Experiments in Web Entrepreneurship.

Book Cover Design Contest; $200 Prize.

As an Author, this is the exciting part!  Watching your ideas and concepts visually come to life by professional designers.

I'm knocked-out by some of the brilliant designs already submitted.  Click Here to see the entries.

Simplicity.

You'll need to go through complexity,

..before you reach simplicity.

p.s.  After two years of writing my second book, things finally came together today.. that's when this thought dropped into my head.

The Bottleneck, ..Where Ideas Die.

 
The bottleneck is anything that blocks your ideas from becoming a reality in the marketplace.

Everyone has bottlenecks, some are completely closed.  Most peoples are barley open and incredibly difficult to get anything through.  Including my own at times.

Maybe you're lacking some technical skills, working two jobs, lacking money to pay for web design, you're going through a divorce, illness, your kid is jail, ..  Whatever..

Interestingly, most successful people operate with a barley open bottleneck. 

They have learned the bottleneck will never be easy to get things through.  They decided not to wait around until it got easier, ..it won't, they just practice getting things through and solve the few things that must be solved to keep it open and constantly put things out like blog posts, videos, campaigns and products into the marketplace.

The key is to identify the one or two things that are truly blocking you and focus on them until they open the bottleneck, at least wide-enough to get some things through. 

My question is, what's your bottleneck?  What probelm needs to be solved to reach your marketplace.  Cut out other people as often as you can, how can YOU get to your market the fastest.  The sooner you're there, the sooner you can start learning true knowledge about your business environment and stop guessing about it.

For intermediate and advanced Web entrepreneurs, the bottleneck is probably yourself.  You're trying to make a hard decision of weather to do something or not.  My advice, do the one that scares you the most.  Even if you fail, you're knowledge gained will brilliantly outweigh the cost.

For those who haven't broken into their market yet.  One of the best ways is to start a blog, just start typing, posting, putting things out there into the Web.  Keep doing it and at least some of your market will eventually find you.

Ironically, the bottleneck is a good thing.  It's a barrier to entry.  Most people never figure theirs out.  That's good for you, it keeps your competition out.

The Provocateur Project.

The mission for this campaign is to capture a provocative image that not only throws-a-punch, but hopefully ignites inspiration in you to find a different, more compelling way, to run your business, ..launch a product ..or create a campaign.

It doesn't need to be provocative, just not boring and forgettable.  Something daring!  Something that takes courage to put out under public scrutiny. 

This campaign, linked below, is not about playing it safe or following the rules.  It's about finding enough guts to Be Bold or You're Boring and create something fascinating, ..captivating, ..enchanting.

No one in the Web marketing industry does anything like this.  I've mixed what is traditionally a high-fashion type of provocative marketing campaign, along with one of my mantras to Start Something Brilliant. 

It took me 3-months to get this photographed and another 3-months to be brave enough to release it.  Please forgive me if I've offended you, it's not my intention.  It was to try something new, something that scares me, inspires me and hopefully a few others as well.

And the best news of all, it's all for a good cause, 100% of proceeds from Prints donated to the National Breast Cancer Foundation, Inc.

(Please be careful clicking the link. The images are not safe to view at work or public computer)

Click here to see "The Provocateur Project."

Notes: I did the photography, image post-production, Flash mock-up and web-design.  Best viewed on a computer with Flash installed.

When Things Aren't Working.

So you've got a Website, Blog, Videos, FaceBook, and Twitter account.  You've also done Search Engine Optimization, Pay-Per-Click, and even prayed once that something would work. 

But it's not.. now what?

The best advice I have for this situation, which more than 98% of Web entrepreneurs fall into, is this.

Focus on one thing ..and KILL IT!

When you look around at those that are successful, they have all the things listed above.  But what you might not realize is that they almost all started with one thing first, ..built it slowly, ..gradually, ..sometimes painfully.. and everything else expanded naturally from there.

If you're struggling it's probably because you're trying to do too much.  Focus all your energies on the one thing you love doing the most, and that will also make you money. 

You don't need all these things listed above to start, they are just amplifiers for something you have already made successful.