You take care to send email messages that are grammatically correct and well formatted. But did you know that what you send isn’t always what your recipient sees? In some cases, what you send can deliver a different impression than you intended.
GMail
Here’s a message I wrote up in my Gmail account and sent to myself (to three of my other email addresses).  The photo I attached is of my collie, the smiling Archee McLeash.

Yahoo!
My GMail-generated email landed in my Yahoo! email account with the photo up top. The whole email looked like …

I heard the clerk say “May I help the next guest?” as I stood in line at Joann’s last Sunday. I was fifth in line, so I had some time to ponder his word choice: Guest. Aren’t I a customer?

Today, in line for coffee, I heard the same question, “May I help the next guest?”

To that, I replied (silently), You can sell me a cup of coffee. But if you plan to have me pay for it, let’s not pretend I’m your guest.

If you are in business—especially if you have a retail establishment at which people purchase your product or …

What do Good Presentations and Good Websites have in common?
It’s simply satisfying to attend a really good presentation. Although you may be one of many audience members, the speaker seems to connect directly with you. You leave, not just persuaded, but inspired to take action.

Now think about what business owners want to achieve with their websites. They want to connect with their web-surfing audiences and inspire them to action. Since the goals are similar, it only makes sense that the underlying principals are very much the same.
Attention to Audience
Too often, presenters fail to venture outside their own head as they …

If you’ve read The Gold Mine over the months, you know that we believe that it is possible to use Powerpoint well.  Earlier this month, I used Powerpoint to enhance a talk I gave to a group of colleagues in my professional network.  Valuable lessons were learned—by me.  And now, I share them with you.
Get Ready
I mapped out the overall message, and the component sections, of my talk. Then, I got it ready on Powerpoint. That part was so much fun! Too much fun! What a monstrous time suck!

I’d start searching through istockphotos.com. Let’s find photos of typewriters. Oh, goodie, …

LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube… once only visited for personal use, these sites are now being used for business purposes. We all hear about them and see their icons everywhere. And, we feel out of touch or like we are dropping the ball if we don’t have profiles on all of them.

It is true that social media sites help business. But how? Most of the case studies we read about are about big business and their bigger than life social media campaigns. How can small business benefit?

The truth is—at least our opinion of it—that there are no step-by-step rules to follow …

An important thing to remember when you go looking for your online market is that nobody can tell you more about your audence than your audience itself. With that in mind, here are five ways to …

You’ve got the facts. Do you have the feelings? Show them!

When you’re making a presentation, you’re imparting information. Whatever your message might be—Vote! or Buy my new book! or Floss after meals! — you have some emotional attachment to it. (If you truly do not, I recommend you decline invitations to speak.)

Let your audience see and hear your emotions. I’m not saying every presentation needs to be a Hallmark moment. You don’t need to hand out Kleenex. But you need to impart more than mere facts if you want to motivate your audience.

Let’s take an …

You’ve been there… eyelids growing heavy, mind wandering, sitting through another boring business presentation. And what happens when it’s your turn to speak? Chances are you are committing some of the same presentations sins as everyone else. One of the greatest of these sins is the misuse of presentation software like PowerPoint.

Slides laden with bulleted text are not ingredients for a powerful presentation. But many of us don’t know any better. The templates provided by the software seem to beg for bullets and text and slide titles and logos and clipart. What were meant as tools to make …

Who Are You Writing For?

Writing for your own enjoyment makes total sense on a personal blog.  However, when you are writing for a professional website you should be writing for an audience that has a professional relationship to you.  Regardless of whether you are writing for peers, employees, clients, or vendors you need to speak to your audience for them to engage with what you say.

Writing in the second person helps.  The real world is not like grade school, and you will not be marked off for acknowledging that you have a reader and that they have personal and professional …

My friend Gene called me on my home phone to ask for my business phone number, in order to pass it along to a potential customer. Gene is one of the brightest, more insightful people I know, and he has a website for his own business. But it did not occur to him to simply give the potential customer my web address.

Lesson learned: Not everyone in my world is Internet savvy. Levels of experience dip and sway from people who use email and do nothing else on line;  who surf but don’t bookmark;  who buy online but don’t know how …