Thanks for your great response to the first Reader Mailbag. I was originally going to do this as a weekly feature, but given the volume of your emails, there’s a real demand for this, and I might need to do it more often.
Melody:
How do I sell monologs to Jerry Seinfeld? I know he writes his own stuff, but I just keep coming up with these really funny stories, (true experiences). My friends love the way I tell them, because I embellish on my opinion of the incidents. I have been having some really good one liners lately, and would love to share. In fact, my friend had this idea for me to try to inquire about possibly selling my funny life experiences.
Dane: Melody, I don’t know how to sell them to Jerry Seinfeld, but if they’re really good, I don’t see why you couldn’t monetize them with a newsletter like This is True.
Randy Cassingham publishes two versions of this newsletter — one for free and one for money. The free one offers only a subset the funny stories from his paid newsletter and also includes advertisements, but it alone is sent to 110,000+ subscribers every week. If your stories are as good as ones told by Jerry Seinfeld or Randy Cassingham, I’d subscribe, and I’m sure that others would too. Everyone loves a funny story.
Lisa:
The television has me worried about the recession. Should I be? Is it a bad time to be an entrepreneur?
Dane: If you pay attention to the evening news and the talking heads, the world is headed towards a economic disaster even greater than the Great Depression. When was the last time that the TV news accurately predicted anything of that scale? Did the news tell you prepare for 9/11? Katrina? No, but they did tell you to prepare for Y2K, and look what that amounted to.
If you want to profit in these times, ignore the doom and gloom and concentrate of selling a product or service that people need.
To add an email to the reader mailbag, contact me.
Photo by Alan Light
Rich on October 10th, 2008 at 10:59 am
How do I sell monologues to Jerry Seinfeld?
Forget about Jerry, do it yourself. Here’s a way to “try out” at no cost.
1) First go to blogger.com or wordpress.com and sign up for a free blog.
2) Then go to http://audacity.sourceforge.net/ and download and install Audacity,
a free, open source software for recording and editing sounds. (You will also need a microphone)
3. Record your funny monologues.
4. Go to http://www.podbean.com/ and sign up and upload your podcast here. They also have a feed to iTunes and other podcast stores.
5. Write about your funny exploits on your blog and link your podcasts to the blog. Also, thru PodBean you can make money thru advertising and/or paid subscriptions.
6. Lastly, get the word out. Call your Mother and all your friends and have them download the podcasts.
Send out free press releases and talk about your project in forums, etc. It will take some time, but you will attract an audience, maybe even Jerry S.
Bonus: If you have a video camera, you can make a video version and post it on YouTube for even more exposure.
Lisa asks: The television has me worried about the recession. Should I be? Is it a bad time to be an entrepreneur?
If you work in the housing industry or associated businesses, it is a bad time. However, with the Internet, now is a great time to start some businesses because you can leverage the Internet to do a lot of the tasks that would cost money and manpower in the past.
Start small. Bootstrap everything. Build your business a little at a time and when the economy gets back in gear, your business will be up and running and ready to take advantage.
CoolProducts on October 10th, 2008 at 1:10 pm
“The television has me worried about the recession. Should I be? Is it a bad time to be an entrepreneur?”
I’m nearly about to give up reading the WSJ for the fact that I always feel somewhat sick after reading the paper. I know this isn’t healthy, but there isn’t a single positive article in that paper.. I’m sure others agree with me on this