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Yep, it's Monday and that means that it's time to pull out the keyboard and get down to some serious work again. There was a time when weekends weren't all that different to weekdays for Steve and me and we just went right on working but things have changed for us.

After years of ignoring weekends and working right through them we began to find that we needed to make the weekends a bit different so that we didn't go stale from too much work. Oh we didn't change our work habits all that much back then; we didn't step away from the computer entirely but we did work on different projects to what we might work on through the week.

From there we graduated to taking time off from just about all web-work on the weekends because we really did need a break away from the computers and now we've moved on to a totally different situation. Now we're staying away from the computers on the weekend because we don't have time to get close to them.

Weekends for us have become the time when we do our shopping, our housework and deal with our family issues. If we didn't take that time to do all those things then our business and life would probably grind to a halt.

So if you're still locked into working right through the weekends then take a step back. Try taking the weekend off and see if that doesn't improve your ability to work through the week. You might find that you end up with less distractions through the week and you're a lot fresher and a lot more eager to get on with your work come Monday morning.

A different world
Ok, let me be honest here for a moment. Steve and I aren't exactly spring chickens and a lot of years have gone by since we could have been considered to be young. If you're in a similar age group to us and you are trying to market to young people then are you really connecting with them? Do you understand their culture? How long has it been since you even looked at what they do when they want to have fun?

It's certainly been a while since we looked at what young people do with their leisure time and how the world might look to them while they're enjoying that time. But yesterday morning we caught a glimpse of how things are for many of them.

We had to pick up a relative from the airport down in the state capital. That's about a 400 mile round trip and we had to be there very early ... like 6.30am early. So at 3am there we were driving out of town. We didn't expect to see anyone but instead, as we drove down the main street, there were dozens and dozens of teenagers wandering around.

Some were in groups, some were there by themselves. Some were looking for more fun, others were sitting on footpaths talking, some were texting friends and some were obviously heading home and to older people like us it was a real eye-opener.

It's different world out there after dark and if you don't get out there and at least look at it then you're going to have some trouble connecting with some of the people that you're trying to market to. And the same applies if you're a young person trying to market to older people.

If your target audience is over 40 then you're probably talking to people who were on strict curfews when they were teenagers and even if they weren't on a curfew it was quite possible that there wasn't much nightlife after midnight anyway. It's not that older people didn't have a lot of fun when they went out at night ... it's just that our fun didn't always extend right through till the sun came up next morning.

I guess what I've been trying to say here is that not everyone sees things in exactly the same way that you see them. Not everyone's experiences are the same as yours and, as I said last week, you have to be careful not to fall into the trap of trying to sell your products to yourself.

Instead you have to target your marketing message to where your audience is in their lives and sometimes that means that you have to go out and do a little field research to see life from their perspective. When you have some understanding of where they are and what they see then you can produce far more effective marketing messages than you can if you're only writing advertisements that appeal to you.