Susan B. Weiner's Blog, page 48

Quotation websites for your writing

“What quotation websites do you recommend?” A friend’s question in response to my discussion of “Famous quotes make your commentary memorable” prompted me to ask my virtual assistant to research quotation websites. My VA wasn’t impressed by what she found. I’m sharing the results of her research, along with my ideas for other ways to find quotes to spice up your writing.

Quotation websites

My VA thinks BrainyQuote is the best of the bunch. It does have the most attractive appearance, and it’s relatively light on distracting advertisements.

Here are the websites she identified.

BrainyQuote—This website lets you search by author or topic. You can also sign up for a quote of the day, which may help you discover an unexpected gem. If you post quotes on social media, you may enjoy BrainyQuote’s QuotePictures, quotations against the backdrop of an attractive photograph. You can share the QuotePictures to social media—including Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest—with a couple of clicks.
Quoteland—This website has online forums with topics such as “I need a quote.” I haven’t tried the forums, but they might help you when you’re stuck.
The Quotations Page
Find Quotes
Wisdom Quotes—This website is overwhelmed by ads.

Online searches

You can find quotations by doing an online search. Here’s what I found when I did a Google search on “quotations about money.”

This kind of search may help you to identify other websites that are good sources of quotations.

Some of the sites may be general. For example, Goodreads, a membership site, has a quotations page. The Goodreads quotes page is driven by members adding and tagging quotes they like. You can browse the quotes by their tags. When I checked, one of the top post for “money” was one that I doubt many financial professionals will use in their writing, except as an example of what not to do.

“Anyone who lives within their means suffers from a lack of imagination.”

― Oscar Wilde

Cool Funny Quotes is a niche site with a humorous twist. Here are the site’s money-related quotes. Like BrainyQuotes, it offers social-media-ready images of quotations.

If you’re thinking in terms of visuals, Pinterest is another site to search. Here are Pinterest’s quotes related to money.

Books

Some books are rich in useable quotes.

Buffet’s Bites: The Essential Investor’s Guide to Warren Buffett’s Shareholder Letters by L.J. Rittenhouse must have plenty of great quotes. Unfortunately, it lacks an index.

When you’re looking for quotes, a Kindle or other e-book will make your research easier. At a minimum, a great index will help.

Compile your own collection of quotations

If you enjoy using quotes in your writing, them save great quotations as you see them.

In the old days, I recommended scribbling them in a paper notebook. These days, it’s probably more efficient to save quotes online in a Word document or something like Evernote.

Did they really say it?

Plenty of quotes are mistakenly attributed to famous people. I enjoyed reading a Wall Street Journal review of Garson O’Toole’s Hemingway Didn’t Say That.

The review introduced me to the Quote Investigator website, which explores the origins of famous quotes.

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Use Trello to manage your VA’s marketing help

If you’re a solopreneur like me, you may hire a virtual assistant (VA) to help with routine tasks like marketing. As your VA’s tasks multiply, the two of you may have trouble tracking them. You may find yourself searching for an email trail or wondering if you’ve told your VA about a specific task. That’s why I started using Trello, an online collaboration or project management tool. Here are my tips for using Trello to manage your VA’s marketing help.

Ask your VA what tool they use

When you hire a VA, ask how they track their projects. If you’re using the same tool—say, Trello instead of Asana, another popular tool—your communications will flow more smoothly because of greater integration.

However, different tools don’t pose an insurmountable obstacle. I use Trello, while my VA uses Asana with many of her clients. I think she has to import my tasks into Asana.

Set up boards that reflect your process

Boards are columns that contain cards that represent individual tasks. While Trello says that “a board represents a project,” I think of each board as a category of tasks.

My key boards are “TO DO,” “IN PROCESS,” and “WAITING for Susan’s input,” as you’ll see in the image below.

Each board consists of multiple cards. Each card represents a  task, such as “fix cover image–Draft LinkedIn post” in the upper left of the image. As you and your VA make progress on a task, drag it from one board to another.

A card keeps in one place all of the information related to a specific task. It cuts down on the number of emails you send and receive because all conversations about the task appear on the card.

Cards typically move from TO DO to WAITING. They may repeat the cycle by returning from WAITING to TO DO (or maybe IN PROCESS) before hitting DONE, a fourth board that is like a graveyard for completed tasks.

Pick deadlines wisely

Learn your VA’s approach to deadlines, and take it into account when setting deadlines and organizing tasks.

For example, your VA may wait until the deadline day to read about and start the tasks due that day. This causes problems if you have a big project due all at once. It also hurts if a small project is due on a busy day for your VA. If you have a huge project, you should break it down into small steps and make the first step’s deadline early. This helps VAs to pace themselves.

Breaking down tasks and scheduling them at appropriate intervals is probably a good approach for working with any VA. Time is money. The less time your VA spends assessing your schedule, the more time they can spend helping you with your marketing. Also, the typical VA balances multiple clients. I imagine that it’s hard for them to keep multiple projects straight in their heads.

Use checklists for multi-step tasks

A Trello checklist can help your VA track all of the necessary steps in completing your marketing tasks. For example, here’s the start of my monthly newsletter checklist.

In the beginning, I created one checklist per card, as with my monthly newsletter. More recently, I’ve created Trello cards that consist of multiple checklists. For example, my blogging class card includes 16 checklists organized in chronological order. It starts with a checklist called “13 weeks before class starts [week of 11/21]” and ends with “week after class ends [week of 4/3].”

Trello lets you copy checklists. After we complete one set of blogging class checklists, my VA will rename and re-date the checklists for the next class.

These reusable checklists have made my life much easier. I think they also make it easier for my VA to manage my gazillion small tasks.

Use Trello to track “use it or lose it” hours

Many VAs let you prepay for a discounted package of hours. However, they may not let you roll over unused hours into the next month. Or, they may limit the number of hours that you can roll over. On the other hand, if you need more hours than what you’ve prepaid for, you’ll pay a higher rate.

I have two monthly Trello cards to help me track my VA’s hours. A mid-month task asks her to tell me how many hours I’ve used. A late-month card asks her to tell me if I’m within two hours of using up my monthly allotment.

Archive or delete completed Trello cards

To keep Trello useful for a quick overview of pending tasks, you should move completed cards out of sight. This could mean moving to a DONE column.

Alternatively, you can archive cards, which would allow you to search and find them later. Note: your VA won’t be able to view cards that you’ve archived.

Deleting cards is the next step beyond archiving. If you delete cards, they’re gone forever.

Free vs. paid version of Trello?

I use the free version of Trello. When I had a temporary free upgrade to Trello Gold, I didn’t use it. However, if you have a technologically more complicated business than I do—or if you have a larger team—you may find a paid version of Trello helpful.

Bonus tip

Don’t make the mistake that I sometimes make. Don’t forget to hit “Send” after you create a new card or comment in Trello. If you don’t hit “Send,” your VA will never see your task or comment.

Also, you can read my tips on “9 Ways A Virtual Assistant Can Streamline Your Financial Advisor Blogging” on the Nerd’s Eye View blog published by Michael Kitces.

The post Use Trello to manage your VA’s marketing help appeared first on Susan Weiner's Blog on Investment Writing.

Top posts from 2017’s first quarter

Check out my top posts from the first quarter!

They’re a mix of practical tips on investment commentary (#1), marketing (#2, 3), public relations (#4, 7), writing (#1, 5, 10), email (#6, 7), and blogging (#8, 9).

My post about words to avoid (#1) seemed to resonate the most with readers. It also spurred comments suggesting more words to avoid. I was surprised that I didn’t receive angry comments from fans of technical language. Perhaps that’s because I said that “Some jargon is okay if your communications go exclusively to other investment professionals.”

I must thank my gym for its contribution to this top 10 list. “Words to avoid” was inspired by watching CNBC on the elliptical machine. Some words are okay there because CNBC targets investing geeks. But those same words will puzzle regular folks. “Marketing lesson” discusses my gym’s smart handling of an annoying problem.

Here’s my list of posts that attracted the most views during the first quarter.

Words to avoid in your investment communications with regular folks
Marketing lesson from clashing clocks
10-minute boosts for your financial content marketing
Financial PR opportunities for professionals—and they’re free
20 ways to organize a story
Personalized subject lines can backfire in emails
Quit sending press releases as attachments!
4 reasons learning to blog helps CFA charterholders
5 ways blog posts are like tulips
When do you push proper usage on your writing clients?

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Fixing compliance issues with comments on your LinkedIn Pulse posts

More financial professionals are blogging on LinkedIn Pulse, LinkedIn’s blogging platform. Sometimes this raises compliance issues that you may not know how to fix. Compliance issues for content that you post are easy to handle. But what about compliance issues with other people’s comments on your LinkedIn Pulse posts?

Compliance issues for content that you post

It’s easy to manage compliance issues directly related to the content that you post to LinkedIn Pulse—or any social media. You handle it by only posting content that you believe to be in compliance.

If you’re a registered representative affiliated with a broker-dealer, you should probably get all of your content reviewed before you post it.

If you’re a registered investment advisor (RIA), your employer may require compliance review before posting. However, many RIAs have a lot more leeway than registered reps. If there’s no formal review process, you should identify criteria for distinguishing compliant content from non-compliant content. You can also keep a list of recommended disclosures.

Compliance issues with other people’s comments

But what about other people’s comments on your LinkedIn Pulse posts? I investigated this after someone posted a spammy link in response to one of my posts on LinkedIn Pulse. Surprisingly, the LinkedIn Help person who responded to my inquiry didn’t immediately know the answer to my question.

However, eventually, I learned that you can flag and hide comments. Just click on the three dots (…) next to any comment and a dropdown menu opens. Click on “Flag and Hide” to remove the troubling comment.

If comments make you—or your compliance professionals—too nervous, then you can disable comments. I don’t recommend this unless your compliance professionals insist on it. After all, you’re posting on LinkedIn to deepen your relationships with readers. You don’t want to mistakenly give readers the impression that you don’t care about their reactions.

Managing Comments on LinkedIn Pulse gives LinkedIn’s official explanation of how to disable comments, as well as how to flag and hide comments. However, I couldn’t find the Settings icon that they refer to on my Pulse post.

If you have problems with LinkedIn, visit its Help Center. If you don’t find what you need, open a case using the contact form.

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One investment manager’s approach to writing commentary

Writers tailor their processes to their needs. Leslie J. Lammers, CFA, of Riverstone Advisors , shared her process with me after reading my post, “ A case against writing outlines .” Lammers has used this process to write almost 100 quarterly letters.

 

My approach to writing investment commentary

By Leslie J. Lammers, CFA

Here is my process:  do the research, hone in on your central points, put butt in chair, attach fingers to key board, go to the zone.

To write a letter that communicates, you have to have a view and have conviction in that view. If your view is not clear to you, do more research.  Read as widely as you can across the financial world.

If you are writing quarterly, start collecting articles at the beginning of the last month of the quarter. Sign up to receive pieces from various sources. Read Bob Johnson on Morningstar, read Cramer, sign up for Cam Hui on his own site, find some people you like on Seeking Alpha, sign up for Economy.com to read Mark Zandi and others on that site. The Bank Credit Analyst is also excellent.

Find some comments you believe in and build your view from there if you don’t already know what it is.

When you sit down to write, picture your average client and write to them as though they are sitting across the desk from you.

Art helps clients grasp the concept and retain it. You can easily find a graphic artist on ifreelance.com or other websites. Here is an example of one we had done.

If proper English usage is not your strong suit, pay an editor.  If you have a college near you, you can find someone who edits student papers.  Or use a freelancer website to find an editor.

You must write with conviction.  Adopt an attitude of “sometimes wrong—never in doubt.”

 

If you’re looking for great investment or wealth management commentary, you may find some in “ Who are the fixed-income commentary winners–and why? ”, “ Wealth manager blogs that my readers like, ” or “ Market commentary with wit and wisdom .” These lists were compiled with suggestions from my readers.

Given Lammers’ emphasis on writing with conviction, you may also enjoy “ Are financial predictions too risky for investment commentary writers? ”

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Writers, prepare for National Stress Awareness Month!

 

Do you enjoy stress? I don’t think so. That’s why National Stress Awareness Month exists. During April, health professionals strive “to inform people about the dangers of stress, successful coping strategies, and harmful misconceptions about stress that are prevalent in our society,” according to the promoters’ official website.

Thinking about sources of stress for writers, I came up with the three topics that I discuss below, along with their solutions.

1. Generating ideas

A blank piece of paper or computer screen is intimidating. You can avoid this stress if you are always collecting ideas. If you’re more of a talker than a writer, dictate your ideas like this portfolio manager. Alternatively, you can jot them down on paper or in an electronic format. One nice thing about saving ideas electronically—whether you use Evernote, Microsoft Word or Excel, or some other format—is that later you can search for a specific word.

Your idea list should always include questions that members of your target audience ask. You can also ask questions of your readers.

If no ideas come to mind, consider using mind mapping, which is a key technique in my financial blogging book and my blogging class for financial advisors. You can enlist your colleagues in a group mind-mapping exercise. Still short on ideas to mind map? Barbie may help, as I discovered. A blogging buddy may also ride to your rescue.

2. Finding and avoiding errors

It’s hard to proofread your own work for grammar, punctuation, and other usage errors. Plus, it’s embarrassing when errors slip through.

The easiest solution is to hire a professional to check your work. On a tight budget? Get a colleague to check it.

But sometimes you’re the only person who can check your text. Using software’s text-to-speech function is the basis of one of my most powerful proofreading tips.

Text can be perfect in terms of usage, but contain errors, as I’ve experienced firsthand. I have tips to help you get your numbers right.

3. Getting along with people who are important to your writing

I have written about how to get along with others whether you’re a marketer overseeing writers, a compliance officer, or a writer or editor.

Here are some posts:

Help employees write financial content for publication

7 ways to manage writing by committee

7 ways Compliance can work with investment writers for their mutual success

Reader question: How can communicators manage difficult portfolio managers?

Reader question: How to get writers to follow style guidelines?

An overall help for writing-related stress

You can reduce your overall stress by putting processes in place to systematize how you approach common challenges. Starting to create processes is a great way to kick off National Stress Awareness Month.

Basically, the less you have to think about your next step, the less stress you will feel. My post on 8 reasons you need a financial blogging process goes into more detail on this.

Even something as simple as creating style guidelines is a practical step toward creating a process. It can reduce the number of stressful decisions you need to make.

Thanks, Selena Soo!

This post about National Stress Awareness Month was inspired by an events calendar, a technique that I recommended in Use a wacky days list when you run out of blog ideas.

However, it wasn’t my post that sparked this post. Instead, it was Selena Soo’s 2017 “Publicity Insider” Calendar, a freebie on her website. Skimming my download, my eyes fixed on National Stress Awareness Month, and this blog post was born.

This reminds me that you should always keep reading, even if you think you already know everything another expert may know. The results may surprise you.

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Can you “impact” results? A case against using “impact” as a verb

Want to send a longtime, classically trained writer into a screaming fit? Write about how your financial strategies “impact” results. Using “impact” as a verb is as irritating to many writers as my husband’s early-morning cellphone alarms that go off before my alarm clock are to me. When you use the word this way, you will irritate readers who are familiar with proper usage.

Experts against “impact” as a verb

Bryan Garner of Garner’s Modern American Usage says, ” Reserve impact for noun uses and impacted for wisdom teeth.” On a related note, he says that “impactful” is “barbarous jargon dating from the mid-1970s.”

Grammar Girl Mignon Fogarty agrees, saying “Don’t annoy people with jargony usage.”

I was a bit concerned when I saw that The Mayfield Handbook of Technical & Scientific Writing says, “Do not confuse the words affect, effect, and impact, each of which can be used both as a verb and as a noun.” However, it goes to specify using the verb only in the sense in which it’s used with impacted wisdom teeth. It says, “Avoid incorrectly using impact as a verb in place of affect or as a noun in place of effect.”

Alternatives to “impact” as a verb

The experts agree. “Affect” is almost always better than “impact” as a verb.

Looking for an alternative? Try “influence.”

Here’s an example of how dropping “impact” can streamline your communications. Change “negatively impact” to “hurt.” That’s beautiful.

The case for using “impact” as a verb

“Impact” is widely—too widely—accepted as a verb. That’s why the experts spend time railing against it.

I cringe when I see “impact” used as a verb. However, I understand what the author means. In my mind, this makes it a less serious mistake than dense, impenetrable writing.

As a writer, you may have limited influence over decision makers, as I discuss in “When do you push proper usage on your writing clients?” You may decide to let “impact” go in favor of fixing a much bigger problem. I understand.

Image courtesy of Clare Bloomfield at FreeDigitalPhotos.net.

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Writing an email help request that gets results

“I NEED HELP!” This line will get your email recipient’s attention. But email help requests that sound this desperate won’t get the results you seek. Nor will requests that are too subtle. Strike a balance to achieve the best results.

Let me illustrate what works—and what doesn’t—with a before-and-after example of a financial professional’s email request for help. Imagine that you’re a financial blogger asking respected experts to contribute to an article, and you need their responses by a specific date. How would you tackle it? The writer of “Email help request 1” makes mistakes.

Email help request 1

Here’s “Email help request 1”

Re: article on my blog

Hi Charlie,

I am writing the latest article for my blog, which I update weekly. I think it would be great if you could contribute something to my blog. My readers are interested in saving for retirement and you write a lot of articles about retirement. Your good name could help me get better known in this space. Could you send me your opinions on what works in terms of rolling over a traditional IRA into a Roth IRA? It would be great if you could reply by the second week in March.

Compared with “Email help request 1,” the author of the next email writes in a way that’s easier for the recipient to understand.

Email help request 2

Re: Answer Roth IRA question by March 6?

Hi Charlie,

Our mutual friend, Janet Brown suggested, I contact you because she thinks you would be a great expert to contribute to my blog. Also, she experienced a boost in her e-newsletter subscribers after contributing to my blog last month.

By Tuesday, March 7, could you briefly answer my question about Roth IRAs, so I can incorporate your answer into a blog post? Here’s my question: How does an individual’s number of years until expected retirement affect the attractiveness of rolling a traditional IRA into a Roth IRA? After I compile my blog post, I will check to make sure that I’ve presented your views accurately.

My blog receives 5,000 views monthly, and my target audience of dog-owners in their 50s and 60s for my financial planning business seems to overlap with your target as a consultant. I’d be happy to link to your website and feature your photo in my blog.

Please let me know if you have any questions. I’ll call you next week if I don’t hear from you.

What makes an email help request effective?

I believe the second email request will be more effective than the first.

Why will the second email work better?

The subject line clearly identifies the reason for the email.
The first paragraph establishes a relationship between the writer and the recipient, by referring to their mutual friend.
The second paragraph says exactly what the writer is seeking, including the deadline for a reply.
The third paragraph (and the end of the first paragraph) suggests how the recipient may benefit from responding to the writer’s request. This contrasts with the first email that is mostly about the sender
Breaking the email into paragraphs makes it easier for the recipient to absorb the information.
The promise—threat?—of a follow-up may spur the recipient to reply, even if it’s just to say “No, thanks.”

The first email is too self-centered and makes the reader work too hard to figure out what the writer wants.

 

If you enjoyed this post, you may also enjoy “Top four email mistakes to avoid when you have a referral.”

Image courtesy of Keerati at FreeDigitalPhotos.net.

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Marketing lesson from clashing clocks

I’m a regular at my gym. I go there to use the elliptical machine, work out with free weights, and take spinning classes. But sometimes I learn lessons that have nothing to do with exercise—like the lesson of the clashing clocks.

For years, my gym has had two wall clocks facing each other. One was above the mirrors next to the exercise mat. The other was on the opposite wall.

For years, it has driven me crazy that the two clocks disagreed about the time. Sometimes they differed by only a minute. Other times, the gap was as much as five minutes. That made a big difference when I was watching the clock to figure out if I needed to go clip into my spin bike for the start of class.

I complained occasionally to management, but the clocks never stayed aligned for long.

One day, things changed for the better. But that didn’t happen in the way that I expected. The gym didn’t buy two perfectly aligned clocks. Instead, they permanently removed one clock.

This is a clever solution because it forever removes the potential for members to complain about a mismatch between two clocks that they can see by simply swiveling their heads. This solution saves time for management and costs them nothing.

What clashing clock can YOU remove?

Your business may have the metaphorical equivalent of clashing clocks.

For example, I imagine that you may have marketing messages for different products that conflict. You could spend time rewriting your marketing collateral. Or, you could simply stop marketing one of the products, assuming that it isn’t core to your business.

Or, you may be active in six social media channels. If your marketing isn’t consistent across those channels, you can drop one or more of them. Sometimes less marketing is better marketing because you spend the time to do a better job on your remaining tasks.

You needn’t limit your clashing-clock analysis to marketing. Perhaps there are components of other parts of your business that you can eliminate.

What clashing clock can you remove?

 

If you enjoyed this post, you may enjoy “Financial blogging lessons from my spinning class” or “Learn what works in winning clients.”

 

Image courtesy of Serge Bertasius at FreeDigitalPhotos.net.

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4 reasons learning to blog helps CFA charterholders

CFA candidates and charterholders have great quantitative and analytical skills, so why should they care about learning to blog? The ability to write a great blog post matters because good writing skills will carry you far in your career—and life in general. There are four reasons that learning to blog helps CFA charterholders at all stages of their careers.

Reason 1: Writing is an essential career skill

The world’s best ideas don’t mean anything if you can’t move people to act on them. Whether you’re writing an equity research report, a marketing email, a resume, or a blog post, good writing will boost the impact of your ideas.

Reason 2: Blogging is a great way to improve your writing

 Blog posts are short, which makes it easier to produce many of them. Yet each post must satisfy the basic requirements of strong written communications:

A strong title and introduction, which quickly relays your main message.
Information about why your readers should care about your topic—your audience suffers from information overload. Readers want to know “What’s in it for me?” before they invest time in your piece.
Reader-friendly writing—this means writing that’s well organized and economically written. A logical flow of information, informative headings, and strong topic sentences make it easy for people to understand your message even when they only skim it. Short sentences that avoid jargon make it easy for readers to absorb your details.

These characteristics will serve you well in most written communications. Financial professionals who have taken my blogging class tell me that they’ve applied my lessons to emails, articles, and more.

Reason 3: You may need to blog for work

The number of investment management firms in the blogosphere has been increasing. The range of corporate blog contributors is also expanding, from the strategists who’ve traditionally opined on markets, to folks in lower-level roles and with other areas of expertise.

Blogging is also relevant to CFA charterholders who go out on their own, whether they start private wealth management firms, launch a product, or do consulting. A blog is a great way for smaller firms to differentiate themselves with a display of personality. That’s much harder for a large firm limited by a bureaucracy, corporate branding guidelines, or other constraints.

All of this makes it increasingly likely that you’ll need to blog at some point in your career.

Reason 4: It’s fun and helps you think better

Blogging can be fun. Writing helps you to develop your ideas. It’s satisfying when a glimmer of an idea turns into a complete post. Even better is when your posts help—and spur comments from—your readers.

Start now!

You can start blogging today. It’s easy to set up your own blog using free software from WordPress.com or other providers. You can also contact other people’s blogs for guest-posting opportunities. I’ve blogged about how to find opportunities in “How to guest-blog on personal finance or investments—Part I Your approach” and “Part II Blogs that accept guest posts from financial advisors.”

Check out my five-week financial blogging class if you’d like to learn more about writing blog posts.

Image courtesy of stockimages at FreeDigitalPhotos.net.

 

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