What did he mean? You don’t have to be the best to be successful. The people who get ahead don’t worry about being perfect. They get off their butts, take action and get their products to market.

So here are my thoughts on why imperfect execution is better than perfect planning

Work your plan

While I’m the first one to tell you that planning is important, I know that too often planning can be a form of procrastination. Rather than getting down to the work, you keep tweaking the plan. Get a plan in place and start working it. Over time you can tweak the plan as you see what works and what doesn’t.

Beating the competition

How many times have you seen a competitor release a new product that is just like the brilliant idea you had a year ago but is still in the planning stages? Don’t you kick yourself when that happens? I know I have. Let’s learn from our mistakes; when you have a brilliant idea quickly create a plan then work on execution so that someone else doesn’t beat you to the punch.

Get results now

Customers don’t buy your plan. People have to know how to buy from you, so make it easy. A less-than-perfect sales page, advertisement, or social media campaign will get infinitely more results than that piece of paper with your plan on it that never gets implemented. Whatever method you choose to market with, get on with it. You’ll get better as you go.

You can do better?

How many times have you seen somebody else’s product, read somebody else’s book, or been to somebody else’s seminar and thought to yourself “I can do better than that”? Well if you really can do better, prove it! Nothing is perfect. If those less-than-perfect competitors are selling, get off your butt and get your better product out there too.

You’ll feel better

You’ll feel better. Seriously. That frustration you feel every time you look at your plan but don’t see any forward action will go away. Sure you may feel some trepidation, some nerves, as you get started. But as Dale Carnegie said: “Inaction breeds doubt and fear. Action breeds confidence encourage. If you want to conquer fear, do not sit home and think about it. Go out and get busy.”

So if you have some new product that has been sitting in the back your mind, or new marketing strategy you been planning to attempt, quick tweaking the plan! Go out and get busy.

One of the things I do is use binders. Each project has its own binder, as does planning. This has been a relatively useful way to keep track of ongoing work (when the labels don’t fall off the binders).

New ideas were little harder to track. For a while I was doing the Post-it note method. Every time I got a new idea I’d write it on a Post-it note and stick it up on the wall next to my desk.

This didn’t work for two reasons. One, after a while the Post-it notes just became visual noise; I just didn’t see them anymore. The second reason is the mental clutter they caused me. Although I can block out the content on the Post-it notes, I still knew they were there. Although I wasn’t consciously aware of it, it was causing me constant stress.

I moved away from the Post-it notes to whiteboards. Now whenever a garden idea I could just write it on the whiteboard. The nice thing about the whiteboard is it’s one continual surface so it’s less visually cluttering than Post-its.

However, the whiteboard method isn’t perfect either. It’s great for recording an idea as it occurs to me, but what do I do later? Eventually the whiteboard gets full. I needed some way to deal with the ideas.

Then I thought about Microsoft OneNote. This is a software program that comes as part of Microsoft office. I knew it was part of the package but hadn’t looked at it. Last week I decided to open it and take a look. I’m glad I did.

OneNote is designed for the entrepreneurial ADD brain. You can have different folders for different projects, and different pages in each folder. You’re not stuck to writing an orderly fashion as you would be in a word document; you can put notes anywhere on the page. You can import PDFs or JPEG’s; you can even add audio. You can also hyperlink between different factions within OneNote.

This has been a really freeing tool for me since I started using it. I’m able to take pieces off my whiteboard that I want to implement, and create a kind of plan. As I get new information, new details, new action items to add to this plan, they’re easy to add with OneNote.

When the things that held me back from using OneNote is the fact that I don’t always do my planning and brainstorming sitting at my desk. In fact, I often find it is better for me to leave my office entirely when doing brainstorming. Additionally, I have both a desktop and a laptop machine. I was worried about not having my OneNote document on the correct machine.

Then I had a brainstorm. I’ve been using Dropbox to share documents with customers and colleagues. Why not use it to share my OneNote between computers?

That’s what I’ve done. So now I’m using my whiteboard to record ideas that pop up when I’m in the middle of another task. Then, at a later time, I can take these ideas and add them to my OneNote document. Now I can access this document regardless of which computer I’m using. (If you’d like to see how to add OneNote to Dropbox read this blog post on RetroHack)

Andrea J. Stenberg

Have you been using OneNote in your business? Please leave a comment and tell us how you use this piece of software,

I was surprised because Sean is very loyal to the local business community. He makes a point of shopping in town, even if going to the city or buying online will save him a few bucks. So I asked him to explain.

It goes back to his career. You see, Sean sells cell phones. He’s an independent sales person and works out of his home, rather than a retail location.

His main focus is larger companies that need multiple phones for their employees. However, he also sells to small businesses that only need one or two phones.

Sean gives great customer service

What makes buying a phone from him different is the level of customer service. Sean goes above and beyond for his customers. He helps you decide which phone and which plan is best for you. He’ll deliver the phone to you personally. And if you run into problems, he cuts through the red tape of the corporation and solves it for you.

But there is much more to being a customer of Sean’s. Sean is extremely loyal to his customers. If you buy a cell phone from him, he works hard to help your business succeed. He’ll recommend you to his vast network of contacts. He’ll frequent your business himself. In fact, even if he can save money by going to your competitor, if you’re his customer and they’re not, he’ll buy from you. Every time.

So why was he so mad at this local business?

You see, this local business used to be a customer of his.  When his cell phone contract came up, he decided to shop around. This retailer found a cell phone that was a better deal than Sean’s cell phones so he switched.

Seems reasonable; get a better deal, switch suppliers.

So why was Sean so mad?

The guy saved peanuts

First of all, this new phone plan is $3 per month cheaper than Sean’s cell phones. That means this guy is only saving $36 a year.

Compare that to the $150 Sean recently spent in this man’s store. And he probably spent three times that amount annually. That’s a lot of money compared to $36 per year.

He didn’t shop locally

Second, the cell phone provider this guy switched to was selling to him out of head office in Toronto, not even a local competitor. If it had been someone local, Sean could have lived with that. But not shopping locally is a big sin in Sean’s book.

No loyalty to customers

Finally, there’s fair play. By shopping around himself, Sean could buy products much cheaper than from this local retailer. In fact, this guy’s not even the cheapest place in town, never mind compared to the city or online. But Sean purchased from him because he got good customer service from the staff. But mainly, he shopped there because he’s loyal to his customers. But this guy didn’t show the same level of loyalty.

So, the upshot is, this guy has saved himself $36 per year. But he’s lost $500 per year in sales. And I expect I’m not the first person Sean’s told this story to, and I won’t be the last. I know for myself, I feel slightly less inclined to shop at this retailer’s store. I just don’t quite have the same warm fuzzy feeling that I used to.

So, at the end of the day, was it worth it for this guy to switch suppliers? I suspect not.

Andrea J. Stenberg

And I love books. Forget shoes, for me there’s nothing better than wandering the isles of a good bookstore. It might even rival a computer store for pure fun factor.

There’s nothing more exciting than having $100 to spend on books. Even a spare $20 gets me going. You can’t get anything really exciting at the computer store for 20 bucks.

But there’s a downside to my love of books. There’s so much to do and so much to learn. I just can’t keep up.

The photo attached to this article is my current stack of non-fiction reading. Each of these books is on the go. Only two are library books. The rest I picked up somewhere along the way. And yes, I understand the irony of having Getting Things Done be one of the books I haven’t quite managed to finish.

These are all great books. I’m enjoying the read but I’m not getting through them. One of the library books has already been renewed once. I just spend so much time reading – emails, RSS feeds, websites, my own work – that I just can’t bring myself to read non-fiction for long periods of time.

Hence the stack of on-the-go books.

However, I have discovered a secret to getting through books faster. Audio books! I love them. I get one, upload it to my mp3 player, and boom, I can multitask. I can listen at the gym, in the car, while doing the dishes. Suddenly wasted time becomes learning time.

I didn’t expect to love audio books so much. In NLP parlance, I’m a visual communicator. I have to “see” things to really understand. When I was in school during tests I would actually visualize the page in my notebook that had the answer.

I thought audio books would just be noise, and nothing would sink in. But I was wrong. All the years of watching tv while doing the Sudoko or listening to the radio has primed me for audio books.

Yes, there are things that I miss the first time through. However, I can usually listen to a good audio book twice, faster than I can read a print one once. Sometimes, I zone out in the middle of a section, but my mp3 player has this nice little feature called rewind. Sometimes I even have to pull over and make a note of something amazing I just heard.

Where do you get audio books? At the library, the normal bookstore, iTunes, Audible all have audio books available. Not every book you want will be available, but if they are, great. I recently picked up a book and headed to the checkout at the bookstore. Then I stopped to check if they had the audio version. They didn’t have it in stock but agreed to order it for me. I paid for it and in a couple of days the CDs were in my mailbox. I finished the audio version way before the print version would have been cracked beyond chapter two.

Will I give up the paper version for technology? No. I love the feel of a book. I love the smell. I even love the stack next to my bed. But for getting through business books, give me an mp3 every time.

Andrea J. Stenberg

How do you keep up with the information you need to have to run your business? Please leave a comment and share your tips.

Still no go.

So I calmly clicked the “forgot my password” link. Wordpress sent me an email with a link to change my password. I went to my inbox and clicked the link. I was then told I’d get a second email with my new, temporary password.

I waited.

And waited.

No new password.

So I tried again. Got the email with the link to change my password, but never received a new password.

Panic started to set in.

Then I remembered I’d had a friend look at the back-end of my blog when I’d had a problem with something. Problem solved! I asked if he remembered the password I gave him.

No.

Scrolled through our Skype chats to see if it was recorded there.

No dice.

My friend suggested my spam filter. I couldn’t see why the first email from Wordpress would get through but not the second, but I was desperate. Checked spam. Still no luck.

Real panic. What if I couldn’t get into my blog – ever?!?

Started scrolling through my sent emails to see if I’d sent my friend the password that way.

Still no luck.

Then it hit me. Several weeks back I’d had some troubles with my site and had given tech support at my hosting company a login and password. Dug up what I’d sent them and tried using that login and password.

Success! I was able to get into the admin in my blog. I quickly changed my password for my main user name, recorded the login and password for the second user and created a third user with another email address I have.

My advice:

Learn from my scary episode. If you have a website, blog, Facebook fan page or any other web presence that is vital to your business, make sure you have more than one user name and password. Make sure both users are designated as administrators with full access and rights to the back-end. Make sure they are attached to different email addresses. If you don’t have a second email address, ask a trusted friend to be your backup or create a gmail account just for this purpose.

Trust me, if you ever have a moment like I had last week, you’ll be really glad you listened to me.

Andrea J. Stenberg

What are some of the ways you protect yourself from weird technology glitches? Please share your secrets here.

Apparently, Americans aged 55 to 64 are more likely to become entrepreneurs than those aged 20 to 34. For many people this statistic is counter-intuitive. Younger people are more likely to take risks, right?

Wrong! According to this particular study, “In every single year from 1996 to 2007, Americans between the ages of 55 and 64 had a higher rate of entrepreneurial activity than those aged 20-34.”

How much higher? One third.

But that’s not all. The study also notes that “a longitudinal survey of nearly 5,000 companies that began in 2004, two-thirds of firm founders are between the ages of 35 and 54.”

What are the causes of this baby boomer boom? The study suggests a decline of lifetime employment is a major cause. While many boomers grew up expecting to work for the same company through to retirement, as we all know, this is no longer the case. The implication is lose your job, start a business.

Our longer, healthier lifespan is another contributing factor. Because we live longer, and are fitter and more active, boomers are more likely to continue working longer and are doing so in their own businesses. The study also suggests the current recession is contributing to the increase in entrepreneurial activity in the baby boom generation. When people lose their jobs and can’t find new ones, they start a business instead.

However comprehensive this study is, I believe they are missing a major reason why entrepreneurial activity is skewing older. When someone has worked 15, 20, 30 years in a career they like, but don’t love, at some point they start thinking about doing more with their life. When the mortgage is paid off and the kids have moved out, it’s time to start thinking about doing something they love.

While I haven’t conducted a scientific survey of boomers, from people I’ve met and spoken with, the main reason for starting a business in your 40s, 50s and 60s is passion. They decide it’s time to spend their days working in something that really moves them.

When you’re younger, you’re looking for experience or to pay the bills. You’re trying to figure out who you are, what you want to be when you grow up. You’re starting a family. Taking a risk and starting a business can seem like too much when everything else in your life seems risky.

But at some point, many of us start to think life is too short to waste doing something less than amazing. I know for me, there was that moment when I thought, “If I don’t do it now, I’ll never do it.”

Perhaps it’s the fear of getting to the end of your life and having regrets about actions you didn’t take. Or it’s just a desire to have a career that is more meaningful. Yes, getting laid off may be the boot in the behind some of us need to get started. But I’ve spoken to just as many baby boomer entrepreneurs who left high-paying, secure jobs of their own volition.

Passion, not recession is why boomers are joining the ranks of the entrepreneurs.

Andrea J. Stenberg

What do you think? Leave a comment and share your thoughts.

Putting your focus on profit doesn’t make you a Ferengi. It is a necessary part of the business world. When you have a j-o-b, someone else is responsible for marketing, office space, administration and designing a business plan. You show up, do your job and get paid for your time.

But when you own your own business, even if you have employees, you are ultimately responsible for every part of your business. That’s why you charge a higher hourly rate than you would if you worked for someone else. Very few entrepreneurs bill 40 hours per week.

But in spite of this, many entrepreneurs have an uneasy relationship with money. And it is a relationship, as I was reminded by Iyabo Asani in a teleseminar I attended last night. In this teleseminar she said that money represents an exchange of energy. You provide a services (expend energy) and the customer gives you money in exchange.

However, if you have a problem relationship with money, it spills over into other parts of your business life. If you always feel there is never enough money, then it is often because you lack value in yourself. This can manifest itself in a lack of clients or in attracting clients who can’t or won’t pay what you’re worth.

What Iyabo said made a lot of sense to me. I know in my own life, my relationship with money hasn’t always run smooth. I don’t come from an entrepreneurial background so making money isn’t always seen as a good thing. This makes for some interesting thought processes when you’re in business, let me tell you.

However, when I focus on money, when I focus on cleaning up my relationship with money, things improve.

How? A few years ago, I was attracting people who didn’t want to pay. They didn’t truly value my services yet they claimed the wanted to hire me. On more than one occasion I allowed myself to be talked into working for a reduced rate. Then the client kept adding more work.

The worst situation came when I was hired for what I thought would be an exciting project; something I had never done before. However, in the back of my mind there was a red danger flag waving franticly at me. But I ignored it. As a result, I was talked into cutting my rate in half. Then, a job that should have taken hardly more than a week ended up taking 8 weeks of my time, full time, and netted me less than $1,000.

After that experience I decided to get smarter. I wrote out a detailed description of my ideal client. This description included someone who truly valued what I offered and would readily and happily pay my full fee.

The result, it worked. I began getting better clients, clients who could and would pay me, happily and on time.

This happened because I knew what I was looking for. I was determined to never again be taken advantage of by others. I became more confident in quoting my fees. Clients sensed that and were less likely to try to get me at a discount.

Second, by focusing on what I truly wanted, the Law of Attraction could come into play. I know it sounds “woo woo” but when you know what you want and put it in writing, it has a way of showing up.

If you have an uneasy relationship with money, don’t bury your head in the sand. Look closely at it. It’s only once you deal with your money demons that things can improve.

Andrea J. Stenberg

This teleseminar I attended with Iyabo was part of the Masters of Client Attraction telesumit being presented by my colleagues Scott Shane Holt and Janice Wright. The list of speakers they have lined up is impressive. The Telesumit runs until April 12^th. If you’d like to attend free, here’s the link http://tinyurl.com/ajsMOCA.

Yes, that is an affiliate link. Yes, if you upgrade to one of the paid versions of the Telesumit I’ll get a commission. But we’re all in business, so you won’t mind. After all, if you’ve been reading this blog for a while, you should know I wouldn’t recommend anything I didn’t truly believe in.

Oh, it’s not like I nap every day. If you call me at 2 p.m. and I don’t answer, it doesn’t necessarily mean I’m in snoozville. It’s much more likely that I’m taking a late lunch or I can’t locate the cordless phone.

But the truth is, at least a few times a month, I will lay down after lunch and sleep.

How did this happen? It’s not like I’ve always been a napper. I can even remember in kindergarten (yes, waaaaaaaaay back then) laying on the floor and wishing “nap time” would hurry up and finish so I could get on with things.

So if at the ripe old age of five I was able to make it through the afternoon, why can’t I now?

There’s a couple of things at play. First, it is not at all uncommon for me to be sitting at my computer by 4 a.m. In fact, I prefer days when I get up that early. Think of it: I can have three and a half hours of work done before I even wake my son up for school. By noon, I’ve put in a full day. If I want to take the afternoon off and watch a movie, read a trashy novel, or even take a nap, I can easily do it without feeling guilty.

And if I work until my son gets home at 3:30 I can really get a lot accomplished.

Now it’s not as if I set my alarm for 4 a.m. and force myself out of bed. Far from it. My alarm is usually set for 6. However, very frequently I wake up a 4 a.m. And it’s not one of those groggy, peer at the clock, get up, stumble to the bathroom and then decide whether or not to go back to sleep. Most days when I wake up at 4 I’m wide awake. If I resist and try to stay in bed, sleep won’t come. Over time, I’ve learned when I wake up at 4, I might as well get up.

However, the 4 a.m. mornings are not usually the days I nap. Yes, if I’ve had a late night the night before, I may drop off after lunch. Particularly if I decide to turn on the television and then close my eyes for “just a moment”.

However, the real reason I’m a napper is the 3 a.m. mornings. It doesn’t happen to me often, but occasionally I’ll wake up, bright-eyed and bushy tailed at three.

Those are rough mornings. At 3 a.m. I have a tough decision to make. If I wake up at three I can usually go back to sleep again, but it usually takes me a couple of hours. Then, when my alarm goes off at 6, I’m in trouble. I’ll be right in the middle of a REM cycle. It doesn’t matter how much coffee I drink or how long I stand in the shower, I’m going to be wrecked for the entire day. Nothing truly productive will get done because I will be in a fog all day.

But getting up at 3 a.m. isn’t much better. True, I will get work done before 7:30 – a lot of work in fact – but by noon I’m a waste case. I’m exhausted, can’t think, can barely keep my eyes open. And if I have any plans for the evening, I’d better cancel because I can’t make it past 7 p.m.

At least, until I rediscovered naps. Now on those rare occasions when my eyes pop open at three and I know I’m not falling back asleep I can get out of bed without fear. I’ll work until late morning, have an early lunch then, when most people are just figuring out where to go for lunch, I’m back in bed for a couple of extra hours of sleep. Then, when I get up I’m a functioning human being again. I can teach a workshop, host a teleseminar or even have a night out with the girls, even if the event runs later than 7 p.m. All because of the little nap.

So, there’s my dirty little secret. Not terribly corporate I know. But like they say, when you work for yourself, you’re free to work any 80 hours of the week you choose. Some days I just don’t choose to work between noon and 2 p.m.

Andrea J. Stenberg

What’s your dirty little secret for getting through the day or the week? What perks do you give yourself to make up for the sometimes long hours that are involved with being an entrepreneur? Please leave a comment and share your story.

As a business owner, a blogger, and an information junkie, I often scour the internet looking for information that will help me run my business or help me help my clients and readers run theirs. When I found something interesting I would usually be offered an invitation to subscribe to an email newsletter or blog feed via email. I usually accepted that offer.

While this had the benefit of keeping me informed about new content, it had a very big downside. My inbox was getting filled with emails that were not written for me alone. I was getting hundreds of emails a day. Emails that required a response or an action from me were getting lost in the noise.

To solve that problem I gradually started switching all my subscriptions to my Gmail account. This helped at first because it did start clearing up my inbox. But that wasn’t really working either. First of all, now I had two places to access mail. To access my Gmail account I had to log in and read it from my web browser. It just wasn’t a part of my daily routine, so I wasn’t logging in.

This led to a new problem. Because I wasn’t logging into my Gmail account regularly, I started re-subscribing with my main email address to feeds and newsletters that were very important to me. Now I was getting them in two places. Arrrrrrrrrgh!

Next I tried RSS. RSS is that little orange button you see in the upper left of this blog. If you subscribe using that button and use a feed reader (which is how you access your RSS subscriptions) you get updated whenever I write a new blog post. No more inbox.

The problem with that is I’d never had any real success with RSS readers before. I’d tried using the feed reader function of the Flock web browser but found that I had so many feeds it was slowing the browser down to a crawl.

Then I started using Google Reader. Instead of having everything go into my Gmail account, I could have my subscriptions go into Reader.

And because the data is on Google and not downloaded into my browser as with Flock, it wouldn’t slow everything to a crawl.

However, I found Reader annoying to use. First of all, it’s ugly! Really, really ugly. I hate looking at it.

Second, I found it not very user-friendly. The column on the left lists all the sites I’ve subscribed to with a number beside each website telling me how many new posts are there. The problem is, until I click on the name of the website and Reader opens a page for that site, I can’t see what the new content is. Just because I subscribed to the feed doesn’t mean I’ll read everything there.

Because of this need to click to see what the headlines are for each of the sites on top of the ugliness factor, I found I wasn’t using Reader very often either. It seemed to take too long. I couldn’t see at a glance what was new so I just didn’t use the tool.

Back to filling up my inbox.

Until I went to Podcamp Toronto. There I attended a session called “Hacking Your Workflow”. Session leader Leona Hobbs shared some of her favourite technology tools: Feedly. Feedly is a plug-in for the web browser Firefox. Once installed, it works with your Google Reader subscriptions to make a magazine-like page of your subscriptions. It makes it pretty!

The “cover” page is created with random bits of the latest items from your subscriptions.

Like a print magazine, the layout is a mix of shapes, sizes and has images. Not only can you see the title of the article and the blog it came from, you also see the first line of the post. Finally, I can see at a glance whether there is something I want to read.

Even better, each subscription can be tagged with one or more keywords. Then if I want to see feeds that are related to that keyword, I can choose it from the list on the side and suddenly Feedly is giving me only those sites that I’ve tagged with that keyword.

I can also share with Twitter and Facebook right from Feedly. I can save individual articles that I want red flagged for rereading later. I can import my Google Alerts.

All I can say is I’m in love with Feedly!

I am now reading more relevant content than ever before and my inbox is marvellously empty.

Andrea J. Stenberg

Are you using RSS? How do you access it? Leave a comment and share your favourite tool.

1. Choose Your Sessions

Unlike some conferences, at Podcamp you didn’t have to register for individual sessions ahead of time. Even so, I spend a good bit of time looking over the sessions and the speakers. Before I got there I had a list I really wanted to attend.

However, I didn’t carve that list in stone. I know from past experience that sometimes the best sessions are not the ones I was expecting. So I kept my ears open. There were a couple of sessions I attended solely because some else said the speaker rocked. In each case, they were right. Being flexible about the sessions made for a better weekend.

2. Plan Who To Meet

Registration for Podcamp is public – you name goes on a wiki when you register. There was also a LinkedIn group and Twitter hash tags for the event. In spite of this, I didn’t see anyone who I really felt I needed to meet.

However, I didn’t just throw up my hands. I decided one of my goals for the weekend was to meet five interesting people who I would want to contact later and continue the conversations we had.

Setting this goal was very important for me. Although many people who know me personally may not realize this, I’m actually very shy. My natural inclination is to sit in the back of the room and not speak to anyone unless they speak first.

But setting this goal of people to meet forced me out of my shell. Whenever I sat next to someone, if they looked at all friendly, I started talking: about the speaker, about the weekend, about the weather. It didn’t really matter, it was just to start the connection.

The net result, I have eight people I want to keep in touch with. Not only that, one of those people has already contacted me.

3. Go with a Friend

While attending on your own is okay, going with a partner is even better. There were several times during the weekend when there were sessions occurring simultaneously that I wanted to attend. Going with my friend meant we could see more sessions and compare notes later.

I also got to meet more people than I would have on my own. My friend ran into a couple of women she knew from social media and introduced me. I was able to introduce her to others as well. Being a tag-team meant we could get more out of the weekend.

4. Be Social

Most conferences have some sort of social event – cocktail hour, drinks in the pub, a coffee corner. Go to them! This is usually where the best networking takes place. You can sit down and have a longer conversation than you can between sessions. And because these parts of the conference involve food and drink, everyone is more relaxed. There is something innately human about connecting over a meal.

Remember my comment about being shy? Social events are where having a buddy can really help. I might not (probably not) have attended on my own, but for us shy types, there is strength in numbers. It’s a lot easier to join a group having a conversation when you’re not on your own.

Additionally, because we each have different interests and met different people during the day, we were able to introduce each other to new people in the evening.

5. Implement

While there are many reasons to attend a conference, learning something is usually a main one. But sitting in a lecture or workshop doesn’t do you any good if all you do is take notes. When you get home you need to actually implement some of what you learned.

You don’t have to do it all at once. In fact, you may need a few days just to process what you learned. Reread your notes, debrief with your conference buddy, monitor the conference hash tags to see what others thought, write a blog post. It doesn’t matter what you do, just make sure you spend some time to absorb the material.

Once you’ve decompressed, pick the best and add them to your business. Even if it’s only one or two things, commit to implementing them. It could be adding a new plug-in for your web browser or it could be an entirely new marketing system. It doesn’t matter. Just pick one and vow to add it to what you do. You spent the time and money to attend the conference. Get some ROI on that investment.

6. Follow Up

If you collected some business cards from some interesting people, don’t let them gather dust in the corner of your office. Plan to spend some time in the first few days after you get home connecting. At the very minimum, follow everyone you met on Twitter. If they were interesting enough for you to grab their business card or write down their Twitter I.D., surely they’re worth following on Twitter.

Next, visit their website. Find out a little more about who they are and what they do. You don’t need to check out everyone, just the handful you know you want to stay in touch with.

Finally, in the first week after the conference, make that first real connection. Send them an email, invite them to connect on LinkedIn or pick up the phone. It doesn’t matter. If you had one real conversation with this person make the first move. Trust me, so few people do it, you’ll stand out from the crowd.

Of course, I shouldn’t have to say this, but I will just in case. Don’t send them a sales pitch. Just a brief “nice to meet you”, a reminder of what you talked about and maybe a link to a resource or blog post (by someone else) you think they might find helpful. You started a conversation at the conference. Now you’re trying to keep it going. Later, once they’ve had time to really get to know, like and trust you, is when you can move on to the sales conversation.

If you follow my conference plan, you should get a lot of value out of the next event you attend.

Andrea J. Stenberg

Have you been to a conference lately? What did you take home from the event? How did you ensure to meet the right people? Please leave a comment and share your thoughts.