It happens to the best of us. Things are rolling along nicely - new clients! big meetings! money dripping into your account at a sweet and steady pace!  And then allofasudden, nothing but the sound of wind down a long hallway and an owl in the distance. Whoooooo! Whooooo!  Whoooooo are you going to live with when business dries up? 

For the first few days, you treasure the empty inbox. You go to matinees, grab long lunches with friends, and catch up on your Netflix.

But after a few weeks, you start getting a little nervous. Nervous and twitchy and compulsively checking your bank account balance - as though seeing that number is going to help at all.

Dude. Worry not. All of us - every single self-employed human - has gone through dry spells. At the risk of being a total Pollyanna, let’s try to reframe this downtime as an opportunity to get some awesome stuff done.

Here are eight confidence-building, business-netting things you can (and should!) do when business is slow. 

Update your permanent pages
Despite my years as a professional copywriter, I had the same About page for, oh, ever. And my old sales pages? Well, they’re gone now AND THAT IS NOT AN ACCIDENT. I regularly look through and update older, high traffic posts but it’s rare that I look at my own permanent pages - and I bet you’re the same. Seems a bit narcissist to read your own bio on the regs, right?

But other people are constantly reading your About page and Sales pages - my Yes and Yes About page has 50,000+ views! Here’s a 15-part tutorial to help you write better sales pages and here’s a post full of great ‘cheats’ to finish your About page.

Also - you know your About page should end with a call to action, right? Like, you (charmingly) ask them to follow you on social media and/or subscribe to your list? Yeah, I thought you already knew that.

Update and gather testimonials
In a perfect world, you’d have an automated system in place to help you gather testimonials a week or so after you’ve wrapped up with a client. I’m still working out the kinks in mine, but thus far it consists of an email that I schedule for two weeks after we’re finished with a link that takes them to a Google form. The form elicits all sorts of feedback and they let me know if I can use that feedback on my testimonial page.

Not sure what makes a good testimonial?
1. Data! How many more sales? How many more Twitter followers? How many dates? How much money or time saved? We want hard numbers, son.
2. Barriers to purchase that were overcome. “I always thought life coaches were for hippies, but then I hired Nancy.” “$1,500 seemed like a lot of money to invest in my engagement photos, but it was sooooo worth it.”

Contact previous clients and see if they need anything
It’s a million times easier to get repeat business than convert a new customer. Go have a good online stalk of all your previous clients and see if there’s anything you can help with. They’ve been tweeting about a big new project - do they need your help designing the website? She tweeted that they’re expecting a baby - do they need pregnancy photos? Send a sweet, personalized email reaching out and offering to help.

Optimize some of your older, high-traffic posts and re-promote them
Make the post images Pinterest-friendly! Make the posts more readable! Include links to other posts within this post! See if you can use them as guest posts on other sites!

Then re-promote these newly awesome-i-fied posts on your social media channels. Eassssy.

Pitch guest posts or offer yourself up for interviews
When I offered myself up for interviews, I got about 15 takers (!) over a month and a half. That means that heaps of new readers and potential clients heard and read all about me. Nice, right? You can do the same. Find podcasts that regularly feature people in your field and pitch yourself!

You’d also do well to bookmark sites that feature guest posters in your field. Some particularly great ones: Freelancers Union, Oh My Handmade, and  Designsponge’s Biz Ladies column.

Create a different form of your offerings
Can you turn a one-on-one offering into a group offering? Could you turn an e-course into a live workshop? Could you repurpose an old, no-longer-selling-that-well ebook into a series of blog posts? Or guest posts? There are innumerable ways to reinvent your wheel.

Learn that thing you know you should be learning (but have been putting off)
Like, A/B split testing. Or Google Analytics. Or starting a newsletter. Or making videos. Or creating a series of autoresponders.  You knooooow you should be doing these things (and by ‘you’ I also mean ‘me’). Let’s make a pact to finally figure them out. Ready? Go.

Schedule out a bunch of social media updates
I’m a huge fan of promoting other people’s work and I think it’s been a big part of my ‘online success,’ as counterintuitive as that may seem.  I squirrel away great posts and links that I find all over the internet and then schedule out daily ‘Fave Read of The Day’ tweets. (Are we Twitter friends? We should be.)  These pre-scheduled tweets send traffic to lovely people, entertain my Twitter friends, and help me connect with the people I’m promoting.

You can also pre schedule tweets that promote your products and services or link to older, now-optimized posts.

What do you do when business is slow? Leave your tips in the comments!

P.S. If you liked this and don’t want to miss future posts (and you want two free ebooks that’ll help your business), may I be so bold as to suggest that you sign up for my newsletter?

photo by scott robinson // cc

As the child of two teachers and an inveterate, unrepentant traveler I’ve developed a severe aversion to working during the summer.
What? Social media strategy? If by ‘social media strategy’ you mean ‘white sangria in my friend’s backyard.’
Can I do this conference call from the dock? Wrapped in a He-man towel? Because that’s what’s happening.

But since I spread my travel out over the whooooole year, taking three months off - smack dab in the middle of it - isn’t really an option. And I imagine you’re in a similar situation: wanting to slow things down a bit, but not quite ready/able to remove your foot from the proverbial pedal.

If you, too, would like to take a summer vacation of sorts from your blog (without falling off the face of the internet or losing all your business) here are six ways to do just that. 

1. Do a guest post swap
If you, like me, have been blogging for years upon years, you probably have some great content that’s accruing mold in your archives. And I bet your internet friends do, too. Why not ask them if they’re interested in swapping some particularly phenomenal older posts? New readers (and potential clients) will see your stuff and you won’t have to do any extra work!

2. Rewrite old posts
In those aforementioned moldy archives I bet you’ve got some great ideas that weren’t written or expressed particularly well the first time around. It’s okay! That’s the reality of blogging for years - you get shockingly, staggeringly better as you go. Dig through your archives and see if there are any low-traffic-but-good-idea posts that you can polish up, optimize, and repost.

3. If you have approval, post things you wrote for other blogs/websites/publications
Sometimes, when you write a guest post, you’re forbidden from posting that content anywhere else. If that’s not the case (triple check to make sure) repost it on your own site. To keep your karma clean, include an introduction that says something like “This piece originally appeared on Tiny Buddha but it got such a good response I thought you guys might like to take a peek at it, too.”

4. Reformat + repurpose old posts
THIS TIP IS WORTH ITS WEIGHT IN FINELY AGED CHEDDAR. All those clever, helpful posts in your archives? Take all the useful information contained therein and put it in a different format. My ‘How to get over a breakup‘ post is one of my most popular. I could turn it into an infographic, a podcast, a video, or create a worksheet to go with it, turn it into an ebook and use it to bulk up my newsletter list. Here’s an insanely helpful post about all the other ways you can repurpose content.

5. Schedule out posts and tweets into the future
If you’re super ambitious or reluctant to share blogging duties with anyone else, it’s totally possible to write all your own content and schedule your posts and social media weeks (or months!) into the future. When I’m traveling, I usually have 90% of my content scheduled and check in and update from time to time.

6. Just don’t post
Last summer, I made the executive decision that I wasn’t going to post on Fridays anymore on Yes and Yes. I felt like work was eating my life and that I was just doing a lot of things poorly and nothing very well. And you know what the response was? “Good for you Sarah! Taking this time to do you will definitely help enhance all aspects of your life. Enjoy your summer!” and “You are one of the few bloggers I read who posts seven times a week. You deserve to do All The Things with happiness and ease. Cheers to playing outside instead of sitting at a computer! Happy Weekend. :)”

In the best and most loving way, let us remember that the world will turn even if we do not post. The internet will not break if we don’t post every day.

Are you taking a summer vacation from your blog or business? How are you managing it? Share your tips in the comments!

P.S. Want more super applicable advice like this - tailored to you and your business? Check out Laser Focus.

 photo by Hugo Boutier// cc

If your small business has a blog
If you’re a blogger
If you have a life outside of the internet (with, like, friends and parties and food and cute ballet flats)
There’s a 99% chance that at some point, you have racked that incredibly attractive brain of yours for topics to write about. (“Animals in buckets! International snacks!  How to become a functioning member of adult society!“)

Those are all terribly clever ideas, friend.  You know what else works?  Interviewing people.
I do it every week on Yes and Yes - the True Story series and Real Life Style Icons are some of my most popular posts!

Here are four reasons why you should be interviewing people.

1. It’s ‘easy’ content
Of course, you need to research your interviewee and write clever, engaging questions, format the post, and scheduled the social media, but the meat of the post?  It’s insight from your interview subject!  You ask the questions, they provide the content.

2. It gives you access to people who might otherwise be ‘unavailable’
If you ask a Big Deal Blogger to guest post for you, they’ll probably turn you down.  But if you ask them for an interview?  Well, we’re all ego-driven.  It’s significantly more likely that they’ll give you an interview.  Of course, if you’re approaching someone who’s reaaaaaalllly huge, spend a few months interacting with them on Twitter and Facebook before you pitch them.

If the person you’d like to interview just launched a new product, couch your interview request in those terms. They’re a lot more likely to accept if they know they can talk about their new book/clothing line/podcast.

3. It’s a great networking tool
Interviewing someone is a great way to begin a supportive, mutually beneficial friendship.  When we’ve done a 45-minute Skype interview and I’ve seen your sweet face, I’m a million times more likely to tweet links to your blog posts and contribute to that book you’re writing.

4. It exposes your work to new people
In a perfect world, your interviewees will send traffic to your blog - tweeting links to the interview, posting it on their Facebook page, and even linking to it on their blog.  You can make this a million times easier by @mentioning them on social media, so they can just retweet it. 

(Annnnnnnd a bit of self-serving, self-promotion here: if you’d like to interview me on your blog/podcast/vlog about writing, blogging, internet awesomery, or my Solution Sessions - I’d love to chat!)

Do you do interviews for you blog?  Who do you interview? How do you find interview subjects?

photo by evan forester, cc

If you’ve spent any amount of time reading Problogger or Copyblogger or, well, any website that bosses you around about blogging, you know you should be writing advice and how-tos and tutorials on your blog.

There are heaps of reasons that why is a good idea.

* It helps position you as an expert (“I know how to do this and I’ll show you how!”)
* It establishes trust with your readers (“I’m so experienced I can share my knowledge with you!”)
* It builds goodwill with your readers (“I’m sharing useful + valuable information with you because you’re important to me!”)

But. What’s the difference between a great tutorial that gets forwarded around the internet and one that inadvertently teaches your entire readership how to do what you do? And thereby teaches you out of a job?

Good question! Here are two ways to deal with that:

1.  Teach the small, easy, instantly implementable aspects of your field
I can’t teach you how to be an engaging, funny writer in one blog post.  There’s no how-to that will teach fledgling photographers how to capture every beautiful candid moment at a wedding.  But I can tell you five things you should do before you launch your blog.   Sarah can tell you about how to create a style guide for your blog and Alex will tell you about editing beauty shots in Photoshop.

2.  Teach the topics that surround and affect your topic
Let’s say you’re a makeup artist.  You want to be famous for your eyeliner skillz and get hired for photo shoots.  You’re worried that if you create a series of videos teaching people how to do a smoky eye or a beestung lip, they’ll do it themselves and won’t hire you.  So write a series of tutorials about choosing the right makeup for your skin.   Or when to splurge and when to save on beauty products.  You can still teach readers important things about your industry without laying all your proverbial cards on the table.

But before you hoard all that knowledge like a greedy little squirrel, I think it should be said:
Even if you wrote an exhaustive, free ebook that laid out everything you’d learned over the course of your career
Even if you wrote a tutorial for every blessed thing you know how to do

People would probably still hire you to do those things for them.

I know that I could commit to learning HTML and spend months (years?) honing my design eye to redo my own sites.  But honestly?  I’d rather write and consult and pay Kim to code wrangle. I’m pretty sure I could figure out my taxes, but I feel a lot better when Fox Tax does it. People who are serious about their businesses want to bring in an expert to help them. And when you’ve been showing them week after week, month after month, that you know what you’re talking about, you are the one they’re going to want to hire.

Do you write how-tos and tutorials on your blog?  Do you ever worry you’re “giving too much away”?

social media buttons by twenty three oh one

Everyone and their sister has told you that you need a blog/twitter/facebook/instagram/everything ever for your business. And while it is, in fact, possible to be a successful business or entrepreneur without those, it sure is nice to have thousands of potential customers and clients interacting with you online, enjoying your cat photos and clever status updates, no?

Need a bit more convincing?  Here are five nearly un-ignorable reasons that you should start a blog for your business.

1)  You can establish yourself as an expert
True story time: I once spent a summer writing for a leading women’s magazine.  When we needed experts to weigh in on a topic?  We’d literally Google “relationship expert [city name]” or “interior designers [city name].”  And then we’d paw through their online lives and if they were active online and could string a few grammatically correct sentences together, we’d email them and request a pull quote on our topic. National press coverage = achieved.  Wouldn’t you like to get some national press coverage?

 2) Up Your SEO
Search Engine Optimization (how your site and business ranks in search engines) need not be be the stuff of headaches.  When you write about your area of expertise (and when people link to your posts) you move up the search rankings.  If you just have a static website for your graphic design business in New York, you’ll be buried deep on page 23.  But if you’ve got 25 blog posts about the ins and outs of the graphic design world, you’re much more likely to be closer to the top of the pile. It makes sense, right? The more searchable content there is about you and your business, the more people are going to find you. And then buy your awesome jewelry/services/hand-knitted cat sweaters.

 3)  Make new connections
Is it painfully hippie dippie to say that blogging for your business shouldn’t just be about making money and finding new customers?  You can also connect with professional peers, mentors and mentees, companies that can provide you with make-your-life-easier products, vendors and  heaps of new friends.  When you interview people for your blog, interact with people on twitter, link to other bloggers, and host guest posts you’re strengthening your professional network and, really, you’re just being nice.  Which is sort of more important.

 4) Create buzz for new products and services
Launching a new line of jewelry?  Spend the month before you launch writing about the process, your inspiration, the resources you used, and posting teaser photos or videos.  Send out promotional samples to bloggers you think would enjoy them.  Easy peasy!

 5) Connect with new clients and customers (Dur.)
Well, obviously.  OBVIOUSLY.  When people like your product or brand (or you) they want to know more about it.  And someone who’s reading your blog is about a million times more likely to buy your new products, purchase something on sale, spread the word about your work, and become a repeat buyer.  When you create great, google-able content (“How to wear layers under a dress” for a fashion label or “What to pack for Hawaii” for a travel agency) people who don’t know about you and your products will find you.  And if you’re lucky, they’ll stay around for awhile browsing all your great content.  And then buy something.

Does your business have a blog?  What good things have happened to you because of your blog?