Fun, Practical and Personalised Post-its

We all know you can write on post-its. Did you know you can print on them too?

Printing

In the original OVERnote article the author admitted to playing "fast and loose" on a cheap Laser printer and suggested that printing these things carried some risk. Keeping that in mind I tried printing first on an old inkjet printer (my trusty Canon BJC-1000SP). No problem! I then tried it on an HP multi-function printer and finally on a Laser printer. Worked without a hitch.

I'll also say "proceed at your own risk" to cover my behind, but I've printed lots of these things now (mostly on the Canon) and none of the printers have complained yet.

Printing Templates

The original OVERnote documents were in PDF format. I created these easily-editable templates in Word (.DOC) format and OpenDocument format (ODF) to make it easier for you to make your own Post-it covers.

There are two templates:

1. The Printing Guide. This is the first page you want to print out. It has six boxes marked on the page so you know where to position your six blank Post-its. It's editable in case you want to use Post-its that are not the standard 3x3 inch squares. Download the Printing Guide here: ODF (9 KB) or DOC (13 KB).
Figure 2. The Printing Guide

2. The Cover Template. This is the document you modify to place your own post-it designs. The page has six 3x3 inch squares based on the standard Post-it size. The numbers in the column in the middle (0 to 3) serve two purposes. The first is to mark out (roughly) the inches down the page, 3 inches per box. The second is so the table's cells representing the post-it boxes remain at the proper size even when the cells themselves are empty (and ready for you to fill with your own designs). Download the Cover Template here: ODF (9 KB) or DOC (13 KB)

Template Tweaking Hints

Turn on the ruler guide in your word processor. Use it when editing to keep an eye on the post-it boxes of your Printing Guide and Cover Template to make sure they stay at 3" x 3" (assuming you're using standard post-its).

Add and Resize images to fit. After inserting images into my post-it boxes, I found I could use the resize drag bars around the image box to enlarge or reduce my images to bring my boxes back to 3" as required. Note: You'll probably use Photoshop or MS Paint to come up with your images - whatever you're comfortable with is fine. I used the GIMP to create and manipulate my images. It's free and is available for Windows, Mac and Linux. Anyway, we're not printing on photo paper so some roughness in your images is acceptable.

Note: I created these documents using OpenOffice.org. OpenOffice.org allows saving to Word format as well as in the new standard, OpenDocument format (aka ODF). I haven't tested the Word version from within MS Word so your results may vary. If you're on MS Word, there's an ODF Add-in you can try here.

How to Print Your Personalised Post-its

Step 1. Print the Printing Guide. It has six boxes where you can position six standard post-its (3" x 3").
Step 2. Load your Printing Guide with blank post-its.
Step 3. Feed the loaded Printing Guide into your printer.
Step 4. Print the Cover Template you've personalised with your designs. If you like, you can try my sample cover template as in Figure 3, available here: ODF (24 KB) or DOC (27 KB). This step will print the Cover Template's designs onto your six blank post-its.
Step 5. Peel off your post-its and use as desired!


Figure 4. Loading the Printing Guide with blank post-its


Figure 5. Printing out a set of personalised post-its using the Cover Sample: Before...

Figure 6. Printing out a set of personalised post-its: After!

Ideas

Here are some of my ideas for your post-it designs.

Bookmarks

A blank post-it works perfectly well as a bookmark. Not much point in printing out the word "Bookmark" on a post-it, is there? But how about a bookmark that lets you know the date and time you last set it? Maybe even one that lets you know the current page number at a glance? And, of course, your name just in case you lose the book.

Leave a Message

To take messages and write notes, the original OVERnote is perfectly servicable, especially if you're a scribbler like the OVERnote's creator. If you want something different, how about this? Print your face on your post-its. Make your messages personalised. Advertise yourself. Don't let them forget the favour you did them. What goes around may come around.

Chapter tabs

Just like those plastic dividers, but even cheaper! Plus, you can print the chapter names out, write them in yourself, or just have the chapter numbers on these babies.

Targets

A bit of Office Fun. Included in the sample cover template is one for a human silhouette. Use it for a bit of deskbound target practice. Keep score! The beauty of these targets is, they can make a satisfying snap when you hit them. They can take a lickin' and keep on tickin'. You might want to go visit OfficeGuns.com or splash out and get yourself some hardcore rubberband action from Rubberbandguns.com and BackyardArtillery.com.

Inbox Organiser

For your physical inbox. Separate the reams of paper with post-its sporting the titles: Must Do, Optional, Maybe, Recycle. Make up your own titles depending on whether you're a follower of GTD, some other productivity regime, or your home-brew version.

Status

The Doctor Is IN. The Doctor is OUT. Don't bother me just now, I'm REALLY BUSY. A variation of the Come in/Go Away! mat. Happy, Angry, Sad... A blank Smilie Face. A Series of enlarged Emoticons. Stick these on your monitor, on the door to your office, on your forehead. People will get the message. Crystal clear communication is a wonderful thing.

Practicality

Okay, so maybe not all of these things are all that practical (or practicable). Still, it's a way of indulging in a bit of procrastinating fun and looking busy while you're doing it.

Figure 7. No more wondering who took the trouble to take a message for them!

The Guarantee: Making Your Offer Even More Risk-Free

Using a guarantee in your sales copy is one of the most powerful ways to reassure your prospective customer that he or she is making a good choice by buying your product.

Expert copywriter Michael Samonek will show you how to turn 10 ordinary guarantees into blockbusters. You may have noticed that all of those guarantees fall into several categories. Actually, there are four categories - each one eliminating one more level of risk for the customer.

1. The Basic Guarantee.

You simply offer the prospect his money back if he returns the product within a certain time period.

2. The "Pay-Only-If-It-Works" Guarantee.

Now it starts to get interesting. This type of guarantee tells the prospect that he can try the product first - and then pay for it. Joe Karbo (its originator) made millions with this one.

3. The "Keep-All-the-Bonuses-Free" Guarantee.

You let the prospect keep his free bonuses - even if he returns the product for a full refund. This technique works like a charm to increase response rates.

4. The "Better-Than-Money-Back" Guarantee.

Not only do you guarantee satisfaction, you take it three steps further... until the customer can actually profit from returning the product: (a) The dissatisfied customer gets a 100 percent refund plus shipping costs, (b) the customer keeps the unsatisfactory merchandise (the only "but" being that they must give it to someone who can use it.), (c) the customer gets $10!

"This last guarantee is great for high-ticket items," Michael told me. "Use it, or a variation of it, with discretion."

How to Find High-Demand Products That Sell Like Hotcakes

By Paul Smithson

You can't sell a product if you don't have someone to sell it to! A good guideline to help you figure out whether Internet surfers are simply doing research - not looking to buy - is the number of words they use in their search terms.

• One or two words ("gift baskets") means they’re probably doing research.
• Three or more words ("corporate gift basket" or "gift basket supplies" or "Orange County gourmet gift basket") means they’re probably looking to buy.

You can supplement the product demand information you gather from your keyword research with the following:

• Go to PayPal.com. Click on the Shops link at the bottom of page. All 42,000 websites that accept PayPal are listed here by category. There's a Categories column on the left side of the page. Click on the category of the product you're researching. PayPal will display the top shops in that category, ranked by volume (the number of sales made through PayPal).

If, for example, you're thinking of selling tooth whiteners, you'd click on the Health and Nutrition category. And one of the things you'd find is a listing for a company that sold 16,736 of their bleaching kits through PayPal. Since that company seems to have robust sales, they're obviously making money. A tooth whitener, therefore, is a good product to sell.

• Go to groups.Google.com. In the search box, type in the kind of product you're interested in selling - let's say, a supplement that has something to do with human growth hormone. The search results will list all the news groups that are discussing human growth hormone (40,200). Click on the links and you'll find out how many people are posting to those news groups. If there are lots of them, that tells you there is a great deal of interest in human growth hormone, and a supplement like yours will probably be very popular.

• Go to Amazon.com. Click on the Top Sellers tab. The items featured there are organized by category and updated hourly. Amazon may be best known for being an online bookseller, but they also sell a wide variety of other products - computers, jewelry, apparel, automotive, personal care, cell phones, and electronics, among many others. This will give you a good idea of what people are buying on the Internet.

• Go to eBay.com. In the search box, type in the product you're interested in selling. eBay will display how many items are available for sale in that category. If you type in "yoga mats," for example, you'd find that 455 such items are available. That's good information, but what you really want to know is how well those yoga mats are selling. So click on the Sell tab at the top of eBay's home page. Then click on the Seller Central link at the bottom of the Sell page. Scroll down the page, and click on the What's Hot link, then click on Hot Items by Category. This is where you find out which categories and products are HOT - and where demand is outpacing supply!

The Four-Hour Work Week

I've been reading The Four-Hour Work Week by Timothy Ferriss. It's very engaging - smart and full of good stories and good humor. The book's argument - that you can run a successful business by working only four hours a week - is mind crack for any busy entrepreneur. Ferriss makes the idea seem plausible.

I don't remember how I found out about him. I do remember seeing a piece he wrote in Forbes Small Business that featured a photo of him training in mixed martial arts with a caption that went something like, "I run a great business... and spend more time on sports than work... using my simple time-saving system."

Ferriss is not only an interesting guy, he's a master at promoting himself. For example, he holds a world record in the tango (for the most turns made in a given time) - and to document the achievement, he got himself on Regis and Kelly. He also won a martial arts competition by, as it turns out, taking advantage of a technicality in the rules.

Ferriss was working 15 hours a day, he says, when he came across the work of economist Vilfredo Pareto. Pareto is the one who came up with the original "8/20 rule" (also known as Pareto's Law), demonstrating that 80 percent of a society's wealth is produced and owned by 20 percent of the population. "This highly debated principle," Ferriss points out, "also applies to other situations. For instance, 80 percent of a company's profits typically come from 20 percent of its products and customers."

Ferriss applied Pareto's 19th century concept to his company "by pinpointing the sources of most of my sales - and my problems - so I could spend my time more efficiently." He quickly realized that of more than 120 wholesale customers, only five were bringing in 95 percent of his revenues. Then, in a single day, he made a few simple but "emotionally difficult" decisions that changed his life for the better.

"First, I decided to stop pursuing most of my customers so that I could profile and duplicate the most profitable ones," Ferriss says. "I was spending most of my time working on small accounts, when the big five already ordered regularly without any follow up. I also abandoned being busy for being productive. I realized I could reduce my hours by limiting tasks to the critical few and cutting my work time to force myself to focus on the most important projects."

I like what I'm hearing from this guy.

How to Do the Impossible: Create a Paperless Life, Never Check Voice Mail Again, Never Return Another Phone Call

Forget the paperless office - that’s aiming too low.

Let’s take a look at the bigger picture: a paperless life. While we’re at it, let’s also eliminate three other nuisances: answering the phone, checking voice mail, and returning phone calls.

Is this possible? It is. The key to finding means to accomplish the "impossible" is asking the right question: "How would you do ____ for a week if your life depended on it?" Most things considered impossible just haven’t been looked at through the "how" lens of lateral thinking.

Here are two warm-up exercise questions for Paperless Life 101:

What would you have to do to never again touch mail?

What would you have to do to never touch another check?

Consider these as real questions. If I offered you a million dollars to stop doing these two things for a month, could you do it? Here are a just a few potential strategies you could use… then we’ll move on to phone games:

• No more mail

First, we need to cut out the crap - reduce volume. To begin, get removed from junk-mail lists and common commercial mailing lists. There are a few ways to do this:

1. Get removed from the most common junk-mail lists at dmaconsumers.org. (This costs a few dollars in some cases.) And check alternative strategies at stopjunkmail.org.
2. Use LifeLock, or another identity-protection service, which automatically removes you from large mailing lists, one of the most common vehicles for identity theft.
3. Have your mail forwarded to special processing centers, where it is all scanned and e-mailed to you. One popular service is Remote Control Mail, which offers two big benefits to the time-focused and mobile-minded: (a) Relevant postal mail is funneled into e-mail, so you can check both e-mail and postal mail at once. (b) You can travel freely, whenever and wherever, without ever missing a letter.

• No more checks

1. Set up online banking so you can issue checks directly from your bank, and set up automatic recurring payments.
2. Give your accountant power of attorney to sign specific checks (for tax documents, etc.) on your behalf. Power of attorney is no joke, so do your homework - but it can be used with little risk. This approach not only cuts down on checks but also on finance-related mail, which you can then forward to your accountant for handling, start-to-finish.

"But what of the other 9-to-5 headaches?" you ask. "How can I eliminate the need to answer the phone, check voice mail, or return phone calls?

Here are a few quick fixes:

• No more answering the phone

Use a service like GrandCentral so you can listen to your voice mails as they’re being left. Each caller is required to announce their name before the call is dialed, and you are able to preview the name and then send the call to voice mail, where you can listen to the message they’re leaving. If you want to speak with them, you can jump in. If not, let them leave the message.

• No more voice mail

Stop managing separate inputs from office phone voice mail, cellphone voice mail, and multiple e-mail accounts. Consolidate. Get your voice mail delivered to your e-mail inbox, which then serves as your single communications "funnel" - with all your e-mail, postal mail, and voice mail in one place. GrandCentral can e-mail audio files, but for those who want text, Simulscribe is a popular option with nearly 90 percent transcription accuracy.

To further encourage people to communicate with you via e-mail, there are two approaches that I’ve used effectively: Indicate in your voice mail greeting that they must leave their e-mail address, and then respond to them via e-mail. You can also use a service like Jott to send a voice message to them as an e-mail.

• No more returning calls

Pinger enables you to send voice mail to people without calling them. Why would you want to do that? Pinger’s website explains:

"We’ve all been there - you make a call and think to yourself, ‘please don’t pick up,’ or you call and think ‘I hope I’m not interrupting…’ With Pinger you leave the message at your convenience, and they get it at their convenience. Unlike voice mail, there is no ringing, no annoying prompts, no lengthy greetings - just your message."

None of these strategies is perfect, but they do demonstrate that none of our impossible questions are impossible to answer. Once you frame the question in terms of "how would I…?" it is entirely possible to stop tolerating most of life’s annoyances and eliminate them altogether.

How to Make a New Business Work

Apart from starting off with (and sticking to) a good plan, there are nine secrets I’ve discovered to making a start-up business work:

1. Don't spend too much time planning.
2. The most effective way of entering a new market is to offer a popular product at a much lower price.
3. It’s ultimately about selling.
4. Don't spend too much money.
5. Before you invest time and money in any business, know exactly how much you are willing to lose - and get out if you hit that point.
6. Get operational fast.
7. Go for the quick cash first.
8. Let your winners run and cut your losses short.
9. Pay attention to Pareto’s Law (the 80-20 rule): 80 percent of your success comes from 20 percent of your resources.
10. Under - promise and over - deliver
11. Schedule for on-time delivery.

Build a Business That Doesn’t Need You

Entrepreneurs start there dream business in there garage. Business takes off. Entrepreneur slowly becomes de facto head of marketing, sales, product development, customer service, shipping etc., etc. Business booms but then stalls. The problem? The founder no longer has time to be that original entrepreneur who had the great ideas and the energy that brought about the initial success.

If your company’s survival is based on you, you don’t have a business, you have a self-employment job.

Entrepreneurs fall into this trap, too. After initial success, they discover that they’ve dug themselves into a hole. They can’t take a vacation. They can’t take on any of the other projects they’re interested in because all their time is wrapped up in this one business. And one day they wake up and find out that they are the company. Without them, it will fall apart.But it doesn’t have to be this way. Even though it’s tough - because you are financially and emotionally invested in your business - you need to get out of the way so your business can grow.

From day one, you should be planning to build a company that doesn’t need you. One of the first things you need to do is let go of your ego and find a superstar who can eventually run your company. Then you can focus on your big vision and more ideas.

And especially if your business is "personality based," you need to create other related "pods'’ that can generate income from sources other than "you."