Posts Tagged ‘bold business ideas’

Two-words to give you a bit of creativity. Do with them what you will – and don’t forget to share!

Break something






Confused? Check out the start of two-word Tuesday

I had a post completely planned out for the day, talking about twitter and techniques for the more advanced users.

Then I read Brad Marley’s post about college degree’s. I wanted to write so many things, both agreeing and disagreeing with his point. I was frustrated because I couldn’t think of how to respond, and excited because I knew exactly what I wanted to say (I know, makes no sense, right?). Problem was, my answer was not going to fit in a comment box, nor did I want to place it in one (sorry Brad). I wanted to open it up further, I wanted to get heated, I wanted to be logical, I wanted to get creative…I wanted a lot of things (can you tell this issue is a hot button for me?). So, I finally decided the only way to properly address the topic was to write my own post about college degrees.

To start, Brad’s basic point is that while college can be good for those pursuing a field that needs a degree (doctor, lawyer, etc), college may not be the right choice for everyone. His conclusion is supported by his brother, who has a ‘can’t be taught, jene se qua, that can only be acquired by working in the field’ personality that got him a well paying job in a bad market without having a college degree.

*By the way, I’d recommend reading his entire college post though before continuing to my thoughts.*

So, here are my thoughts:

Brad is 100% right and 100% wrong.

He is right in the fact that you can not succeed as a doctor, lawyer, etc, without a degree. He is wrong in thinking college is not right for everyone. While you can succeed without college (many very successful people have), I believe that the point of college is not the little piece of paper you pay wayyy to much money for with your name on it. College can benefit anyone and everyone. I firmly believe that college is for building your character and helping you to mature and grow as an individual, and that is something that everyone needs.

I attended Cal State Long Beach and received a B.A. in Communications, and while that’s what my degree says, that isn’t what’s important. The communications classes I took, while it did improve my speaking, aren’t what makes me a hard worker and a talented writer. They are what helped make me confident enough to tackle being freelance. The experiences I had out of class were what made me stronger, more empathetic and understanding (sharing a room for 4 years will do that to a person). What it didn’t do was guarantee me a job when I graduated, but if I had expected it to, I really wouldn’t have learned anything.

Basically, I believe college is completely unnecessary to get a job, unless you need a technical/scientific degree, just like Brad states. But, I believe college is completely necessary for everyone for improving you as an individual. Getting the college degree just proves that you can stick something out and that you have dedication to achieve a goal.

Finally, I want to bring to attention that I didn’t say getting a 4 year degree at a certain type of college is necessary for everyone. I said college. “College” can mean receiving everything from an automotive technical degree (like my husband did), an AA degree (like my mother did) or a master’s degree (like my father did). College is whatever you make it…just make it yours.

What do you think (about either Brad or my thoughts)? Did you attend college? I would love to hear from someone who didn’t and is glad they didn’t or who did, and regrets it!

Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies. Powerful name, powerful idea, even more powerful messages inside. About 2 weeks ago, I mentioned that I would be reading Groundswell. I am slowly working my way through the book and wanted to share some thoughts on a section that caught my attention. On page 44 of Groundswell (for those of you who have the book), you can see a chart that looks like this (for those who don’t have it):

(click to enlarge)

The focus for this article is the last column – the 44% of people that are inactive on the Internet. Inactive doesn’t mean that they are not on the Internet but that while on there, they do not have anything to do with the groundswell (or “the spontaneous movement of people using online tools to connect”). These are people who go online to shop, check their email, maybe read a story or 2, but their involvement in the Internet is minimal at best, and benefits no one but themselves.

The question that I pose – and that we can discuss in the comments – is how do we take an inactive Internet user and turn them into one of the other 5 types listed above?

I’ll get the discussion started. I believe that the inactive users need to be divided into two categories – inactive because of personality and inactive because of an unknown reason.

Let’s look at the first group: Inactive because of personality. There is a certain percentage of Internet users that you could stand on your head, offer them free cars for using social media and they still wouldn’t become involved. They just don’t care. Let me repeat – they just don’t care. As much as we all hate to think that there are people like this, I know of one personally. My mother. She has used the Internet for business for the last 15 years, but would be considered an inactive user because she has never touched a social network, doesn’t read blogs, stay away from forums and ignores the fact that there is anyone else on the Internet. This isn’t for lack of understanding. In fact she understands blogging and social media very well – she just doesn’t want anything to do with it.

The second group: Inactive for some unknown reason. This group is harder to understand because we have a large variable. Although some people may have similar reasons for inactivity, many of them won’t actually know why they are inactive, therefore making it extremely difficult to help them to become active. The most important fact about this group is they are often wary of interaction. Which means one false move or bad comment towards them, and they could be scared off of social media forever. So, if we are going to make them active, we need to do it slowly and in a way that they can be protected until they are more comfortable.

Share your thoughts to the question in comments and let’s see what we can figure out together.

And if you haven’t, I highly recommend picking up a copy of Groundswell. Only 50 pages in and it has already become one of my new favorites.

Hello to all the readers of Wright Creativity! I would like to introduce you to Kyle Reddoch, the new weekly web/code guru. He will be writing weekly post to help my readers on the more technical side. He is not only a great resource, but a good friend who I rely on for all my coding work. Enjoy (and check out his bio at the end of the post)!

The first step in getting your website up and running is picking your domain name. You want to pick the right one that best portrays your business, industry, or relevat to what your website is.

Company Website

You first will want to try seeing if your company’s name is available as a domain name. If so, great then you are on the way. If not, you will have to do a little more research. What does your business provide? What is your industry? For example, my company does web design, hosting, maintenance, domain registration, etc. everything a person will need to get a website up and running. Now, luckily my business name was available as a domain name! I currently have registered; www.theeverydaywebexpert.com and www.kylereddoch.com, both of which goes to my company’s website.

Let’s say that my company’s name wasn’t available. What would I do? Well I would have to look to what my company does. Maybe even the region where my company is located, or town. I would then put all those together and find the right domain. Here are some possible domains that I could use for my industry:

• www.yourtexaswebexpert.com
• www.texaswebexpert.com
• www.mywebsiteexpert.com

Just take some time to search available domains and find the right one that fits your company.

Personal Website / Blog

If you are creating a website for personal use or a blog, you might want to go a different route to decide your domain name. For personal websites or blogs, you can have your name as the domain name. For instance, www.kylereddoch.com is a great one for me . You can also have a domain name that suits what the purpose of the website or blog is about.

You want to make the domain name easy to remember though. You don’t ever want a person trying to remember your domain name…because in all reality, they won’t.

There are thousands of possibilities for domain names out there, you just have to find the RIGHT one!

Kyle Reddoch is the Owner of The Everyday Web Expert, a full service web design firm located in Amarillo, TX. He is also a featured writer on many blogs. He loves every minute of his life with his wonderful wife and two kids at their home in Amarillo.

Pardon the interruption of the flow of the Problogger Challenge, but I was enjoying the last 4 days in Vegas with my girls. Now, I am trying to get caught up. Luckily, some of the posts weren’t really about writing a post but doing something to improve your blog outside of your blog.

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For example, day #12, Friday, was about developing an editorial calendar. Problogger suggests creating a spreadsheet that covers each day and start putting in topics, jotting down notes and making it easy to add to. I know he’s the ‘pro’ and all, but I actually liked the suggestion of one of his commenter’s better.

Jodi says: do this but not on the computer. There are some things I like to be able to touch, feel and scratch So I do this on a piece of blank paper. And I do a month at a time. I do not fill the whole month out at once, but this way if I run a contest, I can put the end date/announcement date down. Or I can see when i have too many guest bloggers or too many tutorials, etc. It allows me to see the big picture as I fill slots in.

I love this idea because I too love the feeling of real paper and a pen (I know, so antiquated!). Anyway, whatever way you do it, the idea of planning out your monthly calendar for blog posts is something we all should do. I spent some time today working on mine, but they won’t start until after this series with problogger. I would share them, but then you’d know what was coming!

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Then, onto day #13, Saturday, another task without a post. This one recommends you to go shopping (not that I am complaining!). Here are the 6 basic steps he asks you to follow:

1. Step away from the computer

2. Grab a notebook and pen

3. Head to your local shopping area

4. Once at the ‘mall’ take 30 minutes or so to go ‘wandering’ with no agenda except to ‘watch’ and ‘observe’ in some of the following ways:

5. As you watch, make some notes. Don’t attempt to find any ‘lessons’ or try to tie it back to your blog yet.

6. Once you’ve spent half an hour or so on ‘observation mode’ find a spot to sit down with a coffee and go over the things that you’ve noticed and see if there’s any lessons there that you might be able to apply to your blogging?

Well, being the always curious, I actually did this while walking the strip in Vegas. Although I didn’t take notes, I did make quite a few observations about the people, the city and the area. It actually spawned my weekly post for Catherine Favazza today!

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Sunday…day #14…finally back to doing something on the blog itself (sort of). Sunday’s task was about updating a key page on your site. Well, since I redesigned my entire site, I had added 3 new pages. So, this task was accomplished pre-request (maybe I’m psychic!). I now have a copywriting page, a design page, and a page about advertising on Wright Creativity (do it, you know you want to!). But, to be throurough, I did go back to the pages today and check links, grammar and make sure they were perfect.

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And now we are up to today, Monday, day #15. Almost halfway through and so far I am really happy that I decided to do the challenge. Comments are up, visitors are up and I am happier with my writing as I have been forcing myself to write more often!

Anyway, today’s post is about finding a blogging buddy. I read the whole post 3 times, plus the links that were in the post. Thought about it, read it all again and re-read some of the links. I still don’t know what I think about it. So, I am opening the floor to a discussion – do you want a blogging buddy? Why would you find it beneficial? Or do you think it would be detrimental? For someone like me who writes posts for others and gets paid for it, would I be cutting into my ability to make money by having a blogging buddy?

I’d love your thoughts on this one (or any of the ones above)! Feel free to share how you’re doing with the challenge or ask me any questions about the tasks I have completed recently.

Forums*…aren’t those for people who want to talk about cars or plastic surgery? Apparently not! According to problogger’s challenge for the day, joining a forum and answering some questions can be a great way to add traffic to your blog. He suggests finding a forum that is discussing a topic that you care about – whether it’s jazz, animals, business or photography.

Since I have a wide range of topics that I write about, I needed to find something that had a lot of topics it covered. One of the networks that I am already part of, LinkedIn, has a great Answer’s Forum where people can ask questions of any nature and then vote on the best answer. Although a bit different than the traditional forum layout, I think that it qualifies. I have thought about being more active in this environment and today is a great day to start. For my challenge today, I have chosen a couple questions to answer:

How to make a really awesome facebook promotion about an event

Calculating ROI on social media initiatives

There is no right number of questions you can answer, and I may go back and answer more. The point is to start it and continue it, make it a goal to answer 1 or 2 a day and you will hopefully see the results fairly quickly. To get started, add your thoughts to questions that you have knowledge, and help someone. If nothing else, it makes you think, and gets your name out there. Feel free to share some of your favorite forums, or the new ones you discover!

Oh, and for those of you playing the home game** we are on Day 9 of problogger’s challenge. Day 8 challenge was an internal blog thing, not something that needed a post, but I do recommend checking out his tips for interlinking your posts.

*One point to the first person to tell me why this picture works for this post (or what it is)

**extra point if you can name where the quote came from.

Today is day 10 of the “10 bold moves to stir up your creativity”.

Here is a quick recap of #1-#9:

1. Read in public

2. Quit your job

3. Contact someone you look up to

4. Do something you never thought you could

5. Disconnect

6. Don’t follow the crowd

7. Be nice

8. Ask questions

9. Let yourself be wrong

Bold Move #10: Stop reading and start doing!

Not to sound ungrateful to my readers, because I love each and every one of you, but stop reading (at least until tomorrow’s post ). Seriously, stop reading about being bold and GO DO SOMETHING BOLD.

Click here to see the other 9 bold ideas

Today is day 9 of the “10 bold moves to stir up your creativity”.

Bold Move #9: Let yourself be wrong.

Think about it: If you are never wrong, you never have the opportunity to learn something. We all like being right, ask any of my friends, I don’t do ‘wrong’ well. But, I have learned more about business by being wrong than I ever have by being right. When I am wrong about something, it allows someone who knows more than me to teach me something. It is the same in all walks of life – from business to relationships. We can’t all be right all the time, it is a physical and mental impossibility. Let yourself be okay with being wrong and you’ll be amazed how much more you learn, and in turn, how much more often you can be right. The minute we stop learning, the minute we stop living.

Have you been wrong recently and had it teach you something amazing?

Click here to see the other 8 bold ideas

Today is day 8 of the “10 bold moves to stir up your creativity”.

Bold Move #8: Ask questions…not for the answer but for the conversation that it creates.

Creativity is not a solo sport. If you were to lock yourself in a room and cut off all interaction, you would lose creative steam fairly quickly. You might get a few more things done in the beginning, without the distractions, but how long would it take before you couldn’t think of anything creative or new? Other people are what give us ideas. Things that happen in our lives inspire our writing and our ideas.

Today is about starting conversation. Find someone on twitter that interests you, and respond to something they ask. Ask a question on Facebook and see where the conversation goes.

People love to participate. People want to participate. So, give them the opportunity to participate.

Here is your opportunity to participate by answering today’s creative conversation: What makes a creative expert? What makes you stop and take notice of their ideas?

Click here to see the other 7 bold ideas

Today is day 7 of the “10 bold moves to stir up your creativity”.

Bold Move #7: Be nice. Genuinely, honestly and truly nice.

This sounds like a very simple, and not-so-bold task, but it is often forgotten and has a larger influence than we often think. Creativity is driven by the interactions in our lives, so why not have those interactions be kind ones?

Rather than tell you a story about how someones kind attitude stirred my creativity, I want to hear your stories. Have you met someone that surprised you with niceness and made you think? Have you treated someone well, just because, and had it reward you? Feel free to share a name or keep it annonymous.

Click here to see the other 6 bold ideas