Long Tail Writing

Getting to know who you are can sometimes be an endless journey. There are many aspects that we all must go through daily. Beyond learning what to do in the moment, we all change over time. In fact, our brains are set up to change every night by dreaming. This mechanism allows us to determine courses of action without actually doing them. So what are a few methods we can dream with our eyes open? We have TV and movies, but those are incredibly descriptive and don't allow for much mental wiggle room. Here are four ways you can find yourself by getting lost in a book. Method 1: Escape Our daily lives can be filled with necessity. They can be so filled with this maintenance that we grow weary. The monotony isn't a bad thing, after all it allows us to sustain our existence. If we are lucky it helps us derive purpose on why we are here. On occasion though, we need to escape from this constant pressure to continue. For those cases, we enjoy escaping into life and death situat...

In a recent podcast with Seth Godin, one of the ideas mentioned was looking at the minimal audience needed. When people are thinking of what they can sell to make money, they are thinking that the more people that views their product the better. Therefore, they look to see advertising as an infinite source of views. This becomes a race of converting views into “funnel” travelers. At the end of the funnel is a customer who buys everything you put out. Personal connection vs. Funnel travelers The flip side that Seth Godin talks about is that true marketing is about personal connection. To me, that makes logical sense. In the small town I used to live in, my boss was like a celebrity. When he walked down the street, people waved, and he chatted with nearly everyone. In fact, he had to send people out to get items from the store sometimes because it would take too long for him to do.   He had a personal connection with so many people, which is the foundation of his busine...

When it comes to how to market an ebook, there is a lot of bad advice out there. However, the advice can sound completely rational and logical. So how do you best separate out the good information from the bad? There are three main ways to do this: Method 1: Ignore success, look for failures There is an old saying that failures teach more than success. This is exceedingly true when you are looking for marketing advice. Many people will take a look at the success of a project and try to duplicate it. However, they may not see that the success of the project was an iterative approach, achieved just a bit at a time. That means that when you try to duplicate success, you could be missing steps or may not have the full picture. Instead, if you can see the road they took to get to success, you will be setup better. Things to look for include: How many failures did they have How much did each or all the failures cost What was the method that they experimented T...