It’s hard to believe I’ve been at this for four months already! Something like 35 posts that I hope you’ve been finding valuable.
It’s time to ask for your help once again.
If you haven’t seen it all, I’ll refer you to the table of contents. I’ve been keeping it up-to-date as each article is added. It’s a great overview of where we’ve been. It also still has a few place holders for articles yet-to-come, as well as some topics I want to address in the future.
As you read this, I’ll have just returned full of ideas and energy from Expert’s Academy Live, a four-day conference that covers … well, it pretty much covers how to do things like Ask Leo! and Ask Leo! On Business. (Though I’m pretty pleased that Ask Leo! predates it by several years – I’ve been at this for a while. 🙂 )
So if I’ve been doing this successfully for so long, why do I need training? Because I can always serve you better. My goal is to walk away with ideas to grow Ask Leo! and Ask Leo! On Business to make them even more valuable resources for even more people than they already are.
I should be overflowing with ideas … which means it’s a perfect time to add yours to the mix, specifically with respect to Ask Leo! On Business.
What else should I cover?
What should I cover more deeply?
What other ways might I cover the topics that are important to you?
Are there specific tools and technologies relating to your online presence that you’d love to see me cover?
And perhaps most importantly, what’s your biggest roadblock right now? What’s keeping you from making progress today towards building an awesome online presence for your business or cause?
I can guess, but my take is that it’ll serve you much, much better if I address problems and issues you’re actually facing.
Let me know in the comments to this article. (You can reply by email if you like, but I’d prefer posted comments, so all can share in the discussion. Ideas have a tendency to trigger even more ideas if everyone can see ’em.)
Thanks, as always, for being here…
I have no plans to make money on the Web, but I do have two ideas for Web sites/blogs that I’d like to do. One would be for my family, tracking our ancestry and relations, and the other would replace a joke list I currently run via Yahoo groups. What’s my biggest roadblock? In fact, there are three:
1. Cost. Since I’ll have nothing coming in from either of these, even the nominal costs for things like domains, hosting and WordPress plug-ins adds up to more than I’m prepared to spend
2. Expertise. For the family site I’d like to post a picture of my grandmother and her sisters and let users click on a person to view her children, and their children, and so on, linking to individual pages for each family, and then comment and update us on their recent comings and goings, sort of like a year-’round holiday newsletter. I don’t have a clue how to do that.
3. Fear. “What if they gave a Web site and nobody came?” This applies to the joke list. I’d be asking people to take an action — sign up for my blog as I discontinue the Yahoo group, and since inertia is the greatest force known to man I fear that very few would do that. I can’t even think about signing them up automatically. Not only would it be borderline unethical, there are just too many to do that.
My business is not designed to make money but to educate and help people. But the technical and marketing issues are pretty similar.
My biggest obstacle is fear. I won’t be able to do it because . . .
I am too old to learn something new (88)
I am a product of the analog age
I am a forest person, not a tree person. Missing one detail will make the program useless or confuse readers
I’m not creative enough
I’m not self-confident enough
I procrastinate because I am afraid
Computers don’t like me and they won’t tell me why
When I can’t do something I cry and short out my keyboard
The list goes on and on, but you get the idea. Fear.
Jean
PS I do learn a lot from you, but it is slow
You should put your 35 posts into a single file as a mini-book on getting started for business.
It would be a great resource for those who missed the original posts.
Dear Leo,
Fantastic idea (ie asking for readers’ ideas). As background I am an ex-Cobol programmer, and I’m fairly OK with PC’s (my m/c is Win-7 with Avast anti-virus, Malwarebytes, G-mail, F/Fox, Adobe Reader, Macrium Reflect, Open Office, Total Commander, etc. etc…)
I have recently got a 10.1″ tablet (Android 4.4) and my problem is lack of knowledge as to the relationship between files/folders on Windows & Android and how to copy them from Win to Android. Also if I copy a text file (.txt or .rtf) will that be readable (&/or editable) on the Tablet? What is a good reader and a good text editor for the Tablet and can these copy/edit the file just as it is copied or are there some in-between steps needed (like converting English so as an Italian can understand it!) I imagine the 8-bit bytes on Windows may be quite different on an Android system (assuming it uses bits!) I feel I cannot get started with the Tablet until I get to understand some of the bricks and mortar and how they stick together. Hope you can spend the time to help, Leo, and that it will help others also. Many, many thanks for all you have done for your many readers over the years!! Dick Jenkin – Australia.