deciding upon a legal structure for your business.

The first step to starting a small business is NOT performing a SWOT analysis, a competitor analysis or any other kind of “analysis”.

The first step to starting a small business is NOT creating a logo, ordering business cards or creating a website.

Are you ready – [drumroll – finger on desk]

The first step to starting a small business is the birth of the idea!

“Money never starts an idea. It is always the idea that starts the money.”– Owen Laughlin

Starting a small business with the idea that you’re going to make a LOT of money is a piss poor reason to launch a business. As a matter of fact, if there’s a BETTER way to achieve failure, I can’t think of it. Some Of The Best Business Ideas begin not with a passion for money, but a passion for something other than money.

There are certain inalienable truths which you should know as you begin the exciting journey of starting a small business.

You’re going to need more money that you thought to launch this business.
You’re going to need more money than you can beg, steal or borrow to launch this business.*
You’re going to have to work harder than you ever have in your life to launch this business.
You’re going to have to turn a deaf ear to the people who think you’re crazy for pursuing this business.

* There is an exception to the “you’ll never have enough money” truth. You may gain access to venture capital, in which case you’ll have too much money – which surprisingly can be WORSE than not having enough. Read Monitor110: A Post Mortem, which digs deep into the reasons (hindsight is always 20:20) why Monitor 110 didn’t rise to the ranks of legendary success – one reason was the access to too much money!

By the way, I’m not saying that you WILL NOT make money with your small business, I’m just saying if that is your primary motivation, you probably won’t make it.

So if money isn’t a good reason to start new business, what is?

In a nutshell – it’s an idea. An idea that keeps you up at night. An idea that permeates your every waking moment. An idea that has hold of your brain and won’t let go.

“Ideas are a dime a dozen. People who implement them are priceless” – Mary Kay Ash

If you want to start a small business in order to improve the balance of your checking account – for heavens sake, go get a JOB and don’t even think about starting a small business!

What’s your passion? What’s keeping you up at night?

Once you’ve found your passion – then begins the process of bringing your business to life.

Achieve Success While Maintaining a Healthy Work Life Balance

October 24, 2008 by Kathy Hendershot-Hurd

Entrepreneurship is a lot like athletic competition: if you don’t prepare yourself mentally AND physically, you’ll find you don’t have what it takes to play the entire game. The competition in the business world is grueling and relentless and you have to be able to play until the final buzzer!

This is one of those “Do as I say – not as I do” kind of blog posts for me. Like Monika Mundell, I too have been suffering the health consequences of living a life that has fallen out of balance.

Success is all about balance.

I love word pictures and here’s one to illustrate my point: to achieve success in your business, you must stand upon a three legged stool. The three legs of the stool are:

Exercise
Eat Right
Sleep

Trying to build a business which requires you to work 12 – 16 hours a day without doing those three essential things is a recipe for disaster.

It could be that the purpose of your life is only to serve as a warning to others.

Here is my story of life balance disaster. Let is serve as a warning to others.

It started 6 months ago when I fell out of the habit of daily exercise. I believe exercise is an essential ingredient in your quest for success. Your body was created to move, not to sit in a chair all day. Daily exercise sharpens not only your body, but your mind as well.

In my case, exercise is the foundation of EVERYTHING healthy and good in my life.

Exercise serves to keep my diet “healthy”.

For example, if I try to eat my favorite food of all time – Pop-Tarts [cue angelic singing] – and exercise, I’ll find that I struggle to finish my workout. If however, breakfast is a bowl of steel cut oats or an omelet, I’ll have enough energy to exercise and then jump into working. If I don’t eat healthy, I see the effects when I exercise.

Exercise also helps you get a good night’s sleep.

When I’m exercising, the quality and quantity of my sleep is GREATLY improved. When I don’t exercise, well – I begin to become acquainted with the various mattress companies infomercials which run during the wee hours of the morning.

So for more than 3 years, my day would begin by putting on my walking shoes, putting a leash on my dog and walking a mile or more every morning. If 7:00 AM rolled around and I didn’t have on my walking shoes, my dog would begin barking relentlessly until I started our pre-walk ritual. If I didn’t know better, I’d swear that silly dog could tell time!

Then, I came down with the flu. I guess the dog knew something was up because instead of launching his full scale high decibel barking assault, he just whimpered and whined outside my bedroom door.

Well, the habit was broken with the dog after a week – and when the daily exercise stopped, everything else went to hell in a hand basket.

So at this point in time, I’m not walking, I’m busy working and my family is subsisting on Pop-Tarts, frozen pizzas and fast food. It should come as no surprise that I began having trouble sleeping about this time.

Fast forward just a few months. I feel like crap and my twisted, nutrition deprived mind decides the problem lies in a partially impacted wisdom tooth that has recently emerged.

It’s not my junk food diet that is making me feel like crap. It’s not my lack of exercise that is making me feel like crap. It’s not the fact that I’m only sleeping 4 hours a night that I feel like crap- it’s my tooth that is the root of all evil.

In a nutshell, my idiot dentist prescribes an antibiotic to which I have a reaction which the leaflet says could be fatal. When I call the office, the woman says, “Don’t worry about it. We’ll see you next Tuesday.” The idiot dentist pulls the infected tooth and the infection rages out of control. A month later,a doctor is telling me, ” This is really serious. You could die.” I walk out with a referral to an ENT and enough prescriptions to start my own pharmacy.

After CAT scans, blood tests, specialists and way too many hours sitting in doctor’s waiting rooms, I’m really regretting NOT paying attention to maintaining a healthy life balance.

Oh, I’m so back on the “wagon” when it comes to diet and exercise – the sleep thing just follows naturally when I’m doing the first two.

It could be that the purpose of your life is only to serve as a warning to others.

Don’t wait until you’re making the rounds of various doctor’s offices to pay attention to the “basics” you need to achieve success. Trust me, productivity takes a NOSE DIVE when you’re spending your days in a doctor’s waiting room!

If the three legged stool is in balance – exercise, eat right and adequate sleep – then you have a firm foundation upon which to operate your business. If you think you can “cheat” the system – think again. It’s true – an ounce of prevention is really worth a pound of cure!

I thought I was invincible – and I discovered I’m human. I guess that discovery is just another part of the aging process!

This blog post is part of Stacey Hoffer Weckstein’s “Life Balance Group Writing Project“.

If it ain’t broken, PLEASE don’t fix it!

October 23, 2008 by Kathy Hendershot-Hurd

I am seething with rage right now and the object of loathing is Gmail!!! Recently, the Google gods decided to “improve” Gmail – and right now, I’m regretting using the service.

I don’t know who I’m more angry with at the moment – Gmail for “fixing” something that wasn’t broken or my stupidity (and blatant disregard of my own “standards”) for expecting something of value for nothing.

The new Gmail interface – to put it politely – SUCKS!!!!

I’ve composed the same email THREE TIMES over the past 90 minutes. I’ll be in the middle of composing this same email and suddenly the screen will “refresh” and my reply will be GONE!!! Admittedly, I’m multi-tasking. I’ve got 5 other things going at once so the reply is happening in “spurts” – but still – COME ON GMAIL!!!

The first two times it happened, I tried to tell myself that my Higher Power wanted me to revise this email. Maybe that’s still the case. I’d love to hear your two cents on this situation.

Is this my Higher Power protecting me from myself?

Here’s the deal: I’m actively seeking guest blog posts for a new blog I’ve launched: Divorce Recovery Advice.

(If you’re a coach who specializes in divorce recovery, consider yourself invited to guest post on the blog.)

The blog is REALLY new and yet it’s already getting some nice SERPS on a couple of desirable keyword terms.

Today I got a GREAT post from a divorce coach. This woman is a NATURAL born communicator and in the course of just one blog post, she had no trouble gaining my trust. She knows her stuff and it SHOWS! It’s a GREAT guest post – so, I head over to her website to grab a head shot to include in her author’s bio box. (This guest post is scheduled to appear later in the month – thanks to WordPress’ ability to schedule posts to publish in the future!)

[Sound Effects] BRAKES SCREECHING! CARS CRASHING!!!

Oh my – what a DISASTER! Her website F-UGLY. However, the good news is that according to Alexa – no one is seeing it anyway.

Remember – my first impression of this woman was her guest post. Her guest blog post was great – and her website is BAD!

Here’s my dilemma –

I can help and she obviously NEEDS my help. However, she didn’t ASK for my assistance.

It was the email to her to tell her when her guest blog post will “air” on the blog that I have lost 3 times.

On the one hand, I could invite her to be a repeat guest poster to my blog. She would be building content on my blog and putting Adsense money in my pocket. I could tell myself that she would benefit because my blog after 6 weeks is doing MUCH better traffic wise than her website. However, if someone clicks through, they’re not going to stick around.

On the other, I could offer to help her. Which is the horns of my dillemma. She didn’t ASK for my help – and I’m afraid that offering to help might cast my invitation to guest blog as a filthy marketing whore tactic.

What would you do?

The Name of the Game is Trust

October 19, 2008 by Kathy Hendershot-Hurd

Lately, I’ve been talking a LOT about the importance of TRUST as an essential element of your marketing efforts. Here’s a word picture to help you “visualize” how the whole “trust building” process works.

Think of trust like you would a bank account. When you first meet someone, the balance of the “trust” account is zero. Then, as you interact with this other person, deposits are being made into the trust account. To borrow from Tom Volkar’s blog – when you honor your agreements, explicit AND implicit, you’re making deposits into the trust account. When you don’t honor those commitments, you are debiting the trust account.

You do this all the time with friends, family and other people you come into contact with during the course of your daily life – including the “entities” with which you do business!

In the case of your trust relationship with business “entities”, when it comes time for real MONEY to change hands, when it’s time to write the the check for legal tender, you’ll make a quick mental check of the balance of the “trust” account. Unfortunately, there’s not a way to “log in to” the trust account to check the balance. When you’re trying to establish with a new client, you’ll know you haven’t accumulated enough “trust” in the account if you ask for the sale and the potential client “balks”.

This is the word picture in my mind as I read a recent post over at David Airey’s blog. In his post, A Conversation About Spec Work“, David shares a somewhat heated exchange between a prospective client and a designer over working on spec. In case you didn’t know, the BANE of a graphic artist’s existence – SPEC WORK! (If you don’t get why a graphic artist might be upset over the prospect of working for “free”, check out Jacob Cass’ post, Why logo design does not cost $5.00)

All I could see in the exchange was a battle of two individuals whose trust accounts were empty when the trust checks were presented for payment.

Jacob makes a point in the comments section of David’s post where he points out that you don’t expect your dentist to work on spec. (OUCH! That illustration really “hit home” with me thanks to my little “dental drama” of late and the ensuing anti-word of mouth marketing campaign.)

However, Jacob is only partially correct. While it’s true that ESTABLISHED dentists don’t offer to work on spec, it’s a different story for new dentist.

When you see an incredibly low cost initial appointment advertised by a dentist, it’s actually another version of working on spec. While the dentist IS charging a small fee, the advertised price that doesn’t BEGIN to cover the variable costs associated with the exam let alone the fixed costs of running the practice! If that’s not working on spec, I don’t know what is!

Working on spec is nothing new to anyone who is in the business of selling “nothing but air“. Service based businesses usually have to do a LOT of spec work in the beginning! Chiropractors, attorneys, coaches and consultants are just a few of the other professionals who are selling their expertise who must establish a significant level of trust with their potential clients. I personally created a LOT of web sites in the beginning for minimal cost to build my practice.

However, as the service professional continues to build trust with an ever expanding circle of clients – then the need for spec work decreases. Not only do you begin to get client referrals, but you can also share client testimonials to help build trust.

David Airey has openly credited his blog with building his business from a local business to one with an international scope. David’s blog is acting as a GREAT vehicle for building trust with potential clients.

Not only can you feature client testimonials on your blog, but you can also share your expertise freely – which has the effect of making HUGE deposits in your trust account with your blog’s readers.

Building your service based business is a catch 22 type of deal. In order to gain the trust of potential clients you have to have testimonials/referrals which you can’t get until you get clients!!!

That’s the reason for working on spec. However, the good news is that blogs are GREAT for building trust with prospective clients. They can help you to build trust for your service based business.