Archives for June 2012

Studying may be the key to doing well on spelling quizzes and math tests, but it’s a crucial success skill beyond the school walls. The ability to concentrate and prioritize without the prospect of earning a letter grade is crucial to children’s success in college, and throughout their career. Help your child master the art of studying by sharing these tips:

• Use your time effectively. When are you at your brightest? Are you an early bird or a nighthawk? Are you sleepy and distracted after lunch? Try to schedule study time during your peaks.

• Develop your concentration. How long is your concentration span? Find out by recording your start time when you read from a textbook or other course material. As soon as your mind begins to drift, record the time again. Try this several times until you can gauge your average concentration span. Most people take nearly imperceptible “refresher” breaks every few minutes.

• Read actively. Keep your mind alive while you’re reading. Use a highlighter to mark important passages; write down questions about items you don’t understand; try to predict what will be on the next page or connect what you’re reading with other material you’ve read.

• Manage your internal distractions. When random thoughts surface, don’t try to suppress them. Instead, quickly jot them down for consideration at another time. Sometimes a memory or a thought that appeared to be unrelated to your reading yields interesting insights into the subject upon later reflection.

• Create the right environment. Be aware of your optimal study conditions, and use this awareness to reduce distractions around you. Are you more relaxed with absolute silence, or with classical music in the background? Do you have enough light to read without straining? How is the temperature? Is your chair comfortable?

• Reward yourself. Remember that making the most of your study time means having more time for your other activities.

Some managers worry so much about what they can’t say to employees that they shut up and limit their conversation to “Do this” and “Good job.” But you can’t run a workplace without active communication.

These useful phrases and questions can help enhance employee morale and productivity:

• “How can I help you with . . . ?” This doesn’t mean volunteering to do employees’ jobs for them. Just make sure they have the resources to do good work and remove any unnecessary obstacles.

• “Good work on _____.” The key is specificity. A generic “You rock!” doesn’t tell employees what to repeat. When you praise an employee’s work, point out exactly how it succeeded to reinforce the results.

• “I want your opinion on . . .” Asking employees what they think shows you trust their judgment and value their ideas. But don’t ask for input unless you’re willing to seriously consider it. If employees think you’re just pretending to be interested in their thoughts, they’ll stop sharing.

• “Thank you for ____.” Don’t take a “That’s their job” attitude. Show genuine appreciation for employees’ efforts. They’ll reward you with greater openness and loyalty.

Over Easter I had the pleasure to spend 6 days on the Central Coast and go to Bluesfest. Five stages, each one playing live music for about 12 hours for five days – epic festival.

While watching the likes of Crosby Stills and Nash, The Pogues, John Foggarty, Maceo Parker, G3, Lucinda Williams, Seasick Steve, Canned Heat, Earth Wind and Fire, The Specials, Sublime (with Rome), Trombone Shorty, Buddy Guy, Keb Mo, Eugene ‘Hidaway’ Bridges, Brian Setzer’s Rockabilly Riot (The Stray Cats came too), Steve Earle, his son Justin Townes Earle, Slightly Stoopid, Zappa Plays Zappa The Melbourne Ska Orchestra and the Round Mountain Girls  to name but a few… I noticed some marketing ideas being implemented in and around all that music.

Some 80,000 people attended over the five days. Each person shells out a considerable sum of money. Over $100 a day for short passes once the line up is announced. You can get 5 day passes for $299.00 if you buy next year’s ticket within a couple of months of the last festival finishing. But most will buy based on line-up and pay more for the privilege. Add food, beverages accommodation and narcotics to the bill.

Peter Noble and the marketing team are putting their brains to work. They secured their own venue, which is a Tea Tree farm the rest of the year. Don’t snicker. They get harvestable cash crop every year that pays for the venue and its own costs. It is the agricultural equivalent of buying a large commercial space. Leasing part of it to your own business and tenanting the rest of it to pay the mortgage.

These guys are getting much more aggressive and sophisticated about their marketing and business operation in general. The 23^rd Bluesfest will run Easter 2013, (80,000 people a year for many years) so they have built a sizeable database of people many of whom are willing to come up every year and people within ‘driving distance’ of the festival grounds.

Now they are adding multiple single day music events, another multiday festival to their calendar. They already have a large database of music fans for a handful of specific genres. The database is full of big spenders – this isn’t a cheap festival. Odds are you get bands they want to see to play at their festivals and concerts then you can be sure that they will come.

Work to sell the tickets to these extra events amounts to a few emails, text messages putting up a few new web pages and creating a new entry in their shopping cart. That isn’t Rocket Surgery for them it’s only brain science…

This is the power of being able to acquire new customers to build your database at a profit or breakeven then find all these additional ways to make money off of the same customers. The value of their database to them has can be expanded no end because they have all these additional sales they make to their existing customers.

Every business can be enhanced by copying this strategy. But it can’t happen without that database and securing each person on the database’s loyalty with good products and services as well as a strong personal relationship. To find out how you can build that relationship with your customers automatically go to newslettermarketingsystems.com.au/get-started or call 1300 120 006.

Reviewing and reflection are two methods of thinking about anything that you have just recently learned. Reviewing can of course be undertaken mere moments after a question has been posed, a passage has been read, directions have been given, a comment has been made or an activity has been performed, allowing some time to be given over to think about what has just taken place, to process that information and then to react in an appropriate manner.

Reviewing also needs to be undertaken at periodic intervals over the course of a year, so that students have the chance to be able to revisit, clarify, relearn and then consolidate what they have learned to memory.

Reflection meanwhile encompasses not just the way the actual material is or has been responded to, but also taking into account the way in which one actually goes about the process of learning in the first place.

“Immature poets imitate,” wrote poet T.S. Eliot; “mature poets steal.” The path to success isn’t always based on coming up with your own unique ideas. Sometimes the best route is to follow someone else’s approach. From the book Steal Like an Artist, by Austin Kleon (Workman), here’s how to harvest good ideas from the sources around you:

• Pick a handful of thinkers to emulate. Instead of trying to immerse yourself in an entire subject, select two or three representatives to study at a time. The effort will be less daunting, and you’ll get a good view of the issues and ideas swirling around the topic. Find out where they’re coming from and how they see the world, and use that to inform your perceptions.

• Change the scenery. Don’t just sit at your computer when you’re trying to generate ideas. Get out into the world: Move around, observe your surroundings, record your impressions without worrying about how logical they may be, and then spend some time assembling your thoughts around the experiences you’ve collected.

• Widen your perspective. Avoid taking a narrow focus in your work—or your life. Explore different interests and passions. Most of the time your various activities will complement each other, and you’ll be able to use what you learned in one area on a different project. Keep your eyes and your mind open to the resources around you.

The other week I got a call from my 4 year old daughter Holli. She said “daddy you got a letter… Can I open it?” I hesitated a little, then and asked her to put mum on the phone. After a few questions and telling her if it was important to put it aside, I let Holli open it.

I hear the rustling of the envelope over the phone and my daughter shouts “It’s an elephant”… Totally confused at this point I wait patiently for more of an explanation…

I hear my 8 year old  son DJ chime in and get the suspicion that the phones been chucked aside as they begin to argue over who gets to hold the so-called elephant.

To my rescue, the phone is picked up by Cassi and she says “it’s a card with an elephant on the front” then she begins to read “Hi Ben, it’s been 2 years since we had you visit Skyscrapers BNI club in South Perth. We really enjoyed having you along. If you’d like to come visit again, please contact me and we’ll arrange a time..”

Now I was very surprised to receive this… I have received a card from them previously after 3 months, and had received 2 Christmas cards… But 2 years later, for them to still be making an effort to let me know they appreciate me, even though all I ever did was attend as a guest to a single meeting, which really impressed me!

We can learn a lot from this particular BNI club, they know how valuable relationships are. BNI as an organization is all about cultivating referrals and building business relationships. I personally don’t belong to any club, but I’ve attended various clubs and have always been impressed by the community atmosphere.

Hand written thank you cards, Christmas cards, holiday cards or even just ‘because I thought of you’ cards are amazing marketing tools that help build strong relationships. Like newsletters they are non-sales, so the reader doesn’t feel that your trying to lure them into buying something which takes their defenses down and give you some time to create an emotional bond with them.

If you haven’t got a newsletter going yet, but need to keep your customers loyal, consider greeting cards as a stepping stone into a solid customer relationship strategy. They are amazingly affordable and they can make all the difference between your prospect staying or straying when it comes time to re-purchase in the future!