Tag — Tools of the Trade
Tools of the Trade: Special Price on Third Tribe Marketing
I know I’ve been kind of sell-y this week at Magpie Girl, what with the spots coming open at Flock and all. But I truly believe that an offer which meets your reader’s need is a gift, not a sale pitch. That’s why I would just kick myself if I didn’t let you know about this deal that is closing on Sunday, May 31st.
Are you trying to sell your art, coaching services, or Ecourses on line? You need a tribe.
Third Tribe is a membership site dedicated to helping people market their business in a non-slimey way. It’s hosted by already very helpful people like Darrin Rowse at ProBlogger, Chris Brogan, Brian Clark from Copyblogger and Sonia Simone of the amazing Remarkable Blueprint. Each month Third Tribe features a mp3 seminar just chocked full full of practical tips for on-line business — plus they help you take action with “next step” worksheets and other resources. But my favorite is that each seminar has a follow up Q&A Call where you can submit your specific questions.
I listen to these on repeat as I walk, bike, and bus around Copenhagen. (So, SO helpful.)
Click here if you already know you want to join at the intro price of $47/month, before it jumps to $97/month on Monday.
Otherwise, read on and I’ll tell you how Third Tribe has helped me.
Another benefit at 3T is the a huge collection of forums where you can ask your business questions, get advice, and find partners. Third Tribe forums have helped me:
- find the right email service provider
- set up a membership site (Flock!)
- launch my first ebook
- figure out affiliate marketing
The price for Third Tribe is taking a tremendous jump. At the current price of $47 a month, it’s a great value. The new price of $97/mo will be hard to fit into a tiny starting-up budget. Honestly, it may too pricey to be worth the value. So get in there now and get your business LAUNCHED!
Click here to join before June 1st and take advantage of this introductory price.
If you have any questions about 3T, shoot me an email. I’m happy to help. See you in the Tribe!
I take pride in featuring services and products you can count on. Doing some soulwork? Building your soulful business? Need a little help getting over the next hurdle? Tools of the Trade are the books, courses, services, and coaches that get my gold star. Come find what you need to move forward.
Flock Sampler: Ask an Expert, Dream Counselor
What kind of questions do the Flock experts answer? When you have a Life Coach, a Sexologist, a Mental Health Counselor, a Dream Counselor, and a Money Healer on staff, the answer is almost anything. Here’s an example…
Originally posted in the Flock, February 3 2010.
Hello, Flock! Welcome to our first dream session with Karen Mori Bonner, MS, LPC. This month, a Flock Dreamer sends this dream:
It’s a recurring dream I’ve had for as long as I can remember and it always involves being in a big, dark, warm and comforting house full of rich wood and soft lamplight, lots of windy corridors and nooks and crannies for curling up and reading. I know it’s my house and I always marvel as how I can afford such a gorgeous, large home. But…at some point there’s a party happening downstairs and I go along and try to join in. It’s a work-related party with people I hate and I can’t figure out whether I’ve invited them or they’ve just turned up. I think from the conversation (which I can never remember) that they’re all much more intelligent than I am. I get really annoyed that they’re in my house and I can’t work out why. At some point then the house disappears and we’re in some kind of open-air venue that feels alien to me. Then I wake up!
Karen Replies:
Thank you, Dreamer! First, a reminder: I can’t (won’t) interpret the dream; I will make suggestions and comment on themes and larger symbolism found in the dream. It’s the responsibility of our Dear Dreamer to try these on and discard anything that doesn’t fit and produce that “a-HA!” moment.
Recurring dreams – Dreams come as pictures or little plays from our unconscious to tell us something about ourselves we do not already know. Think of a recurring dream as a blinking neon sign – you haven’t got the message yet.
Big dark warm comforting house – Often (not always) houses represent the psyche itself – where we live in our heads. This is especially true about “dream” houses that we don’t know from waking life like this one. A common theme is to discover a downstairs or an upstairs or more rooms than we thought – our psyche is bigger than we think and we’re only conscious of a limited area.
Party/downstairs – There is always a party going on in the unconscious! References to downstairs, underground, under water can be about deeper, not yet conscious places in our psyche. The party may refer to the dynamic elements in our psyche – our complexes. Don’t get excited about complexes. They are not necessarily positive or negative – they are just constellations of psychological energies that make up who we are based on our experiences and the emotions that accompanied them. (Say that three times fast!)
Work-related – the dream may be a comment on your work life, Dreamer – but not necessarily. However, that’s what I’d consider first if it were my dream.
People I hate – Ahhhh…. Here it is. Remember! Every thing and every one in our dreams are parts of us. Oh, NO! These “people I hate” are our Shadow. Parts of ourselves we’ve disowned, disavowed, devalued. Yet Psyche is always moving to reunite us with our split off selves so we can become conscious of them. Why? So we don’t project that shadowy stuff onto other people! The work for this Dreamer is to examine carefully the “people I hate” and come to see what part of that is her. We are selectively blind about ourselves but greater consciousness is called for in the world and it starts with us. Yikes! No wonder Dreamer (dream ego) is annoyed! Such an examination and call to consciousness may call for – brace yourselves! Change!
____________________
Flock: Soulcare with Magpie Girl is an online soulspa full of support, guidance, inspiration and community. This private membership site creates a safe haven dedicated to “finding a spirituality that fits.” Please stop by to learn more about our current offerings, meet our professional soulcare providers, or to join us in the Flock.
How to Use Muscle Testing for Resonate Price Setting
As a part of my quest for migraine relief, I learned a technique chiropractors and other doctors use called applied kinesiology or muscle testing. This technique taps into your body’s intuitive knowledge to diagnose various problems. Muscle testing helped me determine which foods would trigger my migraines on any given day. A truly skilled practitioner can even determine how much of a given food will trigger a migraine, or how many tablets of a given supplement you might need to take. But even rudimentary skills at this technique can proved helpful in any number of settings.
Lately I’ve been using muscle testing to determine what to charge for the things I’m offering on line. Muscle testing is great for getting around chatty Gremlins and circumnavigating self-sabotaging thoughts. Here’s how to do it in a few easy steps. (You’ll need a friend to help you.)
Write the different prices you are considering for a service on small pieces of paper. Create a whole range of options, from the lowest you’ll go to the highest you could hope for. If possible have whatever you are setting a price for in your line-of-site while you do the muscle test.
First, shake your hands to discharge any tensions or energy you are holding around the price setting process. Ask your friend, the Tester, to do the same.
Extend your non-dominate hand out to one side. Have your Tester press down on your forearm to gauge how much strength you generally have in that arm. (The Tester can put one hand on your opposite shoulder for counter balance, but this may not be necessary.)
Now hold the first price in your other hand. Extend your non-dominate arm again and have your Tester press down on it with the same amount of force. If your arm remains strong, your body is intuitively telling you that is the right price. If it weakens or goes down, it’s the wrong price.
Between each price test, move away from the slips of paper and shake off your hands. (Have the tester do the same.) When you hold each price in your hand, think about the thing you are offering and imagine charging that price to someone.
You can also do this “blind” by folding the pieces of paper in half. It’s interesting to see if you get the same results.
If you get a range of prices with the same strength, you could play within that price range. Maybe you get $35, $40, $50 equally strong. Make $40 you base price, $35 your discount for people who are on your mailing list, and $50 the price you bump up to as the service expands.
For more tips on Resonate pricing, Pam Slim has an excellent round-up here, including posts from Mark Silver of Heart of Business, and Naomi Dunford of Itty Biz.
What techniques to you use to make sure you are setting the “right” price for you? And how do you stick to your guns once you set it? Do tell in the comments below! Thanks for being here.
Magpie Suggests: The Art of Being Minimalist
Remember last month when I gave Everett Bouge’s The Art of Being Minimalist a kind of lackluster review in this post on *8Things to Minimize?
I changed my mind. (You knew I’d come around, didn’t you Everett?)
It’s sticking with me, this little book, and the ideas presented in it are turning ’round and ’round in my mind. Since reading it Paul and I are seriously considering:
- living without a car when we return stateside.
- extending the lease on our six bedroom house in Seattle in order to experiment with living in small, downtown condo.
- selling 90% of our 1,000 volume library. (150 is our new golden number)
- getting rid of most of our DVD’s.
Anything that makes you re-think that much stuff is worth the $9.95. (Soon to go up to $19.95.) Plus, it’s an ebook – no physical clutter required. And it has a beautiful minimalist design, which I, the migrainuer, appreciates. (No visual clutter!)
Now look, I know a lot of you are doing too much. So don’t buy this if it’s just going to be one more thing sitting on your desk waiting to be read. But if you have 90 minutes to read it this weekend, it might change your life.
Click here to buy The Art of Being Minimalist.
P.s. If you buy the book by clicking on a link in this post, you’ll be buying me a cuppa. For my full disclosure statement about how I love you and only tell you good things, click here.
How to Hatch a Flock
The publishing and writing schedule for Magpie Girl and Flock…as scribbled out during the kid’s gospel choir rehearsal last night. (Work where you can.)
I am on pins and needles waiting for my designer to upload the finalized version of our new endeavor – Flock with Magpie Girl. Flock is “a nesting place for restless souls” with lots of courses for spiritual nurture, all offered at one monthly price. Think of it as a spa for your soul! The bonus to this method is that it creates an on-going place for a soultribe to gather, and it allows for the kind of teaching-learning process I so adore. We can really fill up the giant pool of wisdom with the Flock!
I like knowing how artists and other creative people work. If you are intrigued by that too, here’s a peek into the process of starting our Flock.
Initially Flock started out as an idea for two Ecourses. But as I worked through 31 Days to A Better Blog and started on the elevator pitches for my Ecourses, I realized what I really wanted was an ongoing on-line soultribe. I’d already done some vocational work with my amazing life coach, Jena Strong, and knew that community building was a skill I’d been practicing for a long time. The short-term nature of Ecourses wouldn’t scratch my community building itch. Since reading Chris Guillebeau’s Art + Money, I had been thinking about opening a membership site. But I had allowed the outside voices of Conventional Wisdom and Fear to negate my intuitive pull towards that option. As I embraced the membership site as a viable choice, things started moving into place.
Jennifer McGuiggan helped me move through the wheel of work, which made me realize I needed a partner to get through the bottom half of the wheel – the execution half. So I scraped my money together and hired Neil Sittler of Stickflower Design to help me get a website ready. This was important because my work with Jena had already shown me that “beauty” was high on my list of guiding values, and that if I didn’t have a esthetically pleasing site, I wouldn’t be able to tap into the right energy to sustain a long-term project such as an online soulcare community.
While Neil worked on the site, soulsisters Lisa Alexander and Jamie Ridler coached me on values-based pricing, so that I would not consider my pattern of chronically under-charging. I was still struggling with setting a price that truly reflected the value of my work, when Jen Lemen suggested I do muscle testing to connect with my inner wisdom on the matter. After a truly amazing round of muscle testing with my daughter Eden, I finally came to a place of confidence with my pricing choices.
I also decided to face my fear of asking for help so I asked a few soulcare providers I know and adore to come on board as expert advisers for Flock. And while I cannot announce who quite yet, I’m happy to say that my dream team of (therapist, life coach, and dream analyst and more) is starting to come together for our “Ask the Experts” column.
Finally, yesterday I sat down and wrote out a schedule of what I’m going to be posting each day both at Magpie Girl and at Flock, and what day I’d have to write it in order to get it posted professionally, on time, and well-edited. Because my health is a bit of a crap shoot, I included a day to write “stockpiled” posts so I have something to keep the goodness flowing when chronic pain sets me back for awhile.
Now I’m just waiting for the last odds and ends to get done on the website, and before Christmas we will have sign ups ready for our New Year’s launch! (Join my mailing list for a grand opening discount.)
As I write this post I realize once again how blessed I am to have this (almost entirely virtual) community around me. Those mentioned here, and others as well, helped me get past my sticking points and uncover the “ah ha” moments I needed to get through this process. I’m also struck by how Jen Lemen’s advice to “write to the tribe you’re starting to form”; and my mentor Ed Cook’s adage “you always preach the sermons you need to hear,” have both been proven true. All of the links embeded in this story were written by myself, or by Magpie Girl guests, because I needed to hear them, and so did my tribe. Now I can see them as the work The Muse and The Universe were doing to get us where we need to be — that is, together.
So thanks you so much, dear Magpie Girl reader, for being a part of this process. Your comments and visits have encouraged me more than I can say. I cannot wait until we are all gathered together in our Flock! Thanks for being here.
Much Warmth,
Rachelle
Art + Money: Re-visioning Marketing for Creatives
As a writer and soulcare specialist, I struggle with the oft’ soul-less world of marketing. I want to create a system of sacred commerce around my work, in which I have peace around things like pricing, marketing, and promotion.
Thankfully I’ve stumbled upon Art + Money: Thriving as an artist without selling out by Chris Guillebeau and Zoë Westhof. This manual, plus the accompanying artist interviews, gives practical tips and guidelines for getting your work out there, connecting to you audience, and telling your story.
Art + Money is offered at two levels. The $39 Starving Artist version includes the 55 page guide, 3 artists interviews on mp3, and free updates for 6 months. The Picasso version is $58 and includes 3 additional artists interviews. (I’ve not reviewed this part of the product.) Chris is also an incredibly accessible person who actively supports his product and his community.
I know there’s a lot of stuff out there promising to help you sell, sell, sell — and most of it relies on becoming a superstar on Technorati or having the biggest blog readership on the block. Art + Money does not take that approach. Rather it helps you connect your work, your story, and your people into a comprehensive whole that will help you earn either a supplemental income or a living wage — depending on how much time you want to put into it.
While it’s geared primarily for visual artists, it’s also great for writers. Just replace artists/galleries with writers/publishing as you read. And wherever it stays “studio” think “bookstore.” A lot of the links and suggested sites are specifically for selling visual art, but as a writer you’ll still find about 70% of the content applicable.
Art + Money helped me redefining marketing as “sharing your story with your people” – which I already do and love! It’s also confirming my hunch that time on Twitter and Facebook promoting my work—and promoting the work of others in my community—is time well spent. In concrete terms, Art + Money:
- helps me figure out pricing.
- encourages me to keep on with my choice to not pursue traditional publishing.
- shows me how to fine tune my social networking methods.
- teaches me to launch my upcoming products and courses.
I would say the book is especially helpful if you are not yet blogging or using social networking, or if you have not figured out how to focus your blogging and networking in a way that supports your creative work. And if you are they type of person who is inspired by the stories of working artists, the interviews will be a big boon to you as well.
I hope Art + Money scratches where it itches and helps you bring your creative dreams closer to reality.
Magpie Girl’s Promise: I adore my readers, so I only review products I truly believe in. In this case, I purchased the product at full price and decided to become an affiliate ambassador for Art + Money. If you purchase this book through the links on my site you’ll not only get a great product, you’ll also support my work. Thanks for being here!
Wednesday Review: The War of Art
The War of Art
Steven Pressfield
“If you find yourself asking yourself (and your friends), “Am I really a writer? Am I really an artist?” chances are you are. The counterfeit innovator is wildly self-confident. The real one is scared to death.”
-p. 39
Living the artist life is hard. No one gives you a business card and a plaque on the door to help you feel official. There’s not a regularly salary. It comes with no overtime pay.
While we artists may turn up our noses at bourgeois needs like a pay raise and a corner office, the reality is that in our culture these things convey value. They tell us and others that we are legitimate–that we have a license to practice art, that someone has given us permission. In short, cash and clout confirm that we have cajones.
Without these cultural permission givers, artists often find themselves adrift and never progress professionally. Steven Pressfield would like us all to please, knock it off.
The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles takes the rose colored lenses off our romantic notion of what it means to be a writer/painter/poet/etc and gets us all prepped for battle. What are we fighting? Resistance, mostly –our most prevalent foe. In this pithy book, Pressfield teaches us how to move beyond being amateurs. More than any other book, The War of Art taught me to become a professional artist.
Go ahead, get your marching orders.
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