Ping has a couple great photos up on one of those “stock photo” sites. She was all excited - she’d just sold a copy of one of her photos. (Well - the site sold it for her. She just uploaded her photos.) Check out Ping’s photos here.

After I’d looked at all two of her photos, she started telling me about a cousin in New Zealand who’s quite a photography buff. Cuz Fotog! I commented that all she really needs to do now is promote her photos like crazy. And she asked - how could she do that? After looking at her cousin’s photos, the conversation changed to what this BUSY person in New Zealand could do to promote his stuff.

Well, now. That’s an interesting question. Let me give 5 or 10 quick ideas…

• Put links to your photos into your Yahoo Messenger, Facebook, Direct Matches, gmail status, on your Facebook “what are you doing now”, mention it in twitter, etc.
• Send an email to 100 friends and ask them what they think of your photo. (Some of those people will send your photo link to other people…people you do NOT know.)
• Get on your Internet Radio Show and talk about your photos.
• Put up a lens about your photos on Squidoo.
• Create a snazzy music video of your photos. (I create these for people - it’s a paid service. Read on for Why It’s a GREAT Idea.)
• Place sexy photo video, with rocking music and YOUR photo URL up on YouTube.
• Put your YouTube video in a Video Squeeze Box and have it pop up on your Blog.
• Or maybe you NEED a blog. Write to HelpfulGeek@GeekyMarketers.com if you would like a blog created for you.
• Find 8 or 20 or 75 Facebook applications where you can have other people vote on your photos. Link them over to your photo collection.
• Use your photo in your profile, and join some forums or comment on some blogs.
• Use your photo in your profile when you join MyBlogLog and list your blog.

Well, those were my quick ideas. The one I hope some people will like is creating the Music Video out of photos so you have a jazzy, snazzy, sexy video to add to YouTube, MySpace, Facebook, your blog, your video squeeze popup box and so many other places.

Cheers,

Tim

The Helpful Geek

So here’s what I am doing about this. Yeah, I’ve spent thousands on things to help. But I really want a group of people to interact with. People I can ask questions of, and get feedback. People, also, who have projects and don’t quite have enough tech savvy to get the project completed. Win-Win masterminding and resources.

Beginners Marketing Class

Specials during February 2008

If you read this before midnight US Pacific time, Feb 29 2008, hurry and click - you can still get a free membership. Starting in March, Chuck is getting rid of free. Sounds like free will be gone forever.

If Lifetime Membership sounds better to you, hurry for that as well. In February that is $197; March 1 the price for Lifetime access reverts to the standard $260.

Monthly access is discounted in February, too. It’s $29.95 normally, but you can lock in the discounted rate of $19.95 now.

So what’s available?

• Free copies of Classic Success books;
• An active forum, with the Good Stuff restricted to paid members;
• Weekly calls, one for our Paid Crew, and a separate call for free/Trial members
• For Lifetime Members, access to coaching from Chuck - focused on business basics and marketing;
• Interviews of Internet marketers who have gotten “over the hump” to success, with a focus on what had gone WRONG that they needed to overcome to achieve their success.

Come join our marketing and business basics community.

A Geeky Anti-social Valedictorian

Years back I was high school valedictorian. I was a rather antisocial intellectual kid. I played the clarinet, and did a pretty good job of learning the trumpet in short order. I did door-to-door sales in college, and studied in Spain for a year. By my shyness and discomfort in social situations continued for years. At one point, as a technical support person, I visited Brazil and was able to instruct corporate students how to use a complex computer user account management package - in Portuguese. I love languages.

So then I moved to Asia. My technical skills started to be less important, and I really had to understand people speaking other versions of English - Australian English, and the pigeon English languages in Singapore and Malaysia, commonly referred to as Singlish and Manglish. I’m still struggling with the pseudo-English in Malaysia. My take on this is - in the US, we are concerned with grammar and pronunciation, and “proper American”. Same goes in England, South African and Australia / New Zealand. Here in Asia, things seem much more focused on communicating, and “proper” anything is often out the window.

So now, again a handful of years later, I’m intrigued with marketing. Getting across an idea of what a software package, a book or a blog website can do for a person just piques my interest. Now, I can’t claim any great success at marketing as yet. But over the past years I’ve been having a lot of fun playing with the tools that marketers use. Blogs. Autoresponders. Membership scripts. Forums. PHP scripts for various things - social bookmarking, membership sites, forums, etc. And since I have loved playing with scripts (PHP is a scripting language used on websites), I have been having fun modifying the way that various PHP scripts behave. When I get an idea in my head, 99% of the time I get the script to do what I want it to do.

Not A Marketing Success…Yet

I have dabbled in writing newsletters. I’ve had a couple blogs for about 9 months now. But these never really fit me properly, or I never got my mindset in order for them. That’s not really important. What is important is this - I’m realizing that I can play “tech support” now for a whole flock of people that are trying to do marketing on the Internet, and the technology is getting in the way. I can be the go-to guy for people who can market, but can’t figure out - or don’t care to try to figure out - how to configure up a One-Time Offer in their membership package. Or maybe they know that visitor tracking data is valuable to them, but they don’t want to pour over the Intenet figuring out what options they have for gathering that data.

And blogs are a big thing. After people work with a blog for 6 months, it’s pretty comfortable. But often when first getting acquainted, a blog can be quite big and scary. Some of that is only in the mind. But that’s not important - the reality is that technology can be a huge roadblock. And I can help reduce or remove the roadblocks.

Removing Technical Barriers

So, are you “Not a (hosting / autoresponder / membership site / Wordpress) success….Yet”? Could you use a hand in those areas? Are there things you work on, knowing full well that it shouldn’t take 5 hours to do certain things? Or maybe you are quite proficient in an area, but there’s no spark of interest in it for you.

Well, that’s what this blog and later additions to this website are all about. Do you find yourself gritting your teeth when working on your web hosting, changing some small thing on your blog, or trying to get a membership site put together? Then I want to help you along. I might help by teaching you how these things work. Some people just need to get a bit of the psychology and the zen of the Internet. Others just need a better tool to do file transfers or HTML editing with. Then there are people who really shouldn’t even be wasting their time playing with file transfers and HTML at all - and I’m glad to have tasks outsourced to me.

Let me ask you - If you could give me a call, we can discuss a new blog website, and you can have that up and running 3 or 4 days later - and I get all the work done - Would that put a smile on your face? And would you be happy to go post 10 or 20 times on your blog in the next week or two? Well, if so - I think it would make us both happy to have a conversation. Drop me a note, leave a comment on my blog, or give me a call. Let’s make some things happen for you.

Joint Ventures

One way that I’ve been improving my own marketing is by partnering with tech-challenged marketers. Often a good marketer from offline disciplines will do just fine on the Internet. It’s still just a game of getting a message to a person, and getting them to consider your point of view. An offline marketer knows this stuff, while others are just learning it. What that offline marketer might want to do is to continue spending their time on marketing. They’ll seek out someone like me to put together the website, the blog, the or the membership site. They’ll put together the sales letter, and write the blog entries. We might work together to add the things that Search Engines look for. Together, we create a successful marketing site on the Internet, and have much more success than we would have if working on the same task, but not working as a team.