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Archive for July, 2006
July 14th, 2006 by Lani Voivod
It’s messy.
This whole dang “turning dreams into realities” game is a messy, maniacal mosh pit.
Call upon your best Announcer’s Voice within your head and play along with me. Ready?
“In THIS corner, weighing 470 tons, representing Fears, Past Failures, The Uncontrollables, and a lifetime of Outside Voices force-feeding you your own limits and explaining why the things you want out of life can’t be done – it’s the reigning Heavyweight Champion of the World…SHAMUS MAXIMUS!
“And in THIS corner, the unlikely underdog weighing three ounces wet, representing Hope, Will, Desire, Vision, Spirit, Truth, and an unreliable-yet-combustible reserve of Untapped Potential — it’s the scrappy Featherweight opponent we all know and love…GERONIM UH-OHHHHHH!”
When you’ve not only bought tickets to this fight but set it up and invited a crowd, the only thing “floatin’ like a butterfly and stingin’ like a bee” is your upset stomach.
Let’s face it — there are people on this Earth who are different than the main populous, and we’re called Entrepreneurs. We want more. We put in more. We expect more. We’ve listened to the straight-shootin’ voices in history who have insisted we should:
- “Go confidently in the direction of your dreams. Live the life you have imagined.” (Henry David Thoreau)
- “Always bear in mind that your own resolution to succeed is more important than any other.” (Abraham Lincoln)
- “Dream no small dreams for they have no power to move the hearts of men.” (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe)
Yet, all this Grand Dreaming seldom lets us do the one thing we need to survive in this world (or, if not “survive,” then at least “exist in the infrastructure that allows our children to enter the public school system”), which is expressed so eloquently by Mr. Robin Williams:
- “Carpe per diem - seize the check.”
Dream Big, or Pay Bills? Hmmm. There’s the question for the ages, and one that fuels the hearts and minds of more folks blessed and cursed with the Entrepreneurial Spirit than I care to admit, including myself.
Honestly, this driving need to own our own life, manifest our destiny, create something from nothing, and turn our ideas into real, tangible GOLD is a tough business.
Even on the bad days (especially on the bad days!) the worst of it is that when we consider the alternative — spending 40+ hours a week (over 2000 hours per year!!!) of OUR precious lives toward some company’s bottom line — it just makes me want to vomit for our species.
But here, in the Messy Middle, where we’ve gone too far to turn back, but we cannot for the life of us see the Hopeful Horizon — and the debt is getting bigger while the reserves are shrinking into oblivion — all we’ve got is some crackerjack prayer that all those nice-sounding, optimistic voices from the past weren’t B.S.-ing us.
Oh, dear God, PLEASE — tell me they weren’t B.S.-ing us!!!
-Lani
Posted in Entrepreneur Diaries | No Comments »
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July 9th, 2006 by Lani Voivod
Ayn Rand of Atlas Shrugged fame used one of her Bold and Heroic characters to declare this universal truth:
“All life is a purposeful struggle, and your only choice is the choice of a goal.”
This fine Sunday morning, I’m riffing off that quote to support one of the greatest Content Tenets around:
“All COPY is a purposeful struggle, and your only choice is the choice of a goal.”
Allen and I have spent the last 36 hours grinding out a sales letter — the heart of which has been writhing like a hobbled cheetah in Allen’s brain for the last three years.
 It’s the formalized declaration for “The Rumsfeld Diaries,” a calculated, satirical, pseudo-fictitious account of the torrid relationship between Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Saddam Hussein, set against the backdrop of real historical events of the last 25 years.
After a couple reckless drafts, we came to realize we were committing a writer’s act of treason: We had been trying to write a bunch of information around our subject WITHOUT launching each word, phrase and idea from one unified GOAL.
Various copywriting and story experts call this goal by many other names — “Margin Mantra,” “Through Line,” and “Controlling Idea” are some that come to mind — but whatever YOU want to call it, just be sure you understand its beef.
Whether you’re someone who lives to write or you’d rather scrape gravel on your eyeballs than get your thoughts down on paper, you’ll save yourself MUCH angst, frustration, time, and ink if you BEGIN with your goal in mind — then write every word to support your mission.
Yes, it’s a struggle — but at least when you’re done, your mental acrobatics will not have been done in vain!
-Lani
P.S. Happy birthday, Rumsfeld! And by the way, we’re coming for ya!
P.P.S. If you want to find out more about “The Rumsfeld Diaries” or get on the notification list so you’re the first to know when it’s released into the wild of this fine nation of ours, shoot Allen an email at Rumsfeld@EpiphaniesInc.com!
Posted in All About Content | No Comments »
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on Sunday, July 9th, 2006 at 2:00 pm and is filed under All About Content.
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July 8th, 2006 by Lani Voivod
Oh, goody goody goody! I just got permission from one of the greatest practicing marketers around, Ms. Marcia Yudkin (http://www.yudkin.com/), to share one of her most recent quick tips from her weekly “Marketing Minute” email.
 A word about Marcia from a Content Lover:
She’s AMAZING. She’s been consistent, prolific, laser-sharp, and right on target every single week since I first discovered her way back in 2002, when I was working from my cubicle at Mattel with the Web group, writing for Barbie.com. If you need information on marketing, copywriting, publicity, website makeovers, turning content to cash, media schmoozing, or any other trick of the trade for the small biz pro, Marcia’s your gal. 
The woman started her career from the top rung with an article printed in the New York Times, and she’s been building her own extension ladders ever since. With THREE Ivy League degrees (including a Ph.D.!), 11 books, thousands of articles, and a thriving creative marketing and professional speaking business under her belt (not to mention DOZENS of targeted info-products and dynamite interviews with select industry pros across all sorts of categories!), Marcia is a resource that’s worth knowing about. ESPECIALLY since, as savvy as she is, she’s just as supportive and prolific when it comes to writers and writing in general. In fact, she put together a separate site - Published! How to Reach Writing Success - geared for these burning passions of hers.Oh — and as the co-owner of a company named Epiphanies, Inc., I would be absolutely remiss if I didn’t also mention my FAVORITE resource of hers. It’s a robust and exciting eBook I own and love:
Inspired! How to Be More Original, Insightful and Productive in Your Work. Strategies for heightened creativity, based on years of interviewing, testing and research. Learn how to tune into your intuition, set up your environment to facilitate insights, change your routines for improved productivity, put more pizzazz into your communication, engineer stress out of your life, and much more. PDF file. $39.95. (You can find it on this page.)
I LOVE that she brought together all this amazing stuff — stories, examples, how-tos, etc.! — to honor and maximize the creative process. Rock on, Marcia!
Which brings us to the quickie article that *inspired* this blog entry…
READABILITY TIPS
Can your customers easily understand how (and why) to do business with you?
The average American adult has an 8th to 9th grade reading level, but when I randomly tested ten web sites of Marketing Minute subscribers, they demanded an average reading ability more than two grades higher.
Microsoft Word has a built-in readability checker, or use
this readability calculator:
http://resources.aellalei.com/tools/writer/sample.php
Readability doesn’t necessarily involve any “dumbing down.” While I have in mind a reader of higher than average intelligence, the reading level of my own articles is 8th to 9th grade. Greater readability requires:* Shorter sentences, with simpler sentence structure* Fewer multisyllabic words* Less jargon* Shorter paragraphs* Subheads and bullet points, when appropriate
* Easy-to-find summaries
In the 1930s and 1940s, newspaper circulation plunged. Then readability pioneers Rudolph Flesch and Robert Gunning worked with the Associated Press and United Press to make news writing more readable. When the average reading level of newspapers dropped from the 12th to the 9th grade, readership rose 45%. The same would happen today.
Get read. Get understood. Get results!
- Reprinted with permission from Marcia Yudkin’s free weekly Marketing Minute newsletter. Subscribe at www.yudkin.com/marksynd.htm
Thanks, Marcia!!! Keep up the INSPIRING and utterly READABLE work!
Posted in All About Content, Dances With Gurus | No Comments »
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on Saturday, July 8th, 2006 at 1:27 am and is filed under All About Content, Dances With Gurus.
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July 6th, 2006 by Lani Voivod
 “The strongest oak tree of the forest is not the one that is protected from the storm and hidden from the sun. It’s the one that stands in the open where it is compelled to struggle for its existence against the winds and rains and the scorching sun.”
- Napoleon Hill, author
Man, I’m so sick of struggling, aren’t you?
That noblest of noble entrepreneurial traits. The Forger. The Struggler. The Pavement Pounder. The Stubborn, Get-Kicked-in-the-Groin-and-Keep-on-Two-Steppin’-Toward-Your-Big-Beautiful-Dream Maverick, with eyes firmly set on his prize, and heart teetering on her sleeve for all to poo-poo upon.
We all have things we do when that going gets tougher than we think we can handle. Me? I’ve been yelling a lot this year. Believe it or not, this hasn’t proven to be very effective, so I’m transitioning to new, more productive strategies.For example, I’ve been climbing a local mountain at the crack of dawn once a week since the middle of May, and I hung up two awesome hammock chairs on our porch so Allen and I would have a place to sway, rock, and BREATHE while we attempt to shake off the stresses of building our dream business and living our lives. And just four days ago, I finally started reading “Think & Grow Rich” by Napoleon Hill.This book could not be more ubiquitous on the Recommended Reading shelves of the business-minded, solo or otherwise. And even though I’ve known its backstory — that the turn-of-the-century mega mogul Andrew Carnegie delivered unto Napoleon Hill a secret for infinite wealth, and Mr. Hill spent the next 20 years interviewing 500 other successful mega moguls and flipping ALL the information out into this handy little page turner — I’ve ignored its riches.
Oops. My bad. Turns out this trippy ditty is a fun, frenetic, heady, and rollicking exploration; a wily, run-on riddle that feels like it’s trying to mess with your cranium. Yet, at the same time, it’s like a Dick ‘n Jane reader, full of simplistic stories of Faith, Desire, Perseverance, Opportunity, Goal Digging, Magic by Muscle, and high gusto Imagination.
It’s not a frivolous “Greed Is Good” campaign, which the title had led me to believe for years. No no no. It’s a book that’s trying to cut through the B.S. of time and space and say something meaningful about our Human Potential — which is something we see decidedly less of every day of every month of every year.
And as a Content Lover, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the extra perk that keeps me smiling as I read it:
Its sentence structure and dated language is absolutely brazen and utterly spectacular!
You can tell the editor was hands-off on this one. Oh, what a privilege and pleasure it is to see a passionate dynamo allowed to say what he wants and embrace his ticks, quips, and renegade turns of phrase!
As Epiphanies, Inc. rolls out reviews later this year, this one will definitely get on the First Dibs list. If you decide to read it, get out your highlighter, cuz you’ll be going to town with it!
Posted in Gotta Reads | No Comments »
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on Thursday, July 6th, 2006 at 1:34 am and is filed under Gotta Reads.
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