Being Smarter

Copywriting is a skill. A skill which can take years to master. A skill which you perhaps will never master, yet if you run any kind of business, the chances are you have a need to be able to write persuasively, clearly and concisely on a daily basis.

Whether it’s an important internal email, an email to a target or a client, a blog post, an advertisement or a script, there’s a big difference between average copy and great copy.

Assuming you don’t have years to master the art, if you need to get a document together quickly, then this application may be for you.

Wordy is a WordPress plugin and web service which takes your draft copy and provides it to a network of copywriters for proofing and editing as required.

Academic text, corporate literature, blog posts and web content are all among the categories of copy that Wordy’s professional editors can handle, with specialized staff available to work on material focused on specific subjects. The interface to them is simple – you upload your file to Wordy.com, or use a WordPress plugin for integrated editing.

Wordy then instantly returns a quote along with an approximate delivery time. As an example – EUR 7.68 for 26 minutes of editing on a 440-word document. If you accept, a Wordy copy editor checks the text for grammar, spelling, punctuation and structure—the company can currently accommodate both UK and US English—and returns it in ready-to-publish form. After that, you have two business days to accept the work or request a re-edit.

A great concept and one for the copy-phobic amongst you. We’ve not tried it yet – but if you have – why not leave a comment below.

Related articles

• A Word About Wordy (binarybonsai.com)
• Write Eye Catching Headlines In 32.4 Seconds (cenaynailor.com)
• Increasing Revenue By Becoming A Great Copywriter (pro2sell.com)

Happy New Year to all of our Being Smarter readers.

I wanted to start the year by resurrecting a post from December last year – which seems very appropriate for the start of the working year for most people…

At a recent conference, a now colleague of mine, Ed Dale did four separate sessions on a topic which I am calling “How to do business in 2010“… he had a different title, but my take on it was simple – it was a message to all corporate management… to all the folks who’ve sadly been made redundant recently from that world… and to all smaller businesses who are paralysed by indecision. The message was something along the lines of

“Wake up and smell the coffee… the world has totally changed (not just by the Internet.) If you carry on doing business as it was done ten years ago, or do you know what, perhaps even a year ago… then you are dead in the water.”

There were 86 separate provacative statements, here’s my top 10:

1.) Whatever you do, make sure you’re in a business or market place that you are completely unpassionate about. Make sure that it leaves you feeling cold, empty and completely drained at the end of the day. The great news is that if you’ve found a marketplace you particularly have no interest in, it will help you to be average at best when it comes to selling to and supporting your customers – and they will love you for it.

2.)If you are in a small business, ensure you try to run it like a corporate entitiy. Make sure you absolutely do not in any way try to differentiate yourself from these bigger companies. Treat your customers like numbers and be completely devoid of any business personality.

3.) When developing products or services, it’s imperative that you don’t start to build anything without examining every ounce of detail at the early stage. Take as long as you like to write specs and make sure you start with the small picture and buld it up. You’ll never get anything launched if you don’t spend many weeks and months getting the finer detail argued about, before talking to customers about the concept – they won’t thank you.

4.) When your service is launched – for goodness sake try to sell it to everyone that moves… ignore segmentation and playing in niche markets – it’s a complete waste of time. If the product is good enough, everyone will want it.

5.) If you’re in the online game, think very carefully about building giant server or data centre infrastructures the minute your product is out the door. There’s literally no one else out there that does this kind of thing… and they certainly wouldn’t be able to scale it up to your demands.Your data is important to you, and so you should keep it under your control at all times.

6.) When designing your next product, ensure you get every feature that your customers will need into the very first release. Don’t design it so that it could be released in stages, or people just won’t buy it. They need everything on day one.

7.) Decision making – this is key. Involve everyone at all times. Ensure you plan as many meetings as possible – all day ones if necessary to reach a consensus. If you aren’t able to make a decision with the whole team after a huge amount of analysis and delay, then play safe and don’t make one.

8.) When it comes to recruitment, make sure you hire experts in their field, irrespective of whether they are difficult to work with. It’s much better to have a team of experts who don’t communicate than a team of generalists who gel as a team and work for the common good. Oh – and don’t work with them as affiliates or freelancers first to test them out – that just isn’t the done thing.

9.) Customers don’t mind being slightly misled about what they are about to receive as a service… as long as you hook them in, they’ll generally soon get over it. It also helps to provide a very detailed contract, which is difficult to break out of, for your protection.

10.) And finally, the Internet is just a fad. Stick with the old rules of marketing – direct mail and cold calling has worked for years. Your customer base has no idea what a twoot or a blag is, and they’re still on 56k modems, so video will never work on their pcs – you will just need to invest in a support department.

If you like my take on Ed’s wisdom, check out this post 5 Days with Ed Dale.

We are delighted to announce a new guest blogger to the Being Smarter stage – Francis Wade. Francis is the author of the 2Time blog that focuses on helping smart people develop and upgrade their own time management systems. He’s going to be writing with his unique take on the subject of time management systems over the coming months.

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A friend of mine who is a brilliant web designer recently complained to me that a lot of the time management stuff to be found on the internet was simply cr*p! I thought about it for a minute, and then I agreed.

I did a short survey of the comments floating around on Twitter and found that a lot of it should insult anyone with average intelligence and ability. While I’m not immune from charges of being an arrogant “smarty-pants,” I think that that there is reason to be annoyed.

Here’s why….

1. Same old, same old

Much of the stuff that’s written about time management has been said elsewhere, MANY times. Merely repeating the same bromides makes little or no difference to most of us who have heard them many times (and may even have repeated them at some point.)

For example, “Start meetings on time” is not something that you can say to an adult without their eyes glazing over… they have heard it before. Putting it in an article or a blog post doesn’t help. When I read a time management article I am looking for something that I haven’t heard before… in fact, I’m hungry for it. When I don’t find it, I am mildly disappointed, especially when the headline hints at some new thinking.

The truth is, it’s hard to come up with fresh ideas, and most writers seem happy to rehash well-worn sentiments that have no impact whatsoever. For the reader it all adds up to a boring sense of deja vu.

2. Magical results with no effort

Many courses and books promise the near-impossible. They convince us that we can produce results with little or no effort, if we just follow the “Top 10 Secret Tips that Executives Use.”

The use of the word “tip” is what makes it all sound so easy to do. Authors make it seem as if a small piece of advice, and a quick and tiny tweak can produce a massive breakthrough in stubborn habits.

Unfortunately, the experience of most people is quite the opposite.

The fact is, time management is built on habits, rituals and practices that take many years to develop. A little tip is hardly ever enough to ensure a solid transformation.

Many don’t buy the snake-oil that’s being sold in this case, and turn away shaking their heads in disbelief… they know that habit changing is hard work, and involves more than just a small change here than there that takes little or no effort.

It reminds me of the exercise machines that used to be sold on television, in which the viewer just needed to strap on a “Jiggler-matic” and watch TV while all their fat was jiggled away. Lots of quick results for no effort!!

3. One size fits all

Many gurus who come up with commercial time management systems would have us believe that their particular solution, which works so well for them, will work just as well for us.

Here is a short list of the things that don’t seem to matter:
- our age
- the culture to which we belong
- the kind of work we do
- our education
- our experience implementing other systems
- our goals and needs
- whether we are executives, or even professionals

The belief that everyone can and should follow the same system makes me imagine long lines of soldiers in a totalitarian country marching in perfect goose-step to martial music: perfect clones of each other.

Instead, we are unique people, and it’s crazy to think that one system of time management can be the final solution for all needs, for all people.

4. Follow or else

Some gurus go even further and insist that a user who doesn’t follow their system down to the last letter is ruining the whole thing, and is likely to fail.

This particular claim is a Catch-22 of sorts.

It’s virtually impossible to implement all the practices of a time management system that someone else creates. There are just too many habits to copy, and too many new word and ideas to remember.

The catch is that the creator who claims that it must ALL be followed, comes out being the only person who can implement the whole thing perfectly. They win, and the rest of us are big losers.

5. Disregard my accomplishments

Perhaps the most puzzling aspect of these guru-led systems, however, is that they completely disregard the progress that smart people often make.

Instead of starting with the system that a person is currently using, and figuring out where it’s working or not, they treat all users as if they don’t know what they are doing. They tell the user to start all over, as if they are currently using nothing at all.

That’s harsh medicine!

For many smart people, it’s like transferring them to a new high school and putting them in a class without first doing any kind of assessment.

It just feels wrong.

Most smart people don’t need complete and radical overhauls of their time management systems, as they have been working on perfecting them for years. Instead, they are looking for a way to effect intelligent upgrades.

They also realize that there might never be a time in their professional lives when they stop upgrading their systems, due in part to technology changes. Continuous improvement is the only way to keep up with the flood of information that comes at them. Once a credible assessment is done, however, they can adjust on their own and make small changes that stand the test of time.

Bottom Line

Most smart people have already given some thought to their systems of habits, practices and rituals and understand that changing them is no trivial, superficial business.

If they need help, it is the kind that must go well past the superficial tip-giving that seems to have infected so many. Instead, they require solid insight that illuminates the challenge of time management and results in consistent new behavior.

That wouldn’t be annoying — far from it. Whenever I have been lucky enough to find that kind of help, I have been very, very grateful.

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Francis Wade is the author of the 2Time blog and the originator of Time Management 2.0. He’ll be back in a couple of weeks with more words of wisdom…

I’d firstly like to thank everyone for their interest in the posts from the last two days. 5 days with Ed Dale and 10 ways to not do business in 2010 have been amongst the most popular posts I’ve ever written – so I’m hoping you’ve found them interesting. Let’s get back to it then in day #3 of our series of articles on my experiences and learnings of spending 5 days with Ed Dale, the creator of www.thirtydaychallenge.com.

The three day seminar he gave last week has been inspiring to many (Hashtag here). Today, as someone that creates content online in various guises every day of the week, I wanted to add my take on Ed’s thoughts on creating content online.

#1 Overcoming writer’s block

“It’s all been done before”… Oh no it hasn’t… not with your spin on it… not for your audience – think about a different take. Add your opinion. Leave your own web footprints around the Internet by creating opinion. Create an audience for yourself. Granted, it won’t happen over night – but it will do eventually if you are discipined in your approach. Go find the prominent bloggers out there – Chris Brogan didn’t say that everything’s been done before… he just started writing and created an audience.

“I’ve got nothing to say”. Of course you haven’t, because you aren’t following rule #2.

#2 Be a selective  information sponge

Google Reader without question is the most awesome free business tool you can possibly use. It is your very own personal information database, which pushes the information you need to you… If you don’t know what it is and how powerful it is, then take a look here.

Get into the habit of:

• Using the ‘note in reader’ button on your browser toolbar, collect information as you go. Don’t get distracted by it – store it away for when you need it.
• Use the TAGS function. If you see an article you want to share – note it and tag it as tweet. When you’re short of something to say – head into reader and dig it out again. When you are going to write a blog post, look at the blog post tag for articles you’ve filed away.
• Clean up your RSS feeds on a regular basis. Your information needs change over time – so manage your feeds accordingly.

HEALTH WARNING: be obsessed by relevance. Don’t collect information unnecessarily and don’t get distracted by it. There’s a time and a place for reading – schedule it.

Get into the groove

Ed talked about having a process for creation – whether it be writing or video recording or whatever. This is great advice. I write blog posts at the start of each day – never in the middle or at the end. It’s when it’s quiet. Some people literally put their writing hat on to get into the zone. What could you do to help you focus? Turn the phone off, turn your email off and turn the children off if you have to … that’s the only way it will happen.

Once it’s happened – whatever it is on the page – then take a break, and go back and edit… add the images, add the links, tidy it up and make it fit for purpose. Key to success is – don’t edit as you go.

Day #4 of my experience of working with Ed comes tomorrow…

Here at Being Smarter, we like to review software which saves you time and generally makes your life easier. We’ve talked about managing knowledge before – it’s such an important part of business life. Information is power… knowledge is power.

Everyone has the capability of finding information now thanks to the power of search. What sets you apart from the crowd however is minimising the time you take to set up and monitor your information streams and of course how you use them. It’s easy to spend all day watching data. The trick is to have it done for you.

Becoming a Knowledge Jedi is about spending as little time as possible monitoring and researching data. In order to help you become as efficient at this as possible, you need the right tools. RSS is one must-have skill you need to master. We’ve found another essential data mining tool which we would argue is a must have too.

Gist has recently come out of closed beta and is available to all. It’s yet another online contact management application, except this is one with a difference. You won’t believe your eyes when you see it.

On  set up, you tell the application where to find your various contact lists – Outlook on your hard drive, Linkedin, Twitter, webmail services etc. The system then goes off, brings in that data to one place, applies intelligent data to it and then displays it in a great format for you to really learn from.

If you are in sales – this is essential.

I would like to highlight three key areas – although I should add, it’s merely scratching the surface.

1) The dashboard

The dashboard view I really like – it gives you a snapshot view of everything going on within the companies and contacts in your system. You can choose to show contacts and/or companies, and also select the type of information shown. When you really sit back and think about this – if you went off to find all of this information manually – and people still do this, it would take you hours, even with the power of Google.

There’s an example shot below taken from the dashboard view.

2) Contact news

I’ve always defined Twitter as ‘legal stalking’ – simply, follow the people you want to do business with, to learn about their lives. Gist takes it a step further and provides you with ‘totally automated legal stalking’.

Imagine you’re a sales person looking to do business with an individual. That individual is already in your contact database, because you’ve researched their details. Before you head off to your meeting – all you would need to do is click on your contact in Gist…

You can then see a photo of the individual, their latest blog posts, their latest tweets and any other news items that have been picked up recently. You can then walk into that meeting feeling like you know them…

3) Company news

The same can also apply at a company level. If you manage or are looking to sell into certain companies, Gist has pulled out all of the companies from your contact lists and runs off and provides you with the latest news, blog posts and Tweets from that particular company, so if you are heading off to a meeting with your suspect – guess what – one click into Gist and you can be completely uptodate with that company’s news and comments.

Conclusions

I hope you’ve found this Gist review enlightening.  It does a thousand other things too – and we think you really should go and register. It is of course totally free.

If we’re honest, it’s never going to replace Outlook, because it’s just so entrenched. However if I were Microsoft, I’d be snapping up these folks and doing everything in my power to mirror what Gist have done and turn Outlook into a real tool for managing knowledge as opposed to letting a corporate industry standard languish with a set of lame updates over the last 10 years.

For Gist, that’s the ultimate compliment.

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We hope you enjoyed this article. What can we do for you now?

• Would you like to see how to use bite-sized video chunks to deliver messages to your teams or customers?
  
• Would you like to see a demonstration of how to convert sales targets into prospects?
  
• Would you like to follow the founder of Being Smarter on Twitter?

Would you like to read related articles?

• Gist beats Xobni at tackling email, Twitter overload (billbennett.co.nz)
• Get the Drift With Gist (gigaom.com)
• Without Free Software, Open Source Would Lose its Meaning (slumpedoverkeyboarddead.com)
• Gist Opens to the Public, Wants to Own the Nexus of E-mail, Search, and Social Networks (xconomy.com)
• Gist (chris.pirillo.com)

I only discovered RSS about 18 months ago and I don’t think it’s too much of an exaggeration to say that it has changed my (business) life. It is an enabler… it makes you smarter… and it helps you in managing knowledge - giving you an edge over your competitors and colleagues.

I naturally spend part of my day sending people information I think might be relevant to them – to help them in their jobs. To make them look good… to even make them money because of the usefulness of that information. I suspect many of my friends and colleagues think I sit there all day researching for them. I don’t. I let the Internet do the hard work for me…. I then sit back and watch.

RSS… Google Alerts… Google Reader. Three technological terms that if you don’t understand in business today then you are most definitely at a disadvantage.

You’ve seen the RSS icon a thousand times haven’t you? A million times maybe… have you ever thought to click it? to investigate what it might do? Possibly not.

Make a resolution today to get to grips with RSS… get to grips with Google Alerts and Google Reader. Then tell us below how amazed you are.

Intrigued?

The secrets of Managing knowledge are here… click the video to see the first session completely free.

Related articles

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• On PubSubHubbub and rssCloud … (brad.livejournal.com)
• Changing Feed Service (catskillcottageseed.com)

One of the reasons for launching Being Smarter a year ago was because of our wish to help people with workplace productivity.
In previous lives I spent many years watching people and businesses going about things the long way round… doing things in a particular way because… well it has always been done like that… not using technology to be more productive… or worse still using technology poorly and making things worse. I was inspired by some of these issues – and that was one of the reasons Being Smarter was born.

The 8.45 Club (one of our venture companies) has just re-released its course on workplace productivity. We’ve taken on board feedback, shortened it, and made the first session’s trial available without registration.

The course is made up of 12 video-based modules. (Do read them all, because there’s a bonus at the bottom of the page). Once you become a member, they are delivered to your inbox every two working days for a month and cover the following sessions:

Day 1: Keyboard shortcut keys – they speed up your life

We start with a free trial video and give you dozens of ways to increase your productivity by introducing you to the world of shortcuts. We throw down the gauntlet and say don’t do things in that way, just because you’ve been doing that for years – learn new ways to speed up you life. Will you rise to the challenge?!

Day 2: How to save hours a month through email productivity

We then focus on one of the biggest timewasters in business – managing email… and yes, it really is possible to do it better.

Day 3: Productivity monitoring – work out HOW you spend your time – then fix the problem

We then show you a way of getting organised and saying to yourself – are you really optimising the way you work (or your colleagues work?) We introduce a free tool which sits in the background and analyses how you spend your day at your PC. It’s invaluable and will almost certainly shock you at the end of the week when you look at the stats.

Day 4: How and why to share your desktop with anyone for free

We take a look at saving time and money from a travel perspective and see how easy it is to share your PC’s desktop with colleagues or customers, inside or outside of the firewall.

Day 5: Messy office? Not efficient and productive? There’s a link

Your office is a state isn’t it? Do you know where the post-it notes are? We give you plenty of thoughts from an industry leader on how to get more organised at home and at work. Note – this is bedtime reading as opposed to a video session today.

Day 6: Customize your desktop in seconds and save hours

We then move on to Day 6 and show you all kinds of time saving tips when it comes to customizing your PC to suit your needs, as opposed to Microsoft’s… This really isn’t for geeks – it’s for business people – so hang in there.

Day 7: To do list software – friend or foe?

Day 7 then moves on to talk about to do list software and gives you another free alternative which really should help you to get organised and improve the way your stats look from Day 3!

Day 8: Password management software – stop wasting time remembering your credentials

We then move onto the the tricky subject of password management software. How many passwords do you have – 10, 100, 1000? They are a fundamental part of every knowledge worker’s day and this advicelet shows you the perfect, secure way to manage them.

Day 9: Xobni review – Email productivity gets a boost with this awesome plugin

We then move onto looking at another real timesaver – back to email management and a plugin which should have been made by Microsoft originally – but they weren’t clever enough to think of it. We show you the plugin and the power it gives you when it comes to finding ’stuff’ in Outlook – which we all know takes ages… normally.

Day 10: How to write a good email – things you never think about (and should)

We may sound like we are teaching you to suck eggs – but we aren’t. Day 10 talks through some things to think about when you next write an email – taken from expert views in the industry. We bet it opens your eyes.

Day 11: Be more productive – how to fit 12 hours into 7.5

In our second and final piece of bedtime reading – we bring you a set of thoughts (ahem over 150) from industry leaders on the real vision for the course – squeezing 12 hours into your 7.5 hour day.

Day 12: Increase workplace productivity with this free mind mapping tool

And finally, we start with refreshing your memories on mindmapping – you’ve heard of it – but do you use it and do you want to spend £200 on the software? Well you don’t have to – it’s free now – and in the cloud – and excellent – we show you everything – warts and all today.

BONUS

To celebrate the relaunch of this already popular course – and as a thank you for finding Being Smarter… enter the coupon code “beingsmarter” in the registration box to receive a 50% discount until the end of September.

Workplace productivity can be found at this link. Enjoy!

It’s so easy to become distracted from your working day with the browser constantly open and the Internet always available to you. Leaving your Outlook client on all day is another massive distraction too – which is another story. Turn that off straight away!

If you are looking for ways to be smarter when it comes to putting some focus on your day, Read it Later could be a handy little application for you to know about. In short, it stops you from becoming distracted from what you were doing, without losing a piece of useful information, which could just disappear into the ether.

Read it later is a simple, free application, which has just had its second birthday and comes in three flavo(u)rs – Firefox, Iphone, or any other browser. You are surfing away – trying hard to meet a deadline, and of course you become distracted by an unrelated blog post or other snippet of information that suddenly takes you completely away from what you were trying to achieve originally.

Get into the habit of clicking the Read it later button, which installs into your browser… stop being distracted! What will then happen is that Read it later will file away the URL you were just going to look at for easy access later. You can continue to focus on what you were doing – safe in the knowledge that during you allotted ‘follow up’ or ‘spare’ time even – you can go back and examine the link…

Reading your filed away URLS…

If using Firefox, you can click on the ReadItLater dropdown on the right of Firefox’s search box to expand the list of items you’ve added. ReadItLater conveniently sorts the links by oldest added (you can change this), so you see the stuff that’s been hanging out there the longest at the top. You can quickly filter the list by tag, page name, site, or URL, too.

One of the really cool features of ReadItLater is that it automatically saves links to your Firefox bookmarks in a folder you specify. So if you’re already syncing your bookmarks across computers, your reading list goes to other computers.

In addition – at Being Smarter, we send the list to an RSS feed, which we can then view in Google Reader when time allows.

This is an excellent recommendation for business people serious about putting more focus into the day. It’s a great habit to get into reaching for that Read it Later button…

Demo for you below if you like the sound of it… watch it and then go and be more focused… like its million other users!

http://readitlaterlist.com