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That particular book had changed his life. He checked the price again. Thirty dollars! “It’s a steal” he thought. He wanted to give back something to the author. After thinking for a while, he decided to buy ten of the same books and sent one to each of his friends.
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Note: A mini saga is a story in exactly 50 words!
Punit Soni from Wharton has been sending me this quote in every email that he has sent me in the last few months. I don’t know whether he is sending me a message 
Enjoy!
Simplicity again. Naveen at Start2Lead has a simple, yet brilliant post covering the basic difference between what is ordinary and what is extraordinary.
Link - Start2Lead: The little ‘extra’
Enjoy!
Initial inspiration for this - of course from my hero Seth Godin (post: 332 is boring)
First, came the Million Dollar Home Page experiment (advertise for $1/pixel) - which is totally sold out by the way.
Now comes, the 1000 Paintings for sale business where paintings of numbers 1 to 1000 are being sold. Who will buy? Don’t know but 216 of them are already sold. The price keeps increasing by 10% every time 100 paintings are sold. That’s the motivation for someone to buy quickly (in case they are interested to buy them in the first place.)
The ideas are simple and I am sure becasue of the ease with which they will be replicated, they WILL be replicated by fast followers. However, the initial person WILL make a huge fortune. Now that the idea is out, it looks very simple and obvious.
The key observation is that in order to make money, all you need to have is a simple idea executed brilliantly. Make it worth talking and people will talk about it. You don’t need to spend any marketing dollars.
Life is really fun, isn’t it?
The guy at the store showed me all sorts of phones – sliding, flipping, PDA phone, camera phone, slim phone and more. There were too many good phones there. I needed to do some more research before I buy. Two months have passed and I have not made a decision yet.
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Note: A mini saga is a story in exactly 50 words!
The sales team in a startup was jazzed after a great customer presentation. The startup VC had a prior relationship with the customer. He called the customer and asked if he would buy the system from them. The customer politely responded “No way. The meeting was only for market research”
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Note: A mini saga is a story in exactly 50 words!
You can have the cake and eat it too.
The other day I ordered a couple of books from Amazon. I got a shipment notice from them yesterday. Of course, being Amazon, the notice had every detail that I was looking for including an USPS tracking number
So, hats off to USPS for using this advertisements to serve!
Love at first sight
John was a regular in that train. Today seemed different, probably because of Sally who was in New York for work. They started the conversation casually but both became very close in less than thirty minutes. They exchanged phone numbers, of course. John promptly called a day later – “Wrong number!”
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Note: A mini saga is a story in exactly 50 words!
Web is really something. It provides “Soup to Nuts” Programs for Experts wanting to make money
If you are competent in a one or more domains that are interest to the marketplace, you now have all the tools on the web to let the world know about your expertise and start making money. This is a partial list of such resources that you can use. Some of them these services are free and some are paid.
1. Keep your collateral ready
Backpack provides a simple way to organize your information online. You can create pages and store documents, lists and to-do lists and much more. I use Backpack to store collaterals of all the companies that I am involved with, the writing projects that are in progress and the presentations that I may use for my speaking engagements. I never have to worry about missing something important when I am not at the office. All I need is access to a computer with an internet connection and I can get to that information.
2. Self-Publish a book
Publishing your book through the traditional publishing process is not only hard but it also takes time. Multiply the complexity and time taken by a resonable factor if you are a first-time author. It can be brutal at times. Forget about getting a publisher, getting a good agent is a challenge for many first-time authors. Self-publishing may be the way to go if
you are in a time crunch to establish yourself.
Related Links:
One thing to remember is that everything is not equal with self-publishing. Not all reviewers will pick up your book if it is self-published. There is this question of distribution and reach and many other challenges. All said and done, its a great start and it may land you a deal for the next book.
3. Sell your book
There are so many ways to sell your book online. Here are a few:
3.2 Amazon will allow individuals to setup shops
3.3 You can sell the digital version of the book and almost save everything on fulfillment costs. There are so many cool technologies out there that already provide DRM (digital rights management) software to use on a “pay per use” basis.
4. Start a Blog
Earlier it was a fashion, now it is a necessity. The good part is starting a blog is never easier. As long as you have good ideas to share, technology and the knowledge are available (many times for no cost) Here are a few popular technology platforms:
For a basic starter checklist, please take a look at my Squidoo lens on the same topic
Link: Blogging Starter Checklist
You can also start podcasting easily with services like AudioBlog or Odeo to supplement your blog.
5. Implement revenue generation programs on your blog
Yes, if that is your interest, you CAN make money online by offering your expertise via your blog or otherwise. Here is a partial list of programs that you can immediately implement on your blog.
5.2 eMiniMalls
Chitika provides a simple merchandising solution that is targeted based on the content of your blog.
5.3 BlogAds
Allow people to rent space on your blog to share their messages. In other words, BlogAds provides a service for advertisers to choose a set of blogs where they want to advertise.
5.4 Amazon Associates Program
Instread of linking directly, spend a few minutes extra and link back to the same products on Amazon via associates link and earn referral fees (5% - 8% depending on volumes)
6. Setup Squidoo Lenses
How will anyone know you are an expert?
The easiest way is to establish your expertise by creating a valuable lens on Squidoo. Squidoo is free and you will easily know if you have valuable content or not just by watching the rankings of your lenses. You might think that your lenses are valuable but ultimately its the opinions of readers that matters.
7. Sell digital content
Apart from your book, you can also audio, video or eBooks on your website. Bitpass and Paypal provide two easy ways to collect money. Bitpass also provides DRM support.
8. Publish your manifesto at ChangeThis
ChangeThis is a place where thought leaders write something, well, thought provoking. It is currently owned and operated by reputed 800-CEO-READ.
The process to publish a manifesto is simple.
8.2 All proposals will be featured to be voted upon.
8.3 If your proposal gets high marks (votes) you will be asked to submit your written manifesto.
8.4 Your written manifesto will be circulated amongst the editorial board.
8.5 If you have written a good manifesto it will published in a polished PDF format.
I published my manifesto “25 Ways to Distinguish Yourself” a few months ago and even today I get to hear from people who have recently downloaded it.
9. Setup conference calls
Want to conduct a seminar on the web? Want to do it free? No problem. FreeConference provides that facility. Its free for you if you and your participants are willing to cover the long-distance charges. If participants are participating using a Skype kind of service that should not be a problem.
10. Get Publicity
You are an expert and most probably have opinions on topics that are of your interest. You have established yourself as an expert and you now want to get the word out to media. PRLeads is a cool service that will provide you (as the name indicates) PR leads. It will try to match requests by writers and reporters that are working on stories and columns related to your field of expertise. The service costs about $99 per month.
11. Setup your virtual office
You need a phone number and a fax number and you are always moving - meaning you need broadband internet access on the go too. No problem - there are solutions for all these requirements.
11.2 Services like GizmoProject will provide a phone number + fax number for about $8 per month. The cool thing about a GizmoProject phone is that you can easily record phone calls. So if you want to conduct a phone interview of a client or another expert for your podcast, you have the tools ready. You may want to polish up the recorded file and for that you can use an open source sound editing package called Audacity.
12. Manage your customers
You may be working as a solo practitioner but you can still get to use the tools that large companies use to manage their customer relationships. There are a number of open source CRM packages like SugarCRM that offer this service. Whatever be your size, with the right tools you can still put up a very professional image.
13. Build your personal brand
Here as a quick resource (40 page FREE eBook) for starting on that journey. It’s in two formats:
All of you have a fantastic memorial day weekend!
Of course, by the right people and the right messages.
I have seen many people who complain about attending seminars (leadership, self-development) and getting nothing out of it. When I probe further, half these people were making an assessment of the speaker and speculating whether to agree with the speaker or not. In other words, they had not given the full license to the speaker to influence them. The focus was more on the speaker and not on the message.
Here is something for you to consider. It requires a lot of courage to be influenced. Think about it. If you are influenced by a message fully, you will have to do something about it. Then you got to be accountable. You will have to find a great excuse when you slip on the follow through. Lets look at the alternative. If you are not fully influenced or make an intelligent comment about a situation where the speaker’s claims may not work, you got yourself a license not to act on what you learnt. Repeat this a few times and you can make a generic claim that none of these things work. Its a total waste of your time. Take it to an extreme and you can graduate to become a cynic.
Having great teachers on your side can be a competitive advantage for you. However, if you are not a good student and won’t allow the teacher to get through to you, it won’t be of much help. After some time, those teachers will disappear. They have limited time and if you don’t make good progress, it may not be a good investment of their time. There may not be a big enough ROII for them.
When was the last time you were completely influenced by something or someone? What kind of action did you take because of that? What were the circumstances under which you were influenced? If you experienced positive results, what can you do to create those or similar circumstances to get influenced again?
If you are from the Press or if you are from a Speakers Bureau, you can schedule a meeting with me using Jiffle.
Like Jiffle? Get it here.
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