Internet, a Key to a Fulfilling Life

Alright, so it has been over two weeks since I last wrote in my blog. Unfortunately, this will be my last blog entry. It is the last week of school. My Craig’s List project has been on hold because my neighbor lady had become very busy opening her new shop. I met with her yesterday regarding a personal issue. I discovered that she has also been working on opening another new location in the downtown area. I told her that I just knew there was a reason that I was not bringing up the Craig’s List idea with her these days! I told my neighbor that we could definitely work on marketing and research ideas regarding Craig’s List this summer while school is not in session for me. She told me that she doesn’t think the Craig’s List thing was working for her since there were so few real people interested. She said that she got a lot of phony calls and e-mails. We agreed that in general people are looking to purchase items for cheap when they look to Craig’s List. My neighbor is trying to make a profit with larger hand-crafter items, so this actually may not be the right route, for now. I wonder if Craig’s List will evolve and develop over the coming years? Perhaps, it may grow so large that it will need to branch off into a sort of price differential. Or, I could just be having wishful thinking. Either way, I do feel like I should keep my ear to the ground, and my eye on this Craig’s List thing. Perhaps someday the business venture that I was offered could be realistic and profitable on Craig’s List.

It has been a little while since I last posted. I have realized that my neighbor lady was too busy to keep up with this on-line portion of her furniture sale ventures. She is currently in the beginning stages of opening another shop in the Twin Cities area. I know that I could handle all of the on-line tasks. I would just need to ask my neighbor about furniture details and statistics that customers would ask. I do not want to bother my neighbor with too many unrelated questions during her new venture. I will approach this subject once her new shop is opened for a little while.

It has been six weeks since I posted the last furniture ads on Craig's List. I had sporadically been checking the inbox of my business partner's business email account for the first few weeks after I did the posts. I could not wait to see the responses. However, I soon became boggled as to why there was not even one person that had taken an interest in the ads. So, I gave up checking the email, especially since I figured my business partner still checks her email.

Well, just today I randomly decided to give a check to my business partner's email account for the Craig's List project that we are doing. In the inbox there was a message from March 7th from an interested party. Whoops, two weeks late! Turns out my neighbor has not checked her inbox at all this month.

I am learning that to succeed in this world, one must stay on top of everything.

I have enjoyed my time watching my neighbor’s store this weekend. It is an honor to be entrusted with such a task. I know it takes a good deal of confidence in someone to have them be in charge of customer contact and money. I enjoy visiting with the customers. Every person has such a different story to tell, and trust me, there are some really interesting folks that visit the downtown St. Cloud area.

I look forward to my neighbor’s return. I will enjoy our meetings regarding the business. Next week for sure we need to discuss our Craig’s List strategies.

I met with my neighbor yesterday morning to briefly discuss the marketing strategies that I had discovered while doing the interview for my class project. At first she said that she wanted to keep away from whatever her colleague was doing. However, I enticed my neighbor to hear me out.

I told my neighbor that she should stay away from the companies that her colleague collaborates with, but that collaboration among businesses could prove to be very profitable. I told her that she should still utilize the idea of business collaboration. I explained to her that to share customers between stores of different products could be very profitable. I asked her to think about business friends, or people that she knows, in the St. Cloud area. I suggested the idea that she holds a party in her store in which she asks other business friends to bring their product (and their customers) to her store. This alone would help to get the word out about her store. I will ask her what she came up with when I meet with her next.

I have been asked to open and close her store for her this weekend. I look forward to this job, as I have done it several times in the past!

I am not meeting with my business associate this week due to the busy Valentine’s holiday weekend. However, I did discover that a business friend of my neighbor is involved in a great marketing strategy.

For a school project, I went with my group to visit a store in Sauk Rapids. We got a chance to talk extensively with the owner. I learned a few different marketing strategies for their company and other local companies. The most valuable marketing strategy that we discovered was business collaboration. Some local companies plan to be open on the same weekends. This way customers can plan to get all their shopping completed at once, or the businesses get to send their customers to other nearby stores and vice versa. This is the marketing strategy that my neighbor’s business friend is involved with.

I am planning to meet with my neighbor very early next week to describe the marketing strategies that I learned from our group project venture. I feel that her business may be greatly benefited from the business collaboration that I discovered. I learned how to make memos in another class of mine. I am in the process of drawing up a memo for this project.

A week has gone by already since I began the first steps to my new professional approach to Craig’s List. I did meet my neighbor at her store two days ago. We were unproductive though, as it was just one of those days that neither of us felt like working. Instead, we visited with the other shop owners in the mall. The day did lead us to an interesting work tidbit. An antique dealer informed us that an ordinary dresser that we had originally posted this summer (without success) had a unique 1930’s “waterfall” frontal design. We both liked the waterfall wording and thought perhaps that our potential customers might as well.

I found myself at my neighbor’s house today. I feel like I tricked her into working without knowing that she was. I asked to use her work laptop and I just started writing descriptions. I handed the laptop to her to do a proof-read. This procedure ended up taking much less time and headache than the scheduling approach we previously had.

I was able to get a post up much more rapidly today. I am excited about our descriptive waterfall word, but I still feel as if we are missing something. I will talk more in a future post about the marketing strategy that I learned in my Anthropology in the Arts course.

A neighbor-friend of mine, who owns a store in town, approached me several months ago asking me to help her to sell furniture on-line at Craig's List. She did not feel competent to proceed with the internet task alone.

She had taken a few pictures that we initially used to post items onto Craig's List last summer. We did not have much success. I explained to her that the items could be displayed in more detail if there was proper lighting shining on them. I also pointed out that the pictures she had taken appeared too busy with the other surrounding furniture. I told her there are also camera angle tricks that can be deployed.

Today I was able to meet up with her in her store to start the professional photo process. She had the idea of throwing a background material onto a dowel and to hold it behind the furniture. She tried to hold the dowel alone, but without much luck. We realized that we will need to have another person to hold the other side, or to find a couple of stands of some sort.

I expressed my concern regarding the lighting. It is absolutely essential that we bring extra lighting in. I suggested small movable fluorescent lights. She told me that she has some halogen work lights that she will bring in.

I also have a terminology marketing venture that I plan to deploy next. I learned a few tricks from my Anthropology in the Arts course last semester.

I have never posted on a blog or a forum before. I have read very few forums and only one blog. I have generally not learned too much from the average Google search forum reading. I have found reading forums most useful on cooking sites though. There is nothing quite like a real user’s past experience with a product or procedure. The first blog that I read was my sister’s blog this past summer while she was interning in New York City. I thought it was an interesting way to log one’s working progress for a job.

I work at a group home for people with developmental disabilities where we write in the client’s progress notes every day. We also communicate daily with other staff in the Staff Log Book. However, I have never thought about logging MY daily thoughts and processes for my personal job growth and college learning. It is an intriguing idea to be able to easily look back to view one’s job or personal growth through time. Also, quite frequently one really needs to recall information regarding what they did in a job at some point. There is the added benefit that other individuals can comment on one’s posts. Peer reviews are a valuable resource to keep our minds pushing forward in the knowledge and improvement departments.

I think I may take this opportunity to log either my learning within classes and/or to track the tasks that I complete for my probono work experience. I value my probono work experiences very highly as an application of my technological knowledge gained from college.