MyBabyBoomers Blog

A Word of Caution as You Venture Down the Long Tail

The Long Tail is rich in data and knowledge. A little wisdom applied to that knowledge may be useful. As the old expression goes, forewarned is forearmed.

If something sounds too good to be true, it probably is. A click on an eBook link may get you a short succinct review of that book. On the other hand, it may get you a hard sell that goes on and on, with pie-in-the-sky promises of how great it is. When you are presented with a hard sell, look for value in the sell itself. Search on some of the terms. You may learn more from the searching than you would learn from the eBook.

For example, I received a long hard-sell email recently that extolled the virtues of a health product. I searched on a variety of the terms found in the email and discovered that I could buy locally the same product that was being offered through mail order. However, the local product was about one fourth the cost of the mail order product.

Another example. For as long as I can remember, I’ve heard of offers that will tell you how to turn a hundred dollars into a million. Some are better than others, but an example of the worst is to send them your money and get a short note back saying, essentially, “Take a hundred dollars, invest it at 5% and wait 150 years.” Buyer beware; if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is too good to be true.

On the other hand, you may find a gem among the stones. I’ve found a number of ebooks that did provide value, some of them provided far more than I expected. Look for the gems, and learn from the stones.

Are you finding any gems or applying wisdom to get value from the stones? Tell us about it - leave a comment.

August 28th, 2008 | Tags: E-book, Good, Long Tail, Mail order, Marketing, Value theory, Web search engine, Website | Category: Wisdom | Leave a comment

The Making of This Web Site - Part 1

As a novice “Webmaster”, I’ve been asked what my thought processes were when deciding on a theme for this web site, the thought processes I went through as I developed the site, why I chose the tools I used, how I expect to market the site and finally, how I plan to maintain it.

You may have noticed that I went from the past tense to the present tense. I’m at the point where the first iteration of the site is ready to present to the web community. I am about to “Market” it and maintain it.

Both this book and the web site are a “Work In Progress” (WIP). This booklog will evolve into something that may resemble what I’m writing in this series of postings; I’m sure the site will also evolve.

My first thought processes were as follows.

Like most Baby Boomers, I approached retirement without really planning for it. I had a successful career as a Banker, retiring early to pursue another successful career as a Management/Technology Consultant. If you want to know more, see my LinkedIn Profile. At the age of 65 I was still working as a consultant and expected to do so to the age of 70 in order to achieve the financial independence I wanted.

Last year, at the age of 66, I concluded that my approach to achieving this goal should be enriched with other streams of income. I started researching streams of income that I could pursue without having a “job” that demanded my daily presence. Ideally, I wanted to be able to launch streams of income and have them automatically generate income without requiring my constant attention. This goal has been the focus of my research for most of 2007.

The “streams of income” concept is not mine. It is exceptionally well-defined by Robert G. Allen in several books on that topic. I urge you to investigate his approach to “Multiple Streams of Income”.

I have identified four broad categories of relatively passive streams of income that are achievable through a web site. These will be the initial focus of the web site content. In order of priority, they are:
• Affiliate Income (Notice the links to Amazon books.)
• Self-published Books (This first one will be free.)
• Advertising (After the web site becomes successful.)
• Joint Ventures (Not yet fully defined.)

Next, Part 2, an informal business case.

August 25th, 2008 | Tags: Amazon.com, Baby boomer, income, Joint venture, LinkedIn, retire, Robert G. Allen, United States, webmaster, Website, World Wide Web | Category: BookLog | Leave a comment

Welcome to MyBabyBoomers

MyBabyBoomers is a website designed to provide easy intuitive access to “The Long Tail” in the new Marketplace.

This Long Tail was described by Chris Anderson, editor in chief of Wired Magazine ,, when he wrote an article (and subsequently a book) entitled The Long Tail to show how the Internet provides access to products that do not have sufficient mass appeal to be stocked in your local store.

An excerpt from his blog, www.longtail.com/about.html describes the long tail as follows.

The theory of the Long Tail is that our culture and economy is increasingly shifting away from a focus on a
relatively small number of “hits” (mainstream products and markets) at the head of the demand curve and toward a huge number of niches in the tail.

The term, The Long Tail, refers specifically to the orange part of the sales chart, which shows a standard demand curve that could apply to any industry, from entertainment to hard goods. The vertical axis is sales; the horizontal is products. The red part of the curve is the hits, which have dominated our markets and culture for most of the last century. The orange part is the non-hits, or niches, which is where the new growth is coming from now and in the future.

Traditional retail economics dictate that stores only stock the
likely hits, because shelf space is expensive. But online retailers (from Amazon to iTunes) can stock virtually everything, and the number of available niche products outnumber the hits by several orders of magnitude. Those millions of niches are the long tail, which had been largely neglected until recently in favor of the Short Head of hits.

Our goal is to provide articles of interest to you and from those articles, provide associate links into the long tail.

This link will take you to a partial list of articles on our site that have links connecting you to corresponding content in the long tail.

This link will take you to our Amazon Mini-Store

While this web site was originally intended to be of interest to the Baby Boomer generation, many of the articles are of interest to all generations. If you know of anyone who would be interested in our content, please click on File/Send Link or File/Send Page (top left corner of your browser window) and tell them about us.