Had a ball at: Breakfast with Dannii Minogue. I grew up watching Dannii Minogue on Young Talent Time. I can STILL picture her rendition of “Purple Rain” by Prince. Obviously, Dannii is not only all grown up, she’s a businesswoman with her own fashion label, Project D.

I could relate to this because, in my previous life, I co-founded a fashion label that ran for six years, I know how challenging it can be to design, manufacture, market, wholesale and retail your clothes. We ran a store in Pitt Street Mall seven days a week. And this was my part-time venture – I also had a day job!

Dannii was self-deprecating, engaging and … funny! She has a sense of comedic timing that you just don’t expect. And while you might expect her clothes to be unrealistic for real women, they were totally wearable and just gorgeous. Check them out at David Jones. You’ll also see Dannii on the cover of the next issue of Latte magazine.

Inspired by: Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos. It was great to hear Tony speak recently at a workshop run by the amazing team at Business Chicks. (Yes, I’m biased, I’m editor of Latte, published by Business Chicks). Tony has been part of Zappos since day one. Since 1999, he has grown it from a tiny start-up to the online retail giant that it is today. In 2009, it was acquired by Amazon for a reported $1.2 billion. Uh-huh. Billion. You can read more about Tony in my Enterprise post here.

Anyhow, I clearly wasn’t the only one in Australia keen to hear from Tony. He spoke to a packed room at The Ivy in Sydney, and everyone was hanging off every word.

Impressed with: The function room at The Ivy. Nice. And the goodie bags distributed to all attendees at the workshop, which included this cute iPad cover from Outcased.

Reading: Unmarketing by Scott Stratten. This book had been on my reading list for almost a year. But I finally got stuck into it because I had the opportunity to interview Scott this week when he spoke at the Schmart Marketing Conference in Melbourne.

I loved the book. While I have read many books, blogs posts and reports on social media, this book particularly resonated with me. It confirmed so many of my ideas about how to interact on social media. In short, it’s about being authentic and building relationships. And it’s at odds with some of the advice you hear these days from so-called social media experts who advise you to build a following with automatic adding tools and other dubious strategies. Ugh.

I love Scott’s approach to how he built his following and chatted at length with him about it. Look out for that blog post and video soon.

Recovering from: driving from Sydney to Melbourne

As you can see, I’ve been in Melbourne. While most people get on a plane to do this, my little cat Rocky gets very airsick. So the whole family – Rex (cat), Rocky (cat) and Rambo (dog) – has to pile into the car and drive all the way down.

I loaded up my iPod with podcasts and music and figured I was set. But I didn’t expect little Rambo to throw up four times (on my dress each time) on the way down. Needless to say, that dress is now in the bin. Let’s hope there isn’t a repeat performance on the way back.

Here’s a picture of an exhausted little Rambo when we finally got to Victoria.

But just because these sites now exist, should you use them and will they be effective in attracting customers to your site?

The answer is use them if they have a database large enough that it will include the sort of customers who would use your business. Make sure people are actually going to the site you want to partner with since there is no point offering a deal that few people will see.

But before you align yourself with a site, make sure you have a strategy to deal with the new customers coming your way. Do you have the capacity to handle all these new people wanting to use your product or service, often in a very short period of time? And have you thought about how you can convert them from one-off users to long term valuable customers?

Used correctly, buying sites, which are likely to become more niche – making offers to people in particular areas, or from one industry only – can work for you. They can expand your customer base, and help grow your business.

But only if you’re ready with a follow through strategy that will make your investment in a short term marketing campaign a long term winner for your business.

In this discussion hosted by Suzi Dafnis (Community Director, Australian Businesswomen’s Network) with guests Valerie Khoo (Managing Director, Sydney Writers’ Centre), and Robert Gerrish (Business coach and consultant, Flying Solo), we talk about how you can make use of buying sites like Groupon and Kudos to grow your business, and the pluses and minuses of this new marketing approach.

There aren’t too many celebrity CEOs in the world. But without a doubt, Tony Hsieh is one of them. As CEO of giant online shoe and clothing retailer Zappos, Hsieh has grown the company from a fledging start-up in 1999 to the behemoth it is today. Amazon acquired Zappos in 2009 for a reported $1.2 billion and Hsieh (pronounced Shay) remained as CEO.
In Australia running a series of workshops for national network Business Chicks, he spoke to a packed room in Sydney earlier this week about his entrepreneurial journey.

Not the first time
Hsieh’s success with Zappos doesn’t appear to be a fluke. Out of college, Hsieh founded online advertising company LinkExchange, which he sold for $265 million to Microsoft in 1999 at the age of just 24.

“It just wasn’t a fun place to work any more,” says Hsieh, now 38.

“Company culture went downhill. Our whole strategy was to employ friends, and friends of friends. That worked well till we got to about 20 people. Then we ran out of friends.

“When we got to about 100 people, I realised that I was dreading getting out of bed to go to my own company.”

Selling out of LinkExchange gave Hsieh enough money to never work again. Along with his former college mate Alfred Lin, he co-founded incubator and investment firm, Venture Frogs.  ”We invested in about 20 companies,” he says. “Zappos was one of them. Within a year, I joined full-time.”

You can read the full Enterprise post here.

As the interview was scheduled at 7.15am, I conducted it from my home, converting my lounge room into a de facto online TV studio for an hour.

Everything was going well. The questions were flowing, her answers were insightful and the technology was seamless. Since I was filming the conversation, I was also doing the very best Katie Couric impression I could muster.

Then it happened
In the middle of this professional discussion on business, finance and entrepreneurship, I suddenly realised that I’d forgotten one crucial thing that was about to ruin the interview and cause me lots of embarrassment.

I had left a bowl of cat food on the table. Unsurprisingly, my cat Rex didn’t particularly care that I was in the middle of filming a Really Important Interview with a Really Famous Person. So he promptly jumped on the table and began munching. LOUDLY.

If that wasn’t enough, the bell on Rex’s collar clinked against the bowl every time he took a mouthful. He had clearly chosen the wrong time to embark on a feeding frenzy, but he didn’t care.

Against the otherwise quiet studio-like atmosphere I’d created in my lounge room, this *clink-scrape-crunch-crumble* sounded like jack-hammering on a Sunday morning.

I tried shooing him away but Rex wasn’t going to have any of it.

I tried telepathising to him: “Get the freaking hell off the table!”

I willed my (still sleeping) partner to wake up so he could come to the rescue.

I silently prayed that Rex would be distracted by a bird outside the window.

All the while trying to conduct a professional interview that was being filmed.

After what seemed like forever, Rex jumped off. I breathed a sigh of relief. But, within a few minutes, my other cat Rocky decided to copy his brother. And the *clink-scrape-crunch-crumble* sound effects started all over again.

The jury is still out on whether we’ll be able to edit out these unwanted sound effects courtesy of this feline feeding frenzy. I’m keeping my fingers crossed.

The perils of working from home
These days it’s becoming more common to work from home. There are:

* start-ups who are bootstrapping their business and can’t afford to rent premises yet.

* people with young kids who want the flexibility of working from home.

* more established business owners who have systems in place to allow them to work from anywhere (which is my ultimate aim).

There’s a fine line between embracing the idea of working from home and allowing too much “personal” to creep into the professional. Like the woman who rang me the other day. She had children screaming the house down in the background. Perhaps she had become desensitised to the noise, but I could barely make out a word she was saying. Geez, ever heard of closing the door? Or calling at a better time? Or this thing some kids need called discipline?

Then there was the seemingly professional manager of a sustainability fund. In the middle of our discussion on allocation of assets he said: “My three year old just urinated on the floor in front of me.”

Total over-share.

I’ve spoken to work-at-home business owners who’ve said to me: “Look, this is me. I’m a mother. I have two kids. I don’t hide that and people should know that’s who they’re dealing with. If I can’t make it to a meeting because I’ve got to do the school run or because I have to let the plumber into the house then I’m honest about it.”

Transparency is great. But sharing the minutiae of your diary is just … unnecessary. If you work from home I think it’s vital to still strive for some semblance of professionalism. It’s a demonstration of your “care factor”. It’s also an indication you’re taking your business seriously instead of treating it like a hobby.

Some factors to consider:

* Get a separate phone number for your business calls
Or, at the very least, ensure that your answering machine (or outgoing voicemail message) sounds professional. That means avoiding having your three-year-old baby talk a message into it. You might think it sounds cute – but your customers and prospects probably don’t need to hear it.

* Ensure you have a dedicated email address
Ideally it will be tied to your domain name. That is: johnsmith@yourcompanyname.com.au

It’s very easy to set up and looks more professional than johnsmith@optusnet.com.au

And whatever you do, ensure that the email address you choose is professional. I’ve seen businesses with cutsie names like fluffykitten@gmail.com or, worse, women who use their husband’s email address. Especially when it’s so easy – not to mention free – to create your own email address.

* Get a door
Then make sure you close it.

* Dedicated space and hours
If you are working off the dining room table, you’re not likely to go anywhere fast. You need a dedicated space for your “office”. If you don’t have a spare room to convert into an office, then cordon off a dedicated space – even if it’s just a corner – in your lounge room or living area. Ensure that your family know that when you are sitting there, you should not be disturbed because you are “at work”. Even if you don’t mind working from the dining room table, that’s not the point. Ensuring a clear delineation between “personal” and “work” will help to create a proactive mindset about your business.

Does it really matter?
With flexible work arrangements and an increasing number of business owners working from home, you may wonder whether anyone actually needs to hide the fact they are working from home. My point is that it’s not a matter about hiding this. It’s about remaining professional and respectful to whomever you’re dealing with. And that means not making business calls while you have screaming hordes of children in the background. It also means not informing your customers or suppliers that your three-year-old urinated on the floor. And, yes, it also means keeping hungry cats away from Really Important Interviews!

Do you work from home? Do you hide it or are you open about it?

These days, it’s all about customer-focused writing. And that’s not just your customers and clients, it’s also your wider community – whether you’re writing for internal staff or other stakeholders. So what is customer-focused writing? And how does it differ from other kinds of business writing?

Customer-focused writing is all about making sure that your customers are front and centre in your mind when you are crafting any messages.

1. A clear picture of your customer
Always have a clear picture of your customer. What do they look like? What do they want? What are their hopes, dreams, fears and aspirations? Too often, we get caught up in what we want to tell customers and forget about paying attention to what they really want to hear.

Put yourself in your customers’ shoes and work out the information they really want to know from you. Ask yourself what their pain points are. In other words, determine what their frustrations are and how your product or service can help them overcome that frustration. But don’t jump in there and rave on about how you can provide the solution. They first need to hear that you understand their pain. They need to know that you know what they are going through. If you do this right, then you’ll be the company that ‘gets’ that customer segment and you’ll be the one they turn to when they are ready to buy.

2. The power of the word ‘you’
Don’t be afraid to speak directly to the customer by using the word ‘you’. I’m often amazed at how often this word is avoided. But it can be the most engaging and empowering word you can use in your writing.

Look at these two examples. Which one is more engaging?

(a) You can try on the clothes in the lounge area before heading through to the checkout.
(b) Customers are required to try on clothes in the lounge area before heading through to the checkout.

It’s a subtle change – but it does make a difference. How many signs in your premises or messages on your website could be tweaked to speak directly to the customer?

3. Active phrases
In the days of yore, business language was littered with passive sentences. However, it’s far more engaging to use active words and phrases.

Examples:

PASSIVE: The ball was thrown by John.
ACTIVE: John threw the ball.

or,

PASSIVE: A certificate will be issued to all eligible businesses.
ACTIVE: All eligible businesses will be issued a certificate.

You might wonder whether such subtle differences really do have an impact. However, it can be the difference between sounding warm and accessible to sounding aloof and maybe even uncaring.

4. FAQs save you time and money
Brainstorm all the frequently asked questions you’re likely to get from customers. If possible, incorporate all the answers into your written communication. The reason for this is that when readers read a message, they get frustrated if that piece of writing provokes questions that then goes unanswered.

When you leave your readers or customers frustrated, they will either simply remain dissatisfied, or they will contact you for clarification. This could be good or bad, depending on whether you have the capacity to deal with these queries. If you aren’t able to do so in a timely manner, you end up causing more frustration. So answer as many questions as possible in your original message.

Ultimately, customer-focused writing boils down to showing that you care about a one-on-one connection. Old-fashioned phrases and formal expressions indicate that you want a distant relationship with your customers – or that you’re out of touch. Don’t be guilty of either.

This article first appeared on Nett.com.au

In 2003, he turned his love of adventures into a career, giving up his full time job in advertising for life, as he describes it on his website, as “a very poor full time author.” He has now published seven books, the latest of which is Tell Them to Get Lost – Travels with the Lonely Planet guidebook that started it all. It grew from a conversation with one of the Lonely Planet founders, Tony Wheeler, when they discussed whether it would be feasible to retrace the journey through Southeast Asia documented by the Wheelers in their first guide book.

It proved to be an eye-opening adventure for Brian, not least for the chance to see how dramatically the region had changed, and is just the latest chapter in a life spent travelling and writing, and enjoying it all immensely.

I think you’ll really enjoy what he has to say.

Just click the icon to listen to it.

Brian Thacker podcast

If you would love to follow in Brian’s footsteps as a travel writer, why not consider taking our Travel Writing course?

Kim Kiyosaki is an entrepreneur, author and, yes, wife of Robert Kiyosaki, the man behind the worldwide Rich Dad, Poor Dad phenomenon. Like her husband, she is passionate about financial education, particularly among women, and has just released the book It’s Rising Time! What it really takes for the reward of financial freedom.

The focus of the book is about building wealth. Specifically about making the right investment decisions so that you are putting your money into assets that will generate positive cash flow for years to come. The concept isn’t a new one. In fact, it’s the cornerstone of the philosophy she and her husband have been preaching to the world for over a decade when Rich Dad, Poor Dad first burst on the scene.

Kim Kyosaki

Despite this, Kiyosaki felt it was important to write the book as a wake-up call to women. While the book is part “how to”, it’s also a motivational kick up the bum for women who have either neglected their financial planning or have handed over the reins to their partner.

“I think there just comes a time where there’s a mindshift that goes ‘Sometimes, you’re going to have to put yourself first’,” she says.

“I think women sometimes think that they’re being selfish if they do something for themselves. I think we just have to change that. Your financial life is everything and if you can’t take care of yourself financially, how are you going to prepare for your kids and take care of them as well?”

You can read the full Enterprise post here.

While these might seem like self-evident points, many exhibitors turn up at these events with visually unappealing booths, poor promotional materials, and no clear sense of what they hope to achieve from it.

It isn’t enough to simply gather a long list of names and email addresses, if these people are not potential customers. It is always worth your while to find out from the convenor who they are targeting as attendees so you have an idea of whether they fit your target market or not.

Assuming the trade fair will be swarming with key potential customers eager to get to know you and your wares, make sure your booth is well set out, your elevator pitch is word perfect, and you present a warm and welcoming front for your business.

Think of it as hosting a cocktail party. You are there to meet people, get them connected to your company and also to each other. Be prepared to talk to each person as long as needed and make the most of your time there.

Above all, remember it’s not simply enough to turn up. You need to know why you’re there, and make the most of what is a golden opportunity to build your business.

In this discussion hosted by Suzi Dafnis (Community Director, Australian Businesswomen’s Network) with guests Valerie Khoo (Managing Director, Sydney Writers’ Centre), and Robert Gerrish (Business coach and consultant, Flying Solo), we talk about the best ways to make the trade fair experience pay dividends for your business.

All I could think of was: “Wow. Who cares?”

If I wanted personalised service, this definitely was not the firm for me. Admittedly, I’m probably not their target market. No doubt, their message is best suited to global clients who want access to their firm’s lawyers in Abu Dhabi, Bogota and Piraeus. Fair enough.

However, I see this mistake being made by small business owners, most of whom are not appealing to a global audience. For example, I recently heard a coach introduce herself at a networking event with: “I’m a life coach, and am part of a network of 1100 coaches around the world.” This proud statement was also prominently displayed on her business card and website.

Well, you know what? If I want a life coach, I probably want one I’m going to build a relationship with. Life coaching is an intimate relationship where you talk about your personal goals, dreams and challenges. Chances are I’m never going to want to speak to any of the other life coaches in this extensive network.

This life coach may have been better off stating something like: “I’m a life coach, and I help people who are in a rut to achieve their goals and feel happier about their lives.” If she has a niche market, she might even say: “I’m a life coach and I help mothers who are returning to work get the job they want without feeling guilty about leaving their family at home.”

Whether you are speaking to someone or writing material for your website or brochures, the key is to clearly understand who you want to appeal to. In fact, this is the step that most people leave out. But it’s a vital factor in ensuring that your communication is on target. So what should you do?

1. Clearly define your reader
You need to be clear on who your reader is. To do this, ask yourself who your target customer is. Please don’t say that you want to appeal to everyone and that you want everyone to buy your product/services. Taking the ‘spray and pray’ approach is nowhere near as effective as a ‘sniper’ strategy. If you identify your target, you’ll hit them.

Take the time to determine whether your target customer is male or female, their age, income level, interests, geographic location and any other kind of demographic data that can help you picture who they are.

2. Give your target customer a name
You read that correctly. Give your target customer a name and visualise who they are. When you are writing marketing material, picture that person and write directly to them.

If you have products/services that appeal to different demographic groups, that’s ok. Simply use different customer profiles.

For example, I run the Sydney Writers’ Centre in Milsons Point. When I’m writing marketing material for our magazine writing course, I’m writing to ‘Sarah’, who is 35. She’s likely to have experienced a professional career in the corporate world, either currently, or she may have recently taken some time out to have kids.

However, when I write marketing material for our seminar on how to write a business book, I’m picturing Michael, 45, an entrepreneur who is likely to be a consultant or speaker. He wants to write a book to showcase his expertise.

3. What do your customers really want?
You need to take the time to think about your customers’ hopes, fears, objections and goals – and write your material accordingly.

Often, we are too preoccupied with telling our customers about how fabulous our products/services are that we are not addressing what they really want to know. Imagine the main questions or concerns that your customers are likely to raise and address these issues in the material you are writing. Otherwise, your potential customer is left with unanswered questions, leaving them frustrated. Not only that, you end up with time-consuming phone or email queries to answer.

4. Features versus benefits
I see so many websites that list the features of a product/service and not the benefits. This drives me nuts. Remember when iPods first came on to the scene? An MP3 player was a new concept to many people. But Apple nailed it by focusing on the benefits, not the features. It could have highlighted the specifications of the iPod like this: “128-Kbps AAC encoding; in 256-Kbps AAC format, song capacity is up to 10,000 songs; actual capacity varies by encoding method and bit rate.”

Instead, it focused on the benefits to the consumer: “10,000 songs in your pocket”.

Such a simple message – but so powerful.

What can you do to create more powerful messages to your target customers?