Happy New Year 2009

Well I hope you had a good break, kicked back, took it easy and haven’t put too many pounds on during the holiday. If you took one.

I weighed myself a couple of days ago, and while according to the scales I haven’t put any weight on, I definitely feel a little plumper – ha-ha. It will all tighten up in the Spring when I’m out and about more and I get more exercise.

I always celebrate Christmas by taking a couple of weeks off and spending some time with the family, but all good things come to an end and the kids went back to school yesterday with some very glum faces to be seen and a few tears too.

If it wasn’t mandatory to send the kids into school we probably wouldn’t do it. We’ve had some serious conversations about home schooling in our house.

It’s a bit of a crash after the build up to Christmas and it can be a glum time of year if you let it be.

Maybe you feel similar to me, and maybe that started a few days ago for you if you started work earlier than I have.

Okay hands up, I don’t take the entire 2 weeks off over Christmas, I just pick and choose what I do. I can’t help it, I’ve sort of become a bit of a workaholic completely unintentionally.

Yes I have the odd off day and sometimes it’s more than a single day, but I can’t help thinking about work in quiet moments. If you run your own business from home like I do, you probably know what I’m talking about.

Anyway, I’m now officially back in the saddle and I’ve surveyed what needs to be done ASAP, and also what plans we need to make for the beginning of the year.

The first thing I have to do is something I’ve already started. I’m slowly working my way through all the support tickets that have been raised. There’s a lot, but after a quick scan through, apart from 5 or 6, most of them seem to be fairly straight forward answers.

Next is catch up with the forum which is getting interesting – I know I have at least a couple of PMs there I need to read and answer.

And then, I have to get the written docs for SmartDD out.

With one thing and another I’ve found I’ve had to push them to one side. It’s like a really annoying re-run of what happened when I released v2.

I’ve got to fix that soon or it’s going to drive me nuts.

And while I’m working my way through those tasks, I’ve also set myself another regular task.

At the end of 2008, I discovered IPK and confirmed to my own satisfaction that it was a good way to make some additional money online. More importantly though, using the IPK method means a few hours work for a semi-permanent income.

If you’ve missed any of my last posts and not yet bought IPK, I’ll just repeat that.

You do a couple of hours work and get paid repeatedly for it.

Ahhh… The Dream…

It’s ideal for anyone who wants to work from home but aren’t sure about what to do and where to start. And it’s also ideal for people who already make money online and want to add a new income stream.

I don’t know about you, but I like new income streams.

IPK is so good that my wife has jumped on it too and starting yesterday is now putting up a site a day for four days a week.

We ran through the first site together yesterday, with her doing all the work and asking questions while I talked her through it all. Today, we did the market research for a cluster of sites and took out three new domains. Two of them are “baby” sites and the third is the “mother”.

She built the first page of one of the baby sites in about 15 minutes before having to go out. She’ll finish that site tomorrow in about 90 minutes I reckon.

In about 2 weeks or less, she’ll have the entire skill set to research and build web sites from scratch.

Yep, she’s never done anything like this before and is only going to allocate 2 hours a day, 4 days a week to it. My estimate based on my experience with the Jumperoo site is that each site she builds will earn payback after 3 weeks and anything after that is pure profit.

After reading what several people have said about using .com and .co.uk domains, we’ve decided to use .info domains only as a last resort. Our initial target market is the UK so all our domains will be .co.uk to begin with.

But watch out, eventually we’ll be looking at the US and Canadian markets too. 😉

Only kidding – realistically the truth is we’ll probably never have to look outside the UK.

Looking again today and seeing the HUGE amounts of products that are getting lots of search and few competing web sites, we know the selection process for the UK alone is never ending. There must be hundreds of new products being released every week and it would be extremely difficult to catch all of them.

And I guess that’s the main reason why Craig released this information in the first place. He knows that the market will never become saturated because it’s so damn big.

For me though, there is one worry about IPK.

Reading some of the comments in the forum, I can see that some people aren’t getting the process quite right just yet. I’ve tried to fix that by offering my own advice and critiquing a couple of sites on request.

I’ve come up with my own market research critical success factors to complement Craig’s OPSEO critical success factors. I’ll repeat them here on this blog in a later post.

I (and I guess maybe Craig had too) made the assumption that people would easily understand the market research part of it and would struggle with the OPSEO. But of course the market research part of it is just as important in making a site pay, and if you get that wrong, all the OPSEO in the world isn’t going to help your site make money.

It’s one of those things where the more you do it correctly, then the more you’ll get a feel for it and be able to do it correctly – it’s a bit chicken and egg.

I can see though that some people might get turned off if things don’t pan out immediately. And that’s bad because IPK is one of the very few systems that I know will work well for most people.

It would be tragic for people not to be able to make it all work, and I really want everyone to succeed with IPK, so I’ll be doing my bit to help however I can.

Announcements about that as they happen.

IPK aside, I’ll also be running a couple of WSOs soon, and I’ll announce them here and on my other mailing lists as I launch them.

I also intend to do a few how to videos, and finish off a couple of books that are almost done. One of them is 99% done and it’s just silly for me not to make that final effort and finish it all off. Freebies to blog subscribers I think.

So those are yet more tasks I have to do.

*sigh*

Back to the grind. 😉

I sincerely hope that 2009 will be a good one for you. Take good care of yourself and your family.

-Frank Haywood

Posted by Frank Haywood

4 comments

Graham Cox

Frank, I don’t think your working hard enough…pull your socks up will ya…lol!

Out of interest, how many hours do you work on an average day?

And what percentage of each day’s hours would you say you spent on stuff that doesn’t actually benefit or improve your business, such as surfing forums aimlessly, checking out offers etc. I’m sure your procrastination quota will be low but interesting to know nonetheless.

Happy New Year btw…hope it’s a good one for you.

Cheers…Graham

Frank Haywood

Hi Graham,

If you can call it work it’s probably 12 for about 4 days a week and less at weekends. My guess is maybe 60 hours.

Some of that time is spent looking at forums, email (not so much now, in fact hardly any), answering support questions and other non-productive tasks. More than 50% I guess.

I’m the world’s worst at procrastinating. Or best. Most times I can make a decision and get on with it, but sometimes I get stuck for days on end and in one recent case, weeks. I still don’t know how to handle it.

And I think I have something outstanding for you that’s been 12 months now isn’t it? ::)

Happy new year to you too.

Cheers,

Frank.

Ernie Hodge

Frank,

I know you have a code to refer people to IPK but I was wondering is there an affiliate program?

I couldn’t find anything in the IPK members area.

Thanks,

Ernie Hodge

Frank Haywood

Hi Ernie,

It’s a ClickBank scheme – build a link for your subscribers by putting your CB id in front of this:-

.ipkiller.hop.clickbank.net

Cheers,

Frank.