heartharmony.com.au

When you are hiring a new employee you want to find out if the person will be a great match for your role. You want to discover a bit more about them as a person and how they generally operate under both normal and stressful situations.

Let’s be honest – you would dearly love to find out if they are stalkers, likely to rob your company or create a lawsuit by their bizarre behaviour towards clients … but you can’t generally ask those sort of questions.

That’s why I loved this article in the Indianapolos star. It talked about weird interview questions and here are some of my favourites:

• which character on Seinfeld are you most like and why
• if you were a fruit what kind would you be and why
• what movie star would be the best kind of employee and why
• what colour describes your personality

These are all great questions to reflect on your personality – but not in a job interview! Particularly the one about “are you a placid pool or a running horse”?

If you are going to ask questions, ask ones that are based on experience that transfers to your job. “Tell me about the best team you worked for and what made them a great team”, “describe the qualities of your favourite boss you have worked for”, “how would we know you are under stress” are more likely to get sensible answers than the fruit question.

Have a great weekend!

From running horse Ingrid

Heart Harmony

Putting your business into words

Have you ever looked at your website in different web browsers? Many people use Internet Explorer, but many more use things like Firefox, Flock, Opera, Navigator (the list goes on). There are also many more people checking out websites from their mobile phones and PDAs.

What looks brilliant in Explorer may look like a pile of dog food in another browser (or a mobile phone) which means you are losing sales and customers.

I have 3 different browsers installed on my work computer and check out pages on each of the three browsers to make sure the site looks OK across the three of them. It may not be perfect – but at least it gives me an idea of what I am up against!

Recently I have had a few clients whose websites just didn’t work across the 3 browsers – which meant they were throwing away at least 10% of all site visitors before they even had read the first word on the page (for a copywriter that is just straight sacrilege!).

If your site doesn’t look great across different browsers, it is time to visit your friendly web developer to get your site updated.

While you are there – ask them to put in a permanent 301 redirect for your website. There is a historical quirk that means Google (and other search engines) index both www.heartharmony.com.au and heartharmony.com.au. When they do that you could get hit with what is called “duplicate content penalty” and lose Google rank as a result.

The simplest way to fix it is a permanent 301 redirect so that heartharmony.com.au automatically redirects the search engine to www.heartharmony.com.au.

Does all of this sound weird? Go to your browser and type in your website without the www. in front of it. What comes up? If it is anything other than www.yoursite.com.au you are losing valuable Google rank. Talk with your developer or if you are a closet geek go to your cpanel (if you have one) and put in a redirect yourself.

Ingrid Cliff
Heart Harmony

Putting your business into words

• 10:55 Currently Browsing: tinyurl.com/5aoxm7 #
• 12:44 Tweaking Twitter in readiness for 30DC – Check out the blog tinyurl.com/5aoxm7 #

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If you run a small business it pays to learn the latest trends in internet marketing. In my opinion, the best course available to teach you is called the Thirty Day Challenge … and the even better bit is it is free, with nothing to buy to make it all work.

How the course is structured is a pre-season where you learn the latest free tools and software available on the net and the actual challenge in August where your goal is to earn $1US applying your learnings.

I did the Challenge last year and from personal experience I can tell you it will push every one of your boundaries. The technology pre-season was brilliant – the tools I picked up boosted my productivity enormously.

The actual challenge saw amazing and dramatic results for my business and my e-books and I now generate at least 1/4 of my business income as a direct result from the course (so you can see why I recommend it!).

A heads up – from my HR history I have to tell you the guys that run the course (Ed Dale and Dan Rein) are not trainers. They tend to be a bit full of themselves, waffle and take a LOOOOONNNGGGG while to say anything that is needed to be said.

The trouble is their nuggets of content are so unique and worthwhile that it is worth putting yourself through the agony of poor presentation to get the content (or do what I did and find someone who created cheat summary notes from the waffle and refer to the notes rather than watch the videos/TV streaming).

The other thing is often you are asked to do things without context or explanation – just “do this it is cool” or “it works”. I found this personally challenging and almost threw in the towel a few times because of my need to know “WHY”. But they were right – it does work (and yes the results are cool) so put up with your inner demons if you are like me and work through it.

They have continued this approach into this year’s Challenge with the release of their first pre-season training video on the internet browser Flock. Lots of how and absolutely no why! AARRRGGGHH but given my experience last year, Flock is my new browser and I am controlling my need to know why.

The Thirty Day Challenge just like all good training only works if you actually apply what you have learnt. Looking at the videos/TV streams or just reading the blog notes does nothing unless you actually apply it. You need to block out dedicated time and put the tools into action. I already have committed to a lighter workload in August to allow time for the challenge each day.

One of the most powerful parts of the Challenge is the need to form teams to back you up. Last year I had a great team from people around the world and like all teams we had people committed to the project and the odd passenger. It was great experience again from a HR side of things about setting and running virtual teams using the latest free technology available and is worth doing the course just for those lessons alone.

This year I am looking for a local team of small business people passionate about the internet, dedicated to following through and willing to commit the time it takes to do the course. I will happily share my expertise and look forward to learning from other team members as well. If you are interested drop me an email and we will have a chat about it in a bit more detail. The best sized teams are about 4-6 people.

So – check out the Thirty Day Challenge, book some time in your diary and prepare to be stretched! I will keep you posted on my blog about some of the things we are learning through the pre-season and actual Challenge over the coming months.

Ingrid Cliff
Heart Harmony

Putting your business into words

With the growing trend to recycle, many small businesses are embracing this with a passion and forging a whole new business out of repurposing products.

Elena from EP Designs is a classic case study for repurposing – taking old products and with a twist of creativity making new (and profitable) products for sale. This week in her blog she talked about repurposing an old stainless steel gravy boat to become a candle, complete with decoupage! Now that’s creativity.

Repurposing doesn’t have to be restricted to physical products. If you sell e-books you can look at repurposing them as well. Can they become e-courses, bundled into larger packages, read aloud or talked about in a teleseminar, edited into becoming articles, or presented as physical seminars.

I am all for creating something once and using it for multiple purposes! Many of my clients repurpose our direct mail pieces and use the words on their websites or visa versa. What can you repurpose today?

Ingrid Cliff

Heart Harmony

Putting your business into words