www.WrensJournal.blogspot.com

There is a new interview of Seth Godin talking about himself and his new book The Dip. http://www.ducttapemarketing.com/podcast.php Here are my notes of the highlights:

I don’t give answers, I just help people ask themselves good questions. I don’t do consulting, because I’m not sure I can get people to change, people have to change themselves. I do public speaking for a living, and I write books to promote the speaking.

The proof that I don’t know what I’m doing is that while I was writing my first book, two of my friends started Yahoo.

Idea Virus still available (just Google Idea Virus), has been downloaded over 2 million times, most downloaded ebook ever. Consumers prize novelty, they are willing to help it spread if they think their friends will like it too…

No one has ever written a book about quitting before, which is astonishing because there are millions of people quitting every day. The problem is that we often quit at the wrong time. In our Googalized world, there are benefits to being #1 that far exceed the cost of getting there. If you can’t commit to be #1, it is better not to start.

It is not a self-help book, I don’t tell people what to do. I encourage people to have a conversation with their team and with themselves.

My book tour is about buying 5 books, because I wrote the book for the person that might not buy it… If you are doing something that is frustrating you, if you’re stuck, that’s what this book is about. If you treat quitting as not an option, you are making a moral decision that hurts yourself.

Find a niche where you can be #1.

The dip is your friend, it gives you a chance to step through the dip when everyone else just quits… The art of the dip, is knowing when to do that… Measurable? Getting harder? Are you filled with panic? Then you probably shouldn’t be quitting.

I went through a book packager living off Spaghetti-Os for a year because I knew I was getting to the place where I could get a 6 figure advance. Most of the time I’ve quit at exactly the wrong time. A record company, another record company that never got started.

Punch line of the book is that it is really about mastery. Everyone tries hard.

There has never been a better time to have a small business, the number of opportunities today his huge. What is needed now is not a lot of cash, but creativity and know-how. The challenge is doing something that people will talk about.

Small doesn’t have to be about number of employees, it’s an attitude that you care about the customer, that you treat each one like an important person. That’s the big advantage of small business.

Communities build themselves, what you need to do is make it easy for that to happen. Communities don’t build or support commodities.

Best, as in best in the world, is not external, you can’t prove it. It’s a story and experience that the marketplace chooses to say is the best, the people in the world who need your answer.

Permission marketing is that you make a promise and you keep it. If through social networking people ask for you to give them information, great. But if you are just harvesting names, NO. If you would do it on a date, it’s ok to do it with online social networking.

For more about my book The Dip, see Squidoo.com/thedipbook

I finished my next book last week, publishing being what it is. How am I able to write so many books? The secret is to write like you talk, that’s why blogs were invented!