Day 12

Morning Review. You have three days left to hit the 50 percent mark on your Success Ingredients. What will it take? If you are having any logistical challenges or how-to questions, read the chapter in Part III that discusses the marketing cycle stage you are working on.

Daily Scores. Did you hit your target scores? Take a moment to celebrate! Are you still struggling? You may need some additional support. Call your business buddy or a friend and ask that person to help you in the following specific way:

1. Set a fixed time to talk. Whether you meet by phone or in person, set a start and end time for your conversation. This will tighten the focus on solving your problem. Half an hour is probably enough; an hour is plenty.

2. Begin by clearing. Ask your buddy to just listen while you recount what’s going on. Your buddy can say things like, “Gee, that’s tough,” or “How awful!” but should avoid offering advice until you have told the whole story. Talk about not only what is happening but also how it makes you feel. If it sounds like complaining, that probably means you’re doing it right. You might be saying something like: “I’ve been trying for two weeks to finish the new copy for my website but there’s just been one emergency after another, and now my mother wants me to help with getting her computer fixed, and I’m so frustrated! All the words I write down just come out wrong, and I don’t think it’ll ever come together, and I needed it yesterday, and I’m so worried that….” You get the idea.

3. Set a time limit of five to ten minutes for clearing. Then ask your buddy to summarize for you: “I hear how frustrated and worried you are. You seem to have two problems that need to be solved: finding the time to work on the website copy, and getting the words to come out right. Are you ready to look at some solutions?”

4. Brainstorm possible solutions. Now that your problems are out in the open, you can get some assistance in solving them. Your buddy’s job is not to hand you the right answer; it is to help you expand your thinking to come up with some new ideas. Take your problems one at time and together with your buddy make a list of possible solutions. Don’t edit the list as you are brainstorming; you will do that later. Anything and everything that comes up should go on the list. A basic principle of brainstorming is that you are not allowed to say, “That won’t work,” or “I already tried that.” Here are the potential results of a brainstorm aimed at getting the right words for your website:

Hire a copywriter

Plagiarize my competitors’ sites

Use a thesaurus

Ask my cousin, the writer, to help

Design a website with pictures instead of words

Don’t have a website at all

Look at sites I like for inspiration

Take a class in copywriting

Leave the site like it is and stop worrying

Have some colleagues review it

5. Look for a next step. You can ask your buddy to help you with this or do it later on your own. If none of the brainstormed ideas seems right, look at each one to see if there’s something useful in it. Maybe you can’t afford a copywriter, but you know one you could ask for some free advice. Perhaps a class in copywriting would take too long, but you could buy an e-book on the subject and read it tonight. Find just one thing you can do that will get you moving forward again, and then do it.

Thought for the day: It really doesn’t matter what you choose; the important thing is that you choose.