Wayne and Kat’s Blog

 I’ve never been a fan of the news until recently; that persistent little ‘yahoo news’ box that pops up on my desk top every morning has some how gotten my attention, at least in the Tech news section. Scanning the headlines has led me to actually reading the articles and I have noticed some very interesting trends of late that seem to relieve me of my shame for feeling like a dork in my on line efforts.As someone who creates multiple pages on the internet just about daily, marketing has quite naturally become a matter of daily importance. Having spent 7 years of my life in college (pre-internet days) with a full 2 of those on marketing, one would think that I should be somewhat savvy to the whole question but in actual fact, this is the part where I feel the most dorky. Being relieved of the shame of being a dork has done much to boast my self confidence.

You wouldn’t happen to feel the same way at times would you?

Allow me to make you feel a bit better. You - me - none of us are alone.

Over the last couple of months both Microsoft and Google have purchased a market research companies and while I don’t know this for sure; I suspect that there are many large and multi national companies doing the same - all trying as best they can to get a handle on how to market on the internet. They don’t know what they are doing either. (Feel better? LOL I do!)

The internet is a wonderfully diverse tool AND the incalculable number of factors that make up that diversity also makes it a very complicated tool. It seems to me that very few, if any, truly understand the scope of what is being created (after all, every single person on the planet with a computer is contributing to the creation of the internet) let alone how to market within it’s fluid structure. I am certain that I don’t understand the scope of it and I have spent 10+ years trying to get a handle on it.

The fluid nature of the internet means that it changes every single moment of every single day. New tools spring up daily and others fall away; potential customers and clients are reading the content posted through different eyes every time they boot up. We all have every right to feel dorky in our marketing efforts. After all, Microsoft and Google felt the need to get help, why should we be any different?

I’ve come to the ‘soft’ conclusion that the little guy like you and me probably has a better chance at marketing our stuff then the conglomerates. After all, we spend time in the neighborhoods talking with actual people about real topics that matter to us. Person to person marketing has always been the most effective way of moving product and the internet doesn’t change that.

If I need to purchase a product, my preference is always to go to someone I know. Someone who is likely to pick up their ringing phone and help me out if something goes awry. As we all spend more of our living time swimming around in the diverse internet, high touch marketing will become more and more important. After all, would a corporation in Russia really give a damn if I am happy with their product? Ivan, who has a family and will answer his phone, probably will.

Happy Trails
Kat
The Magic Happens Magazine

As you may have noticed from my post ‘Musician Jeff Healey: A Tribute To A Man Who Thrived!‘  I recently discovered Seth Godin’s brainchild, ‘Squidoo!’

I say discovered but the truth is, I’ve known about it since it first got started and many of my friends use it. What changed was I finally realized its simplicity and its value.

Having gotten started with Squidoo just a couple of weeks ago, I have only created a few lenses (a lens being a webpage) and the results have been rather remarkable. I’ve gotten additional traffic to every page I used the Squidoo lens to and I’ve made money from every lens, something I can not say about every other webpage I have created over the years. It really was that simple.

The system itself is remarkably simple. Once you have an account, it is only a matter of choosing your URL, picking out modules and ordering them to your satisfaction, and then filling in the content.

Squidoo makes filling in the content easy as pie. For every module, with the exception of text modules, there is a link provided to help you find the content. So if you put up an Amazon module, you get a direct link to Amazon to search out the products you want to offer on your lens.

Even cooler is that you don’t have to have an Amazon account - it’s all done through Squidoo. The same goes for ebay stuff - it’s all handled and as a lens master, you don’t have to understand ebay at all. Squidoo has totally short cut my learning curve as far as having to learn systems on the internet to make money. What a bonus!!

If you want to see just how easy it is, drop by and check out the lenses I have made so far.

This lens points to our online magazine, The Magic Happens:
The Magic Happens At Squidoo.

This is a lens I created as a tribute to Jeff Healey when he passed away earlier this month:
Jeff Healey

This lens I made for Wayne when his HTML eBook came out:
A Beginner’s Guide To Website Design On Squidoo

And it gets better!! You can toss up the beginnings of your lens - a real simple affair - to help you start making money and/or get more traffic to your main website, and then continue to build it, just as simply as it was to start, as you have time and inspiration.

Here is an example of one I just started with the intention of building it as I go:
A Lens About Our Lenses.

I am seriously regretting that I didn’t pay more attention to this free on line system a lot sooner. I could have been making a lot more money a lot faster and it is great fun creating lenses. The ideas just keep flying, so fast, I haven’t had time to build most them yet - I just have way to many other things to do.

Law of attraction being what it is, I do want to note here that Squidoo didn’t make itself clearly known to me until I set an intention a few weeks back to find a simple and effective way to increase my earning potential. Up until this point, I had been ok with working for my money. The issue became that I didn’t have many more hours to allocate to work while my need to increase my income grew in importance. The Universe once again answered me in stars. Perhaps there is an option to spend less time working now that I have Squidoo in my corner.

If I had known the value of Seth Godin’s Squidoo a year ago, I think I would have spent the year building lenses. There are many people making thousands of dollars a month through their lenses. Sounds like a worthy thing to put my time in to. Well I have made the commitment to make 100 lenses by the end of the year so stay tuned - this will be fun. Wanna join in? We’d love to have some company!!

Happy Squiding
Kat

The brass ring in Internet Marketing is to have your own product to sell and I have just recently stumbled my way through creating an e-book. I wanted to pass along some thoughts about the creative process that you might find useful incase you decide at some point to reach for that brass ring. Here is my ebook if you want to see it: ‘A Beginner’s Guide To Website Design.’Layout and design is king, so do your research on how e-books are put together. There is a huge difference between an e-book on the internet and a book on the shelf at a bookstore.

We all seem to do a lot of it and yet reading anything on the internet can get really boring after a few paragraphs. A good ebook will be spiced up with some interesting photos or graphics and adhere to good web design basics to keep the reader’s attention. The photos and graphics break up the monotony of several pages of text and offers relief to the reader’s eyes.

Most of the materials on the internet are written in some form of how to do this or how to do that. A great way to break up the dry monologue of how to instructions is to offer personal stories. While it is important to make sure those personal stories are relevant to the text, they will add the entertainment value to an otherwise dry text.  Information exchange is what an internet book is all about so make sure your content is supreme while spicing it up with some personal anecdotes, an occasional joke or witticism and a little bit of dramatic expression.

It is important to know who your target market is and write with that in mind at all times. Who is it that you want to reach with your work? By staying true to your niche, the questions that come up later like ‘how to market this puppy,’ will be far easier to answer. Also by being clear from the beginning, you will avoid making your topic too general. An overly general topic will not address anyone’s needs by being too basic for some and way too complex for others. If your e-book is about a basic knowledge of …., ensure that you write using basic concepts, not using rocket science babble. If your ebook is for an advanced user, while it is prudent to provide basics, an overly long explanation of them would not be useful.

It takes a bit of time to get an e-book designed and written but eventually it will get finished. Then there is a whole list of other questions to consider like: Where do I promote it? What do I charge? How do I get past myself to believing that someone might actually want to buy my book? These are just some of the unanswered questions that popped up for me. What I learned and would like to share with you is ‘take it one step at a time.’ Talk to others that have created an ebook and see what they did to promote etc.

Have a good friend read your material to see if it is a smooth read and makes sense. Ask another friend to run your ebook through a spell and grammar check and modify what needs to be modified to honor the flow of the book. With the tools available on our computers these days, anyone that is even marginally gifted with language can serve in the role as editor; a professional editor is no longer necessary.

Added value is a powerful way to sell a product on the internet. Be sure offer something that adds value to the dollars spent to your potential buyers Maybe offer up a free chapter along with some other gift(s). Even the most established authors of the hard copy book world need to and do offer a free chapter or some kind of trailer when they are marketing their books on the internet. Extra gifts and added value are an important marketing strategy on the internet.

Add a sign up box for a newsletter so that you can send these people further information from you. A newsletter, if well handled, can be part of your added value strategy (by offering useful information to your subscribers) as well as giving you the opportunity to develop a relationship with your subscribers for future releases of other products.

Create a limited time special offer with clear and concise dates. Allow some of your purchasers to acquire your ebook at a discounted price so that you can begin to develop a following to your work. This will serve you in the word of mouth ‘viral marketing’ aspect. There is no marketing strategy more powerful then a happy customer or client telling their friends.

Above all else, be very accurate, open and honest in all you do. People will pick up on your level of authenticity and integrity and it will determine if your customers wish to continue a relationship with you. A single happy repeat customer is worth far more then ten one time unhappy customers.

Last but not least, create from a place of passion and all the other concepts and questions will fall into place for your amazing ebook.

Peace and Love
Wayne