Kansas City Freelance Writer Liz Craig

You say things haven’t been going so well in your business? You say your kid got a D in all of his classes and may not graduate? You say you got a flat tire on the way here? And your bunion is killing you?

Guess what? Nobody wants to hear about it. Especially strangers you just met at a networking event or party. I know, it’s sad to think people don’t care about your problems. They’re more likely to back away from you slowly, as if from a hissing cobra, than try to help (as if they could in any of those situations).

Let’s say you just heard some bad news before your entrance to a party. Do you appear at the door looking like someone just licked all the red off your lollypop? No. You shake it off and smile! You put your problems on the back burner for awhile and express an interest in other people.

Once you’re in, don’t take the first opportunity to steer the conversation toward your latest catastrophe. Ask someone about what they’ve been doing that’s fun lately. Their enthusiasm in describing their hiking vacation or backyard barbecue with the family or trip to Disney World will bring your spirits right up.

Know what? Even if you’re not going to a networking event or party, nine times out of ten, you can’t do anything about whatever you’re whining about. If you could, you’d stop whining and do it, wouldn’t you?

Well, here’s a proactive approach to something you might be able to do something about: If you have a car problem, go to someone who knows what might be ailing your car, and then, go ahead and get it fixed. Charge it if you must, but at least you’ll quit whining about your car-tastrophe and switch to an exciting new whine: your credit card bill!

I probably was too hasty in saying absolutely nobody wants to hear you whining. There are people who are professionally trained to listen to whining and help the whiners get past the problems. They are called counselors, social workers, psychologists, and psychotherapists. In their absence, or if you can’t afford one of them, a very good friend who really knows you and isn’t afraid to kick you in your rear might be the best substitute.

This friend can remind you of when you went through something similar before, and how you were able to handle it successfully. Or remind you how smart you are, and express faith that you’ll figure it out. Or even suggest some solutions you hadn’t thought of.

Anyway, next time you hear yourself whining, think of how John Wayne would have sounded whining. You’re at least as strong as the Duke. And the very idea of it should get you laughing. Which is the first step out of your whiny mood.

Moral: If you want to be happier, more popular and more successful, decline to whine!

What do you do with brochures that come in the mail? Toss them into File 13, or “the circular file?” Yep. That’s what most people do. So they’re in the trash before they’re read.

If your business creates brochures, you know they cost a pretty penny to produce. There’s the fee for the writer, fee for the designer, printing, the mail list, postage, personnel to handle getting them ready to mail, and so on. That’s a lot of cost for what then amounts to recyclable material.

But there are secrets to how you can grab your potential customers’ attention long enough to get your brochure read – and acted on. Here are a few:

• Know thy customer.
It seems obvious, but don’t ever buy a mail list without sizing up your current customers and looking for other potential customers like them. Know their characteristics, what businesses they’re in, what size they are, and finally, what problem you help those customers solve. If you don’t know the answers to these questions, you’re not ready to do any type of advertising, including brochures.

• Make your brochure action-oriented.
To save your brochure from the recycle bin, first grab the recipient’s attention with a cover design and headline that he or she can relate to; something his or her business needs. Once you’ve twanged their “need” string, they’ll probably read the copy inside, understand you’ve got what they need, and take the action you ask them to take to get on-board with you. Maybe that’s calling a toll-free number, returning a card for more information, or going to a certain page on your website or a splash page with information about your service that they need.

See, it’s not enough to get them to read your brochure or save it for later. You want them to take action right now! It’s now or never with direct mail.

• Focus on “you,” not “we.”
Don’t “we” on your prospective customers. In other words, they don’t care about your statement that “we” have 234 trucks and a 34,000-foot warehouse. They care about themselves, and how you can help their business. Bragging about yourself in a brochure is a big no-no. You’re asking the reader to connect the dots between what you have to what he or she needs. Too much work. Do the work for them. Tell them how you can help their business right now! And make sure to tell them how to reach you right now.

• Talk about benefits, not features.
Your company may have a lot of admirable features, like warehouse floors so clean you could eat off them, or a cadre of sales people ready to help you 24/7. But how do you translate those into benefits for the customer? If a customer is looking for a completely rat-free warehouse, maybe the clean floors are appealing. And having sales people available 24/7 is okay, but what if you positioned it as a team of problem-solvers who can respond to any emergency situation you have, any time of night or day? For instance, if you have a building maintenance company, and a water heater blows at 2:00 in the morning, isn’t it great to know your customer can call your company for emergency service? That’s a benefit.

• Create a compelling brochure cover.
Did you know you only have about five seconds to save your brochure from the recycle bin? Yup. We’re all busy, and we get a lot of mail. Make sure that headline goes right to the heart of a big concern your reader has and offers a solution to it.

By the way, please don’t write or design any of your sales materials, including your website, yourself (or let your computer-savvy teenager do it) to save money. Hire a professional writer and designer. When your materials look professional, so does your company.

• Let subheads tell the story in brief.
Most people scan headlines and subheads before deciding whether they want to read the text in between. Short, pithy subheads that tell enough of the story to draw the reader in are good. So are bullet points. Keep body text to a minimum. You don’t want to tell them absolutely everything you do in this brochure. That’s a sales person’s job. You only want them to know you can solve a specific problem they have, and then make it easy for them to call, visit your website, or send in a postcard for more information.

• Build in a ticking clock.

Why should your prospect call or send in that card or go to that website right NOW? Because the longer they wait, the smaller the chance they’ll respond to you. Emphasize they need to act NOW. Offer a time-limited discount on a service, a free demonstration of your service in the next week, a free gift to the first 25 people who call to meet with a sales person, a notice that prior to raising your fees next week, you’re letting them in on your old prices this week.

• Make contact information impossible to miss.
Your phone number, website address, and physical address (if relevant) should be easy to find, rendered in large type, in a different color, or done in any way that will allow people to find it easily. In the Western world, we read from left to right and top to bottom. So the lower right-hand corner is a fine place to put this information. But ask the designer for a couple of different versions, and see which seems to pop best.

• Include a 100% satisfaction guarantee.
If your prospect has any qualms about hiring you because she or he doesn’t know you, put them at ease by saying, “Look, try us out, and if you’re not completely satisfied, we will return 100% of your money.” Then there’s no harm in trying you, is there? When you visit with them, have with you a contract that says you also will pay for any damages to their facility, lost work time, or whatever is appropriate for your business.

• Keep up the good work.
If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again. Once it was said that a person had to see an ad in the newspaper 10 times before he or she actually read it. I’d say that was a poor ad, since it obviously didn’t address the reader’s (or non-reader’s, in this case) urgent problems.

But even if your brochure is a strong piece, you don’t just mail it and sit by the phone, waiting for the calls to come flooding in. You continue to send your carefully selected prospects different, on-strategy brochures or post cards on a regular basis, maybe once every four to six weeks. Then, after a few have been mailed, you follow up with phone calls. You’ll find out if the brochure hit the mark with potential customers or not. If so, you may have some new customers. If not, you may either want to delete some customers from your mail list or hone your message to make a greater impact.

• Don’t be discouraged.
They say a 2% response to a direct mail campaign is good. I think you can up the odds by being relevant, using creative design and cogent headlines and subheads, and repeating mailings at regular intervals, then following up with phone calls. After all, these customers will need to give their business to someone, so why not you?

No need for potential customers to ignore you just because they don’t see you on local search. Now, you can be up to five times more visible than your competitors on local search, at a very reasonable, one-time cost.

If think you could benefit from being more visible in local search, all it takes is a one-time payment of only $500. We do all the work. Here’s a contrast between a business location that did it and one that didn’t:

1. Yogurtini in DuPont, WA Completed (except for Google) 3 months ago, Store opened in January 2013

2. Yogurtini in Williamsburg, VA Never done, Store opened in January 2013

Page through the first half dozen pages of Google Search Results for each location and you’ll see the DuPont store on every page in various directory listings while you’ll find only two listings on page 2 for Williamsburg. One listing is from a press release from when the store opened and one is from the Yogurtini website, and that’s it.

Impressive difference, yes?

So, for a one-time investment in your business, you can get a pretty good footprint in the local market leveraging the power of aggregating all the local directories by claiming and loading them with similar content.

The more visibility on local search, the more potential customers/clients call or come in. And that translates to more business. Call me for more information. Get visible! Get business!

I just found this on my computer, a piece written by an alter ego of mine named Stoney Broke. It’s a little late, but maybe not too late.

Reflections on Memorial Day
by Stoney Broke

Stoney Broke, yer cowboy journalist, out here at the best dude ranch on the Kansas prairie. Felt moved to say a few words here on Memorial Day, a day for reflection if there ever was one.

This day, I’ve been thinking about a boy who sat at the back of my English class in high school. His name was Robert. The boy was so shy he never raised his hand. Sometimes, the teacher would ask him a question, and he would lower his head and endure the 15 or so seconds of charged silence, his face the shade of a radish, before the teacher finally called on someone else. I never saw him talk to anybody, or anybody except the teacher talk to him. He moved in a bubble of silence around the hallways, neither knowing or being known by anybody.

Robert drew a low number in the draft lottery and was shipped off to Vietnam. Within two weeks, we heard he’d been killed. A kid like that, well, he never shoulda been sent. You don’t take a scared kid like that, put a gun in his hand, send him to a foreign land and tell him to kill. For all the fight there was in him, they’d just as well taken him out back and shot him to save him the agony of training. Poor Robert. Rest in peace.

My business partner here at the dude ranch, Carl, he went off to the Vietnam War, too. There was talk around of guys skedaddlin’ off north of the border or enrollin’ in college before they could be called up. But Carl just wasn’t made that way. He said America’d done plenty for him and his family, and he was gonna try and repay it by volunteerin’ for the Army. His fiancee, Lorene, cried and bawled somethin’ terrible as she waved goodbye to him at the Kansas City airport.

Carl wasn’t much for writin’ letters, so we didn’t hear all the details of his Vietnam duty. He did write that every guy in his hooch except him was doin’ heroin. Their entertainment of an evening was to fill the hooch with marijuana smoke and watch the giant roaches get stoned and skitter up and down the walls and across the floor like maniacs. He’d write something funny or curious to Lorene once in awhile, but nothing disturbing. He didn’t want to worry her or his mom, dad and sisters.

Me, I didn’t go to Vietnam. When the Army docs saw I had two steel rods in my spine from breakin’ it during my brief teenaged rodeo career, they said, “Go on home.” I said, “I’ll do that, thank ya.” But I watched the news footage on TV and heard the stories from guys comin’ home, and I thought, “Who woulda thought hell was an Asian jungle?”

Carl got banged up a tad and picked up a nasty parasite, but he came home after his year basically in one piece. Protesters at the San Francisco Airport gave Carl and the other returning soldiers a cruel welcome. They screamed, “Murderer! Baby-killer!” Carl looked straight ahead as he fought his way through the crowds to Lorene. The way he hugged her, he’d like to squeezed all the air out of her.

He and Lorene had a weddin’, and before long, they had a baby on the way. Then Carl’s dad died when a son-of-a-bitch stallion he was tryin’ to break kicked his skull in. So the ranch went to Carl to take care of. He was doin’ a very efficient job of it, too, until the baby came. When Carl held the baby and looked into his eyes for the first time, Lorene said the blood drained out of Carl’s face, and he handed the baby back to her quick, but careful, like it was a bomb.

Lorene found him awhile later out by the corral, both hands grippin’ the top rail, just starin’ into space. When she asked him what was wrong, he never even looked at her. Just kept starin’ and said, “He knows. He knows what I done over there.”

Back then, nobody knew much about post-traumatic stress syndrome. In WWI, it was called “shell shock.” In later wars, I don’t know if it was called anything. After the Vietnam War, the vets were said to have the “thousand-yard stare,” like Carl had that night. Lorene persuaded Carl to talk things over with his pastor and go to the VA to see a shrink. Gradually, over the years, he seemed to come to himself again. He no longer saw judgment in his son’s eyes, but innocence and joy. He loved that boy, Carl, Jr., fiercely. It was like the little boy showed him there was life, and it was good. Lorene was the soul of patience with him. And he healed, mostly, though the scars still showed from time to time.

Robert sacrificed his life. Carl sacrificed his peace of mind. Their families sacrificed the happiness of being with their loved ones, whole and healthy. Every person who has served in every war has sacrificed because his or her country required it, for good cause or questionable cause. No matter. Every veteran who has served in wartime deserves our thanks, our respect, and our honor this day. Let’s honor them by doing all we can to make peace, not war. If you’ve a mind to pray for peace, do that. If you’ve a mind to march for it, then do that. At the very least, remember peace. Remember what it felt like. So you can recognize the feeling when it comes again, someday. Let’s hope. Yes, let’s hope.

There are those of us who want to connect with lots of people, via any means possible. Or I should say, every means possible. Computer, iPhone or Android, tablet, bluetooth, Facebook, LinkedIn, you name it, they’re on it. Connecting with lots of people they don’t really know (like on LI or FB).

I admit I have a few connections. But enough, already. Complete strangers are asking me to Link In with them. On FB, people who may not even be people want to join groups I’m in. Sure these things are convenient, but how good are those connections? And what do you pay for the convenience?

For one thing, you lose your privacy. If you are tagged on a photo in someone’s FB page, did you know people can find out nearly everything about you, from your Social Security number to your favorite stores? Probably same with LinkedIn.

I don’t know about you, but I’m torn about remaining in FB. I have some great FB friends from my hometown I’d like to keep in touch with, and heck, I’m administrator of two FB groups. But it’s all so… public.

Remember when you didn’t know what everyone’s favorite music, movies and songs were? When you had no idea what their dog looked like, if they lived in a different town? When people used to phone each other to get caught up? Or, heaven forfend, handwrote letters and cards?

I was going through boxes and boxes of photos, clippings and letters from both sides of my family and came across some delightful notes from my grandfathers mostly expressing what a wonderful child I was. But what was so touching was that I could see their handwriting. My father’s father’s handwriting was large and bold, beautiful in its loopiness. My mother’s father’s handwriting was not so large, but also beautifully executed. And when they handwrote letters, they had to think about what they were writing, because it would years later be discovered in a big box of photos, letters and all. They had to think more about what they were writing than I do right now, because if I make an error, I only have to hit “delete” and correct it. They were committed to their words by a bond of ink.

I vow today to start handwriting letters to my friends. I have one friend in Omaha who treasures them, whenever I get around to writing them. Sometimes she will send me a typed letter, which is nearly as good. They’re done on a manual typewriter. I want my dad’s old Smith-Corona portable back, so I can hear the “thwack” the keys made on the paper.

We’re so connected, but are we really connected to the right people, in the right way? I sometimes doubt it.

“The aim of life is self-development. To realize one’s nature perfectly—that is what each of us is here for.”
-Oscar Wilde

To realize one’s nature perfectly. What does that mean, really?

If you are active in the business world, you may wonder at times (or many times) whether this is really “you,” or who you had hoped you would be, sitting in the meeting playing Boardroom Bingo to pass the time. Or hanging out with people you really don’t like very much.

What is self-development? Is it achieved by winning awards, climbing the ladder to higher echelons in your company? Coming in first in your Corporate Challenge event? Climbing Mount Everest? Getting a tummy-tuck? Knowing the right people? Driving the cool car?

In my opinion, none of those things is going to help you develop your true self. To me, finding one’s true nature is an inside job. How could it not be?

If you are focused outward, looking for symbols of success or things to make you happy in the world, it seems to me you never will be happy. Isn’t it true that once you get that shiny new thing you had been after, thinking it would make you happy, it quickly loses its luster, and you have to think of something else to go after?

I heard an author the other day say, “The more things you have, the more things you have to take care of, and the more tension it causes.” Having had a house full of stuff for 12 years, which I then pared down to move into an apartment, I can tell you it’s true. The stuff accumulates, and it becomes a burden. This author said, “The things you own, own you.” True, true.

But self-knowledge is something that never piles up and becomes a burden. Instead, it makes you feel lighter and lighter. Because you can let go of all the stuff that really doesn’t serve you and really doesn’t matter.

Why should you devote yourself to doing the real work of self-development? Let me ask you this: Do you think you know yourself? Or are you too busy to notice who you are?

That seems like a strange question, I imagine. A lot of us are extremely busy because we have jobs, families, hobbies, friends, and whatever other things we’re required to spend time on. Who has time for self-development?? But even in an extremely harried life, I contend that if you can’t take five minutes to simply BE, you are short-changing yourself by neglecting to at least form a friendly acquaintance with yourself.

Years ago, I took the Silva Method of Meditation, which is a terrific course. In fact, I took it twice. Once you’ve taken it, as long as you keep your card proving you are a graduate, you can take it as many times as you like. The course teaches you how to enter the alpha state of awareness, then to go one rung deeper, to a place where you find the answers your inner self has to the questions you ask.

In the Silva course, our instructor (a Franciscan monk who was a hoot) reminded us to practice for at least a few minutes daily. “Five minutes is good; ten minutes is very good; fifteen minutes is excellent.” And then, “Once a day is good, twice a day is very good, and three times is excellent.”

I’m afraid I’ve let myself slip a bit since I first took the course. But when things get hairy, or when I’m experiencing negative emotions like worry, anger, or depression, nothing helps calm me like meditating the way I was taught.

You don’t have to take the Silva course to know how to meditate. There are a lot of books out there, and a lot of classes, on how to do it. But you don’t need any of those. All you need is five minutes and a quiet place with dim lighting. Get comfortable, preferably sitting (so you don’t doze off), keep your hands open and relaxed, close your eyes, and either focus on the breath coming in and exiting your nose or focus on a word, like “peace.” Just keep breathing in and out and try to maintain your focus. Your monkey-mind will be jumping all over the place, and when you notice you’re thinking about dinner or a book you’re reading, or an itch on your neck, you gently bring your mind back to your breathing or your word.

Five minutes at work is doable, isn’t it? At home, you may find more time. And for something that’s free and easy, it eventually yields great results: calmness, less being caught up in the crisis of the moment, more insight into who you truly are, and more compassion for others in your world. Honest!

I don’t know if Oscar Wilde meditated, but it’s clear he understood there is a real self we all have, and when we learn who we are and live as we truly are, instead of living up to someone else’s idea of who or what we should be, then we can be truly free.

Try five minutes of simple meditation, and even if it’s hard to keep focused at first, you’ll get better at it, and then you’ll not only feel better, but you’ll know who you are. And you’ll probably like you!

Here I am, a proofreader and editor, as well as a writer, apparently misled by those nice lady English teachers all these years about what proper grammar is. It’s okay to boldly split infinitives? It’s okay to ask where this shipment is to go to? Good grief!

The ground beneath my feet isn’t exactly shifting, but some parts of my brain are; the parts that absorbed what apparently is false information about proper English grammar. Just take a look at this brief article. The Smithsonian is always right, so it must be so!

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/Most-of-What-You-Think-You-Know-About-Grammar-is-Wrong-187940351.html

But boy, sometimes I wish there were!

Have you noticed that these days, everyone from “Fresh Air” host Teri Gross to the third-grader next door is starting sentences with “So…?”

Several years ago, when I first heard a biology grad student do it, I thought it was cute and kind of funny. I mean, it sounded as if she were continuing a conversation, rather than answering a question. The first few times you heard it, it jolted you awake. Wakefulness is always a desirable state to be in, unless you’re an insomniac. But then it became annoying. In my mind, “so” belongs in a sentence where it means one thing is a consequence of another. For instance, “His home blew away, SO he was homeless.”

But as the first word in a conversation? “So…” has gone viral, or become a meme, or *something*, and I tried to figure out why. Perhaps people don’t want to be interrupted or thought dumb, so instead of “Well” or “Uh,” they say, “So…” to alert you that they’re about to say something.

Also, how many times lately have you heard a politician or interviewee on TV or radio say, in non-answer to a question, “That’s a great question?” Every day people at City Council meetings are even using it. Good grief, if all the questions people asked before someone said that actually *were* great, fine. But the phrase, repeated several times during an interview or conversation, is not a reflection of the quality of the question. It’s just a speed bump, a breather, a two-second “think of plausible response” tic. “Let me think a second” would sound as if you didn’t know the answer. “Hmm” or the formerly popular “Y’know…” are out of fashion. It seems everyone’s doing the “great question” dodge these days.

As long as I’m griping about grammar here, the most recent thing that I dislike, even more than anchovies (ugh), is “change up” or “change out,” when “change” alone will do. A person says they’re going to “change up” their workout routine. Or they’re going to “change out” one light bulb for another. My solution: Out with the “out” and the “up.”

Finally of course, there’s the ubiquitous “snuck” instead of the perfectly good “sneaked.” Recently I heard someone use “sneaked” as the past tense of “sneak,” and I wanted to hug that person. But the trend is toward “snuck.” Even the OED people have no problem with “snuck.” I question their standards. Question: If your sneakers are worn out, is it okay to say they are “snuckered?” Oh, well, maybe I’m stuck in the 19th century, but I cannot make myself say “snuck,” especially since it’s an ugly, blunt word. Yes, words do have shapes, and some sound lovelier than others.

What other words annoy me? Say, that’s a great question! So… What words or usages drive you up a wall? Let me know, so I can start using them on people who say “snuck!”

“There is no excellent beauty, that hath not some strangeness in the proportion.”
-Francis Bacon

That’s a tweet I posted this morning. It’s a strange one that I didn’t quite “grok” right away. But when I thought of a project that required screening beautiful women for work as a principal in a TV commercial, I got it.

Casting for a TV commercial usually begins with looking at lots and lots of photo “head shots” of models and actors. Out of those, you choose the ones you think have potential to fit your need, and if they’re local, you invite them in, so you can see them in person. Heck, they might be photoshopped to look beautiful. You’d want to know that before hiring them.

We selected three or four women to come in for personal interviews, all of whom were beautiful in their pictures. But in person, what a surprise! Were these the same women we’d selected?

One model’s face actually looked a bit misshapen. The two sides didn’t match. Another one’s nose seemed a size too large for her face. The third looked just plain homely.

These models didn’t come in without makeup, looking as if they had just fallen out of bed. They were made up to look as pretty as they could — in person. And they certainly didn’t look like candidates for Miss America. But soon, I was to learn something valuable.

When we did video auditions with our candidates, these women revealed their true beauty. In a magical way, it is true that the camera loves some faces. These rather ordinary-looking (or even peculiar-looking) women became lovely and engaging, even fascinating, in the eye of the camera.

So I understand what Bacon meant in that quote. Now I try to look at every person through the eye of a transforming camera. You’d be amazed how much more beautiful they all look!

Do you ever furrow your brow and chew your pencil (What’s a “pencil” these days?) about whether “which” or “that” is the proper word to use in a sentence? You know there must be some rule besides, “That sounds funny.” But you’re still all at sea.

Well, fear not, there is a rule, or rather, a tricky difference between a “restrictive relative clause” and a “non-restrictive relative clause.” I can see your eyes glazing from all the way over here, just as they did in English class. Well, don’t fret. This isn’t a big deal to learn.

Take a look at the following two sentences:
• He returned the book, which was due.
• He returned the book that was due.

Both of these sentences are correct. In both these sentences, the “which” or “that” was introducing a “restrictive relative clause.” That’s a clause that gives you important information about the noun before it. The meaning of the sentence would be different if you left out that clause. Restrictive relative clauses can kick off with the words that, which, whose, who, or whom.

But there’s another type of relative clause, a non-restrictive relative clause. You could think of the “non” as the beginning of “non-essential,” because even if you left out the clause, the meaning of the sentence probably wouldn’t change much. Non-restrictive clauses can begin with which, whose, who, or whom. Using “that” to introduce them is a no-no.

Examples of sentences with proper usage of non-restrictive relative clauses:
• She watered the plants, which made the leaves damp.
• A GPS would have made it easier to navigate through the neighborhood, which had few street signs.

The giveaway that you’re looking at a non-restrictive clause is a comma before the “which.” There is none before a restrictive clause.

Examples:
Non-restrictive: He bought her a ring, which he slipped into his pocket.
Restrictive: He slipped a ring that he bought for her into his pocket.

Examples of incorrect usage:
• Here are the papers which you need to sign. (Use “that.” Or neither “that” nor “which.” It’s clear what the sentence means without either.)
• Here are the people that signed up for the class. (Trick example. Always use “who” for people. This would be a restrictive clause, because what comes after “that” or “who” is essential information.)
• She was defrosting the fish which she wanted to cook for dinner.”
(Should be “that.”)

There may be some sentences that stump you about “which” or “that,” but if you’re really stuck, sometimes the easiest answer is to rewrite the sentence to eliminate the problem. Tricks of the trade, m’dear. (wink)