Advertising Tips ....................................... 31 March 2000

This week

Three Tips for a Creating a Professional Image by Jennifer Stewart

More TimeE by Dr. Donald E. Wetmore

Quick Tip

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We all want to create a professional image for our businesses - this week there are three tips to help you do just that!

Don Wetmore has another excellent article on how to create more time to do the million and one things you always seem to have to do.

If you'd like to send any messages to the members of this group, you can do so easily and economically.

For details on how you can advertise in this newsletter

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Regards,

Jennifer

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Three Tips for a Creating a Professional Image

by Jennifer Stewart Write101.com

Doing business on the Web is totally unlike any other form of business because no-one knows how big or small you are just by looking at your 'shop front.' The term "equal playing field" has been done to death in connection with the Internet, but only because it's true. The first view of your business home page is exactly the same size as the first view of Microsoft's home page, or Amazon.com or the Federal Government's home page.

What makes these three different from many other home pages is the quality of the content they offer AND the way it's presented.

If you've had an offline business, you relied on offering excellent service, good value products and had one or more friendly staff to help you. Your customers could come into your office, shop or workshop and see that it was clean and well organised; they could talk to you and they knew you were honest; they did business with you over a period of time and knew that you were reliable.

It didn't matter all that much if your signs read something like, "Staff only passed this point" or "Your always welcome here," because people had so many other ways to assess the standard of your business.

However, on the Internet, your website is the only part of your business that's visible; it's the only way potential customers and clients can judge how professional you are and you only get one chance to make a good first impression with it.

Here are three little tips that can help create a professional - or amateurish - impression of your business, and they're all very easy to get right - once you know how. Have a look at the following sentence:

'Its the little things that count.'

What's wrong with it?

That's right - there should be an apostrophe in It's because it's a contraction of two separate words: it and is.

Grammar and punctuation are a bit like riding a bike - once you know how to do it, it's easy, and you never forget. The trouble is that many people went through the education system when the trend was to let children learn to write by "doing". The theory was that they'd pick up the rules later.

Hmmm - another fine theory from the experts.

(I recently came across one of those little comments that express how we feel about some of these experts: "The Ark was built by amateurs; experts built the Titanic.")

So the first tip concerns the apostrophe.

It only has TWO functions to perform and they're both very straightforward:

1. We've already looked at the first function - to show the omission of letters in a contraction: 'What's a nice kid like me doing in place like this?' (What is a nice kid ...)

'You're going to be sorry that you forgot your credit card.' (You are going to be sorry ...)

Note: you're is the contraction of you and are; your is the possessive pronoun - it shows ownership. 'Is that your horse?'

So, in future whenever you see an apostrophe, ask yourself if a letter has been left out and make a conscious effort to work out what the original word was before the letter was omitted. (Sometimes - as in the case of could've ['could HAVE', not 'could of'] more than one letter has been omitted.)

This will establish good habits and alert you to the role of the apostrophe.

2. The second function of the apostrophe is to show POSSESSION.

'We went to Marmaduke's site to download that new program.' (Marmaduke owns the site; it is the 'site of Marmaduke'.)

'At the zoo site, the children were most interested in seeing the lions' den.'

More than one lion owns the den, so the apostrophe comes after the 's' (it's the den of the lions).

So, the general rule is:

• if there's ONE owner - add an apostrophe and an 's'
• if there are TWO OR MORE owners, add 's' then an apostrophe

However, there are exceptions to this general rule ... why aren't you surprised?

For words which form their plural by changing internal letters (instead of by adding 's'), the apostrophe comes before the 's'.

'It was the children's turn to wash up.'

'Children' is already a plural word, so you don't need to make it doubly plural by adding 's' apostrophe; however, you do need to indicate the idea of ownership, so use apostrophe 's'.

BUT you do NOT use the apostrophe with possessive pronouns:

'After dinner at Marmaduke's restaurant, we went back to his place for coffee.' (No apostrophe in his.)

'The bird's feathers were ruffled.' (The bird owns the feathers.)

'The bird ruffled its feathers.' (The bird owns the feathers, but the pronoun is being used instead of the noun, so there is NO apostrophe.)

You will see its and it's used incorrectly nearly everyday and in places where it should never happen. An easy way to make sure you NEVER confuse the two is to ask yourself if the words 'it is' can be substituted in the sentence - if the answer is 'yes', then whack in the old apostrophe.

If the answer is 'no', then sit on your hands so that you won't be tempted!

'The bird ruffled its (it is) feathers.' NO!

'It's (it is) a lovely day.' YES!

The second tip involves a word that just doesn't exist in the English language - 'alot' - ain't no such animal, folks. You wouldn't think of writing something like this: 'My site has alittle information,' would you? So it makes you wonder just why so many people write sentences like this, 'There is alot of information on this site.' They're two separate words: 'a lot' or 'a little.'

The third tip covers another common error: less and fewer

How many times have you been to a website that announces it will sell you more gizmos for 'less bucks'?

Hmm ...

'Less' refers to quantity (a mass of something):

'There is LESS water in the dam now.'

'Fewer' refers to number (something that can be counted).

'There are FEWER apples on the tree this year.' (Because you can count them)

OR ... yes, you guessed it ...

'More gizmos for fewer bucks.'

If it's been some time since you worried about the standard of your grammar, punctuation or spelling, now might be a good time to do something about it. Every day, more and more businesses come on line but many also close down - the competition is fierce.

You can take steps to improve your writing skills so you can create a good impression with your website - by contacting your local technical college or night school, or by enrolling in a one of the many high quality home study courses on the Internet.

Act now and you'll reap the rewards for years to come.

If the spelling of words like "organised" in this article worried you, please read this: http://www.write101.com/aus.htm

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Jennifer Stewart (a High School English teacher for twenty years) has written a series of home study tutorials to help those who want to improve their writing. She also offers professional writing and editing services for web pages, press releases, advertising material, business reports, content for autoresponders, technical booklets and articles for newsletters, from her website: http://www.write101.com You can subscribe to free, weekly Writing Tips now mailto:WritingTips-subscribe@onelist.com?subject=Tips

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MORE TIME

By: Dr. Donald E. Wetmore

Time is the great equalizer for all of us. We all have 24
hours in a day, 7 days a week, yielding 168 hours per week.
Take out 56 hours for sleep (we do spend about a third of
our week dead) and we are down to 112 hours to achieve all
the results we desire. We cannot save time (ever have any
time left over on a Sunday night that you could lop over to
the next week?), it can only be spent. And there's only two
ways to spend our time: we can spend it wisely, or, not so
wisely.

We can effectively increase the amount of time available to
us each week by working "smarter" rather than working
"harder". In my twenty years as a full-time Professional
Speaker on the topic of Time Management, I have noted five
sure fire ways to make an immediate impact on increasing our
available time each week.

Engage an intern

Most high schools and community colleges
offer intern programs for their students. The student is
assigned to a real-life organization for 10-20 hours per
week. They are typically unpaid but do earn academic credit
and make great contacts and the organization gets an "extra
pair of hands". The person who is assigned the intern can
now delegate any number of things to the intern to free up
their time for more productive matters. It's a "Win-Win"
deal for both.

Run an Interruptions Log

It would be great if we could plan
our day the night before and then make that plan happen as
scheduled. The real world is different. We have to deal with
interruptions. Interruptions are unanticipated events that
come to us via the telephone (any of the electronic stuff:
beepers, pagers, email, etc.) or in person. Many
interruptions are important and are what we may be paid to
handle. However, many interruptions have little or no value
to our responsibilities. Run an Interruptions Log for about
a week. List every interruption as it occurs and rate its
value to you. A=Crucial, B=Important, C=Little value, D= No
value. After the week of logging them in, review the list
and take action to eliminate the repetitive C and D
interruptions and re-capture some wasted time.

Run a Crisis Management Log

Crisis management for the most
part is when the deadline has snuck up upon you and robbed
you of choice, you have to respond and you are a slave to
the clock. Crisis management is generally poor time
management because you're rushing, the quality of your
performance suffers, your stress level is elevated, and,
most important, you are often having to go back and re-do
what was done in the first place. "If you want to manage it,
measure it." Run a Crisis Management Log for a week. After
encountering every crisis, log it in on a piece of paper.
After a week of accumulating the data, go back through every
crisis that occurred and ask yourself, "Which one of these
could have been avoided?" and start to take corrective steps
to stop their reoccurrence and buy back some "smarter" time
for your weeks ahead.

Become a Speed Reader The average person reads about two
hours per day at a rate of about 200 words per minute. (We
get more information exposures in one day today than people
in the year 1900 received in a lifetime.) Speed-reading is a
simple skill that is easy to learn and improves with
consistent practice. The average person can easily double
their reading rate and thereby cut their reading time in
half or double the volume of reading material they can go
through in the same amount of time.

Do Daily Planning

"A stitch in time saves 9." Every
grandmother knows this. Every minute of planning will save
you nine minutes in execution. Walt Whitman, the poet, said
it best, "The most powerful time is when we are alone,
thinking about what we are to do." Daily Planning helps us
to focus on what is really crucial and important in our day
to come and permits us to identify time wasters in advance
to avoid them and use that time more productively.


Dr. Donald E. Wetmore has been a full-time Professional
Speaker for the last 20 years having made over 2,000
presentations to audiences from around the Globe. He is
available to conduct his dynamic Time Management Seminars at
your location helping your people get more done in less
time, with less stress. Don's programs are entertaining,
fast paced, and filed with practical, common sense ideas.
His seminars are typically rated as "the best I have ever
attended". For more information, contact Don via email at:
ctsem@msn.com or call him at: (203) 929-9902.

Would you like to receive free Timely Time Management Tips
on a regular basis to increase your personal productivity
and get more out of every day? Sign up now for our free
"TIMELY TIME MANAGEMENT TIPS". Just go to:
http://www.topica.com/lists/timemanagement and select
"subscribe". We welcome you aboard!

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Not everyone has the time or the skills to write all the ads, autoresponder messages, website copy etc that are a necessary part of running a business on the Internet - if you'd rather spend your time doing what you do, instead of agonising over how to word a sentence, let me write for you. Just email me or click here for my Fee Schedule.

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Quick Tip

Get something for nothing

The printing industry is notorious for specifying "fuzzy" quotes.

They'll quote each job with a "plus or minus" factor of 10% in order to
confuse you when you shop around on price alone. 

For example, if you order 10,000 envelopes, you might get 11,000 or 9,000
(10,000, plus or minus 10%).  Either way, you're charged what they print,
not what you asked for.

According to Bob Watson, one way to avoid this situation is to specify
"no overs/unders" in your order.  Chances are, you'll get more than you
requested, without paying extra.

Source: Markus Allen's Tip of the Day
(available FREE via e-mail)
www.markusallen.com/tips/default.lasso?A=25040

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Don't risk losing customers because you missed out on some of the basic language skills at school - you can enroll in my Home Study Writing Course and take steps right now to improve your writing so you present a professional image in everything you do. Click now for details: http://www.write101.com/writewell.htm

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If you received this newsletter from a friend, subscribe now and get your FREE, weekly newsletter which gives expert tips on how to write effective advertisements for your business

CLICK HERE!

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Jennifer Stewart offers professional writing services - copy writing, editing and proof reading your: web pages, press releases, technical booklets, newsletters, business proposals, reports or any other writing projects: http://www.write101.com

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