How to Beat Procrastination at Work

Everyone procrastinates sometimes, but creative people seem more prone to it than others. especially writers. Not just novelists and poets, but also copywriters and journalists.

It’s a universal flaw in human psychology, though. Graphic designers, musicians, and even plumbers sometimes succumb to it.

The good news is that it’s surprisingly easy to beat.

Just do it. The muse is a myth. If you sit around and wait for inspiration to strike, you’ll hardly ever get anything done.

Motivation comes after you start. As psychologist David Burns wrote in his landmark book, Feeling Good, “You have to prime the pump. Then you will begin to get motivated, and the fluids will flow spontaneously.”

First comes action. Then comes motivation, followed by more action.

All working professionals know this, but many of us are prone to forgetting and have to be reminded over and over again. Consider this your weekly reminder.

If all you need to do is work for five minutes, just sit down and work for five minutes.

Science-fiction writer Kevin J. Anderson forces himself to write 50 words a day and no more. Hardly a tall order. This paragraph alone includes more than 50 words, so you can see at a glace how little that actually is. If he’d rather do something else for the rest of the day when he reaches the minimum, he gives himself permission to call it a day without guilt.

If he wrote only 50 words a day, he wouldn’t get very much done. But he rarely writes only 50. Once he gets started, he’s almost always motivated to keep going.

It sounds like a lazy person’s work ethic, but paradoxically his method has made him one of the most prolific writers in the world with more than 120 published books. Because unlike most writers, he produces something every day without exception.

Don’t eat the elephant. Imagine if someone delivered an elephant to your house and ordered you to eat the whole thing. You might feel disgusted. You’d certainly feel overwhelmed. Never mind taking out a knife and a fork, you’d probably rather do anything but even think about eating that elephant.

If someone were to cut that elephant into half-pound steaks, however, and order you to eat just one per day, it wouldn’t be so bad. You might even feel terrific. Hey, a freezer full of steaks!

So when you’re facing a large project that will last days, weeks, or even months, thinking of it as an elephant you have to eat is a guaranteed motivation killer. You can’t eat an elephant. A single steak, though, that’s easy. Possibly even delicious.

Limit yourself. Don’t just cut that elephant into steaks to make it feel less overwhelming. Actually limit yourself to eating just one per day and no more. Then cut it into pieces and limit yourself again to small chunks throughout the day.

Here’s how it works. Force yourself to take a break after an hour. If you’re feeling particularly overwhelmed, force yourself to take a break after just thirty minutes or even twenty. If you’re sick, require yourself to take a break after ten. Get up and go for a walk, make a cup of coffee, do a crossword puzzle, or anything else you enjoy after your time is up even if you aren’t finished working yet.

If you force yourself to take breaks, your productivity will actually go up, partly because your mind has a chance to rest, but also because it’s easier to get started when you know the break is coming ahead of time.

Avoid should statements. If you’re procrastinating and beating up on yourself, don’t tell yourself you should get to work. That word implies consequences from your boss, your clients, your editors, or whoever else.

Use carrots rather than sticks. Do it for yourself. Tell yourself that you’ll feel better after you start. All those feelings of frustration and angst will vanish just minutes after you start. On some level you know this is true no matter how much you’d rather go to the mall or watch Leave it to Beaver. Wouldn’t you rather feel good about yourself sooner rather than later?

For Tech Marketing, the West is Best

Forbes recently conducted a survey of the top US cities for marketing jobs. As expected, New York and San Francisco topped the list, but the two cities are a continent apart in more ways than one.

New York City is America’s media and publishing capital, as well as its largest city, so it makes sense that many of the biggest advertising and marketing agencies locate their headquarters there. The high tech sector, however, is based overwhelmingly on the West Coast, and most tech firms don’t bother with the big Madison Avenue agencies.

The San Francisco Bay Area is the tech marketing capital of America, but Seattle comes in a close second, and there almost as many high tech and marketing jobs available per capita in Portland.

Until late in the 20th century, Portland and Seattle were both gritty resource towns. With the relative decline of industries like logging and mining, the two cities had little choice but to reinvent themselves if they wanted to prosper. With the rise of Silicon Valley a few hundred miles to the south, becoming the industry’s adjust cities made perfect sense.

Both high technology and marketing suit us out here. The West is still the “America” of America, and the tech industry has been on the bleeding edge of innovation and economic dynamism since its inception. It naturally attracts the descendents of the risk-taking pioneers who settled the West following Lewis and Clark’s expedition.

Advertising and marketing, meanwhile, have always attracted creative people, and the West Coast—like New York City—pulls them in like a gravity well.

We at reddbug are based almost entirely in the West—in Las Vegas, Utah, Texas, and in all three states on the West Coast. Most of us wouldn’t dream of living or working anywhere else.

Black Hat Tactics Are Guaranteed to Backfire

Like most dishonest business practices, black hat marketing tactics may yield returns in the short term, but they’re guaranteed to blow up in your face.

Your customers are people, even if your customers are businesses. (Businesses are made up of people, after all.) And people always have their guard up when they’re being marketed to by companies they have not learned to trust yet.

Some black hat marketing techniques—bait and switch, for example—have been around for ages, but we have brand-new categories now with the rise of the Internet.

Social media manipulation. If you install a program on your web site that forces your readers to automatically “like” your company page, they’ll find out when they peruse their list of “likes,” and they will feel had. They will feel had by you.

Their fake “like” will turn into genuine dislike. Many will tell their friends, and Facebook may eventually close your account, dropping your number of genuine likes and fake likes alike down to zero.

Cloaking. Google explicitly says, “don’t deceive your users or present different content to search engines than you display to users, a practice commonly referred to as ‘cloaking.’”

If you run a cheat eats diner, but deliberately attract web site visitors with an invisible five-star restaurant page set up solely for search engines, you’re cloaking.

Used car salesmen have a bad rep. Some of them surely don’t deserve it, but think about the stereotype. He’s dishonest. He’s pushy. And he charges too much.

Imagine how much more annoying he’d be if, according to his storefront, he sold Mercedes and Jaguars but in reality he only sold Chevys and Fords.

You don’t even want to be in the same time zone as that guy. Your would-be customers won’t appreciate it, and it wouldn’t matter much if they did. Your site will get blacklisted from search engines.

One of the most famous cases involved BMW in Germany. They wanted hits from readers who searched for “used cars.” (Some people actually want to find a used car salesman.) So they created a cloaked “doorway page” that redirected readers to the regular BMW web site.

Google found out and reduced BMW’s search rank to zero.

Hidden Text. You won’t annoy your web site visitors if you can create hidden text crammed with keywords that will only be seen by search engine spiders, but at the end of the day this is just a less annoying version of cloaking.

Search engines may not be sentient, but they are designed by people on the lookout for this sort of behavior, and you’ll pay for it when they catch you.

Cybersquatting. If you register a domain name that’s similar to the name of a well-known company and hoping to pick up their customers, you’ll only hurt yourself as soon as customers get wise. And they will get wise.

Domain name shenanigans aren’t the only form of cybersquatting. A self-published writer decided to put the name “Stephen King” on his books in order to fool the real Stephen King’s fans. The reader reviews on Amazon.com are scathing. Amazon will catch on soon enough and blacklist this author, and his career—such as it is—will implode.

Don the black hat if you want, and it might even work for a while, but your market share will crash after your customers and the gatekeepers at search engines figure out what you’re up to. You’ll be the used car salesman, and unlike some perfectly ethical people who happen to sell used cars for a living, you will have earned that reputation.

What’s the ethical way to sell things?

Marketing-schools.org says that question has never had a satisfactory answer, but we all know the answer.

It’s simple: be honest.

What To Do When You’re Out of Ideas

According to Axonn Research, nine out of ten businesses use some form of content marketing to build trust and connections with customers. And the demand for content never ends.

Company web sites and business blogs can be ruthless taskmasters, treadmills with no off switch that run to infinity. It’s enough to make even the best content marketers feel like Sisyphus, the king in Greek mythology whom the gods punished for chronic deceitfulness by making him push a boulder up a hill over and over again—forever.

No wonder a content marketer’s often idea well often runs dry.

There’s a tried-and-true method, however, to refilling the well.

Carry a notebook with you. Better yet, use the notes app on your smartphone so you’ll always have it wherever you go. Whenever you get an idea, write it down in your notebook or tap it into your phone. If you need to write a blog post each week, you should be able think of something over the next week. Don’t promise yourself you’ll remember the idea, though. Pin in down on paper—or in pixels.

Talk to your co-workers. Other people will always think of things you’d never think of yourself, and if they aren’t on your content marketing team, their idea wells should be full. Most of them will be flattered that you asked them to help you.

Talk to your customers. Ask them what they love about your products and how you help make their lives better. They might surprise you. And don’t forget: your customers have stories of their own. Why not publish some?

Read. Read about your industry. Read what your competitors are publishing. Follow copywriting blogs like Copyblogger and consume everything published by the indispensable Content Marketing Institute. When you get out of your mental rut and into somebody else’s, ideas will naturally come to you.

Brainstorm. It’s intimidating when you’re mental gas tank is empty—what if I can’t come up with anything?—but your subconscious is full of ideas even when your conscious mind is running on fumes. All you have to do it engage it.

If you come up with idea that seem dumb, write them down anyway. If you combine two “dumb” ideas, you might come up with a smart one.

If you need to write a blog post per week and can manage to come up with twelve ideas during a brainstorming session, that will be keep you busy for three months. You’re bound to think of something else to write during that three month period if you follow the advice above, and if you add those ideas to your note file as you go, you should be in good shape indefinitely.

Talk to a 6 yr old–K.I.S.S

No matter your industry, you’ve heard the phrase, “Keep it simple, stupid.” It’s the transparent motto written within every office building. But have we truly internalized this message? Does it resonate with our current work?

Albert Einstein believed, “If you can’t explain it to a six-year-old, you don’t understand it yourself.”

Einstein may have been a bit playful when he said that, but in all his brilliance, he recognized the importance of simplicity.

So here are five ways to keep things simple before you share your next greatest idea:

1. Define one purpose. Your purpose is the overarching vision that encompasses your specified goals. When you identify a purpose, you’ll more easily follow the rules of K.I.S.S.

2. Understand your audience. You may not be speaking to six year olds, but your desired audience may be unfamiliar with certain expressions you use to explain your idea/product/message. Once you’ve defined and observed your audience, choose the correct language and format your presentation to meet their needs.

3. Spout out your pitch in front of a mirror. Trust us, this works. This rehearsal will help you refine and rework your words and expressions more concisely.

4. Practice your message using words and pictures. Explain your idea with the help of 10 visual aids. Then try to condense your pitch into 10 key points or less.

5. Finally, find someone who isn’t aware of your new idea, and share the concept with him/her in five minutes or less. Then ask questions about his/her understanding.

How to Edit Your Own Work

“I hate to write, but I love having written.” Dorothy Parker

Writing is hard work, even for seasoned professionals. From the blank page at the beginning, to the clumsy and uneven middle, and all the way through to the sloppy end, first drafts never seem to get easier.

Don’t despair, though. First drafts aren’t supposed to be easy. As Harry Shaw wrote in Errors in English and Ways to Correct Them, “There is no such thing as good writing. There is only good rewriting.”

Editors can help, but you don’t want to turn that mess of a draft in to an editor. And what if you don’t have an editor?

It’s all on you.

Here are five tips to make the process much easier.

1. Take a break

Before rewriting even a sentence, you must clear your head and get some space between you and your words. Take a walk. Read a magazine. Cook a meal. Let your mind rest so you can look at what you have so far with fresh eyes.

2. Watch your eyes

As you cycle through second and third drafts, watch your eyes. If you keep looking at the same sentences over and over and you aren’t sure why, something is probably wrong with them. You might not know what the problem is, but your subconscious mind knows something is off. Keep working those sentences until they no longer stand out.

3. Read your work out loud

Awkwardly written sentences sound twice as awkward when you read them out loud as they appear when you look at them silently. If your words are clunky, you’ll hear the clunk. Keep banging away until the words flow from you mouth when you read them aloud as easily as they do when you’re talking.

4. Print it

Print a hard copy and mark it up with a red pen. Seeing your work in a different format initiates a slightly different thought process. Part of your brain thinks it’s reading your words for the first time, giving you a glimpse of how your work looks to readers.

Problems such as typos, clumsy wording, and botched information flow that were previously invisible are suddenly obvious.

Don’t be afraid to make your page bleed with red ink. Remember: all that red is making it better. Go over your work again and again, marking, slashing, crossing out and revising. You’ll know you’re done when you read through an entire draft and hardly make any changes.

5. Sleep on it

Your subconscious mind never stops chewing on problems, so until you file or publish your work, your brain is still in writing mode even when it’s asleep. You’ll rarely wake up with an epiphany, but better phrasing, a better organization, or a better beginning or ending will be worked out somewhere in your head, and it will reveal itself to you on your final pass through.

How to Write Headlines That Don’t Suck

On the Internet you have about three seconds to grab a reader’s attention or they’re outta there—especially if they find your site through a search engine and have no idea where they are.

The first thing they’ll read is your headline.

Eighty percent won’t read anything else.

Think about how you read a newspaper. Doesn’t matter if you’re browsing online in your pajamas or reading a dead-tree edition over breakfast in a cafe. If you’re like most people, you’ll scan at least a half-dozen headlines before you read one of the articles.

Copywriters and content marketers face the same problem, so your headlines better not suck.

1. Be clear. Headline writing is an art, not a science, but the headline itself should not be artistic. Be clear. Don’t use metaphors or cute turns of phrase. If a twelve-year old can’t understand it, start over.

2. Be direct. Tell the reader exactly what your sales copy or content marketing is about. If it’s about a new smartphone with a week-long battery life, say that in the headline.

3. Emphasize the benefits. You can’t always let the reader know what the benefits are in a headline, but when you can, you should. Like this:

How to Double Your Sales Without Hiring Any More Sales People

It’s clear. It’s direct. And the benefits are right there.

4. Don’t be click-baity. The headline’s job is to convince the reader to read the first sentence. (The first sentence’s job is to get the reader to move on to the second sentence, etc.) But be wary of manipulative click-bait. If you promise amazing results, you need to deliver.

Manipulative click-bait has become a genre unto itself, and Click Hole brilliantly lampooned it last summer with this:

This Stick Of Butter Is Left Out At Room Temperature; You Won’t Believe What Happens Next

Below that headline is a three-hour long video that shows a stick of butter s-l-o-w-l-y melting on the kitchen counter. Not a single human being will ever watch the whole thing.

5. Be outrageous if possible. Click-bait will almost certainly backfire, but if you can deliver on an outrageous headline, go for it.

Jon Morrow over at Problogger wrote one of the best outrageous headlines ever:

How to Quit Your Job, Move to Paradise, and Get Paid to Change the World.

Look at what he did there. It’s clear. It’s direct. He emphasizes the benefits. Hardly anyone can resist clicking it. And, believe it or not, he delivers.

Keep it Simple

Writing is first and foremost a communication tool. What you say matter, but so does how you say it.

Your writing should be approachable. Friendly. Digestible.

Copywriting is a craft, not an art, but it has one thing in common with poetry. Every word has a job. Words that clutter your sentences and make them longer for no reason need to be cut.

Write like you talk, only better. Because we can slow down and edit, writing gives us the opportunity to communicate more articulately than when we speak. But some writers, especially beginners, overdo it. They use too many words. They aim for formal instead of relaxed, and their sentences are inelegant, awkward and at times incomprehensible.

If you can take some words out without breaking the sentence, take them out.

If that’s not enough, if you find yourself staring at a convoluted or constipated mess, ask yourself: what are you trying to say? Don’t look at what you’ve already written. Close your eyes and answer the question like you’re explaining it to a friend over coffee. Say the answer out loud, then write down what you just said. Chances are, it will be clearer than whatever you started with.

And break up your sentences into bite-sized paragraphs.

If you flip through some novels written in the 19h century, you’ll notice that entire pages go by without a single paragraph break. Some of those blocks of text are big enough to kill a human being. Even literature professors groan when they see them nowadays.

Hardly anyone writes that way anymore, but still, the more paragraph breaks you can squeeze in the better. It’s a bit counter intuitive, but if you break 500 words into eight paragraphs instead of six, the text looks shorter even if your readers have to scroll farther down the page to get to the bottom.

And shorter text is inviting. It asks to be read. It can be scanned. Long sentences and even longer paragraphs are off-putting. They look like homework assignments. Like chores.

Writing may be a chore, but if your web site visitors glance at what you’re written and think reading it will be a chore, they won’t read it.

Don’t be afraid to murder your darlings, as William Faulkner once put it. When it’s time to edit, scrutinize what you’ve written with ruthless objectivity. You may find that some of your favorite passages have to be cut if they bog down your work or take readers off into tangents. It may hurt a little (or even a lot), but sometimes it has to be done.

Lastly, if your final draft isn’t shorter than your first draft, you’re doing it wrong. As Blaise Pascal once said, “I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time.”

Think Like a Publisher

Publishing is no longer an industry or a job. As technology consultant Clay Shirky famously put it, publishing is a button. “It’s a button that says publish,” he said, “and when you press it, it’s done.”

The ease of publishing anything and everything on the Internet is radically transforming the worlds of journalism, traditional book publishing, and marketing. News blogging revolutionized the media business. Self-publishing books is no longer a loser’s game—it’s a multi-million dollar business. And marketers no longer need to rent all their media real estate.

The big six New York publishers once viewed books as produce like lettuce or bananas that spoil on the shelf after a short period. New releases would sell for a few weeks and months, but they had to be replenished constantly with more new releases because most bookstores didn’t have the space for anything else.

Some publishers still think this way to an extent, but with the rise of e-books, print-on-demand and online booksellers like Amazon where shelf space isn’t an issue, books don’t go out of print anymore. Every title is now an income-generating asset that can turn a profit indefinitely.

Think of your content marketing the same way. An ad in a newspaper is produce. It spoils even faster than bananas and lettuce. Today’s newspaper is tomorrow’s bird cage liner or fish wrap.

Ads are fine. So are newspapers, bananas, and lettuce. Engaging content on your brand’s web site, however, can attract new readers—and hence new customers—for years as long as search engines can find it. Like e-books in a publisher’s backlist, your company’s high quality blog posts and articles are income-generating assets. And you should develop those assets by dedicating the same amount of resources you use to develop your other income-generating assets.

How? By thinking like a publisher. Your web site is not just a web site.  www.americanwidgets.com is just as much a publishing platform as www.wallstreetjournal.com.

You have the same capacity to publish massive amounts of quality material as any online newspaper or magazine. And you don’t need to pay for it with subscriptions or advertising revenue like they do.
But don’t just throw something together in five minutes and call it good because it’s optimized for search engines and mentions your company. Ask yourself seriously if anybody would actually want to read it. Is it good enough for Wired magazine? How about The New York Times? Is it at least good enough for a local newspaper or trade magazine? If not, your content will be ignored by readers accustomed to the higher-quality content they do find in the media business and on other company web sites.

The best way to produce content that’s good enough for online newspapers and magazines—in other words, content that’s good enough to engage, build and sustain an audience—is by hiring writers and editors with experience working for online newspapers and magazines.

Intel is doing it with its tech magazine, IQ by Intel. John Deere did it more than 100 years ago with its agriculture magazine, The Furrow, which is still delivered to more than 1.5 million subscribers. Saudi Aramco publishes Aramco World, a world class magazine about the people and cultures of the Middle East.

In his book, Epic Content Marketing, Joe Pulizzi writes that his company, the Content Marketing Institute, taught a workshop for more than a dozen technology companies and found and that every single one of them “had an open position for an in-house journalist, managing editor, or content marketing director.” They didn’t reinvent the wheel. Most of them hired experienced media professionals with the proven ability to engage, build and sustain an audience.

And that’s what we’ve done here at reddbug.

The Humanity of Social Media

April 25, 2015: Facebook shared the news, while tweets delivered the message and photos revealed the devastation. The first of two deadly earthquakes hit Nepal.

Within minutes of the tragedy, social media proved its greatest quality, to empower and create a global community for good. Trending hashtags rose with #prayfornepal #nepal and #nepalearthquake. These messages of news, hope and sympathy motivated friends, family and followers to reach out and help.  From the NY Times, to sports heroes and even beloved bloggers, a global community ascended to support Nepal.

This is the power of social media.

Over a month has passed and the efforts to help Nepal are still in motion. Just this morning schools and organizations used social media to promote charity events dedicated to this cause. Often times we forget about the gravity of a disaster, when we live far from it, but social media aids all “sharers” to remember and keep the humanity within all of us alive.