Author Archives: Steve Coxsey

Open a Window!

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I have been posting comments to a few blogs in the last few days as I catch up on the backlog of blogs (backblog?) I missed from mid-December through mid-January or later. I read the latest and the oldest on my list each time I read and slowly I’m getting back to only having a few old posts left.

That’s mainly because I’m completely skipping the missed posts on a lot of blogs in my subscription list. I’m only diligently reading every single post on three of them and scanning a few others.

Which gets to the purpose of this post. It’s pretty much just a placeholder because when I comment on a blog it shows my last blog post.

That old post is more stale than the flour tortillas we threw out last week. It’s more stale than the half loaf of Italian bread I threw out the week before. It had mold on it.

I think that old post has a little mold on it, too.

More posts are coming, but not ready yet. I’d rather have people see this easily forgettable but recent post than the old stale moldy thing.

Did anyone see the “Kids in the Hall” episode decades ago with the phrase in my title? It’s a twisted skit with a bizarre place in my personal archives.

No More Carnival Games

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My last two posts were about the sleaziness of tricking people into buying what they don’t really want, and the ridiculousness of people complaining the FTC is going to try to keep them from tricking people into buying something that’s not what they say it is.

Then I see Seth Godin’s recent blog post about his experience being bombarded by red light district marketing tactics. He suggests an alternative: cut the hype, cut the crap, no more deceit, just be transparent and deliver.

So are you going to sell at a street carnival, a back alley, or the public square?

FTC Mania

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People in the online marketing world are getting worked up about a new stand the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is taking towards enforcing marketing and advertising rules on the internet. Some people are claiming the FTC added new rules or changed the game.

The un-hyped version is that the FTC has issued guidelines for how existing rules will be applied to online marketing and advertising. The rules have always applied, but they have not had the interpretation guidelines or the resources to enforce them online.

If you want to skip the personal story part of this post, you can see a great webinar Continue reading →

Godin 12-03-09: Did Seth meet Ken?

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Sometimes the valuable nugget for me in Seth Godin’s blog post is not the main point. Sometimes it’s a tangential aside, and sometimes it’s just an automatic way of thinking that shows his point of view. In fact, in one post he referred to this as an accent in the way people speak, write, and act.

I was reading through the bullet points in Seth’s recent post titled Is it too late to catch up? which is about ways for companies that have not established a web presence to go digital and learn about online marketing. It wasn’t a particularly interesting topic to me so I was scanning, until I hit the last two bullet points:

• Don’t [have any meetings about your web strategy]. Just do stuff. First you have to fail, then you can improve.

• Refuse to cede the work to consultants. You don’t outsource your drill press or your bookkeeping or your product design. If you’re going to catch up, you must (all of you) get good at this, and you only accomplish that by doing it.

I added the brackets in the first one, because you can fill those brackets in with a lot of options and the wisdom still rings true.

“Don’t plan the format and structure of your blog for the next year. Just start blogging. First you have to fail; then you can improve.”

“Don’t fret over every sentence in the article you’re writing to post online. Just write it. First you have to fail; then you can improve.”

“Don’t memorize every possible variation you might encounter during a consulting session. Just have consulting sessions. First you have to fail; then you can improve”

I think Seth Godin may have been reading Ken Robert’s Mildly Creative blog post about the two-step process for making meaning. Ken tells us, “you can’t do anything with it until you make it.” [my note: “it” = whatever you’re creating or doing]

The second bullet point above, the last from Seth’s long list, will totally upend the worlds of most coaches and other consulting types I know. We have been trained relentlessly from all sides that it’s better to hire someone to do the web stuff unless we are highly technical and web oriented. We’ve been told not to waste our time on it because we can outsource it and spend our time in better ways.

But now I’m thinking of a coaching friend who isn’t sure if her blog is updated because she sent material to her VA but doesn’t know when it will be posted. Hmmm…

Maybe it’s good to have help doing the online marketing, but it’s important to know how to do it ourselves if we need to. Marketing is the number one activity of most successful businesses, right?

Kind of goes along with that first point.

First you have to fail; then you can improve.

I really love that one.

Play is Life

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I am reading the book Play: How It Shapes the Brain, Opens the Imagination, and Invigorates the Soul by Stuart Brown, M.D. It’s shifting my perspective and filling in a lot of the blanks for me about life design and my own natural way of being. This is likely to be one of the defining moments of my life, like first learning about Jungian analytical psychology, or having my first course in play therapy, or finding my three creative self-employment muses, Valerie Young, Barbara Winter, and Barbara Sher.
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AWAI Online 11-03-09

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Serendipity again! This time the person pointing me to the exact information I need is, most appropriately, Barbara Winter, the Joyfully Jobless Muse.

I am presenting a series of three calls for the Outside the Job Box Career Experts Program on amplifying and honing your Vision for your business, identifying the Goals that take you to fulfilling your Vision, and breaking Goals into Next Steps with Accountability. I spent the time at my son’s soccer practice last night thinking about how to help the consultants stay focused on the core of their business design and their priorities for being self-employed.

This new framework I’m developing started a month or so ago. I was trying out new tag lines for my coaching business and kept coming back to the metaphor of a journey and the importance of the compass.

Barbara Winter posted a chirp (or is it twirp?) on Twitter today with a link to a great blog post on AWAI Online from June. The post is ”Make Your Business Your Compass” by Isabel Viana.

Thanks, Barbara. Now I have another great resource to share with the consultants, and with anyone who pulls over for a rest stop here On The Twisting Road.

Ken’s Mild Things 10-23-09

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Ken is a writer. He doesn’t always know that. He says he wants to be a writer, and that he is establishing the habits of a writer by writing or at least doing something creative every day. But I have no doubt. Ken is a writer. Read this snippet and see that I’m right. While you’re at his Ken and Paper blog, leave him a comment.

Then click over to Mildly Creative and see how diverse Ken is as a writer. In addition to having a gift for storytelling and poetry (also to be found at Ken and Paper), he is compiling a book to serve as a guide to people wanting to express their creativity. In the style of his open-to-the-public working studio, he is posting sections as he completes them. It’s part of his process of evaluating his writing and deciding how to polish it. Start here with the first section and then follow the links at the end to the next one.