Working Better When Working From Home

My Home Office Hacks Publisher Joe D’Eramo, a copywriter/marketing & PR consultant by trade, shares his insights on being more productive while working in a home office. During this episode, we’ll also delve into marketing campaigns for small business owners: what works and how they could be better.

My guest is Joe D’Eramo, the founder and publisher of My Home Office Hacks, a virtual water cooler/newsletter for work-from-home professionals and home-based business owners. Joe’s been working remotely as a freelance copywriter/marketing & PR consultant since 2002. In addition to My Home Office Hacks, Joe has self-published two books, Recipes for the Roommate-Impaired and 25 Ways to Go from Stepfather to StepDad. He’s the father of a very cool 17-year-old and the owner of HiRoad Communications (www.hiroadcommunications.com) of Plymouth, Massachusetts. You can read My Home Office Hacks on Substack at https://iworkfromhome.substack.com/.

Transcript

0:10

Welcome to The Water Trough, where we can't make you drink, but we will make you think. My name is Ed Drawster, the Small Business Doctor, and I'm really excited you chose to join me here as we discuss topics that are important for small business folks just like you. If you're looking for ideas, inspiration, and possibility, you've come to the right place. Join us as we take steps to help you create the healthy business that you've always wanted. Hello, folks. This is Ed draws to the small business doctor. I want to welcome you to the water trough and I am joined today by Joe Doramo. Joe is the founder and publisher of my home office. Hacks a virtual water cooler newsletter for work from home professionals. Like myself and home based business owners, Joe has been working remotely as a freelance copywriter and marketing and PR consultant since 2002. Right to that. He was a marketing communications professional in the engineering and insurance industries. In addition to my home office hacks, Joe has self published two books, and he is the proud father of a very cool, his words, not mine. I haven't met a son yet, 17 year old. And he's the owner of high road communications in Plymouth, Massachusetts. Joe, welcome. Oh, thank you, Ed. And just for my daughter's sake, if she hears this, let her know that she's a cool 17 year old daughter girl. Oh, I do apologize. I don't know why I said son, but I did. So please excuse me. No, she's another topic altogether and I could spend the whole time talking about her, but we'll get to the gist of why we're here. we'll do that next time. So Joe, tell us a bit about how it is you came to produce the My Home Office Hacks. What inspired you to go down this path? Well, I blame Dan rather. I was a big fan of his, News and Guts organization on Facebook. And, I noticed it was not there anymore and I wondered what happened to it. And then I discovered he was on Substack. Now, the idea for a newsletter it actually started out as a blog idea and I had it back in 2014. And at the time, I had, uh, my stepchildren were in college. My daughter was in elementary. I was busy. It was something I kept meaning to do and it never happened and life happened in between then. And then, during the pandemic, like I said, I happened to notice Dan was on Substack. I'm like, what's that? Like a lot of us during the pandemic, we were just. Kind of exploring things and I said, well, you know, maybe this is how I can start this without the pressure of creating a website and that's how it began and it took a couple of years for me to get it off the ground. I started in 2021 and towards the end of the year I just made it a weekly and now I've amped it up for, a weekly post with, Maybe a post or two during the week with ideas that come up. So what is the source of your hacks? Is it your own experience? Those of others or combination? It's things that come across my plate during the course of my week. Most of them come up from people I interact with. I do a lot of networking and I'll hear things, even before my home office hacks, I write about a dozen newsletters for clients and organizations that I work with. I warned people that, when we have a meeting, there's a good possibility. Something you say, especially if it's noteworthy, it could end up in a newsletter somehow, some way. so that's always been kind of my radar just to listen for good ideas. I used to work at an engineering firm in Boston in the 90s, and whether it was the lunchroom or the break room. There was always a gathering of some people and we talk about a variety of things and whether it was, stocks or the show we watched last night or, as the Internet was evolving, different things you could do and that's what I wanted for this newsletter. So. I've taken that into my daily life. And as somebody who works from home and is usually by myself, when I'm working from home, I'm paying attention to the emails I'm getting and pay attention to the people I'm talking to. And the ideas come up and, I've lately found Google alerts, which I've always used for clients as a way to find coverage for them and, mentions about myself, but now I'm using it for. Different work from home phrases. Okay. Finding a lot of content that way. There's all sorts of sources for contact. And just from talking to people about what I'm doing, people always will mention something and, we'll come up with an idea and there's always anecdotes, like I shared one with you this morning about, a little furry guest who appeared in my home office this morning that I had to take care of, So these are all common experiences that people like to hear. My goal is, basically. To provide something of value to my readers and then hopefully leave them with a smile. And I think that's an interesting thing for us all to consider. We can take the direct approach by me, by me, or we can take the indirect approach, which is vastly more appealing here. I am giving a sense of who I am by sharing your hacks. Would you not say that you're taking that? I don't want to say passive approach, but that less invasive approach about introducing yourself to people. They're getting to know you right? Absolutely. They do. There is a relationship building process that comes with a newsletter 808 on monday mornings the newsletter comes out and people know that And they wonder if it's not there at 808 like if it's 8 30 like oh, where's my hacks? What's joe doing here today? it develops over a period of time and ironically at i'm trying to Step away from that a little bit and become more engaged with the readers and let You know, I often will have guest contributors. I'm looking for people to contribute their hack or do interviews and things like that, because I do want it to be a dialogue. And that's kind of the evolution of where I'm going with it. And to do it in a way, again, that's bringing value, there's this business coach who's in one of my networking groups. Every time I talk to him, I learn something or he's recommending a book. I can read and he's bringing something to every conversation. That's a value to me. So that's what I want. My office acts to do with readers. I would like to share a couple of hacks with us Oh, love to. the one that people find most interesting and valuable. I use what's called the Pomodoro timer, which for those of you unfamiliar and old enough, Ed and I can remember the Pomodoro timers, which were actually what our mothers used for baking. they look like a tomato, a Pomodoro tomato, and they set for a certain period of time. And then you take whatever's. Well, it's been applied to productivity. So how the Pomodoro timer works is you work for 25 minutes, you take a five minute break. Go back to work for 25 minutes. You rinse and repeat a couple more times. And then on the fourth Pomodoro, you take a 15 minute break as a writer. I found it really beneficial because, you really lock in for the 25 minutes and then you stretch or whatever. This way. You're not getting distracted by emails and social media. You save that for your five minute breaks. So that's part one of the Pomodoro timer. But what I've done is I've incorporated an exercise routine within the Pomodoro timer method. So years ago, when my ex was expecting our daughter, I found this guy, Matt Fury, who teaches a lot of things, but one of them is body weight exercises. So Hindu pushups, Hindu squats, a bunch of things like that, that you can get a really decent workout in a very short amount of time. So what I've done is during my five minute breaks, I'm doing a hundred Hindu squats, or I'm doing a hundred Hindu pushups, or I'm doing his combat abs program, which can be done within five minutes. What I'm finding is that I'm sweating, I'm panting a little bit, but when I get back to my computer, or back to the keyboard, I'm in a better groove, and I'm also being productive, so at the end of my workday, I've actually completed my workouts too. So, if I want to go off and do whatever, I feel like, oh, I've gotten my work done, I've gotten my exercise in. The rest of the day is mine. Interesting. Do you do this consistently every day? Yeah, it's my during my work days. Yeah. On the weekends. I don't. Okay. And that's how I make it feel like it's the weekend is that I don't stick to the pomodoro. It's really beneficial. And, uh, the 4 quadrants Has been another thing where you basically, draw the cross in the middle of it in the upper left corner. You put the things that absolutely have to be done today to the right of that. The things that you would like to get done today, bottom left, the things you could get done today. And then things, eventually will have to get done. I set it up that way so that I'm addressing the things in the upper left quadrant 1st and. I used this technique, interestingly enough, before I went on a trip to, Europe. I went to Belgium last month. And... It's the first trip I've taken in a long time. And I think a lot of people that work from home are guilty of not doing that for themselves. Right. So I set it up that, okay, these are the things that have to be done before I leave the house for going to the airport. And then I had the other stuff and, the first two quadrants I was able to knock out and, it was the first time I really focused on it and really use that, productivity method. I found it beneficial the same coach I was telling you about before taught me that one. So not that he originated, but he brought it to my attention. So I give him credit for it. That's fantastic. It reminds me of another, similar thing. This is about prioritization. There's another with the urgency and. Necessity, basically, I confess I can't recall the name of the author of that 1, it's a time management tool, the 4 quadrants, but a slightly different perspective. And the 4th 1, there's no purpose for this stuff at all, is a place where we spend a lot of our time. Ironically enough, it's always easy to default to the easiest that which requires the least thought and consideration. But I like the idea of prioritizing such as this. It really is good. It puts you in the mood of getting things cleaned up and off your plate, giving you space for your own agenda versus the things that you have to do. That's really cool. you still do, freelance copywriter marketing and PR work. Is that correct? That is my day job, yes. So the Home Office Hacks is it fair to say that it is something to give people a sense about you for those roles? Um, I mean it ends up being that way because I'm always promoting my Home Office Hacks, which... Is promoting my writing, which is promoting what I do anyway. So they're intertwined. Okay. So yeah, it does become part of my marketing where I'm sharing, my hacks on my social media platforms for. my high road communications business. So what are business people missing in the world of effective communication? Where are we falling short? What kind of recommendations do you have to us? The hacks obviously are things that we can individually employ or not, or we can tweak to our own benefit. But what do we collectively coming up short on in this world? Well, from the business folks, I would say there are a couple of things and this occurs when I work with people is that we're missing a commitment to campaigning a commitment to marketing. my newsletter comes out once a week. That's my commitment. I feel like a lot of business owners look at marketing as a chore. It's considered overhead unless it brings in certain dollars and it's really got to be a commitment I'm going to do these things. I'm going to put out a press release every quarter. I'm going to do a newsletter every month or every week. I'm going to post multiple times per week on my social media. there's a lack of commitment to that. And I think it's a lack of belief that it's actually doing anything. I think. We're such an immediate gratitude society that, a plus B equals C. And if we don't see that right away, we get frustrated. And the difficult thing about the type of work that I do is that it's largely collaborative. I can do a lot of the work for people. But they have to put their time in review because they know their business better than anybody else, right? As much as I bone up on things as much as I use the internet and use AI for research Ultimately, they're the expert and what goes out to their audience is them, or it should be. And that's what's missing from AI. When people are thinking AI is this great, big problem solver, like it helps, but it's not that unique thing that people are getting when they hire your company to do whatever, or when they buy your product, that's going to come across in your communication. When business owners realize that if they Dedicate. It doesn't have to be an extraordinary amount of time. It just has to be, when something's put in front of you, give it, a half hour to an hour. See if it sounds like you and then work with the writers and work with the designers and. Make sure it's a reflection of you because most professionals who do that sort of work, they get in the groove of what you're trying to say and how you want to say it. And the effort put in to do that in the beginning will pay off, will save you time down the road because the people who do it for you will end up knowing your product as well, if not better than you do. After a while, 1 of the things I bring to the table is memory and I've had a very good long term memory that I can remember. You know, the 1st, 3 digits of phone numbers and things like that and zip codes When I was a kid, I really loved history. And that's the biggest part of history is remembering what happened when and, it's helped me quite a bit as a writer and as a consultant because I remember what we did when and, a lot of people get so involved in their business. They don't even remember when. So having the outsider whose job it is to do all these things. Really becomes an extension of you. And that's the thing I'd like business owners to think about. I get the impression that you, try to encourage the storyteller in your clients. Oh, absolutely. And a lot of times I will record an initial conversation with them because a lot of times things come up you and I had a free flow before we started this, and there were a lot of cool things that came up that Could be used and, I have a client I meet with regularly and brilliant guy, MIT grad has developed this flooring that's been recycled and it's, mitigates electrostatic discharge and. He and I will meet and I swear the first half hour, we're just okay, what else is going on? And then about minute 40 or so it's, Oh yeah, We started working with that company out in California that's named after a fruit or So I'll get this thing. That's like the lead story, but it'll take 40 minutes for it to finally come up because we're so focused on the present and we forget, Oh, maybe three or four weeks ago, the one thing I've learned at over the years, and you probably found the same thing is that the biggest challenge of being a consultant is not the product that you're creating for them. It's finding the best way to communicate with them to get to that faster. And that's what I found is that what some people like to have a phone conversation. Some people like to meet in person. Some people would prefer email. They're all different and you just got to find what works best. Right, Going back to something you'd said earlier, you're talking about people being able to believe in the message, the stories that they're putting out there, to believe that there's a value to them. Now this is something, well, some people just expect to farm it out to somebody else, like yourself, for example, and say, do it and they will come. But for those of us that really need tangible evidence, is there a hack for being able to be able to identify the benefit of these marketing PR efforts that we make. Very specifically, this campaign led to this. Yeah. For the work I do, typically it's links. It's all about links. how many links have you created? how many people. Liked how many people clicked, how many people engaged on your social media and doing your due diligence when you do get clients. How did you hear about us? What made you want to reach out the PR element, it's a really tricky thing in the PR game, especially because. It isn't always a plus B equals C. One of the clients I've worked for and one of their clients, they sell franchises and they'll do their research on the franchise or before they buy in. And they may not mention the fact that. They saw all these press releases about different things they were doing in the community. They'll say, Oh, I had a great conversation with Michael. He was wonderful to deal with. And I liked what the company represents, but what they leave out of the fact finding thing is that, we felt better about the company because we saw a third party saying that, even if it's running a release verbatim, but a third party thought enough of that to post that on their site. And unfortunately, that doesn't always get mentioned when new business gets signed, but it's part of the package because let's face it. If you go to somebody's website, unless you're doing it completely wrong, you're saying positive things about your business, right? And people expect that and take it with a grain of salt. It's when a another website says something nice about you or. reinforces the news that you're putting out there. That's when the opinions start to change and that doesn't always get mentioned at the time of sale. That's a very interesting point. I totally understand what you're saying. I'm going to take a slight change of course here. For a lot of us, I don't think the concept of public relations PR is really well understood. In fact, there's a tendency to think that, the writing and the marketing and the PR are all one thing. That's not true, is it? No, it takes on a number of shapes too. PR can be a spokesperson. A lot of people think of it that way. Okay. Somebody who's like a mouthpiece for whatever company or agency. Traditional PR really doesn't exist. I worked for a PR agency in the late 1990s, and it was basically push out a press release, make a lot of phone calls, try to get feature story coverage. And nowadays. It's about following up by email and, there's not enough staff to be called first at most publications to pitch. And the ones that are there prefer to be pitched by email. Right. And the PR person really has become like the marketing communications wing of a company. Okay. So you're doing the press releases but you're also wearing a lot of other hats too. Okay. And it's really become an all inclusive communications role. Okay. But it really depends on the organization you're working with. Somebody like myself, I become like the PR marketing communications wing of a company, whereas Somebody who holds office, become like a spokesperson, even though they're doing all that other stuff too, or maybe they have staff. So it really varies. Okay, what is your strongest advice and guidance about this whole communication thing about our ability to get the word out there? What is in a nutshell? I lead with newsletters. Everything to me is a newsletter. If you're a small business and you don't have a newsletter. And you're not sending it to your list, you're missing a golden opportunity. A lot of people tend to think email is dead, there couldn't be more wrong, social media basically you see something in a news feed and the odds of you seeing it are very minimal. so even a newsletter that's getting a 20 percent open rate. If it's directed towards an individual, and the 20 percent open rate probably isn't accurate because a lot of times, a newsletter is basically reminding people that you are out there, right? If they read the content, that's a bonus, but you're tapping on the glass saying, Hey, Joe from high road communications here. Just want to let you know I'm out here and still writing and still in business. And, what's going on with you and. It's such an affordable commodity, even just a monthly newsletter, that's one of the things that came out of COVID too, I think a lot of people found that they weren't doing that enough. And yours truly was guilty of that as well. It's this typical, the cobbler's children go without shoes. But I think a lot of us realized that we weren't doing it enough. I think it's a great opportunity just to remind folks that you're there for when they are ready to either make the introduction or to purchase. And a lot of people get hung up on the, well, I didn't get any sales off of that newsletter. Yeah, but you don't want to just send it to prospect. You want to keep your network aware of what you do and how many of us have been in a networking meeting and we've talked about one of our services and people say, Oh, I didn't know you did that. And that's what the newsletter is very handy for is reminding people of all the different things you do. And you're probably thinking, well, if you don't open the newsletter, how would you know that? That's where the professional writer comes in or the skilled writer comes in and that by creating that subject line and subtitle. That is very specific to what the newsletter is about. That's where you come in and people who want to read more, we'll open and check it out. And I think most small business owners, if they're taking it on themselves and they're not like a trained writer, they don't really follow that. They don't appreciate the need for an impact statement to draw the attention. You don't have to be a copywriter like me to do that, but you need to know how to do that. exactly. It's going to take some time and some thought. Well, Joe, do you have any closing comments you'd like to leave us with before we wrap up here? Yeah, I'm always looking for the voices from people who do work from home, who have a story to tell, who have a hack to tell. I'm always grateful to share links and whatnot and social media pages. If you have a hack, you can go to, I work from home. substack. com and Ed will share that information with you. I have done interviews with folks. I will publish and give credit to folks. I'm also looking for sponsors, so people who would like to have their business mentioned. In, my home office hacks, I have a subscribership of well over 1000. So a lot of folks, small business owners like us who. Read it and might check you out. Well, I want to thank you, Joe. My guest today. Was Joe Duramo, the founder and publisher of my home office hacks. And I really enjoy this conversation. There's a lot of little things under the covers. We don't think about as small business owners and. They're so subtle, but it's important to appreciate that these little things can have a big impact. I think putting a professional spin on these things is important and reminding us that we can't do everything alone, nor should we. It's important that we take a look around. Who's got what skills to offer and which ones do we need the most, but getting our word out there about who we are, what we are, what we're doing is critical because if we don't do that, then we're basically sitting home alone, doing much of nothing, right? Joe, thank you very much. It was a pleasure having you here today, folks. This is Ed draws with the Small Business Doctor. I want to thank you for joining us and until we meet again. I wanna wish you a healthy business. Thank you. I've been back in this room Wait a long time We've been back in this room Wait a long time We've been back in this room We've been back in this room Wait, wait, we've been baking what last year