This Message Is Brought To You By The Letters R & D
I’m assuming at some point in your life you’ve seen an episode of Sesame Street. On Sesame Street, they have a segment called, “Today is brought to you by the letter,” and today this episode is being brought to you by the letter R and D for Department of Redundancy.
I don’t know about you guys, but I feel stuck in Groundhog’s day. It’s hard to tell what day it is. what day tomorrow is, and so on and so forth. There’s still a little bit of flow going on, but it gets tough working from home day after day, not going out, and not having any activities. You get bored. Not necessarily bored because you’ve got nothing to do, Lord knows we’ve got things to do. Yes, I was bored over the weekend and yes, I did organize our Tupperware drawer, but we’re not here to talk about Tupperware or Sesame Street, we’re here to talk about work.
Over and Over
One thing I’ve discovered is that I’m doing the same work week, after week, after week. There’s not a lot of new going on. I write these blog posts every single week, I do my podcast every single week, and even the work I’m doing for my clients is somewhat redundant. So I sat down and I made a list of all the projects in my business that I have not gotten done because I’ve been so busy working on everybody else’s projects.
There were three things that I found I needed to get done. I wrote them down and then I made a point to work on them until they were done. I needed to focus, if you’ve ever seen the acronym FOCUS, it stands for Follow One Course Until Successful.
So I decided to grin, bare it, and get it done. Aside from having matched lids and Tupperware containers, I decided to jump in on three major projects. I’m bringing these up because maybe you have something similar or maybe it will spark something in you that you could be doing to move your business forward and to get out of the rut, in case you’re in one.
Awareness Graphics
The first project I did was based on something I called Baconisms. A while ago, I paid a virtual assistant to basically take terms that I use inside of my presentations.
- “F.O.C.U.S., Follow One Course Until Successful”.
- “K.E.Y., Knowledge Empowers You”.
- “Business does not do business with other businesses, people do business with people”.
- “We’re all in the relationship business”.
These are just simple thoughts that I put on awareness graphics. They are a thousand pixels by a thousand pixels where I placed the quotes on a background. Then I realized that the old background was boring, wasn’t branded, and it didn’t really drive traffic back to my business.
I went through my list of over 60 of those Baconisms and I picked out my top 32. I created a new background that included the logo for my podcast and my business, and then I went and recreated all of those graphics. Sure I could have paid a VA to do it, but it gave me the opportunity to pick the ones I liked the best and create something I felt proud about.
Once that was finished, I went into my social media planning tool, Planable, and I set those up so they would go out one a day to all of my social media, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram for 30 days straight.
That gives me the opportunity to use those 30 graphics over and over and over again every single month and make sure that I’m feeding my social media audiences with quality content.
You can do the same thing… Follow One Course Until Successful! Create the background, find your favorite tips, get those quotes in something like Evernote, copy and paste them, save them, organize them and get them out on the internet.
Social Distributing
Because we’re in lock down or in a social distancing quarantine, I was supposed to do a live LinkedIn boot camp on Friday, but unfortunately the place I was going to give the live presentation was closed and of course nobody could have shown up. So I repurposed it to an online version. I didn’t have the crowd that I would normally get live, but it gave me an opportunity to create the content that I needed, to go through the presentations, and still do these boot camps. It’s a lot of work since it’s over four hours worth of presentations and since LinkedIn changes so much, I have to update that content every 3 months.
Check… That’s Done
I recorded the boot camp. I edited it, and I put it on my website LI4Sales.com. That site was live, but the slides and the videos needed to be updated (as well as some other tweaking). I also included my updated series of checklists.
Do you have some information or processes that you could turn into checklists that your customer could use?, Could you create assets or trainings to hand to your customers as you’re bringing them on board or maybe egg them on to do business with you again in the future?
After I updated those checklists, I put them into a package. Then I shared them as a freemium or a giveaway on my website to attract more people. I added them as a free download on the website where I posted my LinkedIn tips, which became the third leg of another marketing stool that helps make it viable, current, and stable.
Tipping With Video
I then also realized I had a bunch of videos that I had never edited down and put up on Vimeo. These were segments of 10 minute LinkedIn Tips that I recorded, but never finished.
I went through all of those, edited them, and put them up on Vimeo. Then I also added them to Planable to give them away on LinkedIn as video tips I can share once a week to drive people back to that training website. This could help create awareness that I do these LinkedIn boot camps.
I also included all of those tips videos on that website, which I sell as a package. They are a great 10 minute video assets that I can give away.
Once I was done, I had 75 videos, eight checklists, and 32 newly created Baconism quotes. I could use this content as awareness graphics on social media to drive people back to my LinkedIn training courses, tips and boot camps.
Final FOCUS Thoughts
With that said and done over a weekend (along with better organized Tupperware), I felt fulfilled. I can now look at all of the work that I did. I took on each of those, one at a time to stay focused, I Followed One Course Until Successful. Then I took them all, and combined them into a complete marketing system to help me build my business. It also did a few of things for me along the way…
- Broke up the boredom, no more Department of Redundancy Department.
- Gave me assets that I could use to grow my business.
- Kept me busy. It got my juices flowing. It made me feel like I accomplished something other than just doing the same thing over and over and over.
My question to you is, what projects do you have that you can do to promote your business, that sit unfinished, waiting for that time for you to be able to get focused enough to get them done?
This message is brought to you by the letter “D” for DONE.
I would love to hear your thoughts on this. Comment below and share your thoughts, ideas or questions about completing projects you’ve put on the back burner. Have you had to overcome any of the presented concepts? What worked and what did not live up to your expectations? Do you have any ideas or advice you could share?
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