I have no other word to describe the feeling one gets when reading the blogs or watching the videos of Yet Another Self Appointed Expert: as if SEO was a secret order to which mere mortals are not admitted (unless they buy that $200 SEO-SECRETS guide, of course).

But as time passed it became very clear that 99% of it was mere smoke and mirrors. Everyone wants to be #1 on Google. And people are willing to believe almost anything to get there.

So is SEO a lie? Far from it. But you should take everything people say with a grain of salt. Instead of believing the experts, experiment!

Having said that, here are a few tips that I wish someone had told me when I started out.

1. Know Your Keywords: What Would Google Do?

Keywords. You read about them on every SEO blog, in every SEO guide, so it must be important, right? That’s what I thought when I first heard about them. And still I had no clue what I was supposed to do!

Now I know that this reaction was perfectly natural. First of all, there’s not much to do! This doesn’t refer to secret knowledge of any kind. No, it simply means learning to think like a search engine.

Because, despite all the “smart algorithms” search engines are stupid. They are machines! They don’t have a clue what you mean when you search for something. All they know is key words or phrases. So, for example, when you write 1,000 words about the “White Album” by the Beatles, and you neither mention its title, the band’s members, producers or anything, it’s invisible to Google or any other search engine for that matter.

This is the cornerstone of SEO. You have to use the right words and phrases for your content in the right places. How do we know which are the right ones? Simply look at what other people are searching for.

Google’s Keyword tool is a great way to do this. Simply enter a keyword and see how many people are searching for it. If the number is too low, or if the competition is too high, think of another one or let yourself be inspired by Google’s related keywords.

Okay, so where do we put them? Here are some general guidelines!

2. If It’s In The Title, It’s Important (Must Be, Right?)

This is how a search engine spider thinks when it crawls your website. (Don’t worry, there aren’t any insects on your site. “Spider” is simply the name for a search engine program that constantly and restlessly scours the internet for new information to include in search results.)

In other words: Use your keywords in your titles. For WordPress that means, first of all the headline. But even when you use sub-headers (“Heading 1, 2,3, etc.”) within the post, spiders will pay special attention to them. So you should, too.

3. Bold, Italic, Underline: A Search Engine Spider’s Paradise

After scouring the titles for important keywords, spiders also like to look at everything that’s bold, italic or underlined. The idea here is that if an author gives special attention to these words, they are especially important! So if you want to make sure that they are being seen, give them some extra attention, too.

Note: I wouldn’t recommend to overdo it, but doing it once in a while will help both spiders and readers’ eyes to quickly spot what your content is about.

4. A Picture Says More Than A Thousands Words, But Nomen Est Omen

This is simple but underrated. When you upload an image on your post, make sure to rename it. In other words: Don’t upload an image called 347233X.jpg but instead, name the file for what can be seen on the picture, example: beatles-white-album.jpg. If you can couple this with your keywords (without forcing it), even better! Also, images can carry additional information, such as “Description” and “Title” – make sure to fill these out, too, if you can.

5. On Page SEO: Taking Out The Guesswork and Writing More

How do you remember all of this? Either keep practicing, or, one of my favorite solutions, lately: simply use a plugin to remind you to think like a search engine!

For a long time I dallied over a tool called Scribe which does exactly that. It reminds you, while you’re writing a post, to pay attention to all of the above and more. But paying $20 dollars per month just to have a piece of software remind me what I already knew seemed a bit steep. I wanted to have something simpler. So I looked for alternatives, and after a few hours came up with this free plugin called Copy Compass.

I’m immensely grateful to the guys who made this plugin possible. Not only is it a great way to remind oneself of certain SEO practices while racking one’s brain for creative juices, it’s also a great way to train oneself to think like a search engine.

Again, there are no magic bullets in the world of SEO, but a few habits here and there will improve the chance of being seen online.

Check the video below to see Copy Compass in action. And make sure to buy the programmers a coffee!

P.S: You don’t need to get a 100% on each article. These are just guidelines. Simply write your post and click “Analyze Content” to get some ideas.

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img: snoopy sherlock via flickr Scott Monty

About the author: André Klein was born in Germany, has grown up and lived in many different places including Thailand, Sweden and Israel. He has produced two music albums, performed and organized literary readings, curated an experimental television program and is the author of various short stories and non-fiction works.

I was on the road to becoming a writer, so I started helping kids with their homework to keep myself from fulfilling the “starving artist” stereotype.

It was supposed to be only a part-time job until I won the Pulitzer. Well, okay I didn’t really aim for it, but as a teen fresh out of school I was living under an amorphous cloud of Great Expectations. At first it was weird. I was only a few months older than some of the kids I was supposed to teach. What could I possibly teach them?

I planned to stay for only a while. But then things turned out to be very very different.

The kids liked the way I shared with them my experimental knowledge of present progressive, German declensions and Passé Composé.

And I became rather fond of them, too. The cool thing was that it didn’t interfere with my writing. On the contrary, when I wasn’t writing I was still constantly engaged with language, preparing lessons, correcting homework or discussing nuances in textual expression.

I stayed in this job for about 8 years!

And I would have continued if the time-waste of commuting hadn’t gone on my nerves, after a while. And even while I was getting ready to jump ship, I was already teaching somewhere else: Namely, The Internet. Yep, after 8 years of brick & mortar teaching I switched to teaching languages online.

And guess what: I’m still writing. And teaching still isn’t interfering with it, on the contrary: it shapes and develops my craft.

Why Being A Teacher Doesn’t Mean Being Poor

Some people think teaching is a bad career choice. I always point them to the Shanghai Tutors. But even if teaching doesn’t turn you into a millionaire, it’s still one of the most rewarding career-choices I’ve ever made. Whenever I think of all the kids that went through my classroom years ago, it still puts a smile onto my face.

Another misunderstanding is that teaching = teaching. Nothing could be farther from the truth.

If you think being a teacher essentially means standing in front of a blackboard and 30 screaming pupils, think again.

Teaching isn’t a fixed occupation. It’s a lifestyle choice.

And there are many ways to do it.

Thus, to encourage and enable more people to teach (does the world really need another stock broker?) we’ve set up a job-board here on the site. You can find there a variety of different teaching and teaching-related jobs both online and offline. Also, if you’re looking for teachers, you can post your jobs directly onto our site. How cool is that?

Click here to visit the job board now.

Happy Learning!

P.S: If you don’t like the idea of working for someone else and would rather be your own boss, check out this book.

About the author: André Klein was born in Germany, has grown up and lived in many different places including Thailand, Sweden and Israel. He has produced two music albums, performed and organized literary readings, curated an experimental television program and is the author of various short stories and non-fiction works.

According to online statistics the “average American is exposed to over 3,000 ads every day” whereas the average child sees about 40,000 commercials on TV each year with an average of 4 hours of TV programming containing about 100 ads.

Whether these number are accurate or not, it is a fact that both our public and private lives are increasingly permeated with texts and images of a purely commercial nature.

We open a newspaper and see ads. We walk on the streets: ads. Turn on the radio: ads. We ride on trains and buses and are flooded with more ads. Even our smart-phones are turning into just another canvas for the “creativity” of advertising networks.

Is there no end to this?

Online Advertising: A Quick Way To Get Rich Or The Short-Cut To Sell-Out?

Every few days I get unsolicited emails by people offering me to pay money if I include links to their (client’s) homepages here on this blog, preferably directly in the articles, without revealing that these are paid links.

And I think to myself: “Sure, I’ll ruin both my reputation and the design of my website with links to stuff I don’t endorse so that you can pimp your search ranking and pay me off with a few measly dollars per year?”

Yeah, right. Many times I have resisted the urge to simply send this as a reply.

But seriously. Zuckerberg turned Facebook into a cash-cow with ads. Google did the same with their search engine.

So it must be the royal road to online success if they did it, right?

Recently, I read a reddit thread about a 16 year old kid who was supposedly making 40 dollars a days just with advertising. (It was later followed by another thread of a grown up who reportedly was getting huge amounts of traffic but was only making 5-10 cents a day)

Here’s my take on it:

When I started out a few years ago to look for ways to turn my internet addiction, er I mean fascination into a solid income, the Glorious Gospel of Online Marketers echoed and bounced off a thousand web-logs (*insert angel-choir here*): “Find a niche and add advertising and affiliate links!”

So I decided to give it a shot: building a blog is so easy. And slapping on a few Adsense banners cost me only a few minutes.

Little did I know that the hardest part was yet to come: getting people to my site and actually click those darn Adsense links.

When I told my friends about this new project, full of excitement, I had no clue that they would go home and click a few thousand times on my links in a spirit of what to them was generosity (After all, they were making me richer and richer with every click, right?) – but apparently it was a violation of Adsense’s terms so I was quickly banned from using their service and cast into advertising exile.

This was after having barely “earned” about 78 cents or so.

Publishing At The Barrel Of A Gun

Somehow I managed to reactivate the account and continued a few months later, this time making a point of not telling anyone about it.

What followed were weeks and months of little traffic and even less clicks on “my” ads. I was spending a lot of time on forums and reading from other people that apparently “the good times” were over, that clicks used to pay more, that the endless content-farms were making it nearly impossible to get decent search-engine traffic, etc.

And my life was turning into a perpetual dead-end of hitting refresh on my earning and traffic statistics.

I learned that certain articles with certain headlines got more search engine traffic and others less. So I actually tried to publish only stuff that people and the search-engines would want to click in the first place (next best thing to selling one’s soul) – and it did ramp up the traffic a bit.

But I wasn’t earning more than a few cents per day.

And then the ads started getting more and more questionable, hailing certain quasi-religious cults, ever desperate dating sites and more and more mindless browser-games.

I found out how to block certain ads from displaying on my site and started by asking myself:”Ok, so which of these sites would you actually recommend to anyone (who’s not your worst enemy) in real life?”

The answer came slowly but eventually fully downloaded into recognition: None. Nada. Zilch!

I couldn’t possibly care less about these ads and the companies behind them.

So why was I allowing them to advertise on my site then?

The truth had shown its teeth and sank its fangs into my conscience.

I deleted my blog, began to curse the Holy Gospel Of Internet Marketers and swore never to sail these waters again.

Understanding The Dark Side From Another Vantage Point

About two years after this somewhat humbling experience, I started building this blog which you are currently reading.

This was going to be new, this was going to be different. No more soul-selling, no more ads.

And like anyone else who has ever built a website from scratch I suffered the pangs of obscurity. I was all on fire with a new project but noone seemed to care.

Traffic stats were idling between 0-5 visitors per day.

This time I was not shooting for low-hanging fruit but still my new project needed exposure.

Incidentally, at the same time I received a coupon for Google Adwords (that’s the other side of AdSense, the place where you pay to have others host your ads).

So, I said: “Neat. 80 euros of free advertising money. Let’s give it a shot!”

Little did I know that I was already again with one foot in the same quagmire I barely merely months before. For, in order to actually use these advertising euros I had to feed the hungry AdWords mouth with my own monies.

So I wrote Adwords a check with the minimum amount and waited for approval which came a few days later.

I had about 200 dollars worth of potential traffic now.

So I started learning about the Adwords platform, its nasty navigation apparently built without the recognition that people are actually going to have to use this mess. (Or maybe the mess is deliberate so that advertising funds drop quickly and need to be renewed?)

Here’s what happened in a nutshell:

The euros were gone quicker than I could say “Pay Per Click”.

Yes, I did receive traffic and – yes – some of this traffic even translated into paying customers for language tutoring services while advertising two of my first independently published books did near to nothing. (I spoke to a seasoned AdWords expert, later and he told me that it was getting harder and harder to make cold sales through Adwords ads because all of the ads were doing it and people were getting tired of it. Banner Blindness was on the surge.)

Throughout this time it felt like I was using a sledgehammer to crack a nut. Lots of time (and money) spent on Adwords – and the results were meager for everything that went into it. Plus: The moment you stopped running the campaigns, the traffic stopped.

And again I was ripe for a reality check:

Did I ever click the advertising in Google results? No.

Did I ever click any kinds of banners and advertising links on other websites? No. I wasn’t even seeing them because I constantly browse with Adblock.

So why was I expecting others to click on my ads then?

*ouch*

Now, a common response to this is that the average Joe doesn’t know and doesn’t want to know so we can happily exploit their ignorance.

But first of all this is less and less true as people are becoming more and more sensivitized to advertising and secondly not everyone targets the average Joe as a primary audience.

Taking A Step Back And Connecting Individual Actions To Cumulative Influence

Big companies and start-ups greased with investor-money are happily investing in advertising.

I’ve worked for a non-profit organization once that burned hundreds of advertising dollars every day and thus managed to grow its new social network user-base literally over night.

But what does it really prove except that they have the money to do this?

All over the world people are currently protesting against the monarchy of money, how banks and the 1% make a mockery of human decency in the name of democracy.

But, seriously…

If you’re a young kid trying to collect a few dollars by letting those richer than you paste ugly ads all over your site or if you’re building a start-up with the money (and implicit governance) of the 1% – how can you possibly complain against the way things are going in our world?

It’s hard to admit, but it’s behavior like this that lead us to this point.

When masses of individuals go through their days seeking only their own benefit regardless of larger contexts, it has cumulative effects in the real world just as in the example of the traffic jam: hundreds of people individually slowing down leads to the phenomenon of the traffic jam. No-one single-handedly “created” it. So no-one in particular feels responsible for it.

And yet we all created it together.

In other words: It’s easy to protest against “The Rich”.

But it’s us (the 99%) who made these people rich by our cumulative individual actions.

It’s the same with advertising. Each time you click an ad, someone makes a profit.

Each time you pay a huge advertising network in the hope of getting exposure, they get richer and richer.

The Googles and Facebooks of our time may be more popular than the Goldman Sachs and Wallstreets. But they’re all in bed with each other.

And it’s up to us to choose alternatives by supporting people instead of monopolies.

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img:  CC by x-ray delta one via flickr / thumbnail:  CC by Pink Ponk via flickr

About the author: André Klein was born in Germany, has grown up and lived in many different places including Thailand, Sweden and Israel. He has produced two music albums, performed and organized literary readings, curated an experimental television program and is the author of various short stories and non-fiction works.

There used to be a time when the only way to make a living as an author or musician was to go through publishing houses and labels that would help you create the work, package it, distribute it and sell it.

This way still exists but with the disappearance of book stores and physical music storage media like the CD, a new way of doing things is slowly emerging.

Connecting Creator & Customer

Imagine you get rid of offices filled with accountants, call-centers and marketing drones. Then, you abandon the CD factories and book printing presses. Last but not least, you throw your contract to the wind along with its deadlines.

What are you left with?

The bare minimum: An individual who creates stuff – and a world that is always hungry for awesomeness.

Since we don’t have a factory anymore, there is no physical artifice.

But this is no problem because as a writer or musician you’ll probably use computers as part of your creative process so that even before the physical product, there’s the Digital Download.

From Conception to Consumption

Now, the question is how to get the good stuff out to the people who want it.

There’s no marketing department. No advertisement budget. No sales people. You’re on your own.

And it’s not that bad, actually!

You simply have to come up with an alternative that maximizes the effect while using as little time and effort as possible.

As I’ve suggested in my recent book, blogging can be a great way to drive attention without spending a dime on ads.

But once the attention is there, how to actually sell your goods?

There are many ways. Here’s a small selection:

5 Services That Let You Sell Your Digital Goods

tinypay.me

If you’re just looking for a quick way to sell something, tinypay is a simple solution.

There’s no need for a user account (you can collect payments by PayPal)  and there are no fees (it’s free, at least for now)

Also, there is no customizable shopping cart, all customers have to go through the tinypay website.

But it’s a great way to start!

pulleyapp.com

This is another minimalist approach. It’s not free (starting at $6 per month) But it comes with an embeddable “buy now” button that you can put anywhere. Your customers will never even notice that they’re going through pulleyapp. All they do is pay and get the goods delivered automatically in a customizable email.

getdpd.com

Digital Product Delivery is a complete digital goods solution with all the bells and whistles. It starts at $5 dollars per month and it supports all major payment providers from Paypal to Google Checkout, 2checkout and AlertPay. On top of that they offer complete mailing list integration, their own WordPress Plugin and allow you to run your own affiliate system and much more. It’s one of the most comprehensive digital sales services I’ve seen, so far. To beginners, the multitude of different options and features might seem overwhelming. But if you want to go pro, DPD is a good choice.

e-junkie.com

E-junkie is another comprehensive solution, also starting at $5 dollars per month. Its user-interface isn’t as streamlined as DPD and its features are fewer but focused on the essentials. E-junkie supports all major payment services, offers coupon codes and its own affiliate and newsletter service. Where DPD might seem to have too many options, e-junkie’s user-interface is a bit confusing – but it does deliver once you’ve understood how it works. Essentially, it’s a rather minimal approach but with all the major features.

digitaldeliveryapp.com

This is another allround solution starting at $9 per month, making it the most expensive in our list but also it’s the only service that doesn’t charge you if you don’t sell anything! Also, they have all the features one could wish for from subscription based access to testing your products before even creating them, PDF stamping and much much more. Personally, I think their interface is very nice and clean, organizing the many features in a way which is not too overwhelming.

Conclusion

What’s the best one?

It depends on a) what you are trying to do and b) willing to pay per month.

If you’re just selling one item, the first two easier solutions might save you some time and confusion.

If you are planning to build your own little digital warehouse and offer a variety of different products in different combinations with discounts and all the rest, you should pick one of the last three.

Most of them offer a free trial, so you can get acquainted with all of them before you pay for something.

NOTE: Even if you have selected one of these services, learned how to use them and integrated them into your webpage, this doesn’t mean that your products will automatically sell. You are going to need some kind of strategy to get the word out. Click here to find out what’s my favorite of doing this.

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What service do you use? What were your experiences? Do you prefer simple and clean over bells & whistles? What are the most important features such a service should have? Leave a comment below!

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img:  Some rights reserved by (Luciano) via Flickr

About the author: André Klein was born in Germany, has grown up and lived in many different places including Thailand, Sweden and Israel. He has produced two music albums, performed and organized literary readings, curated an experimental television program and is the author of various short stories and non-fiction works.

In a recent article on TNW, Chikodi Chima pointed out that the next big thing in Silicon Valley will be a startup Gold Rush around education. Why the sudden interest? Well…

The educational pie is enormous, and anyone who can get his or her hands on even a small slice can expect to reap huge returns.

Silicon Valley has the reputation of being the pinnacle of technological innovation. Start-up founders all around the world seek to model their businesses and they way they present and talk about what they do after the great Fountainhead of Silicon Valley. (Yes, Ayn Rand is also very popular there. But that’s a different story.)

The past has shown that Silicon Valley knows how to make technology and money.

With such a concentration of brilliant minds already in Silicon Valley, and with the potential upside so clear, expect a new California Gold Rush to begin soon, one we hope will last for decades.

Only now, it’s about “education”.

A Million Dollars is Not Cool. You Know What’s Cool? A Godzillion!!!

Hermione Way interviewed around 200 startups in Silicon Valley and what she found out is all but glamorous:

• productization of entrepeneurship

Start-ups aren’t garage-projects that get discovered and become hugely successful because they’re so awesome. Instead, they are manufactured and this process is streamlined into a lucrative conveyor-belt sequence by organizations like Y Combinator that promise young entrepreneurs fast success through injections of money upon entering their program. But the focus is not building quality first and then to monetize. Instead, founders are urged to ”quickly exit or IPO”.

• monopoly-game of user-stats and investors

Way describes how at a barbecue with Y Combinator graduates topic #1 is numbers. (Hey, these are geeks after all.) But not complex mathematical formulas obsessed about for their sheer complexity. No, more as in business numbers: investments, customers (sign-ups), growth-rates. It’s like a big monopoly game: Who makes the most money the quickest by building something up and exiting!

• no real world solution

Another thing that Way found is that almost none of the startups she interviewed are dealing with solving real-world problems:

all these highly intelligent, well educated youngsters, many of whom have been educated in the best universities in the world (Stanford, Yale and Harvard) are not putting their brains to good use by solving real-world problems. Instead they’re building technology to solve trivial issues – like apps that show where to spot your nearest tofu cupcake and share it with your friends.

Way goes on to defend these privileged youngsters by saying that maybe they just don’t have enough exposure to real-world problems and therefore can’t be blamed if they produce one fad after the other: after all, this is what customers want, right?

The Unlikely Pair Of Geeks and Social Skills

The term “geek” has become so fashionable today (yes, it wasn’t always like that) that people wear it with pride. Now, I don’t want to rain on anyone’s parade, and, yes a geek is a person who is eccentrically devoted to a particular, often highly specialized topic but is also “socially inept”!

Why do we pride ourselves on being socially inept?

In a culture of geeks, of course – noone will feel awkward, because everybody is.

Nevertheless, the geek is not famous for his soft skills. Instead, he’s famed for (mostly left-brained) skills such as working with numbers.

Now, take this social awkwardness together with an obsession with numbers and let it loose on the Monopoly board of Silicon Valley, competing for investments.

This is the mix that is preparing for the Gold Rush in online education.

What is somewhat ironic about this is that some of these founders of supposedly “game-changing education startups” are actually perpetuating the old education system’s notions that they claim to supersede.

How is that, you ask?

Fast-Food Education And The Same Old Same Old

Lured by the bait of huge ROIs, startups and investors are outdoing each other to create “educational” startups, each claiming to usher in the “Education Revolution”.

First of all there is the problem a questionable primarily money-based approach to education, but since that’s obvious, let’s leave it aside.

The real problem here is that education can not be revolutionized through quantification. (More knowledge, more access, more textbooks, more iPads don’t automatically equate with better education.)

It is the same mistake offline education has been doing for decades and in this way most online learning startups are all but new: Education is understood as an acquisition of quantifiable knowledge and the ability to reproduce when called (or tested) for.

Hard skills rule over soft skills. Results over process. This is nothing new.

But maybe there is no magical one-click solution to education… What if it is a long process which involves all of our dedicated human (!) faculties and never really ends?

A genuine “education revolution” would challenge the assumptions we have as to what learning means in an age where knowledge and information are more and more outsourced to machines.

But does Silicon Valley have a long enough breath for that?

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img:  Some rights reserved by EJP Photo

About the author: André Klein was born in Germany, has grown up and lived in many different places including Thailand, Sweden and Israel. He has produced two music albums, performed and organized literary readings, curated an experimental television program and is the author of various short stories and non-fiction works.

In 2000 there were 360,985,492 users worldwide.

Internet World Stats predicts that in 2011 the number will rise to 2,095,006,005

That’s 2 billion users!

What are all those people doing online?

Let’s look at this awesome diagram created by the RuderFinn Index that describes the Internet habits of Americans (18+).

Tips And Bottoms

Learning (educate self) and Having Fun (pass time) are the clear winners, here.

What’s the least popular activity?

Even less popular than Manage Finance (online banking, tax information, etc.)?

Selling.

Note, that of all the sectors this is the only sector in this diagram involved with directly making money online!

I’ll get back to that, soon.

Global Unemployment And Missed Opportunities

According to ILO data released earlier this year, global unemployment is growing.

6.2 % percent of the world population are without jobs, and not just in the developing world. The Guardian writes:

Although the developed economies of the west account for only 15% of the earth’s working population, they accounted for 55% of the increase in unemployment between 2007 and 2010.

In the Middle East dramatic rates of youth unemployment have been a driving factor of the so-called “Arab Spring”.

It led to the upheaval of several governments and is continuing to take its toll on political systems, but not just in the Middle East, also in countries like Spain and Greece youth unemployment has been a key component of recent protests.

In China, policies of aggressive economic expansion are being pushed to prevent mass unemployment and the resulting political instabilities.

In short: It’s a growing global problem.

But what’s behind it?

New Jobs & Old Habits

It’s not the Industrial Age anymore. Factories are more and more automized. The assembly-line is robotized, accounting for that scary and powerful term of “technical unemployment”.

Manual labour is redundant. Machines, in the long run, are cheaper because they are more productive and don’t need holidays.

As an example, the job of secretary has almost been made obsolete.

around two million administrative and clerical workers lost their jobs after bosses discovered they could handle their calendars and travel arrangements online and rendered their assistants expendable. (source)

Talking about travel arrangements, when was the last time you went to the “travel agency”?

It’s not just the hard physical labor which is replaced by machines. On a subtler level, all kinds of jobs that are related to information and don’t need human intervention are vanishing, being replaced by modern media, especially the Net.

And, as Paul Ford wrote in NYMag, new jobs with increasingly esoteric descriptions are taking their place:

Viral meme tracker, slideshow specialist, headline optimizer — these are jobs that didn’t exist a few years ago

But, as we all know, not everyone can become a Social Media Expert, SEO analyst, etc. (In fact, those two might not even be real jobs but just bland image-stunts)

Exodus To The Online World

The time and energies invested worldwide in the Internet are incredible and growing at an exhilarating pace.

We are networking, chatting to our friends and family, shopping, researching, creating content – all online.

The logical consequence is that in the future we won’t just increasingly spend our money but make it online!

As I described here, the benefits for both the individual and the society cannot be underestimated.

Yet, personally, I know only a hand full of people who manage to make a full-time income online. It’s not that it’s too difficult or requires super-human strength but rather that abounding misconceptions and criticisms keep people away.

One of the most common misconceptions is not to differentiate between working for an online employer or working for oneself.

The jobs offered by companies like Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, etc. are high-paying but very rare and requiring insane amounts of professional experience, knowledge and connections.

Strictly speaking, most of the employments offered by these companies aren’t even online. They have offices with desks and board-meetings just like regular companies.

This is not where future jobs online will come from.

Instead, a huge amount of paying online jobs will be supplied by the people themselves.

Employee and employer are becoming one.

Instead of looking for jobs, or waiting for the government to create them, we now have the opportunity to create them, ourselves.

The belief that making a living online is by definition something half-sleazy, dangerous or even illegal is a false one and unfortunately neither governments or education can be relied upon to set the record straight; They are the proverbial blind leading the blind.

Working online is not just a way to make money.

It’s a lifestyle choice.

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Further Reading:

• Quacks and Giants: In Search of a Golden Middle in the Land of Online Livelihood

• The Rise and Fall of the Product Mindset: From Assembly Lines to the Service Age

• Where Democracy Goes to Die… (Coming Soon To A Country Near You)

• Hey Kids, We’re On A Road To Nowhere!

• A Mindful Guide to Online Living [ebook]

About the author: André Klein was born in Germany, has grown up and lived in many different places including Thailand, Sweden and Israel. He has produced two music albums, performed and organized literary readings, curated an experimental television program and is the author of various short stories and non-fiction works.

According to the real Zuckerberg, none of this is true but the image of the blog as a venting-platform for nerds and other socially awkward personalities has prevailed in many people’s minds.

Blogging is like diary-writing. The more personally revealing, funnier, angrier, the better. Right?

Well, there’s blogging and then there’s blogging and blogging.

Diaries Vs In-Depth Coverage

The Huffington Post would have never been sold for $315 million dollars, if it weren’t for the bloggers. (Also, its founder wouldn’t have been sued, had she paid them better. But that’s a different story.)

Journalistic blogging provides one of the best forms of in-depth coverage of any event, especially if the blogger is independent and doesn’t carry out the uniform opinion of his editorial board.

So there are the vengeful nerds and angry geeks blogging about the highs and lows of their daily lives. This is the subjective approach. Then there’s journalistic bloggers. That’s the objective approach. But there’s a third kind, as well.

Whereas the first form (blogging as an online diary) and the second (blogging as news coverage) imitate earlier media, the third kind cannot be compared to any previous way, shape or form of expression.

I’m talking about the audience-builders, attention-magnets and opinion-shaping folks!

Bloggers of The Third Kind

Those are the people who use the medium of blogging unlike anyone else. They use it as a direct extension of their personality but in a very conscious and focused way, thereby…

• creating an audience
• spreading their influence
• generating leads, sales, etc.

Some people believe it’s “immoral” to use blogs for business. After all, a newspaper, ok, but who would want a diary with ads in it?

That’s a misunderstanding. This third kind approach to blogging is not about simply publishing sales-letters and calling them blogposts.

Instead, it’s about providing readers with as much helpful information as possible. Period. The business part happens when you get readers hooked. They know from experience that you deliver. This creates trust. And they are more likely to purchase products or premium services you offer or follow recommendations.

But you don’t have to be no Seth Godin to benefit from this approach to blogging.

Anyone can do it. Sure, it’s not easy. Especially at the beginning. But if you want to drive traffic to your homepage, get more people to sign up for something or purchase products or services, this is way better than spending hundreds of dollars on Adwords clicks.

Why?

• (almost) zero cost: If you’re already running a homepage somewhere, adding a blog won’t cost a dime. Also, whether you write one post per week or 20 won’t have any impact on your wallet.
• increased creativity and focus: Blogging increases reflectivity about what you do. By writing a professional blog you’ll get more ideas about what you do and how to present it from as many angles as possible.
• networking: Facebook & LinkedIn is great, but writing a blog and connecting to your readers and other bloggers is priceless. It’s the difference between running in between one-room apartments in a tenement building or throwing a pool party.

So, whether you’re an online teacher, author or small business owner, consider building a blog if you don’t have one, yet or re-launch one that never quite took off.

Next time I’ll talk about common mistakes while building blogs and what to do about them.

Got excited?

Also check out:

• 7 Ways To Write Eye-Catching Headlines
• How To Grow Your Online (Teaching) Business Without Becoming a Self-Promoter
• 5 Simple Steps to Increase Your Audience Through Better Design

img:  Some rights reserved by Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com

About the author: André Klein was born in Germany, has grown up and lived in many different places including Thailand, Sweden and Israel. He has produced two music albums, performed and organized literary readings, curated an experimental television program and is the author of various short stories and non-fiction works.

“I’m just not creative, you see?”

Have you ever heard someone say: “I’m not creative.”?

What does that actually mean?

If you dig deeper you might find answers like “I have no imagination.” – “I’m a structural person”  or: “I’m not talented.”

Whatever the answer may be, creativity can be learned.

To be more precise: Imagination has to be trained. Structural is not mutually exclusive with “creative”. And talent does not replace training.

Having said that…

I feel that many online educators could radically improve the effectiveness of their course materials and webpages by taking design more seriously. (The same holds true for many other kinds of online businesses.)

I’m talking here specifically about Websites, Blogs, Powerpoint presentations, Ebooks and Learning Materials.

Some people (especially the educated kind) seem to believe that if you’re teaching let’s say English, only the grammar, vocab and speaking/listening practice matter while the font-type, color, size and use of design elements are just some kind of fancy gimmicks.

Guess what! They’re not! Have you ever thought about why companies invest a lot of money to get an awesome webpage? It’s not (always) just corporate vanity. They know that good design creates a) good reputation and b) sells better than bad design.

No matter which way you turn it, there really is no excuse to burrow yourself in the conceptual part of your brain and refuse to think in colors, shapes and textures.

There are of course – and this is a popular argument to avoid any real growth in this area – examples of glossy design with little or no substance. But the examples of great content which is poorly packaged are far more common and painful! Think of diamonds wrapped in greasy BigMac paper packaged in coffee-stained shoe-boxes. Most people wouldn’t even take it for free. Their fault? Maybe.

And it doesn’t have to be a diamond. But if your product, course material, ebook, etc. is worth something you should package it in a way that reflects its value! I had a creative writing teacher once who used to tell us: “It’s your baby. You sweated it out!” – meaning our first stories. So, if you put all your heart and hard work in it, please do yourself the favor of letting it shine!

If you settle for bad design you keep people away from discovering your value. And, let’s face it – over years and years of  exposure to glossy advertisements, magazine layouts and polished web-pages people got accustomed to certain quality standards, so that if something is below the standard they will consciously or unconsciously be repelled by it. (For the language-geeks: Bad design is like bad grammar. It’s distracting and annoying!)

Luckily, there’s always something that can be done. And with help of the Internet, tutorials and free (!) open-source tools we are in a position like never before to create things that simply rock!

Here’s some quick guidelines:

1. Research: “The Hunt is On!”

Take a look at what others are doing in your field. But please note. Design it not about taste. Good design is like language. Either it communicates effectively or it doesn’t.

So when you look at what others are doing, you might find things that seem very successful but you don’t like them. Then there may be things that suit your taste but have no traction.

There’s always the problem of measuring success in some way. I don’t believe there are absolutes, but you can look at what other people are saying about the product or webpage. What’s their activity and user-count on Facebook or Twitter. Etc.

If you find a website or an ebook that people are raving about all over the place but you think their homepage is “cheesy” or “not serious” – maybe you should double-check and re-consider their approach. Again, you don’t have to like it but if they have a button positioned at the right place, with the right color and millions of people are happily clicking it, you might want to do something similar.

2. Imitate, Compare, Derive!

This often gets a bad rap. But creative people know that there are no ideas which aren’t based on other ideas. So, if you like the way this and that design uses colors, fonts and headlines, imitate it! This doesn’t mean being a copycat. After all, nobody owns a certain color or relation of font-sizes and design-elements!

A very practical approach to this is using styles for your documents, themes for your homepage and templates for your presentations. You can find great stuff that is both free and cutting-edge if you look a bit deeper! (If you don’t have the time or the nerve, awesome templates can easily be purchased!) So, if you have seen something somewhere you like, chances are huge that you’ll find a template or theme that you can build on to do something similar.

Two common mistakes: a) People either refuse to start with something professional while lacking the skills to do something better themselves or b) they just take on the theme or style without any further changes and thereby make their product/page look like all the others who chose the same: If you’re doing it right you’ll use the prepared theme or template only as a starting point and customize it beyond recognition into something which you can call “your own”.

3. Get Feedback

So you’ve looked at thousand of examples. Loved some. Hated others. But opened your mind to possibilities.  Then you worked very hard to implement some of what you’ve seen. Thought that was difficult? The toughest part is yet to come: Showing your hard work to others and processing their feedback without getting hung up on criticism or praise. There are a few factors here to make this process effective:

• Ask the right people! Some people might be very biased (positively or negatively) to you as a person, because they know you. They don’t always count, unfortunately. You can ask them but their feedback might not be the most reliable if you want to take your product and webpage and be succesful with it in a world where people don’t know you, yet!
• When getting feedback from people who don’t know you make sure they are really saying what they think and not just trying to be polite or make you like them. For example, undifferentiated praise doesn’t really help, at all!
• When you get radical feedback “This doesn’t work at ALL!” be just as ready to forget it as to seriously consider it!
• Diversity: If enough people from various backgrounds share a similar opinion there might be something to it!
• Don’t settle for “it’s great” or “it sucks” but always look at why something works and why it doesn’t

In my experience, giving great feedback takes just as much skill and experience as being able to process it. The best feedback is respectful and constructive, focusing on details instead of undifferentiated praise or dismissal.

4. Improve! – The Sky is The Limit

Rinse and repeat! Keep updating. Keep improving. Don’t fall asleep. Always be on the lookout for new input. Learn new skills. Even if your design works great, how can you improve it? The worst thing you could do is going on for years with the same approach without seeing any real breakthroughs and blaming it on the audience. As a rule of thumb, in many cases it’s not their fault but miscommunication based on bad design – which is not your “fault” but your responsibility!

Also, there is a problem of over-optimization and losing the bigger picture, becoming completely wrapped up in shades of blue or questions of “a few pixels up or down”. In this case, it’s high time to …

5. Take A Step Back

Do something completely different. Forget about the design-aspects. Work only on the content for a while ignoring the design. Go on a holiday!  When you come back, it will look different! Your worst fears might be proven and it really looks as bad as you thought, but more often than not, the opposite is the case. After a while you return and realize “Hey, it’s really not that bad!”

In the end you can ask yourself: What are the web-pages and products that are well designed in your eyes? What makes them outstanding? And: What is Design, anyway? Is it really just the “wrapping” or does it maybe have to do more with the way in which your content fits together with its presentation?

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thumbnail:Alessandro Rei LGPL, illustration:  Some rights reserved by HikingArtist.com

About the author: André Klein was born in Germany, has grown up and lived in many different places including Thailand, Sweden and Israel. He has produced two music albums, performed and organized literary readings, curated an experimental television program and is the author of various short stories and non-fiction works.

What if Lady Gaga helped your child to prepare for that next English test?

Imagine hiring Justin Bieber for an hour of homework help.

How much would they charge for one lesson?

But in Hong Kong, it’s not that the stars are teaching. Here, the teachers themselves are the stars. They earn up to $1.5 million a year, drive luxury cars and their white-toothed smiles and glossy hairdos are gleaming from billboards all over the city, larger than life.

Needless to say, their lessons aren’t exactly cheap. But in Asia, grades and exams are everything. For parents, no price is high enough. Half of Hong Kong’s students get professional tutoring outside of schools. (source)

The “star teachers” and their businesses are catering to this need. There’s intense competition. So they are marketing themselves similar to the music or movies industry with the only difference maybe that while the latter are going down, the “star tutors” are doing better than ever throwing piles of money at promotion and raking in the profits.

Star tutors spare no costs on publicity. Even tutors who belong to one of the four major chains here must self-promote. But successful tutors can command hundreds of students. - csmonitor

There’s a certain principle here: As education systems are tumbling down, tutoring businesses go up. Like I’ve written before they are the vultures circling the carcass of a system that has kicked the bucket. Positively speaking,  they are a good indicator of how public education is doing. If you are seeing to many of them, something is going very wrong.

The Hong Kong version of it is alarming in its aggressive marketing strategies. It raises questions such as: What is the role of public education in a booming economy? Is it just the giver of grades, dispenser of certificates? What does it do?

In the West, we often like to see our education system as a prerequisite for economic growth, that our education lays the foundation and shapes the future of our economy. Hong Kong shows a different picture. Here, public education can’t keep up with the rapid growth of the economy. Therefore, a new education system, a parallel world of tutoring is born, one that is modelled on the dynamics of the free market. And they seem to be doing well. Hong Kong tutors provide the desired results to their clients: “exam skills”. And parents keep shelling out mountains of money.

Many businesses in Europe and America are already doing the same. They aren’t necessarily promoting their teachers done up like Hollywood puppets, not yet, but they are feeding off parent’s needs to provide “good grades” and “pass exams”.

One could argue that public education has lost all means to make students reach the grades and exams set up as standards of its own making. A paradox? Not to private tutoring, for they depend on the system being broken!

But this is just one side of it. Even if grades are sufficient, parents (especially in Asia) will want their children to be the best. Which means: numbers, ratios: Measurable success!

We invariably feel that the state of education should be measured similar to the GDP. The effects of education must be demonstrated quantitatively, at all costs!

Hong Kong is at the forefront of this kind of thinking.

But America and Europe are not far from it. Tutoring has become an integral part of the educational landscape. At its core is the idea that both teachers and students are failing to meet the official standards.

But instead of questioning the standards themselves, after all they are “god” .. excuse me .. “government-given” there surely must be something wrong with the people.

And thus, the dog continues to chase its own tail.

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img:  Some rights reserved by lloydi

About the author: André Klein was born in Germany, has grown up and lived in many different places including Thailand, Sweden and Israel. He has produced two music albums, performed and organized literary readings, curated an experimental television program and is the author of various short stories and non-fiction works.

Leaving the Sinking Ship

I’ve heard many times from my colleagues that they feel society doesn’t give enough respect to their teaching efforts and that this is reflected in their salaries and in the way schools are organized.

Classes are over-filled. Budgets are cut. Staff is overworked.

This is why many teachers are looking for other teaching opportunities online.

For some it’s a refreshing awakening into a world of endless possibilities. Others simply don’t know where to start!

In my recent book “How To Teach Online Without Selling Your Soul” I portray the picture of the independent online teacher, who works not for a school or for a company but only for the benefit of himself and her students.

This is to guarantee a maximum of flexibility and minimize certain financial or professional compromises one might face while working in a more conservative environment.

Sizing Up The Elephant

Many people start out by registering in one of these online teaching marketplaces that claim to connect teachers looking for students with students looking for teachers. This is what I did, too.

Sometimes you have to pay a fee just to get listed (don’t sign up!) and others are free but even then, after a while you begin to wonder why you are paying relatively high commissions while the marketplace provider doesn’t really seem to be doing anything!

And after a while you might find yourself in a shockingly similar position like the one you tried to escape by going online: Salaries are low. You feel that your hard work is not appreciated. Only now, it’s worse. You don’t simply have lessons on a consistent basis. No! Now you have to compete with hundreds of other teachers, each self-promoting themselves to death and pushing prices down while all that you get from the marketplace provider is some measly rating-system and a not-always-fully-functioning virtual classroom software. (I’m sure hat not all online teaching marketplaces are bad, but I simply haven’t seen one that is awesome, either!)

Looking at all of this in retrospect, it is hard for me to understand why I put up with it in the first place.

One of the obvious reasons is that the marketplace provider promises to hook you up with students. But even then, it’s not like you get something for free. You have to work hard just to get started teaching.

So in the end, it’s not less likely that students will find you if you aren’t listed on the marketplace. Instead it will be more likely for them to find you if you go independent!

“But that means that I have to do all of this evil marketing, right?”, many people ask.

This is what I though first. But actually, you can’t sink lower than fighting directly or indirectly with your colleagues over who “gets” a student can you? Shouldn’t we have some sense of self-respect? We are supposed to be educators, no?

So, yes. You can only win by leaving the marketplace. And, in fact, it’s not that you’re actually leaving it. You’re entering the real market, instead. (Many online learning marketplaces try to make you feel that you’re lost without them. That’s bogus!)

Standing on The Market With Cold Hands And Wet Feet

Now you’ve left. Gone, the warm and fuzzy feelings of the forum. You’ve left the herd. Now what?
Maybe you’ve already built a little homepage somewhere and installed a contact form and payment buttons.

But what to do next? Should you put yourself on the pedestal and start shouting “Lessons!!! Lessons!!! Education for Everyone!!!”

Probably not.

Do you have millionds of dollars of spend on advertising. No, sir.

So, what to do? After all, you’re not a marketer, right?

And my answer is: If you’re a great teacher, you’ll be a natural at “marketing”, not in the way economics students think but in a more essential and original way!

“How I learned to stop worrying and Love the Market”

The skills which make business people succeed in the “market” and teachers succeed in the classroom aren’t as different as they might seem at first glance.

In order to sell something you have to make your potential buyers see the value.

In order to teach something, especially if it’s difficult, the learners has to see a certain value in what is being taught, and if this perceived value isn’t there, the teacher has to help create it.

In other words: If you’re teaching algebra and your students don’t care about it you have to advertise it.

If people are already wildly interested in what you got to teach, you’re lucky.

It’s the same for starting your online teaching business.

You have to find ways to get people interested.

And, since you’re an awesome teacher you know that bending the truth won’t help. Empty promises and approaches like 100% money back guarantee won’t cut it. You have to actually make them feel the value!

This is why immediately after having set up your homepage you should start a blog! Get accustomed to posting consistently (hard at first, easier later) and try to let people see the value that you (hopefully) perceive in what you do.

Sometimes I wish that my high school teachers would have had to do this as part of their training. Because when you start to write a blog about what you do you start to think differently about it.

You start to ask questions like:

• “What is it that I have to give?”
• “Why should anyone bother listening to me?”
• “Would I be interested in this person?”
• “How can I make this more interesting?”

And it is at this point that you start doing the real “marketing”. Even if noone read your articles you still would have the advantage of having asked yourself those questions and come up with new creative ways of thinking and doing.

Self-Promotion vs Service Promotion

We all hate selfish people. The self-promoter is the worst kind of them. Because they don’t ever seem  to shut up about how great they are. Especially on Twitter on Facebook this species has found a new breeding ground.

So, while many people recommend that if you market something online it should be personal – (making it too impersonal would be pretty bad and boring, so this is a no-brainer) – don’t make it all about you!

And this is actually a very important point. For, if you go independent and you write a blog about what you do, trying to make people see the value and get to take lessons with you, there is no school, headmaster or Ministry of Education to hide behind.

This is certainly true and this is why many online teachers start promoting their person, buying a domain with their name and taking it from there.

While that’s not really a bad idea I would actually suggest not to focus too much on your person. To keep you from falling into this black hole of navel-gazing and tooting your own horn, come up with a project title, give your website a funny name and inject it with your personality, instead.

This way you can keep the doors open for new ideas (and other people) and you won’t get in the way of your own progress.

Something that I can’t fully explain is that when you don’t make everything about you you are infinitely more resourceful. It’s the same phenomenon that when other people are in need of help we can give lots of advice but when we suffer from the same thing ourselves we are as helpless as the beetle on its back.

Call it altruism or whatever. It works.

Again: Don’t be afraid of filling your project with personality.

But don’t make it all about you!

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images: Some rights reserved by HikingArtist.com (see also hikingartist.com)

About the author: André Klein was born in Germany, has grown up and lived in many different places including Thailand, Sweden and Israel. He has produced two music albums, performed and organized literary readings, curated an experimental television program and is the author of various short stories and non-fiction works.

This is how I feel when I think about BitCoin.

Yes, BitCoin: The virtual cryptocurrency that you can “virtually” generate out of thin air if you have the right hardware.

BitCoin is an open-source currency which doesn’t need any banks and is “virtually” untraceable.

Therefore, despite its somewhat evanescent nature it has huge disruptive potential and has already been called the “most dangerous open-source project”, ever. (Think of what Wikipedia did to the encyclopedia!)

We’re talking about a project which could change the way we think about money or currencies for good!

How does it Work?

The currency units, called Bitcoins are stored on your harddrive much in the same way you’d store pennies in your wallet. Through encrypted transactions you can send and receive bitcoins directly, without the aid of a middleman such as a bank.

The currency is technically limited to a total of 21 million coins at the moment. Six millions are currently available. Until 2014 the number of total coins is planned to be doubled.

The Mining

The weirdest part about Bitcoin is that you can “mine money” by running your computer.

But it’s not as easy as just leaving your MacBook on through the night and getting rich before you can say Jackpot. No, a household computer would take up to 5 years (!) to just produce one coin.

The mining of bitcoins is a serious profession that takes a lot of time, computer skills and – electricity.

In fact, it can use up so much juice that the police might knock on your door because you’re generating just as much heat as the cannabis farmer next door, as has happened multiple times in Canada.

If you want to see how a bitcoin miner’s lair looks like, I highly recommend this little videoclip of a professional miner who lets us take a peek into the crazy business of generating those coins.

Fears and Hopes

Many people fear that governments will eventually shut down and persecute the BitCoin model, because it undermines (get it??) the way their economies work. It can best be compared to how Wikileaks defaced global diplomacy as we knew it.

People need banks. Banks need people’s money.  Governments are driven by banks.

Make banks unnecessary and you could see some radical changes to our societal structure.

Whatever your opinion about it, Facebook and Twitter changed the way activists organize protests. Wikileaks changed the way we think about political power. It’s not entirely unlikely that Bitcoin (or a similar project) will forever change the way we think about transactions of value.

The somewhat scary thing about all of this is that it’s completely uncontrollable. In the same way random activism organized through Social Media and random leaking of information makes organizing governments (as we knew it) a very difficult ordeal, we don’t really know what will happen if the anarchic BitCoin is unleashed onto the system.

On the other hand, it is about time that we change the way we think about money.

The fact that you’re paying with euros or dollars or whatever is completely arbitrary.  Heck, you could be slotting seashells into the vending machine, for that matter.

Despite all of the complex ramfications, currencies are just symbols for value. Symbols, one might argue, that have become rather over-taxed with inflated claims and have been showing great signs of discrepancies regarding the actual value they are supposed to represent.

So it’s only fair to ask: What would happen if we had a global uncontrollable currency like BitCoin which anyone accepts?

Ice-cream and jetpacks for everyone?

Or an anarchic economy that is ruled by survival of the geekiest and miner’s conglomerates stealing and trading in dirty pieces of hardware for a slice of bread?

The truth is probably somewhere inbetween. But we’re bound to find out…

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img: CC by Dom Dada

About the author: André Klein was born in Germany, has grown up and lived in many different places including Thailand, Sweden and Israel. He has produced two music albums, performed and organized literary readings, curated an experimental television program and is the author of various short stories and non-fiction works.

Not the government. A company. Or a church. But other people. Directly.

Now, when I think of the “service industry” I always think of a barber. You go there, he gives you a nice cut. And you carry it home. But you didn’t pay for the hair-cut itself. You actually paid for his service.

Service means attending another person’s needs and being compensated for your time and efforts.

If you think this thought to the end it has some interesting implications for artists, the creation of artifacts and the copyright industry.

Matt Sherman put it in such simple and clear words yesterday that I have to reprint his 140 char wisdom here:

I like the way he uses the word “value” here. And I totally agree. The days where musicians made money by selling records are pretty much gone. Nowadays, if you want to survive as a musician you have to rely on giving concerts, selling merchandise and the generosity of your fans.This is why many musicians are also giving away their music for free. Because people are going to download it, anyway.

Another thing about this quote is that when I saw this, I immediately asked myself:”What If I replace the word music with books?”

Does it still hold true?

I teach languages and write for a living. The former is very clearly a service and not unlike being a barber: It is time-based. It is about attending a person’s need and being compensated for your time and efforts.

But even writing books and selling them, to me, is a service.

The time-factor is “out of phase” – meaning it’s not a real-time interactive engagement (like live teaching) but nevertheless it means attending to a person’s needs directly.

Some will say this is just floozy woozy splitting of hairs. A product is a product, no matter what you call it.

This is probably true. But I think it does matter how you relate to the things you put into the world.

Apart from the fact that I just love Bruce Sterling’s idea of looking at objects as “frozen relationships” it also makes the whole creation and selling of artefacts more fun.

Let’s face it:

We are living in a world that is over-saturated with products and useless clutter.

Products that cater to the market’s need instead of people’s needs. (big difference!)

We don’t want another “product X that will make our life better.” And how many products that promise this are really worth buying, anyways?

Have you ever noticed by the way that millions of people use Google and Facebook everyday and yet – if you got a problem there’s no customer service? – At all?

They make billions. But if you need to talk a person, there’s nobody there.

That’s pretty weird if you ask me.

Anyways. I hope the case is somewhat clear.

If you are a Wallstreet wiz and think you can just live off the vapor of the “market” by selling and buying money you might have to re-think what you do. Because you aren’t serving anybody. You aren’t creating any value. So what are you doing?

Value cannot be owned. It can only be created and shared.

Put more positively:

Even if you’re selling stuff, it’s still a service.

This is why I give away a lot of the hard work I do for free.

Because relationships are not based on ownership and money.

They are based on value. What that means and how to generate more of it is another question I discussed in the chapter “Copyrights & Dead Patent Dreams” in my recent ebook “A Mindful Guide to Social Media”, which (of course) is available as a free download.

Having said that, I hope that what I do is helpful to you. Because, no matter what I think, in the end it’s you who decides.

Now, let’s have a nice virtual hair-cut!

About the author: André Klein was born in Germany, has grown up and lived in many different places including Thailand, Sweden and Israel. He has produced two music albums, performed and organized literary readings, curated an experimental television program and is the author of various short stories and non-fiction works.