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

Before I get to point of this offering and Seth Godin, Wayne asked me to extend his apologies for not being around to post lately. He’s just finishing up his first ever ebook and he’s been pretty focused on that. It’s a book about website basics for beginners; for people like me, who don’t know what those pointy brackets are and don’t care too either - just tell me how to make it look good.  He’ll be with us again soon…

Today I was digging up some material I had been saving for eons to put in my new internet marketing group and I ran into a wonderful piece by Seth Godin. If you don’t know who Seth Godin  is and you are an aspiring internet marketer, then you are in for a treat. I couldn’t wait to run right over here to share this with you.

Both the ‘how to’s’ and the philosophy behind internet marketing are very important. Understanding one part and not the other will have us all working way too hard without very much result. The philosophy has been the most difficult part of all of this for me to learn mostly because far fewer people talk about it. I get it…

When I was a newby, I didn’t care about the philosophy; I just wanted to know how to do what I needed to do.  No wonder it took me so long to get here and that I still have a long way to go to become a pro. These days though, I find the philosophy the most fascinating and honestly, the most useful; especially Godin’s.

As you may have caught in an earlier post, Wayne and I are both co-founders of the popular Powerful Intentions social networking site that boasts over 100,000 users and hosts the forum for the international best selling movie ‘The Secret.’ When we and the other 11 founders launched Powerful Intentions, we were paying very close attention to Godin’s viral marketing concepts and so I’ve experienced absolute proof that his ideas work.

Today I was sent the link to an interview of Seth Godin  for the Wordtracker blog which got me searching through my folders for a free ebook by Godin that I had read a couple of years back. Since my plan was to put it in my group, it seemed reasonable to reread it before I did that. Know what I learned? I learned that I have forgotten much. LOL And this blog actually goes against most of what Godin suggests. Well this is new to me and so it will take me some time to learn to be a powerful blogger. That’s the fun of it all though isn’t it?

Then I realized that if it was that valuable to me, then maybe one of the visitors to my blog could benefit. So here goes…

Who’s There

A book about the ‘whys’ of social media and blogging

by Seth Godin

Let me know what you learned about from Godin’s book if you will. You might have caught something I missed.

Happy Trails till Next Time.

Kat

PS. Have you seen our free internet magazine yet?

The Magic Happens: Wayne, Kat and Friends, Thriving Out Loud

internet marketers