Muse Question...

[JJSOmaha]

Hello all-

Looking forward to chatting and sharing ideas from everyone here.

So I'm having a hard time trying to come up with the right muse to generate some extra income.

I'm good at meeting and networking with people and am wondering what types of information or ebooks I might be able to sell? Again, my outgoingness and eagerness to connect people with jobs and play job skill matchmaker as well as meeting new and interesting people are skills that I posses and as I've read here that's what important is to find a skill or something you're knowledgeable in, but just not sure if I can make any money from it...please provide your feedback!

Eager to get started---have some extra time and money ready to invest!

Looking forward to hearing from you soon...

JS

[searstower]

Hi JS and welcome!

So you say you are good at meeting and networking with people. How has that been directly beneficial for you in your life?

How about do you ever look at other people in painful situations and cringe, thinking "If they only knew what I know, this never would have happened."

Give us an example or two and then we'll give you some ideas that you should be able to use.

Rebecca

[JJSOmaha]

Thanks for the note Rebecca!

To answer your questions, by meeting people and not being afraide to introduce myself or connect with others, I have actually landed my current job and became pretty involved in several political races due to meeting the right people up front...not sure if that helps.

I subscribe to the philosopy of 6 degrees of seperation, often much smaller and help others b/c you never know when you need help or it could come back around to you...

I set my friend up, who had never been involved in politics, with a political campaign to design their webpage, from there he won a few awards and is now sought after by others...and I enjoy that type of thing, not so much to get credit and thanks but because I love being the middle man...

Hope that helps provide a little more information and I look forward to talking with you more...

Jeff

[GatsbyGirl]

I would write an ebook called Power Networking for Politicians or something similar and use the website award as a testimonial.

I wrote an ebook called Mortgage Secrets for Real Estate Investors and sell it online. It's been live since 2/2007 and I have made about $1500 so far. Not a huge amount but $1000 more than it cost me to produce it.

Information marketing is great. Janet Switzer has a series of free reports that are really stellar.

[JJSOmaha]

Interesting...thanks GatsbyGirl. Would you mind if I had a look at your website?

Any ideas along the personal branding line? I'm interested in "personal branding" maybe something along the lines of personal branding for young professionals?

Any other thoughts?

[JJSOmaha]

Hello

Can anyone help me with my ideas around young professionals, networking, personal branding, social entrepreneurship and web 2.0?

Would love to do something with these areas, but need some direction---much appreciated!

[James Grey]

Besides your social skills what do you do for a living?

What are your hobbies?

What other skills do you have?


Write all of these down (you should have at least 20 things) and google each one

Find a problem, question or untapped community within the subject and write an ebook, blog, website, ect… about it = your muse


~JG

[JJSOmaha]

Thanks---I'll try to jot some things down--next steps, should I create an ebook or blog like crazy online or ???

Thanks in advance for the advice!

[jonparker83]

Have you considered other means of generating revenue other than selling an eBook?

I don't know if it already exists but have you thought about starting some form of website directory or forum for connecting people together

This could make use of web 2.0 technologies and/or a personal blog, and could make money from advertising, affiliate schemes or membership

Jon

[final_id]

I don't even know why "Web 2.0" EXISTS. It looks to me like simply, "We have websites but we're very bad at functional design so we try to claim that we messed everything up deliberately."

[Marcie]

I don't even know why "Web 2.0" EXISTS. It looks to me like simply, "We have websites but we're very bad at functional design so we try to claim that we messed everything up deliberately."

Actually, I am curious for a good definition of web 2.0, I've read several explanations in various places and they all differ...

[final_id]

ROFL.

Web 2.0: how children play in a sandbox and then pretend it will be professionally business-worthy

[deanypop]

I work for a US subsidiary of a Japanese company... A company that is used to running the supply chain from the top down (they control development, manufacturing, distribution, and retail levels)... It's very hard, at times, to get them to let us run the business "American style", in which the ultimate arbiter of what gets produced/promoted/sold is the consumer (voting with the pocketbook).

I see a lot of parallels with web 1.0/2.0. If web 1.0 was at first exploring the possibilities of the internet, and then exploiting those so that companies can make money... Then web 2.0 is about refactoring the conversation about HOW companies make money, based on how the consumer wants the interaction to work.

So, instead of me having to visit a hundred websites a day, I can churn through a bunch of RSS feeds, and then maybe* wander to the few remaining sites of any worth that haven't set up feeds yet (honestly, I'm not able to think of ANY right now, but I'm tired). Instead of going to 100 online stores, I can visit Amazon.com, and expect that anything I want that they don't sell themselves will be in the "Amazon marketplace", or perhaps in a handy link off their site to an ebay auction, etc...

I hate when people look at rss/ajax/ruby/shiny round icons, and say "that's been around 5 years, what makes it so special?!?", because it irks me that such folks are STILL trying to think of "web 2.0" in the product sense. This isn't a sequel, or a revision with extra buttons or longer battery life. It's a sea-change in who is "in power" online (at least at the content level).

At the same time, I don't buy the argument of the folks who are pissed at the 2.0 number because they feel that, as a natural evolving process, it doesn't make sense to glorify what is, in many ways, an incremental improvement to technology. These are the folks who are waiting for floating hologram monitors, and flying cars. They're pissed we aren't living in the jetsons world. And, for the most part, they're right. We're horribly slow, and backward... But in large part due to the "old powers" of industry wanting to keep making more and more money off "the way things used to be", when there's an even larger pile of cash involved with "making everything better than it used to be".

What something like web 2.0 does is shake up that power, and FORCE the older business models/ways of thinking to change. It's happening now in content - DRM is slowly falling away from digital content in dribs and drabs (and companies are still making piles of cash off downloadable content that is unlocked)... It really NEEDS to happen on the distribution end (imagine how different things would be if every cellphone worked with every carrier on the planet, period... Or if cable/dsl provisioners had more competition/reason to perform FOR their customers lest they lose them)... It's very possibly coming, too... And when it happens, there won't be a rock to hide behind, and even the big monopolies will get back in the game of providing good value for dollar.

Or they'll squash the whole thing and make it unusable, bankrupting us all in the process. Seriously, it's about 50/50 the way things look.

Anyway, long-winded rant from tired-boy. Core idea is just "web 2.0 is web that benefits the surfer more than the site/producer, but still makes the producer money". We really CAN have it both ways in this new wonderful world.

Speaking of, does anyone have some quick links to starting up a business on Facebook, so we can just side-step the whole "having our own website" thing entirely?

Thanks,

-d

[final_id]

Deanypop: seems you're referring to something other than what I'm referring to. What IS "web 2.0" to you? Aside from "it's a new model," can you actually define its characteristics? Aside from "it will improve such-and-so a task," can you name the tasks which it performs and which web 1.0 does NOT perform?

This is the problem I always have with ueber-geeks -- they seem to think the discussion starts at about stage seven. Please recur to stage one.

[deanypop]

Simply put, what a 2.0 site/application/engine has that a 1.0 version doesn't, is the inherent idea that the consumer (or even competing site owner) knows best.

Even though youtube loses some direct visitors by allowing people to embed videos into their own sites, they build youtube brand awareness, while ALSO providing site owners with a way to add cool content to their sites. That breeds goodwill from the site providers and from visitors, and increases youtube's share of the overall market.

Just a few years ago, people embedding youtube's videos on their own site would be universally regarded as some kind of piracy to be protected against. In web 2.0, there's no need to police your content - you just have to make it compete in the market. Scary stuff indeed.

The same could be said with bittorrent now - what once was considered pure piracy is now seen by many content providers as a "must have" feature - so long as they can work out how to drive revenue through it, it'll be a great way to serve massive amounts of content without driving the bandwidth bill through the roof.

Many sites, even if they themselves won't open the doors, are getting screen-scraped by content aggregators - sites that pull info from 100 different retailers/news sites/etc and allow me to filter based on MY criteria. So, in a lot of ways, any site that isn't 2.0 is in danger! They could find that their potential customers still get open/full access to their information, but without the site/company being able to control or even participate in the conversation.

Web 2.0 is a healthier, less-adversarial web. Success for everyone (or at least all of us who can stay fresh, content-focused, and at the top of the google results).

[final_id]

I think of "Web 2.0" as an expression that means cluttered pages put up by teeny-boppers. I just surveyed my family and a whole class of pre-LSAT students. Of the roughly 25 answers, about 20 were "crappy design" and about 5 were "something programmers think is all cool but it isn't really any different."

Personal conclusion: hype. Those who use the term "Web 2.0" are trying to sell me something. Good business models (such as "all about the customer") wouldn't need a new name and a cluttered design to be integrated into a company's online presence.

[dttvn57]

I'd heard about Web 2.0 but didn't care enough to research any further.

Recently, a project required me to look into Web 2.0 and I realized what I've been missing.

Web 2.0 if used correctly is a very good source of free traffic. It's best to work in a team. It's a gold mine for marketers.

Even though I've not fully utilized its power, the experiment proves it works.

You can go to http://thirtydaychallenge.com to learn about it. The challenge was over, but the teaching materials are still made available to the public.

__________________
Trung
How to create a product in an hour for under $80? (http://audiointerviewprofits.com)

[JJSOmaha]

ok so maybe i'll say away from "web 2.0"...any other suggestions based upon my interests?

thanks

jeff

[laniers]

You can go to http://thirtydaychallenge.com to learn about it. The challenge was over, but the teaching materials are still made available to the public.

__________________
Trung
How to create a product in an hour for under $80? (http://audiointerviewprofits.com)

I highly recommend the Thirty Day Challenge. As someone who has been studying internet marketing for the past several years I can say that this is one of the best sources of free information on the internet marketing, period.

[JJSOmaha]

Ok thanks---I'll check it out!

[Sven]

Web 2.0 is not a defined way of doing stuff on the internet. I agree with final-id, it's marketing lingo, used by web companys to present themselves as experts.

I prefer Web MM.

Making money.

[Marcie]

Actually, I ended up interviewing one of the "big" guys in web design/usability for my class last semester, and asked for his definition of Web 2.0 and his answer was "marketing hype and bullshit" LOL. Unfortunately he didn't want his answers publicized, so I can't say who it was :P

I do think, however, there is a big trend towards evening the plaing field if you will - for example blogs being sources of news instead of just the big news outlets, and people like you and me selling niche products to deliver instead of the big brick-and-mortar type players :) And thankfully, (hopefully) a movement away from the terrible design as well...

[AntonTheKhan]

Actually, I ended up interviewing one of the "big" guys in web design/usability for my class last semester, and asked for his definition of Web 2.0 and his answer was "marketing hype and bullshit" LOL. Unfortunately he didn't want his answers publicized, so I can't say who it was :P

I do think, however, there is a big trend towards evening the plaing field if you will - for example blogs being sources of news instead of just the big news outlets, and people like you and me selling niche products to deliver instead of the big brick-and-mortar type players :) And thankfully, (hopefully) a movement away from the terrible design as well...

I think the whole social networking thing is great for marketers. I mean these days people get on the net, they find message boards like this. They ask for reviews and referrals from other who have had experience with the same companies, products, services, etc. You go to any big corporation's website and they still use the same ol school marketing, just in a new media. They have Flashy designs, videos, there is very little information about their products. Like cars for example. Go to any manufacturer's website and tell me whether you can actually make a decision on whether to buy one of their care just by looking at their website. There is almost no info. Just flashy photos, and advertisement for no money down financing, etc, etc.
You can learn more just by going to a car enthusiasts blog and reading their thoughts and reviews of a new sedan, for example. Consumers are looking for others who have taken the road and who can tell them whether it is worth taking.