Cahir Castle
On our drive from Wexford to Galway, in addition to stopping for gas and ALL THE SNACKS, we stopped at Cahir Castle. It was not...
17 ways you’re running your business wrong (#3 will shock you!)
Sometimes I like to talk to other small business owners about how they do what they do. How do you get X done? Have you ever dealt with Y? I overcame Z by doing… that sort of thing. A back and forth. What I don’t like – and I just figured this out – is business advice by someone who’s business is giving advice. For the longest time I thought maybe I just didn’t get what business advisers were telling me, like maybe I was too thick to understand, but what I’ve come to realize is that for the most part, when evaluating/advising a small one-person craft business run at home, those people are full of shit.
Here are some recent article titles I’ve been advised to read….
12 Ways to Improve Your Social Media Profiles in One Hour or Less
– I got through the first paragraph of this one which chided the reader for having a blurry contact photo, an old email address, and a previously-held title or job description. Seriously, are we children? If you want me to read your article don’t start out with a lecture, I’m not a three year old. Also, who would use a blurry picture of themselves when representing their company IN THE FIRST PLACE? Ugh.
5 Easy Ways to Refresh Your LinkedIn Profile
– … people use LinkedIn?
The Facebook Algorithm: What You Need to Know to Boost Organic Reach
– I’m so, so tired of being told that Facebook is the best way to reach people but in the same breath that it’s impossible to reach people on Facebook so here’s how to game the system.
7 Creative Snapchat Tips to Improve Your Stories
– I don’t use Snapchat. I’m one person, already using a personal and a work Facebook account, a personal and a work Google + account, a personal and a work Twitter account, a personal and a work blog, and Instagram, and Pinterest, and Ravelry. Out of those I’ve pretty much stopped using Twitter, I’ve fallen behind in blogging, and Pinterest gives me a headache. Snapchat? Just, no.
The Best Time to Post on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram in 2016
– because it changes from year to year and like a tiger chasing its tail, I should run around posting to all these different places at different times of the day, catering to the elusive “like” or “heart”? When am I supposed to get any WORK done?!
18 of the Best Google Chrome Extensions for Social Media Marketers
– so, in other words, eighteen more things I need to check in a day? Ugh. No thank you.
Do you see a trend, here? All these articles are about how to share on social media, how to get views on social media, how to work social media to the best of your business’s advantage. Not a single thing here is about how to juggle home and work responsibilities when you work where you live. No articles about how to incorporate time to work out kinks in new products when you need to be selling perfect things all the time. Nothing on what to do with your online shop and/or how to keep in touch with customers when you also need to take a week’s vacation and travel. Absolutely zip on sales tax and how to figure it and what to do if you figure it wrong.
In other words, no USEFUL articles. Just everyone parroting the same things other people have already said and perhaps changing the number of bullet points but still giving it a click-baity title. I’m tired of clickbait. I’m tired of articles being pushed on me that start off by telling me what I’m doing wrong, what I’m not doing enough of, what I can do better.
Do you know what I can do better? Know my business. Know my heart. Know my customer base and where they go and then go there and communicate with them as if they were actual human beings.
Ugh. This rant brought to you by an early morning, too much email, not enough coffee, and a lot of work that needs to be done.
5 thoughts on “17”
Leave a Reply to marie stanley Cancel reply
I'm so proud of you. You've managed to take something awful that happened and used that grief and pain as…
I love that picture of you!
Absolutely <3
Unfurl those sparkling wings!
Elizabeth Moon once told me that brave is what happens while fear is going on. This has proved helpful to…
Yep; we don’t need advice from people who have never worked the actual work.
LOL. Hahahaha.
People DO use LinkedIn. It shocked me, too. #Crazysauce.
People DO use horrendous photos to represent their businesses. I know, totally shocking. #Crazysauce.
You probably should schedule social shares during the highest/best traffic hours, but those may not be the same for YOUR business as they are in general. I could help you figure that out, should you ever want to give it a try. (I only say that because it is time consuming and I have time, while you do not.) Once you find out when the best times are for your biz, schedule – schedule – schedule. No running around all the places posting at different times. That way leads to madness. And a dead business.
Snapchat is… amazing. For some businesses. Not all businesses. If you had an unpaid young intern who would experiment with it for you, that would be ideal. But, you don’t (I don’t think, lol) so let it gooo.
The thing all of these “How to” posts for get to say is that these are general recommendations and each business owner needs to choose which tactics to try, based on what she knows about her own business and her own life. It’s not a DO ALL OF THESE kind of thing, but all of the posts make it sound like it is.
Can you tell I’m still un/der employed and talking about stuff you don’t really want me to talk about? SORRY! I’ll get a real job, soon. I’m sure. And then you won’t have to listen to me talk about this stuff. 😉
Hahahaha, you’re adorable, Denise.
Allegedly Hootsuite will … I don’t know, track, or compile, the times of day that my posts get the most interaction, and suggest the best times to post. Unfortunately when I use the autoscheduler, it moves my posts all out of order. Example: I have five posts a day I want to push out. I use the autoscheduler, and upload one, two, three, four, five. Sometime after after #3, it’ll reorder everything so it’ll be more like one, three, five, four, two. NOT HELPFUL. A lot of times I’m putting them in that order because I don’t want some things to post until certain times – like the release of a new item close to 5 on a Friday… having that go out a little before 9 AM isn’t helpful. So I stopped using the autoscheduler and just schedule them myself to post about every two hours.
I typically (shh, don’t tell my customers, shut up, I know they can see this) post for the whole week on Sunday. So for about two hours on Sunday I go through all the photos I took in the last seven days, upload them and write captions that will then post throughout the week. I’ve kind of vaguely figured out what time to post what based on previous interaction (works-in-progress Wed post at lunchtime, new product photos latest in the day, etc) but I’ve not had time to sit down and metric that shit. If you want to come over some time and look at my back end and stats, you’re welcome to!
😀
I do not like auto-schedulers that auto-schedule in ways you don’t want them to auto-schedule. That’s the problem with auto-schedulers, particularly those that are affordable for small businesses (but also for those affordable for larger businesses.)
Once I get through October, I’d totes love to come over and dive into some stats and give you some more insight. (Or, ohhh this would be fun, we could get Sassymonkey to come visit and she and I could do it together. We make a great team….)
If you and me and Sassymonkey were in a room together, well, first, we wouldn’t be there long without Sharon; but second, kingdoms would fall before our feet! Online business would never be the same!
Seriously, though, yes – let’s make a late October or early November date for you to come over, and we can geek out to online stuff. I’ll even lay in some gin. 😉