My friend Sandra Ries emailed the other day:

"I’m in the midst of my first collaboration and I’m in a bit of a quandary. We’re putting together a 1/2 day workshop with the idea that someone will hire us to deliver the same program for them in house and then do followup coaching with both of us. If not, they can hire one or the other of us for followup coaching.

"How do we do this? ‘We’ don’t have a business. Should I be his contractor? Should he be mine? Who do we tell people to write the check to? And how do we brand the marketing?"

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1. Put a search box on every page. If you have a lot of content on your website that you want users to browse, make it easy for them to find it! Interactive Tools offers an inexpensive search tool, and their customer support is top-rate.
2. Make your navigation consistent across your website. I’ve seen a lot of web pages where the order of the menu items changes, or some disappear and others sprout in their place randomly. This is easy to implement and update by creating one menu and inserting it on each page using server-side includes. Your web designer should know how to do this for you.
3. Use simple, familiar titles for the pages/areas of your site. It’s fun to get creative, but your reader often has no idea what you are talking about, and ^click^ they’re gone! Peruse websites similar to yours and you’ll start to see the patterns of common naming conventions.
4. Put your newsletter signup box on every page. You want people to sign up, right? Make it as easy as possible and they might.
5. Cut 50% of the words on the utility pages of your site. Utility pages are the ones that introduce you, your service, your prices, how to contact you, etc. In other words, anything other than the intellectual-property type of content. Get concise. Use bullets instead of complete sentences. Help the reader pick out the important stuff by using font color, bold, italics, highlighting, etc. — just don’t go overboard!

For more information on improving your website, I recommend Don’t Make Me Think – A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability, by Steve Krug.

Joy. When you dig down through all the reasons we all thought we went into business for ourselves, joy is sitting right there staring at us. And all of us could probably use a guide to experience more of it!

That’s why I was very excited to learn that Suzanne Falter-Barns is making her best-selling book available as an ebook for FREE!

If you’ve heard of Suzanne, you already know this is a great book. If you haven’t, what a great opportunity to learn about her and get more JOY in your life.

It is a fast read, and could be the book that gets you on the path to your dreams. And you can share it with your friends, colleagues and clients — no strings attached!

Terri Recommends How Much Joy Can You Stand?

non-affiliate link

In my local newspaper this morning, was an intriguing article: Take time to do…nothing. Excerpt: "This summer, Kim Blakeman and her three kids are doing nothing. There is no camp. There are no enrichment classes. Most days, there isn’t even much of a schedule."

On this hot summer day in North Carolina, it got me to thinking about how refreshing a whole day of not working could be. A day to rest the body and mind, to not even think about what is on the to-do list, and to recharge the spirit.

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We noticed some technical problems with one of our cloaked affiliate links the other day. Below, we’ll share a couple of solutions for those with similar problems.

Now, you might ask, why do we “cloak” our affiliate links at all? No, we aren’t trying to fool anyone; we try to provide “non-affiliate” links for anyone who’s not comfortable with us getting compensation for our recommendations. (I used to have misgivings about affiliate links too — but that’s another story.)

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Many of us grew up in the 9-5, 40-hour-work-week paradigm. Our corporate jobs led us to believe that our most productive hours were those between breakfast and dinner.

And so it is interesting to see how that translates to our new lives as independent entrepreneurs. I’ve had engaging email "conversations" with other soloists into the wee hours of a Saturday night (Sunday morning), and I’ve also worked with those who make it a practice not to read their email in the evening or on weekends. True to the entrepreneurial spirit, we all march to the beat of our own drummer.

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