Just One Simple Thing

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What is an influencer? Are you one? Are you trying to be one? Even if you don’t identify yourself as an influencer, to grow your ministry or business, you need to be able to influence people. So let’s learn how to ask for what we want, get people to say yes, and while we are at it, we’ll peek in on an OG influencer in the Bible.
We are in our Next Steps series. Maybe you’ve taken those first steps to establish your ministry or business and you are looking for the thing that will push you to the next level. Once you have the basics down, it becomes less about learning all the things and more about the behaviors and the way you operate to grow.
In this episode, we’ll look at influencing ... getting people to do what we want them to do.
It all comes down to the way you ask .... to ask in a way that makes people want to say yes. Here are four ways to do that.
1. Make it personal
Your ask should show that you understand the person and what they need.
Make sure it is something the person you are asking needs, and that your ask incorporates some of the language they use themselves to describe their need.
2. Make it direct
A clear and direct ask lets people know your offer should be seriously considered.
3. Make it easy
We often unintentionally put up barriers that keep people from saying yes.
4. Make it worth it
In addition to making the benefits of the ask clear and compelling, a little incentive can go a long way. It doesn’t have to be huge.
Going to the next level with your business or ministry will take a lot of yes’s. But if you can make it personal, make it direct, make it easy, and make it worth it, you’ll get all the yes’s you need to meet your goals.
ACTION STEP
Look at the next ask you need to make. How can you apply just one of these principles to improve the likelihood of a yes?
Well, we are halfway through our series on Next Steps. In the next episode, we’ll talk about right-sizing that step into something that is doable to reduce overwhelm and confusion. I hope you’ll join me then. And if these episodes have been helpful to you, I’d really appreciate it if you would leave a rating and review wherever you listen.
RESOURCES
Trust Your Own Voice: Growing Your Influence Through Confident Communication by Karen Laos

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How would it feel to close the door on this year and start the new year with fresh confidence?
No matter how it went for you, you need to say a fond farewell before you can move confidently into a new year.
The Looking Back to Move Forward challenge will help you take stock of the past year, decide what to carry with you into the New Year, and what needs to stay in the past.

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How many emails do you get every day? It seems like I spend half my day in my email inbox. Thankfully, Gmail has some features that can actually save us time. Listen in to Episode 102 of Just One Simple Thing as I share my favorites.
Welcome back to part 2 of our Time Saving Tools series! As I was preparing for this series, I did a poll on my Instagram stories asking which tools you’d like to learn more about. And would you believe ... Gmail was dead last! Y’all are sleeping on Gmail. It has some built-in and add-on features that can save you tons of time.
Let’s talk about a few of my favorites.
1. Schedule Send- Allows you to pick a time in the future that your email will be sent. Very handy!
2. Snooze- I can schedule them all to pop back to the top of my inbox later in the evening when I know I’ll be able to read and respond.
3. Undo/Unsend-You may have noticed Gmail’s Undo option flash by when you hit send, but the default only gives you five seconds to undo. Sorry, but at my age, my reflexes are not that fast! However, you can go to the settings and change the default to 30 seconds, which is more doable (or undoable!) for most of us.
4. Templates-If you have emails with similar content that you send routinely, you can create a template of that email, then call up the template, adjust a few details, then send it off, instead of trying to re-type the whole thing.
5. Snippets –Similar to Templates, Snippets allows you to quickly add commonly used text into an email.
Our last two tips involve using folders and filtering to manage your inbox. If you listened to Episode 93 in the January Reset series, you know that I am not a big fan of having a lot of folders. However, there are a few things that are better kept all together and that’s where labels, folders, and filters come in.
6. Simple filters
The first screen is where you tell it what you want to filter, either based on a from or to address, a word or phrase in the email, the size, etc. On the second screen, you select what you want to do with the filtered email. You can add a label, reply with a template, skip the inbox, and several other things.
7. Filters with Alias email
In a paid Gmail account, you can add up to 30 aliases for your main email address. Google recognizes the alias as the same email address and will put it in your inbox, unless you have a filter that says to put it somewhere else.
However,if you have the free account, you can create aliases without any extra charges. Just add a plus sign to the first part of the email address, then a word after the plus ... like [email protected]
So those are my favorite Gmail time-saving tips, but if you search around, you will find tons of other ideas to automate and streamline your inbox.
ACTION STEP
Pick just one of these tips and try it out. Share your favorite tip on social media and tag me @doanewthing so I can be inspired by how you are using it.
I hope you are enjoying this time-saving tools series. Do you have a friend who needs to save some time too? Be sure to share these episodes with her, so you both have more time for work AND play!
RESOURCES
Visit the episode page on my website for

+++++++++++++++
How would it feel to close the door on this year and start the new year with fresh confidence?
No matter how it went for you, you need to say a fond farewell before you can move confidently into a new year.
The Looking Back to Move Forward challenge will help you take stock of the past year, decide what to carry with you into the New Year, and what needs to stay in the past.

Send us a text

Still think Canva is just for creating nice graphics? Think again. Canva has continued to update their product so that it has a unique offering of branding tools, website, video, and document creation, automation, and of course, graphic design. In Episode 103 of Just One Simple Thing, we’ll look at some of the best time-saving tools for content creators inside Canva.
Hey friends! Welcome back to our Time-Saving Tools series. So far, we’ve looked at the AI program ChatGPT in Episode 101 and Gmail in Episode 102. In in this episode, we’ll dive into our favorite program for quickly creating high-quality graphics ... Canva.
Canva has become the go-to tool for content creators to generate the graphics they need for social media, websites, and products. But the more recent additions to Canva branch out from downloadable graphics to include websites, documents, presentation tools, and a long list of app integrations.
So let’s look into some of the best features that will save you time.
We’ll start with Brand Kits. Your brand kit includes your brand colors, fonts, and logos. When you create a brand kit in Canva, they become available to you throughout the platform.
Another easy one is Templates. Canva comes loaded with thousands of templates you can use to get started on your design. But you can also create custom templates.
Another really cool feature is Bulk Create. This auto-generates multiple graphics from a template and a spreadsheet.
We could go on forever about all the fun graphic elements and tools for creating the graphics, but since we are focused mainly on saving time, let’s move away from graphics creation to some of the newer tools.
Like Canva websites. Canva recently rolled out this feature that allows you to publish your design as a website. You can start with a Canva website template, or create your own. It’s super easy to build by dragging and dropping elements just like you do in a graphic, changing background colors, sizing images, and laying it out exactly how you want it. It is great when you need a quick landing page for a product or event, an information portal or a client portal.
Another new-ish feature is Presentations ... Canva’s answer to Power Point and Keynote.
There’s another feature where you can invite people to join you live while you are presenting without using any other software (like Zoom or Teams) and you can go back and forth between your presentation and other tabs on your desktop.
So those are some of my favorite time-saving features in Canva. And these are just the tip of the iceberg. Next time you are creating a graphic, scroll down to the bottom of the far left toolbar and click on Apps. There are tons of things there to explore.
ACTION STEP
Head over to Canva and try just one new thing you haven’t done before. And let me know how it’s working out for you. You can follow me @doanewthing on FB and IG. I’d love to see what you are up to.
In the next episode, we’ll wrap up the Time Saving Tools series with tips for using Trello ... my favorite project management tool. I’ll see you then, and I hope you’ll bring a friend.
RESOURCES

Visit the

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How would it feel to close the door on this year and start the new year with fresh confidence?
No matter how it went for you, you need to say a fond farewell before you can move confidently into a new year.
The Looking Back to Move Forward challenge will help you take stock of the past year, decide what to carry with you into the New Year, and what needs to stay in the past.

Send us a text

As we head into November, there is one thing on the minds of online businesses and ministries .... It’s not turkey or dressing. It’s “what will I do about Black Friday??” Join me for Episode 121 of Just One Simple Thing where you’ll learn three ways to maximize your Black Friday, and two ways to stand out in the noisy crowd.
Hey friends! Welcome back to Just One Simple Thing, where we are motoring towards the end of the year. It will be here before you know it!
Black Friday isn’t just a day now ... it’s a whole week. And then you tack on Small Business Saturday, Cyber Monday, and Giving Tuesday. It’s enough to make your head spin.
But let’s simplify the whole thing with a few tips and two ways that you can stand out among the crowd.
1. Don’t feel like you have to offer major discounts, especially if you are a service-based business.
Cutting the price on your regular offers devalues them, and if you get a big response, delivering on all of those cut-price sessions could be draining for you. Instead, try adding bonuses to your regular offers that increase their value or you can go the other way ... a mini-version of your regular offer to give people a taste of what you do and how you can help.
2. Create a signature Black Friday offer.
My core audience expects it and plans to purchase that weekend so they get the best deal.
3. Leverage affiliate promotions.
One easy way to do this is to create a gift guide
So you have a great offer in mind ... but with all the noise, how do you stand out in the crowd?
1. Tease your offer in advance.
If you catch their attention before all of the noise starts, they’ll be watching for your email so they can jump on it.
2. Make it personal.
Segment your email list based on previous interactions and send different emails to each segment, addressing their specific pain points and how your offer can help.
And finally, as just one word of caution ...As you make your Black Friday plan, keep in mind the other things you want to do during that week and the Thanksgiving weekend.
Think ahead about how much time you really want to spend during the weekend when you plan your promotions.
ACTION STEP
Look at what you already have available and how you might promote it over the big holiday weekend. Can you turn it into a signature annual offer? When you decide what to do, tease it on your social media. Be sure to tag me so I can cheer you on AND share the amazing things you come up with!
Thanks for hanging out with me today. I don’t know about you, but things feel really unsettled all around me. I’m praying that by keeping things simple, we can find peace in the chaos and use our gifts to bring peace to others as well. If you’re in on that, send me a DM and let me know! That would be a huge blessing to me.
RESOURCES
Go-Getter Jesus Girls Gift Guide

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How would it feel to close the door on this year and start the new year with fresh confidence?
No matter how it went for you, you need to say a fond farewell before you can move confidently into a new year.
The Looking Back to Move Forward challenge will help you take stock of the past year, decide what to carry with you into the New Year, and what needs to stay in the past.

Send us a text

Before we close our 2022 planners and open the crisp new ones, blank with possibilities for 2023, there are some things we can do to make way for all those possibilities. We need to unload some things and straighten up others. Let’s kick off the new year in Episode 93 with my best tips for managing email.
All this month, we'll work on getting organized ... just a little at a time. Think of it as a January Reset, opening yourself up and making room for all the new blessings God has for you in 2023. My one word for 2023 is "FOUNDATIONS," and I'm determined to shore up some of the foundations in my business. Wanna join me?
Each week in January, we'll focus on one area, and I'll give you two or three assignments to choose from. So let's dive right in to one of the biggest time sucks we face ... email.
Here are three tips for managing email and keeping things simple.
1. Review Your Subscriptions
We know how important email lists are. Most of us with an online presence work to build a relationship with our audience using an email list. But honestly, if my email is just going to sit unopened in your inbox, that's not much of a relationship. So unsubscribe from my list or any other list that is not delivering something you love to your inbox.
2. Clear Your Inbox
Once you've got the subscriptions under control, now it's time to clear that inbox. Michael Hyatt has a great method for clearing out the inbox.

• Do –Take action on the task right now.
• Delegate –Pass the task on to someone else
• Defer –Consciously decide you will do it later
• Delete –If you don’t need it for later, send it to the trash
• File –If you need it for later, file it

A piece of advice from Mr. Hyatt :
Do not create an elaborate set of file folders. This is the single most important piece of advice I can give you. Just file everything in one folder called “Processed Mail” or use Gmail’s Archive function.
3. Remove Your Inactive Subscribers
If you have people who have been on your list for over six months and not opened any emails from you in that time, there are several reasons why you need to remove them:

1. You are or will be paying for them at some point.
2. Gmail and other email services screen incoming messages to put them in Spam or Promotions folders. If your email routinely has a low open rate, Google is more likely to put it in Spam or Promotions.
3. Subscribers who open your emails are (for the most part) the ones who really matter.

If you are ready to do this, identify your inactive subscribers, send them an email asking if they want to stay on your list (I bet very few of them will even open it!) then archive the ones who don't respond.

ACTION STEP
Head over to my free Facebook group Plan & Pray with Do A New Thing and grab your January Reset tracker. You’ll be able to check off the actions you take all month and look back at what a difference it made.
I’m excited about this reset. If you know someone else who needs clean up their foundations to make room for what God wants to build, share this episode with them so they can join us!

RESOURCES
Free to Focus: A Total Productivi

+++++++++++++++
How would it feel to close the door on this year and start the new year with fresh confidence?
No matter how it went for you, you need to say a fond farewell before you can move confidently into a new year.
The Looking Back to Move Forward challenge will help you take stock of the past year, decide what to carry with you into the New Year, and what needs to stay in the past.