Ask five friends to describe, in their words, what you do...you will get back as many different answers. Your "Positioning", or the set of impressions people have about you, speak so much louder than any marketing campaign or snazzy logo.

In this webinar, you will understand the anatomy of your positioning, and discover a simple process to ignite a powerful word-of-mouth buzz about who you are, what you offer and what kinds of clients you really want.

(Notes, mp3 and other resources below the fold)

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As a solopreneur, money is a constant obsession. Some nights I can't get to sleep, with all the what-if's and how-can-I's running around in my head.

I fantasize about winning $50 million at LottoMax, what I would do with it. Of course I would give a million to each of my brothers, as well as my mother, and endow an educational trust for my nieces, nephews and their children (as well as any kids I would have or adopt someday, in the unlikely event that should happen). But what would I do with the rest?

I read the stories of lottery winners, how they say they will buy a new house, a new truck (it always seems to be a truck, doesn't it?), go for a trip down south, then put the rest in savings. Several even say they would not quit their job (yeah, right).

But not me. It would all go into my business. I guess that is the difference between employee thinking and entrepreneur thinking.

How are the money worries of an employee different than that of an entrepreneur?

And, even more importantly, will my money worries ever stop?

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I received an interesting blog post by Michael Port about the incident during a retreat led by James Ray last October in Sedona that resulted in three deaths and several injuries. Today (January 8) is the 90-day anniversary of this tragedy.

Michael decries the silence of the personal development profession about this tragic incident. He starts his article:

"The tragic death of three people attending a "spiritual retreat" with James Arthur Ray has made me so angry that I'm having trouble finding words to express myself. But I'm going to try because, to me, silence is acceptance---and there has been a deafening level of silence from other "teachers" in the spiritual-help "community." Though, I am not in the "spiritual-help" business, I do write business-help books, and am close enough to, and sometimes, much to my annoyance, associated with James Ray's corner of the self-help market, that I'm embarrassed and ashamed that I haven't spoken up earlier about these teachers and their tactics. What happened in Sedona on Oct 8, 2009 was unacceptable. This is not the first time a narcissistic sociopath with a god-complex has lead people to their deaths and unfortunately it won't be the last time."

The post continues with a condemnation of James Ray's tactics:

"From all accounts, James Arthur Ray's tactics at this retreat and elsewhere, are coercive and manipulative, designed to strip followers of their power, and might I add, money. (...) Not only was Ray presenting himself as a spiritual guru promising spiritual enlightenment, but also as a business advisor offering profound economic improvement in business. According to an article on cbsnews.com, "The self-stylized success guru says people are ready for his wisdom if "You simply (and deeply) want to make more money and become more successful" and "want to double, triple, and even multiply by ten the size of your business." "

I notice, especially among coaches, that we try to promise bold transformations in material wealth, by using "spiritual" words.  Obviously, if this kind of marketing talk works for the big guns in the industry, it should work for us, right? [Read more →]

Are we in a "recession" or in a "recovery"? Who cares? What real, practical impact does the state of economy as described by the media and the government have on solopreneurs like you and I?

An op-ed piece by David Brooks on NYTimes.com had me thinking about this. His column, titled "The Protocol Society" talks about the shift in Western economies from the 19th and 20th century focus on making stuff (corn, steel, trucks), to the 21st century basis of the economy: sets of instructions such as software, processes, and intellectual property.

In my opinion, what makes being a solopreneur possible in this day and age is that we can leverage our ideas and skills to create parallel streams of income. This is the distinction between a solopreneur and an artisan: the artisan is a self-employed person who makes things or delivers a personal service, and since only one thing can be produced or service delivered at a time, the earning of an artisan is linear. I'm thinking of some people I've coached in the past: a furniture reupholsterer, a plumber, even a dentist. No matter how advanced or specialized is their knowledge, the business model that they're forced into creates linear income.

But when you take that knowledge or skill and transform it into "protocols" - organized information - then you can move from a linear income to a parallel income. Solopreneurs can leverage ideas and technologies to produce much more value from a time unit of work than if we were building widgets or serving customers on an individual basis.

David Brooks makes a a key distinction between the classic physical goods economy and the new protocol economy: physical things are finite, you can use them up, and therefore responds to the law of supply and demand. But the protocol economy, based on ideas, has no such limit.

What does all this mean for solopreneurs? Here are some ideas that came to me as I considered this concept:

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