This is in response to Sarah's excellent Rants From the Geek Lab: Improving Your Blog. The questions hungry bloggers want to know: How do I make money from my blog, should I put ads on it, how much traffic to I need to make money? The short answer is: you are asking the wrong questions. First, pageviews aren't the … [Read more...]
Noticing Your Commitments
I've been all about the GTD thing lately. I got my lists, I'm getting things done! I'm biggifying! I'm awesome! And then yesterday I realized, I'm completely exhausted. Here's what GTD is missing: sometimes you need to re-evaluate your commitments. Not just come up with the next thing and do it. Sometimes you've got … [Read more...]
Branding: It’s Not What You Think It Is
This post is in response to Mark Silver's post Can Branding Ever Be Heart-Centered? Mark wants to rename branding "worldview". I don't - I like the word "branding". It means something specific - but maybe not what you think it means. Your associations with this word might be from seeing graphical logos or "brand … [Read more...]
Do You Need to be Aggressive to Get Sales?
I once had a prospective customer call me up and demand a sales pitch. He said "Sell me what you've got". I was caught off guard. I'm used to people calling to ask me questions, not calling to demand I sell them something. I said, uh, well, have you looked through the website? Yes. Did you have any questions? Then he got … [Read more...]
Using Mistakes to Create Connection
I was at Fred Meyer today getting some storage bins and three of the lids slipped off the shelf and clattered to the floor in three different directions. I halfheartedly tried to catch one, but for the most part I just let them fall. I said "D'oh!" under my breath and looked sheepishly at a fellow shopper nearby and started … [Read more...]
Making Work Trades Worth It
When I first started doing web design, I accepted trades eagerly. It sounds great, doesn't it? I'll work for you, you work for me, it's all very equitable and communistic. In theory. However, I noticed that my projects that were paid for in trade didn't always go the way I had hoped. They would take a lot longer than … [Read more...]
Releasing Attachments to Money and Clients
Attachments, in the spiritual/emotional sense, are when you strongly want something to be a certain way (or not a certain way), and you have an emotional investment in it. They feel like a tension, tightness, clenching in your body and are accompanied by persistent and generally unpleasant emotions that arise whenever you … [Read more...]
Outsourcing to the Mechanical Turk
Amazon had a service called the Mechanical Turk that lets people complete small tasks for a fee - or, on the flipside, submit tasks to be completed. It was originally designed to make it easy for developers to let humans do tasks that computers are very bad at - such as distinguish text within photos. But since any type of … [Read more...]
Choosing Who You Play With
What happens when your business partner or employee is also your friend...but they aren't good for your business? Sometimes you don't realize right away. You want to give them a chance, so you let things slide that you wouldn't if they were anyone else. Perhaps they used to do a good job but lately things never get … [Read more...]
Business is a Journey About Love
I think prosperity boils down to two things: 1. Knowing who you are, what you want from life, and what you have to offer. 2. Offering yourself to the world with love. When we're doing both, things are good. We are aligned with our inner self, and with the laws of the Universe, and prosperity happens naturally. But … [Read more...]