“No one who had ever helped me had ever been wealthy, they had just been nice”

–Keith Taylor, Modest Needs Foundation founder and CEO

Say Merry Christmas to a specific someone who NEEDS that extra $10 you have for gifts.

When you are shopping this year, why not drop $10 or $20 into a Modest Needs Gift Certficate for each of your recipients and SHOW your friends and family why it “feels better to give than receive”.  In fact, get one for yourself too.  Read the stories, choose one, donate!  It’s as real as it gets.

It won’t break your budget, and it will give them more satisfaction than any hot chocolate gift set you may be considering!

Since 2004 I have been an avid donor and supporter of Modest Needs in everything I do.  Why not visit their site and see what I mean.  Once you do, you will never look at a charitable donation the same way again!

Gift certificates are available. A donor can contribute any amount and then let the gift recipient decide where it should go.

Go ahead, donate that $10 to a REAL PERSON with a SPECIFIC NEED.  It’s addicting – in a very healthy and affordable way!

Recently, one of my girlfriends asked me why she hadn’t gotten an email I had sent her.  While she was having angst over how that could happen, I found myself sitting there amazed that it EVER happened to work.

Guess I’ve spent way too much time in hardware tech.  WAY TO MUCH TIME.

So, since I was sitting there drinking my morning go-go juice (coffee), I decided to try to provide the simplest explanation I could over how email just disappears in transit.   I left out all the detail about SMTP and POP3 servers….after all, I didn’t want to write a novel, just the most basic explanation I could, so it was clear that eMail is a wonder in and of itself!  For those of you who ponder the same question, here is the basic explanation!

Took the Myers-Briggs today, it was a nice affirmation of who I am:  an INFP-Healer.  My career types are point-on, I have always been a writer.

Idealist Portrait of the Healer (INFP)Healers present a calm and serene face to the world, and can seem shy, even distant around others. But inside they’re anything but serene, having a capacity for personal caring rarely found in the other types. Healers care deeply about the inner life of a few special persons, or about a favorite cause in the world at large. And their great passion is to heal the conflicts that trouble individuals, or that divide groups, and thus to bring wholeness, or health, to themselves, their loved ones, and their community.

Healers have a profound sense of idealism that comes from a strong personal sense of right and wrong. They conceive of the world as an ethical, honorable place, full of wondrous possibilities and potential goods. In fact, to understand Healers, we must understand that their deep commitment to the positive and the good is almost boundless and selfless, inspiring them to make extraordinary sacrifices for someone or something they believe in. Set off from the rest of humanity by their privacy and scarcity (around one percent of the population), Healers can feel even more isolated in the purity of their idealism.

You can go to Humanmetrics.com for more on Healers and to take the test yourself.

Is your website an electronic billboard or does it tell a story to your visitors, provide information they are looking for and use an archetype designed to attract your specific buying audience?

Too many websites are simply “points of sale”.  Unfortuately, that puts you in a position of requiring a visitor who is ready to buy.  What if they are not at that point in their decision yet?  What if they are simply shopping for goods or services and investigating when they land on your site.  Do you give them information they are looking for in order to get closer to the buying decision – or do you simply send visitors to the “Sales Dept” to let ‘sales’ have a crack at the money in their pockets?

If you are not providing information and telling a story, you are not connecting with your buyers, and you are also not providing information to your visitors to give them the sense that you are a good choice for their purchase.

You need to develop a brand story.  If you are a reseller for someone else, then your brand story should be about YOURSELF, and how YOU are going to personally be of service.

If you sell only one thing, you can give them all the information they need on that one thing and then make it easy – at every point along the way – to let them purchase.

If you sell many things, make sure they have a clear path to the information they seek FIRST.  If you do, they will make a buying decision and you will have them in your lap at that point in the decision process.  You will be a trusted advisor, and they will have confidence to make the purchase.

It takes work, but if you don’t have a brand story, you need to get busy building one!