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Sell Your Strengths
In close to 15 years of small business startup consulting, I have noticed many patterns that are repeated over and over. You get a feel for success – who will do it and who will not, and what kinds of things work, and which are not likely to do so. Much of what I teach, I repeat over and over, in different ways, just trying to help people center themselves on principles that are honest and solid. The get-rich-quick mentality is hard to subdue in most people (even myself), and the lure of the exotic often pulls people from what they KNOW, to what they do not, with the hope that maybe what they do not know will prove better than what they do know.
So… here I go again. You’ve probably heard much of this before from me if you’ve ever heard me talk about starting a business. I keep repeating it for those who do not know – because they outnumber the people who do!
So… first off… the get rich quick thing. The rules are the same today as they always were, from time immemorial. The internet has not changed the rules, it has only increased the type of scams available.
- Trust your gut. If something sounds too good to be true, it is. Don’t let greed overpower common sense, don’t ever tell yourself “It is only $29.95, if it ends up being a fraud I haven’t lost much.” If you lose $29.95 that is money you could have used for something real.
- If you don’t walk away feeling like they answered ALL of your questions, don’t buy. If you can’t get hold of a real person, who will admit that there are people who should NOT do it, don’t buy.
- If it is presented on a long page with miles of text and “testimonials”, don’t buy. This is the traditional method used by scammers, half-scammers, and other people who know it does not work, but want your money enough that they’ll do it anyway.
- If it is a “system” don’t buy. It won’t work. Ever.
Now that we’ve cleared that out of the way, please don’t email me and tell me you’ve found a great new system you want me to check out “just in case”. It isn’t real either.
So what do you do? The people who do best do NOT go outside themselves to find a business that works. They go INSIDE themselves. They don’t work someone else’s system, they build their own product or service based on their own skills, strengths, and desires. DON’T let someone else place THEIR idea inside your head. Find your own. It is probably already inside you, and you are probably already moving in that direction.
- The best businesses are built on skills already possessed. It does not mean you don’t learn new things. It just means that you start with your existing strengths and build on those.
- The lowest cost businesses are those built on materials and resources already in hand. If you work with what you’ve already got, it is far less expensive than if you try to buy into something.
- Don’t let the “glamor” of someone else’s presentation of their life make you think that making or selling what you’ve always dabbled in has less success potential than their exaggerated representations. Most lives presented online are illusions (even mine), because nobody EVER shows the whole picture. They only show part of it. Even if they did show all of it, you would filter it through your own comprehension and still come out with something different than what their life really is. Don’t get caught up in peer envy. It can keep you from seeing the potential in yourself.
Brainstorm with a friend, or run it by a pro who knows the shoestring startup arena. Brainstorming has great power – nobody will tell you just the thing you need to do, they’ll all be busy telling you what THEY’D do. But their ideas generate a kind of energy in your brain and help you think outside yourself, which helps you hit on the right idea for yourself.
More and more of us are going to need to resort to generating income for ourselves, instead of relying on others to provide jobs for us. There are endless ways to do it, and endless choices. If you want to do it, go find the thing that is right for you.
Finding the Answer in Cottage Industry
Cottage Industry, as defined for purposes of this post, includes any kind of home manufacturing – where materials of one kind are turned into a product of another kind. This includes making parts, assembling parts into another product, making crafts, doing needlework, etc. It can be as complex as machining, and as simple as crocheted dishcloths.
This article is long, but it does explain something very cool. Something that our Nation is really ready for.
I believe in the power of the individual to create something better than a monster corporation can create it. I have long believed that the solution in hard economic times, for people who need employment that is rewarding and lucrative, is in the home, not in the factory or city. For the impatient, the fastest way to get predictable income, is to become an employee of someone else. But then you are also somewhat enslaved – you are subject to the rules, whims, and employment vagaries of someone else.
I love independence a bit too much to love employment. I’ve worked jobs, and done so well. But I don’t like it. I’d rather have ownership. I’d rather produce a homemade product that has character than work in a factory producing carefully calculated and electronically machined items that are stamped out at hundreds per second.
There is absolutely a place for the assembly line. But there is also a place and time to break free from it. I haven’t drawn any firm conclusions yet about the shape this will take with us. I’m still revolving the options around in my mind, but I have determined on a few things that I think are worth sharing.
I had always thought that if I invented something that I could make at home, eventually we’d reach the point where we had to contract with a manufacturing company for parts to be custom molded and milled, in order to keep costs affordable and in order to produce enough, fast enough. I’ve changed my mind on that. I think there may be a better way, and a better market to tap.
Most of our manufacturing has gone to China. This is a result of the mentality of having to reduce and reduce and reduce the costs of production to accommodate an ever increasing supply chain, and the costs attendant with it, coupled with increases in operational costs due to Unions and Taxes. The US is handicapped in the manufacturing sector, and is now dependent upon overseas suppliers, and the unpredictability that goes with it. That isn’t a good thing.
“Buy America” is NOT the answer.
“Build America” IS the answer.
So here is a potential business model – one we are working as I write this:
- Design something unique. Find a way to make it yourself.
- At first, you are going to spend quite a bit of time making each item, possibly using make-do equipment or tools. They can get better as you go, but be careful! Once you move to “commercial” production materials, costs increase exponentially. If you set a goal of NOT going into debt, you’ll be able to avoid that trap.
- Perfect the process for making it. Write down the steps. Get it worked out so that you can teach someone else how to do it.
- Assemble a materials kit – everything you need to make the item you are making. Create a training kit as well. If it is simple, and based on common skills, you can skip the next step. If the processes or tools require special knowledge or skills, you’ll need the next step.
- Hold a training camp. DON’T charge for it. DO pre-screen attendees for suitability. Train them in how to make the item you need, and train them in meeting your quality standards.
- From the attendees, select one or two to do a pilot program. Rent equipment to them for a low fee (do NOT look at this as a moneymaking opportunity – sales of your product is where your money comes from!). Sign a contract with them that they ONLY manufacture the item for YOUR company. Have a deposit on any rented equipment so you get it back if they quit. Agree on a set output per week or month. Pay them well enough for them to make a nice income if they do it fast and accurately. THEY pay for materials – you may supply them, but they pay for them (this is also NOT a money-making opportunity for you, you sell them to them at cost, or tell them where to get approved materials). They are sub-contractors, NOT employees. They own their own business, and manufacture something for you.
- Add more trained subcontractors as needed. Hold periodic training camps to train new prospects.
Now, there are people who will be terrified at this idea. They will feel that in doing this, they’ll be giving up their proprietary rights to someone else.
Don’t be so paranoid! Is there a risk that one of these hotshots will take the training and then go copycat? Of course! But they are going to do that anyway! Most people who are dishonest copycats don’t have the motivation to see it through – they think that having a hot product is enough. It is not! They are usually bad at marketing and actually competing with an established business. Most people whom you train will rather sell to you for a predictable income than to want to take on the marketing, additional costs, and additional time and hassle of direct selling the product, even if they can make more from each sale. That extra money is hard won!
If you watch, you’ll get a feel for those who are content with a predictable income stream, and those who have a more entrepreneurial spirit in them. They are usually easy to differentiate.
The potential here is that long term, you can be the means of not only keeping YOUR business in the country, but of helping dozens of small businesses get a firm foothold, while it benefits the growth of your own business. Your business stays comfortably small, but gains the income benefits of a much larger business.
So how can you do this affordably? There are a couple of keys to it:
- Setting your pricing for YOUR production at the start – in other words, base your sale price on what it costs you to manufacture when you start out – don’t decrease and decrease it if your costs go down, you may go broke without realizing it, and you eliminate the room for paying someone else, and get into a trap. As you go along, your production costs will drop as you learn to work faster and as you refine your processes – this is good, it means that you will be able to “split the difference”, and pay someone else less than it cost you to start, but a bit more than it cost you doing it yourself at your fastest. Don’t get sucked in by greed either – having to have it all. Share your bounty, enough is enough.
- Setting a fair price per hour for YOUR labor. Count that into your production costs, so you don’t run off feeling like you can’t subcontract because now your parts are going to cost twice as much (when all you are counting is the cost of materials).
- Pay a fair price to your subcontractors. This is tricky. You pay them BY THE PART, not by the hour. The faster they work, the more they make. So work out how many you were making per hour when you were in about the middle of the speed range, and base what you pay them on that. If they can make $15 per hour working at a moderate pace, they can probably make twice that once they learn to work really fast. If they choose not to work fast, that is their choice, you are not responsible for that choice. Just make sure that you provide a reasonable opportunity for good earnings. If you do, you’ll never lack for subcontractors.
There is plenty of room for this kind of business model. This is how things were done traditionally, and it worked for thousands of years. Our society has NOT outgrown it with the advent of assembly line production. You can take advantage of that in your business, by batch processing at specific stages and contracting single stage production tasks out to different individuals.
Think of what you can accomplish this way:
You can have a home business without having to “move up” to a factory. You can retain all those wonderful advantages of a home business.
You can provide those advantages to other people, and enrich our society by doing so – keeping parents in the home with their young children, giving opportunities to people who have been dropped from the job market but who are still good workers, and by encouraging independence and true performance based compensation.
You can get the government out of your business more than you can if you have employees. It is far more economical to run a business without employees than with. EVERYBODY benefits more in this kind of scenario.
You eliminate the supply chain from the cost equation. Most items double the price at multiple points along the distribution chain – raw material, shipped, refined material, shipped, manufactured part, shipped, distribution center, shipped, wholesaler, shipped, retailer, shipped, you. When you manufacture your own parts, you eliminate a LOT of steps and shipping, and markups. Maybe you have to pay twice as much to your subcontractors for the part as you would from a manufacturer, but at the same time, you are direct selling to your customers, so you can afford to do that and still make good money, whereas if you sold to the distribution center, you’d be making far less from it. Of course you also have marketing and other tasks, but overall, it is a win-win situation. You and your subcontractors take the place of multiple steps along the way, so you and your subcontractors can share the profit that those steps would normally siphon off. This assumes that you are purchasing refined goods to manufacture yourself.
This concept was originally discussed with a friend of mine who makes hair bows. An alternative to Direct Sales Companies, for other people to own a business and really profit well. I believe that this is what many people really want. They really just want a job to do at home that they can get paid for.
From the customer perspective, I also see that there is a growing market of people who would rather purchase a hand manufactured item with imperfections and irregularities than a more perfect looking one that has been imported from China.
Bigger isn’t better. Smaller is the trend that will save our nation economically.
Our company is now offering Cottage Industry Consulting.
Businesses You Can Start for Less than $50
Not once will you ever see me recommend buying one of those online systems that promises that you’ll make thousands each month. That is because packaged business “systems” simply do not work. What DOES work, is good old fashioned products or services. New twists on old ideas work fine, but the heart of it all is WORK. The less money you put in, the more WORK you have to put in.
Now that we got that out of the way, yes, there are things you can do for less than $50. But you are going to have to rely more on things you have on hand, recycled and repurposed items, and items scrounged at yard sales and swap meets, smart balancing of resources, and gaining the creative edge.
The following business options may not be terribly original. What is original is the way that you get started on a frugal budget. Not by investing hundreds or thousands in equipment and inventory, but by buying only what you need to get started, using workarounds and imperfect methods to get going. Once you get some cash coming in you can make things better.
Before I outline some of the options, I need to say that there are some concepts that make it work, or not work, which have to accompany the product.
- Smart spending. Don’t spend on anything that won’t increase your profits. A piece of equipment that makes things faster or more convenient for you than an old tin can and wooden spoon isn’t going to increase your profits. It will just cost you before you can afford it.
- Do the Math. If you have to buy small amounts to start, you are going to pay more for supplies, ingredients, and resale items. Make sure you can charge enough to actually make a profit at the prices you’ll have to pay to start. If you can’t, then you’ll have to save up a bit longer to get to the point of buying larger bulk. Taking a lower profit to start is fine. Getting in the hole is not!
- Turning Disadvantage to Advantage. Find the positive side to the imperfections. For example, if you use PayPal because you can’t afford another merchant account, then present that to your customers as a security advantage: “We use PayPal for your security. We never see your sensitive financial information, and you are protected by Buyer Protection.” This is perfectly true – you are just helping the customer focus on the advantage instead of the disadvantage. If something looks handmade, make handmade the selling point. If you can’t provide automation of everything in the order process, be personally accessible instead.
- Don’t enter a saturated market with the same old thing unless you have a really advantageous twist on it.
- Expect to work hard, and get your ducks in a row before you make a dime, and expect to be discouraged and feel like giving up at least a few times. That’s just business.
- You’ll need a printer to print your own business cards, and you’ll need some kind of web presence. You’ll have to get yourself known, and learn how to do that without annoying the socks off of everybody by shoving it in their face. These are things you can do, and learn.
- Don’t expect to do it all on your computer. Especially if you have a physical product. Expect to get out and shake hands, show up at farmer’s markets or business showcases. Expect to have to BE THERE a lot.
- Keep the recession in mind. People will still spend on small indulgences, practical necessities, sustainability and preparedness supplies, items to start or increase business income, frugality items (things to help them save money), and eco-conscious items (especially frugal ones). It probably isn’t the time to launch a new line of luxury teddy bears.
- The cheapest way to start a new product line or business is to piggy back it onto something else you are already doing. Hobbies, or existing product lines. You’ve already got supplies and materials.
- Avoid baby items, food preparation, herbal or cosmetic items, and other items with a high regulatory burden. They are prohibitively costly for budget startups.
- Don’t invest in a lot of inventory of supplies or resale items until you are certain they will sell. Keep your initial investment low, make a sample of several items and take pictures, then order or make on demand. Work out a way to get them out quickly after the customer orders. Make sure and tell them that the item is supplied on demand, and that there is an extra week of waiting for that. Accumulate inventory little by little according to highest demand.
Ok, so what kind of product or service can you do for less than $50? A surprising number of things, especially if you already have a bit of software on hand, such as Photo Editing software.
- Candles… but wait! What did I just say about entering a saturated market? True, it is. But it is a popular enough one that candles often sell because of WHERE they are, as much as who is selling them. There is also still room for creative ideas – shaped tea lights, creative molded scented candles, painted candles, and other awesome and wondrous creations. You can get 5 lbs of wax for about $25. The shipping is gonna cost you more than half of the price, so don’t compare prices without comparing shipping! You can also go to yard sales and get used candles for a quarter apiece, and recycle the wax. Be careful about scents if you do that! You won’t be able to know what kind of wax they are made from either, which may or may not be important. Scent and dye cost about $5 to get in the door for each. Wicking will cost you another couple of bucks. You can use a clean tin can and pot of water for a double boiler, and an old wooden spoon. There are all kinds of creative molding ideas online, or you can use recycled glass jars, obtained from yard sales, second hand shops, or scrounged up around your house.
- Other things with wax. Pinecone firestarters, furniture polish, emergency heat, dyed arts and crafts that use wax to prevent certain areas from being dyed. Google any of these things and you can find ways to make them.
- Fabric, yarn, and thread crafts. These can be sold on a custom order basis, or made and put onto a mall like Etsy. eBay probably is not the best venue for hand-made items, they tend to sell for pennies on the dollar, and you usually barely make the cost of materials. You can often find usable fabrics through second hand stores and at yard sales. Don’t overlook sheets and curtains as potential fabrics that can be obtained cheap. Patterns can be found free online, and equipment is often cheap through yard sales, estate sales, and second hand shops, or eBay.
- Pinecone Bird feeders and ornaments, or other types of hanging objects. Again, Google them, you’ll find ideas. Natural items seem to sell really well right now.
- Fold Up Solar Ovens. Can be made from recycled cardboard, you only pay for glue and foil. Do a quality job, and you can sell them for about $8-10. Make some nice instruction sheets to go with them. They sell great at gun shows. This is an eco-conscious product, a preparedness product, and an outdoors camping and hiking product.
- Self-Publish. If you can do the writing, editing, and typography (making the layout look nice) yourself, and if you can create a reasonable cover design, you can self-publish through a Print On Demand company with no financial investment other than the cost of a book proof. If you are e-publishing, it won’t even cost you that. You’ll have to get out and hawk the book – it won’t sell itself. But you’d have to do that with anything else too! How-to books, novels, specialty cookbooks, all kinds of options here.
- Rabbits. Assuming you can build a cage from materials on hand or salvaged items (our first cages were built from recycled chicken wire, refrigerator shelves for the bottoms, and some OSB and 2X4s that we had on hand, much of it salvaged). You can purchase meat rabbits for about $10 each. A buck and a doe will do to start – be aware though, that you do need a cage for each of them. Rabbit feed is about $15, for 50 lbs. Rabbits can also eat a lot of leftover and scrap fresh veggies, grass, clover, and many kinds of weeds. They are eaters of greens, just introduce new foods slowly, and you can feed them from mostly fresh foods in the spring, summer, and fall. Grass is important – if you give them grass you won’t need much hay (make hay available to them at all times during the winter, and as nesting material). You’ll have to keep them for a few months before they are old enough to breed, so feeding is a major issue (meat rabbits are sold at about 9-12 weeks, and they are not ready to breed until around 5-8 months). A single bag of feed can last anywhere between a month and a half, and four months, depending on how much else you are feeding them. Options for selling them depends on the breed, and what you are selling them for. If you are raising meat rabbits to sell, reducing the cost of feeding them is important, and ample home crops can really make that affordable. Other breeds may be more lucrative, but you’ll need breeding stock – which is more expensive for other breeds, and you’ll have to breed them more carefully. New Zealand and Californians are two of the most affordable startup stock. We recommend Californians. They seem more hardy, and have a distinctive hefty muscling structure and lighter bones that is dominant in most crosses (meaning that you’ll get those advantages even if you breed a Californian to a mutt).
- Wood Pallet Furniture. Again, plenty of designs online, and pallets are often available on Craigslist to come and pick up. The wood is usable most of the time. It can be used weathered, or sanded down (lightly to show grain or heavily to pretty it up). If you already have tools on hand, you’ll just need nails or screws. Be creative about your design, to come up with simple ways to make things that sell well. Simple things often sell better than difficult ones, because the price is more affordable. There’s a place for complex items selling for hundreds or thousands of dollars, but to start, keep it simple, and make quick things that sell fast so you can get cash flow going. Campy looking things and rustic items really go over well with Pallet items, but there are also some amazing things made with pallet lumber cleaned up, sanded, finished and polished and looking spanking new. Pallets can be made into trendy urban farm items also – chicken coops, beehives, hutches, planter boxes, raised beds, fencing, feeders, and more.
- Creative Plantings. Either as a service, or as ready to go planters. Again, you use recycled items and cheap items found at yard sales and second hand shops. Pallet Planters, gutter planters (made from leftover gutters), creative pots and containers – old shoes, anything that can be hung with plants stuck in them. Vertical gardens especially are very popular right now, and if you can supply cute and original items with a hanger on the back and a plant already in them and thriving, people will buy them locally. You’ll have to get out to Farmer’s markets, and talk to local stores that might carry them. If you start the seeds yourself, you are only in for the cost of the seeds and potting mix ($15 should do it if you are frugal). If you have a flair for it, you can probably find things around your house to get started, but failing that, go out yard saling with a $5 bill in your pocket, with a goal of coming home with some amazing stuff. Old boots still make charming planters…
- Green crops from the farm. Ok, so what if you have nothing more than a house or apartment in town? There is a creative market for a few items that you can grow in that environment. Wheatgrass, microgreens, sprouts, potted herbs, and other crops may be grown in very small spaces. The key to this one is two things: Selling at Farmer’s Markets is one option. A Route is another – build up a clientele to whom you make regular deliveries. This will work best if it is a natural outgrowth of sales at a Farmer’s Market. Ask each purchaser “Would you like to have this delivered to you on a regular basis?” Or make a brochure and hand it around, make it available when you sell your homegrown items. Any of these items can be started with little more than trays (or a homemade sprouter), potting soil for microgreens or wheatgrass, and some zip baggies to package microgreens or sprouts. Wheatgrass sells in the tray. A 6X6″ tray sells for around $4 in the grocery stores. There’s room for competition there!
Ideas are a dime a dozen, there are SO many things you can do that can be started cheaply. You may wonder why I’m pushing real products, instead of internet stuff. Experience. My most successful clients in more than a dozen years of working with small online businesses, were the ones with a real product or service. They didn’t have AdSense websites (though I had a few winners there back in the day when they paid more than a penny a click), they didn’t sell “reports”, they didn’t sell Internet Marketing garbage, and while a few (myself included) made a few dollars on the side through affiliate marketing, not one ever made a fortune at it, or even a living at it.
These hard working people were consultants, graphic designers, coaches, gift retailers, personal care manufacturers, musicians and artists. People with real skills, real products and services. Unique things that lasted.
Statistically, this is the most successful type of business to start. Direct Sales and MLM have a success rate that hovers right around 1%, and that is for the “good” ones! Standard product sales or service businesses have a success rate of 50% or better (as measured by how many are still in business after 5 years, which is not always an accurate measurement of success). By smart planning, and consistent follow through, you can increase those odds significantly.
Research it out, do the math, and write up a specific task list to get going. None of it is easy. But some things really do work!
Our company is now offering Cottage Industry Consulting, and can help you develop a business plan on a budget.
Nothing But What You’re Wearing… Then What?
What if you woke tomorrow with nothing but what you have on? For the sake of functionality, let’s assume you went to sleep in your jeans and t-shirt (no, we aren’t going to get into whether it is appropriate to go out in public wearing your pajamas – it isn’t about that!). What if your job was gone, you had no computer, no car, no bike, no spare clothes, no food, nothing that you’ve accumulated or worked for. Your bank accounts have a zero balance, and while you do have your wallet, you do not have any other personal documents. You do NOT have your cell phone. You can’t GET a cell phone, because you have no money.
Oh… and your credit is destroyed.
You may think that this would not happen, but there are situations, less remote than you think, which can put you in exactly that situation.
What do you have left?
How do you recover?
And how in the WORLD do you prepare for that kind of disaster?
You have some VERY valuable assets left, but they aren’t the kind that most people think of when they consider how to prepare for potential catastrophe.
- Your faith. You are going to need a lot. The more you build now, the better. Get your relationship with God together. You are going to need Him.
- Attitude. If you have persevered in your life, and made a practice of not giving up, it will serve you well. Practicing facing challenges and practicing constructive problem solving, will stand you in good stead.
- Your loved ones. Well, let’s face it. You are going to lose some of them when disaster strikes. Some people just can’t handle it – they have to blame someone, and blaming you is easiest, because that relieves them of the responsibility of helping you. But half of them or more will gather round to lift you up, and help you as best they can. It won’t be much – such a disaster is more than anyone can fix for you. But strengthen the relationships with those closest to you – disaster either breaks a relationship, or strengthens it, and that largely depends on how healthy the relationship is to start with, and how committed the individuals are to each other. If your primary relationships are in trouble, repair them now – it is part of being prepared.
- Your skills. The skills that can help you may be widely varied – good job hunting and interview skills, good trade skills that can be applied to self-employment, good bartering skills, good salvaging skills, good work ethic, willingness to work hard at whatever honorable work you can, the ability to make the most of anything you are given (canning and cooking skills, mending skills, mechanical skills,etc) – it is harder to obtain working things than to obtain non-working things, and if you can repair things, you have a distinct advantage. Other skills can help also – frugality, gardening, hunting, being able to entertain yourself free, even basic skills like riding a bike.
Probably the easiest thing in that bunch to improve, are skills. There is always someone to teach you, or a book to help you learn. The other things are more individualized, and perhaps not as easy to pin down, but just as important.
The political climate we live in makes the potential for this kind of situation more of a real risk. When we consider what we would do if we were left with nothing that we think of as being “survival” items, it brings us back to having to depend upon others, and upon ourselves and God. In that respect, it is not a bad thing – no one can recover from such a thing on their own, and there is no shame in accepting help from genuine need.
We know too, that when we are prepared for less devastating disasters, with food storage, some wise self-sufficiency items, water, etc, then we are better able to share and help others who are in a situation where they cannot possibly meet their own needs. Helping others in need is truly a blessing to those who can give to victims of fire, flood, false imprisonment, crop failure, job loss, catastrophic illness, or other disasters that can affect anyone at any time.
Keep preparing for those things which would require you to have a food storage, or to live without electricity, or gather your own food from the wild. But prepare to have that taken away also – and think about what you’d need if it was taken away. Think about what you need within yourself – because THAT is what you take with you no matter what happens.
UPDATE: Our book on growing food from scraps and groceries is now available for download! Get The Scavenger’s Garden: Growing Food from Groceries and Scraps from Amazon for Kindle, or from our Firelight Heritage Farm Books website. If you have to start over with nothing, this book teaches you how to grow a garden without spending money for the garden.
Naturally Healthy Hair
My hair and I get along most days. Sometimes though, the relationship becomes decidedly uneasy, as something changes that my hair does not like – and then IT changes in a way I do not like! I don’t have the answers to everyone’s hair distresses (yes, that is a pun), but I have learned a few things that might be of use.
Anemia causes hair loss – if you notice slowed hair growth on your legs and thinning of hair on your head, it may be from anemia. If you don’t get enough iron in your diet, or if you have heavy bleeding, your hair may thin. This one is pretty easy to fix unless you have an underlying disorder. Get more green veggies and clean red meat in your diet (yes, I said meat! And I won’t apologize!). Egg yolks help too. If you have heavy menstrual bleeding, get the artificial hormones OUT of your meat and dairy (they mess up female hormones), stop using tampons (they increase bleeding), and get the refined foods out of your diet as much as you realistically can. Folic Acid and B-12 supplements can also help dramatically reduce menstrual bleeding – take them starting when your period starts.
Dying hair, and perming hair also causes hair loss. Most people know that it causes damage to hair, but it also is very hard on the scalp. If you already have hair loss for other reasons, this can be even more damaging. Dye or perm your hair less often. Even an extra two weeks between chemical treatments can give your scalp time to recover.
Dying and perming hair also contributes to an increase in split ends and breakage. Treating less often can help with this, but other solutions for split ends will also help. The same chemicals that stress your hair, are absorbed into your body through the scalp, and may stress your body also, so slowing down a bit and treating your hair less often may help your physical health in ways you did not expect.
Aging can also cause hair loss, which means many men and women will fail to recognize reversible types of hair loss. Whether or not diet or exercise can affect age related hair loss is debatable.
I have oily hair. I do not mean hair that gets a little oily. I mean hair that has to be washed every day, and hair that will look oily if it gets rained on in the afternoon. I mean hair that can’t be washed at night and then worn the next day – after it has been slept on, it is too oily for public. So dry hair isn’t something I have experience with. I do have issues with sceborrhetic dermatitis on my scalp though, combined with chemical sensitivities, and my hair does get split ends and breakage when it gets about waist length.
I’ve found that the best treatment for the dermatitis is Borage Oil. One capsule a day, taken internally, has a really nice effect on reducing the symptoms of sceborrhea. It also has some other really cool effects… though one is not so cool in my situation.
Borage Oil makes my skin more oily. While this is good news for people with dry hair, I could do without that, my skin is like my hair, and adding more oil to an oil slick isn’t what I’d consider a good idea. I do take it at times though, because of the effect on the sceborrhea, and because of one other really cool thing:
Borage Oil helps prevent split ends and hair breakage. It strengthens the hair (and fingernails too, by the way), while the hair is forming in the follicle. So taking Borage oil today, will help you NOT have split ends two years from now. The hair is more elastic, and less prone to developing split ends, and less prone to developing breaks up an inch or two from the bottom. I took it on and off for a few years, and as my hair grew out, I could clearly see where I had been taking it, and where I had not. The hair that grew while I was using the Borage Oil was just so much healthier two years down the road.
You can get Borage Oil at Wal-Mart. I’ve not seen it anywhere else in the stores, but you can also order it online.
I’ve also been through times when I could not use shampoos that had the common chemicals in them. Many shampoos with organic sounding names, are not, in fact, organic. They have the same ingredients that other shampoos have. Many shampoos made by small companies are just standard shampoo blends, with a few custom ingredients ordered. Getting away from the chemicals in shampoo is really hard.
I used Burt’s Bees Shampoo for a time, when that was all I could get. But I don’t much care for it – it leaves my hair feeling VERY greasy. Not a good thing, since I’m fighting oily hair anyway. It seems to have a Castile Soap base (as do many homemade soap recipes), which does not remove oil from hair.
The BEST shampoo I EVER used was Tate’s. The last time I bought it though, it was NOT the same shampoo I used originally. The smell was so strong it gave me headaches – NOT the Tate’s I remember. I will not use it again.
Hair responds very much to your overall health and to good nutrition. I don’t mean what the USDA says is “balanced nutrition”, I mean REAL food. The stuff that does not come in a box or can, or from the freezer case. I mean fruits, vegetables, whole grains, clean meats and clean dairy. Your body recognizes and responds to fresh food, and so does your hair. Hair is an optional thing – no longer needed for survival. So when your body is nutritionally stressed, it often cuts back on the non-essentials. Your hair growth will slow dramatically, and you’ll develop problems with hair and fingernails. Yes, you can be overweight, and still be undernourished. Getting too much refined food that your body does not need (so it stores it around your middle), and not enough of the nutrient dense food that it needs (so it keeps telling you that you are hungry, even when you just ate).
Pay attention to your hair, and make a few changes to keep it healthy. Those changes will help your body stay healthy too.
10 Unusual Businesses to Start for Under $100
I’ve been researching business startup concepts and options, and working with business startups for more than 12 years. And just when I think I’ve seen it all, something else pops into view, and shows me that there is a market for things you’d never think there as a market for! So I’ll share some of those things with you.
No, I’m not going to hand you some stupid business system. If you want one of those, what you really want is to get scammed. I’ve got something better in mind. But it assumes that you have some drive, creativity, and the ability to get online and research how to do things, and then SIMPLIFY the instructions on how to do things.
These overviews do not include things like business license, ink and paper for printing your business cards, or the cost of having someone else build a website for you. I’m going to assume that if you are really on a shoestring budget, that you are going to have to do those things yourself, and use existing supplies – and I’m going to assume you do have some simple tools and a few things lurking around that you can repurpose – most people do.
Most of these are probably things you’ve never thought of… and a few are probably things you’ve heard of, but have not thought about in the way that really works for a shoestring startup.
- Butterflies and Moths. Yup. there’s a market for butterflies and moths. There are increasing regulations about importing them, and shipping them across state lines if they are alive, but it is still a fairly easy proposition. You can get cocoons, or eggs. You can even capture live specimens and start that way, as long as you make sure it is legal where you are capturing them. You can raise them in containers – plastic storage containers or glass jars – indoors, or in remay sleeves on trees out of doors. Products range from eggs and cocoons, to instructions, to supplies, to mounted specimens, or crafts made with specimens.
- Snails. Now, personally, I find snails to be rather repugnant. Like slugs, only in a cuter box. Still not my thing, and I can’t imagine actually eating one! Nonetheless, snails are a booming business in many cities, and there is usually insufficient local supply to meet the need. With snails, you MUST think local – and you have to buy or gather starter snails that are known edible, and that are legal in your area. Forget shipping them across state lines – there’s a huge regulatory burden. But growing them and delivering them locally is pretty simple, and it does not take much to get started – initial containment and starter stock is fairly inexpensive. Really, all you need are two snails in the right mood… they can be very prolific!
- Mushrooms. Not THAT kind of mushrooms! Gourmet, edible, medicinal. THOSE mushrooms! Nothing illegal, doing illegal things in your business is never a good idea! So… what kinds of mushrooms? Do some research. See which ones are selling for good prices. You can get started with a few bins, some compost, (alternately, use a kit), and a spot where you can keep temperatures within a warm or cool range. Growing mushrooms is not actually as complicated as it sounds, a sterile environment is not even needed, if you are just smart about keeping things tidy. Just don’t expect to make a fortune growing Shiitake or Portobello mushrooms! The markets are saturated, don’t bother. Grow something that has a solid demand, but which is underproduced, and you’ll do much better. You can sell fresh mushrooms (farmer’s markets, or shipped), dried mushrooms, gourmet mushroom products, pickled mushrooms, mushroom grow-kits, mushroom spawn, mushroom growing instructions, etc.
- Food Molds. Oh, NOT the fuzzy kind… the SHAPED kind. Like people use for chocolate, or marzipan. This takes some talent… Buy a block of paraffin. Carve a 3-D design in it. Something that would look good as a cookie, a chocolate, or a cake decoration. Buy some food grade silicone mold putty. Use that to create the mold. Sell the molds. Make more. Costs about $10 for enough paraffin (or other carvable wax) to make 6-10 mold designs. Costs about $40 for a mold maker’s starter kit, or about $15 for enough putty to make 20-30 molds of about 1″x2″x1/2″ in size. Larger molds, fewer of them, but higher price. Look at what people WANT to shape things like, that you can’t buy at Wal-Mart (seriously, go into the party and bridal area, where they keep the cake decorating stuff – if you can buy the molds in a plastic sheet of a dozen molds, don’t bother!). Do unique and trendy stuff. If you have a flair for carving, and a flair for style, this can be very lucrative.
- eBaying Junk. Ok, not junk, precisely, but garage sale and salvage items. You have to have a bit of talent for knowing what people really want here, but I’ve seen this work for many people. I’ve seen a LOT of people FAIL with eBay also. Because they don’t understand that eBay is a BUYER’S market for common things, and a SELLER’S market for rare and desirable things. Your first step is to search on eBay, in the Completed Auctions (under Advanced Search), to see what the things you’d be interested in selling, are actually selling for! A lot of them aren’t going to be selling at all – dozens of auctions, no buyers. Scratch those items. Look for the ones that EVERY listing sells, for a price from which you know you can profit. Go with your interests – you’ll keep the information in your head better that you need to keep there. Then go salvaging and yard saling, and digging through the second hand shops, for stuff that is underpriced, and salable. The potentials are really good IF you can find a type of product that you have access to, which sells well. What NEVER works with eBay, is those “drop ship companies” that tell you that you can sell their overpriced oh-so-common product, which you will pay more for than you’d pay for something better at Wal-Mart, and which no customer in their right mind is going to pay you a reasonable mark-up to take off your hands. That never works. eBay depends upon uniqueness, and desirability. If you can get that, you’ll have a moneymaker on your hands.
- Hatching Eggs. Ok, so the startup cost for this is debatable – depends on how you get the chickens, and whether you already have containment for them or materials to build containment. But you may have enough resources to be able to do this. If you already have chickens, you can generally just add a good rooster – hatching eggs are far more lucrative than eggs for eating. You can sell edible eggs for around $2-3 per dozen, depending on quality. Hatching eggs go for $1-2 EACH. Heck, they even sell for $1 apiece on eBay! You just need to make sure that you either have breeds segregated so they do not cross-breed, or list them as crossbred chickens. Keep good chickens also, and get the marginal ones out of the breeding pool so you can say with assurance that you are selling good quality stock. If you are planning on getting chickens with the hope for earning a little cash on the side, it is worth knowing that hatching eggs sell for more.
- Meal Planning. There are a number of ways to do this. Weekly menus and shopping lists, or “Prepare Ahead” Recipe and instruction booklets. For Prepare Ahead meals, a recipe book, in PDF downloadable form, for a specific number of meals which can be prepared ahead, and frozen for on-demand quick-fix the following week. Combine ingredient prep – for example, if four of six meals take sauteed onions, combine all into a single chop and cook operation. Shopping lists are also a matter of combining things. An Excel spreadsheet makes a nice way to track the shopping, and estimate costs – you can create a self-calculating spreadsheet, with places to put in the number of items, the average cost of the item, which calculates the total for that item, and then adds up the total for all items. Take pictures of the prepared food (in the freezer containers, and again fully cooked and on the plate), write down all the recipes and combination preparation instructions, the shopping list, and average prep time. If you can keep the prep time to half a day or less, and the meals tasty, healthy, and not too costly, people will be interested. Works best to target a special needs segment – people most likely to do this are those who cannot eat supermarket prepared foods. For weekly menus, meal prep times of 30 minutes or less sell best.
- Auto Detailing. No need for a brick and mortar shop. Operate a mobile business – carry your vacuum cleaner, rags and polish with you, and make house and office calls. Busy people love it when the service comes to them. Now, auto-detailing is one of those things that attracts a lot of fly-by-nighters who think it is an easy way to make a buck. It isn’t. You have to do a good job and go the extra mile to keep paying people coming back (or asking you to come back!). So learn to do a good job, and KEEP doing a good job. At $100 a pop, the potentials are good for a great income.
- Oddball Themed Online Store. There are tons of oddball and quirky things that you can assemble together in an online store. Look through eBay again. Only this time, look for what ISN’T selling well on eBay, but which WOULD sell if you had a bunch of items of that same kind together. You aren’t looking for really common stuff. You’re looking for stuff that a LOT of people have extra laying around, but which a lot of OTHER people really don’t think to go to eBay to get, or don’t know what it might be called on eBay. Your store can become the place to find it all. This will work best if there aren’t a ton of other stores specializing in the niche you discover.
- Printable Posters. This is one I’d have NEVER thought would sell, but it does. Pictures, borders, nice fonts, and motivational or humorous quotes, in PDF format for self-printing. Remember when you make these that most printers have a 1/2″ margin that won’t get printed around the edge. Also, the key to reading text over a photo is contrast – bold text often reads better, and putting a drop shadow behind white text, or a glow behind black text can make it stand out and improve readability when you have an image with a lot of distraction behind the text. Also, putting the text in a box, or with an opacity layer behind it can look classy and make the text readable. Elegant embellishments are easy to do using decoration fonts. Images for this kind of thing can be purchased through places like Big Stock Photo, or through clipart or photo collections from Dover Books. There are other places that sell licensed images also. You’ll need a photo editing program, like PhotoShop Elements, and you’ll need to make sure you use high resolution images (look it up if you don’t know what it means). Holiday quotes, seasonal thoughts, learning tools, classic political quotes, or scriptures. Watch what trends on FaceBook, and sell things with a similar mood. Make it look good enough that people want to pay for it. Sell with instant download for $1-2 each.
If you start a shoestring business, you’ll expect the first revenue that you get to go back into the business, and the next dribbles to put a hefty percentage of the profit back into the business, for quite a while. But all of these options allow you to start on a shoestring, and get to the point of profit much sooner than you would if you went into debt to start up.
No business is FAST to start, but with these ideas, you can be profiting within months instead of years, and possibly even sooner than that. Go out there and look for the unusual, and think about how you can simplify it enough to get in the door for under $100. You’ll be surprised at what is possible.
UPDATE: Our book Starting a Mushroom Growing Business on a Shoestring is now available from Amazon for Kindle, and in PDF format through our Firelight Heritage Farm Books website.
Our company is now offering Cottage Industry Consulting and can help you develop a plan for a successful business on a shoestring.
Making Sense of Website Traffic Numbers
We have taught our clients how to increase traffic to their websites, by interlinking their websites with social media, so that each time they add content to their websites, it is sent out to the places they haunt regularly online.
This has several benefits:
- It gets the website the same traffic benefits of a blog.
- It helps them maintain a presence in many places, with just a single task.
- The pages get indexed faster, since they are fed through Twitter.
But the overriding question, as always, is:
Does it get more paying customers?
The answer, in a word, is “Usually”. Provided the website follows through with good sales presentation, the orders follow.
We’ve noticed some interesting traffic trends on sites with which we’ve implemented this strategy. To explain what happened, I’ll have to give you some definitions and explanations of what the numbers are.
- Unique Visitors – These are people who are theoretically visiting for the first time, or the first time in a while. You need hundreds of these, if not thousands of these, per month, in order to keep a steady flow of orders. This number, more than the others, seems most closely correlated with order volumes.
- Total Visitors – This is all the people that visited, including repeats. This does affect orders somewhat – many people come back to buy again, and people who come back over and over are more likely to refer other people.
- Page Views – This is how many pages all of your visitors visited. Often this will have an average number attached – such as 5.2 pages per visitor. More pages is a good thing in general. It means people are interested in what you are saying, and selling. This means they are more likely to trust you enough to buy, and more likely to refer other people to your site.
- Hits – This is a completely meaningless number in terms of traffic. All it means, is the number of times a file was accessed from the server. Each web page can be made up of dozens of files. This means, if anyone ever brags about getting 80,000 hits on their site per month, they are looking at the wrong numbers, and you can be sure they are not getting more than a few thousand visitors, if that. We’ve had sites that averaged 5 files per page, and sites that averaged 50 files per page, so you just can’t tell anything useful from that number, unless you are a web developer who thinks they need to make a site more efficient.
Ok, so now we know what we are working with. These are the trends that we see when we throw social media into the flow of website content publication:
- Unique Visitors gradually increase. This is a SLOW increase though. But slow is better than nothing. Since the increase is happening in conjunction with other changes, and since it is happening through the completion of tasks you’d be doing anyway, this is a great thing. Without the flow to social media, this increase would not happen without other more time intensive work. This increase happens through the gradual contact and referral to new people.
- Total Visitors dramatically increases. Often a 10-fold increase, literally overnight – it starts the day you post new content that is sent out to your social media profiles. The average small business website, without a tie to social media, has a ratio of about 1.2, to 1.5 visits per visitor. If tied to social media, that increases to an average of just under 10 visits per visitor, and can go much higher. This happens because people are reminded that you are there every time you publish something, so they stop by to read it.
- Page Views dramatically increase. Part of this is a natural reaction to the increased traffic, but we find that the percentages improve also. The pages per visitor often rise. This may be in part, due to the fact that people who are reminded that you are there, can read an extra page or two if they want each time they are there, instead of running out of time the first time, and not coming back.
- Sales tend to do the same thing as the Unique Visitors numbers. Gradual increases. If they do not increase as the new traffic increases, then the site is in need of a review and some changes to help people find the product better, understand it better, or feel more comfortable about purchasing.
- There is a direct connection between frequency of posts, and traffic. Now, the value of this is only really relevant up to a certain point. More than once a day really doesn’t benefit a small business owner (even big business seems to agree that more than once a day is not a profitable use of time). The best balance seems to be somewhere between once a week, and once a day – depending on the schedule and capabilities of the business owner. Scheduling posts to publish at a later date can help with a regular delivery of new content. We find that the greater the frequency, the greater the gap between Unique Visitors, and Total Visitors, so people are responding mostly to the immediacy of having something right in front of them that they think they are interested in. Beyond about every other day though, the increase in Unique Visitors is no longer as dramatic, and more than once a day it levels off even more. The point here is that frequency is vital – you have to post regularly, but that there is a wide range of acceptable frequencies to gain the benefits. You see this benefit really kick in at once a week, peak at about every other day, and dramatically lose benefits per post, at more than once a day.
If you have more than one website, you can get additional benefits by interlinking them, because once you do, what benefits one, will benefit the other.
We’ve found that it helps new sites also. It takes just weeks to get traffic up to the same point that took months using other “free” methods. Sales are still sluggish at first – people are hesitant to buy things from a new site. But it gets it going faster than other methods.
This is one area where automation really helps, because you are automating the non-personal part, and making sure the personal things you do achieve maximum impact. Well worth the 20 minutes or so that it takes to set up!
A Better Way for Airlock Fermenting
In the fermenting world, debates rage over topics such as “anerobic environments”, “airtight containers”, and “traditional methods”. The debates tend to center on two extremes:
One point of view is that traditional fermenting was done under very imperfect conditions, and following a few simple rules can yield success in most situations. In fact, tradition does teach us that if food is kept under brine, it ferments just fine most of the time. A few climates, or home environments, may make this more challenging. A few people with specific health issues may have problems with foods fermented this way. But this IS true traditional fermenting, imperfections and all.
The other point of view is that in order to achieve a true “anerobic ferment”, you have to have an “airless environment”, in an “airtight container”. A system is recommended which is costly, awkward, and which is not in fact, an airtight container at all (explanation is here). It does, however, manage to achieve one thing: It limits air exchange, and microbe exchange from outside the container, and reduces the chances of some kinds of errors. It does this by allowing gas buildup to escape, while eliminating the need to open the jar to release it, or to leave the cap off. Since the container is clear glass, it also allows outside observation – this one factor is perhaps the most important, as it helps people keep their fingers out of it and not mess with it while it is in the initial fermentation stages.
I am not a proponent of either method. I know that it can be done well, either way. I know that certain things REQUIRE an open fermenting environment – that is, they will not work in an airlock system (vinegar, and wild yeast are two of those things). There are other instances where an open environment is preferable, to achieve a specific desired result. There are other instances where an airlock environment is preferable, to achieve a different specific desired result.
That said, many people prefer an airlock system, and I do like the ease of an air-release system, because I don’t have to fuss with the jar to keep it from getting messy! So I began looking for an alternative to the high priced airlock systems. Sure enough, people were making their own airlock caps to go on mason jars. But they had some of the same disadvantages as the expensive systems – they are clunky, and awkward, and the water lock stuck up out of the jar in a very cumbersome manner. I KNEW there had to be a better way, and I could instantly “see” it in my mind. A one-way valve is simpler, more compact, and requires no special instructions to properly operate it. It just works.
The problem is that nobody makes a one way valve for a mason jar lid. And nobody makes a one way valve of the type that is needed, in the configuration needed, at an affordable price! Similar one way valves are available (the concept is scientifically sound, and frequently used in many applications), but they cost upward of $10 apiece. NOT an affordable option, since our goal is to make fermenting MORE affordable, not less!
Long story short, in a trip through a hardware store, I found the pieces I needed, and was able to source appropriate versions of them, to assemble together to make a simple, elegant little Fermenting Jar Cap that goes on any standard size mason jar (Narrow or Wide Mouth). This product is now available for sale on our Fermenta Cap site, under the name of Fermenta Lock.
While we are making and selling them, we are not yet able to sell it at the price that I’d like to be able to sell it, but it is still far less expensive to assemble the parts than are the more costly systems.
A competing Pickling system sells a 1 quart pickling jar and dunker for $23. It is a one quart jar, and nothing more. Price goes up for larger jar sizes, and you have to buy one for every size you need, and more than one if you want to ferment or store more than one item at a time.
In comparison, Wide Mouth Size Fermenta Lock is $8.50, which includes an airlock cap, and a storage cap. A Fermenta Dunk plus Dunk Extender in the same size, is $5.75. So far we are up to $14.25. Add a Quart Mason Jar, for just under $1, or a Half Gallon Mason Jar, for $1.60, and we are still under $16.00 for everything (we don’t sell Mason jars – this is the price for which they typically are sold in stores).
The Fermenta Lock cap is interchangeable. You aren’t stuck spending $23 for one size jar, $25 for another size jar, and so on, and having to buy more and more of them to ferment different sizes or to ferment and then store.
A couple of cases of standard Mason Jars, or jars saved and salvaged from recycled sources give you all you need. Two Fermenta Lock Caps, and a few Fermenta Dunks and Extenders keep a range of things going, and you can swap out the lids and only use the expensive stuff during fermentation times, without having to tie it up for storage as well. Easy, flexible, and cost effective.
You can also assemble things one piece at a time, according to whatever you think is most important – get a Dunker this month, an Airlock Cap next month. No need to spend a lot all at once.
Certainly, our competition may disagree with us, but we think this is definitely a “better way”, and it makes Fermenting more affordable, and more predictable, no matter how you choose to do it!
We won’t stop there. There are more things we can see that we need to do, and we’ve been researching more parts, and suppliers, and thinking creatively to solve problems to provide good solutions for more flexible pickling and fermenting choices, for wholesale purchase of our products, and more. Because we keep looking at other aspects and thinking “There has to be a better way!”. Usually there is. Give us a little time… we’ll find it!
The Art of Inventing
I can invent things a whole lot easier than I can manufacture them. In a way, inventing is the easy part. Taking an invention from an idea in your head, to something you can actually USE, is quite a bit trickier.
I don’t know anyone who hasn’t at one time said, “What we really need is a (insert thing) that (insert function), instead of this old clunky thing!”. Most people KNOW what the invention SHOULD be. But most people can’t get from what they HAVE, to what they really WANT.
The tricky part, is PARTS. When you have invented a thing that nobody has invented before, the parts may not exist. I mean, if nobody knows what a doohicky is, then they really aren’t going to be out there manufacturing pulley wheels and gasket seals for doohickies that they don’t even know exist.
So where parts are concerned, you have to think about FUNCTION, not the NAME of the thing. What I mean is, if you need a gasket for a certain size lid, you may not be able to find a gasket for that lid in stores that sell lids. But somewhere, someone probably makes a gasket that size, if you can determine the size accurately, and the thickness you need. Instant thingamabob for your doohicky.
So think about function – shape, and size, texture, and other properties. What could work? What can you make that might work? What can you easily obtain that you can alter that might work?
Ideally, we all think about the perfect thing, made in a special way. But manufacturing custom parts is very costly. You won’t even get in the door for less than the price of the average house (before the recession!).
Whittling a piece of wood, drilling a hole in an existing part, using two parts together in a new way, or taking parts meant for one purpose and using them in a way that is totally foreign to the original intention isn’t actually hard. What is hard, is finding exactly what you need. Simplify the idea, and think about what you can do in a simple backyard shop with simple tools.
When searching for parts, you can search online, but if you do, you are limited to what you think of searching for by name. You may miss something that would work.
If you walk through a large hardware or fastener store, and just take your time you may have better success at finding something unexpected that will do the job – never do this when you are in a hurry! Go through, aisle by aisle, and just LOOK. As you do, you’ll get ideas. And you might just spot the thing you need. It might not be precisely what you had in mind, but maybe it will work anyway.
Now, some people just don’t have the drive or energy to bother. Other people though, may be natural entrepreneurs, and the idea of creating something new, that fits a need, is intriguing, even exciting, because if you can MAKE it, you can SELL it.
If you are one of those people, then the next time you find yourself saying, “There’s gotta be a better way to do that!”, figure out how to do it! Then go find a way to make it happen.
It may just be the next safety pin or duct tape.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go find a tubular shaped metal thing with one open end, that is cheap, and which can be altered to become… something else!
Our company is now offering Cottage Industry Consulting, including product development services.
Five Years and Counting
I started blogging more than five years ago. I entered the blogging arena reluctantly, and by many standards, very late in the game. That actually proved an advantage, not a disadvantage in some ways. Sure, it was harder to get noticed, but there was more objective data available on what worked and what did not, and I had to learn to use it in a way that would work forever, not just a way that worked because it was new.
I didn’t want to Tweet either. In fact, I still despise Twitter, in spite of recommending it to most of my clients who get bogged down with marketing. I don’t generally Tweet anything – unless I launch a new site and want it indexed ASAP. Mostly, I Auto-Tweet.
This is where Twitter intersects with the blog. One of the keys to being a genius web designer instead of just a mediocre web designer, is being able to think in terms of FUNCTION, and not just in terms of LABELS and FEATURES. Breaking a feature or component down by the functions it performs, rather than just thinking of it as a single purpose item.
See, most people think of Twitter as a great big global conversation, that they have to JOIN in order to get any benefit from Twitter. I don’t. I rarely login to Twitter, and I rarely directly post a Tweet. I do not use TweetDeck, and I don’t use anything to keep me up on the latest or hottest trends. Because I did not think of Twitter as an online community.
I think of Twitter as something that lets you post to a group of people, AND something that can be used to interface with OTHER places that you want to post to OTHER groups of people. It is that second thing that has value to me. I consider the first part to be largely a time waster, and I just have no time to keep up with the Joneses in little text bytes. I have a real life!
I also have a Blog. A blog that, on its own, gets a modest amount of traffic, and has a small following of people who read frequently, but never tell me they did so. I’m ok with that, even though I’d love to hear from more of them. But I can write to the faceless masses if I have to. I just pretend that you are all a bunch of people whom I’d love to hang out with if I met you in person (a few of you, I HAVE met in person… Yup! I was right, I DO like to hang out with you!).
This blog of modest traffic, which is cross linked with whatever my latest business endeavor happens to be, becomes more powerful when I use a function that it possesses – the ability to RSS articles to other places – with the ability of Twitter to interface with some of the places that I want my blog to be seen.
The blog is fed into Twitter, using TwitterFeed.com. Incredibly easy to do. Every time I post, my post goes automatically to Twitter. I also can feed Twitter to FaceBook, Linked-In, Plaxo, etc. Wherever else I want it to go. So now, every time I publish a blog post, out it goes, all over. Automatically. I like automatic.
So I have this little machine that can now be used for either direct, or indirect marketing. I prefer indirect. I prefer to just write about what I want to write about, link to my sites (mostly in the sidebar – rarely in an article directly), and let the increased blog traffic send increased traffic to my other sites. It works. Rather well, in fact.
But what if I could eliminate one of the steps? What if I could send the blog traffic directly to my regular websites?
Back to FUNCTION, not FEATURE. I do not need to turn my website into a blog. I do not even need to ADD a blog to my website. I don’t need another blog at all! I just need to take the functions I need, and add THOSE to the PART of my website that I want to use in that way. In some sites, I’m already posting regular articles to build content, which I’d do anyway. I look at those areas for enhancing with blog functions.
I’ve done this with my book website. I have a Category in it called “Tossed Salad”. It is named after a chapter in my book – this chapter was used for all the odds and ends tips that didn’t really fit in one of the other chapters. Of course, the thing about little tips is that you always come up with one more. So each edition of the book will have even more of them. Probably I’ll eventually have to categorize THEM, and may turn some into full chapters. Whatever. It works. Meanwhile, I store the new ones on this website where people can look them up, where Google can index them, and where they work to promote my book.
The website structure that I use already has the capability to RSS a Category. So I grabbed the Category RSS feed link, and headed back over to TwitterFeed.com, and fed THAT into Twitter, beside my blog feed. Now when I publish an article to that category in my website, IT goes out everywhere my blog goes. People have to click the link to read the whole thing, and that brings them back to my website.
Blogs have one more valuable element that is nice to have in a website – but only one that you want in PARTS of it, not all of it.
Pinging. A blog pings a series of search engines every time a post is published. “Hey guys! New article here! Named THIS… By THIS PERSON… About THAT!”. This gets blog posts indexed in directories fairly quickly, and gives them a millisecond of fame as one of the latest posts (blog directories are incredibly busy, with probably hundreds or thousands of posts being added per second). But it means one or two more people might see it. And it means Google gets the message right away.
So we found a pinging add-on for our website. One that let us assign the ping only to that one category. I now have the advantages of a blog inside my website, bringing a little extra traffic directly into my product sales sites, where more non-pushy articles (I believe in being helpful and informative rather than advertising) bring people who might be interested in what I sell, right to the place that I sell it. If they like the article, they are now feeling all warm and fuzzy toward me, and that is a really good basis on which to foster a good customer relationship. They are well-disposed to consider kindly anything I am selling.
Content Marketing is still the most powerful enduring form of marketing on the net. Understanding technology functions, and how to use them to make life SIMPLER instead of more complicated, is one of the keys to making Content Marketing manageable. I mean, I have time to publish an article a week. I don’t always have time to publish it and then link it to 10 different places online.
Automating the linking part makes everything I write work harder for me, instead of making me work harder because of it.
Of Keys, and Outhouses, and Little Boy’s Prayers
“Mom!”, shouted my oldest son, his feet pounding louder as he neared the campsite, “Alex is locked in the outhouse!”
It was already that kind of camping trip. We had come a day early into the weekend. Our favorite campsite on the Platte River was just 5 minutes from Kevin’s job, so we had come in the night before, and he had left that morning to work as usual on Friday, so I was now alone with the kids – all seven of them – beside the lazy river in September.
It was not really a real campground, so much as an area with possible campsites along the river, with a single concession to camping comfort – a solid concrete block double outhouse set upon a rise, just high enough to be above the high water line during the spring flood season. There were several short roads, with a nice broad area at the end of each, suitable for tents, tables, and chairs. Typically one or two other campers were on our end of the area, and a few fishers at the other end. It was frequently used, but not highly populated. We loved camping there, being able to swim on and off through the day, floating the quarter mile stretch of river near our campsite, and listening to the soft sounds of the river at night, and waking to squirrels chattering and birds chirping in the morning.
Friday evening, before dinner, I had worked on some writing using my computer in the front seat of the car. We had gone into the river, wading and floating on tubes, and I had not wanted to lose my keys if they fell out of my pocket, so I had tucked the car keys under the front seat. And forgot them. And locked the car right before bed. Like good campers we had put all of the food in the trunk of the car prior to shutting down for the night. (This was Wyoming, so not locking the car during the day was not a big deal, but it needed locked at night.)
It was morning before we figured out that the keys were securely locked up under the seat of the car. We did not have a cell phone. The nearest residence was about a mile down the road. Town (and Kevin’s set of keys) was five miles away. Prayer was our only resource, so I gathered the kids around, and we had a prayer together. We explained that our keys were locked in the car, we were hungry, and had no food, and had no practical way of getting help to unlock the car, and we asked that we know what to do to get our keys out of the car.
We finished the prayer, and Sean (oldest boy) decided to go around and ask the other campers there if anyone could help. Maybe a cell phone, or something.
Sean returned with a helpful handyman with a slimjim. One of the three other campers there had the very tool we needed to be able to get into the car. He quickly opened the car for us, we thanked him profusely, and he left smiling to return to his campsite.
We knew that had to be divine intervention. It was too unusual to be coincidence. We gathered again to say a prayer of thanks.
A little later, as we got ready to do something together, our next to youngest child was nowhere to be found. We called her name, and received no answer. So we gathered again, and said a prayer, and then hollered some more. Within a few more hollers, she came out of the trees, and said she had been down by the river washing up, and didn’t think she was gone that long. It wasn’t misbehavior, it was just my daughter, trying to take care of something she felt was important. But the answer to the prayer stuck.
Now, as I hurried down the road and up the small hill to the outhouse, I was already considering how one extracts a small boy from a solid block structure. I already knew it had a heavy metal door, with hinge pins that could not be removed without a blowtorch. The door closed with a 3/4 inch square metal bar slide lock. Heavy, and difficult to move, even for an adult. Sean routinely accompanied Alex to the outhouse, and stood outside, but Alex did not lock the door. I guess his six year old sense of independence was coming to the fore, because this time he locked it, and had been required to give it a good hard shove to get it to slide into place. Hard enough to get it well and truly stuck.
Alex was not the average six year old. We knew things were not right, but could not get a doctor to acknowledge it. He did not have the strength to ride a bike fast enough to get the training wheels off the ground. His arms and legs were stick thin, with far less muscle than they should have had, and he had an obvious curvature to his shin bones, in spite of being well fed. So it wasn’t just a six year old boy stuck in that outhouse. It was one who lacked the physical strength to even begin to help himself. (He was later diagnosed with Crohn’s Disease, during treatment for Acute Lymphocytic Leukemia at the age of 7.)
I reached the outhouse, let Alex know I was there, and looked it over. One tiny vent, up at the peak of the roof. Not quite big enough to let someone else in, or a small boy out, assuming he could even get up that high without falling into the pit trying. No, not really an option. I had visions in my head of having to call Wyoming Game and Fish Department to have them come and dismantle the outhouse to get him out. Prospective newspaper headlines danced in my head for a few moments. I quickly realized that our only option, again, was prayer.
I told Alex that he would have to do it. That we needed to say a prayer together, and he needed to ask Heavenly Father to make him strong enough to move that bolt.
Alex said a prayer on his side, and I said one on my side. Then he grabbed that bolt and yanked. Nothing happened. “Try again!” I encouraged. He threw his weight behind it and tugged again.
“Mom!” he cried excitedly, “It moved!”
“Good! Try again!” I answered. Sean cheered him on in the background, telling him he could do it.
He tried again, and it moved another fraction of an inch. And again, and again, bit by bit he worked that bolt far enough over that it finally slid free with a solid clank.
Alex came out of the outhouse and gave me a hug, and together we said a prayer of thanks. There was no doubt that the Lord had truly given him the strength to move the lock, because Alex simply could not do it himself. Ever since that day, this has been my favorite “God answers little boy’s prayers” story. I must have told it at least 50 times.
It proved to me that our Heavenly Parents do indeed hear the prayers of harried mothers who lock their keys in their cars, or have a child go missing, and little boys locked in outhouses. I have also imagined their kindly amusement as they gave Alex the strength in his puny arms to move that great big stubborn bolt.
It was not until years later that I really put the whole thing together and realized that not only had God answered our prayers earlier that day, and Alex’s prayer later, but that there was a connection between the two. That the example earlier of my keys being locked in the car, and an unquestionable miracle in getting them out, and then and Betsy’s absence and return, had given Alex the confidence to know that God could indeed give him the strength to do what he knew he could not do. I can imagine Heavenly Father watching my son since we got to the river, with Alex eyeing that bolt every time he went to the bathroom, surely thinking, “Today, I MUST be big enough.”, and preparing my son for the disaster that was surely in the offing.
Locking my keys in my car had not just been a random event, it had been a vital part of delivering Alex from his smelly concrete prison later that same day. As to Betsy’s absence, I don’t want to encourage my kids to think going missing is a positive event, so I’ll not speculate where that falls, except that the prayer WAS answered.
God does indeed answer the prayers of little boys. Sometimes He starts answering them before little boys even know they are going to need help.
Someone suggested to me recently that their visions regarding my son’s fate, as they read this story for the first time, centered on wondering how one goes about taking care of a child locked in an outhouse, unable to get out. Pushing sandwiches through the vent, so he could grow strong enough to move that bolt.
And that sign in every outhouse… “Please do not put trash into the toilet, it is very difficult to remove.” No doubt. And little boys more so!
(A Forest Service worker has suggested that perhaps another sign in the outhouse could help. “Please do not lock your children in the outhouse, they are very difficult to remove.”)
THIS STORY and many more can be found on Amazon, for Kindle, in Laura’s storybook: A Little Romp Through Laura’s Storyland
I am the Bug
He told the story toward the end of Stake Conference. “One afternoon I went out and got in my car, and there was this big bug on the windshield. I didn’t want to make a mess with the wipers, so I decided to just start driving and see how long it took for it to be pushed off.
“I got onto the street, and that bug hung on. I went from the street to the highway, and it still hung on. I was starting to have some respect for that little bug. I got up to 55 miles per hour, and he was still hanging on – though he was kind of slowly shifting around. He got his head down and is back end up, so he was more aerodynamic.
“I got out onto the expressway and kept speeding up, finally up to 75 miles per hour. That bug was still hanging on.
“It suddenly occurred to me, that maybe he didn’t know what else to do. And I felt the Spirit tell me, ‘Slow down, and let the bug go.’ I thought that was weird. But it came again, “Slow down, and let him go.”
“So I pulled off to the side, and when I had slowed way down, the bug finally let go, and flew off.
“Some people are like that. Hanging on because they just don’t know what else to do, hoping for someone to rescue them, and they are TIRED.” He went on to make a point about helping others.
All I could think, with tears streaming down my face, is “I am the bug”. Hanging on for dear life, so tired I wonder sometimes if I can make it to the next day, just wishing things would slow down, that just ONE THING would get better, that something would change to give me hope. That somehow, a miracle would occur to make the whole unmanageable mess, somehow, manageable.
This is not about having a pity party. This is about depression. This is what it feels like to have depression. It may also be described as feeling like you are in a tunnel. Like all the color has gone out of the world. Like the laughter has somehow taken a vacation. Like all the effort to make things change for the better just does not help, and there just isn’t enough of you to keep up anymore. Like somehow the rules of life that used to apply, and seem to apply for everyone else just don’t apply to you anymore. Like God loves you, and COULD fix it, but you know He probably won’t. Life just hurts, and feels so heavy. Sometimes it hurts so much you don’t know how you can bear it for one more day.
From the outside it does not look like this. From the outside it looks like this person just grumbles a lot more than they used to. It looks like they have a bad attitude, and they may be more impatient and more angry. It looks like they are lazy and just not making an effort to help themselves. It looks like they’ve become more selfish. It looks like they do not appreciate your encouragement and good advice.
If you identify with either side of this – if you feel like you are the bug, then it is likely that depression is having an effect on you, or if you know someone who just doesn’t seem to be coping in the way you remember them doing, it is likely that they are under the weight of serious depression.
Now, we aren’t talking about “gee, I feel down today” when you have a crying jag due to PMS or something else. We are talking about something that goes on for more than a few months – almost when the person cannot remember the last time they had a good day, or a time when they had more good days than bad days. They feel like they’ve gone in and just can’t get back out. And it feels like it is their fault.
There are two types of depression – Situational, and Clinical. Situational is depression caused by a specific situation – loss, change, relationship problems, etc. Counseling, exercise, activities, and other strategies may help a lot with situational depression. Clinical depression is caused by changes in the chemistry or hormones in the body, and no matter how many “good things” you do to “fix it”, it simply may not respond with enough impact to pull out of the depression. Medication may be helpful with clinical depression, as may diet changes. Sunlight, and working in the dirt (seriously! bacteria in the dirt has a specific mood enhancing effect on the brain) may help either type of depression, but it may or may not be enough to turn things around.
It usually takes something outside themselves to break the pattern. Medication may be PART of the solution, but is rarely the whole thing. In some instances, medication makes little difference – it simply may not be appropriate for some individuals. Herbs may help – St. John’s Wort can help (though it will make you sensitive to the sun), and so can Borage Oil, or Lemon Balm. In either case, you can’t just tell someone with depression what to do to help themselves – they literally may not have the strength to make an appointment to get help, or go to the grocery store to get Borage Oil.
If you have a friend who seems to have depression, don’t try to tell them how to “fix” it. Ask them to go somewhere with you. Be patient if they say no, and ask again. Don’t be surprised if you ask what you can do, and they don’t know – be specific when asking them if they want you to help them with something. Bring them dinner now and again, and bring enough that they have leftovers. Let them know you care. And be patient with their discouraging mood. This is how they feel right now. It isn’t fun, and it isn’t nice to be around sometimes, but if you are patient, they have more hope of pulling out of it. Hugs help. Love helps. Not judging them helps. Helping them see the good in THEM helps.
Certainly, if you feel like hurting yourself, or someone else, you need to tell someone. And if your friend or family member expresses that kind of feeling, you need to call a Mental Health Crisis Center and ask what to do. Because someone may feel so much pain that they really can’t stand it any longer.
Depression can sneak up on anyone. No one is immune. In fact, most people will experience at least one serious depressive episode in their life, when it is the support and kindness of others that allows them to feel the love of the Lord enough to keep going. It is part of the opposition in life that allows us to recognize joy because of pain, and good because of bad. And it is one of our greatest opportunities to be the recipients of Christlike love from those around us, if they but choose to give it.
If we are on the outside looking in, this is a chance to BE the hands of Jesus Christ. To give true charity – “the pure love of Christ”. You may not be able to slow down the car and let them off. But you can cover their hands with yours, and “lift up the hands that hang down, and strengthen the feeble knees”.
Today, I am the bug. Tomorrow, you might be. Together, we are all strong enough to hang on.
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Life from the Garden: Grow Your Own Food Anywhere Practical and low cost options for container gardening, sprouting, small yards, edible landscaping, winter gardening, shady yards, and help for people who are getting started too late. Plenty of tips to simplify, save on work and expense.
