 Great photo by Matheus Bertelli. Special news! Sure, we’ve got a good blog article here, and we’ll get to it in just a second. But first, a little announcement, which segues to this article quite nicely:
We’re proud to announce that this article, these very words you are reading right now, are officially our tenth anniversary blog post. That’s right: We started publishing these in January 2015, and at that time, committed to publishing them twice a month. If you’re unaware—or simply curious—our cadence goes like this: At the top of the month, we publish articles focused primarily for our consulting/business-owner audience. At mid-month, we publish blogs focused a little more toward our “creative” audience, which includes ad agencies and other creative people we enjoy working with. Ten years! And we never missed a post. That’s 240 articles, if we’ve done our math right. And we’re not stopping now. Thanks so much for joining us for this great, long ride! Let’s dive into our latest topic. Why blogging shouldn’t be a New Year’s resolution If you watched any TV during New Year’s, you were surely inundated with ads for gym memberships. It’s as predictable as sunrise. Why? Because people invariably make a New Year’s resolution to “get in shape,” and those gyms are all too happy to cash in. Be honest. How many people have you known (you may be one of them) who made one of these resolutions, joined a gym, bragged to all their friends for the first month or two… and then kind of quietly quit thereafter? Getting in shape takes commitment. In that regard, it’s exactly like blogging. Or doing social posts. Pretty much anything that has to do with your marketing outreach. Not everyone is an Olympian or an NFL star. But that doesn’t mean that you can’t whip your marketing into shape. The good news: It’s much easier than doing squats or lifting weights. You might be surprised at the trick to all this. Ready? Aim low. What??? What???? You read right. This is counterintuitive advice if ever we’d dispensed any. Aim low. Allow us to explain. The attainable cadence The reason that so many people burn out on those January gym memberships is that they aim unrealistically high. So they over-do it. They can’t sustain that level of exertion. And so they just drop out. By aiming so high, they turn it into an all-or-nothing proposition. Which is exactly what you don’t want to do. So ask yourself this: How many blogs could I reasonably push out, every single month? Factor into your answer disruptions like client emergencies and vacation time. Now take your answer, and cut it in half. Really? Really. The resulting number should be laughably easy to attain. And that’s the number you want. For us, here at Copel Communications, we could probably turn these out every single week. But that’s pushing it. So we do it every two weeks, i.e., twice a month. And, as we’d noted above, we’ve never missed a beat. The calendar trick Surely, we’ve had our share of client emergencies, vacation time, and what-not. But the trick is to create what’s called an editorial blog post calendar in which you pre-select the topics you want to blog about. Once you have that in place (we do ours in the fourth quarter each year for the subsequent year), you can then use it to write your blogs in advance so that you always have a cushion for when those client emergencies and/or vacation dates arise. Think of it. You now have two cushions: 1) You cut your originally-intended cadence in half. 2) You have extra blogs, already written, in the pipeline, which you can publish with a single click. When you look at it—and do it—that way, there’s zero stress. And you hit the mark every time. Again, blogging is just one type of output. You can apply this exact same approach to all kinds of marketing and business-development outreach, including emails, webinars, videos, you name it. Who’da thought it would all start by aiming low? Need help with this or similar challenges? Contact us. We’d be delighted to pitch in.
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 Great photo by Andrea Piacquadio. Here we go again! Another year has zipped past… and presented us the opportunity to present you with a compendium of our top articles for consultants from this past year. If you missed any, here’s your chance to catch up. And if you have already seen, and liked, any of these, here’s your opportunity to revisit and brush up. Enjoy!
Have any topics you’d like to see us address next year? Contact us. We’d be delighted to hear from you!  Awesome photo by admiral-general-m-âââââ-godshepherdly. It happens every summer. Work slows down. People take vacations. If you’re still in a business-building mindset, it can be, well, a little maddening.
In this article, we’ll review some things you can do to be productive when others aren’t. To prep your business for the upcoming season of busy-ness. This article might not be for you. In that regard, it’s probably self-selecting: If you’re reading this, you’re still plugging at it. If you’re on vacation right now, this one will sail right past you. Mind you, we’re not judging here. You can fall into either camp; we don’t care. But between the summer preppers and the summer tanners, this article is aimed at the former. Down-time is your time Think back to the busiest part of this year so far. When you had so much work you’d wake up wondering how you’d get through that day. Now, on that day, think of all the things that you didn’t do. That you couldn’t do. Why not? You were too busy. Pretty simple. So now is the time to tackle all of those things you’d put off amid the rush of peak season. This is the time for all you cobblers out there to make your kids’ shoes. This is also a very good time to be selfish, in a biz-dev sort of way. Review what you’ve got, what you’re presenting to the world. Go through your website. Page by page. Remember all those little niggling details you’d intended to fix and/or update? Now’s the time. Ditto for your firm’s presentation deck(s). Weed out the outdated stuff. Make mentions of new, recent wins. For that matter, this is the best possible time to write new client success stories, a.k.a. case studies. (Need help with those? Contact us. We do tons of ‘em.) Pull together all the client-facing materials from those engagements. Use them to jog your memory. Steal from them, liberally, anonymizing as you go, to create all-new world-facing evergreen material. And what about your blogs? Are they looking sorely out of date on your site? Now’s the time to curl up with a nice cup of coffee or tea, and knock out a bunch of them so that you have a good backlog of evergreen material to push out on schedule. (Honestly: Do you think we wrote this July blog in July? Here at Copel Communications, we practice what we preach!) Speaking of blogs, you have a fully-populated editorial calendar for them, right? Well, if not, now’s the time to brainstorm your quarterly/monthly/weekly/whatever topics. (We have a good article to help you with that.) Get into production Blogs—which force people to (ugh) read—are just one way to push out your business. Some of the other ways are surprisingly interlinked:
And you can push them out just as diligently, using the exact same editorial calendar you’d created for the blogs. Of course, you can delegate as much of this responsibility and production as your comfort-zone dictates: The writing. The voiceover. The video production. The on-camera talent. And so on. There are other relatively self-indulgent things you can do during summer down-time, too. Take a good look at your office and your stuff. Is that desk chair begging for replacement? Could the walls use a new coat of paint? Good luck attempting any of those tasks during the busy season. If you can’t beat ‘em... And of course, there’s one other thing you can do during down-time: Relax. If you’ve accomplished even half of the things we’d listed above, you deserve a well-earned pat on the back and a nap. Heck, everyone else is taking time off. Things will get busy enough, soon enough. So enjoy the down-time. If you combine that with the productivity tips above, you’ll have the best of both worlds. And need help with any of those things? Contact us. We’d be happy to pitch in.  If you’re tasked with being creative, all day, every day, it can get pretty taxing. What do you do when the wellspring starts to shallow? Or when you simply can’t find the joy in the job?
In this article, we’ll trace this dreaded affliction to its roots. And we’ll offer up some ways to cure it… and avoid it altogether. What is creative burnout? This may be easier to define by describing what it isn’t. Creative burnout results from working at peak capacity, nonstop without breaks. It can also happen, less obviously and more insidiously, by simply working on the exact same kind of creative assignment, over and over and over again. So what isn’t it? It’s a lack of motivation. It’s a lapse in optimism. At its worst, it’s a feeling akin to writer’s block (and we wrote an entire article devoted to that subject), where you think you’ve simply dried up. Creative burnout, in a word, sucks. It’s the antithesis of why you wanted to become a creative professional in the first place. It makes you question your choices, and face that next assignment with a feeling that uncomfortably resembles resentment. So how do you cure it? Knowing the causes helps to point up the solutions. Based on what we described above, here are some basic things you can try:
How do you prevent it? That should be pretty obvious by now. If you keep aware of the conditions that cause burnout—such as missed lunches and weekends, a lack of variety in assignments or the execution thereof—you can work to avoid them in the first place. Knowing the penalty for not doing so can be a big motivator. Others may not understand or appreciate why you, say, need to take a half-day off. But they’ll certainly appreciate the killer creative you’re able to easily deliver upon your return. Need help with that next creative challenge? Contact us. We’d be delighted to help.  Simple psychological insights that pay off
If it sounds too good to be true, it usually is. Usually. Then, you may justifiably ask, how the heck can you build your business by going on vacation? It certainly does sound too good to be true. If you’ve been reading any of these articles, you’ll know that we have a certain fondness for counterintuitive, social-engineering-type solutions to traditional business problems. And we’re big on business development, too. So those two topics will intersect in this installment. Ready, set… expectations There’s a famous story about the invention of the microwave oven. It was basically discovered by mistake. An engineer was working with microwave radiation for some kind of defense/communications type of assignment, and noticed that a candy bar in his pocket had melted in the process. It was an aha moment that eventually changed our kitchens, and our lives, forever. Honestly. Would you really wait 45 minutes to heat up a frozen entrée these days? Back to business development. The topic of this article was discovered by accident as well. In fact, the same exact thing has probably happened to you… but have you ever capitalized on it? The story goes like this: We were going to take some well-deserved time off, and sent out an email to all our clients, giving them a heads-up so that no deadlines would be missed in our absence. This went—bcc’ed, of course—to all clients, whether they were hot-active or cold-dormant. And we bet you can guess what happened next. Of course we were overloaded with desperate pleas for work. And not just from the current clients, but also from the ones that were so dusty we were about to archive them! This was the microwave oven/aha moment. Cashing in Now, you can take this story two different ways. The more nefarious way is to “fake your own death,” i.e., send out a “vacation” blast even when you don’t have one planned. We don’t advocate that. It’s sneaky, and like most lies, it will catch up to you. The other way to take this is to simply tweak it to better suit your purposes. Consider: You’re going to take time off. Eventually. You’ve earned it. You also 1) want more business (who doesn’t?), and 2) don’t want to deal with unnecessarily brutal deadlines. So you add 1) and 2) and you get 3) Simply send out that vacation notice earlier. In a word, Duh! If you’d previously sent it out two days before your time off, send it out a week before. Heck, depending on your situation, you might send it out two weeks before. This isn’t greedy. In fact, it’s considerate. It will allow those knee-jerk clients who “suddenly” realize they need your services before you go to actually get them, since you’ll have afforded them a more reasonable turnaround timeframe. Grow your business by redefining simple terms Vacations are great, but they’re also rare. So how much mileage—or business—can you get out of this technique? Well—and with a doff of the hat to Alex Trebek—let’s frame your answer in the form of a question: What if you take everything we’ve discussed about “vacation” and applied it to “business trip”? Or “out of the office”? Or pretty much anything that makes your available time more precious and rare? See? It’s not that hard. The important point here is to temper your output. If you blast your clientele every time you’re about to go to lunch, you can rightfully expect those missives to be marked as “spam.” So be judicious. And consider the calendar: weekends, national holidays, overlapping school vacations for clients’ kids…. all of these should factor into your timing. Done properly, this technique can transform a traditional headache (“I’m going to lose business while I’m away!”) into a pleasantly surprising source of new business. There are other ways to grow you business, too. Contact us and let’s discuss. |