Stop Believing in Adult Fairy Tales ~ Be Leaders ~ Support Small Businesses ~ Buy Local

Click image to read Truth in Advertising in Tom Fishburne’s Marketoonist Blog.

Are you interested in having a world where everyone has a strong standard of living and can afford clean water, healthy food, decent shelter and the time to enjoy life? I know why we do not have it now and how we can get it back – or at least the few who truly want it can do it.

WHERE WE WENT WRONG

Have you ever heard the saying, the easiest person to con is the con man? We’ve all been conned: duped into believing fantasies that never existed and never will. It starts when you’re a child with fairy tales of knights on white horses who awaken fairy princesses who live in castles and have anything their heart desires.

All our lives we are inundated with media that sells lies from the airbrushed models who never looked in real life the way they do in photographs to commercials intended to trigger emotions. Advertising is really getting outrageous now and apparently big brands can get away with using entirely different products in the ads than they actually sell.

Maybe people will finally wake up. Most won’t, but I write for the ones who may. Today I’m not talking about marketing lies – I’m talking about the much bigger lies we’ve been raised to believe and had conditioned into us by the media, employers, and the educational system itself.

ADULT FAIRY TALES

There are many grown-up versions of fairy tales. One is that you should go to college so you can get a career and work really hard so you can retire “someday”. Work life balance is impossible as you work ridiculous hours and forget about enjoying life until you supposedly retire.

When that one gets to people after a while or they get “right-sized” they often fall for the illusions that you can “get rich quick” or how easy it is to make money blogging or with affiliate marketing or in an MLM. Many of the regular readers and commenters in this blog still believe in the fantasy that it is easy to make money online.

Then there is this idea that you can build a perpetual money generating machine by creating a site that rakes in money forever. Yes it is wise to do something that makes money while you’re not working, but you can’t just walk away and go on a permanent vacation. You have to market it and promote it and keep it updated – no matter what “it” is.

WHAT IS WRONG WITH THE WORLD

The problem is simple and so is the fix. We have to stop believing in fairy tales and open our eyes. We have to stop allowing people who do NOT have our best interests at heart to control everything by allowing them to condition us to do what THEY want us to do. If we do not, they will keep taking until every economy collapses and the only choices we have left are what they provide.

Image Credit: Marketoonist Business Cartoons ~ Click image to buy for Commercial Purposes or to find out how about his Free to Use in Blogs policy (with attribution and link).

CORPORATE TAKEOVER

Most people do not know the evil being perpetrated around the world by those who control multi-national corporations and even when you tell them they do not care. I am not writing to them. I am writing to those who DO care to ask them to change what they do:

• Stop believing lies.
• Do not forgive people or corporations when they do evil.
• Vote with your money by buying from small businesses.
• Create small businesses that grow through consistent quality products and services.

Do not be naive enough to believe leopards change their spots or snakes will decide not to bite when you give them another chance. If you know a con artist in person you know they do NOT change. Neither do the people behind corporations who have forgotten that originally corporations were mandated to serve the public good – not to make profit their one and only goal.  That is now referred to as Corporate Social Responsibility:

Corporations now have PR specialists working on greenwashing what they do. They have always invested a lot of money internally and publicly on swaying opinions because appearances are what concerns them – not substantive changes. They do not care what the public, their customers or their employees need. They only want to ensure it appears they do.

There is a much easier way to create a better world for us all than trying to reform corporations that have no interest in changing.

BUY LOCAL

Every penny you give to a small business makes a difference because they spend much more of that money locally. EVERY PENNY! They pay overhead, and taxes that support services like fire departments, and they pay people a living wage.

According to a study commissioned by Local First:

$73 of every $100 dollars we spend in locally
owned businesses STAYS in our communities!

Only $43 of every $100 dollars spent in
non-locally owned businesses STAYS.

That extra $30 means more local sales tax revenues and more jobs and higher pay and benefits for people in your community. Small businesses also pay more in property taxes that support schools and fire departments.

Imagine how much more than $30 that would be if your local small businesses start sourcing more of what they sell locally.  Most currently buy from major suppliers and NOT from other local businesses – but they COULD and they WILL if you encourage and support them!

This infographic image makes that easier to see: Use THIS LINK to see the infographic full size.

Economic Impact of Supporting Small Businesses and Buying Local

WHY SMALL BUSINESSES ARE HURTING

Sadly, even in small towns where people have been buying from their neighbors for generations, as soon as Wal-mart comes to town with their promises of low prices most people can’t wait to go there. Then as their local businesses shut down, they are sincerely sorry but apparently not intelligent enough to realize they close because they stopped supporting and buying from them. Either that or they are in denial.

We can reverse this trend. We can stop letting Wal-mart and other big box stores get away with what they’re doing:

• Transferring their costs of doing business onto taxpayers
• Squeezing their suppliers until the products they make are junk that don’t last more than days, weeks or months.
• Operating with part time workers so they do not have to give them benefits.

There are now dozens of studies showing how detrimental Wal-mart is wherever they build. Movies have been made and sites dedicated to why we should never shop at Wal-Mart. There are links to many of them in my story of a small Texas town that still thrives because Walmart has not come to town – yet.

Corporations already have an unfair advantage without being given tax breaks to put small businesses under. The same people who control them control all the major media. They have huge advertising budgets and they can advertise online because they are everywhere. That does not work for small businesses who only operate locally.

STOP RELYING ON GOOGLE

The media was instrumental in making Google “the” search engine and with that monopoly on both paid and organic traffic and their announced goal of cleaning up the “Internet cesspool” by using Google to favor big brands, small business doesn’t have a chance.

Bloggers can encourage their readers to use Google alternatives including alternatives to Google search and alternative search engines such as DuckDuckGo.com. Every search we do somewhere else takes a little power away from Google. But that is not enough.

WHAT WE REALLY NEED

The time has come for some of us to start building alternatives to all things corporate. That means not only Google but also Facebook, Twitter and other social networks plus sites like Amazon. We will continue to use their systems to connect, but then bring those we meet to key independent solutions. I need your help to identify them and spread the word.

Ideally, we would all use and recommend the same specific alternatives, but there may be different groups who use alternatives to the ones I have chosen. These are what I recommend so far:

• Blogging Community: BlogInteract ~Why Blog Interact is the Best Blogging Community ~ We need a place to socialize and connect with other bloggers besides our individual blogs and you can offer your services in the BlogInteract classifieds.
• WikiReviews ~ I’ll be writing a post about this HONEST independent review site featuring both written and video reviews soon. You can read about them in this WikiReviews PRWeb Press Release. They are running an IndieGoGo campaign and could use our support.
• Recommended Products and Brands ~ We need to know what is worth buying and what isn’t which is why we need the review site and also to share companies when we find them.

REAL CONTENT MARKETING

Traditional media claims they are impartial and many blogs try to emulate their policy of not writing about small business.  Instead, they play this silly game of content marketing where the content is never what we really need to be sharing because they don’t want to recommend anything.

Instead of the real information we need, the writer gets a
link or two in the bio and hopes someone might actually
go look at what is found at those links.

This is ridiculous. If you have a product or service that will benefit my readers, write about HOW it benefits them and how to use it. That is more important than yet another general post about Twitter or social media or SEO.

What we need to know is what really works, who offers it, and how to use it.

For example, I wrote a post about Recruiterbox because they created a way to manage the hiring process and any business that plans to hire a new employee needs a process to manage that. Why publish a guest post about something else written by a company that offers a solution my readers need?

If that is something you need, you can read about it in Small Business Recruiting and Hiring Process Management. I encourage you to subscribe to that blog because I will be writing a lot more small business related content there. See what I already wrote on my author page here.

BE A LEADER

Blog Editors need to start using some common sense and publishing content their readers can use. There is nothing wrong with profiling a business or product that offers something our readers need. If you are risk-averse do not recommend them – just write ABOUT them.

Recommendations are even better, but they are not without risk. Sometimes a great idea doesn’t work out or a site fails or gets sold. There are no guarantees in life. But if we do not recommend and immediately support services we really need we lose them. And then we are right back to the only choices being the ones others make for us whether we like it or not.

How about you? Are you ready to change the world?
Will you join me in leading the way to local self-sufficiency?
Make a difference – buy local – support and recommend small businesses!
Every penny you redirect matters!

What are you doing? Share in the comments. (Relevant links are fine.)
Not sure what to do but want to do something? Contact me!

Tagged as: buy local, change the world, small business, support small businesses