Business & Freelancing

Email: We love to hate it. It’s such a convenient form of communication, but inboxes can get out of hand in a hurry, creating a virtual ball and chain that make us want to rip out the wifi, throw the computer out the window, and move to a mysterious island.

Or maybe that’s just me?

Well, if you know the feeling, I’ve got good news. You have it in your power to write better emails in a way that invites better (and fewer) emails in return.

The tips below are time-saving tactics I use to help me communicate more efficiently and effectively using email.

4 Quick Tips to Help You Write Better Emails

Whether you’re planning a meeting, deciding on where to meet for dinner, or just sharing an update, the tips below will cut the number of back and forth emails required to get the desired outcome.

1. Get to the Point (Immediately)

Imagine you receive a forwarded email from a colleague. It’s five huge paragraphs of text, and you have only the vaguest idea of what it’s about based on the subject line.

Ugh.

Do your reader a favor and state your point right up front, in a sentence or two (if you’re forwarding an email, do the same thing by summarizing it). By doing that, you’ve set your reader in the proper context to understand the details that will follow.

2. Narrow Down the Options

This was me on the phone in high school trying to decide where to eat dinner:

Me: Where do you want to eat dinner?

Friend: I don’t know, what do you want?

Me: I don’t really care, you pick.

Friend: Well, I it doesn’t matter to me. Whatever is fine.

[and on it continued until we’d both died of starvation]

Seriously? I annoy myself. What an awful time-waster!

For you, maybe the conversation isn’t about dinner, but it’s about trying to find a time to meet or trying to lead a client to a decision point.

Defining a set of options for your reader to choose from helps them make a decision more quickly and enables you to get exactly the information you need.

For example, if you’re scheduling a meeting:

• I’m available Monday or Friday at 4pEST, or Tuesday at 9aEST. Which time works for you?
• Would you prefer to meet via phone or Skype? My cell number is X and my Skype handle is Y.

Pro tip: For scheduling meetings, I use Calendly. That enables me to narrow down available times that I know work for my schedule and then invite someone to select the time that best matches their schedule. Once they pick a time, it automatically sets up a calendar appointment for both of us. I can also collect their phone number (or Skype, or whatever) at the same time.

3. Anticipate Your Recipient’s Questions

Questions inevitably lead to more questions. If you ask me where I want to eat, I might ask you what you’re in the mood for, and so on.

You can avoid unnecessary email volume by anticipating what question(s) your reader may have and answering them ahead of time.

Let’s continue with the above example, where the italicized questions are ones I’m guessing the recipient might ask.

If you’re scheduling a meeting:

• How much time do I need to block for the meeting? The meeting won’t go over 30 minutes.
• What are we going to discuss Please plan to discuss A and B.
• Will anyone else be on the call? Roger ‘ll also join us.

Pro tip: If you offer email support for a product or service, using this tactic in the form of a FAQ on your website is a huge time-saver. Even if people email you before reading your FAQ, being able to offer a canned response pointing to your FAQ saves you time.

4. End by Telling the Recipient What You’d Like Them to Do Next

Don’t you just love emails that never actually ask you to do anything? You don’t know how to respond because the sender hasn’t clarified what action you need to take.

Consider this example of an email through my contact form when asked: “What Can I Do For You?”

Wanna do online magazine names Calvin, godson of late great actor jeff conaway

My thought? I don’t even know what the heck that means, let alone how to respond, so I didn’t.

Wrapping up your email with a call to action skyrockets your chances that the recipient will respond accordingly.

Understand I’m not talking about marketing emails or converting in a sales sense, even though the technique has some overlap. This is about stating specifically what you’d like your recipient to do (or not do) as a result of the information you’ve conveyed in your message.

Back to our meeting example:

• Please review available meeting times on Calendly and select the one that works best for you.
• This afternoon’s meeting agenda is attached. Please be ready to discuss.

Or you may be conveying some info and don’t even need a response. In that case, say so!

For example,

• Hey! No need to respond to this — just wanted to say I enjoyed meeting you at the conference last weekend and look forward to reading your blog.

The clearer you are about what you’re communicating AND the action you need the recipient to take, the better chance you have of creating an effective and more concise email exchange, saving your time and, more importantly, your sanity.

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If you’d like to learn more about writing better emails and overall email productivity, check out these articles by Matt Perman.

You may also enjoy: Solid time management strategies that save you time and make you money

I wanted to be an astronaut when I was a kid.

I held on to this vision until 1986 when the Challenger space shuttle exploded just after lift-off — I was watching it on live television with my classmates and it’s an impression I’ll never forget.

It wasn’t long after that I decided I wanted to be either a magician or own a 50’s-themed diner.

The truth of the situation was:

I didn’t really want to be an astronaut; I wanted to eat space ice cream and float around in a puffy suit.

Freelancing is Not For Everyone

Just like I wasn’t really cut out to be an astronaut, not everyone is a good fit for freelancing.

Before I tell you how you can know if it’s a good fit for you, I want to define two types of freelancing:

• Short-term: This is where you pick up gigs between jobs to keep the cash flow coming or maybe moonlight on the side for supplemental income. You’re not looking to grow a business or necessarily be “in it” for the long-haul. Freelancing is simply a nice way to use the skills you have to generate some extra cash outside of regular employment.
• Career freelancing: This is a form of self-employment. You’ve hung out your shingle and you’re open for business with the intention of this being your primary source of income.

For the purposes of this post I’m focusing on “career freelancers.”

This sort of freelancing sounds sexy – I mean, who doesn’t want to have complete control of their destiny and call the shots?

But you’ve gotta ask yourself, do you really want to run a business or do you want to eat space ice cream and float around in a puffy suit?

9 Ways to Know if Career Freelancing is Wrong for You:

1. You’d rather have someone else make the decisions.

There is nothing wrong with this. Everyone’s wired differently and some may find it quite freeing to have someone else making decisions and setting the course. With that, you’re able to follow direction and feel a sense of accomplishment for doing your job well. But, if this is you, you’ll be an incredibly stressed out freelancer.

2. You think working from home is too hard.

When I tell people I work from home, I always get an interesting reaction. One of the most common is the thought that it’d be too tempting to watch TV or otherwise find ways to avoid work. Successful freelancers are highly self-motivated, so if you think you’re more apt to work in the garden than “go to the office,” freelancing is not for you.

3. You think working from home is so easy.

On the other side of the spectrum, there are those who think it must be so lovely to work from home – I probably get to meet my friends for lunch every day! To be sure, there are great benefits to having a flexible schedule, but it takes discipline to set boundaries around your work schedule and say no to distractions.

4. You like receiving a regular paycheck.

Who wouldn’t like to get a paycheck, right? The point here is that freelancing income is wildly inconsistent — especially for new freelancers who haven’t had time to get some systems in place to make sure there’s always a little something coming in or a big enough buffer in the bank. It’s a balancing act that’s difficult to manage.

5. You can’t afford (or dislike) risk.

A continuation of the previous point, going into business for yourself is risky — the odds of success are strongly against you. Depending on your life circumstances, you may not be able to take on the risk of failure. Or, you may just be a person who prefers a set routine and knows what to expect from day-to-day. Nothing wrong with that, but that’s not always the life of a business owner.

6. You’re reluctant to invest money to grow.

This goes hand in hand with risk. It’s tough to turn over those hard-earned dollars when you’re not sure you can re-coup the money. A successful freelancer sees the value in investing back into the business, because they’re confident they’ll see a return. This could be in the form of training, a new piece of software, and even knowing when it’s more profitable to outsource a bit of work than struggle with it yourself.

7. You’re uncomfortable being assertive.

Sometimes freelancing takes balls. Your paycheck is entirely dependent on your ability to go hustle up business. You need to have confidence in what you have to offer as well as a willingness to say no to opportunities that aren’t a good fit.

8. Your communication skills are weak.

You might think working for yourself from home means fewer interactions with other humans. That’s not the case. All day, every day, you need to communicate effectively with clients. The success of your business hinges on how well you can communicate. Take heart though, if this is the only thing on the list holding you back, this is an area you can work on and vastly improve.

9. You don’t have a plan for how to grow.

I assume you want to be more successful in 12 months than you are now? (By the way, success doesn’t always equal money.)

What are your plans to get from where you presently are to where you’d like to be? You don’t have to know all the answers, but you do need to have a plan. If you don’t, you’ll be buffeted along by whatever projects come your way and end up stuck in a place you don’t want to be. Successful freelancers make plans.

Well, does the shoe fit?

Freelancing is not for me.

There are so many choices we make everyday in life and so many directions we can go both personally and professionally.

Whether you’ve tried freelancing on for size and it wasn’t right for you or you’ve done some self-evaluation and know that’s not a path you should head down, then congratulations.

Why congratulations?

Because that’s one thing you can cross off the list. I don’t know about you, but for me, eliminating possibilities is the way I narrow down options.

Admitting freelancing isn’t for you doesn’t mean you’re a bad person or a loser – quite the opposite. It means you’re a person who knows yourself and is free to pursue work in an environment that encourages your success.

Freelancing is for me!

If you’re just starting down the path of freelancing, there are so many great resources to help you navigate the various aspects of freelancing: client relationships, billing, accounting, scoping, selling, managing, etc.

Below are a handful resources that I’ve personally used and found helpful in my journey:

Free:

• The Business of Freelancing with Brennan Dunn (podcast)
• The Freelancers Show (podcast)
• Double Your Freelancing (blog + other content) by Brennan Dunn
• My Secrets to Becoming a Successful Freelancer by Emil Lamprecht

Paid:

• The Ultimate Guide to Starting a Freelance Web Design Business by iThemes
• Writing Proposals that Win Work by Curtis McHale

Before I wrap this up, here’s a quick pro tip for taking on a new podcast: Scan through episode titles/descriptions and only download the ones that look most relevant to you. Downloading a history of podcasts is overwhelming. 🙂

Speaking of podcasts, I host a live weekly show called officehours.fm. Each week I bring on successful freelancers and small business owners from the WordPress community. Since the show’s live, you can send questions and have them answered on the air. You can learn more about officehours.fm here.

In the time that I’ve worked with the Genesis Framework, I’ve learned the biggest barrier to entry for folks is understanding how to interact with it. Because the Genesis Framework doesn’t follow the typical templating model of other WordPress themes, it requires a learning curve for both seasoned theme developers and beginners alike.

But once you cross that learning curve, you will soar like the eagle.

Keep reading for a visual step through of the core of the framework and let’s connect the dots.

A Framework of Hooks

One of the unique things about Genesis is its heavy use of action hooks and filters. Unlike traditional WordPress themes or starter themes like _s, Genesis uses templates sparingly and hooks liberally.

What that boils down to is that most of your basic customizations to a Genesis child theme happen via these hooks versus creating templates.

Let’s peel back the framework files and I’ll show you what I mean.

Framework.php

Here she is, in all her glory.

This file is where the genesis() function is defined; Anytime a template file calls genesis(), it’s loading up this code.

Let’s break down the basic structure.

The function is book-ended by two functions: get_header() & get_footer(). These functions are standard WordPress fare for calling the header.php and footer.php template files.

In-between those functions, we’ve got 7 action hooks and a smattering of HTML markup. These hooks are like little placeholders, or bookmarks, in the code where you can come along later and insert your own bits of code (or pictures of kittens).

Let’s see how this function would translate to an individual post.

Single Post

I dare you – right now – to stop reading this post, go open up the files for the Genesis Framework and look for a template file in the root directory called single.php.

Other than documentation, that file has a single line of code. If you went and looked at the file (or are a Genesis buff), you already know what that code is:

genesis();

Yep. The genesis() function is called which invokes all the good stuff we looked at in framework.php.

How does it look on a single post? Well, something like this:

This is a pretty vanilla screenshot, but you can see the post has a header, a content area, and other things below that (like footer widgets and a footer) not captured just because that would make a super long screenshot. The output on this post is a result of the code in framework.php.

Put it Together

There’s a fun little plugin called Genesis Visual Hook Guide that enables you to see where each of those 7 action hooks from framework.php come into play on the page.

It shows other hooks, too, because some of those “original 7” have more hooks that latch onto them. Hooks all day long!

Let’s see what our single post looks like with the Genesis Visual Hook Guide overlay.

Pretty cool. With the hook guide, we can see exactly where on the page a particular hook lives. That means that if we want to add something to the post (e.g. an after entry widget), we look for the spot where we want to put it and then attach a function to that particular hook.

Slow Motion Replay

In case you weren’t duly wowed by the Genesis Visual Hook Guide overlay, I’ll break down the correlation between framework.php and our post one step further.

Using the color codes, you can see what the get_header() outputs on the page, each of the “original 7” hooks, and (if my screenshot was long), what get_footer() outputs.

If you want to dig into each of these hooks further, open up those framework files and do a search. For instance, if you want to see where that do_action ( ' genesis_before_content' ) is used to hook content, do a search through the framework files for:

add_action ( 'genesis_before_content',

By the way, I purposely left the above statement hanging as there are multiple functions hooking into that spot. Just search for the first part, though, will net you results.

More simply, you could just search for genesis_before_content and see what you get.

You can start with any of these hooks and work your way back through the framework to see what’s going on behind the scenes.

Continue Your Learning

If you’d like to continue learning how to work with and make customizations to the Genesis Framework, I’d encourage you to check out my course in the LinkedIN Learning library (formerly Lynda.com): Customizing Themes with Genesis for WordPress.

p.s. If you don’t already have a LinkedIN Learning membership, here’s a free 30-day trial.

Okay, maybe the title of this post is a bit grandiose, but whatever. Here we are.

The Backstory

I participate in a number of affiliate programs and am quite opinionated about how affiliate links and banners are used.

Almost three months ago, I made a decision to remove affiliate banners from my site – not because they were bad, but because I wondered if they hurt my business credibility. For instance, would a potential lead come to my site and think about hiring me, but then see a bunch of affiliate banners and think “Wow, she’s clearly not making enough from client work if she needs to have advertisements all over the place. She must not be very good at what she does.”

I don’t know if that situation ever happened, but I thought it would be an interesting experiment to ditch the banners for a while and rely solely on affiliate links that I sprinkle into my content (when the link is relevant to the conversation at hand, of course).

The Hypothesis

I proposed that removing affiliate banners would not negatively impact income.

@cdils follow up post on your experiment?

— Jared Williams (@madebyjared) January 2, 2015

Read on, Jared, below are the results.

First, My Trends

Before I can make any meaningful interpretation of the last three months of data, I need to set it in the context of several things:

• Comparison relative to site traffic same period last year and previous quarter (presumably the more traffic, the more clicks)
• Comparison to income same period last year (January – March 2014)
• Comparison relative to income previous quarter (October – December 2014)

Site Traffic

Get ready – I’m pulling back the curtain and showing you my traffic data. This is like letting you sit on my couch.

Same Period Last Year

Interestingly, my traffic this first quarter of the year isn’t much higher than my traffic for the same period last year – it’s roughly 9% higher. That’s a little depressing to note, but then, I’ve also published very little content so far this year (40% less than this period last year). Note to self: Write more.

Previous Quarter

Comparing the last three months of traffic with the previous three months, there’s a decent bump (almost 14%). That would excite me, except that the previous quarter was an overall flat quarter traffic-wise; Again, probably due to a decrease in writing.

In case you haven’t caught it yet, there’s a direct correlation between the amount of content you produce and the amount of traffic coming in.

Want to get more people to your site? Write more. Click To Tweet

Affiliate Income

If sharing some traffic stats was like letting you sit on my couch, then sharing financial data is like letting you peek in my underwear drawer.

But I’m doing it anyway. That’s right – you won’t find Big Girl Panties in my underwear drawer, because I’m presently wearing them while writing this post.

Same Period Last Year

Now this is a fun one. Despite a modest increase in site traffic over the same period last year, I saw a 30% increase in affiliate income – $6,507 in Q1 2015 vs  $4,814 in Q1 2014.

One contributing factor is that a couple of my affiliate partners increased their payouts, but that certainly doesn’t account for the full increase. Somehow I’ve converted extra clicks that weren’t necessarily due to traffic. I really don’t have a good explanation for that, though I’m sure a deeper dig into site analytics could reveal something.

Relative to Previous Quarter

Good grief. If last quarter’s traffic and affiliate income were lower than usual, the pendulum has swung in the other direction for this quarter – $6,507 in Q1 2015 vs $3,864 in Q4 2014.

Keep in mind this huge increase is AFTER I dropped affiliate banners. Also, the traffic increase for this quarter seems incredibly disproportionate to the income spike. But I’m not complaining.

The Verdict

If you’ve read this far in the post, then you already suspect the verdict: Removing affiliate banners from my site has not decreased income.

Removing affiliate banners from my site did not decrease income. Click To Tweet

Now, arguably I could have made more if I was using banners in addition to links. The world will never know.

What I do know is that my site feels cleaner and less cluttered without the banners. Since this experiment showed no decrease in income as a consequence of ditching the banners, I’m going to leave them off.

One Last Thing

Stepping outside of this experiment, I did want to pontificate just a moment longer on the topic of affiliate marketing.

People read posts like this or listen to Pat Flynn’s podcast and think that affiliate marketing is some magical income source, where a fairy leaves deposits under the pillow every night. Now, I’m not talking about you here, because I know that you know better, but there are people out there that think that.

[The proverbial] you cannot buy a domain, throw up a website, stick a bunch of banners on like bumper stickers and expect the masses to come (and click your affiliate links). It doesn’t work that way, at least not for the majority of people.

It’s work. Writing content, earning the trust of an audience, building relationships — these are things that take time and effort. And you know what? I don’t do any of those things specifically for affiliate income. I do those things for my brand. Any affiliate income that occurs as a result is just gravy.

(skip down to my recommended email hosting providers)

I was on vacation in Cancun with some girlfriends. We’re talking the kind of vacation where I’m enjoying cocktails before noon, books on the beach, and just the right amount of conversation with friends. I didn’t bring a computer, didn’t have an international plan on my phone, and only had access to wi-fi for 30 minutes a day – plenty of time to message my husband, glance through my work email, and scroll through Facebook.

Except for an odd sunburn on one leg (which margaritas went a long way to soothing), I was enjoying myself immensely…. until the next time I got on wi-fi to check my messages.

That’s when I received a barrage of panicky, urgent(!) messages from a client who couldn’t access her website or email.

Buzz. Kill.

Here’s the problem with hosting your website and email with the same company

Back in my day You may remember a time when email addresses came from your internet service provider (remember FlashNet or Juno?).

Somewhere along the line, when we got comfortable with the idea of purchasing a domain name and a hosting plan, branded email accounts were something just tacked on for free. We were trained that hosting account = email account.

I wrote a post comparing web hosts and made an off-hand comment that folks should use separate web and email hosting providers. It opened up a number of questions, so I thought the topic deserved its own post.

So, why is it a terrible idea to lump your hosting and email in the same account? Let’s look at a few reasons why.

1. If One Goes Down, It All Goes Down

In maritime tradition, a captain always goes down with his ship. If the ship sinks, well, so long Cap’n!

Your web hosting account is the ship in this story (as it was in my client’s story above).

Now raise your hand if you’ve never had downtime on a host. I don’t even need to see you to know your hand’s not raised. Every host* – even the top-notch ones – experience occasional downtime.

Now raise your hand if your email is a critical part of your business? My hand’s up. I conduct a ton of business through email, so losing access to email is more than just an inconvenience – it’s a show stopper.

* I’m not talking about big fancy people who have multiple redundant servers, etc. I’m talking about the average man’s host.

2. Migration is a Royal PITA

Since we’re already doing a fair amount of hand-raising in this post, go ahead and raise your hand if you enjoy dealing with DNS, zone files, and MX records. If you raised your hand, leave a comment and I’ll call you next time I need those services because I hate it. I inevitably screw something up.

Breaking out your email from your hosting makes a domain transfer an infinitely (that’s right – infinitely!) easier process. Also, bonus points for not experiencing email downtime while your updated DNS propagates through the interwebs.

3. It’s like hiring the wrong person for the job

When I need a haircut, I call up my stylist. When I need my trees trimmed, I call my tree guy. Both are great with a pair of shears, but I can tell you I don’t want my tree guy cutting my hair.

I want my host focused on being the best freaking web host they can be – I don’t want them halfheartedly providing my email services. Let everyone play to their strengths, including your web host and your email provider.

And look, I know we’re all looking for a good deal and like to get the cheapest option available, but… I really can’t say this enough: If your business depends on your email, do not use free email hosting. That’s just stupid.

The email hosting providers I recommend

I’ve already recommended my favorite web hosts, but allow me to make some suggestions for email hosts. By the way, I’m using affiliate links below, but I promise they won’t bite.

Hover

I use Hover for both domain hosting and branded email hosting. I’ve never been a huge fan of their user interface, but they’re rolling out a new design that is much more intuitive. Their service is consistent and reliable (which is exactly what I’m looking for) and their customer service is excellent. You can actually get a human on the phone.

This is why I love @hover: A human picked up the phone after ONE ring. Total time investment to answer my question was under 2 minutes.

— carrie dils (@cdils) March 22, 2016

You can set up mailboxes locally or check email through a webmail interface. All addresses include IMAP, so syncing between devices is simple.

Here’s what the pricing looks like for a single email address:

• Forward – $5/yr
• Small mailbox (10G storage) – $20/yr
• Big mailbox (1TB storage) – $29/yr

There’s no price break for additional mailboxes, which is a bummer. I typically use one small mailbox per domain I own and then use forwards for extra addresses. For example, I’ve got a mailbox for my primary email @carriedils.com and then use I’ll use forwards for things like help@ or info@.

One irritation to note about Hover: You have to also host your domain with them. For me, that’s not a big deal since I’m already using them as my domain registrar. However, if you’ve pre-paid for many years of domain registration elsewhere, that’s cash down the toilet if you transfer it to Hover (Thank you, reader Y, for showing me either a new policy or one I hadn’t noticed before).

That said, for personal email hosting, Hover is perfect (and plenty) for me. It might even the best email hosting for a small business team, but I don’t think this would scale well for larger teams. And that brings me to…

Google Apps G Suite for Work

For robust business email hosting, take a look at G Suite for work (formerly called Google Apps). G Suite offers a lot of tight integration with other Google services (think documents, calendars, collaboration, etc) that are icing on the cake.

Also, when it comes to security, there’s nobody better than Google to stay on top of trends. I’ve always had really good luck with Gmail/G Suite spam filters. I also love that I can “unsubscribe” to a newsletter even if an email doesn’t include an unsubscribe link. As of March 2018, G Suite rolled out even better anti-phishing capabilities and protection against spam.

At $6/month for a single user, G Suite is a bit more pricey than Hover, but also includes those extra bells and whistles. And, frankly, $72/year is money well-spent if it means you don’t have to worry about your email going down. You can take it for a spin with a free trial.

Depending on your use case, there is one thing I want to point out: The email engine for G Suite is not exactly the same as what you might be used to with Gmail (presumably G Suite’s better). That’s well and good, but there was some integration I was hoping to get between my G Suite email account and my Gmail account that simply wasn’t there. (Basically, I wanted to check 2 IMAP emails from a single “Gmail” inbox – one a G Suite email and the other just a free Gmail account. Can’t be done at this time. Leave me a comment if you want to know more details and my half-arsed workaround. Also leave me a comment if you’ve figured out how to make this work!)

All of that said, the interface is so similar that if you’re already comfortable working with Google products, you’ll feel right at home with G Suite.

Of course, if you’re a conspiracy theorist, you may not want all of your data eggs in the Google basket. 😉

Other

There are a number of other paid email service providers (i.e. Fast Mail or Yahoo Small Business) as well as some free email hosts (beware – you get what you pay for – if your business depends on email, do not use a free email host). You can do some Googling (or Binging!) if Hover or G Suite don’t ring your bell.

Whatever your situation, there’s an email hosting solution that’s right for you that does not involve your web host. Do yourself a favor and start the move if you haven’t already.

p.s. There are some great discussions in the comments of this post. You might like to hear other people’s thoughts on the subject beside mine.

Featured image courtesy of picjumbo.com