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Average Marketers Wanted!

Seth Godin
Seth Godin

Oh yeah,

Seth Godin (↑) finally started tweeting or twittering as some call it.

You do not believe me, then check this out.

“The reason they want you to fit in…
is that once you do, then they can ignore you.”

83 characters
by Seth Godin on 2009-11-18 (↑)

Certainly a statement that leaves room for interpretation.

So here is mine.

Average companies are looking for average people. They do not want to deal with heretics, unicorns or anyone who could surprise them.

Surprise is a potential threat.
Boring is good!

What is tribal marketing anyway?


Many large organization try to mold everything and everyone. It seems that small business organizations can change more quickly, and they have to.

Yours
John W. Furst

P.S.: Now we have to teach Mr. Godin the twitter interface since this short piece of text was still posted on his blog.


How Safe Is Your Web Business?

Is your Web income at risk?

Does this sound like a dumb question to you?

Only because you have the “Hacker Safe Logo” legitimately on your Web site doesn’t mean your web-based business is 100% safe.

Your site doesn’t need to be attacked by criminals there are many different possibilities for having your web based income stream disrupted. Now I remember that I wrote about the subject of protecting your virtual assets back in December 2007, too.

Think about those scenarios:
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Most Important Lesson About Your Career

Career Advice at its finest
“Stay Hungry” by Becky Blanton.

Let me be honest with you right up-front. My friends and I need your help. But, we've prepared something for you in return. All you need to do is to vote for “Stay Hungry” in the Johnny Bunko contest. And tell all your friends to do the same.

Update Sep 2009:
Becky Blanton's Blog
The contest is long over, but you can visit Becky's new blog.


And now I'll tell you why



Did I tell you that we have a cool, free, funny, smart ebook for you. More about this later. However…

(Watch the animoto video inside!)

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10 Reasons Why Your Business Needs To Grow Continuously


Your Business Needs To Grow

While waking up this morning I suddenly found myself having a pen in my hand and scribbling 2 ideas for a new blog post on a piece of paper. Here is the first one.

Probably you can help me out and post as a comment, who had said the following originally.


“If your business doesn't grow it dies.”,

It is certainly true.

As the population grows, as markets grow, someone else will takeover your niche soon. If not, you are in the wrong market and hopefully close to retirement with enough retirement funds saved.

What are the drivers:
  • Number of sales
  • Average sales price

So why would you like the product of those variables to grow continuously, strictly monotonically?

This is not supposed to be a scientific article. No. I only want to get you engaged thinking about those issues in your own business. So I really only give you a short list and not much more.

Let's start out with a solo entrepreneur, because it's real easy to start thinking from this point on and the rest applies for big corporations as well.

Here is my Top-10 list, why your business needs to grow:
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Performance Boost Under Pressure

Face Yourself!
It seems that people respect their boss and they do whatever they demand — more or less — in exchange for their salary. That's how this boss-employee relationship works. What can you learn from this for your own business?

Even if you have changed the sides in the meantime and become your own boss, either as owner of your company or manager of a department, you will remember the days, when you worked late or on weekends to meet the deadlines given to you by your superiors. All of a sudden everything became less important: your plans for Friday night, the date with your new acquaintance, the movie premier, etc.

You absolutely needed to finish your assignment, because your boss would not accept any excuse and even could fire you. Even, if your assignment appears to be ridiculous to you.
Your boss is your boss.


I will cut a long story short (… and save your time).

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My Answers To Your Questions

Reflecting on Tenerife
Certainly I was taking some time to write this post after I have asked my readers to submit a question for me to answer. 4 questions qualified. In the meantime I have sent an even more detailed answer to those folks, who dared to ask a question.

Now it's time to share my answers in public. I don't want to carry that as liability into the next year. :-) But since I am lazy at the end of the year, while my assistant enjoys a nice skiing vacation in Switzerland, I only will answer 2 of those questions today. I will deal with the other 2 topics in future posts in January.


1. You have hosted some blog carnivals on your blog. Do you recommend that?

Yes, and no.

It appears to me that hosting a carnival gets you more traffic, while using the same amount of time for writing and submitting your articles to other carnivals will get you more back links, which leads to more residual traffic in long term. What do you prefer?

I found the response from the folks whose articles get used in a carnival is less than it could be. Not many digg, sphinn, stumble, or bookmark your post with the carnival edition. That seems to be the reality.

Unless you see hosting or organizing a carnival as part of your content strategy, and you are willing to put some effort to work, you probably should just stick with submitting.

However, if everybody only submits, there won't be good carnivals left soon. Then it might pay off more to organize or host a carnival, again. I noticed that many recent carnivals are basically just link lists. If you don't have any problems with that, Blogcarnival.com (↑) makes it really easy to publish such a “list”. You only have to press the InstaCarnival button and copy the HTML code as is to your Blog. Finished.

It's up to you, how far you want to go. I will host other editions on my Blog throughout 2008, but I will have an assistant doing the actual work.


2. In “Sad Story About The Million Dollar Secret” you wrote “You cannot leverage consulting, unless …”. What's the unless part of it. You never wrote that following post.

Good observation, I never wrote that post here. I only wrote parts of the answer in my time management series of articles Touch It - Do It - Get More Done! and in some comments on other Blogs, and I believe in one of my newsletter editions. Anyway, the answer is very simple.
You need to teach and train others to do your type of consulting in a similar fashion. Those folks will have to be employed or contracted by you. Then you will have the time to work on your business, expand it, and make it more independent from you.

One example:

If you are often hired as consultant for doing project management, then you need to start building a real business, a company around it. You'll need other people doing the work in the future that you are still doing by yourself right now. It's moving from being a freelancer towards being a business owner.


Yours
John W. Furst