Favorite Seth Godin Quips

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How to make money online

The first step is to stop Googling things like, "how to make money online." Not because you shouldn't want to make money online, but because the stuff you're going to find by doing that is going to help you lose money online. Sort of like asking a casino owner how to make money in Vegas... Don't pay anyone for simple and proven instructions on how to achieve this goal. http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2012/05/how-to-make-money-online.html
http://www.businessinsider.com/if-youre-an-average-worker-in-this-forever-recession-youre-going-straight-to-the-bottom-2012-1

SETH GODIN: If You're An Average Worker, You're Going Straight To The Bottom

The way we do business is changing fast and in order to keep up, your entire mentality about work has to change just as quickly. Unfortunately, most people aren't adapting fast enough to this change in the workplace, says marketing guru Seth Godin in an interview with the Canadian talk show "George Stroumboulopoulos Tonight" (via Pragmatic Capitalism ). According to the founder of Squidoo.com and author of 13 books, the current "recession is a forever recession" because it's the end of the industrial age, which also means the end of the average worker. "For 80 years, you got a job, you did what you were told and you retired," says the former vice president of direct marketing at Yahoo !
http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2012/01/sold-or-bought.html

Seth's Blog: Sold or bought?

Some things are bought--like bottled water, airplane tickets and chewing gum. The vendor sets up shop and then waits, patiently, for someone to come along and decide to buy. Other things are sold--like cars, placement of advertising in magazines and life insurance.
http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2012/01/the-first-thing-you-do-when-you-sit-down-at-the-computer.html Let me guess: check the incoming. Check email or traffic stats or messages from your boss. Check the tweets you follow or the FB status of friends. You've just surrendered not only a block of time but your freshest, best chance to start something new. If you're a tech company or a marketer, your goal is to be the first thing people do when they start their day.

Seth's Blog: The first thing you do when you sit down at the computer

http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2011/04/wasting-the-digital-dividend.html

Seth's Blog: Wasting the digital dividend

The internet means that many time-consuming forms of white-collar drudgery have disappeared, or at least been offloaded to cheaper people who aren't you, permitting you to spend more time on things that are actually productive and highly leveraged. No more standing in line at the copier, trudging to the Fedex box, waiting two weeks for a letter to be returned, leaving voice mails, searching for the right person to contact, waiting months to learn a skill or a fact, discovering that a project is hopelessly broken, and on and on. It's a little like the bump we got after the Cold War ended. The peace dividend was there, just waiting for us to repurpose our military, our military budget and our military research. We didn't.
Every weekend there's a line out front of the Avis rental car window on the upper west side of NYC. Every weekend, ostensibly computer-literate upper-middle-class yuppies waste hours trying to pick up a car when they could just use Zipcar. Along the same lines, why doesn't the local accountant sponsor the business section of the nearby independent bookstore? Slip a bookmark and business card into every personal finance book the store sells... it's the right message at the right time. Blogs, of course, ought to be the perfect place to find people in trouble. The challenge is in getting past the "I won't click on an ad" mindset that 80% of those online carry around.

Seth's Blog: Looking for trouble

http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2007/09/looking-for-tro.html
What happens after I click on your Google ad? I was thinking about great Squidoo pages (lenses) yesterday, and realized that many of them, along with many blogs, have the same goal: give someone a handle, a sense of meaning--context--so they can go ahead and take action. Give people a place to go.

Seth's Blog: Seven tips to build for meaning

http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2007/09/seven-tips-to-b.html

Seth's Blog: Starting over with customer service

http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2007/02/starting_over_w.html I've been writing a lot about this topic lately and thinking about it more. I have a radical proposal for you, but it takes a few paragraphs, so I hope you'll bear with me. Customer service is broken. Not just because of bad management, though we have plenty of that to go around.
Make something happen today, before you go home, before the end of the week. Launch that idea, post that post, run that ad, call that customer. Go the edge, that edge you've been holding back from... and do it today. Without waiting for the committee or your boss or the market. Just go. http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2006/10/make_something_.html

Seth's Blog: Make something happen

2. Change the interaction. What makes great websites great is that they are simultaneously effortless and new at the same time. That means that the site teaches you a new thing or new interaction or new connection, but you know how to use it right away. http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2007/10/how-to-create-1.html

Seth's Blog: How to create a great website

Seth's Blog: How to get traffic for your blog

My friend Fred, a talented blogger, asked me for advice the other day. Here's a partial answer, with a few apologies to Swift: (and when you're done with this list, feel free to read my post about shark attacks ).

Seth's Blog: The web doesn't care

When I first started talking about Permission Marketing ten years ago, marketers asked, "sure, but how does this help us? " A decade later, marketers look at Wikipedia or social media or the long tail or whatever trend is finally hitting them in the face and ask the same question. It's entirely possible it could be used that way, but it doesn't owe you anything. The question to ask isn't, "but how does this help me?" as if you have some sort of say in the matter.

Seth's Blog: Scarcity

One day, you may be lucky enough to have a scarcity problem. A product or a service or even a job that's in such high demand that people are clamoring for more than you can make. We can learn a lot from the abysmal performance of Apple this weekend. They took a hot product and totally botched the launch because of a misunderstanding of the benefits and uses of scarcity. First, understand that scarcity is a choice. If you raise your price, scarcity goes away.

Seth's Blog: You should write an ebook

It's technically easy and when it works, your idea will spread far and wide. Even better, the act of writing your idea in a cogent, organized way will make the idea better. You can write an ebook about your travel destination, your consulting philosophy or an amazing job you'd like to fill. Seven years ago, I wrote a book called Unleashing the Ideavirus . It's about how ideas spread. In the book, I go on and on about how free ideas spread faster than expensive ones.

Seth's Blog: The secret of the web (hint: it's a virtue)

I wrote Unleashing the Ideavirus 8 years ago. A few authors tried similar ideas but it didn't work right away. So they gave up. Boingboing is one of the most popular blogs in the world because they never gave up. The irony of the web is that the tactics work really quickly.