I’ll be speaking on March 14, from 11:30 to 12:30 on the topic of my book From Geek to Peak.

The very nice people at SxSW tell me that my panel will be one of their Core Conversations. Here’s a little preview of what these are about:

The informal discussions that pop up in the hallways between, during and after panel sessions have traditionally been one of the most productive parts of the SXSW Interactive Festival. In 2008, we formalized this process with the Core Conversation program — thereby making it easier for more attendees to participate in these hallway-type exchanges of information by letting them know what kind of discussion is happening when and where. For 2009, each of these hour-long Core Conversation sessions will have its own room, which should eliminate most of the noise problems from last year.

We anticipate about 75 total Core Conversations for 2009, so check back to this page frequently for updates on additional sessions. A day-by-day schedule of when these Core Conversations will occur should be posted on this page in mid-December.

If you’re going out on your own, there’s basically two ways to make money: project vs. product.

The project mode is the best way to achieve cash flow. Whether you’re working as an on-site contractor, doing freelance gigs (writing, coding, designing), or speaking or running workshops, they all have one thing in common: you show up, you work, you get paid. Once.

Product mode requires some time and effort, and maybe some money. In product mode, you toil away to write a book, put together a video series, a nice little web or desktop application. You can work for a day or for a year. You might get paid a whole dollar or many hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Product mode is about potential. You can potentially get paid over and over for the same unit of work. If you’re smart, you’ll always have one or more products cooking away while you work on projects.

If you don’t have a product going, you’re going to be in project mode for a really long time, and that’s not a good place to be. Eventually, you want to have a whole universe of products around you that are bringing in some money. If you can’t handle a universe, then aim for a galaxy, or a constellation. Something.

The question becomes, what are the best products to create? There’s only one reasonable answer to that question, and it’s another question: what do you like to do? If you enjoy working on your own and you have some skill at it, write a book. If you like being around people and dealing with people, consider a membership site. If you’ve got the voice for it, do a CD series. If you’re good at teaching, consider a video series or a screencast series (especially if you’re a coder). And so on.

In other words, find a product type that matches your personality and goals.

If you follow a typical salesperson around all day, most of your day will be consumed by the same kinds of activities:

• Researching a set of leads
• Cold-calling (by phone, email, or just dropping by)
• Networking or talking to someone to get an introduction
• Following up with someone who they’ve already presented to

Before I go on, let me just say that I truly believe in the cold call. I think it has its place, particularly in the B2B world. When I started Triple Dog Dare Media, I basically made 100 to 150 cold calls every day for six weeks, and ended up with enough work to get started.

Why? Mostly because I didn’t know any better. These days, I use smarter techniques, such as an email newsletter, speaking engagements, teleseminars, and referrals to build my business.

But having all of that means you have to have a singular, primary requirement: something to say. Usually, the only thing a salesperson has to say to a prospect is “Have you read the brochure?” or “Have you looked at the proposal yet?”

When this kind of thing happens, its mostly due to inexperience or impatience. But it also has something to do with the fact that the salesperson is going in without support.

Yes, when you worked for the man, and you had a marketing team to back you up, they may have produced some nice leave-behinds or collateral. Frankly, I think that most of this stuff has limited value. Collateral is for damage, not your marketing. Honestly, what do you think happens to your brochures? They’re kept in a file and then tossed in a few weeks–if they’re not tossed right away.

What that salesperson needs is a high-integrity reason to call. Not to ask a question that benefits the salesperson, nor to give away free tickets for the Super Bowl (implicit strings attached up the wazoo), or anything silly like that.

No, the best reason to call is to give the prospect a crucial piece of information. Crucial can be quantified in two major categories:

• Crucial as in something they need to know about their circumstances or industry. Perhaps you saw an obscure little article about technology X that might have an impact on your customer. Time to bring it up!
• Crucial as in “crucial to their understanding on a topic.” How do you know what’s crucial to their understanding? Well, you have to look at the information they’ve already interacted with.

If they’ve downloaded the white paper on X, time to invite them to webinar on the same topic X. Perhaps there’s a workshop coming to town in three weeks on the same topic, and better yet, its free, so why not invite them to go with you?

Once they’re there, you can engage them in conversation, exchange business cards, find out what their issues are, give advice, point them to more resources.

That’s a lot better than pounding the pavement asking the same self-serving questions all day.

Here are some links that I thought you’d find interesting:

• Website Marketing SEO Score Tool - What kind of SEO ranking do your sites have? Use this tool to help improve your standings.
• Detailed Keyword Tips - How to navigate the winding roads and badlands of Google AdWords.
• 3 Hot Marketing Tips from Heat Map Analysis (Images) - Learn about scanning, skimming, and the power of images to capture the attention of a reader on your web pages.
• Four Ways the Internet is Transforming Small Business - There’s been a profound shift in marketing over the last few years. Get with it or get clobbered. Enough said.
• Stanford iPhone Class Apps - Listen up. If you’re a geek, and you’re in business, you should be able to come up with some great products–look, even Stanford University students are doing it.
• Marketing in a Recession Webinar | Marketing on a Budget - In a recession, marketing budgets are often the first to get slashed. For many that means cutting programs, cutting spending and cutting staff in order to make it through the economic downturn. But marketing in a recession isn’t about marketing less, it’s about marketing better and smarter. This webinar will share techniques for marketing more efficiently and effectively, particularly on a tight budget.

Another little section from my book, From Geek to Peak:

Part of building the business you want to have is your own value system. It’s something I can’t give you, but its something you really need to contemplate. Now, I know some of you are wondering what I’m talking about, or think that maybe I want you to get all moral or ethical on everyone.

You can do that if you like, but what I mean by values is very simple. I want you to know what you VALUE. Not what your spouse, parents, or friends value. Not what the market values (that’s important too, but not right now). What you value.

If you can get a handle on what you value, then you’ll have a better chance at actually building a consulting practice that makes sense. You’ll attract the right clients, projects, employees, and partners. Having a good value system will keep you from wasting time.

This is all kind of mushy, so I’ll illustrate with a story. When I was first starting out, I had a pretty good handle on what I wanted to do, but I had no clue what I stood for. As the old saying goes, if you don’t stand for something, you’ll fall for anything. Well, about six months after I started consulting, a good friend of mine got laid off and approached me about doing something together. My business was doing okay but it certainly wasn’t going gangbusters, so I agreed to meet with her.

Her idea was pretty simple–help companies publish technical documentation. At the time, I was doing lots of content management work, and had spent quite a bit of time in the tech pubs arena, so I thought the idea had merit. We worked out some ideas and then I started to work toward this goal. Unfortunately, my friend decided to go off and do something else about three weeks later, then something else about three weeks after that, and two months later she was pursuing some other goal, and then a fourth idea distracted her about six months later.

Do I blame her for distracting me? No, not now I don’t. She’s what my wife calls an “idea hamster.” You know the type of person I mean–they generate ideas all day long, but never get off the damn wheel and do stuff. She was the opposite of my friend the database expert who could never get on the wheel.

Truth is, I didn’t have a good handle on what I wanted to do or what I stood for, so I just got sucked into her vortex and didn’t escape until about three months later.

So values are important–if nothing else, they help you save time and money. If you have a set of values, you can evaluate opportunities against them to see if they’re a right match. For example, if you’re a committed Democrat, you–d be crazy to work on behalf of Republican candidate running for office, right? If you’re an environmentalist vegetarian, you probably wouldn’t want to work for a fast food chain that specializes in fatty beef burgers from cattle raised on clear-cut rain forests, right?

I’m not saying that you wouldn’t accept a check from these folks if it meant making the mortgage payment, I’m saying that even under the best of times, working for someone at odds with your value system will be stressful. I’m betting that your outcomes might suck too, or at least, you won’t be giving it your all.

    

A few weeks ago, Fred Castaneda of StrugglingEntrepreneur took the time to interview me about  making a run for the brass ring as a contractor/consultant/freelancer.

In this episode of The Struggling Entrepreneur, we return to the IT industry and showcase the skilled IT or technical professional who wants to become a consultant within the industry and become a successful entrepreneur.

However, how does someone who has great and valuable technical skills become a successful entrepreneur in the arena of IT Consultant or Technical Consultant?

Listen to Tom Myer, the author of the book From Geek to Peak, describe his experiences, obstacles, challenges, mistakes and success stories in getting to the end-game of successful entrepreneur.

Listen to the whole episode here.

I love to play poker. One of the things you see at gatherings with lots of poker newbies is annoying penny ante action.

It goes something like this: I have a pair of aces, so I bet a dollar. Two people fold, the next three call. We see the next round of cards, I bet a buck fifty, they call, and so on.

Because I’m leading, I’m putting a bet out there to see what’s in other people’s hands. It’s how you gather information in a game based on making decisions with incomplete information (kind of like business).

Seeing my call doesn’t give me lots of information. In fact, I’m better off without your stinking call. What I’m looking for is a raise from somebody so I can reraise, then see what happens. If they fold, I win, but if they reraise, I know they’re holding a straight and I can lay my stuff down.

But no, the beginner will hang on and hang on and through stupid perverse luck get his third six to suck out my high pair. Grrrr.

Marketing your business isn’t a poker game, really, and neither is giving advice to other companies on their marketing and management, because the stakes are often much higher. We’re not just talking more (or less) sales, but also your market positioning, market thought leadership, and eventually, jobs.

This is why I urge you to stop looking at what everyone in your industry is doing.Stop right now. All you’re doing is the same-old penny ante bullsh*t. They go to a tradeshow, and so do your clients. They write a white paper, and so then you’re hired to write a white paper. They create a microsite, and here you come with one too. You already know my thoughts on that biggest waste of money in the universe, the marketing brochure.

Instead, raise the stakes. Do something eye-popping. If the other side rents a booth at a tradeshow, get your client to become a sponsor of that tradeshow and get their CEO to be the keynote speaker. And then host the after-hours networking bash. Then post the keynote address as a podcast on your web site. Make sure that the CEO says something totally outrageous about your industry and how much it sucks, but oh by the way, here’s where he’s taking a personal stand on the suckiness.

Then book the CEO on a round-the-country trip to talk to investors, customers, and the media. Podcast all that, even the part where the analyst stands up and berates the CEO about how painfully bad the last product release was.

And remember what Kenny Wayne Shepherd sang:

Blue on black,
Tears on a river,
A push on a shove,
It don’t mean much.
Joker on Jack,
Match on a fire,
Cold on ice,
A dead man’s touch.
Whisper on a scream,
Doesn’t change a thing.

Here are some links that I thought you’d find interesting:

• Function Reference « WordPress Codex - All the wordpress functions you'll ever need to do whatever is you'll need on your blogs.
• How to SEO Your Site in Less Than 60 Minutes - Here's a fast checklist for the timid, the terrified,and the….uh…er, tabulated? You know what I'm talking about. There's also a $25 "how to SEO your site in 60 minutes" info product that is a much deeper explanation.

Various pieces in various magazines and blogs have all been breathlessly touting the latest and greatest technology trends for 2009 and “what it all means to the business guy or gal”: smaller, faster computers; cloud computing; et cetera et cetera. Most of these articles have one thing in common: they usually don’t have much to say to the microbusiness owner (i.e., those with 5 or fewer employers) and particularly the nonemployer businesses out there.

This may seem like a pretty fine distinction to make, but if there’s one thing that’s more true today than it was 8 years ago when I started on this little entrepreneurial journey, it’s this: the one-person shop is vastly different in just about all regards to any other business. Most of the time, the overhead is pretty low. Processes are leaner. Procedures aren’t documented. Customer arrangements are more personal and less encumbered with contracts and other paperwork. Technology trends and their impacts are more deeply felt, but they also represent a much bigger investment slice than with other businesses.

Let me give you a series of examples. If you’re just starting out, hopefully this will save you a great deal of pain. The idea is to take advantage of technology products and services that simplify or streamline your ability to make money. Sometimes this involves portability, other times it means repackaging bundles of things that were hitherto handled via scattered processes. If the tech product or service doesn’t actually help you make more money (or save more money, or time/energy/pain/tears/whatever) then you need to wait a bit before you shell out the bucks.

We’ve always done a lot of web development at Triple Dog Dare Media, most of it from scratch. We originally used Dreamweaver a great deal. We would set up development environments at our hosting company (paying an extra buck or two a month for a subdomain and dedicated database). At some point, we had a bunch of folks working on projects and needed a source code control system, so I went out and bought a cheap server, installed Linux on it, then installed Subversion and Apache and some other tools. I set that server up in our offices and ran an extra dedicated line to it so all of our contractors could reach it.

The extra costs ran into the several hundreds of bucks per month, plus one of my guys spent about 5-10 hours a month tinkering with the server–patching it, setting up backups, mucking about with cron jobs and database caching and mysql logs. Not too bad, and the arrangement stayed that way for a couple of years.

At some point, I decided to simplify my business model (read: go back to being just a lone-gun consultant). By this point I was down to mostly contractors anyway (having employees did not suit me). I switched to another hosting company (DreamHost),  mostly because they gave me a flat rate for hosting that gave me unlimited databases, domains, bandwidth, and email inboxes. They also provided Subversion servers that I could just connect to without having to own all my own stuff.

Within a matter of a few days, I’d moved over, and now life is better. Simpler. And cheaper. $300 a month plus having a guy work 5-10 hours (let’s call that $1000/month in lost productivity–that’s what he would bill out as) may not seem like much to a bigger firm, but to the small fry it is a lot. $1300 a month was roughly my office rent in the old days. But beyond the money, moving to a cheaper hosting provider with better services means simplification, and that means being able to focus more on the business instead of things like “is my Subversion server working” or “can my contractors connect to the Subversion server”.

Here’s another note on the “ever smaller, ever more powerful computer” trend. A few years ago I was a PC user. I had an 11-pound monster Toshiba Tecra laptop that I lugged around everywhere. It was basically a desktop replacement system with a huge screen and oodles of RAM. It crashed all the time and was generally a pain in the behind. Because I didn’t want to switch to Vista and I yearned for a system that had some kind of Unix environment on it (again, to simplify my life, as I was doing a lot of PHP development and UNIX shell scripting), I switched to Mac.

I ordered the biggest MacBook Pro I could get, with maximum RAM, biggest hard drive, the works. It was shiny and thin and light (under six pounds) and had 3x the oomph of the PC, and it never crashed. I could run Apache on it (and a whole host of UNIX tools and applications) without hassles, and was therefore able to carry around a fully loaded development environment. All in all, a very good $3000 spent, the best money I’ve spent on a machine. Two years later the MacBook Pro is still going strong, except I note that the battery only lasts five hours instead of the usual eight or nine.

Suddenly, I had a lot more mobility (it was just easier to carry the lighter machine!), access to both Mac GUI slickness and all the UNIX I could ever want, and didn’t need to maintain an extra Linux server for development environments. Plus I no longer needed to spend 2-3 hours per week dealing with endless virus problems, security patches, and updates.

Another way to look at it is I spent $3000 (which some would say is too much for a laptop) but was able to get back 5x that in the first six months alone just in productivity and not having to maintain a separate Linux server for development (and all the extra costs–both real and opportunity–related to that server).

But it gets even better. At some point, I dumped my BlackBerry and bought an iPhone. I needed a simple to use phone with good web browsing, good email, SMS, and a calendar and address book that worked with the Mac. Very soon after buying this little device (and being delighted by it at every turn) I realized something important: I really didn’t need to lug my MacBook Pro around.

All I needed was the iPhone and a paper notebook.

In most travel situations, all I needed was access to email and some Web capabilities. I was there to listen, take notes, have meetings, maybe do some nosing around. I wasn’t coding. I wasn’t setting up servers. So I really didn’t need the laptop, and frankly, I was getting sick of the TSA guys using it as a frisbee anyway.

So in many ways, the $300 iPhone became a surrogate computer.  In fact, I use it now a lot as I’m doing on-site contracting these days. I can use it as both a discreet tool for checking personal email and a way to keep up to speed with my other business concerns (especially once I installed TouchTerm, an SSH client for the iPhone and moved important documents to my IMAP email). Seen in the light of this use case, the cost for the handset is  a bargain, because what you’re paying for is not some kind of phone, you’re paying for a really small netbook.

If the netbooks+cloud computing trend keeps, er, trending, then we’ll just see an acceleration of what many of us have already started. You’ll have some kind of ultraportable device with just enough power and juice to get on the network, which will give it access to tools and content that you need to get the job done. Don’t have to worry about bad hard drives, backups, upgrades, patches and all the other miserable details of modern computing. All you need is access to the network, which is becoming more and more available as progress marches on.

Here are some links that I thought you’d find interesting:

• Free RSS Feed Icons, The Ultimate List | Icons - Just in case you find yourself in need of some RSS feed icons.
• Freelance Character Design, Character Illustration, Mascot Design - Here's a service that offers you the chance to create a mascot or character for your business (whether online or offline). This is a fantastic idea and a great way to personalize, humanize, and brand your business.
• Web Development Project Estimator - Here's a simple little online app that helpsyou put together a project estimate.