What a great Easter weekend! It was a little cold, but I was thrilled to have all of my kids home for the holiday. Since our girls started college last fall, our house has been awfully quiet. If you’re an empty nester, you’ll know what I’m talking about. After having four kids in the house for a bunch of years, this is a whole new experience.

For one thing, a quart of milk now lasts a week, where we used to go through a gallon a day! Another big change is that since the house is so quiet, and we’re not driving to or attending hundreds of extracurricular school events, I have substantially increased the number of books I read.

I thought I would depart from the topic of newsletters to share some of what’s in my library. In no particular order, here are seven titles that have helped me grow both personally and professionally…here is what I am feeding my mind! 

The calendar says spring, but the thermometer doesn’t say that! I am in the process of writing my first book, Newsletter Secrets Revealed – How to dramatically increase your profits with a customer newsletter! – and this morning I was writing a bonus section called “19 Mistakes you must avoid!”

As I was writing about the importance of proofreading, I had to chuckle as I remembered a very embarrassing moment early in my career. Shortly after starting my first business, Dynamic Communication, I exhibited at a local chamber of commerce business expo. As a business newbie, I was doing everything myself, including proofreading my own handout (hastily prepared the day before the expo!).

Well, there I was, standing in my booth at my first business expo anxiously looking forward to a day full of meeting prospects and new clients, when a woman approached me. I gave her my most confident smile and even managed not to mangle my rehearsed elevator speech as I pushed my handout into her hands. Less than 10 seconds later, this woman gave me a look and some information that could have ruined my day – she told me that I had a spelling mistake in my handout. OUCH! Bad enough for a newsletter writer, but the mistake was that I had misspelled my company’s name! DOUBLE OUCH!!

Once I calmed down, and the red drained from my face, my creative mind kicked in and for the rest of the day I passed out my flyers telling everyone that the flyer contained a mistake – and if they could find it I would give them a free critique of their newsletter! However, right then and there I promised myself that I would never again rely on my own eyes to proofread anything my company puts out.

From time to time I am going to use this blog to pass along to my readers what I call “Golden Nuggets” of information, and today I am going to tell you about an awesome resource that I use a lot: www.ProofreadNOW.com. ProofreadNOW is headed up by Phil Jamieson, and Phil and his team of proofreading experts will pore over virtually any type of document you send them and — in as little as one hour — they will send it back to you in perfect condition! It is an amazing, high-quality, and accurate service that I actually list as a benefit of doing business with my company. I tout to my clients that my service includes an outside professional proofreading service to make sure that their document is as good as it can be, and they view this as a value-added service, which it is.

I have a lot more “Golden Nuggets” to pass along to you and hope that you check back often, or better yet, subscribe to my blog! If you have a funny story, I would enjoy hearing from you; please let me know if you are okay with my sharing it with my readers. I sign off today wishing you all a very happy Easter.

Dan Kennedy is a well-known marketing genius.  If you haven’t read any of his No BS books, you’re really missing a lot.  Dan eloquently applied a phrase to something I’ve long held as essential:  Frequent and regular contact with your customers is “building and maintaining your fence.”  This means that companies need to put a “fence” around their clients to keep them close, to keep them buying, and to keep them from going somewhere else.  In addition, a “fence” is used to protect your clients from “poachers” who are trying to steal your clients’ business or take their money so they don’t have it to spend with you!  Mail order statistics say that customers lose 10 percent of their value each month, which means that if you are not communicating with your customers every month, they will probably forget about you in less than a year.  Now that’s scary! 

In the last week, I’ve been asked the same question three times: Should you mail your company newsletter to prospects or just your customers? I’d be happy to address this soon; right now I have three client newsletters that need to be completed!