German Dominatrix

A friend of mine had hosted all her sites with one hoster. The hoster went bankrupt yesterday, and almost all site backups were on the hoster’s servers.

Lessons to be learned:

• Don’t have all your sites (and domains and e-mail addresses!) with one smaller hoster, no matter how cheap they are or how much you are befriended with them. Distribute your sites between hosting companies.
• Always make local (as in: not somewhere in the net) backups of your contents. And keep those backups up-to-date.
• Have one e-mail address independent from your domains, like on Gmail.

This may sound like an overkill, but if you make your money with or via the Internet, losing your domains and your normal e-mail accounts means losing your business. In a heartbeat. So better take care early and often.

Really. The public pool is always crowded. When there’s school, there are classes around. When there are vacations, there are family with kids around. When you’re too early or too late in the day, normal 8-5 workers are around. And don’t even mention the retired people that clutter the lines!

It’s just the same for sales, right? It’s never the right time for your ads, your letters, you phone calls. Someone lately posted the following joke into a group:

“A salesman has four enemies - spring, summer, autumn, winter.”

And while that’s funny, it’s also rather true - and not. If you deal in candles, Christmas will be great but summer will be lacking turnaround. If you’ve got a restaurant with outdoor seats, summer will be great but less people will spend their money there in winter time. But for normal office work, the seasons aren’t a problem.

A friend of mine owns a cold call business, and she says there’s no good (= no bad!) time for trying. Okay, before holidays or late on Fridays, you may be unlucky in IT offices - but she has no “no-no” time in her schedule.

So, if you think about improving your sales, it’s primarily about choosing the right methods and the right target groups, not about choosing the right time. Or vice versa - if your sales quota sucks, don’t try to use the time of your sales attempt as an excuse. It’s very likely not the real problem you’re facing.

I just read the Freelance Freedom comic strip of today, and it amused me a lot.

Didn’t we all have customers already who want to have speciality#1, 2, 3, and later we found out that they actually wanted normal feature#1+2 only? Most people cannot say what they really want before they see the result. It’s so much easier to criticize something that’s already happening or existing as a text or drawing than if it’s only in your imagination.

How to work around this divergence between wishes and real wants? I prefer rapid prototyping. Start quickly with the project and make clear that you’re creating a first level for your customer - and demand feedback on this draft! Customers who are unwilling to have a look at your intermediate results should be taken with caution; they are likely to be unhappy with the final result. Working on a project is a two-way-experience, and any customer who sets you on the track with a “see you at the end” didn’t get that important point.

So start the work week with communication and have fun!

Sometimes the dragging keeps on. Maybe you feel a little ill, there’s only rain outside, your family calls you with some frustrating news and your new potential project looks like it’s going to die before even starting. And the little work you’ve got on the table does look neither inviting nor will it bring you a lot of money. But you’ve got to do it.

One way to overcome this kind of inertia caused by general low energy is to follow those tips for goal-oriented working, like “shut off your messenger and mail program, don’t answer the phone, then start working and STICK TO IT”.

Usually, that’s the way I go. It’s often a hard way that makes you curl your fist and feel like Hamlet, opposing slings and arrows. Not really a fun method.

But today, I tried an alternative*. I kept on irc’ing because it improved my mood to talk to my friends, I read mails, I watched King Kong (1933), all the while slowly working on my project. Of course, it was no comparison in result to a full-fledged, concentrated action. However, the snaily proceedings showed more effect than if I had smashed my keyboard, gone to bed, left the house or done anything else. So…thumbs up from this dungeon!

*Not recommended when the work is overdue!