Introducing Your Host

Hi. I’m Ric Seaton and I love making Wooden Automata.

I have been carving wood for forty years. I’ve made wooden models, marionettes and even had a go at making miniature wooden totem poles after a memorable trip to Vancouver in Canada.

This is a miniature (18 inch) copy of the Vancouver Thunderbird totem that I made in 2019. The full-sized original is on display in Stanley Park, Vancouver, Canada.

A few years ago back in 2014, I decided to try internet marketing. So I went in to research mode and scoured the internet for a good mentor. I eventually found and joined a great teaching program.

I went online and was soon up and running. I then went through the agonising process of getting a domain name, hosting my first ever website, starting a WordPress blog, doing my first blogpost etc. The whole process including all the design tweaking took the best part of three weeks.

It was hard work, and mostly consisted of failures, restarts and faltering progress which just seemed to end up with no direction and no goal to aim for. And it was costing me a small fortune.

I was literally shooting in the dark

It was a series of tasks I was compelled to complete without a clue as what my end goal was and who my target audience was supposed to be, which made the whole thing excruciating and unpleasant.

And what the hell was an autoresponder anyway?

It was a very tedious process and all completely new to me. I was learning ‘on the hoof’. I was messing everything up and leaning heavily on the other members of the community which I had joined for pointers, help and advice. And the end result was not great either, although just through tenacity I did make a couple of high-end sales.

But it all seemed still to difficult, and the end sales seemed to me to be complete flukes. I had no idea how I got them. I was blindly following the process but not understanding it. For those of you who know me, you’ll know I don’t like feeling out of control.

So I lost my mojo and gave up

I continued deleting my mentor’s emails for a few years until a new one arrived.

Don’t get me wrong! I completely trusted my marketing mentor, it was just that until this point I just wasn’t ready to fully engage with it, and I really didn’t understand the process and what we were trying to do.

So when he sent me this new plan in an email a couple of weeks ago, I hovered over the ‘DELETE’ button while I watched the introduction video.

But then something clicked

‘So what clicked’, I hear you ask?

At some point during the video, I suddenly understood how to market simply by promoting my passion to all you wooden diorama builders.

By providing solutions to your immediate problems regarding building your own automata, I can give you ideas and post free paper plans here to improve your wooden automaton builds.

I can even show you how you can earn money at it as well, if you like?

The whole process is simply about being very uncomplicated and knowing precisely who you want to help and what you can do to help your audience.

My Passion

I now have a single passion which I developed during the ‘offline’ years. The unstoppable urge to carve wooden items and make them move with the use of clever mechanics. It is summed up in the name of this blog which is Woodcraft in Motion. @woodcraftinmotion.

My passion is to carve interesting and often quirky items in wood, and then use simple mechanical movements and gears to animate them.

My next project which I will work through on the blog, is to make my version of this fine automaton.

So I signed up with the crystal clear goal of using a blog and YouTube videos to promote my passion which I had been working on in my time away from formal marketing

Fast forward to yesterday June 2nd 2026

So yesterday, I repeated the same process I had used all those years before. I set up my new blog and domain name, and managed to complete the whole process with a couple of reminders and nudges from the support group. I kicked off this blog plus the associated YouTube channel and posted my first video, and all in the space of six hours!

So do not underestimate how much knowledge and skill you have accumulated with all the mess-ups, mistakes and false starts over the years. Right at this moment, you are the best version of yourself you have ever been.

If any of this interests you, then you need to get in touch and tell me what you are struggling with. You can also comment below this post and introduce yourself.