My dog died today. Clyde was the oldest of our three Basset Hounds. Turns out he swallowed a whole pecan that had fallen from our tree in the backyard. When they went in to remove it, he didn’t make it and died on the operating table.
Clyde was a furry Black, White and Brown hound dog. He looked a lot like the cowhide rug in my office where he would lay at my feet, while I was working. When I would get up, I wouldn’t see him laying there and it is a miracle that I didn’t break my neck tripping over him. Just for the record, it is not advisable to get a rug that matches your dog.
When it was time to eat, Clyde was the dog that would do a happy dance turning all around when we fed him his little cup of dried dog chow. I would always give him a little extra and Duane would get after me about it. Clyde was also the one that would knock on the patio door when they wanted to come back inside. We are all going to miss him
I thought about not writing this today. Give myself a break and all. But I know that life is short and I have a [click to continue…]
Today, this is a twofer. I want to take a minute or two to find out more about you and what your biggest challenges are and….
I also want to demonstrate how you can make a survey yourself using Polldaddy. Before you take my survey I am going to demonstrate several ways of getting your Polldaddy survey to your peeps. But, please only take the survey once!
The first sharing option, good for placing in an e-mail or to your social media update is to post a link. Or… by golly, Polldaddy even provided me with a QR code that is readable with any QR scanner!
And you can take the survey right here on my website where you will find I have embedded it into this post. [click to continue…]
Last week, I was interviewed by Henna Inam, CEO of Transform Leaders and host of her Atlanta Business Radio X radio show, Transformational Women. Henna asked me, along with two other social media women, Diane Kaufman, Cynthia Rogers, to tell the stories of our companies and how we each have used social media to grow our businesses. Henna wanted to hear from her panel of entrepreneur, CEO women, what we thought were the top 2-3 social media tools that actually drive business revenue. It was a lively and interesting hour.
Judi Knight Interviewed on Transformational Women Radio
Last week, I gave some tips to writing great headlines that will get people to open your e-mails or read your posts. This week, let’s talk about things you can do to get them engaged in what you are writing.
Before I launch into the tips, let me preface this with an important overarching caveat.
No amount of good writing will overcome a poor website design. You need a web design that, first of all, facilitates people finding your blog posts. Otherwise, only your mother is going to click the tiny little word, Blog, that is lost on a blah blah blah marketing speak site. Once you have a good site, make sure the style sheet is set up to give your posts a nice presentation. This will make it so much more rewarding to write. Now with that said, here are 15 tips to make you a better blogger:
1. Write posts that are interesting and informative and not just marketing speak. Show them how great you are, rather than telling them.
2. Use at least one image to draw people into the post.
3. Left align the first image with text wrapping, so that the first couple of lines of text to the right side of the image are shorter (about 250 – 300 pixels wide). It is easier for people to read shorter lines of text on the web, but once they are engaged they will keep reading the text with normal column width.
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Creative freelancers are passionate about what we do and spend a lot of time making other people’s businesses look great, but sometimes we are not as good about focusing on our own businesses.
It may be that you know what to do and are not doing those things, but with all the new technology and the way the Internet is changing the way people find people to do work for them, it may be that you need to cut through all of the haze and hype, and have someone tell you how all of this technology actually works together to help you powerfully connect with the people seeking your services.
Recently, I have been speaking on this subject a lot and have had a lot of request for my slides and notes from people who could not attend these events. So by popular demand, I am going one step better with presenting it as a free webinar with the audio and slides available below.
Follow along the audio with the slide presentation for Rock Your Business with a WordPress Website:
- Learn my secrets of attracting plenty of the exact kind of clients that I want to work with and how you can do this too.
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Dan Greenfield of Listen Interactive put on an event called the Social Media Makeover Forum as a part for Digital Atlanta week. I was on one of three panels that gave one of three local Atlanta Companies the opportunity to get some pointers from what has been referred to as “some of the savviest social media gurus out there”. I am very honored to have been chosen to be in this group which included others from such companies as UPS, CBeyond, Arby’s, ING, Turner Entertainment, Fifth Group, Network Solutions and Constant Contact.
The panel I was on included: [click to continue…]
Do you want people to read what you write? Of course you do. Great headlines are a secret weapon.
Fess up. Have you ever been in line at the grocery store when a National Enquirer headline was so compelling that you bought it so you could read the article? Are those techniques smarmy? Well kind of but they are ever so effective and have been working for decades.
Five tried and true methods to write headlines that have a better chance at getting people to read your posts:
1) _________Ways to _____________
- 50 Ways to Leave Your Lover
- 4 Ways to Know If You are Going to Live To One-Hundred
- 300 Ways to Make Some Extra Cash in A Hurry
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For those of us in a creative field, it can be a bit unnerving to present our ideas or designs to our clients or employers. I most always have some anxiety around this process. And like anything in life, sometimes I hit the nail on the head the first time, and other times, well, it can take more than a bit longer to get it right and I really do want it to be just right. This week, I missed the mark with one of my new clients. I know, I will be able to get it right and I think she knows it too. But, nonetheless, I really hate when I get it so wrong.
After getting the disappointing e-mail, I went ahead and got myself out the door to my favorite yoga class rather than reacting to the “monkey talk” going on in my head encouraging me to stay home and work on it, right then and there. I saw it for what it was, just my people pleasing anxiety telling me to stop what I had planned and take some action that might calm the anxiety. I know better and sometimes am able to overcome acting on the “feeling” and do the thing that is better for me.
So there I was in my yoga class, doing the Down Dog and watching those pesky thoughts creep back in with ideas about how I was going to change the design when I got home. Oh, so relentless. However, yoga teaches us to bring our thoughts back to the breath and to be there in the posture you are doing right then and there. It teaches us to stay in the room, stay in the moment, breathe in, breathe out and to let go of all judgement about it. Easier said than done, but overtime it does get easier.
Then I started thinking about what the Honey Badger would do. [click to continue…]
