This is a Guest Post by Cathy Presland. Cathy Presland teaches entrepreneurs to grow their business doing what they love. She specializes in helping you get known and generate income online. You can also follow her on Twitter.

I was in Beirut recently and I called in at the Maison de l’Artisan, which is a non-profit retail outlet in for hundreds of artisan producers all over Lebanon.

This got me thinking about the role of producer cooperatives and how they can help artisans, craft businesses and artists develop and sustain a local economy. I’ve seen some good and some not so good examples but there are a few common themes to most of them – and one single big mistake that I see many of them make.

What they can do for producers...

This is a Guest Post by Cathy Presland. Cathy Presland teaches entrepreneurs to grow their business doing what they love. She specializes in helping you get known and generate income online. You can also follow her on Twitter.

They say that truth is stranger than fiction, and it certainly can be more fascinating. This story seemed to have it all: art, greed, anti-establishment backlash, passion, lawsuits, politics, travel, glamor, and of course at the root, money, a lot of money – estimated to be somewhere in the range of $25 billion....

Last week, I watched a film portraying the incredible story of the Barnes Foundation, a collection of post-impressionist and early modern art that is probably the greatest collection of its type anywhere in the world.

And this is not just my opinion. Matisse was reported to say that “the Barnes Foundation is only sane place to see art in America”.

This is a Guest Post by Cathy Presland. Cathy Presland teaches entrepreneurs to grow their business doing what they love. She specializes in helping you get known and generate income online. You can also follow her on Twitter.

Selling creative products isn’t the same as selling a business or a financial product. While we know that people buy on emotion and justifies with logic sometimes we creative entrepreneurs find it harder to find a language or a sales process that suits our product.

You’re often selling an experience. You’re creating joy. Art. Beauty. Inspiration even.