Believe none of what you see
Much has been made of various attempts at illustrating how distorted our sense of self-image is (especially for women’s self-image) by the trade media using programs like Photoshop. However, if you truly want to blow up someone’s preconceptions about how manipulated everything is, there’s no better way to do it than to do it yourself.
If you have Photoshop or access to it, fire it up and pick a good image of yourself. Like most things, the better the source image (from a technical perspective), the easier it is to manipulate. For fun, we’ll use author Julien Smith’s photo that I shot at Podcasters Across Borders. I want to emphasize that I am not a Photoshop professional. I’m at best an amateur who can Google and follow directions. Everything we do in this little example is something you can do with almost no training besides learning where the individual menu items are.
The authentic Julien Smith
To start, hit three buttons: Auto Tone, Auto Contrast, Auto Color. This will fix up 90% of photographs. Remember that at any time, you can hit undo if a change isn’t quite as good as you’d hoped.
Next, hit up the spot healing brush tool and click on any blemishes or skin imperfections. With just one tool, you can change someone’s appearance fairly drastically, if subtly.
Julien minus minor imperfections
Next, let’s make him clean shaven. We’ll hit up the Dust & Scratches box and simply melt them away by making 2 layers and “painting” over his stubble with the blurred layer.
Julien minus stubble
Now let’s get into some truly warped things. We’ll apply puppet warp to his face, pin down all the sections we don’t want to move, and adjust his jawline. This step is so easy that a six year old can do it.
Bone warp!
So in just a few clicks, we’ve altered reality significantly enough that the photo of Julien is no longer an accurate representation of that moment or of him generally. Doing bone warps changes the actual geometry of his bone structure, something that only drastic surgery could do.
The enhanced Julien Smith
Want to empower someone – including yourself – to understand how absolutely false our perceptions of body image are? Learn these simple tricks in Photoshop, try them out if you can, and then any time you see a photo of someone, look carefully at it. Ask yourself which of these techniques were used (I guarantee at least one, if not more, in every media publication), and realize that pretty much everything you see on the cover of a magazine is fake and has been manipulated.
Even better, teach your kids how to do this and then make a game of spotting the tricks when they see photos of celebrities and other pop culture icons. The secret of this is the same as a stage magician: once you learn how the trick is done and can do it yourself, it loses all of its power over you. You realize it’s just a cheap parlor trick, some digital sleight of hand, so simple that you and your kids can do it. That realization shatters the perception of perfection that the media outlets and appearance-based industries desperately want you to buy into.
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How to get started with affiliate marketing
Lots of people want to make a little extra money, and affiliate marketing is one of the simplest (remember that simple != easy) ways to go about doing it. If you’re interested in adding some beer money to your bottom line, consider getting started in affiliate marketing. Here’s a step by step tutorial on getting started with one of the most well-known and reliable programs: Amazon Associates.
Amazon will pay you around 4% of any item’s sale price for stuff that’s sold through your tracking links. Obviously, unless you can sell a whole bunch of MacBook Pros, this is going to be solely in the realm of beer money and not mortgage money, but every little bit helps.
Take note that you don’t need anything other than a mailing address and basic financial information to sign up – no inventory to manage, no having to do anything other than recommend stuff you like.
You’ll start by signing up for a free account. Once you’ve gone through the basic account process setup, it’s time to start putting together things you want to talk about.
When it comes to affiliate marketing, or any marketing for that matter, your best bet for long term success is to market things you already use, love, and want to talk about, things you’d recommend even if you weren’t getting paid. Why? From time to time as an affiliate marketer, you’ll get customers of your affiliate program asking you about products – and if you own them, you can help them. You can also make honest, true recommendations about the products and services you market because you already own and use them.
Once you’re signed up, create an aStore – one of my favorite ways to showcase the things you want to talk about and share. Use Amazon’s built in guide to get going, by setting up a tracking code:
Then by adding products individually or by category to your store:
After you’ve picked the things you want to market, configure the store to wear your colors and logos. When done, hit publish and your store is live and available to the world:
Now you’ve got your own electronic store online without a square inch of inventory or real estate.
Decide how you want to share it – with a simple standalone link, or embedded on your web site/blog.
You’ll also notice when you’re browsing Amazon and logged in that there is now an affiliate toolbar above each product or service. This gives you quick links to use for things like newsletters or blog posts. Any time you reference an Amazon product, you should use these links rather than just the URL of the page.
Don’t be lazy! Use these links for the extra few seconds it will take you to copy and paste them rather than the URL in your browser. Why? One of the great benefits of Amazon is that if someone reaches the site during their session from one of your links, everything they buy during that session counts towards your affiliate marketing profits.
For example – and this is real – one of my referral fees from this quarter was for condoms. I don’t market or refer to them anywhere on any of my digital properties (except for this post, I guess), but because someone bought them while browsing Amazon from one of my links to a different product, I get credit and $1.11 in referral fees.
Incidentally, this is also some interesting market research to tell you what else your existing customers like.
Affiliate programs are a great way to start earning some beer money, some extra cash, and if you find you have a knack for it, you can earn a lot more than beer money in time, but this tutorial and guide should help you get started with your first program and help you decide if you enjoy affiliate marketing.
Good luck, and please let me know your results in the comments.
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10 ideas for your monthly reboot
Every month, I typically start with a few tweets to friends and followers asking if you’ve cleaned out your inbox. Generally, I like to say that if you haven’t read mail from the first of the previous month, just archive it now since you’re not getting to it. However, my monthly maintenance routine is slightly more detailed than that. Here’s what I do around the first of each month; perhaps you have a routine that helps to boost your productivity, too.
1. Archiving old mail. I follow my own advice here and archive everything I know I’m not getting to.
2. Mark all as read. Once I’ve done my morning reading (I typically read for about 90 minutes every morning), I’ll flush out everything and hit Mark all as read in my blog readers. Stuff that’s older and laying around rapidly loses its value anyway.
3. Delete old syndications. I’m subscribed to a lot of podcasts and other digital downloads. I flush out the old ones each month, whether or not I’ve read/watched/listened.
4. Remove barely used or unused apps. This is something relatively new. I go through my apps on my iPad and pull ones that I downloaded that looked cool or something. If I really want them, I can always grab them out of the cloud again, but I do place a premium on a relatively uncrowded iPad.
5. Organize my hard drive. Each month, cruft accumulates, from PDFs and text files to data dumps to office memos. This both slows down my machine and slows down my brain, so I get stuff into folders and get the desktop clear.
6. FULL BACKUP. No excuses. I have a small portable 1 TB hard drive that I do all my backups on. Backups are one of those things you just leave overnight and the next day, you’re done.
7. Full hard drive defrag. I find this really speeds things up for me on my Mac.
8. On the topic of blogs, I remove any that I haven’t read that month and search out five new blogs to subscribe to every month. This is absolutely essential, because if you just keep reading the same stuff over and over again, you stagnate.
9. Review and purge my to do list. Stuff always accumulates in there that I know I’m not going to do. Every month, a good bunch of it heads for the digital dumpster.
10. Desk clearing. Those few folks who have been to my physical office space in metrowest Boston know that it’s not a large office. To the extent that I can throw away anything non-essential, I do.
Those are my 10 things that I do at the start of each month in order to create conditions conducive to productivity. What do you do as part of your regular monthly reboot routine?
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New Year’s Resolutions 30 Day Trial
It’s nearly December 1, which means that in just over a month, everyone and their cousin will be trying to change their ways for the better with New Year’s resolutions.
Resolutions are a tricky thing. On the one hand, significant dates on the calendar are a great excuse to make changes you might not otherwise be motivated to make, and lots of other people will be seeking to make change as well. On the other hand, attempting significant change normally requires some level of planning, which most people don’t do after the ball drops and the clocks change; the result is usually rapid failure.
So how do you take advantage of the energy of change without the associated planning failure? Here’s a simple suggestion: use the month of December to do a 30 day trial of your upcoming resolutions. Want to lose weight, quit smoking, etc.? Try it out in December and “debug” your resolution, so that you can work out all of the operational issues in advance.
For example, say you want to lose weight. The 30 day trial period will let you figure out how that goal will impact your finances and daily schedule. When during the average day will you have time to work out? What foods will you have to remove from your regimen, and what foods will you have to add? Try things out and see what works and what doesn’t for you, so that when resolutions season kicks off, you’ll be far less discouraged by bumps in the road than in previous years.
By doing the resolution trial run in December, you’ll also know it’s durable. After all, if a resolution of any kind can survive Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, Christmas, Ashura, and a variety of other occasions, then you know it’s going to survive the rest of the year.
The 30 day trial period is also a great time to do your research. For example, let’s say in the weight loss example above that finances are an issue, and you can’t afford a gym membership. Instead of that killing your resolution outright (as it often does in the early days of January), you can go Googling for fitness workouts that don’t require equipment beyond common everyday objects, then try them out.
Here’s the only rule of the 30 day trial period: you must pick one resolution and commit to debugging it for all 30 days. If you decide that in 2012 one of your key changes will be weight loss, then you must find a working methodology for yourself in December. You’re not allowed to change on December 12 to a different resolution, because you won’t be giving yourself nearly enough time to research and work around roadblocks.
Take today and tomorrow to make up your mind about the one thing that must change about you in 2012 and then on December 1, begin your 30 day trial and debugging period!
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Not another dime: a protest that works
Please consider the following:
- Local Governments, Churches, Community Groups, Prominent Business Men And Others Are All Divesting From Big, Corrupt Banks
- Bank customers flee to credit unions
- Massive pile of news results about closing bank accounts
This, ladies and gentlemen, is the protest that works.
This is the protest that actually wakes up the powers that be.
This is the protest that generates results, that generates real change.
It’s the protest that says:
I do not believe in you, therefore I do not do business with you. Not another dime until you change your ways.
You want to change corporate America? Do not do business with companies you don’t believe in. You don’t like X company’s labor practices or wage practices or environmental practices? Don’t buy another thing from them. Find someone else. This is the age when you can Google for nearly everything and probably find 5 alternatives online that are cheaper, better quality, or more environmentally friendly.
You want to change the rule of big banks? Do not lend them your money. Find a local credit union or community bank and bank with them instead. Check out mycreditunion.gov to find one near you, then go close your account with the big bank and do business elsewhere.
You want to change the tone and tenor of Washington politics? Do not give a dime to any candidate running for office, period, because the electoral system is funded by individual donations as well as large companies. You want to make real change happen with your money? Skip the political candidate and donate to the local food pantry instead.
On a big picture level, the ballot box certainly is one of the most powerful tools that a citizen of a country (if they have the right to democratically elect their leadership) has access to. But on a day to day basis, there’s an even more powerful tool: your wallet. Make conscious choices about what you believe in and support those choices with your money. Encourage others to do so as well. You don’t need to convince everyone, just 4-5 friends and colleagues to make similar choices.
When you choose to stop doing business with someone, let them know why. Send them an email. Post it on their facebook page. Write up a blog post. Say to them very publicly and succinctly, with substantiation or citation of the facts you used to make your decision, here is why I am not giving you another dime. Hashtag it #notanotherdime or something like it so that others can see you and join you.
As evidenced by the powerful protests above, it does work.
Disclosure: I’ve been banking with a credit union since 2001. I do not hold investments outside of index funds in any banks.
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What to really worry about as a marketer
Sometimes you’ll do something that people will love, and life is wine and roses. People shower you with accolades, call you all sorts of very complimentary things, and business booms.
Sometimes you’ll do something that people will hate, and it seems like everything you own is on fire. People call you all sorts of very unflattering things, business might take a hit, and life feels like a very rocky road.
Both of these are okay. Both of these are good. Both of these show that people still feel something towards you, and it’s up to you to take that energy and direct it, shape it, focus it, and wield it to the best possible outcome.
In Buddhism, we use the symbol of the lotus flower for enlightenment not because it’s beautiful, but because it typically grows in piles of crap. From a very literal pile of crap, we can still get beauty. You can still take negative feedback and work to transform it into something positive for your marketing.
When you should worry is when no one cares. When you announce something and you don’t get fan mail or hate mail. When you send a newsletter and no one opens it. When your website hits a 100% bounce rate and no one’s sharing with their networks. The opposite of sweet or sour or bitter isn’t another flavor, it’s the absence of flavor entirely.
As long as your audience, your customers, your friends, your fans are giving you some kind of feedback, you’ve still got something to work with. When that’s gone, it’s time to throw in the towel and reboot. Don’t worry too much about sentiment being positive or negative.
Worry if anyone cares.
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