eAction

Recently a number of people from church have dropped by to visit. Ostensibly to offer condolences on the death of my Dad, for whom I was a live-in caregiver many years. When I invite them into the living room and they see my desk, they are often amazed, and wonder at what I do with my time, or “what do you do for a living?” they ask.

I in turn am astonished that they don’t know. I wasn’t trying to keep it a secret. I assure them that I’m a very busy business woman. I run it all from the computer. Then I try to explain it to them, until their eyes glaze over and they notice their watches and have to be going.

Some really care about me and want to know more, but - how do I condense it all into a short answer they can understand and digest?

So I’ve begun to think that what I really need is a brochure or folded card on which all my answers are carefully placed and they can take it home and read it over a few times, and even pass it on, if they don’t need my services.

That’s what I’ve been working on this morning. It took longer than I first thought, but I’ve polished it quite a bit, and though I want to wait a day or so to make sure I don’t catch more mistakes on it, I do believe this 4.5″ x 11″ card folded three into thirds with a front and three inside panels, should do the trick.

Right now I’m doing test print runs. At first I was using an off-white creamy paper with a linen weave that I thought look quite warm and classic. However on the side with the most weave, my photo doesn’t come out clear. So I’ve just tried with plain white cardstock and that looks much better.

The colour printer allows me to add some coloured graphics to break up the text a bit and illustrate it.

I believe most people can skim over this information in 30 seconds or less and find their questions answered, and links to go online to look for more. I even had room to mention my main affiliate link. I’ll need to carry some of these in my purse for a while and see how they go over, but it strikes me as a suitable answer to the problem - how to tell people about our business and make sure they take our special links with them. Be sure to slant your work description so it tells them what you could do for them!

You don’t need a great deal of desktop publishing skill to figure something like this out. The only consideration is what kind of paper are you able to work with? Then you find ways to adapt the idea to suit your situation and business info.

They say everybody should have a 30 second elevator speech ready for when someone asks what you do. I found that this helped me condense my many ventures into a more compact message and space. I like room fro my creative imagination. But with time I may learn to condense this some more.

Feel free to work with the idea for yourself.