A thousand congratulations to my friend and marathon mentor Pete, who finished his 10th marathon with a triumphant run in Boston on Monday.

Way to go, Pete! I’m so proud to know such a dedicated and talented runner and to have such a great friend. I turn to Pete all the time for advice on running and nutrition, and I am so impressed with his success.

Pete tells me that his marathon career is coming to an end. Ten, he said, is enough. (Of course, last year he ran Boston and announced that 8 was enough, but then he went on to run NYC and Boston for a second time, so we’ll see.)

Pete spent 4 years working to qualify for Boston, the pinnacle of marathons with its strict time requirements. And now that he’s run it (twice), he has decided to quit marathoning.

My second marathon is June 1, and I’m running the La Jolla Half Marathon on Sunday. I feel like I’m just on the way up the ladder, much like I am with my new business as a freelance copywriter. And I suppose I could look at running and writing the same way: even though I started both fairly recently, I’m probably not too far away from my maximum pace, and I know I’m pretty much at my maximum capacity for writing projects.

So, I don’t really need to keep climbing either ladder. I’m a good runner with a solid pace, and I’m a good writer with a solid client base. I’m never going to win a gold medal or a Pulitzer, but I do ok. If I were someone who sought a status quo, I could announce that I have arrived and put the ambition to bed.

But that’s not who I am. I embrace the ambition. I want to qualify for Boston. I want to reach beyond normal copywriting businesses to expand my company: speaking engagements, consulting, books…. And I can’t for the life of me imagine at this point where my 10th marathon lies. What will be the pinnacle? What is my benchmark in my business for the top of the line and the place where I can stop trying so hard?

It’s in my nature, I believe, to never stop climbing ladders. When I cross the finish line on my 10th marathon, I want to get online to book my 11th. When I write my first book, I want to package in the second. And just like my running addiction, my drive for success in this career is not motivated by money. I am simply excited by adventure and energized by challenges.

Frequently I’m envious of people like Pete who can achieve a dream and stop to enjoy it. Pete doesn’t have an unending appetite. He desired something; he achieved it. He can, with a sense of peace and pride, move on to desire and achieve something else. I love that my sister is happy with her family and her career and her life. She doesn’t spend nights awake in bed wondering how to satisfy her hunger for achievement. She has achieved most  of what she always wanted: a beautiful family who lives close by, a career helping people as a teacher, a loving husband who buys her tulips.

I admire Pete and my sister, and I wish I could turn my hunger off or at least down. But for now, I’ve got marathons to run, books to write, businesses to grow and desires to satisfy.

Oops. It’s 9:43 a.m. Better get started.

I’m pretty casual with my eNewsletter every month. I know it’s important to keep in touch with potential clients, but I don’t really make the time to do a fantastic job. Until this month, I called it the Avenue Z “FourWayStop,” including four little articles or tidbits in each issue.

Here are four things I have learned in the last few months that have improved my open rate considerably:

1. Spend lots of time on design.
   The first newsletter was pretty plain, but I felt like I liked the newer format in January. This month I completely revamped it, and I love the new format.
   
2. Always, always, always track statistics.
   Many of my clients have worked for years with regular old text email newsletters or attached PDFs. The problem is that they can’t see what people are interested in or even whether anyone opened the newsletter! I use Constant Contact to send my emails, and I track the statistics each month. I also get new ideas for articles when I see that a certain topic or link gets more attention. For example, in my last newsletter, I noticed lots of people clicked on the link for the free wiki. I feel an article coming on…
3. No, really. TEST YOUR SUBJECT LINES!
   I’ve been skeptical of testing subject lines out on small groups of readers before you send to the whole database — mainly because I’m impatient and want to simply push send. But I also doubted the validity of testing very small pools, especially when your database is small to begin with. But this time I created three different subject lines and send them to three groups of 100 people. One subject line received twice the opens as the other two! Thus when I finally sent the big one out, I got one of the highest open rates of any email I’ve sent. Nice!
4. Make it easy for people to get in touch with you.
   I made a mistake on an earlier version that I just repeated in this revamp. Frequently people who enjoy your newsletters will pass them along to friends and coworkers. When the new person gets the newsletter, you need to make sure they have a very easy way to subscribe. I did it really well in February, but I forgot to put the section in for the new format.

Have lots of time to kill? View my newsletter archive.

As a freelance writer who works from home, one of my biggest challenges is procrastination. I would have majored in it in college, but I never got around to visiting my adviser.

Without any further delay, here are the five best things I do to overcome my desire to push everything off:

1. Close out all windows on the computer.
   If I have open the statistics page for my blog, I will keep refreshing the page. If I have a Word document open for another project, I’ll end up seeing something I missed and diving back in. I actually will go in and close every single window first, then deliberately open the windows I need, even if I just closed them (like an Internet browser, for example). I need to set my mind to the GO mode for one (and only one) project.
2. Turn off email in every possible way.
   Email is evil, invasive, overwhelming and distracting. And it’s relentless. I can get anywhere from 5-50 emails in an hour. Almost all of them are one-way communications — things I don’t have to respond to. I turned off the little ghosted notifier that shows up in the corner. I turned off the sounds. I remove my BlackBerry so I can’t see the little red light go off. And I actually took off the “Send/Receive Now” button from my toolbar. Thus, when I’m working, nothing is pinging me or pulling me away.
3. Make a to do list.
   Every time I find myself in a little OCD circle of checking website stats, looking at email and flipping from window to window, I stop and create a list. I look at yesterday’s list, copy the remaining items and highlight the things that are due today. And then I clear my desk except for the list and get going.
4. Invoke your “get serious” voice.
   “Ok, Ziesenis. Get after it,” I’ll say aloud. Somehow I attribute that voice to a higher-ranking employee of the Avenue Z corporation. You have to remember that there are no other employees, and recall that I spend too much time alone. But just saying it aloud gives me a reminder that I’m at work.
5. Take a productive break.
   There are productive breaks and unproductive breaks. An unproductive break is a bath in the middle of the day (which happens), or a jaunt to the coffee shop for a well-justified cupcake. A productive break is a zip up the Hill of Death, a steep street a block away that helps me change gears between projects and focus back on what’s important. Sometimes I just stand on my front steps and stretch in the sunshine, which is also helpful. But to combat procrastination, I am cognizant that my break is a brief break, just a duck out the door to refresh before hitting the books again.

I’ve got a very simple philosophy about writing anything: start from the end user and work back. Always. Tell me what the audience wants, help me figure out what you want to tell them and give me some time to come up with the words.

This is such a fundamental law to me that I’ve never seen a need to take marketing classes or the like to help determine how to write things. My view is not meant to be arrogant or to imply that I’m the world’s best copywriter, but I never felt compelled to give my processes names.

Like I mentioned, I’ve never taken a marketing class. I’ve taken precious few writing classes, with the exception of three or so journalism courses and an ongoing creative writing workshop at Temple University in Philadelphia.

Although my simple philosophy about writing suits me well when I’m sitting here by myself with a blank computer screen, I keep revealing my lack of formal education when my clients throw out marketing and writing terms I should have learned along the way.

• Email Nurture/Drip Campaign: I ran across this about a month after I started my own business when a prospect wrote me to ask for a quote on a series of emails for their new nurture campaign. Uh… well. I searched madly before I wrote back. A company will send a number of emails or other communications to leads to engage them over a period of time, thus nurturing a relationship. The drip part of it comes with the regular correspondence — one newsletter every month with little tips every week, that kind of thing.
• Creative Brief: I’ve had two clients come to me about creative briefs. The first one sent me a creative brief before we figured out the deliverables. The second client asked me to write one with her before we got started. I’m still confused about what they are, but it looks like they are written analyses of the purpose, goals, structure and markets for any type of ad/PR campaign. I think. Here’s more…
• SEO: Sure, I know what this stands for: Search Engine Optimization. But that doesn’t mean I know anything about what it means. I still don’t understand how this search engine differs from that one or how I can get Google to rank an article I wrote for a client. But I do know that if I write something for a client that’s not worth reading, no matter how many people find the document through great search engine optimization, the content is going to suck and the people are not going to find value.
• Site stickiness: I first heard this term about a month ago when I started trying to get more hits to my own little blog. Site stickiness refers to the enticing look, feel, info, etc. that people will encourage visitors to your site to stay a while. My site is not sticky. People pop in for one article or another and pop out. But I don’t spend any time trying to make my site sticky because I’m busy trying to help my clients create content that will make their sites sticky.
• Benefits vs. Features: I’m really embarrassed that I never knew this, but again, I come at it from a different perspective. From an email marketing dictionary: “Benefits address a prospect’s emotional needs and communicate how the product or service will improve his/her quality of life or make him/her feel better. Features address the attributes of the product or service. Benefits are more effective in driving action.” I have a conversation about benefits vs. features at least once a week these days.

We interrupt this regularly scheduled blog post to bring you an update of a woman we should all get to know.

Last night I had the honor of attending a talk by Dr. Jane Goodall, the primatologist who, at the age of 26 in 1960, discovered that chimpanzees create and use tools to harvest termites from mounds. This discovery blurred what previous scientists defined as a clear distinction between man and ape: that men were the only animals capable of using tools.

She discovered this on month five of a six-month grant that was her only hope to secure a more long-term assignment. Her mother accompanied her for her first four months because the government wouldn’t let a single woman work alone in the forest. These two women lived in a leaky tent as Dr. Goodall did her work. Her mother spent many hours alone while Jane tracked the elusive chimpanzees who distrusted the “white ape.”

She told us the story of the chimp she called David Graybeard. He was the first chimp to accept her as an observant and helped the other animals stop fleeing. And David Graybeard was the chimp that she observed breaking off first a long blade of grass then a switch to harvest termites.

In a soft, cultured voice, Dr. Goodall, now 74, described being a young woman with a high school diploma who entered Cambridge University to earn her Ph.D. in the late 1960s. Fellow scientists kept telling her she had done everything wrong with her research — that she shouldn’t have anthropomorphized the chimps, that she wasn’t objective in her scientific observations. But she used her childhood dog Rusty as proof that animals have personalities and feelings, and she eventually proved the critics wrong.

How inspiring this woman is! How strong! She now travels 300 days a year to speak around the globe about the need for conservation and peace to preserve the Earth and all its inhabitants. I was humbled to be in her presence, and I cried when she stopped at the podium and waited quietly while we welcomed her with a standing ovation. I waited in line for an hour (with hundreds of people behind me) as she signed each book and paused for a picture with each fan.

Thank you, Erin, for inviting me to share in this experience. And thank you, Dr. Goodall, for being such a leader.

Visit the Jane Goodall Institute.

Discover her Roots and Shoots program for children.

Something we can all do: Buy Green Mountain Coffee’s Tanzanian Gombe Reserve.