photo credit: Orangeadnan You’ve developed a number of clever systems to help you churn through your work. If you’re not careful, that efficient streamlining can lead to routine. And routine can lead to a rut. And a rut… well, a rut leads to a mediocre business that you hate. So, spend five minutes playing crazy…
Monthly Archives: February 2010
Automate something
photo credit: Extra Ketchup Pick one tiny fiddly job that “only takes a moment!” and automate it. Suggestions: Set up a filter on your email inbox to sort receipts into the receipts folder automatically. Set up your Google Analytics to email you a report weekly or monthly. (Which you automatically sort into the right folder,…
Offer to do a guest post
photo credit: ndanger Visit a blog that has some commonalities to yours and a contributor who probably knows who you are… because you’ve chatted in comments, talked on Twitter, met at a networking event, have friends in common or hang out at the same forum. Get their email address and send them an email. It…
Where do the ideas come from?
photo credit: CarbonNYC The lovely Irina Jordan just asked me on Twitter: How do you come up with ideas for your 5 minute blog: working with clients; smth you came across, etc.? Thx. Great question! Hard question. Now I have to actually figure out where my ideas come from! A few main sources: 1. Stuff…
Enjoy your content
photo credit: billaday Go to some of your earliest work, pages and posts you were proud of. Pretend that you’ve never seen them before and don’t know who wrote them, and just read them for enjoyment. Laugh at the jokes! Nod thoughfully at the insights. Read the comments. And the instant you find yourself thinking,…
Test your readability
photo credit: helgasms! Is your website easy to read? Go to the Juicy Studio Readability Test and enter your website address. It’ll do some math (the average number of syllables in a word, and words in a sentence) and give you a few measures, including the average level of education required to understand the content….
Check your colours
photo credit: antwerpenR Nearly one in twenty people have some form of colour blindness. To see what your website looks like to them, go to the Vischeck webpage checker and enter your website’s address. You can display your website for two kinds of red/green impairment and also blue/yellow. While you’re there, I recommend you look…
Organize your email
Our first guest post! photo credit: Orin Zebest Email is such an important part of our daily work lives that we might not even notice how much of our valuable time it actually eats up. In today’s article, you’ll learn how to squeeze much of the waste from your email management habits. By the time…
Do the icky stuff
We’ve all got tasks that we put off. They’re so embarrassing (or boring or smelly or frustrating or icky or scary or money-related) that we cringe just thinking about them. They’re always pushed to the absolute bottom of the to-do list. So on top of the dread of the task, we end up with a…
Install TweetMeme
See the new tweet option on the right side of this post? Spiffy! I’d been quietly wondering how other blogs did it and then Eugen Oprea wrote an excellent article about how to install and configure TweetMeme on your WordPress website. If you’ve got content you want people to share, it’s a simple and elegant…