As we head towards the end of the year everything bottlenecks into a few hectic weeks. Christmas shopping, present buying and, obviously, the need to optimize websites, drive traffic to specific pages and capitalize on the Christmas online shopping spree which takes place each year.
When it comes to working online or offline often what comes across are the things which keep you going. Success or failure often hinge on the smallest of things. The ability to keep going. The knack of staying focused. The mental strength to not feel disheartened, particularly when the going looks tough and there is no apparent hope in sight.
It’s such a simple question. Right? We would like to believe that it has an obvious answer. Someone’s poor because they did not get a great education, did not have every opportunity available to them, their parents did not encourage them, their teachers ignored them, their employer did not help them develop, someone, in short, somewhere, did not do their job right. The system let them down.
It’s a rule of print media that when there is no news you need to make some up and the deeper the quiet you are experiencing the more sensationalist must be the story you create. I spent enough time in newsrooms in the past to actually know that this is true and it has nothing to do with lying or fabricating stories.
What do The Good Wife, Dexter and Google have in common? Apparently their hate for spam.
Business is undoubtedly tough. Working for yourself you often have to wear many different hats and deal with mini-crisis on an almost constant basis. Difficult customers, cash-flow problems and the intrinsic problems which arise with running any type of business often feel like a grind, eating away at you a sliver at a time, whittling down your resistance until you are either spent or ready to throw in the towel.
In the technology work meltdowns are a problem. Because global service providers provide vital services for hundreds of thousands of clients, in different countries and across time zones, the traditional means of communicating with them are no longer viable.
It is easy to believe that we are going to last forever. We plan our lives, think about new business, work hard to create an online/offline world where things make more sense than before and in doing so we go directly against the endemic, ubiquitous entropy of the universe, constantly emptying ourselves, pouring energy into the system so that it becomes something other than a self-organising, lowest-stable-energy-level platform.
September was a tremendously busy month when it came to SEO and Social Media developments. If you missed anything you would have been excused as the hours of the day suddenly available for keeping up with everything became inadequate.
John Rakestraw is a man whose mission is to help writers exploring the go-it-alone route get as much help as they need to become a viable ‘product’. I use the word ‘product’ because we are now in the days where a transition is occurring between publishers and publishing houses being the traditional gatekeepers of information and the only available way to get books to the public and authors becoming, themselves, the commodity which sells their books.
