Hi everyone, it’s Pat Mussieux here. I wanted to share some interesting tips today with you, and more importantly, the source of this idea and this inspiration for today’s Facebook Live.

I don’t know about you, but my inbox fills up really quickly, and I don’t know about you, but I find it at times to be overwhelming, and so I go into major delete, delete, delete mode. Well, I’ve really narrowed down the e-zines, the newsletters that show up in my inbox, and I keep it very strategically focused on my goals at the time, so I only read things that are totally relevant and aligned. One of the newsletters that I got comes in on Sunday. I read it Monday morning. It was from Chris Brogan.

If you don’t know him, he’s got great content. Chris’s message this week was about our industry and people who do online work, entrepreneurs, and he was talking about the time over the last many years where we were all hustling to create content. Content is king, get your content out, and then we would just blast it out on all types of social media platforms. Then he said he came to the realization – and I really agree, and that’s why I am doing this Facebook Live today – he came to the realization that what we have done, actually, is created a lot of pollution, and that’s what it boils down to.

I’ve seen images on Facebook, lately, where you see pictures of the ocean and all of the plastic pollution that has gathered in the ocean. So think about cyberspace that way and think about your inbox that way, and think about all the content that’s probably piling in, and consider that to be pollution. I call it mind pollution.

I wanted to share with you three tips that I use to keep things simple, and one of them certainly does come down to content. Another one, my practice, my tactic around electronic newsletters and subscriptions is I unsubscribe to everything. I narrow it down to three pieces of content that come into my inbox that are relevant and aligned to my goals at the time.

Secondly, the other piece of pollution that can happen is around our emails in the inbox, and we’re guilty of that too because what comes in goes out, typically, so I want to give you a few tips around handling email, one of which is get clear and specific on your subject line. When you’re writing an email and doing an email blast to your list, of course you want people to read it, but we’re busy and we have a lot of emails, and so get into the habit, develop the habit, first of all, of only sending content that is timely, relevant, and of value, but secondly, make sure your subject line compels somebody to open the darn email.

I got one last week and the subject line was Summer’s Here. News flash. Yeah, I knew that. I figured that out. Come up with some compelling subject lines that will cause people to read the content that you’re putting out there. Again, make sure it’s timely, relevant, and meaningful. Subject lines need to be short, they need to be to the point, and cause someone to lean in and go, “WOW, I wonder what she’s talking about.”

The one I’ll be sending out Friday says, “Are you in a hurry?” Now, that’s going to cause some curiosity with some people, so create compelling subject lines. The other piece I found really interesting this week, Constant Contact did a survey, and they were talking about emails and the fact that they really need to be kept short and sweet these days, which I love because that reduces mind pollution. It says that, based on the results of the survey, the survey said that in your email, it should be no more than 20 lines of content and no more than two to three images. Images keep it interesting, so limit it to two to three images. I thought that was really interesting.

Now, the last tip of what I do around content is I recycle and reuse. One of the methods that we use is postcard method, like these. Some of you have seen this postcard from me. The 7 Steps to Growing Your Business by Getting Out of Your Own Way. One of my other postcards that we’ve created is this one, Stop Compromising: Get the Edge and Make All the Money That You Want.

The reason that I’m mentioning these is that these postcards have a lot of content on them, right here, and what I do with these seven steps, I’ll pull them out and individually will do a Facebook Live on one of the pieces, one of the tips. We’ll then recycle it, that one tip, like we do with the Facebook Live. This Facebook Live happens now, in the moment, then my team grabs the video and the audio, one team member transcribes for the blog, the other team member grabs the video part and it goes up on the blog, and then it goes out in a Friday mail-out to those people on my list who aren’t on Facebook. So we recycle content.

I’m not always in the process of developing and creating new, because quite honestly, there’s not a whole lot of new out there. It’s really in context, in the way that the information is applied strategically, effectively, and easily. That’s my whole philosophy.

So three tips for keeping things simple.

1. Clean out your inbox. Unsubscribe to a lot of crap that’s in there because I’m in a hurry, you’re in a hurry, we’re heading into the lazy, hazy days of summer, which means only look at what is meaningful and of value to you.
2. For the emails that you’re sending out, make sure that you clean it up. Have really compelling subject lines that cause people to open them. Otherwise, what’s the point? You’re wasting your time if people aren’t even opening and reading things. I used to do a newsletter myself. I probably did it every week for about seven years, and as we monitored the stats and the numbers on the open rates and the click rates, we saw them going down and down and down, and that’s because the whole cyberspace was getting cluttered, and so we got lost in that clutter, so I stopped doing it, period.

There are some things you need to stop doing, and maybe turn it around and think about how can you do things differently? What we’re doing now is sending out, instead of a newsletter, what’s called a Tuesday Tip, and it may be just the graphic of one of my postcards. Be thinking in ways that you can keep it simple, keep it productive, keep it meaningful and valuable, and stop with the clutter. You don’t have to go and recreate and reinvent because someone said you had to. Not necessary.

I go back to Chris Brogan’s recommendation that there’s a lot of pollution. Let’s clean up the pollution. Let’s take a look at what we’re doing, how we’re doing it, and clean up our own act because, you know what? The receiver, in the end, will thank you for it.

So pick one of the tips and let me know what resonated with you. Always love to hear from you, and I’ll be back again with another tip in the future. Bye now.