I found Qtv today on Youtube and really enjoyed a video of Jian interviewing Rick Mercer.  I thought some of you Mercer fans may enjoy this 13 minute clip of a Canadian hero, as Jian respectively introduces him as.

I have a vice in which I’ve put forth legitimate effort attempting to quit. I spend short periods throughout the day, multiple times a day, playing out this filthy habit. I feel dirty sometimes, doing it. It consoles me however, that I am not alone and that there are millions out there, like me, that feel conflicted about their secret, just as I do. Read more »

From Mashable July 10, 2008 — 09:01 AM PDT — by Aaron Uhrmacher —

Social media can be an incredible tool for your business, providing you with more customer insight, direct communication channels and the ability to measure the effectiveness of these conversations very closely. Read more »

My kids came rushing over to see why I proclaimed “Holy Moly!” at 7:30am this morning, and I showed on my statistics page on the back-end of my website that I got 503 unique visitors to my site yesterday! My 5yo didn’t care much and my 8 year old was impressed for 15 seconds but they were both much more eager to see if they won the toys they bid on from ebay last night.

It’s really quite incredible to me and not because all of a sudden I got a ton of business from this - I did not - but it’s the way in which it happened and proof of the power of networking on the net. And it was just from a nice guy I met on Twitter who stumbled my blog post from yesterday.

It happened to my dad’s blog after he was featured on CBC’s Compass, their national website and radio show. A tipping point.

The question is, how do you sustain that volume of traffic. Today my blog is back to the normal numbers. I have a few ideas that I’m going to spend some time cultivating so that my wonderful clients benefit!!

Everyone does it eventually. Either by choice or being forced, it’s almost inevitable that you will have to go through a change where new skills are required, a new image, maybe it’s a whole new career. My clients ALL are doing this in some form or another and what I am helping with is utilizing their existing resources and introducing new technology and internet strategies to move in that new direction.

Reinventing yourself requires a lot of thought. It requires you to examine what you really want, possibly an exercise in defining your life purpose, if you want to get really deep. Once you have that figured out, you’re laughing - that’s the biggest hurdle!!

How you get there will start to unfold, almost magically, I believe.

Here is a great blog post on 10 Life Lessons for Reinventing Yourself.

There are, however, many ways to help get you there if you do indeed need help with your new idea, business direction, transition, whatever it may be.

You don’t have to spend a fortune to get it done, to get your message out to people that you have re-invented yourself or your business. With the internet and world wide web, it is relatively easy to spread your message if you truly believe it’s of value and remarkable enough to be shared.

I was discouraged the other day by a new client’s story of how he spent thousands upon thousands of dollars on a website that took years to get right and after it was done the site frequently went down and he reckons he lost a number of sales because of the problems with the site. And now the website, his main marketing tool, sits idle.

There’s no need to reinvent his business in this case - but reinventing the way he looks at his website would be a good exercise, at how he can attract traffic to his website and somehow try and recover some of the time and money he invested in what is arguably his most important marketing tool, is a good strategy.

Another client is transitioning from a business she built up over the past three decades and is now reinventing herself as her new business. Cutting away the fat, putting a high price on her time, expertise and value and doing what she loves.

And yet other clients are having to transition from a second generation business to reinventing themselves and joining the online world where people get their news.

It’s so fun and exciting to have the opportunity to help these clients, I am a lucky lady. It’s not a short process by any means, and I have to constantly work on patience being one of my biggest virtues but I’ve learned that it’s the business owner/entrepreneur themselves who control the speed by which the transition and reinvention happens. Obviously. I guess what I’m saying is that there’s only so much motivating one can do and it comes down to how badly someone wants it.

It’s hard to make a transition and easy to stay with what you know.

A great book to read about this is “Who Moved My Cheese” by Spencer Johnson, MD which you can get here. It’s a great parable about how change is truly a blessing. I have the kid’s version and my boys love it and request it often.

Earlier this month I predicted that YourMarketingMavens.com would double the traffic for March from the month before. I was off by 1%. By midnight last night the number of unique visits to my website had almost doubled from February. Read more »

Jeez, I was trying to think of what I could say today that will get me enough hits to my site by midnight so that I will have DOUBLED traffic from last month?

How about this exciting news:

I WON the $7500 ADVERTISING PACKAGE from the CHAMBER OF COMMERCE!!!! Read more »

Despite blogging being around for years now, as with a number of other fads, it is relatively new to Atlantic Canada, especially from a marketing stand-point. Don’t get me wrong - there have been bloggers blogging for ages around here but the general public is pretty green when it comes to the purpose and uses of blogging. Read more »

I get an e-newsletter from a master marketer named Ken McCarthy who developed a system for marketing called the System. He’s famous in the marketing world and one of the first to ever get into internet marketing. My friend James McConnell from Dataship Technologies told me about him originally and has actually seen him. James claims that all the other marketers out there that I follow: Perry Marshall, Dan Kennedy, Derek Gehl, etc. are all students of Ken McCarthy.

Today I received the following in an email from him: Read more »

I ran into a hippy friend of mine at the doctor’s office not too long ago and he has a business that he co-owns with his wife. They have a couple of small children, work from home creating beautiful, hand-made products. I asked whether he had a website and if he was looking to sell more of their products by that means. His response bordered on being indignant by saying “Why does everyone think that you have to grow? Read more »