In Which I Cut a Dashing Figure

What with one thing and another, I never got to sleep last night. Now it's 8:00, and I have a staff meeting to attend at 9:30. But I puttered around and got things done. I've just finished my second breakfast, à la Holbytlan -- first breakfast was before the store was open, the second was after the shopping trip. I've been setting up a mailing list for my massage newsletter, which I've meant to start sending out ever since I began practicing, and have been collecting email addresses for (you can opt in on my intake interview forms, and soon, I hope, on my massage web page) from day one, but which I've never gotten around to: a bit comical, given how much I babble on here, but this is an audience that found its way here because it likes to hear me babble on, bizarre though that has always seemed to me: writing for an audience that just wanted massage is a different matter. I have always been way too sensitive to the possibility that someone, somewhere, might dislike something I have to say: that's why I was such a dismally bad teacher.

(Okay, I actually was a mediocre teacher. Some students really liked me. But only being a brilliant, life-changing teacher would have made the agonies of standing up in front of bored classroom endurable to me.)

But I digress. I've signed up with MailChimp, which is free if you have under 100 subscribers -- a neat model for attracting small business, I've always thought: when you get your 101st subscriber, are you going to fuss about the modest monthly fees? No, you'll stick with the software you know, where your data already lives, where your account is already configured, and that you've learned to trust.

Sorry. Just drifted off to sleep. Where was I? Oh yes! The wonderful Pronoia recommended Michael Port's book, Book Yourself Solid, to me, and he told me in no uncertain terms that I have to keep in touch with my clients. I know he's right. And besides, I would like to. So I'm working on that.

I like Port. He says some smart things right off the bat, and he doesn't want to make me into somebody I'm not. And he's not a hot-air marketer: almost the very first thing he says is that you have to make yourself genuinely the best person for the job: you have to make yourself an expert, the person to go to for X. Imagine, a marketing book by someone who thinks that the quality of what you have to sell matters! I'm surprised they didn't drum him out of the profession. (Okay, that was the lack of sleep talking. The only marketers I've known have not been anything like the Dilbert caricatures.)

Um... so what was I talking about? I'm going to cut a dashing figure in this staff meeting, I can tell you.