Thinking Home Business — Loving the freedom of working from home

My Break from Blogging

September 17, 2019 by Des Walsh Leave a Comment

I Didn’t Actually Decide Not to Blog

There was no point in time where I decided to take a break from blogging.

But I was shocked the other day to see how long it had been since I had blogged.

On my Des Walsh dot Com site, apart from one brief announcement post, it’s been about 10 months since I’ve done a “real” post.

And on this Thinking Home Business site, more like 18 months!

In the meantime, it’s not that I’ve been idle on the social media front. In that time I’ve been posting almost daily on Facebook.

But not on my blogs.

A situation I am now ready to remedy.

Because I actually love blogging.

And after about 19 months of posting on Facebook, and doing a lot of training for online marketing, I feel I can post now in a way that is more enjoyable for me and that I am confident will be more engaging for readers.

In another post I’ll talk about my latest thoughts about particular blogging platforms, and share the story of some painful but valuable lessons that may be of help to others.

If you’re a blogger, have you ever taken a break from it, whether intending to do that or by “drift”? And if so, how long were you away and was that helpful?

With Business as With Life, Sometimes It’s Good to Press the Reset Button

March 15, 2018 by Des Walsh

Power of an Intention, Even Without a Plan

I’ve realised recently that an intention I declared back in June last year has had consequences that have both surprised and delighted me.

It was at a birthday celebration and, in an uncharacteristically short speech, thanking the family for putting on the show and speaking a bit about where I was in my life at that point, I said that I now intended to “press the reset button” for the next stage of my life.

Truth be told, at the time I had no real idea of what pressing that metaphorical button might mean or prompt in any kind of detail.

What I guess I wanted to convey is that I had no intention of slowing down, kicking back. Rather, I was ready for a new phase, a new adventure even, in my life’s journey.

Dream Big, Stay Open to Possibilities

What has occurred over the intervening time has reminded me that:

A combination of big dreams and being open to possibilities can open paths forward that are aligned with our values and bring with them the promise of more abundant living
My birthday declaration of my intention set the scene, or you might say prepared me, for a significant development in my business and life

A realisation of Henry David Thoreau’s promise a hundred and sixty four years ago, in Walden

“…If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours…”

So What Happened?

Late last year, so about five months after I had declared my Reset intention, my partner Suzie and I were introduced to a fast-growing buisness which we could do from home – or in fact from anywhere in the world – which featured a 90% automated, online affiliate marketing platform. It also came with an amazingly supportive global team, and a very impressive commission structure that is providing real financial freedom for many people, globally, and especially here in Australia.

So, to sum up, after fifteen or more years of trial and error to have a successful online business, we were shown, and connected with, a 90% automated affiliate marketing platform, with high end, high-converting products (and commensurately generous commissions) and a global team of mutually supportive people.

There is truly a beautiful alignment with my business and personal values, and life goals. Not least, it provides the opportunity to achieve true financial freedom, while at the same time helping others to build their own businesses with me and with my support.

For them and for us it’s a business we can do from home, and from anywhere. It opens up to us the laptop lifestyle we have dreamed of.

I’ll be posting more about this as we move forward with it. Watch this space!

Want to Know More?

If you’d like to know more now, and see if this business could help you achieve your dreams, just say “tell me more” in the comments below, or use the Contact page at this link, and I’ll get right back to you.

5 Lessons from a Missed Business Appointment

April 15, 2015 by Des Walsh

OMG, I missed that appointment!

Have you ever missed an important business appointment?

I missed one this morning and was both embarrassed and annoyed with myself for doing so.

Ironically, although I had the appointment date and time correctly listed in my Google calendar, I’d been using a separate backup/reminder system and that had a different date – two weeks hence!

I’ve apologised and although the potential interviewee has not taken up my offer of a reschedule, he has been quite polite about it all and sent me some helpful information.

Mind you, one of my strengths in business is a sense of responsibility, so it’s quite possible that my annoyance with myself is greater than it needs to be.

But I’m still cranky with myself.

Making the best of it

So on the old principle that when life gives you lemons you make lemonade, I drew up the following five things I have learned or had reinforced from the experience.

1. As soon as you realize you have missed the appointment, apologize

Procrastinating on the apology is not going to make matters better and will probably make them worse. Whether you apologize in person, by phone or by email will depend on the circumstances. In the instance today I apologized by return email as soon as the person emailed me about the missed appointment.

In hindsight, I suspect I would have been better picking up the phone and letting him hear how genuinely sorry and embarrassed I was, and with my being willing to handle his response maturely, without the unintended but relatively impersonal shielding of emotion via an email.

2. No excuses – take responsibility for the mistake

If you miss an appointment, take full responsibility. Don’t blame a staff member, one of your family, having to take a dog or cat to the vet, traffic. If there was a real, insurmountable problem, such as a plane being diverted to another city because of storms, get through to the person as soon as you can and let them know. But don’t embellish.

One executive I knew told me that once, after he had missed an appointment with a more senior person, he got his secretary to write and give the impression that he had been out of town, although he hadn’t. The more senior person was not impressed and told him he should not have tried to hide behind his staff member.

3. Offer an alternative and a sweetener

I’m an optimist so my assumption is that people will be understanding and be willing to make a new time for the scheduled appointment. I go on the front foot with this and offer an alternative time, ideally with my doing something extra: for example, if we were to have met in a cafe in the city, I might offer to meet now in the person’s office. Or I might offer to buy them lunch and have the meeting that way.

In the right circumstances and depending on the people and the relationship, sending flowers or chocolates or a vintage wine, or tickets to a sporting event might be worthwhile. In some circumstances that would be over the top and not appropriate.

Sometimes you’ll decide that none of that is going to make much difference, so you just have to suck it up and move on.

4. Review your appointment calendaring system

No matter how state of the art your calendaring/appointment system is, things can go wrong. I would have expected a reminder this morning on my smartphone, 15 minutes before the scheduled time. As far as I know that didn’t happen. So make sure your system is set up so as to give you alerts at appropriate times before your appointments.

5. Check and re-check

Something I started to do, but judging by from today’s events not done assiduously enough, is to review my appointment schedule regularly – i.e. weekly and daily.

Here is the pattern I intend to follow from now on:
(a) Sunday evening before the evening meal check all appointments for the week and make sure there are no conflicts
b) Each weekday evening, before winding up for the day, check all appointments for the following day
c) Each morning, before beginning work, check all my appointments for the day and make sure I am programmed to be the right places at the right time.

Also, and especially if the appointment has been made some time previously, it is a good idea to phone or email the person with something along the lines of “Just checking. Are we still on today for that appointment at (time), at (place/ Skype/ …)?” I’ve never known anyone to take exception to that.

What other steps might you take to ensure you keep your appointments?

What’s the Reading Age for Your Blog?

February 2, 2015 by Des Walsh

“You Should Aim for Grade 8 Reading Level.” “Are You Serious?”

I still remember being quite shocked, some years ago, when a blogging expert said something to the effect that if you wanted to attract and keep readers for your blog you should make the language simple enough for someone with a reading age of Grade 7 or 8. So that’s around 12-14, right?

I was shocked because I felt a bit annoyed at the implication that I should be ready to “talk down” to my readership, rather than expressing myself in the language and sentence structure I would normally use.

But I also thought that if I wanted to communicate my ideas and especially if I wanted to generate some discussion it might make sense to get down off my linguistic high horse and write more plainly, more simply.

However, since then – say about 5 years ago – I’ve not really bothered about the level of language or complexity of sentence structure I’ve used. Just hoped that you and others reading this blog would get what I was writing about, clearly enough for it to be interesting and maybe helpful for you.

So all this came up for me today when I was participating in the weekly Twitter hashtag conversation #blogchat where we were discussing the topic of “speaking the language of our readers”. The transcript of this week’s #blogchat is here.

While the chat was proceeding, I ran a little test on a couple of blog posts from my other blog at Des Walsh dot Com. I used the free testing tool at Gift Rocket. Results? One was assessed at Grade 7, the other at Grade 8.

For the one at Grade 8, the testing page declared:

Your blog reads at Grade 8!

Well done. You write better than most bloggers do. Your blog reads at the level of your local city newspaper. Your blog is well-liked for its easy-to-understand flow.

Hmmm. Had I been subconsciously making myself keep the language and sentence structure at that level? Is that appropriately high enough for the professional audience I see myself blogging for?

And what about this Thinking Home Business blog – what was the reading level here?

Much higher, it seems. A test just now on one of the posts here produced this result:

Your blog reads at grade 11!

You write like you just aced your AP literature class. Your writing is up there with USA Today and other national publications. You’re showing signs of promise to be a professional blogger!

If that is typical it would indicate I write with a bit more complexity for this blog than for the other.

Might be interesting to test from time to time.

Question. Do you have a blog and if so what do you think is the average reading age of your readership and does that work for you?

Why I Love it – Sort of – When People Unsubscribe from My Updates

February 4, 2014 by Des Walsh

I can’t say I’m happy at first.

I’ll be honest. When I see that a bunch of people have unsubscribed just after I sent out a fresh newsletter update, I don’t exactly jump for joy.

In fact, my initial reaction is probably like seeing someone suddenly, without explanation, leave the party you had put on and thought was going well.

The questions arise.

“Was it something I said?”

“Is what I’m sending out useless/boring/annoying?”

And it’s worse when it’s someone you know well.

Now, I know that there can be many perfectly understandable reasons for someone unsubscribing, for example:

the information in my updates is not really relevant for what they are doing or interested in
they are trying to establish some control over an overflowing inbox (I can relate to that, especially)
they don’t remember ever signing up for information from me and might even feel a bit miffed about receiving anything

With the third of those, not remembering signing up, my email service provider AWeber fortunately provides a very detailed record of when people registered and when they confirmed, with date and time down to the minute.

So I am able, with any who leave a comment indicating that they don’t recall ever registering to receive information, to send those details, with a covering note indicating my regret that they might have thought themselves contacted inappropriately.

Generally those messages do not get a response. But happily, one recipient of such a communication from me the other day expressed his wish to be kept informed and asked me to put his name back on the list!

Why I do genuinely love getting those unsubscribe notifications and why you should too

Although my initial reaction is often a basic human “don’t they appreciate me?” one, when I have had a moment to reflect, I am pleased.

Because:

Who in their right mind wants to be sending messages to people who don’t want them?
When people unsubscribe I know I am making some impression and hopefully for those who stay on the list that is a positive impression
My mailing lists are improved by including fewer addresses of people who are not interested in hearing from me
It puts me on my mettle to do better, provide more interesting/valuable information, improve my communication generally

In fact, right now I can’t think of a downside.

Can you?

I wclcome your comments and any suggestions about how to turn the initial lemon taste of an unsubscribe into an even more delicious lemonade than I can manage currently.

Being Busy is OK, but it’s not an Excuse for Discourtesy

January 24, 2014 by Des Walsh

The old “I’m very busy” fob off

A couple of recent experiences have reminded me that being busy is no excuse for being discourteous. Or for fobbing people off just because you don’t want to say no.

I’m sure we have all had some version of the following.

You go to a Chamber of Commerce or other business networking gathering, get into conversation and make a connection with someone who sounds like they could be interested in hiring your services. You follow up with an email or a phone call and you are told they are very busy just now, and probably for a few weeks to come, and why don’t you call again, say in a month’s time, when things should be clearer.

You duly note that, and call. And get the “very busy just now, yada yada yada” response.

At which point your experience tells you this is a lead that was never a prospect and you should just extricate yourself rapidly so you can spend time in more useful pursuits.

But sometimes, especially when you might not be flush with business or hot prospects, you might be tempted to go along with this game and dutifully call back in a month’s time or whenever – only to be told, almost certainly, that the person is very busy and could you call back….

Let’s face it, they were never really going to do business with you

So what happened here?

I believe it’s because we’re all brought up to be polite. Well, most of us. To some degree. There are of course people who like inflicting discomfort or pain, but the rest of us don’t like to say No.

And in some cultures people are particularly averse to saying “No”: they will say “maybe”, or “perhaps later”, when they really want you to drop the subject and not raise it again.

So when you pitched your story at the networking event, the other person didn’t want to discourage you, so you got a “Yes, sure” when you asked could you call, meet for a coffee, or however you phrased it.

Then when you called, your “prospect” did not have the moral courage to say “Look, I’ve thought it over and although your services sound great, they are not for us”.

So an assistant was told to tell you your “prospect” was very busy and could you call back, say in a couple of weeks time.

And you know, really, what’s going to happen then, don’t you? The busy story.

It’s usually, for truthfulness, on a par with “the dog ate my homework”.

The worst thing we can do is to go along with the game

Let’s face it, we’re all busy.

Either we are busy providing service for our clients, or we are busy chasing leads and seeking to turn them into paying clients.

So one day, when I got one of those responses, I thought “Hang on, don’t give me the ‘too busy’ story. I’m busy.”

So either my pitch wasn’t good enough, or the “prospect” had no relevant pain or need I could help with.

The rest is game-playing.

They don’t want to waste their time, but are too “polite” – or too wishy washy – to say so. In fact, what they are doing is impolite. Discourteous.

And we are allowing ourselves to be cast in this game as the people with all the time in the world!

People who are desperate enough to be able to be fobbed off with the Busy story.

That’s bad for us, bad for our brand, and bad for our morale.

A sales trainer of mine used to be always on about having the right “posture” in the market.

Just like our mothers told us to stand up straight and put our shoulders back.

Playing the game of calling back, even though in our heart of hearts we know they are hoping and expecting we will just give up and go away, is not good for our posture. It can subtly undermine our self-confidence, our pride in what we have to offer.

And that’s surely bad for our business.

I admit I’ve been caught

I have to admit I’ve fallen into the trap in the past and dutifully made the calls, been put off, made the calls, sometimes over a period of months.

No more.

My response now is “Well, I’m busy myself, so what I believe would work better is for you/your boss to call me when you can clear some time to speak, if you are still interested, and with luck I may be available at that time.”

In sales terms, that’s head up, shoulders back.

Of course, by not playing we may lose some deals

No one can guarantee that, if you turn the game around and make it your game, not theirs, you won’t thereby miss out on one or more great deals.

But it’s the way I prefer to play the game these days.

On my terms.

I’ve also become much better at being frank early, up front, with those pitching to me and where I know I am not a real prospect.

I’ll even cut people short in the midst of a pitch – doing that as politely as I can – and tell them I am not their market, or words to that effect. They might be discomforted at the moment, but I know that my behaviour then has actually been more thoughtful and courteous towards them than that of the people who are on their list to be called back, and called back, and called back.

Let’s us not have people spinning our wheels with their “He is very busy, could you call back in x weeks time?” game.

And let’s us not do it to others.

Life’s too short for such silly games.

I know this goes against the grain of what I was taught – and maybe what you were taught – about persistent selling, but I’m ok with it.

Your view? Any related experience you would like to share?