How Samarpan found her nose while creating FindYourNose.com
Who wants to create a virtual buddhafield? Not me. Too difficult, too much work, too much trouble and above all illusionary! Having lived and worked for twelve years in Osho’s real buddhafields, I totally enjoyed being out of all buddhafield trouble, just standing on my own feet, merely caring for myself. Yet life had a different opinion. Its plan was to place me in a virtual buddhanet: FindYourNose.com – a German online magazine for meditation was waiting to be created. This is the story…
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Times of learning
Seven years ago, after an adventurous time at the Osho Meditation Resort, I started afresh in Cologne, Germany. The greatest joy at that time had been two things:
1. to watch funny movies and
2. to find out about online marketing.
Surprised how the science of marketing had changed during the five years that I had been busy in the meditation resort I was enthusiastic exploring this topic. So much fun out there in the internet and so many possibilities! I spent hours – fascinated – reading tips for entrepreneurs. You know those websites with “10 tips on how to be successful with your blog…” The internet – what a great opportunity for individuals to express their talents!
It was just logical to use the learnings for sharing my deepest passion: Osho. “What? You want to make a page with Osho quotes? How boring!” – a friend responded. I decided to prove my dreams worthwhile. Just for the fun of it.
In earlier buddhafield days I had been well known as a missionary and seeing the trouble I had created it was clear not to do that again. Thus the domain name had to be something unholy. Those days I experimented with a meditation technique of watching the tip of the nose and found this was the perfect name for a website: ‘FindYourNose’.
My first love – failed
Looking at the first design I now find it quite unprofessional. Yet at that time I loved it! The yummy green, a dog’s nose with a pointing finger and lots of great Osho quotes… lovely! One day there were 120 visitors surfing through the page and man, was I proud. 120 people – so many! As recommended by internet experts, FindYourNose.com provided facilities to make comments, to share insights, to read about friends who died and alive friends selling trainings or meditation cushions or crystals. Unfortunatly (or fortunately) the experts’ advices did not work out. Nobody shared anything and only a few friends were eager to advertise yet did not have money to pay for it. People who were ready to pay advertised meditation events with angels and Hindu masters, all of which I am not in favor of. The visitors numbers did not raise above 150 a day. What to do? Finished already – after one short, intense year having spent much money and energy to make the dream come true?
Second trial – layout changes and crystallization
Continously changing, letting go and adjusting to what is – all this I had learnt while living and working with people in the buddhafields. Material things though had been quite stable and it was new to find out that changing and constantly improving also corresponds to working in the internet. Everything there is moving so quickly. With clear eyes it was easy to see: FindYourNose.com had to change, and I had to let go of some dreams.
Thus I banned everything which was no fun, was unclear, which sucked, which was not resonating with me. The second version of FindYourNose.com became more simple, more to the point – and the point was meditation. It became an online magazine for meditation. As much as I loved the logo of the dog – it simply did not carry the message of meditation. Thus it was exchanged by a soft, female buddha head. The navigation was focused on meditation. A crystallization process had begun. For my own joy I added a page with trailers of my favorite funny movies. (Today this page is visited by 600 people daily.)
Growing perfection!
Until now I don’t really know why I have put so much energy into this website; it was simply natural to me. 10-12 hours of daily work – until today this is a regular amount of work for me. Yet, I would not call it work. Working with Osho’s vision is creativity, play and learning. Working with FindYourNose means to write articles on meditation or translate Osho on meditation – what kind of work is this?
To make FindYourNose.com known and reach many more people I also had to understand the ways of social media marketing like blogging, facebook and youtube and how to produce content by voice, video, pictures and text. Every day I learnt something new, growing perfection became one of my favorite sayings. And the laws of the internet required to find out how to optimize articles so they would be found easily by the search engines. I became an expert in online marketing.
Although FindYourNose.com was growing steadily, no money came in. Ok. After having translated and collected 1,200 quotes of Osho on meditation and written scientific articles on meditation the numbers of visitors within 2 years had gone up to about 500 a day. Brilliant, yet nobody of those readers were prepared to pay any money for the service. For the second time the bubble of hoping for success burst.
Third beginning with SEO optimization
Time for the third big change: I optimized the whole website for search engines, which was a big move and believe me, loooots of work. Each little page had to be opened and adjusted to search engine requirements: new titles, headlines with keywords, descriptions, renaming pictures, if possible new page addresses plus adding some advertisement for the products I had created (1 DVD, 2 Apps, Calender)… This major change went on quietly in the background since the layout of the page stayed the same. It almost took me 2 years to optimize 1,200 pages. Yet all the intense effort proved right: the numbers of visitors went up to 1,500 a day and is growing. 70% of which are coming via Google. This had been the most successful move so far.
My new communication skills opened a world of endless opportunities to share what I had learnt through Osho and experienced in my own life. To give you one example: I invented ‘meditation seconds’. Every day I send a picture with a text to 1,500 people via email. People love it. Being ready to experiment with what people love, I created an application for smartphones. It is called ’99 Meditation Seconds’: http://www.meditation-seconds.com/. Many more products will follow, just because the joy of creating something around meditation does not stop in me. Money still does not flow easily, yet I always get what I need to live comfortably – mainly through the online marketing service http://www.fyn-marketing.de/ I am offering. Much experience in failure – that’s what ‘professional’ means.
A virtual buddhafield
It seems you cannot avoid your destiny and my destiny seems to be in a buddhafield. I stepped out of it just to find myself seven years later in an even larger buddhafield, a virtual buddhafield. Without any intention my love for sharing what I am experiencing with Osho has created a “buddhanet” of daily 5,000 people who get in contact with Osho and his meditations. Although people might think it is me who is sitting in the middle of the net, they are wrong, of course it is Osho! My part is as it has been in any other buddhafield: I am simply an administrator enjoying when everything runs smoothly. And if things don’t work out? Simple: Time for change!
In English: www.meditation-seconds.com
In German: www.findyournose.com
In English: www.meditation-seconds.com
In German: www.sekunden-meditationen.de
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