I have two brilliant friends who have thriving service-based businesses that they market almost entirely online. They both dream of creating and launching digital products like an ebook or ecourse but neither of them have, each for different reasons. Rachel is a go-getting self-promoter. She guest posts regularly and has a thriving Facebook presence. She…
I have approximately three weeks to pull together 30,000 words of an ebook I’m writing for the very successful Digital Photography School blog. I’ve known this project was coming for the better part of a year, but I found out the exact production schedule just after returning from LiftOff and a week before heading home…
Ideas are my chocolate. When it comes to ideas — my own or others — I can consume a lot of them. This tends to manifest itself as the stack of books next to my bed waiting to be read, a folder full of email newsletters to read, and a backlog of RSS feeds. Sound…
I stole the title of this post from Pam Slim’s post about the client-centered business model. She had a realization that being helpful and interesting is great, but people do actually want to pay for effective solutions to their problems. For the search traffic hounds and affiliate marketers of the world, endlessly tweaking their SEO…
(Note: There are no affiliate links in this post.) What if the Wright brothers sat around tweaking blueprints and talking about flight instead of testing their ideas? Information is wonderful, but we all know the implementation is what matters. I said earlier this week in my post about the conscious consumption of info-products that I…
200 pages later It’s an odd feeling, to feel utterly exhausted and yet recharged by such an intensive creative effort as NaNoWriMo (if you don’t know what that is, click here). I imagine it’s the same bittersweet mix of finishing a marathon — spent, but thrilled with the accomplishment. NaNo gave me many gifts, only…
Individual actions, at their core, are often simple, but they can feel like large, complicated undertakings if they involve a change in our habitual patterns. Wake up at 6 A.M. Walk for 20 minutes. Drink herbal tea instead of coffee. These are all simple tasks I set for myself and have often failed to accomplish….
In the late 19th century, a German physiologist named Herman Helmholtz began to describe distinct phases to humankind’s creative acts. Why this became the work of a physiologist I would love to know, but nonetheless he described three distinct stages and named them saturation, incubation and illumination. As the 20th century progressed, other researchers and…