What is and what might be

They have much less in common than you might expect.

The key step in creating a better future is insisting that it not be based on the assumptions, grievances and dead ends of the past.

The future won't be perfect. We won't be perfect. But we can be kind. We can listen. We can give opportunity the benefit of the doubt.

The future won't always work. We won't always succeed. But we can be alert and seek out the possible instead of the predicted.

The future won't always be fair. But we can try. We can care. We can choose to connect.

It can be better if we let it.

 

[Have you read about The Marketing Seminar? This is our last session before the fall.]

       

from Seth Godin's Blog on marketing, tribes and respect https://ift.tt/2J9Am7B

The Podcast Fellowship (a summer program)

[If you know a full-time student in need of a worthy summer project, please share with them...]

Summer internships are a problem. Too often, you're working for free, doing very little of value and learning less. Two out of three might be okay, but that's a lousy combination.

Too often, careers are shaped based on too little input from a busy office. And far too often, privilege and existing relationships play a role in who gets to do something productive.

In real life, after college, you're less likely than ever to have a real job in a real office. You're also hoping to be doing a job you actually like, where people aren't telling you what to do all day. Why train for the worst outcome all summer in a dead-end internship?

Alex DiPalma and I are pleased to invite you to consider an experiment, open to a hand-picked group of students this summer. A virtual program, available wherever there's a laptop and an internet connection. Alex is a successful podcast producer, who has worked on Akimbo, with Minnesota Public Radio, with Cal Fussman, with Food4Thot, among other shows. She knows what's up.

The idea: You should build a podcast. A thirty-episode series, a podcast that captures insights and experiences in an area you care about.

Are you hoping for a career in urban planning? Make your podcast about that. Over the course of the thirty episodes, you can interview leaders in your field. You can capture your thoughts on the big (and small) issues of the day. You can lead and you can teach. And no one can stop you.

It doesn't matter how many people listen to it. It doesn't matter that it doesn't have a sponsor. It matters that you made it.

By the end of the summer, you'll have published your work to anyone who cares to subscribe. You'll have developed assertions, made connections and most of all, shared with generosity. You won't be a technical wizard, you'll have something better than that--the confidence that comes from having built and shipped generous work.

The program itself works like this: We'll accept applications until April 10th, 2018 at 5 pm. Alex will go through the applications and invite a cohort to join the program. It will run every weekday from June 28 to August 15th, using an online community platform we're customizing just for you. You can live anywhere in the world. You can already have a summer gig. All you need is the desire and a commitment to put in the time.

[We're accepting applications from non-students, but students get priority.]

Throughout the program, we'll be teaching you useful techniques, challenging you to invent new ones, and most of all, connecting you with other students who are going where you're going. This online mastermind group will take a real commitment, a few hours a day at minimum. But if you put in the time, you'll earn the body of work you'll end up creating.

The program costs $10 a day, because we want people to have skin in the game. Financial aid is available. The application is here, and we hope you'll consider it.

       

from Seth Godin's Blog on marketing, tribes and respect https://ift.tt/2GnZI02

Video/podcast roundup

Some interviews and talks you might enjoy:

 

 

Podcast: Project Management with Rocketship.fm

Podcast: Talking with Anthony Iannorino. 

Daily Grind podcast.

Don't Quit Your Day Job with Cathy Heller.

Podcast with Heneka Watkis Porter

Podcast with Joe Ferraro.

 

 

Tropical MBA podcast.

Podcast: Design Matters with Debbie Millman (a backlist classic).

 

       

from Seth Godin's Blog on marketing, tribes and respect https://ift.tt/2E4f8V7

When your ideas get stolen

A few meditations:

Good for you. Isn't it better that your ideas are worth stealing? What would happen if you worked all that time, created that book or that movie or that concept and no one wanted to riff on it, expand it or run with it? Would that be better?

You're not going to run out of ideas. In fact, the more people grab your ideas and make magic with them, the more of a vacuum is sitting in your outbox, which means you will prompted to come up with even more ideas, right? 

Ideas that spread win. They enrich our culture, create connection and improve our lives. Isn't that why you created your idea in the first place?

The goal isn't credit. The goal is change.

 

[A new episode of Akimbo is out today, with riffs about infinite and finite games. Feel free to subscribe, and please steal these ideas. Ready to spread your ideas? Check out The Marketing Seminar... don't forget the purple circle.]

 

       

from Seth Godin's Blog on marketing, tribes and respect https://ift.tt/2pMDqO7

It's time

Time to get off the social media marketing merry-go-round that goes faster and faster but never actually goes anywhere.

Time to stop hustling and interrupting.

Time to stop spamming and pretending you're welcome.

Time to stop making average stuff for average people but hoping you can charge more than a commodity price.

Time to stop begging people to become your clients, and time to stop feeling badly about charging for your work.

Time to stop looking for shortcuts and time to start insisting on a long, viable path instead. 

Time to start contributing.

There are lots of ways to embrace modern marketing, but the there's no doubt that you'll be better off once you do.

Modern marketing is the practice of making something worth talking about, developing empathy for those you seek to serve and being in the market in a way that people would miss you if you were gone.

Today's the first day for signups for the proven, effective Marketing Seminar. We've worked with more than 5,000 students so far and they've made a substantial impact with their work. The Seminar is not just videos--it's an ongoing cohort, months of working directly with your peers, engaging, challenging and learning what works (and what doesn't.)

It might be just what you need to transform your work. If you click the purple circle on the bottom of the page, you'll save a bunch of money, but hurry, as the discount gets a little less valuable each day.

And, if you're the sort of student who would prefer to skip the discussion board and binge watch, we've just made the Seminar available in an all-video highlights format as well.

It's time to change the way you engage with the market. I'm hoping we can help.

       

from Seth Godin's Blog on marketing, tribes and respect https://ift.tt/2pKVFDH

How I Built This (Or What I Learned from Being a Scammy Marketer)

As I approach my ten-year anniversary of blogging, I want to tell a tale. The tale of an accidental travel writer who simply wanted to afford beer, dorm rooms, plane tickets, and backpacker pub crawls.

I shared part of this story before but, today, I want to go into more depth.

Once upon a time, I started this website with a selfish goal: to make money to keep myself traveling. I wanted my website to be an online résumé where editors could see my writing and go, “Yeah, we want to hire that guy!” — and then paying to go somewhere and write a story about it. I imagined myself a cross between Bill Bryson and Indiana Jones. My dream was to write guidebooks for Lonely Planet. I imagined no cooler job than a guidebook researcher.

Anything was better than working in the cubicle I was sitting in at the time.

These days, it’s not about how I can keep myself traveling. It’s about how I can help others travel. Every day, the team and I constantly ask ourselves: “How do we help and inspire others to travel cheaper, better, and longer?”

Today, it’s all about you.

But, back then, the only thing I ever said was “How do I help myself?”

So how did I get from a me centric to a reader centric website?

In those early days, I worked as an English teacher in Bangkok and Taiwan. Blogging was never meant to support me full–time — let alone lead to book deals, conferences, speaking events, and so much more.

In fact, I didn’t care much about this website. I mean, sure, worked on it and didn’t want it to fail. I wanted it to become popular.

But building it into something bigger than myself was not the goal.

Instead, I wanted the dream: passive income. I wanted money to be coming in while I slept.

I was 27 with no responsibilities. I wasn’t looking toward the future. I just wanted the good times to never end.

While I earned a little bit of money from affiliates and selling links on this site (back in those days, you could make a lot of money selling text links to companies looking to artificially increase their Google ranking), I spent most of my time creating AdSense websites, designed solely to get people to click on Google ads. Yes, I was a scammy internet marketer!

I put all that money I made back into these websites — getting people to write articles, optimizing the websites for search, and creating more websites — and lived off my teaching income.

I found keywords that paid well and designed very niche and ugly websites around those subjects. I had websites on teaching English, growing corn, taking care of dogs and turtles, and even raising pigs. At one point, if you went searching for advice on how to train your beagle, every website on the first page was mine.

Yes, those were some weird days. All the content was legit (I hired dog trainer friends to write the articles), but the websites lacked soul.

As time went on, between this website, my teaching job, and those AdSense sites, I made more than enough money, earning upwards of $8,000 a month.

Then one day it all changed.

I was part of this group called the Keyword Academy. It was run by two guys from Colorado, Mark and (I think) a guy named Brad. (We’ll call him Brad for this story.) As part of my membership, we had monthly consulting calls. During one, Brad said, “Matt, why are you building this crap? You know travel. You have a website that people read and like. You have a skill set. Focus on that. This shit is stupid. We only do it because it’s quick cash.”

And he was right. That shit was stupid. All I was doing was taking advantage of the fact that Google couldn’t differentiate spam websites from real websites. Travel was really my passion.

So, in late spring 2009, I shifted my focus back to this blog and, over time, let those other websites die or sold them off. (They made money for about a year after I stopped updating them.)

And, when Google finally learned to filter those spammy websites out, all the people I knew from those days were left with nothing. I have no idea what they do now. It’s certainly not running websites as I’ve never come across their names again.

But the experience taught me some important lessons about creating an online business:

First, until your hobby can pay your rent, don’t quit your day job. There are a lot of people telling you to “follow your passion” — but they neglect to tell you that unless your passion can pay your bills, you should keep your “unpassionate” day job. Teaching English and those scammy websites allowed me to have some income while I focused on “Nomadic Matt.” It wasn’t until the end of 2009 / early 2010 that Nomadic Matt earned enough where I needed no other sources of income.

Second, no matter how good or helpful your blog is, marketing is important. If no one knows how to find your website, it’s all for naught. Those crappy, scammy websites taught me how Google and SEO worked as well as the importance of marketing and messaging. I took that experienced to improve this website, optimizing my content for Google, created products, and started networking with bloggers outside travel.

I think this is one of the things that gave me an edge over other bloggers at this time. While they focused solely on writing and social media, I focused on that as well as SEO. This ensured that I ranked high in search engines, got visitors every day, and helped get my “brand” other there (I got interviewed on CNN once because the writer found me on Google).

And, as I built this community and saw my friends’ incomes collapse with the change of an algorithm, I learned the most important lesson of all: when you create a business that helps others, you create something sustainable and gives meaning and joy to your own life. I hated those other websites but I will work 24/7 on this one because I love what I do.

I don’t agree with basically anything I did in those early days. It was a very scammy way to make money. But I don’t regret one moment of it because it showed me a better way and helped get here. I guess the saying is right. When you find a job you love, you’ll never work a day in your life.

P.S. – If you’d like to learn how to start a blog the right way, avoid my early mistakes, nd get a peek at all the processes and methods I use to continue to grow this website (without scammy ads), check out my blogging course. It gives you all my screts as well as direct feedback on your website from me and tech support from my tech team.

The post How I Built This (Or What I Learned from Being a Scammy Marketer) appeared first on Nomadic Matt's Travel Site.

from Nomadic Matt's Travel Site https://ift.tt/2IVlgCy

Secure and respected and engaged and risky

Some people want their workplace to be like an artist's studio. A lab. A dance with the possible. Engaging. Thrilling. The chance to take flight, to be engaged, to risk defeat and to find a new solution to an important problem. 

And some people want a job that's secure, where they are respected by those around them.

The essential lesson: These are not necessarily different people, but they are very different attitudes. 

It's a choice, a choice made once a lifetime, or every year, or perhaps day by day...

When you sit with an employee who seeks security and talk to them about "failing fast," and "understanding the guardrails," and "speaking up," it's not likely to resonate. 

It's worth finding the right state of mind for the job that needs to be done.

       

from Seth Godin's Blog on marketing, tribes and respect https://ift.tt/2GslUt2