I Am Now Podcasting!

So, here’s a brief rundown of my podcasting, blogging, and newsletter activities:

I Am Now Podcasting!

So, here’s a brief rundown of my podcasting, blogging, and newsletter activities:

Kindra Cotton’s Blogger Blog Kindra Cotton's Blogger Blog RSS Feed
(The Blogger spot to catch up with what Kindra’s up to, and
how you can find her other podcasts, blogs, and websites
)


Exclusive Multiplicity: Highlighting the Adventures of a Serial Entrepreneur Exclusive Multiplicity RSS Feed
(A Tale of one Entrepreneur’s rise to success
through bootstrapping while wearing flip-flops
)


Small Business Branding Tips Blog Small Business Branding Tips Blog RSS Feed
(Brought to you by SSS for Success (EASY Brand Marketing Specialists))

The MaximizingTheNet.com Newsletter Blog & Podcast MaximizingTheNet.com Newsletter Blog RSS Feed
(A weekly podcast that highlights a topic of interest to
Maximizing The Net Newsletter subscribers
)
(A weekly podcast providing a tip on market research and online survey design, in addition to talking about how the “Mini Market Assessment” The Mini-Marketing Survey provides can be used to get you the information you need.)

 Effective Complaints Resource Blog Small Business Branding Tips Blog RSS Feed 
(A solution-oriented consumer advocacy resource for writing effective complaints)

Let me know what you think.
K.

KindraCotton.com

P.S. Don’t forget to check out my Nashville Home Technology Examiner page, and Follow me on Twitter (@KindraCotton), Link up with me on LinkedIn, and Friend Me on Facebook, if you haven’t already. And if you do, send me a message! And sign up for the Maximizing The Net Newsletter while you’re visiting MaximizingTheNet.com.

Why I Have 1000 Blogs

Ok, it’s not really 1000, it’s more like 5 or 6, but I have been asked this question recently, and I felt it would be beneficial to answer it hear, just in case other people are curious about this too.

Why I Have 1000 Blogs

Ok, it’s not really 1000, it’s more like 5 or 6, but I have been asked this question recently, and I felt it would be beneficial to answer it hear, just in case other people are curious about this too.

Moving forward, I’ll be branding myself as Kindra Cotton: Serial Entrepreneur, Social Media & Technology Enthusiast, and Jill of All Trades (and Master of Two). That last part is a new edition, as I’ve decided to re-recycle an old catchphrase I used to use when people would say “What Do You Do?“. As time progresses, it gets more and more difficult to answer that question, so I’m back to using “Jill” again. I think I do so for my own amusement more so than anything else, and it surely does crack me up! LOL.

But I digress…The interface that I use for this blog is different from say a Blogger Blog or WordPress Blog (both of which I have), and I wanted to test out all of the different blogging forms and see how effective and user-friendly they are, since it would stand to reason that at some point, someone will ask me to recommend one over the other, and the BEST way I can tell someone about something is having had personal experience using it.

So far, I enjoy this interface, but it wouldn’t be user-friendly to a computing novice. I like it because it’s fairly simple to use, but I can manipulate the code and do a bit more than what I could if I were using a free or paid account from some place like WordPress or GoDaddy.

I’ve used WordPress in the past, and it seems to be “the standard” of blogging, and so many people love it, but something about it, simply doesn’t appeal to me on a basic level. I mean, it’s a good site and it’s relatively easy to use, but I hate to see one particular program or company “dominate” an arena the way WordPress does for blogging, because it doesn’t necessarily mean they’re the best at it, it just means they’re everywhere and you have to deal with them as a result of it.

With Blogger,I was already leaning in this direction, since I have plenty of Google products right now, and the seamless integration of a blog into the Google account that I spend THE MAJORITY of my day logged in, was just too good to pass up. I don’t like how Blogger doesn’t let you put links that can open in another window, and while they do have a work around that you can use by changing the HTML code, the sheer volume of links I could have in any given post makes this a cumbersome chore and it’s something that I think Google specifically doesn’t fix because it’s tied to their profitability for advertising.

Ok, so I said all this to day, I’m playing around with blogging! This will ALWAYS be the central location for general blog information about me, since it’s directly tied to my Web Portal, but I’ll also work to centralize my online activities at: Kindra Cotton’s Blogger Blog and probably post duplicate content in both places, so you can either subscribe to the RSS feed of this blog, or subscribe to the RSS feed for the Blogger Blog (which I would prefer).

Hope this helps explain a few things,K.

P.S. Don’t forget to check out my Nashville Home Technology Examiner page, and Follow me on Twitter (@KindraCotton), Link up with me on LinkedIn, and Friend Me on Facebook, if you haven’t already. And if you do, send me a message! And sign up for the Maximizing The Net Newsletter while you’re visiting MaximizingTheNet.com.

Navigating a New Frontier

This week, in an effort to sharpen my own online image, I will be embarking on a venture into podcasting. Thanks to Cliff Ravenscraft’s teleseminar with Dan Miller last week, as well as a weekend crash course in podcasting, I’m endeavoring to “jump in and get my feet wet” in the field of podcasting and I’m backing up this effort with my new email marketing campaign for my various enterprises.

I’m excited to be moving forward. As an “information-intensive person“, I have a tendency to get so caught up in the details, minutiae, and planning of an activity, that it sometimes takes me more time to actually GET STARTED than usual. I’m working to get past this type of behavior, so this week I’ve simply decided to “JUST DO IT“!

By the end of the week, I plan to be a real “podcaster” with active podcasts floating around the net.

Wish me luck! 🙂

The Butcher, The Baker, The Candlestick Maker

Being an “information intensive person“, I first sought to learn more about the term “The Butcher, The Baker, The Candlestick Maker“, because while I understood it to be a synonym for a “Jack of All Trades“, I wanted to learn the origins of it, before using it as the basis of a “life-altering blog post“. LOL.

My research uncovered that the original term comes from the the nursery rhyme “Rub-a-dub-dub“, and while the rhyme itself has come to have many different meanings, the term “The Butcher, The Baker, The Candlestick Maker” is still widely used as a way to describe a multifaceted person, skilled in many different trades.

I really started thinking about this term, especially as I’ve had several people suggest to me that my desire to be a “Serial Entrepreneur” should be tempered by focusing on one specific area, and later branching out into others. The logic behind these suggestions surely make sense, but my brain just doesn’t function that way. I can manage to do multiple things at the same time, and actually do multiple things WELL (not just applying a paltry amount of time to an area, just to say I’ve done it).

When this suggestion came up for the third time within a month span, it caused me to do some inward reflection. After all, if two or more people are agreeing about something, the very least I can do is give the idea some contemplation in my own life, just to make sure everyone else isn’t seeing something I may have missed.

In thinking about how I consider myself “A Jill of All Trades (and Master of Two…LOL)”, I noticed that one of the themes that emerged from the three people that mentioned my “need to focus” was this idea that I get a new idea, and somehow chuck the old one, and move on to the new one without ever completing anything. That couldn’t be further from the truth. Whenever a new idea or new opportunity is introduced into my life, I accord it a certain priority relative to the other activities I’m balancing. Some things take priority over others, especially for ideas that are income-generating (since that’s my top priority these days). Even the things I LOVE to do sometimes get put on the backburner, because other priorities need to be attended to. I found it interesting that none of the people that suggested I “needed focus” were able to see the need for certain priorities that I have. Now, for two of those people, they really don’t know me well enough to have a good grasp on how I work, they’re merely making suggestions based on the glimpse of what they’ve seen in me, and probably their interaction with tons of other people whose characteristics I match. The person that actually knows me well, sees what they want, and despite the evidence to the contrary that I don’t just drop projects or not finish them, they still have the perception that I do, and at this point, I don’t think there’s much that can be done about it.

So after spending more time really thinking my life plan through, I took into consideration everything that the aforementioned people said to me, and I realized that I really need to do a better job of “scripting a more cohesive narrative” for what I’m doing and how I plan to accomplish my goals. At least to the point where people don’t look at me and simply view me as “flighty” and a person that can’t stick to one thing.

Furthering this thought process, helped me realize something: I am me. And as “me“, I manage to be a daughter to my mother, a sister to my siblings, an aunt to my nieces and nephew, a confidant to my friends, a tech support specialist to anyone who has a computer problem & my cell phone number, a complaint letter writer to anyone with a gripe against a company, and a host of other things in any given day. In fact, people deal with me based on the image of me that they see and my relation to them in their lives (e.g. daughter, tech support specialist, etc.). As such, on any given day, I can manage to be 10 different things to 10 different people, but at the same time: I’m still ME. I’m this ONE person functioning as tons of other things to tons of other people, based on the relationship that we have.

I don’t quite get why I can’t apply that same logic to the professional realm of my life. I mean, I understand that sometimes people have a problem dealing with folks they can’t easily put into a “box“, but I can’t see why I should be limited by other’s opinions of me or what I should be, based on their preconceived notions. Perhaps this will be the “death of me“. But I just can’t live by other’s people’s expectations and curtail my own life and professional growth because some can’t deal with a “Butcher, Baker, Candlestick Maker” in an age where we all spend way too much time and money at Walmart, and believe the need for these professions are obsolete anyway! LOL.

How I found more hours in the day

Until fairly recently, I was one of those über-busy folks trying to cram tons of activities into a 24 hour day and there never seemed to be enough time! Managing several businesses, completing a Certification course, and maintaining some semblance of a personal life, left me feeling as though I simply don’t knock enough things off my “To Do List” on a daily basis.

Down Came the Rain…

Nashville_Flood-05-03-2010

The flooding that took place in Nashville during the weekend of April 30th has effected me in a number of ways. First, I was actually out driving in the downpour during the late afternoon on Saturday, and I witnessed first hand the power of rushing water and its ability to move a car down the road, despite the best attempts at steering. For me, as a native Chicagoan, I thought I’d faced just about all sorts of weather-related incidents on the road, but it was rather unnerving to swerve in one direction while the rain pushes you in another and there’s nothing you can do but just “ride it out” as you would when you hit a patch of ice.

Still Putting the "Social" in Social Networking

Last week, I committed myself to reaching out to all the people that I’m connected with on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter because I want to improve the quality of those connections. I decided to send messages to people in my network, and much to my surprise, it’s been a much more daunting task than I expected. Not complaining, just a bit shocked. Turns out, I have over 200 Facebook friends and while reconnecting has been fun, I’m not even a quarter through my list! LOL.

Putting the "Social" in Social Networking

It seems reasonable to me, that if an activity is called “Social Networking”, then it should actually be Social.

Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve amassed several contacts, connections, and internet friends on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter, but because I want to improve the quality of those connections, I’ll be spending some time actually reaching out to the people in my network.