No Internet marketing today, no trivia and no chit-chat.

This is way too important.

Long time readers of Kickstart will remember that a few years ago
I held an appeal to raise money for my Rotary Club to buy
Lifestraws.

Lifestraws, if you haven’t heard of them, are high-tech filter
tubes that allow a person to suck up water from any dirty,
contaminated source and make it 100% safe to drink.

Each Lifestraw lasts a person for up to a year and for those
stuck in disaster areas, where water is anything but safe to
drink, they save lives.

Each straw cost just a couple of bucks. The price of a cup of
coffee.

Right now there are 6 million people at significant risk in
Pakistan and the Rotary Club coordinating the buying in and
sending out of Lifestraws (over 100,000 have been sent worldwide
since the project began) has completely run out of stocks.

The last 11,000 in the warehouse have already been sent to
Pakistan and now the cupboard is bare.

My Rotary Club – and many others – is now organizing a fast
program of fundraisers and bucket collections to raise money to
quickly buy more container loads of Lifestraws.

The need is desperate – you know that I’m sure as the news in the
papers and on TV has shown the sheer unimaginable scale of the
problem.

We can’t help everyone, but every Lifestraw we can get to
Pakistan will help save a life. That’s all we can hope to do –
save one life at a time.

And you can help.

Please help.

I have reopened the Kickstart Lifestraw Appeal – you can find the
page at http://kickstartdaily.com/lifestraw

It tells you about Lifestraws – what they are, what they can do
and why we need your money so urgently. Both to help the
situation right now and to prepare for the inevitable needs the
next time nature strikes.

But more importantly, there is a PayPal donation button there so
you can send us as much as you can afford.

As this is a Rotary Club initiative, the money will go directly
to my club’s account – not to me – and as Rotarians never make
any admin charges 100% of your donation (after PayPal’s fees)
will go straight towards buying and distributing Lifestraws.

Please visit http://kickstartdaily.com/lifestraw right now.

And please give as generously as you can.

Many thanks,

Martin Avis

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A question that often comes up in my mentoring sessions, and has cropped up again on the Warrior forum today is whether or not you should use your real name in your online businesses.

Some people are paranoid about privacy and are convinced that even hinting at their real name online will bring all kinds of stalkers, identity thieves and other undesirables running to their front doors.

So they hide behind silly nicknames or meaningless strings of characters in the belief that they are somehow protecting themselves.

Rarely is that successful. There have been one or two people who have managed to brand their nickname, but in all cases that I can remember their real name was in evidence as well.

Online marketing is very difficult and starting out with negative credibility is like trying to run a race while attached to the starting post by a bungee rope. Sooner or later it will drag you down.

I have always used my own name and have never had any problems as a result. In fact, here in Kickstart I share a whole lot more personal information than just my name! And apart from making me a lot of good friends, it hasn’t ever been a problem.

No stalkers, no crazed lunatics and only one groupie – Kim Standerline who tells everyone she wants to be the next Mrs Avis when I’ve done with the first one! Sorry Kim, but if Delia reads this, YOU might need to change your name!

Having said that, there ARE circumstances where using your real name can be a problem:

1. If your real name is already well known in a different arena. For example, a friend of mine is a high profile public figure who took up Internet marketing as a hobby some years ago. From the get go he used a pseudonym because he realized that people searching Google for his real name would just get confused if they came up with IM stuff.

2. I’ve known people who have ‘escaped’ from abusive relationships and who use pseudonyms online to avoid their ex spouse finding out where they now live. You can’t argue with that.

3. People who operate in several wildly different niches may want to use different names to keep the various sides of their business apart. I do this myself if I’m selling ebooks and reports in different fields because ‘Martin Avis’ is primarily known for Internet marketing and I don’t want to dilute that by having too many search engine results for different subjects.

4. Some employers are easily upset if they think that their employees are moonlighting, so in that case, a budding online entrepreneur might reasonably and sensibly use a pseudonym to avoid trouble with their boss.

5. It is conceivable that a person’s real name is too long or too difficult to read and pronounce for the market they are aiming at. In that case, it is often simply good practice to adopt a simpler version for recognition reasons.

In each of these cases it is reasonable and justifiable to use a false name. However, the key is that the false name should be recognizable as a ‘real’ name and not as some anonymous jumble of characters, or, sometimes worse, as a silly nickname. There is no credibility in these obvious fake names.

It is often said that people like to do business with people, and that is even more true online. There is so much suspicion already, why add to it by giving the impression you have something to hide?

What do you do and what are your thoughts on the matter? Comments are very welcome undear ANY name!

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Someone asked on a forum what the world would be like without the Internet.

A world without the Internet huh?

That would be when we went to a library for our info products (only we called them books and the only ones who ever said ebooks were elderly Yorkshiremen).

That would be when social networking meant going out to the local youth club. Or, Heaven forbid, becoming a Boy Scout or Girl Guide.

That would be when a facebook had black pages and the ‘faces’ were stuck in with little paper corners.

That would be when a forum was a place for debate and usually involved cold beer and tipsy girlfriends.

That would be when calling someone a blogger would get you a black eye.

That would when watching a monitor involved staring at the school prefect.

That would be when the most advanced keyboard was attached to a Moog.

That would be when a floppy disc would give you a bad back.

That would be when a payment processor was made of brass, had keys with the denominations and a drawer that went ‘ting’.

That would be when the superhighway was the M1 in the UK or Route 66 in the US.

That would be when CD meant you didn’t have to pay your fines.

That would be when the only time you needed a RAM was when you had a few ewes to be covered.

That would be when a bit was more than you could chew or a byte would need a visit to the dentist.

That would be when Amazon was a river and Google was a misspelled number.

That would be when traffic stopped you getting home for dinner.

That would be when hacking meant you had a nasty cough.

That would be when ‘CB’ would be followed by ‘Ten-four, breaker-breaker, good buddy.’

That would be when file sharing involved manilla cardboard.

That would be when a chat room was thick with cigarette smoke and spilled beer.

That would be when the only place you’d find virtual real estate was on a Monopoly board.

That would be when the only autoresponder in the world was called Kit.

That would be when good hosting meant happy guests.

That would be when second life was what we all prayed for on Sundays.

That would be when Go Daddy involved an egg and a spoon.

That would be when a hard drive was accompanied by ‘are we nearly there yet?’

That would be when being digital meant you could count on your fingers.

That would be when banner ad was a big flag you waved at a football match.

That would be when your bookmarks were made by your kids as school projects.

That would be when one cookie was never enough.

That would be when cross browser support was a patient salesperson in the bookstore.

That would be when going to a flash site got you locked up.

That would be when showing someone your holiday pictures involved a darkened room and a Kodak Carousel.

That would be when an impression was something you made.

That would be when My Space was something you didn’t enter.

That would be when spam was a Sunday treat.

That would be when peer-to-peer networking happened at the water cooler.

That would be when the world was a simpler place; when we didn’t have friends all over the world; when our differences were more frightening; when our horizons were limited; when our imaginations were fuelled by HG Wells or Gene Roddenberry.

That would be when almost everything we take for granted today about technology, the Internet and computers was at best an impossible dream and worst simply thoughts of magic.

That would be the days of our parents – or for some of us, our youth.

And thinking back, it wasn’t so long ago was it.

I wonder what the days of our children will bring.

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