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Pivoting To Win With Former NFL Player Jordan Babineaux written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

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Graham has built a brand around personal finance. He began his youtube channel by chance and quickly saw it gain traction as he would discuss his experiences as a real estate agent and provide prudent advice to his audience on how to save money and make smart financial decisions. He started with absolutely no real estate experience and no family connections and bootstrapped his career in real estate as well as his preeminence on Youtube. As his channel grew Graham relied heavily on transparency showing his audience exactly how much he was making with youtube and this exponentially accelerated his growth. After amassing millions of viewers Graham now focuses on budgeting and investing. He can be seen often teaching his students how to use the power of compounding interest to become massively wealthy by the age of 65 while jokingly urging millennials to reduce their intake of avocado toast. Graham has released multiple coaching programs in the real estate space for investors and real estate agents to scale their business and income. On his Youtube channel he can often be seen giving the latest financial news and hot topics in the personal finance space. He is also focused on leveraging real estate and using it to produce income and then freedom. Nonetheless Graham has built a reputation as a highly influential personal finance YouTuber and his goal is to continue to build wealth and freedom while educating his audience. Follow Graham to learn how you can manage your finances better save more money and invest it wisely for the long term. Shawn Sharma Instagram @shawnsharma 2 Million Followers Shawn Sharma has built a brand around credit and financial literacy. Shawn Sharma started out using credit to bootstrap his first business where he was flipping items and using strategies such as retail arbitrage and manufactured spending to amass capital. He made his first million dollars through the power of leveraging other peoples money and finding lucrative arbitrage opportunities. Growing up to two disabled parents in a trailer park Shawn Sharma defied the odds and got an ivy league education at Cornell University and a full ride to medical school. Having to drop out after his father passed away and needing to take care of his disabled Mom Shawn Sharma was able to rely on his good credit to bootstrap his first few businesses. Shawn Sharma constantly stresses the value of credit and how it can create an opportunity for lower-income groups to rise out of poverty. While Shawn has been leveraging credit to make money for almost 8 years he only recently became active on Instagram 2 years ago after seeing the power of branding first hand through businesses hes owned. Shawn quickly built a massive following on Instagram by investing massive amounts of time and being consistent. He saw his biggest growth happen by chance when high-profile clients would repost him and he began to leverage collaborations and celebrity shout-outs to gain a massive following. Shawns Instagram content focuses on teaching people how to leverage credit use it to create income and travel the world for free. Shawns brand growth has been spearheaded by his credit business that has scaled to 8 figures in revenue a year. Especially in a space where most companies hide behind professional websites and untraceable names and owners Shawn has built a massive reputation using his personal name and has become one of the most trusted names in the credit industry. Follow Shawn Sharma to learn creative finance hacks boost your credit scores bootstrap your business using the banks money and travel the world for free. Humphrey Yang Tiktok @humphreytalks 1.2 Million Followers Humphrey Yang built a brand around personal finance ranging from topics including taxes creating a budget credit and investing. Humphrey started out as a former financial advisor and enjoyed educating his clients on the intricacies of personal finance but he saw a window of opportunity when he realized the gap in education and the utility of social media in spreading essential knowledge. He started his hand at tik tok and his videos quickly became viral amassing him over 1.2 million followers. He can be seen making skits of himself asking himself common questions that his audience comments in the comment section and answering the same questions as a wiser version of himself in the same skit. He is also seen covering little-known tax loopholes and common myths in finance that most beginners have. Although most of his audience is under the age of 25 he has built a massive foothold with Millenials who are deciding between purchasing or leasing their first car filing taxes for the first time building their credit and moving into their first home. Yang believes he has gone viral because millennials find it a lot easier to consume daunting topics with skits and videos where otherwise they would normally be much drier and boring in textbooks. According to Humphrey I think if you do care about personal finance its important because it kind of gets you to where you want to go Yang said. Especially if you have financial goals or if you have goals to purchase a house or live a life that you want to live and not be so stressed out all the time. The post 3 Personal Finance Influencers Dominating Social Media appeared first on Social Media Explorer. Original source: https://socialmediaexplorer.com/business-innovation-2/3-personal-finance-influencers-dominating-social-media/ The post 3 Personal Finance Influencers Dominating Social Media appeared first on connect social networks. via Connect Social Networks http://connectsocialnetworks.com/3-personal-finance-influencers-dominating-social-media/

The Only Difference Between A Business Owner And A Superhero Is The Cape written by Sara Nay read more at Duct Tape Marketing

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Weekend Favs March 20 written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

My weekend blog post routine includes posting links to a handful of tools or great content I ran across during the week.

I don’t go into depth about the finds, but encourage you to check them out if they sound interesting. The photo in the post is a favorite for the week from an online source or one that I took out there on the road.

About a year after weve been on COVID lockdowns so many social media apps are there for us when it comes to productivity entertainment and social networking for business and personal reasons. Why is it then when we go to the doctor were often handed a clipboard and filling out paperwork by hand? And then to add insult to injury someone at the doctors office then copies everything we just wrote out only to hand code it into their medical systems? Theres got to be a better way. Each year healthcare organizations lose an astounding $12 billion due to communication issues. Patients use mobile communications throughout their lives and would greatly prefer to work this way with their healthcare providers as well 80% of patients have responded as such. Mobile messaging in healthcare is a step in the right direction for the future of a better healthcare experience. Imagine being able to text with your healthcare provider instead of waiting on some phone tree for someone on the other end of the line to pick up. The rest of the world works well with such nimble asynchronous messaging its about time that healthcare picks up the pace. And the difference of healthcare results is quite shocking consider that 98% of patients will read a mobile message vs the abysmal 7% that will read messages through their healthcare portal. Take a look at the following visual deep dive for more information on how healthcare is going to be more like social media on our smartphones below: The post Why Cant Healthcare Be More Like Social Media? appeared first on Social Media Explorer. Original source: https://socialmediaexplorer.com/social-media-marketing/why-cant-healthcare-be-more-like-social-media/ The post Why Cant Healthcare Be More Like Social Media? appeared first on connect social networks. via Connect Social Networks http://connectsocialnetworks.com/why-cant-healthcare-be-more-like-social-media/

A Roadmap To Financial Success And Fulfillment written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

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The pressure of writing two straight newsletters that have been fairly well received is trying to follow them up with something useful, versus going back to writing the same “man, is anyone else tired? This pandemic thing sure is taking a while,” blog that, well, people enjoy and empathize with, but I wonder about the utility.

One beacon of hope right now – and the first time I’ve really been able to establish a sense of time again – is that there will be enough vaccines by the end of May for the entire country. That is…so wonderful! I don’t really have a snarky or sarcastic response to it. With every person who chooses to get the vaccine, that’s one less person who’s likely to get the virus, spread the virus, and so on.

I also – somewhat optimistically – booked our accommodations for CES 2022, where we’ll be staying in The Venetian Penthouse, hosting reporters, clients and anyone else we like for free drinks and free tacos all week. It’s a yearly ritual that we somehow squeaked into 2020, and I’m not sure if it’ll happen for sure, if people are even tempted to Las Vegas next year for the show – it’s all up in the air, but we’ve got a fairly generous cancellation policy. I hope it does. It’ll be lovely to see you all.

How To Be The Best Communicator Around

Today, in one of the many media trainings I do for clients, I listened as a spokesperson who was still very good stumbled in an answer. He composed himself, then ended up saying something that he believed was a reduction – something that ended up being beautifully clear and simple, that answered my mock question perfectly.

I realized then that I need to start all media trainings by telling people to answer stuff bluntly and honestly (within reason) and that in many cases, the most straightforward answer is usually the best one.

The continual issue that I find with a great many people, especially PR people, is that we’re taught in college and many other walks of life to give the smartest answer rather than best one. We have, societally, been taught to try and avoid any indemnification, to not admit any wrongdoing, to avoid bearing too much of our soul or showing any emotion, and give the textbook answer that we believe is “correct” because it sounds good.

This is something I’ve ever seen from lawyers – the need to make these vast, wall-like responses that make for nice billable hours, but also obfuscate from any actual meeting of the minds. My lawyer, who is wonderful, communicates bluntly with them and says what happened, what we want, and how things will go otherwise. It saves people time.

The goal of a lot of this mediated communication is to position ourselves as what we aspire to be – smart, well-read, engaging, a force to be reckoned with – all while giving relatively long, mealy-mouthed responses because that’s what we were taught to. In my industry, this is usually because PR has a “hire the best GPA” problem, where the smartest kids, who are taught to do college really well, are hired and continually promoted, continuing the Intro-body-conclusion method of communication.

I want to help you be better.

Don’t Do Anything That Doesn’t Help

This is one statement that you’ll find yourself breaking as you get more comfortable communicating, but for the most part metaphors, similes, analogies and references are unhelpful to clear communication.

This takes on several forms, but generally any metaphors, idioms or similes you use should be able to take the reader somewhere that just saying what something is could. The same goes for references to stuff – TV shows, sports stars, and so on. The over-use of these things usually comes down to you trying to sound smart or win someone’s attention, and as you become more sophisticated, or speak to a very specific audience, they make more sense.

In 90% of occasions, they don’t. Telling someone to go Full Court Press on something if they don’t know basketball is bad, and it’s cliché even if they do. A Hail Mary can mean something very different to a religious person who isn’t into sports, but also takes the place of saying “we’re going to try something that is not likely to succeed.” And in any case, using these things too often detracts from your communication.

You also don’t need to use long words unless they do the job better than a short one. Saying something is laborious is useful over, say, time-consuming if you want to add the emotional weight of laboriousness to it, but otherwise it’s a little much. This may seem like I’m telling you to sound stupid, but in most cases you can be blunter, clearer and quicker. You’ll communicate more information to more people, and usually do so faster.

Finally: there is never a time when you try and be funny where you’re actually funny. Actual humorous writing does not come from a place of desperation and appeasement.

Write Like You Talk (And Talk Like You Write)

Something that dismays people that have only got to know me through Twitter is how alarmingly close to my tweets my actual voice is. The reason is because my old editor Will Porter once redlined a single page so much that it looked like I’d bled all over it, and told me bluntly – “write like you talk.”

What this means is that you should get away from trying to push vocabulary and forms of speech into your writing that you don’t actually follow. This will also help you write faster – because you’re not actively engaged in trying to make yourself sound intelligent, you’re going to be talking, just using your fingers and the keyboard.

This will also make you sound better when you talk with your mouth, because you’re now working basically the same muscle versus trying to have a narrative style and a spoken style. This is immensely helpful, and constantly helps you sound smarter because what you write is what you speak and what you speak is what you write.

This is a bizarre way to think about your communication, I realize, but it has been incredibly helpful for me as I mature as a writer and a person who has to do business for money. It makes both things a lot more fun, and is ultimately more honest, which is the root of great communication.

Learning From Others

I will never recommend copying other people’s speech patterns, but I do recommend, when you read or hear someone speaking that you find super engaging, trying to listen or read a little more intently to try and understand why.

In fact, the number one way to get better at writing and talking is to read and watch and listen to things.

Everyone has a particular cadence and flow to how they write when they really, really get into it. For example, my writing crush David J. Roth continually writes interesting prose by using a combination of fairly blunt writing laced with self-effacing comments and, more importantly, references that actually aid the story. It’s something that’s enjoyable to read because it ultimately communicates an emotional context – in this case, setting a scene of dorky quasi-shame that leads you into listening to his podcast.

Learn from what you enjoy, but do not mimic it. You are you, and you are not them, and trying to be them is going to feel forced.

Get To The Point

In basically anything you’re writing you have a goal and an audience, and despite what you may have been told that audience in many cases is there to be informed rather than entertained. Information can be communicated in a way that’s interesting and entertaining, but in many kinds of writing you’re doing for work, or if you’re speaking, you have a point to what you’re saying.

If you’re writing an email to get someone to do something, make the subject header informative (EG: “I want to get coffee with you/graduate learning about XYZ”) and the body direct. You want to meet for coffee – okay, what do you want to talk about? For how long? Will you go to them? What are some days that might work? What’s your cell? Why should they meet with you over someone else, and what’s in it for them?

Great writing oftentimes gets wrapped up in trying to be great writing. Focus on getting across the point that’s in your head. When I wrote about going to Super Bowl 50, I wanted to give people the feeling that they were there, and also lead them to how I got there myself – a story, but one that was informative. I described what I saw as bluntly as possible, took photos, and tried to avoid anything that would get in the way of the emotional or factual content of the day, and people loved it.

If something feels “short” because the way people do things usually is long, sit and think about whether you’ve said everything they need to hear.

Answer The Question

Whenever I’m coaching someone to do media interviews, I try and drill into their heads that a conversation isn’t a puzzle to solve. If someone asks you a question, they are in most cases looking for an answer. Sure, there are situations where they’re trying to trip you up – asking the same question in a different way – but most questions have an answer, so give it as clearly and concisely as possible.

This also means that you can say you don’t want to discuss something. Hey, what’s your revenue? We’re not disclosing that at this time. What does your agency do? We help clients get coverage with the media.

Most of the time you can give a fairly straightforward answer to a question. If it’s a big question – like what problem you’re solving – then that may take a little longer, but it’s totally fine to go down a list of problems you’re solving, and why they’re important to solve. Couch it with numbers – X million people deal with this in a $YBn industry.

And if you truly can’t answer something, or don’t know something, be honest. Say you don’t know. Say you can’t answer that at this time. If you can’t say why, say you can’t say why, but will tell them when you can.

Be Astute, Not Smart

The greatest speakers in any industry are usually the ones that put things well, and some of the greatest quotes in history are actually pretty simple. Most things that sound smart are actually astute – you are not being graded on your answer, you’re getting something out of it.

This all applies to spoken stuff too – public speaking, presentations, and the like – things are made endearing based on the narratives we create around them, and said narratives, while usually fueled by emotional context, are ultimately grounded in some sort of approachable reality. This doesn’t even necessarily mean hard truths or stats, but a context and understanding of the person you’re talking to.

Say you’re speaking to a group of people you want to raise money from – ultimately what you’re communicating is that their investment will be worth more thanks to giving it to you, which means compellingly explaining why your business is both stable enough to survive and thrive, but also new and innovative enough that there’s more money to be made. You can say things like innovative or revolutionary, but these are meaningless if you can’t show them how.

In The End…Actually Give A Shit

The reason a lot of marketing copy rings so hollow is that the person is writing marketing copy, and doesn’t really care. Brand tweets that attempt to emulate human emotion suffer because they are drained of any empathy by being from a brand – don’t pretend you’re my friend! You’re a brand!

This also applies to PR people, or anyone really trying to get you to do something. When someone comes to you and makes a compelling argument that is founded in actual thought and research, that actually flows through it. I sound sort of like a PR person writing PR copy now even writing this, and have had to delete several sentences for fear I’ll sound like the very falsehoods I’m trying to tell you not to say.

But really good writing that is actually readable and does something comes from a place of honesty and truth in your rotten little soul. It may not be the most important thing in the world, or the most emotionally-charged thing in the world, but it sounds like it’s coming from an actual person, which is what another person wants to read or hear from when they’re making a decision.

It is tough to talk and speak clearly, and be listened to, but it really just comes down to speaking the words that are already in your head.

This post originally appeared on the “Where’s Your Ed At” newsletter. Read more here.

The post How To Communicate Clearly appeared first on The Future Buzz.

Todays Master of Brands Award goes to Burger King UK who chose to start a thread on International Womens Day with the statement women belong in the kitchen a bizarre lead-in to how theyre creating a scholarship program for their female employees to pursue their culinary dreams a statement almost totally bereft of substance that was hooked onto an extremely old and sexist phrase. Naturally when told to delete this by another brand account (KFC gaming) Burger King UK decided to double down which is a KFC dish! Ha! by suggestingthat they should not delete a tweet that brought attention to a lack of female representation in cooking. According to my good buddy Caylen Burger Kings agency is BBH (which stands for Bartle Bogle and Hegarty possibly the oldest and whitest series of names Ive ever heard) who you may remember forturning homeless people into hotspotsat SXSW about 9 years ago (though that was their labs division). Their whole thing is being controversial and it works in the sense that everybody gets pissed off and talks about how much the brand sucks for an entire day. However PR loves to conflate lots of impressions about something bad and/or in poor taste as being successful. Everybody talking about something is not good and does not mean that people now remember your brand fondly. If you go into town wearing a clown outfit and yell Im The Big Pee Pee Man and ram your Dodge Charger into the front of a Piggly Wiggly store blasting Taproots Poem but your car also says WOMENS RIGHTS it may indeed be on the news multiple times but that doesnt mean that youve helped promote Womens Rights. The news is going to remember you as the clown guy and at best the clown guy who yelled he was the big pee pee man. People remember shocking and bad things and tend to not remember context of any kind. Being Shocking Is Not The Same As Being Daring I like to draw the line between being shocking and being daring is when youre attacking a norm versus challenging a bias. The line can be thin as norms are in the process of adjusting but basically if you go out and say something that is sexist or racist that is attacking a norm it is saying something specifically built to offend or hurt with the intention of eliciting a reaction. This isnt the same as challenging peoples assumptions about something calling out biases problems in society and so on its the line between making people uncomfortable because they have to question themselves and uncomfortable because you said something shitty to get them to look at you. That crucial difference is what people tend to miss they see the increase in attention as a way to reach new people without remembering how first impressions only happen once. Even if the person likes you before saying something dumb and offensive even if you end up apologizing for it proves that you care less about the customer and/or whatever thing youve chosen to be nasty about and more about the fact that people are mad.Rob over at BoingBoingmentioned a wonderful term Schrodingers Asshole which refers to specifically says something rude and then gauges whether or not they were bad for saying it based on how upset everyone gets which applies perfectly here. The problem with doing this kind of shock jock form of PR/marketing is its hubris. It acts as if its a deft use of the media controversy building impressions by harnessing how the media (both social and otherwise) loves negative stories without realizing thatthe major story about you is how bad you are. A new challenger in this space are the people taking advantage of the right wing victimhood narrative.The Goya Beansboycott came from their CEOs endorsement of President Trump a guy who had literallycalled hispanics murderers and rapists and seeing the freaks rush to say SIR! I LOVE GOYA BEANS SIR! THANK YOU PRESIDENT TRUMP! has convinced certain brands (and people) that there is a movement against white people and conservative values which theyactuallymean is a movement against people being bigots and marginalizing other people. The temptation here by brands is that there is a wokeness that is policing peoples ability to live and thus its good to challenge these things because people are being too sensitive. Its the age old idea that you can sell things by making them good or sell things by making people think other things are bad basically fueling their like of something based on their own hatred and anger versus their actual values. This workssometimesin politics because politicians are good at coming up with shit to make people mad about but in the case of a brand selling something hate burns out quickly. People who will buy something entirely out of spite for something else dont reallycareabout you or the actual quality of the thing youre selling and as a result your value proposition is as flimsy as the reasoning behind a persons purchase. Sure you get people who buy and use things to appear a certain way and put out a certain image but for the most part that only works when something ispositive.And that rarely comes from a place of controversy when someone wears or uses something to say that they support a cause thats one thing but when someone says theyre boldly being rebellious and standing up to a vicious oppressive force bygiving someone moneythe image of sacrifice and struggle is crushed. While there is an audience of people who are super into people who are assholes (seeTrevor Bauer) building a brand entirely based off of outrage and victimhood isnt a longterm proposition. The size of the audience that is going to be allying with you based on the fact that everyone is mad at you is a lot smaller than you think and their attraction to you is based on their own subset of directionless misery and comes with a heaping helping of capriciousness. They will leave you at any time. They arent really your ally theyre aligned with a vague idea that someone is keeping them from beating the drum of their own biases. Ultimately theres no reason to be controversialin this way.Being controversial by saying something to stand out in your industry is fine my own example being the numerous timesIve said how bad PR people are which I did specifically because I want to make it better but being controversial only to get attention and upset people isbad.Its useless to you. You dont need to do it. This post originally appeared on theWheres Your Ed Atnewsletter.Read more here. The post Not All Good Press Is Good Press appeared first on The Future Buzz. Original source: http://feedproxy.google.com/r/TheFutureBuzz/3/RUNMp-ExFgA/ The post Not All Good Press Is Good Press appeared first on connect social networks. via Connect Social Networks http://connectsocialnetworks.com/not-all-good-press-is-good-press/

I havewrittenalotof stuff recently thats more on the instructional side and I promise you that this isnt going to become a Substack thats entirely how-to guides. I also realize that the content has begun to oscillate rapidly between cultural analysis and How To Do Stuff but hey its free right? If I charged money Id feel worse about it. Anyway I was thinking recently about how my job works and how much of it really comes down to writing an email that makes someone do something. Its definitely reductive to say thats theonlything but it is also remarkable how often the process comes down to whether I can get someone to do something based on an email or a DM. Which is why Im writing a newsletter thats basically all about how that works and what it means. Some of this may seem obvious but based on 99% of PR pitches I see it isnt well-known. Why Am I Sending This Email? And Why Am I Sending It To This Person? Oftentimes emails are sent with little regard for their purpose or existence. Sometimes it may seem like they have a point a PR person sending a story idea thats barely if at all related to you for example but doesnt seem to have that logic flowing through it. The very soul of what you write should be dedicated to actually doing something and everything in it should be part of that purpose. Furthermore the email needs to actually apply to the person its going to. This means you should research them and understand not only who they are and what they do but how you can make the email youre sending applicable to them. For example a bad PR pitch is usually bad because its purpose getting a story is fairly vague and doesnt actually connect to the content of the email itself. A good PR pitch is written and delivered to someone that its applicable to and actually does stuff to get that thing to happen. In essence youre not getting a story youre trying to get the person in question to talk to the client click a link read a thing and take action upon it basically making it easy to do the thing you want so that the other thing you want will happen. If Im pitching a reporter with the intention of getting them to cover something Ill send them a short email saying what its about and end it with a clear call to action either herere the assets for the story (assuming theyre a reporter that would write a story based off of an email some quotes and images which does happen in specific industry press) or the same thing but it ends with the assets (because they will need them) and a question of when theyre free to talk to the client in question. You want to make it clear what you want and give them the person reading it specifically everything they need to ideally make the decision you want. This applies to basically any situation you find yourself in where you need something. You want to be writing something for the person reading it thats applicable to them with clear intentions. What Do I Want? And What Do They Need To Know? Say youre complaining to a hotel manager that you had a bad stay. The temptation that a lot of people have is to go nuts with threats and nasty words to scare them. That doesnt motivate anyone! What you want to do is lay out exactly what happened the consequences of what happened and what you would like in return. You can even layer on that youre unhappy and that you wont be staying there again unless theres compensation. The important thing is that the email isnt simply a screed of anger and poison even if you feel that way the person in question likely didnt personally do the bad thing and even if they werent helpful at the time being persuasive and illustrative is a hundred times more effective (and moral) than hurting someone. In the realm of PR writing an email to someone about something should generally come down to some basic things: Whats the thing? Whats new about it? Why is it relevant to me? What do I need to do to either learn more or potentially take action on this? Say Im pitching Gumbus.AI raised $40 million in a Series B. Theyre a company that uses AI to tell you the best vendor for enterprise clients. Most likely a reporter wants to know on receiving this email who funded them when the news is going out what the company does (in short but also not so short that it makes no sense) and why it matters to them. The latter part can come simply from good targeting reading their stuff and understanding what they cover so you can simply write an email that endearingly tells themthere is news its happening here the news is this and this is the person to talk to. It may be a little simpler say a reporter you read a lot of that you want to grab coffee with or learn exactly what they want to hear about. Make the email short and sweet hey I read a bunch of your stuff I know you write about XYZ but would you wanna grab coffee and chat about what you care about in detail? Or perhaps its a simple are you interested in this kinda thing I read your stuff and its on the edge I think? In many cases with reporters its not exactlythe thingto say I want you to write about this story mostly because their evaluation of whether something is a story doesnt really come from just an email. What youre doing is giving them the tools to make that evaluation themselves and usually them taking a call is a sign that yes there is potentially a story that they need to investigate themselves. If youre trying to talk to an investor about investing most likely your short email should include the metrics that would matter to an investor total addressable market revenue (unless you dont want to share it in a quick email) growth % over X amount of time unique things about you and cruciallya very clear ask at the end hey can we grab 30 minutes with you? Can I send you my deck? You dont need to includeeverything you need to includewhats necessary. Be Useful (And Easy) Whatever it is youre asking make it the easiest thing in the world to actually deal with. Want them to talk to you for 30 minutes? Give them your calendar availability or aCalendly linkso they can pick one themselves. Need them to speak to a client? Be ready to respond and loop in said clientand please god respond quickly. Want them to write a story about something based off of your email? Include everything theyd need pricing screenshots or images facts and figures and make it super easy to read like in a Google Doc. Pitching a story that you want to write for an outlet? Make it a tight 4 or 5 bullet point thing that clearly illustrates a narrative how youd get the story done and how much time itd take and make it clear youre available. Sending a proposal? Lay out exactly what youd do who youve done it for how much itd cost and when you can start. People who are very good at getting people to do stuff do not do so using black magic. They do so by offering people as quick and easy a decision as possible directly aligning it with their interests and making the process of saying yes as easy to say as no as possible. And they accept a no gracefully any response is usually a thanks for reading anyway or if it remotely challenges it is similarly quick and easy to read and address or dismiss. A lot of people treat the very basics of communication as a monolith. They want to cram every slice of information into it as possible and write what they believe is a compelling email when most compelling things arent based on the linguistics involved but on the actual content of the words the person is reading. Obfuscating fact with fanciful language is a great way to get ignored. Writing a huge amount of text is a great way to get ignored. Anything you do that will make the person say nah Im not reading that is useless to you. Pragmatism is always your goal. Always. And even if its a no you always want to get your emails or messages read and responded to. If thats not the goal what the hell is? This post originally appeared on the Wheres Your Ed At newsletter. Read more here. The post How To Write An Email (or Message) People Will Read And Respond To appeared first on The Future Buzz. Original source: http://feedproxy.google.com/r/TheFutureBuzz/3/oVBE6FTB828/ The post How To Write An Email (or Message) People Will Read And Respond To appeared first on connect social networks. via Connect Social Networks http://connectsocialnetworks.com/how-to-write-an-email-or-message-people-will-read-and-respond-to/

Reshaping The Online Experience For Virtual Events written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

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