How do I even get google reviews? I tried listing myself on google and I do not know if it’s even done right.
There are others doing guitar repair who gets so much work that they have to stop accepting new customers. I do not know how they do it. But they’re more like a company, with employees and all that and probably multi million NTD initial investment. I can’t even hope to ever out spend them. I’m doing the best with what I have.
I had a customer who actually added me as a friend on facebook. I reglued a broken headstock for him. After that (this was back in june) he called saying he has a couple of guitars he wanted me to set up. However he did not give me a date as to when he will bring the instrument over (or for me to pick up). After a month or so he basically disappeared.
He said he chose me because he saw that I had a background in machining and that a lot of guitar repair guys have no clue about it.
Maybe he found someone cheaper?
You should realize people having double talk, false hopes, and “maybes” is physically painful for me.
have you ever tried to look for someone in music community? Students or hobby players etc. You might offer your instrument maintainanse services as compensation.
I strongly suggest you pay for advertisement on Google and Facebook. You can target your intended audience based on their demographics, location, hobbies, searches, etc. If you are smart about the criteria it can be quite cost effective.
Go look around these pages. Might look too complicated at first but you will get the hang of it soon enough. Do not half ass the targeting as you will only be wasting your money if you just advertise to everyone in the world.
I looked up your listing on Google Maps and anyone can review you right now. To get high reviews on Google, whatever you have to offer (quality of skills/products, customer service, customer experience) has to be good enough to motivate them to review you and share their experience.
Just go to Google Maps on your phone or computer and look up random restaurants. They all have reviews.
It’s not about outspending your competitor. You just proved that in your post. You didn’t have to spend to get that lead in June. That’s the purpose of using social media to boost your business and its profile. It’s a low-cost method advertise yourself where a lot of the attention in Taiwan is. More people need to know how good you are.
You also have a role in this. It’s going to help you if you’re nice and kind to others. Ask questions, be curious, give genuine compliments and praise, make others feel good, positive and comfortable. It’s not just about what you cost. There is value outside of simply the service itself. People value kindness and optimism.
When I go to the evening market, I don’t go to the guy who yelled “10 DOLLAR” at me the one time I didn’t understand him in Mandarin. I go to the stands where they’re nice and friendly to me.
Not read the whole thread, but anyone talk about AR/VR (augmented reality/virtual reality) technology? Research has shown positive results of using this technology to help autistic children with their social skills, mostly non-verbal.
This from jdsmith is the kind of ableist bullshit that keeps Autistic and other neurodiverse people out of mainstream everything because they can never be “quite enough”.
If I had a fucking nickel for every teacher who had “lots of training” and knows ALLLLLLLL about what it’s like to be #actuallyAutistic, I could retire tomorrow. Which would be much better than scrabbling to make a living.
Autistics ARE self-aware. We do not lack empathy nor a theory of mind, despite the propaganda. We KNOW we are not fitting in with the NT world. How the fuck many times do you think you need to punch a person before they know you’re doing it?? After a certain age, some of us decide we don’t give a crap any longer about doing it. We are not wired the same way they/you are and no matter what we do, there’s always going to be SOMETHING they’ll pick at, fire us for, not give us the interview for, whatever. Has absolutely nothing to do with professional competence.
TaiwanLuthiers, you are not wrong. Translation has been tanking since 2007. Steadily. I am grateful to have had a great career translating for many years before that, working remotely, never seeing a client (except for interpreting jobs). Never had to think about money. Then the market just blew away suddenly. Agencies these days are taking the lowest bid regardless of experience or quality. I have been doing a coding bootcamp hoping to move into development – which is also not exactly understaffed at the moment, but who knows.
And enough of the fucking tone police, jdsmith. TLuthiers has a right to ask for actual leads instead of general ideas. We get too much of this general stuff from people who think that’s all we need. I actually need someone to write the email or the phone script to be able to get a foot in the door. We also get way too much of holier than thou NT people telling us that whatever’s going on is our fault because we aren’t expressing ourselves in the way they want to see. Oh, sorry, that’s the Autistic viewpoint – the NT viewpoint is “because we’re all assholes.”
Autistics and neurodiverse people are literally the last group it’s still okay to discriminate against because there’s always a “legitimate” reason that has nothing to do with the group membership. “It’s just that…” Yeah, right. Another fifty years and that will change, but right now, suck it up if you’re an Autistic adult.
Yea, and Hitler didn’t like neurodiverse people, and Hans Asperger had to convince him that neurodiverse people was useful so they can avoid getting sent to the gas chamber.
I had translation jobs, not a whole lot but it was enough to get by. Right now honestly I don’t know if you can even make a living doing anything now, except work for laobans for peanuts.
I think the reality is, NT’s don’t like neurodiverse people because it makes them uncomfortable.
The whole point is, everything today is social. EVERYTHING. You have to network. You have to have a Facebook presence. You have to use Twitter and Instagram and I don’t know what else. It’s not about professional competence, qualifications, or experience. It’s all about whom you know and how you glad-hand them.
AND you have to do it exactly right. You have to put in all the fluff and feel-good stuff that Autistics don’t give a crap about. In Autistic culture (there is one), directness and honesty are valued. We don’t take offense at facts. When you coach, people don’t really want to know what they need to improve. They want to feel good about what they’re doing. I don’t need to write a whole paragraph about your family and whatnot to give you the information you asked me for in the last e-mail. But if I don’t, I’m cold or remote or something, and not considered worth working with, or inviting to give that keynote address, or whatever.
The truth is, we don’t care about the social one-upmanship game, and that makes NT people extremely uncomfortable. Many of us have serious sensory issues which make different situations untenable, and avoidance of those is usually interpreted as standoffishness or lack of desire to socialize or whatever. Go to a party and make small talk about nothing with a bunch of people I don’t know? No, thank you. Even if I force myself to do it, something terrible will happen.
I have absolutely no doubt whatsoever that TLuthiers (and a lot of other Autistics) are being nice and kind to others. They are asking questions, being curious, giving genuine compliments and praise. We simply do not get any credit for this because it doesn’t look or sound like what people are expecting. And because we don’t bow and scrape to things that have no substance. It’s very freeing compared to the agony most NTs seem to go through every day about social media, but at the same time, since the world is controlled by NTs, it’s difficult to get anywhere.
Just a thought that occurs to me: people have evolved over eons to function as social animals. Neurotypical people are no more able to disregard certain social signals or base interactions on other factors than autistic people are able to get along in the neurotypical social paradigm.
That’s true. But NTs on the whole don’t make the attempt, and Autistics are expected to go all the way to the other side. NTs are very much convinced that their way of thinking is the only way. Autistics at least recognize there are two different sorts of wiring out there. We can “mask” (which is exhausting) and pass to some extent, but I have never seen a case where an NT was asked to do the same in reverse.
No doubt, essentially that’s what “neurotypical” means in a way. It’s interesting that people often seem better able to be empathetic towards other sets of circumstances. I guess most other circumstances are more easily visualized. We don’t naturally possess the mindfulness that would be needed to go there?
Kinda like that movie Divergent. Being divergent allows you to take on any role but they are basically killed because they upset the normal order of things.
