Here’s an interview with two teenager entrepreneurs who reached millionaire status before they were old enough to vote. Notice that they achieved this by building successful online businesses, and that they didn’t hit a home run with the first one. Sometimes it takes takes trying a few different ideas before something sticks. Thankfully, the web is very forgiving when you make mistakes. There’s little upfront cost to close down and start over.
And lastly, notice that they didn’t reinvent the wheel. The simply improved on an existing idea. The 14 year old girl took a popular site like MySpace and added her own twist to it – custom page layouts.
A few weeks ago while shopping and running a few other errands, my wife was approached by a salesman for the local newspaper. She decided to buy a weekend subscription, from the guy. My first guess was that this guy was an incredible salesman. From her description though, it sounded more like this guy was desperate to meet his quota. I think most print sales guys are feeling the pinch. They’re selling something fewer and fewer people want or need.
Whenever I’m traveling out of town, I still grab a USA Today out of habit from the hotel I’m staying at, but rarely do I get a chance to do more than scan the pages. I really think it’s the smell of newspaper print that lures me to grab a copy.
I’m a grazer as this article suggests, and like most Generation Xers out there, I primarily get my news online. Today, there are hundreds of thousands of business and political blogs. There’s Podcasts and Ustream and Google News. There’s smartphones and cool new devices like the Kindle and the iPad that allow us to take news on the go; making paper news irrelevant. I realized this trend years ago when I bought my first 16MB pocket PC, the Dell Axim. It allowed me to download the latest local and national news each day when I synced it with my laptop. Now I use my Blackberry to scan the latest on Drudge.
Google news allows me to customize my news settings with whatever specific categories I want to read each day. All I have to do is log on and click “Edit this page” and then start “adding new categories” that I’m interested in.
Print media had better start seeing the handwriting on the wall. Using desperate salesmen to push a stale product is not a strategy for long term survival.
I really like this quote from Seth Godin in his new book Linchpin:
“Expertise gives you enough insight to reinvent what everyone else assumes is the truth”
Those great men and women who’ve turned conventional thinking on it’s head were passionate experts in their fields. They were dedicated to testing, practicing, questioning and then re-testing.
Think of the Wright brothers.
They spent an immeasurable amount of time in their workshop calculating forces and experimenting with different wing shapes. Their knowledge and understanding of flight allowed them to change many preconceived notions about air travel. Whether you’re a programmer, architect, teacher or entrepreneur, when you immerse yourself into something that fires you up, you gain not only the insight but the confidence to shed the status quo.
Natasha Wescoat is one artist who knows the power of social media sites like UStream.TV. Her live paintings have inspired a huge following and in the process increased buyers at her online auctions. Anyone looking to create an authentic voice within their niche can follow this example.
What kind of live streaming content could you offer? [...]
For the few days I’ve been humming Dave Carroll’s song in my head – “Uniiited ….you broke my Taylor guitar”. If you haven’t seen the video, you need to take a look. Why I like the song so much is not so much for the tune alone, but the story behind it. You can see [...]
Anyone can create a blog and start writing content, but to have a blog that gets 4.5 million viewers a day like the People of Walmart , you’ve got to have something that people like and want to share.
It needs to be the kind of content that makes readers forward and say “Hey, check this [...]
I always enjoy reading about some of the unique marketing strategies job seekers are using to separate themselves from the herd of other applicants. Eric Romer landed a job at Headblade by putting up a website HireMeHeadBlade. Needless to say, he got the attention of company president Todd Greene who was looking for an innovative [...]
I don’t drink tequila very often but I like this commercial. It lays out the USP quickly. Shot glass built right in. Seth Godin explained this well a few years ago in his book Purple Cow
His premise – Transform Your Business by creating remarkable products and services that make others say “wow!”. A tequila bottle [...]
A few weeks ago I mentioned that I had been reading ..actually listening to Chris Anderson’s new book Free: The Future of Radical Price. Not long after I posted this, I read that Rupert Murdock announced Fox News would begin charging for their online news content. Mark Cuban had his own advice. He says go [...]
and the iPad that allow us to take news on the go; making paper news irrelevant. I realized this trend years ago when I bought my first 16MB pocket PC, the 
