Direct response marketing - who knew?

Under the heading of “Old Dog Learning New Tricks” I am listening to a weekly internet broadcast called “Internet Marketing for Smart People Radio”. The link to each broadcast is sent to me by http://www.copyblogger.com/, to which I subscribe because they have great tips on business writing and sales writing and a number of other writing for money styles I am exploring. Currently, I am trying to master the basics of direct response marketing so when I launch that new money making website I keep dreaming about, I will actually make money.

Unlike mass media marketing (think of all the Coca Cola jingles you know) or direct marketing (a mailbox full of junk you didn’t ask for and intrusive calls by people you don’t know selling things you don’t want), direct response marketing tries to match a product with people who are actually interested in the product and who are willing to respond in some way to let the seller know they are interested. Sounds kind of civilized, doesn’t it?

To practice direct response marketing on your blog, you must include all sorts of things. Here are the six major Must Dos:

Direct response marketing tool #1: Speak with authority. That basically means know what you are talking about. I’m mostly talking about my life, so I’ve got that one down. Most of the time.

Direct response marketing tool #2: Be likeable. I am uncertain how to accomplish this. If you are my friend, you either like me or you are kind and if you aren’t my friend I guess you read this blog because I am going through some of the same things you are. Either way, this doesn’t seem like something I can cultivate.

Direct response marketing tool #3: Bring commitment and consistency to your blogging. Ooops. The consistency thing has not gone well so far. I’ve been too busy kidding myself that I can make a living at $15 an hour. For those of you who follow my woes as a free lance writer, you will be thrilled to see that this is up from $10 an hour…

Direct response marketing tool #4: Social proof. What a new century phrase that is! It means, get people who like what you write to tell other people about your blog so they will visit it and read other things that you write. The radio show today said you should ask people to do this, so I am now asking you to send this post and my blog site address (http://unedame.blogspot.com) to two other people. Then we will see what happens. I am also to ask you to “follow” the blog if you enjoy what I write. I am minding my teachers and asking! I even have a button for you to advertise the blog on Facebook and Twitter. Very mod of me.

Direct response marketing tool #5: Reciprocity. I am supposed to give you compelling content so that you will be interested in what I have to sell. Unfortunately, I have nothing to sell at present. If any of you have ideas to get the money rolling in, please feel free to comment! Meanwhile I will try to write compelling content.

Direct response marketing tool #6: Scarcity. I’m afraid I nodded off at this point and am not sure what it refers to. There is only one of me, so I can assure you I am scarce. Perhaps they were referring to the use of the old-fashioned “limited time offer”.

Now you know what I know about direct response marketing. I am serious about asking you what I could sell online. I love to write for myself, I have a lot of stories to tell, but I am so busy writing 500 word articles studded with key words for real estate sites, travel sites, and legal sites I am not squeezing out much for myself.

In the meantime, if you visit Copyblogger, be sure to tell them I gave them a plug!

It's been one of those weeks

Back in the day when my daughter was about five years old, I had a good friend with two girls, ages 5 and 7, who was trying to balance a career as an assistant district attorney with motherhood and marriage. Her observation was that as long as everything went as planned, it was completely worth the effort, but if one thing went wrong, down went her carefully constructed house of cards. The “one thing” could be anything from a sick child to a husband’s out of town business trip to forgetting to do the laundry and having no clean socks. Those of you who have been there can relate.

We’ve had a spate of that “one thing” this past week and David and I are going glassy-eyed coping and trying to stay centered enough to know that it will all work itself out eventually. The downhill slide started Halloween weekend with a quick sailing trip to Offat’s Bayou. Offat’s Bayou is a really nice anchorage right behind Moody Gardens on Galveston Island. There is plenty of room to anchor out and a small marina for anyone who wants electricity. We’ve been down there only twice since we moved here, but enjoyed the trip tremendously both times. Weirdly, both trips involved stormy weather, but even the bad weather was fun because 1) it was warm weather, 2) we know the waters around here really well, and 3) Raven sails wonderfully regardless of the weather. We joined some other Cape Dory owners on the trip, had a dockside party, and enjoyed ourselves very much.

Unfortunately on the way home things began to unravel. David started sneezing and coughing with a bad cold and Hobbes, the cat, peed all over the settee, which was completely out of character for him. Then as we approached Redfish Island, the exhaust coupling sheared off, filling the cabin with diesel smoke! We turned off the motor and sailed in toward the channel on 22 knot winds with no problem, but called Tow Boat U.S. for a tow down Kemah channel to our slip. The next day it was clear Hobbes was in a bad way, having peed all over his bed and not even moving to get out of it. The vet confirmed diabetes and dehydration and our very sick cat spent the next 5 days in the cat hospital. Now he is home, being hand fed, dosed with insulin, and placed periodically in the cat box, since he is still very wobbly on his pins. In the meantime, David suffered through his cold and then generously shared it with me. I am still hacking, but better.

The cabin is a wreck. I haven’t given it a good cleaning since before the Offat’s Bayou trip. There are piles of clothing and mislaid boxes on one side, bare wood on the other settee since we had to take out the one the cat peed on and haven’t had it cleaned yet, and a third of the cabin sole is walled off by seat cushions to make a “cage” for the cat. Meantime I cower at the nav station trying to earn enough to pay the vet bill. Even as reasonable as the vet was (very reasonable, considering all the time and care they gave Hobbes), it was $700 at the end of the day, which consumed every dime I made this week.

So. We are very, very tired and feel as though we are truly living a Matrix-like life on a real Nebuchadnezzar. I have always sympathized with Cipher and for today at least I wish I were plugged back in eating a phantom piece of steak.

Work Lessons

I’ve been floundering in the sea of self-employment for about four years now. The good news is, I have stayed afloat and I am learning how to swim. Here are four hard-earned lessons self-employment has taught me:

1. Don’t take it personally. When my services are not chosen, it can feel as though I have been personally rejected. I finally realized that my services are pretty much like a widget on a shelf. If a potential buyer is looking for a widget, the buyer will pick me up and examine me. I’m red, but the buyer wants blue. I am 120 volt, but the buyer wants 220. I am 2” in diameter, but the buyer wants 2.5” in diameter. The buyer puts me down and picks up another widget. There’s nothing wrong with a red, 120 volt, 2” widget. It’s just not what the buyer wants. Note to self: it is not all about me.

2. Face mistakes and learn from them. It’s easy for me to cringe when faced with my mistakes. Looking back, they seem so obvious. Most of them stem from impatience or fatigue or carelessness or misunderstanding. Most of them could have been avoided, if I had just paid attention. It’s very unpleasant for me to realize I have cost myself a job because of a character flaw or oversight. But that unpleasantness causes me to be much more aware the next time I am in a similar situation, and eventually those mistakes teach me to take a different and successful approach. Note to self: pay attention.

3. If you aren’t the right price, they aren’t going to buy you. Back to the store: it doesn’t matter if I could get $35/hr in 1990. It’s not 1990. I can price myself at $35/hr all day long, but unless the market will bear it, I won’t get it. I’m the same type of buyer: I am absolutely not going to pay $4 a roll for paper towels when I can get them for $2.50. Note to self: price to the market.

4. If you don’t have the right skills, they aren’t going to buy you. Not only do you have to have the right skills, buyers have to know your skills are desirable and worth paying for. That’s why tech skills sell so much better than language arts skills. Most English speaking people (myself included) think they speak and write terrific English, whether they do or not. Most people who don’t speak English as a native tongue know they need help with their text, but really have no way of knowing whether your English is terrific or not. By contrast, everyone knows whether or not they have tech skills and everyone knows they are worth paying for. Note to self: get more tech skills.

Temping has a new face

When we first arrived back in Texas, I knew what I wanted to do: I wanted to temp. I liked the idea of working for a company for a few days, a few weeks, or a few months, and then moving on. Temping seemed to offer a perpetual honeymoon with any employer, that shiny new period when work is interesting, people are polite, and office politics and company viability aren’t things you have to deal with.

To my dismay, I discovered that temping, as I defined it, no longer existed. Instead of interviewing with the temp company and then being sent out on assignment, I found that most jobs being offered were temp to hire. Naturally, since they were looking for a long term employee, those companies wanted someone with more experience and background than I had. I have plenty of experience and background, but it’s all language skills and legal-niche experience and background; there just aren’t all that many legal firms looking to hire an estate planning paralegal on a temporary basis. As you would expect, nobody called. What to do?

A friend of mine called me about online work and directed me to a site called oDesk. That’s where all the temps had gone - online! Since finding oDesk, I have also found a site called Elance, and I’m sure there are others. To get started, I posted a profile, set an hourly rate, and started scouring the jobs listing. Jobs were listed in every sort of category. Thankfully, “technical writing” was one of them!

Potential employers from all parts of the globe post job notices for everything from copywriting to SEO to blog posting. The jobs are short term, long term, and everything in between. Most of the pay rates are laughable (paying less than $5 an hour, and obviously targeted to the third world) and some of the job descriptions are questionable, but there are enough reasonable offers to keep me fairly busy.

As time goes on, I am accumulating a whole new set of skills – not my work skills, but my skills in managing my time and dealing with employers from all walks of life. Many of my clients speak shaky English (granted, they speak much better English than I speak Arabic or Russian, etc.) and have different mores. I have made lots of mistakes, but I learn from each mistake. I am learning not to take rejection personally (I hit on about 1 out of every 20 applications) and I am learning what new skills are in demand.

I like working online. There are some drawbacks, like the fact that my office is the boat cabin, and the fact that I spend one to three hours a day applying for jobs rather than working. But it’s great to be temping, just as I expected.

Telling Stories

I subscribe to a dot com that is written for bloggers and other professional writers. Today’s update was somewhat unexpected. The message was about a forthcoming book that will focus on stories of political oppression in Burma. The point of the article was that here in the western world, for the moment anyway, we blog with impunity while the Burmese who blog do so at their own risk. Yet, at the risk of their lives, they struggle to tell their stories. Why do they take the risk?

Telling stories, whether about the clan or the individual, fact or fiction, is an ancient and universal human activity. I am fascinated with the act of storytelling, with the connection forged between tale-teller and audience, with the transformative power of narrative. We tell stories over the phone, on the porch, at funerals and weddings, in books and on blogs, in movies and in song lyrics, even in our advertisements. We tell our tales to our spouses, our children, our friends, and our casual acquaintances, to unseen audiences and corporate entities. Stories make connections among us. Stories are arguably the source of all art – an art form that does not make a connection doesn’t last long.

The stories we love best are the ones that give us a glimpse into our own lives. Think how the pleasure of hearing about someone’s vacation trip is increased when we’ve been there, too. When we add our stories to theirs, we enter into dialogue, enjoying the opportunity to mix and match our experiences. We can enter into dialogue with current acquaintances, or, through the power of the written word or film, with people in distant lands and distant times. We come away from those conversations satisfied, content, and affirmed.

In the context of storytelling, social networking begins to make sense. In our tweets and Facebook entries, in our blog posts and emails, each of us reaches out to everyone else, to tell our stories and to listen to the stories others share with us.

Some stories are hard to hear: stories of pain and death and disappointment, stories of sorrow and regret, of abandonment and loss. But when we allow others to tell us those stories, we give the gift of presence and compassion. When we truly listen to painful stories, we help the tale bearer shoulder the load and we give the relief of being heard. When we are heard, we can begin to heal. Ask anyone who has suffered through a divorce and whose friends picked up the phone to listen, over and over again.

Perhaps that is why some of the Burmese people take the risk of sharing their stories with the rest of us. They may want to educate or inform, but most of all they want to connect, to let all of us know what is happening in their lives. Theirs are the painful stories, the ones that heal when they are told.

The Hood

Boaters tend to walk up and down the docks and visit with each other the way I remember the grown ups walking up and down the street in the evening when I was a child. I think it has to do with the lack of a private drive; to get to your boat, you have to walk down the dock. As you wander by, everyone who is out says hi and stops to chat, offers you a cold drink, asks you if you have this or that widget, if you know how to fix this or that broken whatsit, or if you’re going out (on the bay) this weekend.

Liveaboards range from young families with children to oldsters whose bodies and boats are decaying at about the same rate. Among our acquaintances who are actively working while living aboard are two canvas makers, a hotel builder, a boat salesman, a teacher, a hospital worker, an IT contractor, a trial lawyer, and a jewelry maker. Among those who no longer work are those who want to cruise, those who like to sail the bay, those who haven’t got a clue, those who’ve just returned from cruising, and those who just like to sit on the stern of their boats every evening and watch the world go by.

There’s not much privacy in our little world, because everyone knows someone else, everyone has a story to tell, and when you tell your friends, they tell their friends, and pretty soon the entire marina knows and enjoys your saga. Of course, every story gets better if properly embellished. If yours is dull, it will be fixed.

There’s the foreign fellow who has been told in no uncertain terms by the INS that his visa has reached its sell-by date. Because of his age, he needs crew in order to leave. Evidently he is so incredibly irascible, no crew has made it past Galveston without jumping ship. I’ve never met him, but when I’m out walking the dog and he peddles by on his bike, we wave.

Then there’s the oldster who, although pretty much blind and deaf, set to sea for Mexico some months back. The coast guard returned him to our shores, boatless. His friends organized a boat rescue, set off for mid-Gulf, and returned towing his home. He is now busily engaged in fixing the damage he sustained and making plans to leave again. No one is worried. There are folks around here who have been fixing up their boats for ten years and aren’t close to leaving. No one minds; it’s the dreams that count.

In search of glass or wood or paper or cardboard or...

According to a friend of mine who is a chemist, plastic begins to react with food in a matter of minutes, meaning that food becomes contaminated with greater or lesser quantities of chemicals, depending on the food, the temperature, and the type of plastic used to make the container.

Minute amounts of these substances, if not eliminated from the body, will build up over time. What may not be toxic in small doses or eaten a few times may cause harm in larger quantities or when eaten over a period of years. We don’t know what health conditions, if any, different levels of different chemicals may produce or inhibit. Did you know that arsenic used to be a beauty treatment (it gave you lovely skin)? Then it was discovered that the body does not eliminate arsenic. It just builds up to that final, fatal dose. Terminal beauty, indeed.

Since these questions are of concern to me, I decided to quit buying food in plastic. After some weeks of grocery shopping with this in mind, I have to tell you I am shocked at my lack of choices. Try to buy food not wrapped in plastic! Even when I buy fresh produce from the bins, I have to put it in plastic bags. The only cheese I could find that wasn’t wrapped in plastic was Edam, still cheerfully packaged in red wax, or Laughing Cow, its neat little triangles wrapped in foil paper.

Consider bottled water. It sits in plastic for days or weeks waiting to be consumed, and it sits mostly in warehouses and on grocery store shelves, not in a refrigerator. I decided to buy Perrier, which I remembered comes in glass. I found that even Perrier has a plastic option – and that is the only Perrier option in Wal-Mart, the world’s largest retailer.

I decided to store food in glass and was amazed at the prices I was asked to pay (and all the glass storage containers have – you guessed it – plastic lids). So I went back to my old practice of saving good jars for leftovers and buying only a few of the nicer glass storage containers for use in the microwave or for those leftovers that need to be frozen. Peanut butter jars and spaghetti sauce jars with wide lids and the squat little salsa jars make great storage containers for leftovers – and they’re free!

I have found that it is possible to decrease my exposure to plastic contamination, but I have to be persistent and inventive. To eliminate plastic containers from my life I’ll have to move to another country!