The Tradeoffs Road Trip Give-Back Partnership
HELP! I need a non-profit/charity partner on this summer’s Tradeoffs Road Trip.
I’ll be going coast to coast interviewing financial traders for the book I’m co-writing with Matt Davio, “Tradeoffs: Leveraging the Longs & Shorts of Life.”
I want to raise funds for an organization that helps those who find themselves at the other side of the financial spectrum from the traders. Here’s what comes to mind:
- Low-wage earners (Habitat for Humanity)
- Millions at risk of foreclosure (Neighborhood Assistance Corporation of America)
- Billions who need better financial literacy (Institute for Financial Literacy)
- An organization whose programs include credit counseling along with other essential human services (United Family Services)
I haven’t fully defined the means by which I’ll raise money for the worthy partner, as I’m sure they’ll have great ideas of their own. That said, the corporate sponsors of the trip should be happy to kick in something for a worthy cause in addition to some of the grassroots efforts I can put into play, including:
- Motorcycle riders/clubs sponsoring a leg of the 8000 mile journey
- Sponsored Tweetups
- Side “wagers” on road incidents like flat tires, number of rattlesnakes encountered, whether it snows in SD while I’m at Mt. Rushmore, etc
Please weigh in with a cause or organization that fits the theme of the Tradeoffs Road Trip.
Yes, I Laid It Down
Now that I’m “street legal” I’m motorcycle shopping for the TRADEOFFS ROAD TRIP.
Here’s a little video of me doing the “quick stop” exercise in this past weekend’s course.
Tamela’s “Quick Stop” from TamelaRich on Vimeo.
Let the shopping begin
Yesterday I drove a sweet Triumph Bonneville. I felt sort of like I’d moved from a Shetland pony to a Thoroughbred race horse in the course of a weekend. I’m no gearhead, but even I know that 865cc means a LOT of engine.
It didn’t necessarily get off to a great start. Pulling out of the dealership, the ultra-responsive throttle on that big engine got ahead of me and, horrors, I laid it down.
Dealing with adversity
You can judge a person pretty well by the way they deal with adversity. Having survived childbirth, teenagers, three tours of duty in corporate America and closing down an unprofitable business, I’ve had plenty of experience. I picked the bike up (by myself, all 495 pounds of it), apologized for the lapse and waited for the berating to begin. Thankfully it was not forthcoming.
The owner of the dealership was concerned about me and shrugged off the broken clutch handle. Nary a raised eyebrow. He pushed the bike back to the shop, got a technician to replace the handle, and off we went for my test drive. This bodes well — if I buy the Bonnie it will definitely be from Mark Engle.
What I like about the Bonnie: it’s a bike I can grow into without growing out of. I like the sweet purr of the engine — don’t try to sell me something that grumbles or whines. Both my feet touch the ground when I’m astride. I know I can pick it up by myself (!) and it’s pretty. There, I said it, “it’s pretty.”
I’m also planning to test drive a BMW G650, a CAN-AM Spyder and a Suzuki V-Strom 650.
Any other suggestions out there, bikers? Remember, I’ve got a 28″ inseam and a cruiser is bad for my back. It’ll have to be a standard or touring bike.
Announcing Tradeoffs: The Road Trip
Those who subscribe to my newsletter got the worldwide announcement first: I’m writing a book and promoting it with an 8000-mile, 19-state road trip!
Tradeoffs: Leveraging the Longs & Shorts of Life
Financial trader Matt Davio and I will use the language and practices of those who trade for a living to frame life’s tradeoffs: time for money, freedom for convention, risk for reward, and money for goods and services. Matt’s been interviewing subjects on his website for about six months now, and I’ll do my part from the road (mostly).
Every week I’ll be video blogging about where I’ve been, who I met and what I’ve learned.
In a post-meltdown world where so many people feel the stakes are higher and the margin for error more narrow than ever before, Tradeoffs will introduce a general interest reader to how traders view “scalp,” “swing,” “directional,” “fade” or “breakout” trading setups, how they mitigate risk, and how they live with the outcomes of their trades to do everything from choosing a career, mate and preschool, to helping a parent deal with end-of-life decisions.
Traveling America’s most storied highways
From NC I’ll travel through TN and AR to pick up what’s left of the old Route 66 beginning in OK. I’ll travel through TX, NM then veer north in Kingman, AZ to take in the Hoover Dam en route to Las Vegas for a layover with my parents and sister.
From Vegas, I’ll head west-northwest via the legendary Pacific Coast Highway to Eugene OR. After a layover with my co-author and his family in Bend, OR, I’ll head to Denver, CO to visit friends before heading east.
On the way back I’ll visit Mt Rushmore and Crazy Horse monuments, interview executives at the CME Group in Chicago, then head south to a suburb of Columbus, OH where I’ll visit with my brother (who rides BMWs) and his family.
The final leg of my journey will carry me through the West VirginiaTurnpike (Blue Ridge Mountains) and western VA before landing home in Charlotte.
That’s at least nineteen states, three time zones and a good 8000 miles.
Along the way I’ll frequent Diners, Dives and Drive-Ins and other famous Roadfood joints and occasionally couch surf with the community of financial traders who follow me on Twitter and my blog. I’ll include videos in my blog a couple of times a week and tweet daily. Most people will never take a trip like this, so I’ll do my best to bring you along (in the virtual sense).
Want to be interviewed, host an event or suggest a layover?
Want to sponsor part of this great adventure or know a company that might? Here’s what we’ve come up with so far:
- Motorcycle and gear sponsors
- Hospitality sponsors (food, hotels)
- Petrol products sponsors (fuel, oil)
- Related products: brokerage, mobile trading platforms, financial newsletters
And clients, I’ll be able to work from the road. I’ve got your back — even from two time zones away.
SPAM Tweetup
Looking forward to seeing anyone who wants to talk about SPAM in Charlotte Weds, November 11 at 11:30 :
- Who decides when spam is officially SPAM
- Making sure you’re not mistaken for a spammer
- Best practices for email marketing (including newsletters)
- How to handle spammers
By nature, a tweetup is informal, so drop in at Mama Ricotta’s and meet some great tweeple. Not tweeting yet? This group might convince you to give it a twhirl.
My NPR 3-minute Fiction Entry
I entered NPR’s Three Minute Fiction contest. The rules are straightforward: using a prescribed first sentence, write a short story in less than 600 words. If I’m the big winner, I’ll be interviewed and have my story read on-air during Weekend All Things Considered and receive an autographed copy of the book “How Fiction Works” by The New Yorker’s James Wood, who’s judging the contest.
Here’s my submission:
The nurse left work at five o’clock. He knew what he was doing, leaving mid-shift, but it was time for a change. A mid-shift departure would make change inevitable.
Leaving the employee parking lot, he waived at the attendant and switched on the news. More reports of layoffs, expiring unemployment benefits, bank failures…yet, he’d walked out. Mid-shift.
Pulling into the potholed parking lot, he scanned the fenced-in runs to see if it really was Scamp they’d brought in. “Puppy prison,” he’d called it when his parents took him to the pound to choose a dog for his 8th birthday.
Prison. Maybe he’d apply for a job at a prison – plenty of job security in a growth industry like that. Maybe he could get a job working on death row, keeping the guys alive until the state could have its justice. He might enjoy working with those who’d accepted their ultimate fate, for a change.
Just an hour before, he’d advised the Johnson family that without a Do Not Resuscitate Order on file, the staff was obliged to keep their mother alive if possible. Of course he didn’t go running to an administrator just because Mrs. Johnson’s daughter slapped him, but his former co-workers would draw the conclusion that it was the “Johnson family incident” that finally took him over the edge. Cardiology was notorious for unruly family outbursts. Was it because there was usually no time to plan?
Death row. Opening the door to Puppy Prison he wondered how many they’d gassed today. The uniformed clerk looked up from her filing and smiled as if she worked at Dairy Queen, not Auschwitz. “Here to pick out a pet?”
“No, my vet called to say you might have picked up my dog – a beagle mix with an attitude.”
“Oh, yes, good thing he had a rabies tag. C’mon back.”
Fifteen minutes later and $50 lighter, he and Scamp merged back into traffic. Fondling Scamp’s notched ear from a long-ago-lost battle, he mused what a perfect match they were – their sweet faces belied a tendency to pick fights they couldn’t win.
Moving his hand to his own lightly-califlowered ear, acquired four days after he’d started the job he’d just essentially quit, he felt the irony that in that case, he’d tried keep a patient from taking his own life. God, that guy was strong. A monster.
Swerving to miss a kid on a skateboard, the sudden jolt swept Scamp and the cell phone onto the passenger floor. Scamp was no worse for the wear, but the nurse wondered if this was the last tumble for his old phone. He’d resisted replacing it because all the new phones had features he didn’t want. “Simplicity” was his new watchword. Life had gotten too complicated.
After a traffic report, NPR ran a story on the nation’s death panel hysteria. Yeah, everyone’s a little crazy right now. The living take their lives and the dieing want to prolong theirs. Whatever happened to the role of Providence in these things?
Pulling into his driveway alongside the lime green Beetle driven by the home health aide, he was glad his father was past noticing the early hour of his arrival. Pop’s days and nights were indistinguishable to him now.
Scamp pushed past his master. Trotting straight to the living room where they’d set up Pop’s hospital bed, the dog uncharacteristically stopped and whimpered. The aide looked up; “I’m so sorry,” she sobbed, “I tried calling your cell phone ten minutes ago.”
Next Q: Online/Offline
I’m having a good time responding to questions from my 6/18/09 presentation to CPSE. Thanks, ladies.
Q: With so much moving online, what do you bother to print?
If a tree falls and no one hears it...
A: I’m not qualified to answer questions about e-commerce and web-based customer self-service. I’ll answer this from the perspective of the solo-preneur who asked the question.
What goes online and in print varies from a person to person and must align with industry norms. For example, when I ran an environmental contracting business my market was general contractors with public-bid jobs. Contractors are low-tech, and expect bids to be FAXED, not emailed. Most of them have Yahoo or Hotmail accounts and a LIGHT web presence if any. I could have senselessly spent a fortune on multimedia that would have been like the proverbial tree falling in the woods with no one to hear it. Instead, I hired a telemarketer who made personal contact with the estimators and then followed up with a customized packet that spoke to our expertise on the kinds of jobs the contractor bid.
On the other hand, when I ran a software and services consulting firm we had to demonstrate our tech chops — everything was online.
Answer these questions:
- Where do the people you most want for customers turn when they’re looking for your products and services? Referrals from people they know or from independent raters like Angie’s List? Straight to the Google search page?
- When you’re at a business mixer, how often do people ask you to send them a packet of information?
- When you present your qualifications/proposal to a new prospect, what materials do they spend time REALLY looking at? What do they repeatedly ask for that you don’t often bring?
- Why do your competitors do what they do? They may have best practices or they may be laggards, but it’s always prudent to check them out.
- Do you represent a product or offer a service that requires buyers to hunker down and study to make a decision? Offer that online for sure — also in print if you’ve got lots of money to spend. When I meet a new client I find it helpful to simply sit with them at a computer screen and go through pages on my site and elsewhere. This assures that they’ve seen my site and gives them a constant place to go if a printed piece goes astray.
Business cards & postcards
Business cards are, in my view, still a must. There’s an ongoing and lively discussion on whether you should include your social media “handles” on the card (for example, you can follow me on Twitter @TamelaRich). I can see all points of view.
I also carry 4.25″ x 5.5″ double sided postcards that act as a mini home page. Most people, when given the choice, will take a p-card instead of a b-card. Given the nature of my work, that’s all the print collateral I need, b-cards and p-cards. Your mileage may vary.
How ’bout it, experts? What else should entrepreneurs/small business owners consider?
Next Q: Personal vs Professional Blog?
Continuing my series of answers from questions asked at the CPSE meeting 6/18/09.
Q: When should you have a personal blog and when should you use a blog professionally?
A: (From the perspective of a self-employed/solo-preneur who asked it) This can be a delicate balance. Find your voice somewhere between “faux big business” and the emerging “my-life’s-an-open-book” ethos.
Set the tone with your bio
Here’s a Twitter follower’s bio, (@ex-wirehouse) which sets the stage for the voice he uses in his blog posts and tweets:
“One time Infantry Officer, longtime wirehouse veteran. Currently Principal and CEO of Andover Equity Investment Group LLC an independent asset management paractice,successfully focused on absolute return investing. Proud husband and father of 7 year old twins. Discplined trader who is constantly humbled by the markets. In no way should this even remotely be construed to constitute investment advice, more aptly a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”
When you go on to read his posts, you’ll see that he blends strong professional views with a heavy dose of humility, just as his bio suggests he would.
For something a bit more traditional, here’s my bio.
Find your voice
Let’s say you’re a baseball card collector, you love all things about the sport but your paid work is interior design. How to get into the new media groove?
You might talk about the parallels between project management and third base coaching or dealing with a difficult customer with a personality like Ty Cobb’s. This makes you a REAL PERSON, infuses warmth into your posts and will probably garner you a following of other baseball lovers. Wow, imagine having a client roster full of other people who love the game — that’s the potential of your new media voice.
Next post: What to put in print/online
How to Quench the New Media Thirst?
I’ve got street cred talking about adolescent boys — mine are 17 and 20. So believe me, when it comes to technology, I’m like an adolescent boy learning how to deal with hormones; my ego swells and deflates according to the company I keep.
Last week I addressed a business networking group of small business owners and solo-preneurs. Their program director asked me to speak on e-newsletter marketing, but they wanted to know EVERYTHING about social marketing, from blogs to the proper form for declining a Facebook or LinkedIn invitation without offending.
Since nothing they asked stumped me, my head swelled . Like an adolescent boy, it doesn’t take much.
Getting the job done
Half an hour for Q&A was insufficient; books have been written on each question!
As marketing and media become more granular and everyone’s expected to publish SOMETHING, even a 140-character tweet, there’s an audience for what I have to say about effective business communications and plenty of opportunities to ghostwrite. But I’m a Business Person who writes like an English Major, not a new media guru.
Fortunately for us all there are technology scouts out ahead charting the best path to success. Given the thirst for new media information, I’m going to address the specific unanswered questions of the Charlotte Professional Saleswomen and Entrepreneurs through a series of posts and invite the REAL GENIUSES out there to comment on and enhance what I have to say.
Blog versus Newsletter: what’s the difference?
I love open source technologies, and I love WordPress.
The word “blog” is truncated from web log. Remember Star Trek, with “captain’s log” entries? Well, a blog is a web-based log of thoughts, activities, articles, and whatever else the author publishes in a “post” (as opposed to a web page). Lots of great (and free) software makes publishing a blog easy.
A newsletter can contain the same kind of materials that are published on blogs. Newsletters can be published electronically or on paper, but the blog is called a “blog” because it’s a web log.
If you publish both a blog and newsletter, they should reinforce each other. Your blog should be updated more often than you publish newsletters, so refer to blog posts that take the reader further down the knowledge path of the articles and topics in the newsletter. For example, in my recent newsletter I referred to six blog posts on how to keep your e-newsletters out of the SPAM filters. No need to condense six blog posts in the e-newsletter!
OK, that’s enough from me on this particular question. If you have further questions or want to elaborate on my answer, have at it — floor’s open.
Speaking on Newsletters
This week I speak to the Carolina Professional Saleswomen and Entrepreneurs on a favorite topic: Newsletters and CAN-SPAM.
I plan to start with a primer on the scary compliance stuff and then discuss how professionals can build their newsletter subscription list (as well as subcriptions to blogs, ezines, etc) with a solid CONTENT strategy, including article marketing.
I’d appreciate any advance questions you think I should plan to address in my talk.
I’m also interested in any research on this topic, whether your own or someone else’s.
Thanks in advance.
Your Reputation as a Spammer
You think you’ve properly built a subscriber list of folks who OPTED IN to receive your e-newsletter. Turns out, that’s not good enough. Your email might still wind up in the SPAM file.
Recipients determine who's a SPAMMER
Lyris, Inc.’s 2008 analysis showed one out of every four permission-based email messages sent to U.S.-based Internet Service Providers (ISPs) lands in the junk mail folder.
What’s up? While results vary by the filter policy of each ISP (such as Yahoo, Hotmail, AIM, etc), the report says it’s the sender’s reputation driving 25% of messages to the SPAM folder.
How do you earn the right reputation?
- Craft a compelling message.
- Don’t bombard your list — send no more often than your recipients bargained for.
- Make it easy for people to find the “Unsubscribe” button. If it’s easier to hit “SPAM” than “Unsubscribe” you’ll get a reputation as a spammer on ISPs’ scorecards.
Stefan Pollard, Lyris email marketing expert, points out that “The definition of spam has moved beyond the legal requirements of the CAN-SPAM Act to include any message that is unrecognized, unexpected or unwanted... This puts the onus on senders to make their messages recognized, expected and wanted. Until they do, invited email will continue to be delivered to the bulk folder.”
Spam filter trigger words:
Act Now! Free! 50% off! While Supplies last
Click Here Call now! Earn $ Why pay more?
Discount! You’re a Winner! Credit Serious Cash
Weight Opportunity Compare Double Your Income
Removes Collect Amazing Work from Home
Offer As Seen On… Click Here “Stop” or “Stops”
Buy Direct Loans Buy Direct Satisfaction Guaranteed
Subscribe All Natural Winner Avoid Bankruptcy
Promise You Cash Easy Terms Special Promotion
Get Paid Great offer One time Guarantee, Guaranteed
Join millions No cost, No fees Order Now Online Marketing
Please Read Don’t Delete Save up to Time Limited
Problems with promotional email
In a study by Merkle, “View from the Inbox,” 2009, the main reasons subscribers choose to opt out of email programs, are perceived irrelevance (75%) and sending too frequently (73%).
Promotional emails were deemed the most intrusive. Solution? Make your newsletter informative, not promotional.
Merkle reported that 20% of those receiving e-newsletters thought they were worthy of reading, and received, on average,about eight newsletters each month. That’s a heap of competition for YOUR customers’ attention.
Your reputation intact
If you can’t do the job in house, pay a good ghostwriter/copywriter. You’ll offset by the fees with savings to your reputation with customers and ISPs.
When you decide to outsource, be sure you hire someone who not only can cut a phrase and punctuate, but also who knows your firm/industry. That is, unless you really want to bring a writer up the learning curve(!)
Pardon my plug to consider my turnkey newsletter service. When you go to the trouble of communicating with customers, track results so you know what’s working and what’s not. My service includes custom templates with analytics that can tell you details like who opened what link in what browser.
Speaking engagement
At the kind invitation of the Carolinas Professinal Saleswomen and Entrepreneurs, I’ll be speaking on CAN-SPAM and e-newsletters June 18. Hope to see you there.
