The Real Lance Brown

Facebook was giving away $50 in free ads to lure folks into trying Facebook Ads, and I took the bait. My ad’s not running yet, but here’s what I have so far:

I want to optimize the Hire Me page that I’m going to be sending people to before I launch the ad, but I hope to debut it next week sometime. I’m doing pay-per-click with a bid of $1.00 per click. So I should get 50 free visits to the page from this deal.

I was in a rush to get the ad ordered before the $50 coupon ran out, so this isn’t the most professionally-crafted thing I’ve done. I just used an existing pic…but I do like how the “Need a hand?” line happens to fit with my hand-waving self-pic. :-)

What do you think? I still have time to tweak or change it before it “airs”. (Before you ask, their limit didn’t allow the full word “with” in the headline. All I could fit was “wit”, so I went with the shorthand version instead.)

I’ve been digging around in my archive of voice recordings, which is one reason why I haven’t been posting quite as much as I should here. (A power outage and a major toothache are the other reasons.)

Even though it always feels odd and indulgent, I have to force myself to work my way through those files, and I took out a good swath of them in this recent session. (You can read more about my ongoing battle with my voice recordings here.) I got through the 300 most recent recordings in my “C” (for “Creative”) folder, which amounts to the most recent 8 months worth of recordings.

So now, when it comes to my “C” folder, I am caught up to early 2006 on the far end and mid-2010 on the near end–leaving about 4 and a half years worth left to go. (And about 4 and a half years worth completed so far.) The good news is that at least half of that has been done in the past few months…which means that when I really buckle down and get into it, I can get through this giant backlog over time.

(I store different sorts of things in other folders in my voice recorder – business and/or politics in “B”, to-do items in “A”, and various things in “D” and “E”. But “C/creative” is the most populated over the past 5 years, by far.)

Those 300 recordings that I just finished sorting consisted of a wide range of stuff, though very heavy on the first four here:

• songs – spoken/lyrics only
• songs on the keyboard recorded “live”
• many “silly dog songs”*
• jokes and ideas for stand-up comedy
• new screenplay/movie ideas
• sketch and short video ideas
• drafts of my columns, some which have been finished/published, others still drafts
• same thing, but for my The Little Things comics
• several ideas for small situations or concepts for within movies
• an essay about walking in the dark
• an e-book about being a responsible pet owner
• social media blog post ideas
• various loose ideas for several of my existing screenplay projects

*We’ll get into why I am collecting “silly dog songs”, and why I record almost all my ideas, in another post.

Listening to all these things in rapid succession provides a dizzying rush, and a nice reminder of the reality behind what I’m trying to build in my life. There is certainly an aspect to my backlog of ideas/recordings that could be seen as unfortunate or even sad, but for me they are only problematic if they aren’t under control somehow.

Having thousands of unsorted (and effectively unknown, since most of my recordings sound like fresh ideas when I finally get back to them) ideas, songs, writings, and potential projects just sitting in masses, with generic names like “DM420511″ and “C0000033.VOC” is the very picture of untapped potential. But once I go through and revisit them, naming and sorting them into my ever-growing folders titled “non-fiction”, “movies, shows, and screenplays”, “songs”, and so on…it changes their nature in a key way. (See the pic above for an idea of my main folder categories. [Note: "Animal noises" is actual recordings of animal noises, out in the woods...not me making various animal noises. Just for the record.])

It’s one thing to wave vaguely at 8,000+ recordings and say, “There are tons of song ideas in there that I’ve recorded over the years”–and not be able to effectively point at an actual example of such a thing, because all the song ideas are buried in piles 100-deep or deeper with all sorts of other ideas, all in the exact same brown paper packaging. It’s a very different thing  to point to a “songs’ folder that has dozens of ideas sorted into genres, albums, and type (i.e., lyrics vs full-on recordings, finished ideas vs. snippets).

Of course, it’s a different thing again to actually get all those ideas manifested into completed things that I put out into the world, but I don’t mind the slow-and-steady approach. I’m taking a long-game view of all this. Which is fine, as long as progress is being made.

The plan at this point is to continue sorting through the masses of backlogged “Creative” files, in a quest to ferret out all my notes on my main ongoing screenplay projects. (Because I have been using the excuse of not having all those notes together as a way to avoid finishing those projects for years now.) And while I slog my way through them–which is actually really fun to do, to the point of feeling indulgent, as I mentioned earlier–I am working on putting the machinery in place to actually get my ideas into production as the sorting gets finished up.

And listening to the ideas themselves, knowing all the things that I have waiting for me as I take my efforts to the next level, really fuels my energy for getting things in place to make sure I can start making more of my outrageous dreams come true.

I might share a small sample of what I’ve been mining from my voice recording archives; I’m not sure. Most of it is rough, by its nature. And I have a habit of thinking things are great that I later think are really dumb. Which actually is one nice thing about the fact that most of my ideas have sat dormant for years…I’ve had time to grow up some and now can see many of them as the crap they are. :-)

I know I’ve gone on a lot about this, but don’t worry, I’ll go on more about it later. My voice recorder has been such a huge and integral part of my creative process for so long, that I think it’s important to let people know about the potential of using one religiously. And I’ve been learning more lately about how the use of the tool, and my freeflow method of capturing things, has paid creative dividends over the years.

Until recently, it’s been hard to discuss the so-called benefits, because it really seemed like my recordings were getting the best of me. But I have knocked out a tremendous amount of them in the past year, and can now see a time where they might all be at least named and sorted, if not yet transcribed and fully realized.

Once they’re sorted and assessed, they can be dealt with in an intelligent and informed way. I’ll know just how many songs there are, and what type. I’ll have all the notes gathered for my screenplay ideas. I’ll have a list of all the stand-up jokes I have in draft form. And literally hundreds of other ideas will be corralled, and ready to be tamed completely.

It might sound like only a slightly-better mega-pile of unfinished stuff to you, but to me it sounds like heaven.

I’m all about learning, and not so much about school, which means that online education is good cheese by me. I seldom go so far as to absorb whole courses online, but I’ve been educating myself on the web for 15 years now. And I’m pretty brilliant. So there’s that.

A site called Bachelor’s Degree Online has been kind (and savvy) enough to compile 100 Free and Useful Open Courseware Classes for Web Workers–full-blown courses on a fairly comprehensive range of subjects, grouped into the various disciplines that a web worker might need to tackle.

About 75% of these courses are from MIT, which has been putting courses on the web for a while now. You may have heard of MIT. It purportedly does not suck.

So go get educated then already! And I don’t expect to hear “I’m bored” from you for at least a year.

Got more free education for our readers? Drop some knowledge in the comments!

If you have a locally-based business, this is a great and really easy way to get more local traffic to your site, and it can also be an excellent way to make nice personal connections with businesses that might become customers or referrers one day.

The concept is simple: if you have a locally-based business, make a place on your site where you link to all the businesses that are nearby (and that have websites).

Here’s how it goes:

1. Look around or walk around or somehow find out the names of all the businesses near you. How you define “near you” is your call. One local client of mine had about 40 businesses within a block or so. That’s a great start. You can reach out as far as you want—just have a sense of what “neighborhood” you’re compiling. It could be a block or an office building, or it could be a whole town or a county. You’ll want to do them in reasonably-sized portions, whatever your range.
2. You may want to narrow your list down, and pick your targets based on an estimate of their likelihood of “paying off”. I discourage taking that approach–though it couldn’t hurt to at least make sure you’re putting your best effort into the better bets. Still, you never know what might come from reaching out, even it’s to Grandma Smith’s Sewing Shop. And part of this exercise is about using old-school relationship-style marketing, and when translated to your neighboring businesses, that means being friendly to everyone you can. So if they have a website, I say keep them on the list unless there’s a good reason not to.
3. Find websites for all of the businesses on your list that you can. As you add them to a links page on your site (or a text file on your computer), note down contact info for the business in question. (Email, phone, address, owner or manager’s name, etc.)
4. Post the links on your site. There are two main ways to deal with that:
   1. The easiest is to create a links page and just add whatever links you want to it. (Or use WordPress’s Links function to add your links, and a links page plugin to display them.) If you use a links page, make sure you add a link to that page somewhere in the common navigation areas of your site. Some marketers might say you could just have your links page exist without cluttering up your menus with a “Links” button. Those same folks implicitly would be thinking that links pages are a thing of the past, and they’d probably think of your links page as simply a chance to bleed away visitors who will never be seen again.
      I disagree on all counts. It’s true that links pages have been around since the earliest days of the web, but this is still the Internet, and people still want to get pointed to other cool places. And the idea that you lose people from linking off of your site is 99% myth. So if you have a links page, make it a full partner in your site. You can stick the link to it down with the bottom-of-the-page links if you want, rather than up in your main navigation. But don’t just create the page and leave it lonely and untethered from your site. That’s cheesy, and it undermines the genuineness of the connection you are trying to make with these other human beings, your neighbors.
   2. Another option, if you a) only have a blog or b) have a lot of empty sidebar space, or 3) don’t want to have a links page for whatever reason, is to post your links “blogroll”-style–i.e., in a list in your right or left sidebar. If you have both sides available, do the right. And put it below other primary stuff in your sidebar. That will make it the least emphasized of all your sidebar stuff–but even still, you will be giving very prominent props to the folks on your blogroll.
      If you have a lot of links, or are concerned about giving up that much real estate, you could use a plugin to rotate your links on a page-by-page basis, showing just one or five or ten links at a time. (That could make it tougher for your linkees to go see their link, since it would be rotating randomly around the site, but if it’s a good fit otherwise, then it might be the way to go.)
      If you really want to get friendly with some other places with websites, putting them in a blogroll/links list that shows up in the sidebar on all or most of your pages is a very generous gesture, and if they are web-aware at all, they will realize as much, and most likely feel indebted or at least grateful.
5. Once you have posted the links on your site and your blogroll or links page is looking good, then you get in touch with your newly-linked neighbors. How you go about that is up to you–you could stop by in person, call on the phone, or send an email. You’ll have to go with your gut on that. Obviously each has a different time commitment, and will be received differently.
   I would go for at least a phone call probably, but it does depend on who you’re dealing with on the other end. It might be that an email is all you can do to try and reach the person who will care. But if you are looking for an excuse to get some face time with your fellow neighborhood business owners, I think this makes for a great opportunity/excuse to make it happen.
6. When you tell them about the link, do not ask for a link back. Do not try and sell them anything. Do not try and give them your card unless they ask. This is important. Break this rule and you risk spoiling the whole thing. You are not doing this for easily measurable cost/benefit-based reasons, so don’t bother trying to make it “pay off”. This doesn’t mean don’t engage in conversation or even strut your stuff if asked, but your mission is simply to drop by and let them know that you did something nice for them, “just because you’re my neighbor and we’re both business owners, and it was an easy way to maybe point a few people in your direction every now and then.”
   Paraphrase what I just said there, and if they don’t say anything else after they say “Thank you” or “OK”, then bid them a courteous goodbye and call it good. (Let them know how they can find your site and their link on it also, of course.) Don’t make sales moves of any sort on them, and don’t try and get anything out of it other than making contact with another human being. If they want to go forward in business with you, they will let you know.
7. Now, wait for the piles of money to start pouring in! Just kidding. You will get some links back, though. That’s pretty much guaranteed. (And those will pay off over time.) And you will definitely be more at the forefront of those neighbors’ minds for the next while. If they didn’t know you existed before, they will probably look for you, and if they did know you existed, they will think more vividly of you when they walk or drive by every day. Because you will be the nice neighbor who did a nice thing for them, just to be nice. And not that many people do that these days.
   Trust me, with a few of your neighbors, this little gesture will make a big difference in these modern times of detachment and increasing isolation. And while they themselves might not need a lawyer or hair stylist or whatever it is that you do, they probably know other people in the world. And some of those people will need your services (or will have what you need), and your neighbor buddy might be the one who is in the position to connect you when the time comes.

This is “Networking 101″ stuff here, but it can be easy to forget how simple it is to make a new personal connection that could help your business (and your heart and spirit and stuff too).

It can also be easy to forget that your website doesn’t have to always be focused on “way out there”; something as simple as a list of neighboring business websites on a links page can get you traffic, referrals, and maybe even new lifelong friends! (Remember back when people made friends with other people in their neighborhood? Me neither really, but it’s in all those old TV shows, so it’s definitely a real thing.)

By the way, most of these principles can be applied to making a links page or blogroll even if you aren’t locally-based. You just define your “neighborhood” differently–by industry (horizontally and/or vertically), or by common interests, etc. If you reach out this way to folks around the Internet, treat it just the same, in terms of making a real personal connection. Don’t make it generic and impersonal just because you’re emailing or calling someone far away.

And do not–I repeat, do not–ask for a link back. (Don’t suggest it, don’t half-ask for it–don’t even mention it.) It won’t increase your chances of getting one, it will increase your chances of not getting one, and it destroys all the positive vibeage that you are trying to manifest, because it turns you into someone who’s trying to use them under the guise of helping them, and that just feels slimy and lame.

Link freely and with genuine neighborly love, and you will get dividends back, don’t worry.

Or at least maybe a nice plate of brownies or something.

Do you have a neighbor-linking success story to share? Well then share it, yo! (In the comments, yo.)

From SFWeekly.com, a cool article about working hard to live the dream in the new media age.

Just Tweet It

Wallpaper.’s Eric Frederic is an unstoppable viral music producer. But can the incessant songwriting, video blogging, and booty tweeting make him a star?

Read the article: San Francisco Music – Just Tweet It.

There are a huge–theoretically infinite–number of home-based business opportunities these days. Inc.com’s slideshow highlights 11 examples that show the range of options pretty well. If you don’t have one of these skill sets or interests, then at least seeing how others have converted their aptitudes and interests into viable, freedom-imbued, home-based careers can give you leads on how you might do the same for yourself.

11 Businesses You Can Start In Your Pajamas in 2009 | Inc.com.