The Boy Who Cried Wolf

Remember the story of the little boy who cried wolf? If not, here's a quick recap:

Kid cries wolf. There was no wolf. Everyone came running to try to protect kid from non-existant wolf. Kid found this funny. Townspeople did not. Kid did it again and, again, he thought it was funny. Again, townspeople did not. Then, wolf really came. Boy cried wolf. Townspeople don't believe him. Boy is eaten by wolf.

Moral of the story? Well, that's up to the reader. Here's my take on it...the more attention you demand, the less people want to give it to you.

I thought of this today after I came home from running errands this afternoon. My E mail in box had a dozen messages from a professional list serve I subscribe to. It's not uncommon to have three or four mesages per day. But three times that many? Some of them were the same story, just from a different point of view. Some were totally worthless. All of them ended up annoying me. Why? I spent a good 30 minutes culling through these. Do I need to? Well, yeah, sort of.

See, sometimes the messages are important. In fact, more times than not they have great info. But after half a dozen in a row, I was tired of reading this stuff. Hence, frequency isn't always a good thing.

I was thinking about this from a professional standpoint. , of course, I am a businessman and I want clients to use my services. Therefore, I have to keep my name in front of them. The balancing act comes when trying to keep my name out there, but not where it gets annoying.

When I began writing The Marcus Engel Newsletter over four years ago, I swore I'd treat people how I wanted to be treated. I would come up with something interesting and entertaining. I'd send only one newsletter per month so as not to oversaturate in boxes. I'd not fill it with meaningless crap that I(if I were a reader) would not want to read(and please notice, there aren't a whole ton of shameless plugs and links to other sites selling products. Never have, never will).

In short, today I'm proud of myself. I've kept my promise to provide relevant, entertaining and informative newsletters...without flooding in boxes with a dozen messages per day. In fact, the dozen is an annual thing. And look for the August edition next week!