The title of today’s article might sound like the first line of a bad joke, but it’s actually the preface to a useful (and fun) exercise. Trying to understand your best clients is no laughing matter.  In fact, for many people it can be surprisingly – even painfully – difficult.  We know how to help [...]

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Last Saturday was Opening Day at the Southern California Renaissance Faire. I’ve been attending and working at the Faire for 15 years.  I love everything about Faire, from the dust, heat, and inevitable splinters to the beautiful craftswork and the wonderful people. It’s the SoCal RenFaire’s 50th anniversary, and they’re celebrating in several ways.  This [...]

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Your marketing is intended to help the right people say yes to what you offer. This is true whether you’re writing a how-to article, building a sales page, or talking with a potential client.  Everything you do to promote your business leads toward that ultimate goal:  helping the right people know, think, and feel what [...]

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I was recently in a rather heated debate with a colleague over the pros and cons of HTML emails. It got me thinking about the beliefs, thoughts, and feelings we have about the things we do in our businesses – and about how our beliefs, thoughts, and feelings don’t always hold up when we compare [...]

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In the previous article, “Did You Learn from Last Year’s Successes,” I explained why I’m not a fan of formal plans and concrete goals. As I described in that article, they can be a painful set-up for feelings of struggle, inadequacy, and failure. I also think that too much structure tends to be destructive to [...]

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It’s harsh but true:  your website – from your home page content to that sales letter you slaved over, trying to get every word exactly right – mostly doesn’t get read. People skim.  They bounce through those carefully-crafted paragraphs, picking out a word here, a headline there. If you’re lucky, something will catch their attention [...]

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All marketing is one-on-one:  one you and one client. You standing in front of an audience of thousands. Your website representing you to the teeming masses of internet users. Or you talking face-to-face with one person. It doesn’t matter.  It’s always one-on-one:  one you talking with one other person. Each person in that audience of [...]

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Words. From the moment our ears and brain develop in the womb, we’re surrounded by words. Within months of birth, we start responding to the words we hear.  We learn to speak around the time of our first birthday.  And we might be reading by age three. Words fill our thoughts, our dreams, our encounters [...]

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Early this year, a friend’s daughter opened a day spa here in San Diego. I was thrilled for the young woman and for her business partner in the endeavor. (And for myself as a customer!)  She’s brilliant at her work, and it’s great to see them opening the doors of a charming, top-quality local spa. [...]

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There are many good reasons to start out on an hourly basis – reasons that serve both you and your customer.  When your work process is still developing, it will probably feel nervewracking and uncomfortable to set fixed prices and define packages, and that’s fine. Fixed-price project pricing and defined services packages are something businesses [...]

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