This weekend I made the nine hour round-trip drive from Bellingham to Port Angeles for a surprise birthday party for my uncle. It was good to see family again since I haven't been able to make this trip since our son was born. Of course they all wanted to see him, but that's just too long of a trip for an 11 month old kid to make. Heck, it's almost too long for me to make!
My uncle is actually looking pretty good, especially considering that he's still recovering from a knee replacement over the winter. Now both knees are artificial, but he's getting around really well. In fact he wants to do some commercial fishing on one of the weekends this summer. These days he just fishes for enough to put into jars and to smoke.
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Working out of a home office can be an isolating experience. Certain personalities just can't handle it, while other do just fine. Personally, the transition from busy cubicle life with all the background noise and distractions to the relative quiet of the office in my home was pretty nice.
The situation has changed a bit with my additional role as a stay-at-home dad, but there's still a limited amount of personal contact with the "outside" world – and a definite lack of office colleagues. Except for my son of course, who at nearly 11 months of age has definite opinions how I should run my business. I'm just having challenges interpreting his advice.
So it just happens that I'm discovering the social networks that have developed (and are continuing to develop) on the internet and how they're not just for teenagers with self esteem issues. These internet based social networks have the potential to be a much more powerful implementation of the concept of business networking groups like BNI. The additional strength comes partly from the ability to easily refer business to others, and even make a comission directly from that referral.
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There's quite a bit of buzz going around the internet marketing groups about tapping into the online social networks to promote our products and services. As with anything else, there are a good ways and bad ways to go about this. Since I want to go about it the "right" way, which provides real value to those networks, I've been doing some ongoing research on how best to do that.
I came across a post on conscientious marketing which doesn't really address the topic I was looking into, but it did make a point that stuck with me. Recently Shaklee has been emphasizing their record on environmental activism with a relaunch of environmentally friendly cleaners, the news stories about their [tag-tec]climate neutral building[/tag-tec], the initiative to plant a million trees worldwide over the course of a year, appearances on Oprah for [tag-tec]green household cleaners[/tag-tec] and high ratings in Consumer Reports for the quality of their [tag-tec]water purification[/tag-tec] products.
The delicate balance to achieve is to find a way to relate the positive experiences and benefits of the products without really getting in people's faces. One the one side, you can just put your products out there by just mentioning them in an aside and hoping someone takes action, while the other side involves aggressive marketing that hits all of the "hot buttons", talks on and on about the products and demands action right now.
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This weekend I spent some time getting caught up with FreeIQ. I've been meaning to really dive in and see how it will help with marketing, but I've been a bit busy with so many other projects, plus taking care of our son who is just about 10 1/2 months old now.
I should have gotten to it sooner. 
When you first look at it, FreeIQ seems like just another video hosting service like YouTube, AOL video etc. But when you start to look at it closely, you can see that it is much more. The underlying premise of this site is to provide useful information, unlike sites such as YouTube which seem to be geared towards teenagers with bad acne, video game fetishes and poor taste in music. Its redeeming quality, at least to me, was that you could host and stream video without taking up the bandwidth or disk space on your own server.
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A couple of days ago I wrote about some of the challenges of balancing home life and working at home when the responsibilities of home life can jump in at any time. I mentioned how our dog Timber had been not eating and throwing up on the carpet, which was not all that unusual for him as this might happen once or twice a year.
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| Timber Scoping Out the Area from the Trees |
This time was different. He was not going back to eating normally as he usually did and was getting skinnier all the time. When we took him to the vet, she mentioned that she might have felt something in his abdomen so we had x-rays done.
When the x-rays came back they mostly showed fragments from the rib bones we gave him the previous night just to get him to eat something. The radiologist also mentioned that the intestines looked like they were larger than normal. The vet suggested some different food and to see if he would get better.
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When you work at a home office you have to learn a certain amount of discipline so that you can get any kind of work accomplished during the day. That is especially true if you are the primary caregiver to a small child. I imagine that's true if you are primary caregiver of any sort, but I haven't got there yet.
There are some days when even focus and personal discipline are not enough to carry you through to getting work done during the day. This was one of those days. Combine a teething 10 month old with a sick dog and that spells a recipe for busy day, just not a productive one.
This is mainly a story about our dog. Timber is about 9 years old and is generally a very good dog. However he seems to have always had "eating issues".
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Here's this week's video blog entry and a quick lesson on SEO.
When you publish something like a video on a web page, it doesn't really produce much in the way of textual content for the search engines to find. When the search engine spiders come across the page, they see all of the formatting and standard text that is on the rest of your site, so they calculate that this page is a lot like the others pages. Since SE's like Google want to show unique, relevant results ina search, they'll stick that page in somthing called the "supplemental index".
This means that page is a lot less likely to show up for a search than other pages. Now the content of those other pages may not be as good, but because there are more words on the page put together in a fashion that is fairly unique from any other page in its index, it will show up earlier than a page with just a video on a blog site, even though that video may have great content.
Well, enough with a critique of search engines.
They're getting more capable all the time and since Google owns YouTube, I'm sure they're working on a way to index video content properly.
Note on YouTube: I wish there was a way for me to pick the still frame shown on the video. I look like a chipmunk. Oh well.
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My first introduction to internet discussion forums was through needing to find information. Usually it had to with finding a solution to an obscure technical problem I was having. I never did "hang out" much in forums because I figured I had better things to do with my time.
What I've learned over the years is that I actually have knowledge and experiences that can help other people. What you also find is that these online forums can be a source of meeting people of a similar mindset and can even set the foundation for both business and personal relationships. Since there is a certain amount of anonymity available with internet communication you need to be a bit more careful with developing these relationship than you might with someone in person.
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Having been a student of [tag-tec]network marketing[/tag-tec] and it's methods for years, I have seen, heard or read about many of the ups and downs in the industry. Right now we are in an interesting time where we see some major ups and downs simultaneously.
I'll get a couple of the downs out of the way right now:
- Too many promises of easy money: We've all seen the ads (and maybe even been pulled in by a few) that go something like "you do nothing! we build your downline! massive residuals! join now!" Here's a secret: it's not easy. At least not easy in the way that most people think of "easy". It's easier than some other things I've done, but harder than sitting around and playing video games or watching TV.
- Complete automation: Companies that promise that their entire system is automated and that you never have to deal with people is not going to be around very long. In business you want to know who you are working with because you need to be able to trust them. It's just that the medium has changed. Instead of having to go to meetings and meet in person we have email, webcams, and conference calls.
- More scams than ever: Because of the automation mentioned above, you will find more scams than ever before. It's so easy to cobble something together and do an email blast that more people are doing. Unfortunately, some good people can get caught up in that thinking it's a legitimate way to do business. It's not.
More on Network Marketing on the Internet: You Are Your Brand
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Even though I do a lot of research and reading about [tag-tec]network marketing and internet marketing[/tag-tec], I still enjoy keeping up with engineering and technology. Just recently I was surprised to read in my IEEE Spectrum (the flagship magazine for the worldwide electrical and electronics engineering organization) a short article about engineers being recommended to start their own business.
The surprising part wasn't that engineers are striking out on thier own, that's actually not all that unusual. What caught my attention was that the article in this magazine was actually recommending [tag-tec]starting a home business[/tag-tec], rather than taking the more traditional route of raising capital, opening an office, hiring staff, managing clients, etc. The article gives a lot of good reasons on why this is a good idea.
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