I’m For Hire (not what you think – read on)

bicep.gifI’ve been thinking about this for a long time… and don’t want to send the wrong impression out, so please read on.

First, just to squash any rumors, JibberJobber is still #1 for me. No doubt about that. Big time #1. Things are going fast and furious with the business.

Now that we got that out of the way…

I’m also a new author (the book just hit Amazon yesterday). This book has been making its way through the blogosphere, and career experts have given enthusiastic thumbs-ups on this, and I’m excited about it. In fact, I just bought 200 because I’m going to 3 conferences in the next 6 weeks and figure I can move them all. There are a number of reasons I wrote this book, but notice that it’s directly related to the career/networking space I’m in, and I didn’t find this to be a deviation from my strategy at all.

So now, down to business. I’ve been doing Internet work for about 10 years. All kinds of stuff – I’m good at some stuff and not into other stuff (I’m not a graphics/layout designer). Here’s what I’m offering:

1 hour phone consultation – I’ll spend an hour with you talking about whatever you want. Usually this is geared around what I’ve done with JibberJobber (getting it from zero-to-market in 2 months, and/or marketing, blog marketing strategy, etc.) . I’ve done this a number of times in the last year and feel pretty confident that this will be an hour packed full of good information. You can record the session as long as it stays private. $250/hour.

3 hours of website analysis – I love checking out your website/blog strategy and giving feedback. This usually takes about two to three hours, as I go through the entire thing, and some extra stuff (to see how it’s marketed, possibly checking out the competition, etc.). If I don’t take the entire three hours I’ll spend the remainder with you on the phone if you want. $500

If you want to hire me, let me know – Jason at JibberJobber dot com

The Tuthe Fairee, the dawg and my wife

Last night was awesome. My wife asked me to get the tooth fairy stuff ready for our six year old, feeling bad that we missed it the night before (nothing like a six year old feeling neglected by the tooth fairy!). She was busy with the baby so I got to do it. I printed the following and gave it to her before I tucked it under the bed (note that he wrote a letter asking what the tooth fairy’s name is, and what the TF does with all the teeth):

Yo Dawg! Don’t you brush your teeth enough? You only have so many before you are using dentures, like (someone’s name)!!

My name is T.F. – that’s short for Tuthe Fairee.

I take all the teeth I get and put them in a blender, to mix them up. And then I sell that to the Elmers Glue factory.

Enjoy your quarter Dawg!!

Nasty Tooth Fairy :(

So I go up to the bedroom and give her this cool letter, with fancy writing (that the blog doesn’t recognize) and I had to turn away or my face would give it away. She’s reading it and saying “noooo, noooo, noooooooooooooooooo” … I had her going for about five minutes, she really thought I was going to give it to her. At one point she says:

Are you serious? You really want to put this under his pillow?

and I respond with a manly:

Honey! He’s six years old! He’s not a girl (our others are all girls, so this is a plea to help “him be a man!”)

It was a riot – she really believed I was serious. Those precious five minutes 🙂

Here’s the real letter I put under his pillow:

(his name), wow, another tooth? I was just here a few months ago! Sorry about last night, I was caught up with about four million other kids that lost their teeth – September is kind of a busy month for me 🙂

I take all the teeth I get and put them in a secret, special place – it’s so secret, and so special, I can’t even talk about it!

My first name is Tooth and my last name is Fairy. But it sounds kind of weird to call me “Tooth” …so most people just call me The Tooth Fairy! Cool, huh?

See you next time!

Your Friend, the Tooth Fairy 🙂

Blatently challenging techies and car lovers

Apple creates the sexiest thing to hit cell phones since… well, ever. But they tie it to one provider.

click to see youtube videoIt seems counterintuitive to give something so sexy and techy to one provider. Don’t they know that techies don’t like to be tied down (something about commitment, probably)? Dell learned this lesson and ships with OS’s other than Windows. As my six year old would say, with attitude, “duh. Everyone knows that.

So they tie it to ATT, and don’t let you use your current provider (and I hear it’s hell getting out of contracts).

But wait, techies are resourceful, curious and tinkerers! Click on the head on the right to see a video of a guy (who credits a bunch of others, including “anonymous”) who has unlocked the iPhone and uses it with T-mobile. It was absolutely bound to happen. I read that perhaps there would be a lawsuit. I’m trying to figure out if Apple planned for the techies to take their stuff apart (or otherwise get out their soldering irons) and knew it would happen and that’s part of their strategic plan, or if they really thought that no one would be able to do it.

For icing on the cake, MSNBC is announcing this morning that Apple and Volkswagen are in talks to develop a car. I hear that you can only gas it up at Exxon, though. I wonder if the hackers are going to figure out a cure for that 😉

Where to submit press releases

I’m going to keep a running list of places to submit press releases here, since I have to do my own :p

From YoungPRPros mailing list:

http://www.openpr.com – “…works well, it appears very quickly in Google News, and you can add an image (which most often than not, also appears in Google News). The only downside is that you can’t embed hyperlinks.” (hat tip to Livia Squires for the site and Rachel Hawkes for the comments on the site) Update from Livia – you can embed hyperlinks – see her example here.

From another Yahoo! list (11/8/07):

http://www.prfree.com UGH – I registered, but can’t complete without printing out a pdf, signing it and then faxing it in. I don’t have a fax machine yo!

http://www.free-press-release.com easy to do, here’s my first submission (no registration required)

http://www.prleap.com

http://www.press-base.com/add-press.html

http://www.24-7pressrelease.com

http://www.pr.com/press-releases

http://www.free-news-release.com/

http://i-newswire.com/submit_free.php

Props to Linda Blatchford.

Professinal invitation

I just got an invitation to go to a professinal networking meeting. I think I’m going to pass.

professinal_networking_group.png

Here’s the deal. I know you don’t have an editor – and you are marketing to professionals in transition. So it doesn’t matter if you make a typo, right?

But these are the same professionals that get called on the carpet for any tiny error like this. Some of them have jeapordized their careers because of a mass mailing with a typo.

I won’t even go into other discrepancies that I’ve seen along these lines. Not until I get worked up enough about them :p

Yes, I’m a blogger, book author, columnist etc. And I make mistakes too, lots of them. I am just happy I’m not the only one!

Give me a break

Geesh, word verification is getting uglier when leaving comments on posts. I used to have the capcha stuff on my JJ blog until I got too many complaints about it not working right. Check out this word verification sequence that I just saw on a blogger site:

blogger_word_verification.png

No big deal, right? Except that it’s 3 letters longer than normal – what’s next – a sentence???  Come on, the world is already complaining about having to do 5 letters (not a big deal, except that I’m sure many folks have had a hard time getting past it on lazy finger days). Luckily after I submitted the next page (if I wanted to enter another comment) was back to normal, with five letters:

blogger_word_verification_ii.png

Come on guys, I’m public schooled. Talk slow, and don’t challenge me 🙁