I did a podcast interview with Yaro Starak of Entrepreneur’s Journey last week. Yaro asked some great questions, to which I gave my typical rambling responses.
Posts categorized as Internet Marketing
Well, the emails have started again. 
After my last post, several people wrote in wondering what exactly I meant by this:
Or you can simply blog to meet cool people with great skills and great ideas and do business with them.
Well, basically, my method of doing business online involves joint ventures.
Now, depending on your familiarity with that term as it’s been used lately online, you may be thinking of something that I’m not.
I learned about joint ventures from practicing law, not from some Internet “guru.” In fact, I was so fascinated by what the clients were doing when setting up deals that I knew I’d never be satisfied simply “papering” the details for them.
Advice is a tricky thing, especially when dispensed en masse.
The answer to most things, if we’re being honest, is it depends.
There are certainly principles that are near universal, and I try to stick with them as much as possible around here, while showing how those basic principles can be applied in a new and quickly evolving medium.
Aaron Wall’s recent confessional post about advice got me thinking about this topic a bit more than usual. In reality, everyone’s situation is different, and what works for me might not work for you when it comes down to the nitty-gritty details.
Now, of course this truism won’t stop all the opportunists with their Gobbledygook Manifestos telling you that the entire world has turned upside down thanks to social media. And of course, only they have the high-priced new ideas you so desperately need to avoid going out of business.
Stories sell, there’s no doubt about it.
But they don’t sell because they tell people what to do.
It’s what a story allows people to tell themselves that makes it a powerful selling tool.
Sometimes people do believe what you tell them.
But people rarely ever doubt what they conclude.
Take the novel and film Fight Club for instance.
I haven’t posted about RSS much lately, since there’s been very little going on.
But this week Gabe Rivera of TechMeme announced a very cool use of RSS—he pulls posts from his sponsor’s blogs via feed and displays them in the sponsor area.
Great content is the advertisment (as it should be).
That’s very cool, and there’s a lot more to explore in the area that Gabe is blazing a trail in.
Now today, Text Link Ads released Feedvertising, a free WordPress plugin that allows you to rotate sponsored advertising copy and links in your RSS feed. If you’re reading this via feed (or email) right now, look down at the bottom to see an example.
I love movies, and movies are what led me into copywriting and entrepreneurship.
Better explain that one, huh?
Back in 1997 when I bolted from the big law firm and moved down to Austin, my plan was to become a screenwriter. Feast or famine, damn the consequences, starving artist type stuff.
Well, instead of writing screenplays, I got caught up in the Web 1.0 boom, and read a lot of books about the film industry in my downtime.
Turns out, being a screenwriter in Hollywood ranks somewhere below “best boy” and “key grip” when it comes to actual influence. Not exactly inspiring.
The only way to have true influence in the film world as a writer is if you are also the director and/or producer. That fact made me realize that I am really an entrepreneur, not a pure writer.
And being an entrepreneur is so much like being a Hollywood writer / director / producer, except you operate in the real world. But often the writing part gets neglected, and that ultimately hurts the business.
I’m not only talking about writing in the blogging / online marketing sense. Anyone starting a business is primarily responsible for both the big story and the day-to-day tales, in one way or another. Online, that responsibility is amplified by the benefits that great storytellers enjoy in the social media environment.
