Ignorance or Apathy

“Ignorance or Apathy? I don’t know and I don’t care.” ~ Jimmy Buffett

What’s the more difficult position – not knowing or not caring? When starting a business I’ve often found myself in the position of not knowing something. No matter how smart I might think I am, I have found that I can’t know everything so I often have to go searching for information to fill the gap. But what happens when we know what we need to do but we just can’t muster the motivation to do it? Apathy, procrastination, doldrums, rut, unmotivated – no matter what you call it, it can be a problem that is difficult to overcome. We’re going to look at some ways to overcome both.

Being called ignorant is perceived as a real put down and is often used to describe people who are bound by their prejudices rather than simply without facts. Ignorance is defined as lacking knowledge or information as to a particular subject or fact. We can’t know everything so we’re bound to be ignorant of something at some time. There is more access to more information today than there has ever been in history. Not only do we know more, but the access is incredible.

In the not so distant past, only the very wealthy and primarily men, had access to books and the abundance of knowledge that was available at that time. The internet has made it possible to gain more information than you ever thought possible in a matter of moments. We can find out just about anything we want 24/7 with the click of a button – ignorance overcome.

But what do we do when we know what we should be doing but just don’t do it? Sheesh! That’s a whole lot of doing!

This weekend I was working at a client event and early Saturday morning I was playing taxi to the airport so that our Continuing Education speaker could catch his flight. During the hour long trip we started talking about his business. He’s a good speaker with a very relevant message but he’s struggling to get his bookings at the level that he’d like to have them. On the flip side, there are other speakers who aren’t as good at the on-stage delivery but they are consistently getting booked. Not only booked, but booked at rates that are almost double.

What’s the difference? Or, as I put it in one of my favorite questions to others when facing a problem – Why do you think that is? His response was: I know what I need to do, I just don’t do it.

Do you ever feel that way? I know I do.

Apathy is more difficult to overcome than ignorance because we can’t just click a button to feel motivated to do whatever task is preventing us from moving forward. I don’t think it’s that we don’t care, we just don’t care enough. In other words, the consequences of our inaction aren’t painful enough to spark us to action or the promise of the payoff for completion isn’t relevant enough to lure us forward.

So, how do we overcome the problem?

There’s not a quick fix and certainly not a one size fits all solution, but these are a few methods that have been of help to me.

Break it down. Sometimes when I have a particularly daunting task, I look at the whole and just really don’t feel like tackling it. It helps me to break it down into smaller tasks. I’m not a big to-do list person on a daily basis except when it comes to planning large events for clients; then I live by my lists. If I look at the event as a whole, it can be overwhelming. But when I start breaking the event down into all the little things that need to be done, I’m faced with bite sized pieces which are much easier to, umm, digest. I know it can be just as overwhelming to look at a 5 page list of to-do’s but when you wade into the smaller bits, you can spend 30 minutes working on the project and mark off 10 items. Before you know it, you’ve whittled down a daunting list into a sea of checkmarks. I love that sense of accomplishment.

Relieve the stress. I find it easier to seek diversions when I’m feeling particularly stressed. I often feel stressed when I’ve had my head to into a project for too long. Sometimes I just need to walk away and change focus. It may help to go for a walk or spend 30 minutes playing with the dog. I’ll go throw a load of clothes in the washer, anything to reorient my brain for a few minutes.

Change up your routine. Occasionally I’m just lonely. Going from working in an office with dozens and dozens of other people to working at home alone can make it easy to be diverted by the TV or playing around on the web. When I sense that creeping in, I make a point to set up some lunch dates with friends. That brief interchange with others helps me come back feeling refreshed and ready to tackle things anew.

Schedule play time. Take a break. Schedule some slacker time into your schedule. You’re more likely to keep plowing through when you can look at the clock and see that it’s only 30 more minutes until you have your “legal” half hour of play time to surf the web, play a game or watch TV.

Create accountability. Even when you’re the boss, you may need to be accountable to someone. Now wait a minute, I’m not saying you need to go out and find a j-o-b again; there are other ways to be accountable. Find a group of like-minded folks to hang out with. In Think and Grow Rich Napoleon Hill talks about the concept of a Master Mind Alliance or I’ve more often seen them called a Master Mind Group. Each group is unique in that it is made of up unique individuals and the agenda belongs to the group but the general focus is on brainstorming, feedback, being a sounding board, accountability and working together to attain new heights.

Outsource/Delegate. In the case of the underbooked speaker, when we got down to it, he was having a problem following through when it came to keeping in front of existing and potential clients so that he was in the forefront of the event planner’s minds when they were deciding on speakers for their events. He was honest and said that just wasn’t something he enjoyed. We all have things that we really don’t enjoy doing but some things are harder to handle than others. If you have something specific that is holding you back, and it happens repeatedly, perhaps you need to hire someone else to do that for you. If you can’t afford to add to your staff, you may be best served by outsourcing that part of your business. Often other service professionals are willing to barter services in lieu of money.

I’ve saved for last; the two things that I feel are the greatest antidotes to apathy.

Get a vision/Renew your vision. Do you know where you’re going? If not, spend some time thinking about where you’re headed and find a way to keep that vision in front of you. I have my “dream board” in pictures and my personal mission statement plastered all over one wall in my office so that I see it every single day. If you know where you’re heading, remind yourself. Put up some pictures or quotes or statements that you will see every day to help motivate you to keep moving toward that dream.

Set goals/Refresh your goals. Do you have goals? I think that goals are one of the most important tools for anyone, business person or worker bee. Goals will help drive you forward. Goals should be set in increments instead of having one end goal in mind. The great thing about goals is that you can set those increments where ever they work best for you. I work with 3 month, 6 month, 1 year, 5 year and 10 year goals and revisit my goals every quarter to see if they need tweaking or realigning based on where I’m headed. Goals aren’t ever to be set in stone, just as we evolve, our goals should evolve with us.

Whether you find yourself faced with ignorance or apathy, don’t despair, both can be overcome. Information cures ignorance and information is readily available with the click of a mouse button, just be smart about it and double check the facts so that you make sure what you’ve found is really the information you need. However, apathy may be more difficult to overcome. It’s certainly not insurmountable, but there are several methods you can use to help keep you motivated. Try a few on for size and see which works best for you.

Happy entrepreneuring!

Katherine

© Yanwe

Keep Moving Forward

I love the movie Meet the Robinsons. Yes, it’s a kids movie but it has a great message:

“Keep moving forward!”

That’s one of the many messages of the movie, but it’s my favorite. In the movie, Lewis wants to give up when his experiments don’t work out the way he wants them to. Then he meets a family that helps him understand that failure is useful and should be celebrated as a learning experience rather than a reason to give up.

I’d been frustrated because I hadn’t been able to allocate my time the way I wanted and development of a product I’m working on kept getting pushed to the background. I always try to make the best of any situation, but I was fighting the urge to be a little whiney and wallow in the frustration.

Do you ever feel frustrated when your plans get waylayed? Tired of pushing, especially when it doesn’t look like you’re making a whole lot of progress? In the beginning it can look like that a lot. And in the middle. And 10 years down the road.

It can feel that way, but Keep Moving Forward. Even if it’s baby steps. Those baby steps will add up to ground covered and eventually position you to take the leaps when the opportunity appears.

Happy Entrepreneuring!

Katherine

Meta Tag Basics: The Good, The Bad, and The Useless

Here at Startup-Toolbox.com, we strive to bring you good information to help you in your business. As someone who is just getting acclimated to this whole blog, SEO, meta whozits stuff, I found the following article a great read. Short, sweet, to the point and not filled with a lot of tech speak and jargon that went right over my head. This is from Jarom Adair at Internet Marketing for Business Owners. You can find the original article at this link:

http://tinyurl.com/metfay

Enjoy and Happy Entrepreneuring!

Katherine

Meta Tag Basics: The Good, The Bad, and The Useless

Meta tags are little bits of code usually inserted between the tags on your web site. There are some very useful meta tags out there while others are a waste of time (one of which surprises most people).

With the exception of the title tag, people don’t see your meta tags unless they look at your web site code. Here’s what each of them do and whether you want to bother with them or not.

Meta title:

This is a very important meta tag. Each of your web site pages can have a unique title and search engines pay special attention to what the title of your web page is when ranking each page of your site.

People also see these titles in the tabs in their browser. This page is titled “Internet Marketing For Business Owners » Blog Archive » Meta Tags: the Good, the Bad, and the Useless” (not that you can see the entire title–it’s probably too long to read it all).

Titles should include key words you want that page to rank well for, should be unique to each page, should describe that page and it’s contents, shouldn’t be longer than about 60 characters, and you want to avoid excessive use of commas (,). You don’t want a title that says “The best deals on hats, bags, shoes, belts, shirts, pants, socks, and gloves” because all the commas might make search engines think you’re “key word spamming” (see How to break a search engine’s heart for more info on this and other things that will get you in trouble with search engines).

Meta description:

This is the description of page as it shows up in search engines. For example, if type in IMFBO.com in Google, the description under the IMFBO.com listing says:

“Internet Marketing for Business Owners is full of tips and strategies to help you increase your web site traffic and convert site visitors into paying customers.”

That specific wording is not seen anyplace on the web site itself, but if you look at the code on my site it says:

That’s where Google gets it’s description.

Don’t get too fancy with your description. Keep it to under 200 characters because search engines will only display about that many to your site visitors (20~30 words).

If you don’t have this tag in your page header, search engines will choose what your web site description will say using wording they take from your web site. My site description that Google chose for me originally said:

“Site Links. Login Main Article Page Getting Started Affiliate Program. Dear Jarom: I bought a couple “How to Market Online” guides from some other web sites …”

…not very descriptive, was it?

Meta robots

If you’re interested in bossing the search engine spiders around, you can tell search engines what to index and what not to index on your web site (if you’ve got information you’d rather the world not know about). See the Thwarting the Search Engines tutorial for details on this meta tag.

Meta forward

This is a trick affiliates use a lot. If you’re an affiliate for a web site and your affiliate link is AffiliateSite.com/Xip7uu34npq and you’d rather pretty the link up so it’s not so weird looking, check out How to Pretty Up Your Affiliate Links. This works any time you have a long link you’d like to shorten or make it look nicer.

Other tags

There are other meta tags

<META NAME=”Author” CONTENT=””>
<META NAME=”Date” CONTENT=””>
<META NAME=”Channel” CONTENT=””>
<META NAME=”Revisit” CONTENT=””>

Search engines pretty much ignore them.

Meta keywords

Here’s the short answer: Search engines don’t look at keyword meta tags anymore. You can pretty much ignore this tag. This surprises a lot of people.

The long answer: Years ago (circa 1999~2000) when search engines were still figuring things out, meta keywords were something that search engines would use to find out what a web site was about. If someone included the key word “football” in their keyword meta tag, the search engine would make a note that the web site was about football.

Oops, she did it again

Around that time, Yahoo released their search statistics and revealed that the #1 searched for term that year was “Brittany Spears”.

What happened next? Every web site that wanted to get some free traffic added “Britney Spears” to their keywords meta tag, regardless of whether their web site was about Brittany Spears or not.

The result was that anyone looking for information on Britney Spears would find a bunch of web sites, very few of which were actually about Britney Spears. If people don’t get their Britney Spears fix for the day, they stop using the search engine that sends them to bogus sites.

Once the search engines saw this, they started ignoring the meta keywords and instead started looking at the text that is actually on the web site to figure out what the site is about. This made the Britney Spears fans much happier.

Search engines today might glance at your meta keywords, but if your meta tag has “football” in it the search engine will verify that “football” is a major theme in the text of your web site before they list you as a football site.

Oops, she did it again…and again and again

By the way, Britney Spears has topped Yahoo’s search engine list seven times in Yahoo’s history between 1994 and 2009.

Yours in success,
-Jarom Adair

Not a young Entrepreneur? So what?

I’ve been noticing a lot of articles about young entrepreneurs lately. I certainly don’t want to downplay their accomplishments; I only wish I’d had their gumption when I was 25 years younger. I certainly had the ideas; I just never had the courage to step out of my comfort zone.

However, I want to point out that while they are indeed courageous and talented and admirable, I’m just a whole lot more impressed when people who are older take the leap toward their dreams.

How much more courage does it take to leap off the entrepreneurial cliff when you have a family to support? With things like braces. And college tuition. And the garage or bedroom that their young entrepreneur child is working out of.

And a mortgage to cover?

And when your family and friends are much more likely to say whatareyaNUTS???

I find myself in awe of many mid-life start up entrepreneurs and this article is going to show you that you CAN follow your dreams, even if you’re 30, 40, 50 or beyond. To quote part of the title of a book from one of my favorite authors, Barbara Sher, It’s Only Too Late If You Don’t Start Now.

I’ve come up with some examples to prove it’s true.

Some of the following people are very famous names that you will most certainly recognize, some may not be known worldwide, but they are still very worthy of admiration.

Ray Kroc, Founder, McDonald’s Corporation
Went from being a milkshake machine salesman to a partner with the McDonald brothers at the age of 52. Six years later, Kroc was 58 and when the brothers wanted to limit the franchise of the restaurants, he bought out the McDonald brother’s stake in the restaurant chain.

Colonel Sanders, Founder Kentucky Fried Chicken
At the age of 40, Harland Sanders was running a service station and serving chicken dishes out of his living quarters. Later he moved to a motel with a restaurant that seated 142 people and worked as the chef. At the age of 65 Sanders used $105 from his first Social Security check to start the Kentucky Fried Chicken franchise.

Julia Child, Chef, Author and Television Personality
In 1951, at the age of 38, Child along with Simone Beck and Louisette Bertholle began to teach cooking to American women in Child’s Paris kitchen, calling their informal school L’Ecole des Trois Gourmandes (The School of the Three Food Lovers). The three worked on a cookbook together which was eventually published in 1961.

Ed Sullivan, Entertainment Writer and Television Host
At the age of 47, Ed Sullivan went from being a newspaper columnist to being the host of the weekly Sunday night TV variety show – Toast of the Town – which later became The Ed Sullivan Show.

Jo Fuchs Luscombe, Former Connecticut State Representative
After spending most of her life as a stay at home mom, Jo entered the world of politics. At age 48, she ran for and won a seat in the state of Connecticut’s House of Representatives. After eight years in the seat, she became the Republican Minority Whip.

Mary Orlando, Owner, Mary Stuart House
At the age of 62, Mary purchased the historic home she had lived in as a child and turned it into a successful bed and breakfast.

Jean Karotkin, Photographer and Author
Jean had never taken a professional photograph before but as a breast cancer survivor she, at the age of 46, had a vision and dream for photographs of other survivors, showing their strength and beauty. Five years later, she had not only pulled her dream into reality, but was exhibiting her work at the Houston Center for Photography and was featured in top magazines like Oprah and Rosie.

Rainelle Burton, Author
At fifty-two, after working twenty years at Michigan Blue Cross and dealing with dyslexia, homelessness and depression, Rainelle Burton published a critically-acclaimed first novel.

 Jim Minick, Owner, Home Care Georgia
At age 51, Jim was fearful of being laid off. So he started an elder-care business in 2003 that helps people with daily tasks at home, such as getting dressed.

Poppy Bridger, Owner Anaheim Test Labs
Poppy worked as a PhD chemist for 45 years and retired at the age of 69. On her 72nd birthday, she was offered an opportunity to buy the lab she had worked at. She took her savings and went back to work.

Sylvia Lieberman, Creator of Archibald Mouse Books
Sylvia wrote a children’s story as part of a course in Writing for the Juvenile Reader. The instructor recognized her talent and urged her to seek publishing. However, it wasn’t until she was a grandmother that Sylvia’s book was published and appearing on bookstore shelves.

Happy Entrepreneuring!

Katherine

Obstacles or Opportunities?

I posed a question in a social networking site that is geared toward business folk. The question was – As an entrepreneur, what do you know now that you wish you’d known when you first started out?

For the most part, the input was excellent. But there was one response that surprised me.

“If at first you don’t succeed, quit.”

I know, right? I mean, I had to read it a couple of times to make sure I read it right.

Perhaps he was just being facetious. Perhaps not.

As entrepreneurs…or really even as human beings…we’re going to come up against obstacles. We can either use the obstacle as a convenient reason to quit. Or we can see them for what obstacles really are – opportunities.

Opportunities for growth.

Not all obstacles can be overcome, but they still provide room for growth. Just as a poker player analyzes the table to decide whether they should stay the course, raise the stakes or fold, we need to analyze what lies in our path instead of reacting by immediately throwing in the towel.

DIY isn’t always the best way

It’s Friday afternoon and you’re just wrapping up the finishing touches on the last batch of widgets. You look at the clock on the wall and think, “Whew, I made it through another week.” Then it hits you. You have checks that need to be deposited, the week’s invoices still need to be sent out and you promised Mrs. Chalmers and Mr. Dobson that they’d both have their deliveries on Monday. As all that sinks in, you scramble around the recesses of your mind to remember what time the last Fed-ex drop is so that you can keep your promises to your clients and have their product to them on Monday. So much for having the possibility of a weekend.

Sound familiar?

As your business grows, you will inevitably have times when there is more work to do than one person can manage. So, what’s an entrepreneur to do? You could always hire another person, but you should weigh that option carefully. Adding to staff creates more than just an added salary. There is the additional overhead that encompasses another body in your office space and unless you’re consistently overwhelmed, hiring another body as a “just in case” for the peak periods means you may be paying someone to sit around during the non-busy times. Alternatively, outsourcing may be a good fit for your needs.

Outsourcing has gotten kind of a black eye in the past few years as more and more big businesses are shipping jobs out of the country. However, when it comes to tailor made help for a small business’ needs, outsourcing can be your best friend.

When you’re first starting out, doing everything yourself is often the best way to do things. It helps keep overhead low and you can dip your fingers into the beginnings of every role in your company and set the processes in place just the way you want them. You can “try on” different solutions and quickly figure out what works and what doesn’t. If you’re thinking ahead, you can also use the hands on experience in the beginning to help you decide which functions you will be able to delegate to someone else and in what order you want to peel those duties away from your core activities, the things you love that drew you into business in the first place.

In the not so distant past, telecommuting was a young business model and technology was growing exponentially to keep up with the demand for newer, faster, more reliable ways to keep in touch and work efficiently. Consequently, in today’s business environment, working across the world is almost as convenient as working across the hall. There has also been a surge of experts and professionals who have opened up their own shops making quality assistance more accessible than ever for small business people – from bookkeeping, to billing, to engineering, to warehousing/shipping/transportation to payroll and HR services to IT services to administrative support – there are thousands of quality companies available to help meet your needs.

The key to a successful collaboration with any company you outsource to is clear communication. Know exactly what duties you want to turn over. Talk to a few different companies to see which would be the best fit for you. Also, just as you would with a potential employee, talk to other companies that use their services. Reputable resources should be happy to turn over references. Many companies will offer packages in varying levels that empower you to decide what level of service you need right now. As your needs grow, you can upgrade your level of service incrementally with that company which is a great way to manage your costs.

Delegate, don’t abdicate! As small business people, we’re often so relieved to not have to deal with the parts of the business we didn’t enjoy that we tend to turn over the tasks and forget about them. You can’t just call across the office to check on a project so make sure you maintain the communication and create clear deliverables and deadlines. You may not be performing the details of the tasks anymore, but they still contribute to YOUR business.

The options for outsourcing are only going to grow in the current economy as more and more professionals find themselves transitioned out of their corporate jobs. Many of those professionals, unable to find a suitable opening often choose to start their own venture. By opting to do business with outsource companies, you not only get a level of experience you’d be unlikely to get for the same price in an employee, but you foster a stronger economy and a stronger foundation for your own company.

Happy entrepreneuring!

Katherine

© Yanwe

Web Based Faxing

Fax machine? We don’t need no stinkin’ fax machine!

I’ve never been a fan of fax machines. It seems like their only consistent feature is jamming. And a new machine only meant jamming in more creative ways. I needed to get my home office set up; I knew that a fax was a necessary evil but I kept putting it off. I was less than thrilled at the prospect but I finally waded into the logistics of set-up. Little did I know that I had options – gotta love options!

When I transitioned into working at home, one of the issues I needed to look at was faxing. I have an all in one machine that has faxing capability but I wasn’t keen on having to toggle back and forth between phone and fax on a land line. I’ve had to do that before and it never worked well. I certainly didn’t want to have the added expense of installing a second line dedicated to the fax. I mean, when you’re just starting out every penny counts, right?!

I was talking about it with a brilliant friend of mine who asked, “Have you ever thought about a web based fax service? That’s what I use and it’s great!”

This woman is a financial genius, and when smart people talk, I try to listen.  I was more than a little skeptical, though. I had heard of efaxing before, but what I’d heard was that it was unreliable with faxes often ending up somewhere in the nether regions of cyber space instead of where you sent them. Also, that the file formats were greatly limited and needed a lot of storage space.

As soon as I got home, I fired up the trusty computer and started researching. Come to find out, efaxing has come a long way baby! Web based fax services are more reliable than ever. The more I read, the more I was persuaded.

  • No paper and toner needed, saves trees, good for the environment. Like that.
  • Many allow you to choose your desired file format and include PDFs which is space efficient. Like that.
  • Many have reporting functionality if you need to track the metrics of your faxing activity. Probably won’t use it, but like that.
  • No phone line needed/monthly service fee is less expensive than having a dedicated line. Love that.
  • No long distance charges. Love that.
  • Was able to choose a fax # that closely correlated to my business #. Love that.
  • Increased privacy; I always hated it when proprietary faxes were left sitting on the machine for anyone to read. Love that.
  • NO MORE JAMS!! – LOVE that!

There are a several sites that break down the various services including price and a whole lot of technical stuff that makes my eyes glaze over. I’m listing two, because between them, they cover most of the services available:

http://faxing-service-review.toptenreviews.com/
http://www.faxcompare.com/

I personally use RapidFax and Metro Fax, one for a client and one for my business. I went with different companies just to avoid confusion. My personal experience has been good with both. I’ve had them for over a year and have only had one small glitch with RapidFax. They never figured out what happened, but instead of faxing all of the pages, only one went through. Luckily, I caught it and was able to re-send. It only happened once and I have sent hundreds of faxes. I just try to be diligent about checking the confirmation email to make sure all the pages went through. I also set up a web based email account for the fax # so that my Inbox didn’t get slogged with faxes. The services vary on how long they retain faxes on their server, but the incoming faxes and confirmation emails stay on the dedicated email account as long as I want to leave them there. I save some onto my computer, but most just stay on the email’s storage system. This also reduces my storage space requirements.

The days of the clunky fax machine taking up precious counter space are all but over. If you’re searching for ways to free up counter space, reduce costs, help the environment, or just plain don’t like fax machines, web based faxing may be a good fit for you. There are several services with many different options so there is sure to be one that meets your needs. If you’re still not sure, try a few on! Many of the services offer free trials.

Happy entrepreneuring!

Katherine

© Yanwe

I Could Do Anything…

I Could Do Anything If I Only Knew What It Was: How to Discover What You Really Want and How to Get It
By Barbara Sher

Are you one of those people that were born knowing what they wanted to be when they grew up? No? Me, either. I spent years taking aptitude tests, personality tests, skills assessments and everything else I could find to try and help figure it out. I kept waiting, hoping that I’d come across the perfect assessment tool and suddenly the clouds would part, a ray of sunlight would burst through illuminating the answer and a heavenly choir would rise with the appropriate soundtrack. That never happened either.

So, I kept searching. I attended seminars. I tried on jobs. I read books.

And years went by. Still I was no closer to having an answer to the question of which direction I should point my vocational ship.

One day I was in a bookstore, perusing the shelves for the latest in career soul searching material when I saw a title that created a mini version of my desired moment of illumination. “I Could Do Anything If I Only Knew What It Was: How to Discover What You Really Want and How to Get It.” I thought “EXACTLY!!”

I snatched it off the shelf, raced home and started reading. The epiphany continued. At first I skimmed through the reading and skipped over the exercises. Then I went back and actually did the work. This book did more for me to help me discover my direction than any other book I’ve read.

Having said that, it wasn’t the perfect tool. Yes, it pointed me in the right direction but it took a bit more refining to fine tune things. But just having a direction was incredibly freeing! I’m very much a planner and it didn’t do a lot to help me in that area. However, that’s also part of what spurred me to start this website. There are lots of folks out there who want to help you figure out our dreams – this one was the best fit for me. There are also lots of folks who want to be your cheerleader along the way while you make it happen. There aren’t a whole lot of folks out there who will help you plot a path from choosing a direction to making it happen so I wanted to help fill the gap.

Anyhoo, if you’re still searching and unsure of the direction you want to go in when you grow up, (although I’m not sure if I ever really want to grow up) this book may be a good fit for you, too.

Happy entrepreneuring!

Katherine

© Yanwe