Monday is Memorial Day. Most of the country, including all of my clients, will be taking the day off. But I plan to work, perhaps finish up some billing, plow through the editing of a website I need to finish, knock out an article on the results of a survey. Maybe I’ll follow up with some leads I’ve left hanging, or try to update my own website with its woefully out of date samples and text.

As a small business owner and a single woman who lives alone, I’m not sure what I’d really do with a day off. When I was dating, I guess a day off would mean a little side trip or a fun day watching movies. When I’m here in my house by myself, I’m working, or at least I’m sitting here at the computer. I guess sometimes it means I’m sitting in the bathtub or taking a nap, but full days here of doing nothing are out of the question.

There are days I don’t work, but I don’t spend them here. On Saturdays I do my long runs with Team in Training, the fundraising arm of The Leukemia and Lymphoma Society. Perhaps a hundred of us have been meeting every Saturday for four months to run between 4 and 20 miles. But tomorrow we do 8 and have the final pep talk for the Rock ‘n’ Roll Marathon, which is June 1. After the marathon, I’ll either find another group to run with on Saturdays or I’ll go back to spending Friday and Saturday nights at the gym and working during the day. (It’s not as pathetic as it sounds, and if it is, don’t tell me.)

I also meet friends for coffee, attend a dinner on occasion, run hither and yon with Erin, congregate at the track on Thursday mornings with a dozen other people who like to torture themselves…. I’m not entirely alone all the time. But because I live and work at home by myself, I don’t think I’ll get back that relaxed weekend leisure time, when someone calls to ask, “Whatcha up to?” and I answer honestly, “Nuthin. Just hanging out.”

I’m wearing purple socks today: purple cashmere socks that a San Diego ex-boyfriend I don’t really count gave to me for my birthday a couple of years ago. They’re soft and warm, and the purple is regal and strong.

Somehow purple socks give me some kind of internal strength. I always wear purple socks on days when I need a little extra energy, a little more drive. I think I have the largest purple sock collection in the world, next to Donny Osmond, who wore them on The Donny and Marie Show. (It’s sad that I know that.)

Today I’m hosting my second educational webinar, this time on Free and Low-Cost Tools Your Organization Can’t Live Without. Since I rely on a very small number of clients who each ask me to work on quite a few projects, I worry that if I lose one, I will lose a big hunk of business. So I market my services from time to time with free webinars like this one. I usually end up getting a couple of warm leads from the audience.

Last night I slowly and methodically reviewed my material, and I keep trying to envision the webinar, hearing my voice as strong and confident, telling little jokes to keep the audience interested, sharing important tools that will help people and wearing my purple socks.

Visualizing success is vital, either with the webinar or with running. I was at track this morning, this being the last really full-on workout before the marathon June 1. The coach was starting to pump us up for the run, helping us start to visualize the race, imagine ourselves at the beginning, the halfway point, close to the end, crossing the finish line. I don’t have purple running socks, unfortunately, but in my mind my feet reached out far across the finish line, bright purple socks practically aglow.

So, today as I do my webinar to help with my marketing to grow my business, I’m going to concentrate on visualizing success, and I’m going to remember I’m wearing purple socks. Everything should go just fine.

Gulp.

1. Need to fix something? CTRL + Z is Undo, but need to unfix what you just undid? CTRL + Y is Redo.
2. Have too many windows open? Hold down the ALT key and press TAB. A small window will let you tab through your open windows and applications.
3. Headline a little too big? CTRL + [ will shrink your font a size. CTRL + ] will grow it.
4. CTRL + H will open the Find and Replace window. I use this all the time to take out the second space after the period between sentences, to change all the capitalizations of a title, etc.
5. CTRL + Enter will insert a page break in Word, and SHIFT + Enter inserts a soft line break so you can, for example, add info under a bullet without adding another bullet.
6. CTRL + N opens a new document. CTRL + O opens a document. CTRL + W closes a document.

I have a deadline in 37 minutes for a project that came in yesterday.

Why the hell don’t I keep chocolate in this house?

This is an emergency!

Warning: this post may make you paranoid…

I’m writing an article about organizations’ use of wikis, and I sent out a small email blast to a select group of contacts. I got a note back from my mother:

Beth, I don’t know if I have a wiki. What is a wiki?

I know my mom doesn’t have a wiki. Why in the world would I have selected her for an email blast about wikis?

Mom was in that select group of contacts because I created a list of people who had engaged in some of my previous emails. I wrote the email blast about wikis to make it look personal, and I sent it to people who had clicked on at least one link in at least one of my emails in the past.

Tracking email behavior is quite a science. Each time I send a newsletter out, I get reports of how many emails were delivered, how many people opened the email, how many people clicked on the email, how many times, etc. And I know exactly who clicked and when. I know that San Diego ex-boyfriend #1 opens each email exactly one time but doesn’t click on anything. I know San Diego ex-boyfriend #2 went to my website the other day, and that made my heart race a little (was he going to call? Nope.). [I also know that after this post, both San Diego ex-boyfriends are going to unsubscribe from everything with my name on it.]

My basic little email service costs $30 a month. As a freelance copywriter, I find myself creating more and more email campaigns for companies who have invested thousands in sophisticated email tracking/drip marketing services. We write one email, and based on what the person does from that first email (clicks this, ignores that), we write other emails that will go out automatically. For example, I get emails from Staples. I was looking for furniture for my new office, so I clicked on a furniture ad. For the next three weeks, I received all kinds of ads from Staples about office furniture sales. This is not a coincidence.

When I tell people I write email campaigns like this, I’m often surprised about how surprised people are that their behaviors are being tracked. But this has been happening for many years. Systems are getting more sophisticated, but for quite some time people have been able to determine if you’ve taken any action on an email you received. The same goes for your click behavior on a website. People can tell where you came in, what you clicked, how long you stayed, where you left, etc.

Of course, I teach sessions on improving your email open rate, and I’m equally surprised about the number of organizations that do not track email statistics. I work with a lot of professional nonprofit associations, and many are still using the BCC method for mass emails, where they officially send the email to themselves and put hundreds of recipients into the BCC field.

When I track people’s clicking habits, I find out what types of topics interest my readers. For example, my last newsletter focused on free and low-cost tech tools, and I had a small teaser of some of the tools in the body of the email. An unusually high number of people clicked on the link to the free wiki, and that prompted my decision to write an article about organizations’ use of wikis. I can also see who clicks through to my website, and that gives me info about who might be interested in my services. But I generally don’t bug people. I just like the stats.