I asked if any of you knew of a web development company that could assist me in taking Hellopeter.com into the future. Your response was overwhelming. I received responses from Vereeniging to Viet Nam (really)…

My request was quite specific, so I didn’t look at all the CVs submitted, and I eliminated applications where links didn’t work… I also rejected emails where Hellopeter was spelt hUllo, hAllo, etc…

This sifting process still left me with too many applications to process properly, so… and here’s a tip for anyone looking for new business… I filtered out the companies telling me only how wonderful they were. I focused on companies who told me what they could do for Hellopeter.com.

It’s simple. We’re not really interested in what our suppliers can do: we’re only interested in what they can do for us.

Surround yourself with brilliance, expertise and experience, but if you don’t like the people, keep away. It’s critical to surround yourself with nice people.

… I’m in the final stages of sifting through the development companies that responded to my email, but I can assure you that – in addition to the company being brilliant – it’ll also be full of helluva nice people, from the top down.

People like YOU… Thank you for being just so…nice.

Whenever I talk to some intrepid entrepreneur about finding clients…they assure me they don’t need to do any marketing because all of their clients arrive by word-of-mouth.

This is a prime example of a problem known as confirmation bias.

Of course all of their clients arrive by word-of-mouth. That’s because they’re not doing any other marketing, so there is no other way for clients to arrive.

Just in case this isn’t obvious, it is very unlikely that a person will call in response to the ad my intrepid friend did not arrange, or the magazine advert he didn’t place, or the flyer at the traffic light he did not hand out, or the website he doesn’t have.

That’s not the way he sees it. Rather, he interprets the results to mean that he is so darn good that his past clients are referring him.

It is easy to make this mistake. After all, 100% of his new clients are indeed the result of word-of-mouth, even if there are not enough of them to cover the watery soup and gruel he has come to enjoy.

Relying on word-of-mouth is, I think, a dreadful way to sell your services and products. Especially at a time when the world economy is tightening, and the competitors are getting a lot hungrier.

I think this is the universe telling us to bring our First Team to the market…

- Peter Carruthers, PetesWeekly.Com

You’ll agree that s.p.a.m is bad. Irritating all the time, time-stealing some of the time, really dangerous a bit of the time. And, to combat its unrelenting flood, Internet service providers, email marketing services and even email programmes analyse millions of messages, compiling lists of ‘trigger’ words and phrases associated with s.p.a.m.

These words and phrases are then used to filter or screen incoming email messages.

Now, this helps to reduce the deluge of unwanted messages we all receive, so it’s a good thing. But the down side is that, often, real emails, i.e. yours, are caught in the web. Why? Because certain words, especially when used in the subject line, trigger the s.p.a.m filters and get you bounced to the Junk folder. Relegated – possibly forever.

Here are some of the evil triggers at the moment. Don’t use them. Please. Thanks.

• #1
• 100% satisfied
• Additional Income
• Affordable
• Amazing
• Bargain
• Best price
• Click / Click Here / Click Below
• Congratulations
• Dear friend
• For free
• Free
• Guarantee
• Information you requested
• Marketing solutions
• Message contains
• No-obligation
• Order / Order Now / Order today
• Please read
• Remove
• Risk free
• Satisfaction guaranteed
• Save $
• Save up to
• Special promotion
• Urgent
• Win
• Winner

Tip: Talk to the email service provider that sends your messages and see if they’ll give you their most current trigger word list. Be particularly careful with subject lines.

Note: Your email won’t get junked because it features just one of these words. Filters use formulae that allocate s.p.a.m points to each message. The words above, and some others, add points. And when your message gets enough points, it is filtered. Cheerio.

It makes the writing look less like homework, creates bite-size pieces and gives readers ‘visual breathing room’.

Lists are also great because readers are inherently lazy and like to think you’ve given them a helpful summary.

But, there’s a catch. When using lists, try to keep the balance right.

Don’t hit your readers with a list of 15 bullet points, each two lines long, with no lines open in between.

They’ll just skim over it (after all, research shows that 79% of your readers are scanners who ignore large chunks of your writing), to the next short paragraph.

In which case you may as well have used a dense, heavy, unpalatable paragraph in the first place, and left out the carefully considered bulleting altogether.

• Instead, break your 15 items into three lists of five shorter points; each list with its own sub-heading.

• Keep a line open between the bulleted or numbered items if the points (some or all) are long-ish.

• Punctuate carefully and consistently (this deserves its own newsletter, which I’ll write soon).

• Ensure that they match; i.e. that if one starts with a verb (‘Achieve’), a noun (‘Systems’), or a gerund (‘Maintaining’), they all do.

• And be fastidious about keeping all of your points as similar as possible in terms of their length.

This way, they’ll read easier, flow better, look nicer and achieve the goal of giving your reader’s eye a real break, which was the point in the first place.

In other words, to keep it clean. Simple. Straightforward. He said, ‘Let the meaning choose the word, and not the other way around. In prose, the worst thing one can do with words is surrender to them.’

A couple of days ago, Seth Godin, writer and genius, took a polite machete to Orwell’s six rules, rendering them considerably nakeder.

I wish I’d written the short post below. I really do. Because it’s brilliant. But just because I didn’t write it doesn’t mean I don’t badly want to share it with you.

So here it is. Enjoy. And keep your business writing clean.

Writing naked (nakeder than Orwell) by Seth Godin

Here are Orwell’s rules, edited:

1. Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print. You don’t need cliches.

2. Never use a long word where a short one will do. Avoid long words.

3. If it is possible to cut a word out,always cut it out.

4. Never use the passive where you can use the active. Write in the now.

5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent. When in doubt, say it clearly.

6. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous. Better to be interesting than to follow these rules.

The reason business writing is horrible is that people are afraid.

Afraid to say what they mean, because they might be criticized for it. Afraid to be misunderstood, to be accused of saying what they didn’t mean, because they might be criticized for it.

Orwell was on the right track. Just say it. Say it clearly. Say it now. Say it without fear of being criticized and say it without being boring.

If the goal is no feedback, then say nothing. Don’t write the memo. If the goal is to communicate, then say what you mean.

My best tip is this: buy a cheap digital recorder. Say what you want to say, as if the person you seek to persuade is standing there, listening. Then type that up. Simplify. Send.

Seth’s original post is here.

I have a client in the diary business. They design and manufacture custom diaries for their clients. All sorts. Diaries with hard covers, soft covers, gold leaf. Diaries with inspiration and imagery. And they proof their diaries very carefully before printing. But once, we very nearly let 1 500 diaries go to print, expensively, featuring the heading – in large letters – ‘PUBIC HOLIDAYS’.

Yikes.

Not because we don’t know the difference between ‘pubic’ and ‘public’, mind you, but because Spell Check doesn’t. We were complacent about having spell-checked and our eyes showed us, all of us, what we wanted to see.

End of the true story.

This article is about spelling. In it, I’ll give you 3 quick tips for improving yours. Because you can’t rely on Spell Check and you can’t afford to make mistakes.

Why not?

Well, poor spelling creates a bad impression, implying either carelessness or cluelessness – both of which can be damaging to your reputation. And private anxiety about shoddy spelling can inhibit your workplace writing, especially your choice of words. So, read on…

Tip 1:

A trick that expert proof-readers use is to read short copy backwards. Not for meaning, but to spot the mistakes your brain glosses over when you read it the right way. I call this phenomenon ‘Neuro Auto-Correct’ – the way your brain shows you what you want to see, not what’s actually there.

‘Definitely’ instead of ‘defiantly’. ‘Rain’, not ‘reign’. ‘Casual’, not ‘causal’.

And this happens either because you can’t spell too well, or because you mis-typed and Spell Check can’t identify context. So please don’t assume that because there are no red lines beneath your copy, it’s good to go.

Do a spell check, yes, but then use your brain… This is easier than it sounds.

Start on the bottom right hand corner of your text – in other words, at the end of the last sentence – and scan the sentence backwards til you get to the beginning. Remember, you’re not reading it for meaning; you’re glossing over it so that mistakes can jump out at you. This technique really works.

Note: Even if you’re a poor speller, you’ll see how misspelled words just don’t ‘look right’ in a lot of cases. And if it looks dodgy, it’s probably dodgy.

Tip 2:

We all have our spelling demons. Mine, for a long time, was ‘valuable’. I’d leave out the second ‘a’. And I can never, ever remember how to spell ‘embarrassed’. That flipping word has too many r’s and s’s.

So I’ve put together a short list of words that I consistently find difficult to spell (necessary, occasion, glamorous), and the list lives on my desktop for easy reference. It used to live on a Post-It, stuck to my laptop, but it got too large…

Note: When you have a query about English, about spelling or grammar, and all you want is a simple answer to your question, not a complete lesson in grammar, try this: www.whichenglish.com.

Tip 3:

Watch out for Americanisation. This is a sure sign of the amateur business writer in South Africa/the UK (as well as, thankfully, a major source of good, honest, hourly work for thousands of pro proof-readers).

Use ‘favourite’, not ‘favorite’. ‘Analyse’, not ‘analyze’. ‘Centre’, not ‘center’. ‘Judgement’, not ‘judgment’. ‘Licence’, not ‘license’. ‘Programme’, not ‘program’. ‘Jewellery’, not ‘jewelry’. And so on.

And don’t rely on the SA/UK Spelling selection in Microsoft Word to do this for you. It doesn’t.

My method, once I’ve proofed a document, is to do a Find/Replace for ‘ze’, for ‘or’, for ‘er’, etc. But I go through the results and change them manually, because I don’t want to change ‘citizen’, which is spelled correctly, to ‘citisen’.

Note: I’m not a wild fan of Wikipedia. But its overview of UK vs US spelling is useful. Bookmark it in your browser and refer to it when you’re not sure: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_and_British_English_spelling_differences.

And, in closing…

Be super-careful that, when you mean to type, “We might need some new cheques,” you don’t type, “Wee mite knead sum knew checks.” Because Spell Check has absolutely no idea which of these is the right one… Good luck.

But sometimes we’re not as effective as we could be. Or, we offend. Or, we cause frustration. And frustration, offence or ineffectiveness are not good ingredients when it comes to making our clients happy. So, here are 6 tips.

1. Be comprehensive

Be sure to answer all questions, and to pre-empt further questions where possible. You know how irritating it is when you send someone a list of points to consider, and they respond to the first and ignore the rest. They ‘didn’t see them’ – so you have to send a further email about the unanswered questions, which wastes your time, and so on. Annoying! Please, don’t be that guy.

2. Use templates

If you’re regularly asked the same things – how to get to your offices, how to subscribe to your newsletter, what your rates are, whether you’re BEE-compliant, etc, use friendly, pre-drafted templates to reply to these emails.

For one thing, it’s a time-saver; for another, it helps you to avoid sounding snotty or impatient – especially if the client or contact is asking a question with which you’re confronted often. Tip: Save your templates in a Word document.

3. Answer swiftly

Clients send an email because they want a quick response. That’s what email is about and unfortunately, that’s what people expect. So try to make a habit of responding within 24 hours, if you can, and on the same working day if at all possible. Tip: If the email is complicated, and needs time or consideration from you, send a quickie to confirm that you’ve received it and you’re on it.

4. Don’t use receipts

The auto request for a ‘delivery’ or ‘read’ receipt almost always irritates readers, even before they’ve read your message. Not a good start… Besides, this function usually doesn’t work anyway, since many recipients block it or say ‘No’ as a rule. Unless there’s a major legal implication, if you want to know whether an email was received, rather ask the recipient to advise you.

5. Retain the context

Even if you’re keen to save email space and recipient reading time, please don’t leave the previous message thread out of your replies. People who receive many emails find it hard to remember each individual email and have to spend time locating the context of the email in order to deal with it properly.

6. Title cleverly

In this tip, I’d like to go beyond my usual advice which is, ‘Use the subject field to indicate specific content and purpose in seven words or less’.

How about being creative and agreeing within your team, division, department or company to use acronyms to identify certain actions? For example, <AR> could mean Action Required or <MSR> could indicate the Monthly Status Report. It’s also good practice to include the word ‘Long’ in the subject, if appropriate, so the recipient knows that the message will take time to read.

7. Always sign off

It drives me scatty when people use a signature in their first email but not in subsequent emails (replies, forwards, etc). Because then, when I want to phone them, fax them, check out their website or whatever, I have to go on a treasure hunt for the first cursed mail in the discussion. Just have it there, on every single mail, every time. Please. It’s a sanity-saver. Thank you.

In conclusion…

Told you it wasn’t rocket science… Bottom line? When you make clients lives easier (or rather, when you don’t make them harder), it’s more likely that they’ll engage with you. And an engaged client says ‘Yes’. Wonderful, right?