The Web Whisperers blog is up and running again. We had a few technical difficulties and the old URL is still down..but we are here…

Since I have been learning all this new Internet stuff over the past few years, I have been starting to think differently. One of the new ways of thinking is to automate everything I can and make an online system.

SAVING TIME USING CUSTOMERS AS OUTSOURCERS

One of the primary sources of income for me is public speaking. I travel around the world three or more times a month in my busy seasons and mkake thousands of dollars per day giving seminars and keynote talks.

Because that is not my only work (I also write books and run my business mostly all by myself - with a little support from virtual assistants), that means I am busy a fair amount of the time, especially when I am traveling and during the spring and fall seasons when there is lots of demand for my speaking - since many organizations hold their conferences during one of those times. It used to be that sponsors would have to track me down and bug me to get my bio statement, photo, brochure content, continuing education questions and objectives, my W-9 tax form which they would need to report my income to the IRS at the end of the year, and so on. I was not always timely in getting back to them when I was busy, frustrating them, delaying their marketing efforts and making me look bad.

Finally, when I learned how easy it is to create a website and began thinking this way, I thought: why not outsource this activity to my sponsors? I set up a website that gives them control and access to all the information they need to hire me and organize my talks and seminars. (You can view part of the information-the public stuff-at http://www.possibill.com/sponsors. The rest is private and I provide passwords to my sponsors so they can access those bits.)

This has saved me an estimated 12 hours a month. And the people who are considering hiring me or who have hired me love it! It saves them time and hassle. It gives them several choices as to topics. They can give the link to their graphics/brochure design people and get themselves out of the middle. In short, I have outsourced this activity to my sponsors, much like the bank outsources a teller’s activity to you when you visit an ATM. You like it because it it faster and gives you more control. But the bank saves money and time when you use their ATM for transactions.

I have said before that my goal is to create a worklife that does not require my time or presence. This outsourcing to customers is part of that strategy. Now how can it apply to you and your business life?

Think about it: which parts of your work activity could you outsource to your customers to save you time, give your customers control, increase customer service and satisfaction and systematize something that was chaotic or messy?

HOW DO YOU LEARN NEW THINGS IN TECHNOLOGY?

I was coaching a person the other day about getting on the workshop circuit and becoming a paid professional speaker (see my site http://www.paidpublicspeaker.com for more about this part of my business). I have claimed for a while that I am not that technical a person, but she challenged that. She told me she wanted to learn more about several programs, including PowerPoint, so she could use them more effectively. How do you learn this stuff?, she asked.

The old answer was that I would go to my local bookstore and read one small method out of the PowerPoint guidebook for complete dolts. This made for torturously slow learning, but gradually learned most of what I needed to know.

LEARN ONLINE THROUGH VIDEO TUTORIALS

My new answer is different. I go to Google and search for “tutorials” or “video tutorial” on whatever subject I want to learn. In this way, I found one of my favorite sites for online tutorials, Screencastsonline (A Mac-only tutorial site. Check them out at: http://www.screencastsonline.com/sco/). The host of Screencasts Online, Don, is a great teacher and tutor. He explains everything you need to know to get set up using programs or services on the Mac.

I have become proficient on several programs that I knew nothing about following Don’s clear tutorials. It costs me $35 for six months of numerous great tutorials and it has made me thousands of dollars so far in the ways I have implemented what I learned. By the way, Don was able to quit his job and make a full-time living through this service, started when he converted to Mac and began to convert friends and relatives who then asked for his help in learning how to better use their new Macs.

I bought a new Mac about a year ago that could run Windows from within the Mac perating system. Problem: I have been using computers since the early 1980s, but had never used a Windows machine and had little clue as to how they worked. Solution: I searched Google and found a free tutorial. It took me about two hours to learn the basics of how Windows worked (much of Mac and Windows are the same these days, but there are crucial differences that will stymie you if you don’t know about them).

Another of my favorite sites is www.lynda.com. For $25 a month, you get access to a bunch of tutorials. If you take just one, you could get your money’s worth, but there are literally hundreds of program tutorials on the site.

I find it easier to learn something is someone shows me than if I read it in a book or just hear it. Audio with visual is a powerful combination for effective learning.

USE TECHNOLOGY TO MASTER TECHNOLOGY

My coaching client vowed she would overcome her lack of technical knowledge and her intimidation about certain technical things by using this same strategy and I recommend it to you. Find it for free or pay a small fee and learn online. Don’t let technology defeat you. Use technology to master technology.

EARLY ADOPTERS

I was just reading about a book that has been out for several years by Geoffrey Moore called Crossing the Chasm. His premise is that there is a group of people who love to be on the bleeding edge of technological developments (they buy the iPhone on the first day; they join Second Life or MySpace early on before more people have heard of these places). These are the “early adopters.”

But for some new technological innovation to succeed, it must cross the chasm between the early adopters and the “early majority.” The early majority then brings in the “late majority” (this is when your grandparents get email and digital cameras and start to use them regularly).

CROSSING THE CHASM FOR PASSIVE AND RESIDUAL INCOME

I think we are at this point in Internet marketing and passive and residual income through the Web. When I first had a website over a decade ago, this stuff was hard to set up (no autoresponder services for the masses; hard to create websites and shopping carts; and so on). And there were not that many people on the Web or who willing to shop through the Internet.

With computers becoming so much easier to use; with more and more people getting broadband and getting on the Internet; with easy-to-use tools and platforms like Ebay, Amazon.com, 1ShoppingCart, e-junkie, Constant Contact, Aweber, Wordpress, RapidWeaver, Second Life, Facebook, and others, we are about to cross the chasm in two senses:

1. More and more non-techies will be comfortable using the web, shopping on it, downloading digital products, etc.
2. More and more of us will be able to afford to and learn to set up automated marketing and sales systems using these easy tools and affordable services.

You will be at an advantage is you are on the leading edge (bleeding edge hurts), with all your systems in place as the vast majority begin to cross the chasm. Be ready when that cash starts pouring down the chute so you can catch some of it.

I just joined Facebook. It seems cool.

I had joined MySpace previously so I could get a sense of what all the social networking fuss was about (I don’t really need more social connections; I can barely keep up with the ones I have). But I found the constant bogus requests from potential “Friends” from that site obnoxious and time-consuming. I would go check on people who had sent me requests and most of them turned out to be sex solicitations from busty-looking females who had some nefarious purpose (and probably didn’t really look like that, right)? (On the Internet, no one knows if you’re a dog, as the famous New Yorker cartoon asserted).

But Facebook seems different. It is easier to set up, more intuitive and obvious. It let me search for potential friends right away by scanning my email address book and turning up real people I actually wanted to connect with, including my sister and several nieces.

And I have already started a social networking group I have wanted to start for some time: Life Solutions.

This group is for anyone who has ever solved a problem in life and is willing to tell others how he, she or they did it. Have you ever gotten over a phobia, depression, an allergy? Ever made a bad or troubled relationship better? Ever gotten out of a bad situation intact? Have you ever gone through a terrible experience and somehow been able to get to a better place because of the experience?

Tell us your story, including the methods, realizations, changes, strategies, help you got or any other details so we might be able to reproduce your solution.

Consider joining Facebook. They just made the cover of Newsweek (August 20/27, 2007) and they were already growing at a phenomenal rate, so that should help them skyrocket.

See my page by clicking on this graphic:

I plan to post updates as I get more experience and spend more time on Facebook. Stay tuned.