There’s some excellent practical advice in this Monday’s Link Roundup.  Because I have a home office, I found How to Set Personal Boundaries When You Work From Home a useful reminder of how to cope with the competing demands of work and domestic life.  C.J. Hayden’s article What if you were wrong about marketing? is a great method of challenging assumptions about the subject.

• Words in stone and on the wind. “After I wrote, in a recent Wall Street Journal article, about the malleability of text in electronic books, a reader asked me to flesh out my thoughts about the different ways that “typographical fixity” – to again borrow Elizabeth Eisenstein’s term – can manifest itself in a book.”

• How to Set Personal Boundaries When You Work From Home. “…the challenges of working from home can sometimes make life/work balance seem unattainable. You may feel like you are constantly being pulled towards both family and work commitments–a bit like being in the middle of a tug-of-war. One answer that can help you achieve better balance between your work and personal life is boundaries.”

• What happened to the former slave that wrote his old master? “You know that letter from former slave Jourdon Anderson to his old master that’s been going around? First of all, it’s good and you should read it…David Galbraith poked around a bit and found a record of Anderson still living in Ohio at the time of the 1900 census as “Jordan Anderson”…At the time, Anderson and his wife Mandy were in their 70s and had been married for 52 years. Mandy had borne 11 children, six of whom were still living…”

• Dashboard? More Like Bookshelf: Your Guide to Literary Tumblrs. “By creating this list of my favorite “literary Tumblrs,” I hope to turn you on to some of the sites that make The Millions’ dashboard that much brighter.”

• In the Footsteps of Giants. “Biographer Michael Scammell has devoted much of his long career to writing about two of the 20th century’s foremost intellectuals, whose impassioned writings defined in human and moral terms the stakes in the struggle against communism. Scammell’s book about the Nobel Prize–winning dissident Russian writer Alexsandr Solzhenitsyn, Solzhenitsyn: A Biography, published in 1984, was the first major biography to shed light on this towering yet secretive figure. Koestler: The Literary and Political Odyssey of a Twentieth-Century Skeptic, which came out last year to much acclaim, revived the reputation of the protean Hungarian writer Arthur Koestler, best known for his 1940 anti-totalitarian novel Darkness at Noon…Writer and translator Michael McDonald interviews Scammell about his life and work.”

• How to Become the Person Everyone Wants to Interview. “You need to establish yourself as an expert, and getting interviewed by radio, podcast or TV hosts can help you do just that. So, here is how you can help speed up the process by positioning yourself as a subject matter expert.”

• What if you were wrong about marketing? “Lately, I’ve been playing the “what if you were wrong” game with my coaching clients…questioning your assumptions about marketing can lead to designing a much more solid strategy. You can try asking yourself what if you were wrong, but it can be even more powerful to have a friend, colleague, or coach ask you.”

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What do you do when you’re between major personal history projects and your bank account is dwindling?  If you’re like me, this can be a stressful time. One solution is to look for smaller projects that can be done relatively easily and quickly to tide you over.  Here are a few things I’ve done… Read more

In today’s marketplace you’ve got to do more than offer excellent service and product. That’s a given. To separate your small business from all the others offering a similar service you’ve got to be unique and memorable. How do you do that?

Begin by checking out your competition. Look at their websites, blogs, and any printed marketing material. Ask yourself, “What can I do that they’re not doing?”

Taking  my own advice, I  started doing a little research on a few personal history websites. Here’s what I learned.

Generally personal historians do a good job of extolling the virtues of recording life stories.  But there are omissions. This means there’s a real opportunity for you to fill the gaps and  set your personal history business apart.  Here are 8 ways to be unique:

1. Provide a money back guarantee. This provides real comfort for potential clients. It also says that you’re confident about the quality of your work. I’ve had a 100% satisfaction guaranteed label on my home page for three years now and it’s never been a problem.

2. Contribute to your community. Demonstrate your values by listing your volunteer activities. Consider donating a percentage of your profits to a charity that has an obvious connection to life stories such as the Alzheimer’s Association and Reading is Fundamental.

3. Have a toll free number.  Prominently display your toll free number on your home page and other marketing materials. The easier it is for potential clients to talk to you, the better the chance of securing that client.

4. Offer free resources. Put together a series of lists and mini-publications  like 15 Great Memoirs Written by Women , The 50 Best Life Story Questions, and Come to Your Senses and Unlock Childhood Memories.  [Please feel free to use these or other articles  from my blog. All I ask is that you duly credit them.]

5. List prices. There’s no getting away from it, price matters. It’s usually the first thing people want to know. Anything that hints at avoidance can lead to suspicion. I know that personal history fees vary widely depending on the scope of a project. But minimally you can indicate a range. For example: Prices range from $300 for a one-hour video interview to $10,000 for a documentary film biography.

6. Go green.  Consumers increasingly expect businesses to limit their environmental impact. Being green can set you apart. How do you reduce your carbon footprint? In your office do you use recycled paper, compact fluorescent bulbs or LED lights? Do you drive a fuel efficient car? Is your printing done by an environmentally responsible company?

Consider buying carbon offsets. In Canada one of the top ranked companies is Less. In the United States check out TerraPass . Make sure that your clients know your commitment to the environment is more than talk.

7. Be an expert.Write articles that offer tips and advice. These can be on your own blog or for sites such as EZineArticles.com and About.com.   In time you’ll be seen as an expert! 

8. Code of Ethics. If you’re a member of the Association of Personal Historians, (If you’re not, you should be ) you know that you’re expected to adhere to the APH Code of Ethics. It’s simple to add this as a page to your website. Like the money back guarantee it creates a degree of comfort for your clients.

Conclusion

If I were a potential client in search a personal historian, who would  I hire?

Over and above the obvious need to hire a personal historian with a high degree of expertise, the nod would go to the person who was not only outstanding but went that extra mile and met the above attributes.

How are you going to make your business stand out this year? Drop me a line. Love to hear from you.

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Image by iStockphoto

1. The 50 Best Life Story Questions.
2. 25 No Cost or Low Cost Marketing Ideas for Your Personal History Business.
3. How Much Should You Pay a Personal Historian?
4. 15 Great Memoirs Written by Women.
5. 5 Top Sites for Free Online Videography Training.
6. The Top 3 Prosumer HD Camcorders Under $2,500.
7. How to Boost Your Interviewing Skills.
8. Three Crucial Steps to Starting Your Personal History Business.
9. 5 Print-On-Demand Sites You’ll Want to Consider.
10. 12 Top Rated Family Tree Makers.

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For this Monday’s Link Roundup I’ve found some great tech articles for you. Two that particularly interest me are Kindle’s Personal Document Service and 5 cloud storage services compared.  Kindle offers some intriguing possibilities for personal historians. And if you use a cloud service as I do, then do yourself a favor and compare services. You may want to switch.

• We’re Crazy About Books and Confused About eBooks. “…you don’t have to read books to be crazy about them. Published authors command attention and respect even from the people who don’t have to budget how much they’ll spend at their local bookstore … A book is a social object, to riff on Hugh McLeod’s conversation. Not only that, it’s a fetish item or physical souvenir. We gift books. We hold onto books after we’ve read them because we largely can’t make a case to let them go.”

• What Hoops Will You Jump Through for Your Clients? “… we usually do our best to meet client requests–even that means jumping through some hoops to keep the client satisfied. However, some customer requests are just plain unreasonable. This post describes some “hoops” that aren’t worth jumping through–even to make a client happy.

• Kindle’s Personal Document Service. “It’s looking like a Kindle Christmas in my family…Why? It’s all about Kindle’s new Personal Document Service. Designed to make it easy for Kindle owners to send personal documents to their reader, it also allows them to authorize others to send documents too. This means I can “publish” family stories by simply emailing the document to my family’s Kindle addresses.”

• Free For All: From CreativePro.com. “This month’s mixed assortment of free resources includes 2012 calendar templates; a vector kit of pre-press and markup symbols; 13 typefaces; 60 photos of paper; and one way to sign and send a document without a fax machine.”

• Unlikely Book Club.[video] “Steve Hartman reports on the book club that’s inspiring people in other states and countries. It all began with an unlikely friendship between two men, one a lawyer and the other homeless.”

• 5 cloud storage services compared. “… personal cloud services have been slowly easing their way into almost everyone’s computing plans.That’s not you you say? You don’t use a cloud service? Really? Do you use Dropbox to store files? Do you get your e-mail at Gmail? Are you experimenting with Apple’s iCloud? Doing work with Google Apps, Office 365, or Zoho Docs? Congratulations, you’re a cloud user.”

• Protect Your Legacy for up to 100 Years. “The SanDisk Memory Vault is the first product from SanDisk engineered to preserve your most important photos, videos, documents, and scanned files for generations to come. The company claims the device has been tested to support data retention for up to 100 years.”

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You may have seen the  inspiring video “Johnny the Bagger”.  It’s the true story of how one young man with Down Syndrome changed the experience of grocery shoppers in a simple but profound way…Read more.

In this week’s Monday’s Link Roundup, if you self-publish, don’t miss Book Design for Self-Publishers: Raw Materials.   This is a terrific site for anyone involved in book design.  And if you’re like me and don’t include pricing on your website, you might change your mind after reading Why We Are Afraid to Talk Pricing.

• Telling Life Stories Through Quilts. “Generations of women have been telling stories in fabric — with quilts. Lisa Morehouse paid a visit to one quilting bee in Mendocino County’s Anderson Valley. Many of the group’s members emigrated to work in the local apple orchards and vineyards.”

• End of life: You shared your stories. “As part of the Globe’s in-depth series on End of Life decisions in the 21st century, we asked you to tell your stories around this difficult topic. Readers from across the country joined the conversation.”

• The Life Reports II. “A few weeks ago, I asked people over 70 to send me “Life Reports” — essays about their own lives and what they’d done poorly and well. They make for fascinating and addictive reading, and I’ve tried to extract a few general life lessons.”

• Not Your Grandmother’s Genealogy Hobby. “Wikis, social-networking sites, search engines and online courses are changing genealogy from a loner’s hobby to a social butterfly’s field day. New tools and expansive digital archives, including many with images of original documents, are helping newbies research like pros.”

• Why We Are Afraid to Talk Pricing. “Think about the last time you went to a website for a product or service that you couldn’t buy outright online. Did it list prices? Or did the site encourage you to call for more information? How many times do you walk away from a purchase simply because you couldn’t get enough information on pricing to make an informed decision?”

• Book Design for Self-Publishers: Raw Materials. “When you sit down to design a book, there are organizational tasks you have to address right at the beginning. Getting your raw materials organized and making sure your workflow will produce an efficient publishing process are important enough to spend some quality time on. Let’s take them one at a time.”

• Family Tree Magazine Podcast Episode Notes. “Tips on how to get relatives to discuss family history, a discussion of the Historic American Cookbook Project, and news on the Genealogists for Families project at Kiva.com. Plus: Learn more about creating a family history book from Family Tree University’s Nancy Hendrickson.”

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That’s the question I was asked one day by a personal history client.   I muttered something about being too busy and feebly joked about not being able to afford it. As a professional personal historian, it wasn’t my best moment. Why should anyone hire me if I didn’t believe enough in life stories to do my own?

I think as professionals we need to “walk-the-talk”. Would you hire an interior decorator who was uninterested in his own home’s appearance? What about the professional organizer who tells you she never has time to organize her own office? The chances are you’d probably have second thoughts about hiring them.

If we haven’t had our life story told, we can’t  talk about the experience in a personal and authentic manner.  Imagine, on the other hand, what a powerful selling point to be able to enthusiastically share with a potential client the rewards of having had your own life story documented.

I have a modest proposal. If you’re a professional personal historian and haven’t  had your life story told, here’s what to do:

• Hire a personal historian to do your life story if you can afford the time and the money.
• If your finances are low, find a fellow personal historian who’s starting out and needs some experience and product to show. Consider a barter arrangement. For your assistance through the process that person produces a life story for you.
• If you’re new to the business and can’t afford to hire a personal historian, do your own writing with the help of books such as How to Write Your Own Life Story, Legacy : A Step-By-Step Guide to Writing Personal History, or Living Legacies: How to Write, Illustrate and Share Your Life Stories

I wonder how many other professional personal historians out there have never had their life stories told? Am I the only one?

Photo by Amarand Agasi

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