Saturday 11 April 2015

What Can You Tell Them? ; 15 things an entrepreneur does, Reconnect with yourself & Banner blindness

I've got more than 900 cd's and over 200 slabs of vinyl. There's nothing unusual in that, as I love music. But cause of the amount of time I've spent making music both live and in a production ( or studio) environment, I tend to listen to music in a different way than the average music fan. In effect, I cannot help but listen out for little details here and there, and all this is done without having to think about it. It's ingrained and  operates on a subconscious level.

The same goes for work, too. You tend to have habits that are unique to you :-

15 Things I Do as an Entrepreneur That Most People Might Not

If you're working in any capacity, wether self employed or for others ( or a combination of both), you'll invariably tend to have habits that are unique to yourself. More importantly, as the article suggests, you'll listen without intent and hopefully without prejudice, during feedback sessions. These can be 'live' via customer interaction ( depending upon the business, e.g. retail), or second-hand via your staff and co-workers, etc. But ameliorating incoming information is ESSENTIAL to effective workflow and improving the quality of output.

For example, if companies are sending out surveys, which I get a number of in email form after ordering something online, then they should do it sooner rather than later. The rationale being that people tend to have gone cold, to the point that may have even forgotten a large portion of their engagement experience online ( e.g.shopping), as time goes on.

If you are working for yourself, then you'll be familiar with the occasional feeling of being 'up to your neck in it', so to speak. But if this is becoming a more common way to spend your time, then perhaps you need to have a rethink :-

Up to Your Eyeballs in Work? Reconnect With What You're In It For. 

It's a cliche'd thing to say, but if you're solely in it just for the money, then perhaps you have lost your way. I could think of at least three other ways to make more money right now, but neither of them would give me long term satisfaction or happiness. That's why you become self-employed in the first instance. You have a vision of your life being more 'in your own hands' and of your own making. If that seems to be a losing battle, which is more about spending time firefighting just to get bills paid or it's just not fulfilling anymore for whatever reason, then something somewhere has gone askew. Bar a general disconnect with being able to make a living out of your concept or vision per se, then a scheduled 'time out' to re-assess things should help you get back on track.

Running a business and potentially running yourself into the ground in the process, isn't something for cissies. It isn't for anyone, in fact and I wouldn't recommend a lengthy period of pulling in six or seven day working weeks, without taking any sort of break.

In the same way, I suspect that internet marketing teams would be having a rethink about using certain forms of online advertising, these days :-

Banner Blindness: How to Get the Ultimate Users Attention

When was the last time you clicked on a banner ad? It's probably less often than used to be the case. The solution proferred in the article is quite novel, but I suspect that it relies on a bit of unintentional 'click slippage' on the users' part, in order to be trully effective. Either that, or your now backdrop-banner is so cleverly rendered, that it genuinely does entice a user to click on it. But how many times will that be?

Interactvitiy is the key word to getting more effective user engagement on your marketing campaign. That means a lot more time, energy and money invested in the first instance.

In the same vein, most of what we forget, we tend to have taken for granted at some point, cause it served us to obtain that knowledge in order to perform more effectively. Or the alternative, which is that our interest in the information and/or subject, started to diminish over time due to a lack of enthusiasm and recall/ useage.

Wether it's the former or the latter, we owe it to ourselves to reconnect with our passions and inner core, as often as possible. That makes dealing with challenges and opportunities in our working lives, a clearer and more fruitful process both now, and in the future.

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