But it's not good enough

Harry's gone now to that great Toastmasters meeting in the sky.  He honored me once by asking me to advise him on one of his speeches.  "It sounds unrehearsed," I said.  "How many days did you practice it?"  He told me that he'd only practiced it for a couple of days.  "Why didn't you give it more time?"

He didn't rehearse it more because he was still writing it, he said, right up till the end.  He could always make it better.

I sympathized.  You can always improve and tweak.

I feel now about the fundraising cookbook the way Harry felt about his speeches.  I felt the same way about the low-budget mailers I sent out as a realtor.  I wrote them.  I laid them out and printed them.  I prepared the address lists and printed the labels.  I folded and stamped them.  By the time I did all this, they irritated me.  Who'd want to look at junk mail like this?

Nonetheless, imperfect marketing is better than none at all. 

The same is true of imperfect fundraising.  Now I'm up to my elbows in the cookbook.  Without the cookbook committee I'd have given up long ago.  Still, it doesn't look good enough.  It looks as if a volunteer laid it out in Word.  I want it to look better!

At some point you have to say, "This is as good as it's going to get."  Boy, it's hard.

Who proofread this spam?

My spell checker is frantic.

LinkedIn Expertise

I’m now an “internet marketing expert” on LinkedIn. 

Here’s what happened:  I visited LinkedIn Answers. I answered another user’s question: how she could get her team to promote her email newsletter? That was easy; I rattled off a few ways that I would have promoted my own newsletter in a perfect world. 

The asker chose mine as “best answer.”   That means I now have an “expert” badge on my profile.

Annoyingly, some people who ask LinkedIn questions never close the loop by choosing the “best answer.”

One fellow asked where he could get print copies of Miss Clairol ads from the 1960s.  Several people sent him to URLs where he could have printed low-res copies.  I actually spent dozens of minutes on eBay tracking down actual ads and even packaging.  I enjoyed it, and I fully expected that he would acknowledge my work by awarding me the “best answer.”  Two months later, he still hasn’t chosen a best answer.

In fact, about 80% of the askers whose questions I’ve answered never select a “best answer.”  Some generous LinkedIn members answer questions because they want to share their knowledge.  Or because they want the links back to their own websites.  But many people like me answer questions because they want that “expert” badge and the ego gratification that goes with it.

So I emailed LinkedIn.  They don’t follow up with askers who don’t close their questions, and they don’t plan to.

If I really, really wanted the badge, and strangers really, really didn’t want to select best answers, there would be a dishonest solution: a “best answer exchange.” 

1. My friend Jimmy Doakes asks a question; I answer it.  Jimmy picks my answer as “best.” 
2.  I ask a question.  Jimmy’s friend Shruti answers it.  I pick Shruti’s answer.
3.  Shruti poses a question.  Jimmy answers.  Shruti picks Jimmy.

Note that I pose this scenario in the subjunctive.  I wouldn’t actually set up an exchange, of course.  It would degrade the value of my precious “best answer” badge.

One thing’s for sure: if I’ve thought of it, someone else is already doing it.  Just sayin’.

Comparison Shopping: Permission-Based Email

I've been thinking for a while about getting a Constant Contact account, especially now that I've taken on a big volunteer project (but that's a posting to itself.)

Constant Contact is a permission-based email service. You can use it to send emails to people who have agreed to received your emails (no spamming). You get good reports back as to how many people received and opened your emails. For small organizations that send out limited numbers of emails, the charge is $15 a month, which seems pretty reasonable.

But as I mentioned before, today is the last day to renew website domains before the price goes up. As long as I was at GoDaddy I thought I would update my profile. Under the "Support and Community" tab they had an Express Email forum for permission-based marketers.

I spent at least 10 minutes flipping around on the site trying to figure out if they charged for Express Email. Finally I had to resort to Google, whereupon I learned that Express Email offers all the features I wanted from Constant Contact for half the price or less. (One month is $7.99/mo; thirty six months is $6.39/mo.)

The main difference is that with Constant Contact I can send unlimited emails. GoDaddy would limit me to 500/mo. If you start receiving oodles of professionally-formatted emails from me, you'll know why.

Reminder: renew your domains today to avoid the 7% price increase.

Delete Delete Delete

I'm so proud. I brought the number of unread emails in my inbox under a hundred.

I guard my email address zealously. I am only on a few email lists, mostly for organizations that encourage me to think of myself as I would like to be.

• Expert (ok, conversant) on businesses in New Jersey--NJBIZ.com
• New media mogul--GoDaddy.com
• Self-supporting freelance writer--eLance.com

Boy, do they send me a lot of emails! And if I get busy for a few days, which often happens, I can't even sign in to my account, let alone delete unwanted messages. After more than a few days, I hate to even scroll down my messages.

A salty old salesman I once worked with filed by the "foot method." He piled his paperwork up. When the stack was two feet high, he threw away the bottom foot. I take a similar approach to my emails. I sort by "sender" and delete the old unread messages. Annoyingly, some of my accounts put entirely different senders on various email messages, making this approach more difficult.

I also get emails from companies to which I have applied online. If I lose my job, I don't want to have to retrieve my account information for all of them. This has a handy side benefit. I'm sorry to say that several of my friends are out of work. When I get an email for a job that looks right for someone, I forward it to them. Here's hoping that I don't need those auto-alerts myself for a long time, and that they can help someone else.