There are about twenty tabs open in my browser right now, and I’m getting a bit anxious to close some of them. Only a couple are destined for bookmarking on Diigo, while the rest belong to those devilish categories of inspirational+ reference, which means study this+dig deeper later [when you have time <sic>].

So I figured it would be best to round them up in a special links post.

The first one is somewhat beyond my comfort zone in terms of social media-and-marketing focus, but there are nuggets I’m sure I’ll want to lay my hands on later: How to Develop a Social Media Content Strategy. Includes references and links to various tools.

Next, Steve Garfield: Get Seen – Web Video, a 40-plus minute video tutorial on making videos. Haven’t had a chance to watch more than the first 15 minutes, but it looks like a great resource and I definitely want to be able to reference Garfield’s post if or when I ever decide to put myself online in video.

I’m a writer, right? Even if at present I’m suffering a kind of content lacuna, unable or unwilling to commit to a theme, a topic, a goal. (I’d like to change that in the coming year, incidentally – this might explain my rooting around in the online equivalent of the self-help section…) With writing in mind, I scoped out a couple of great posts by writers helping writers.

Justine Musk – aka Tribal Writer – has some terrific posts. First one I came across was this: the secret ingredient to a strong author platform. This all gets back to branding (self-branding) and therefore marketing again, but if you take a look at the disruptions in the publishing industry, it makes sense that writers figure out how to do this stuff. Her posts are full of additional links to other great stuff – you can lose yourself in them. For example, here’s another one: the online art of developing your author brand molecule global microbrand thing. (From there I came across Gaping Void‘s the global microbrand rant, another interesting read – ok, it’s from 2005, therefore not exactly new to the world, but to me it was. Incidentally, this one made me feel a bit better about living so far off-center, although it can’t be said that Victoria is cheap, cheapness being the case Hugh Macleod makes for living away from the Big City…)

Justine Musk references creative entrepreneurship, which is something I’m determined to stake my claim in (see pave your way to creative domination: the writer as creative entrepreneur) – my first task is (RE!)-figuring out my goal(s). I used to be really clear on those, but lost the thread some years ago. It’s definitely time for me to get that mojo back.

Incidentally, I came across Musk’s posts via Jane Friedman’s There Are No Rules – another “lose yourself in the links all day” site. I’ve never written to an agent, but maybe one day I’ll find this helpful: How to Ensure 75% of Agents Will Request Your Material. Nor do I wish to write a memoir, but I might reference this: Your Self-Help Book Should Not Be a Thinly Disguised Memoir. Again, these posts are themselves full of additional links, so be prepared for a long reading…

More marketing/ blogging/ writing nuggets from Tara Gentile: How to Sell With a Story. Not sure how/ if I’ll use this, but simply in terms of how Gentile describes her own transition makes me want to keep this in the reference file. That she writes about building an empire (see big thinking) just adds icing to the cake!

Gentile was someone I found via some research about Etsy. I did that research because of something I learned from my son, whose university friend’s father has a thriving Etsy shop. I wanted to tell two of my friends about what Etsy might be able to do for them, so I found some links for them. (Now of course I’m the one who’s interested – although my sculpting days are quite a few years behind me…)

Here are some good ones I found: Megan Auman’s Crafting an MBA is full of brilliant stuff. Start with how to use Etsy as a launch pad – Auman, like Gentile, is thinking “empire,” and she means business. Then check out her recommended reading list and get ready to burn the itty-bitty book light…

Another post of hers that I love is skill, price, and Etsy as business incubator, in which Auman references the theory that you need 10,000 hours of practice to achieve mastery (popularized by Malcolm Gladwell in his book, Outliers), and then refers to a couple of other posts, which let her conclude that on Etsy, people are putting in their 10,000 hours in public. Fascinating idea. From here, she goes on to discuss pricing, and ends with making the case that Etsy can be a business incubator.

Be sure to check this article out, too: why your craft business gets stuck. This one has some great observations about what makes women-led businesses work …or not work so well.

I love that both Auman and Gentile provide a real soup-to-nuts service with their sites: sign up for newsletters, join the online book club, do some online workshops, and so on. I’m seriously in awe of both of them. I could spend hours following more and more links on Auman’s site (for example, using etsy’s circles and activity feeds to research your ideal customer), so I better stop now – otherwise my plan to close tabs will fail. 😉

Climb that mountain ...even if it's in another country

Posted: 12|26|10 at 10:56 pm. Filed under: links.
Tags: etsy, reference, resources, writing
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