Today I’d like you all to meet the good folks behind Meylah.  We’re super excited to partner with Meylah because they are a small, local Seattle company that is dedicated to helping creative entrepreneurs succeed–just like us!  If you haven’t tried it yet, Meylah is an easy-to-use blog platform with an integrated storefront and business tools for the creative entrepreneur (like built-in marketing–sweet).  You can build your own site and keep the blogging, storefront, networking, and pretty much everything else in one place, which is a huge boon to us busy multi-taskers.  Read on to find out more about these good folks!

1) Who are the folks behind Meylah?

Meylah was started by 3 folks:  Ram Dutt, Jason Dirks and Courtney Dirks.  Ram is an engineer by profession who comes from a family of musicians and artists. He sees his own passion for music and art in his nine year old son, who has already inspired many with his art and has led Ram to foster creativity in many others.  Jason is a business management consultant by day and a passionate outdoor photographer by night (or any other hour he can get outside and take pictures)!  Living in Seattle provides the ideal landscape for his photographic interests: wildlife and nature, travel, sports and adventure.  Courtney is a recent escapee of the corporate world with a background in commercial real estate, communications, and sales. She began alleviating her stress at work through creating handmade jewelry and has found great joy traveling and interacting with the local creative community.

2) How and why did you get started?

Meylah was inspired through our own struggles in the online world.  We had enough online knowledge to get started although it still took us months to find and start using the best solutions available.  We found that many of the available solutions were either too expensive, disconnected from one another, cumbersome or didn’t have all the features we needed to be truly effective with our individual businesses so we set out to create everything we needed all in one place.

3) What can CCE attendees expect to learn about you at the conference?

We look forward to introducing Meylah and sharing the specifics around our new solution.  Meylah was specifically built to address the needs of creatives  (artists, photographers, handmade crafters, etc.) for them to EASILY get started and build a long-term business in the online world.  With our solution, a creative entrepreneur can:

• Share Their Story Behind Every Product: This is important in connecting with your audience and to potential customers.  This is achieved through an integrated blog platform which enables an easy two way communication between the creative entrepreneur and their audience.  As we all know, a personal and emotional connection is very important in making the decision to buy a product so enabling this interaction online is key to making a creative entrepreneur successful.
• Sell Their products: We have integrated a storefront into the blog platform with a simple and easy to use ecommerce engine powered by PayPal so that anyone can quickly and easily make a purchase.
• Connect and Grow Their Community: The power of social media is incredible and an essential tool for creative entrepreneurs to use in their businesses.  We have integrated social media channels, email and RSS subscription and embedded code tabs to enable the creative entrepreneur to connect and grow their community.
• Teach and Add Additional Revenue: We have created a new tool called Byte-Syze Learning that enables anyone (literally anyone) to easily create and sell their tutorials online.  The Byte-Syze Learning tool allows a creative entrepreneur to easily create a step-by-step lesson with video, images and text and then publish it in a very consumable and user friendly format for their audience.

We also have many business tools that we are going to be adding in the near future that will make the creative entrepreneur more discoverable, add efficiency to managing their business and replicate many of the activities they do offline into the online world.

4) What are you most looking forward to at CCE?

We are looking forward to meeting and building relationships with all the attendees and fellow creative entrepreneurs!  We want to hear their stories and share and exchange ideas for making their individual businesses more effective and successful.

5) Anything else you’d like to share?

We are really excited to be part of this event and look forward to many more in the future!  If you are interested in learning more about Meylah, you can find us online at the following:

Our Website:  www.meylah.com
Our Blog:  www.meylah.com/meylah
Our Facebook Page:  http://www.facebook.com/meylahfan
Our Twitter Profile: http://twitter.com/meylah
Our Flickr Group:  http://www.flickr.com/groups/encountersofthecreativekindwithmeylah/