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Archive for March, 2008
March 31st, 2008 by Allen Voivod
 I’ve had this blog post on my mind to write for a while, and in the intervening time, I’ve lost the reference source I had for this, so I’m going to tell you this factoid…
Pastor Joel Osteen of Lakewood Church based part of his latest book, Become a Better You, on material he developed in his weekly sermons.
…and ask you to take that on faith. 
Now, you may be thinking something along the lines of, “He used the same material over again?! How unoriginal and lazy!” That’s the Deadly Sin thing - sloth, namely.
Years ago, I used to think that re-using material was lazy myself. But over time, I’ve come to realize that it’s not lazy at all. In fact, it’s darned smart for three very good reasons:
1. Your Ideal Audience doesn’t want to absorb your message, mission, and vision in just one way. In Osteen’s case, one person might only watch his sermons live, and another might only read his book. It’d be foolish - even pride-filled, if we continue the Deadly Sins analogy - if Osteen thought everyone in his following read every single word, watched every single broadcast, and listened to every single radio message or podcast.
2. Having multiple “Content Catapults” reinforces your expert status. Undoubtedly, some people do take in Osteen’s content in multiple ways. Do they resent the fact that he re-purposes content from one venue into another? Of course not! Quite the contrary, they appreciate each in their own way, and they respect him more for it. Additionally, reading a lesson versus hearing it on a TV show exposes us to different communication cues and nuances. The brilliant insight you didn’t have the first time may come leaping out to you when you experience it differently.
3. For the time-crunched lifestyle entrepreneur or doing-it-all small business owner, efficiency is everything. One well-crafted piece of content can serve as the basis of:
- An article
- A blog post
- A news release
- A direct mail postcard campaign
- A newsletter
- An ezine
- Part of a media kit
- A display ad
- A piece of a larger ebook, book, white paper, or special report
- A podcast
- A video blog
You get the idea.
And for what it’s worth, Osteen isn’t the only one re-purposing content for different audiences (and revenue streams). Dilbert creator Scott Adams’ recent bestseller, Stick to Drawing Comics, Monkey Brain! and Seth Godin’s Small Is the New Big are two prominent examples of books where the content was culled almost entirely from Adams’ and Godin’s blog postings.
Other books, like David Meerman Scott’s The New Rules of Marketing and PR and Scoble/Israel’s Naked Conversations were developed on Scott’s and Israel’s blogs with the specific intent of turning them into books.
Lani and I aren’t the only people out there preaching the gospel of content as the key to getting your message, mission, and vision out to your Ideal Audience. We’re not the only ones preaching the re-purposing of content, either.
So if we aren’t causing that flash of insight for you, at one of our workshops, on this blog, or in article directories and archives across the web, then hopefully, someone out there - whether a pastor like Osteen, a satirist like Adams, or other thought leaders like Scott, Godin, Scoble, and Israel - will inspire you to create and re-purpose content for your own business and bottom line.
Posted in All About Content | 2 Comments »
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on Monday, March 31st, 2008 at 1:47 pm and is filed under All About Content.
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March 29th, 2008 by Allen Voivod
 Thursday and Friday, the 27th and 28th, were the days of the Stonyfield Farm Entrepreneurial Institute at Southern New Hampshire University. We both went last year and loved it, and this year, with the new baby and all, it just wasn’t going to work that way.
 So this was going to be another part of Lani’s big “coming out” month - after needing to stay within a few yards of the baby for feeding purposes, this month she led Content Creation workshops at the all-day, 2008 MicroCredit-NH Entrepreneurial Exchange, and we planned for her to go to this as well, and stay overnight at her parents house. Without the kids. And get a full, unbroken night’s sleep.
Until….
Well, you’ll have to listen to the Entrepreneur Diaries entry below to find out how one little device (or lack thereof) changed the course of a couple of days.
(Not to mention yet another six inches of snow!)
Posted in Entrepreneur Diaries | No Comments »
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on Saturday, March 29th, 2008 at 1:39 pm and is filed under Entrepreneur Diaries.
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March 25th, 2008 by Allen Voivod
 Do you remember what you read in a magazine two weeks or two months ago? Have you read multiple issues of a magazine recently? And do you care about what anyone else thought about an article you read, way back when?
If so, then you must be a “Letters to the Editor” reader. Personally, I’ve never been that person. I read part or all of about a dozen different magazines in a given month, and until recently, I’ve never even bothered with the Letters section.
Unlike a blog, where the feedback is instantaneous and I can join in a conversation, it doesn’t serve me to see what Jim Smith from Des Moines thinks, because I can’t reply to him, and if I reply to the magazine, they won’t print it because they’re off printing letters about the next issue. So what’s the point of even giving the time of day to the Letters section?
Then Esquire magazine turned the Letters section upside down.
Crack open an issue (no link, because in actuality, the online version doesn’t replicate or do justice to the print version), and you’ll find in their recently re-named “The Sound and the Fury” things like:
- Graphs showing a breakdown of letter topics
- Highlights in, footnotes on, and annotations of letters
- Behind the scenes peeks at features in the current issue
- Funny quotes from unpublished letters, pulled completely out of context
- “Letter-Inspired Fiction,” where a highly-regarded writer improvises a micro-story using a reader letter as a jumping-off point
Just to name a few. I don’t know who’s responsible (and I’d like to) for the re-imagining of the Letters section at Esquire, but I gotta say, it’s one of the coolest changes in a magazine’s format I’ve seen in … gosh, I don’t know how many years. Maybe this decade?
I could also say in this century or millennium, considering it’s the same thing. Either way, kudos to Esquire for doing what I had once thought impossible - not only getting me to read a Letters section, not only getting me to enjoy it, and not only to get me to look forward to it.
Esquire actually changed the way I read their magazine, by making their Letters section so cool that it’s the first thing I read.
Posted in All About Content | 2 Comments »
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on Tuesday, March 25th, 2008 at 12:07 pm and is filed under All About Content.
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March 20th, 2008 by Allen Voivod
We get this question all the time from small business owners and lifestyle entrepreneurs diving into the blogging world, and the answer is, “Anything related to your business, products, services, industry, which would also be informative and entertaining (and not sales-y) for your Ideal Audience.”
And that answer, while accurate, just isn’t helpful.
Because (as we’re finally realizing) when our clients and prospects ask what to blog about, the question is also a stand-in for a host of other concerns:
- What’s the point?…
- How will this get me more business?…
- I’m not a writer…
- There’s fear involved in “putting myself out there” in this way…
- I don’t know where to start…
- I’m overwhelmed by the idea, the technology, the fitting-it-in around the rest of everything else I have to do as Chief Cook and Bottle Washer in my business…
You get the idea.
Assuming for now that you will be jumping in to the blogging world, here’s the easiest formula I can come up with for a successful blog post, which I laid out for one of our clients in a Progress Report last year:
To sum up, blogging can be as simple as:
1. Reading an industry news story
2. Formulating your opinion on it
3. Typing up your opinion and supporting it with your unique set of knowledge
Could each of [your exceutive team members] do that in 15-30 minutes or so, once (or twice) a month? If so, your blog will be a roaring success.
As an example, ClosetPlace, a storage and organization systems company out of Wolfeboro, NH, is going through blogging training with our buddies at Acorn Creative as I write this. Their new website is going live this week, and they’ve opened a new showroom as well - big year for them!
I met with ClosetPlace’s Bill Huntley yesterday, and we got to talking about how new closet systems affect the resale value of homes. I checked out Remodeling magazine’s 2007 Cost vs. Value annual report, and was surprised to see that they didn’t include anything storage or organization-related.
That lack of inclusion is blog-worthy. In fact, if it had been included, it would also be blog-worthy, but for the specific situation, let’s put it this way:
Imagine you’re Bill Huntley, and you’re at a cocktail party. Someone comes up to you and says, “I heard Remodeling magazine didn’t include storage systems in their Cost vs. Value report. What do you think about that?”
“I think that’s short-sighted,” you say.
“Why?”
“Well, some custom closet installs run about $12K, which is in line with some of the lower-cost projects they’re tracking. Storage and organization is a multi-billion-dollar industry, so it’s worthy of Remodeling’s attention. And a closet system is just as much of an upscale addition as a kitchen remodel, in terms of making the home more attractive to potential buyers. In a tough housing market, that could make the difference between selling and sitting on another year of mortgage and escrow payments.”
That exchange is, literally, what Bill could post on his new blog about that report. He has his own inimitable personality and style of talking and writing, so it would end up reading differently, but in terms of creating the outline of a blog post, that’s exactly all he has to do.
Of course, he could add one more thing. He could then write a question and a call to action for his readers: “Was the sale of your house affected by a closet system? Or was a closet system one of your deciding factors in choosing to buy one house over another? Leave a comment and let us know!”
And I’m about to do the same thing, for our own purposes. So, does that example give you an idea of what to blog about, and how? Leave a comment and let us know!
Posted in Blog Bits, Inciter Articles | 3 Comments »
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on Thursday, March 20th, 2008 at 11:25 am and is filed under Blog Bits, Inciter Articles.
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March 19th, 2008 by Allen Voivod
Got 1 minute and 53 seconds? Then click the play button below, and you’ll get to hear:
- Baby laughter
- Lani making funny noises
- And, as this post’s title claims, a reminder of why we’re in business together - and why it’s pretty darn cool for spousal-preneurs with kids to be taking charge of their lives and incomes
Posted in Entrepreneur Diaries | 1 Comment »
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on Wednesday, March 19th, 2008 at 5:38 pm and is filed under Entrepreneur Diaries.
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March 18th, 2008 by Allen Voivod
“How does Twitter make money?”
This is what Lani asked aloud the other day, and for now the answer seems to be, “With venture capital funding.” So on a lark, we Googled “Twitter business model” and found this post from Allen Stern wondering the same thing, but a few months earlier. I can’t seem to find his answer, but I did find a different post from Jason Calacanis, with 3 ways Twitter could become a billion-dollar business.
(Good grief! Riding a 140-character microblogging engine to a billion dollars? Maybe Twitter’s worth paying attention to after all.)
That said, I noticed two of Calacanis’ three options were based in the old school “Interruption Marketing” world. If you’re not familiar with the term, here it is, contrasted with “Permission Marketing,” from the Wikipedia entry on Seth Godin:
Advertisements on TV and Radio are classified as ‘interruption marketing’, which interrupt the customer while he is doing something of his preference. Thus he introduced the concept of ‘permission marketing’ where the business provides something of value to the customer and thus obtains his permission and then does marketing.
And since Seth Godin wrote the book on Permission Marketing, he oughta know!
With that said, if you were reading the “tweets” of the people you follow, and were suddenly presented with an ad every so often, that looked just like a regular tweet, would you be happy about that? Or annoyed?
That’s the scenario in two of the three business models Calacanis proposed. Granted, I didn’t start a blog empire and sell it to AOL like he did, so maybe I’m not the best guy to ask, but it seems to me that Interruption Marketing just isn’t right for Web 2.0 places like Twitter.
Though I was late to the discussion (his initial post was back in January), I added comment #37 to Calacanis’ post with some other potential money-making, non-interruption-marketing-based ideas. That’s just one of the many great things about blogging - no matter when the conversation started, you can join in.
And I’m just a guy sitting at the kitchen table, with his socks still wet from having stepped through a snowbank to give his wife her laptop, as she was heading out the door to drop our son’s play pal back at his house, on the way to a MicroCredit-NH peer group meeting. (Whew! That’s a mouthful if you read it aloud.)
But I’m also a guy with a half-decent opinion, which is now sitting out on the blog of a heavy-hitting, influential guy who’s being read by a lot of other very interesting folks. Which is pretty cool.
I guess there will always be a place for interruption marketing - it still gets a response, and even if it’s much, much less than it was, if it can be quantifed, it can be sold. But I think when we look back, we’ll see that Permission Marketing may have knocked Interruption Marketing for a loop, but Web 2.0 put it down for the count as we know it.
Posted in Dances With Gurus, Fun With Marketing | No Comments »
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on Tuesday, March 18th, 2008 at 9:31 pm and is filed under Dances With Gurus, Fun With Marketing.
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March 17th, 2008 by Allen Voivod
 We just got notices over the weekend that Alexandria Brown, aka “The Ezine Queen,” is about to throw a free, two-part teleclass on ezines, which she says will be her last one EVER. (Wonder what she’ll call herself from now on, if she’s not going to do ezine-related calls anymore?)
That said, the calls are happening March 25th and 27th at 8pm Eastern, and if you can’t make it live, by signing up here with your first name and email address, you’ll get access to the recordings of the calls, where Ali says:
During these two 75-minute calls, you’ll discover:
- the 3 BIG problems with email right now that you MUST be aware of
(and how to do a complete and easy workaround)
- my top 5 personal recommendations to help you continue to MAKE MONEY from your ezine (and in fact, you can make a higher income than ever!)
- my 3 best NEW strategies that will help you get MORE EZINE SIGNUPS online than ever before (Need to grow your list fast? Then don’t miss this.)
- the new BEST DAY of the week to publish your ezine
(simply changing your schedule alone can increase your response… and sales!)
- the 2 things you MUST start doing NOW — whether you are a beginner or advanced — that will SAVE your online business future. (I’m not being dramatic or “doom and gloom” here… this is serious, folks.)
- 5 real-life lessons learned from ezine publishers just like you, and how they are using their ezines to continue to dramatically increase sales and publicity — despite
all the email naysayers. (You’ll want to hear what these solo-preneurs are doing so you can model what works.)
As we retool how we do our ezine this year, and considering the issues we’ve been hearing over the years about email deliver-ability and what can be done about it, we’re definitely going to be tuning in to find out the latest from the greatest in the ezine field, so to speak.
Mark your calendar, and join the fun next week!
Posted in All About Content, Dances With Gurus | No Comments »
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on Monday, March 17th, 2008 at 1:44 pm and is filed under All About Content, Dances With Gurus.
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March 14th, 2008 by Lani Voivod
Wondering how you can bring more wealth into your life? Why not stalk your favorite billionaire, and see what you can learn from someone who knows the tricks of the wealth-accumulating trade?
I just flipped through a “Special Issue” of Forbes mag — the March 24, 2008 issue — which is dedicated to “The Richest People in the World,” “1,125 Billionaires,” to be exact. Some of the numbers and tidbits here were fascinating enough to inspire me to share them in a blog post.
Here’s a highlight reel…
- Turns out you can “Track a Billionaire” with customizable RSS feeds at www.Forbes.com/lists.
- Re: Billionaire Content: You can add Forbes content about billionaires (or other subjects they cover), to you social media pages (like Facebook, MySpace, iGoogle, etc.) or to your own site at Forbes.com/lists, too.
- Read billionaires’ bios, see their pics, sort ‘em by name, rank, and worth, and globe-peep their home bases with Forbes interactive maps at www.Forbes.com/billionaires.
As for a few excerpted fun facts:
- “The 20 richest people on the planet are worth a total of $661.4 billion, or at least $20.8 billion apiece, $3.3 billion more than last year’s minimum.”
- Warren Buffet kicked Bill Gates off his #1-richest-man-in-the-world throne, where he had been sitting pretty for the last 13 years.
- “For the first time, the number of billionaires [Forbes] identified topped 1,000.”
- “On Feb. 11, [Forbes] counting day, the combined net worth of all billionaires was $4.4 trillion, up $900 billion from last year.”
Recession? What recession? Apparently, there’s PLENTY of money and opportunity out there to be had.
As micro-biz owners and lifestyle entrepreneurs, it’s our job to figure out how we can leverage our own unique talents, knowledge, and expertise to tap into this mind-blowing well of abundance.
Oh, and have fun while we do it. That’s important, too. 
Posted in Microenterprises R Us, Mood Boosters | No Comments »
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on Friday, March 14th, 2008 at 12:36 pm and is filed under Microenterprises R Us, Mood Boosters.
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March 13th, 2008 by Allen Voivod
At yesterday’s 2008 MicroCredit-NH Entrepreneurial Exchange, Lani and I had the pleasure of helping our friend and ally Kevin Skarritt out with his general session presentation on cutting-edge marketing and PR.
To illustrate how marketing has changed over time, Kevin put together a 34-foot-long foamcore board depicting the major technology events of the last 450 or so years…and showed how 90% of the changes in technology which affecting the way marketing is done has happened in just the last five years.
Of course, foamcore is only so compelling. So Kevin also wrote a few scripts for us to perform together, using a dating theme to show certain milestones in the evolution of marketing.
The one below was shot by Katie Payne of The Measurement Standard, and aside from noting that this is an example of the advent of infomercial style, I just have to let the video speak for itself.
Posted in Fun With Marketing | No Comments »
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