product creation

Dec

2011

Personal One On One Coaching Part 2

I had lots of replies and kind words to my last blog post about my depression a few years ago.

In that post I said I’d tell you why I made it. It’s important.

With me, it was my trial through depression and the recovery time that followed that bought me to the place where I realised it was time to strike out on my own. In my case I thankfully had no choice in having to do my own thing as following my depression I effectively became unemployable.

I can take advice, and I can learn stuff just like I’ve always done, and even ask for help. But what I can’t do is have anyone tell me what to do. I can’t help that side of it any more, the barriers just go straight up and whoever’s doing the telling is wasting their breath. It’s quite different if I want the advice or knowledge.

When I finally moved into the digital products market place (in my case software) I believed for a short while all the nonsense I was told about how easy it was running an online business and how you didn’t have to do any work, ha-ha. I say “nonsense” because it really is.

Running your own business takes work and determination no matter what the business type.

There is no “short cut”, no “magic bullet”, no “loophole”, no “weird solution” or “ancient remedy” that many of the methods sellers would have you believe. You just need to choose something you’re happy with and work at it until you get better at doing whatever you do.

Obvious really isn’t it?

If you’ve been going through this yourself, or trying to get started at it, then you’ll have found that to begin with many of your days bring new problems to go with the pile of existing ones and the need to discover ways of solving them. And you find yourself “working” long, unproductive, pointless days when what you really need to be doing is focussing on the money that will drive your business forward.

More than 60% of people give up at some time in the first 6 months for whatever reason, and I suspect the biggest reasons to be a lack of focus and just plain not knowing what to do. This results in trying out lots of different things – “thrashing about” – until finally throwing the towel in.

I’ll repeat it again in case you weren’t paying attention further up the page, you need to choose something you’re happy with and work at it. 🙄

Usually and in my experience, whatever that something is, then you’ll find there’s always going to be a core set of requirements.

From my own perspective, I chose to sell software. Some days I wish I’d just gone into ebooks as I’d have total control of my own product creation process, but I don’t see that as being as much fun as working in software. I’ve always liked computers, but that’s just me. Something else might light you up in your case, or you may be similar to me.

Whatever it is, you need to do something you enjoy, or at the very least feel confident and determined about.

And I can help if you let me.

In a few days time I’ll be opening what might be my last ever personal coaching programme which will run through January and February 2012.

I say might be last ever because I have a project starting in March that will consume a chunk of my time and may eventually take me in a different direction (still with software). We’ll see, it’s very early days yet.

The last coaching I did was four years ago so you can see it’s not the kind of thing I do on a regular basis and that’s why I think it’s a bit special.

I won’t be pushing you through a one-size-fits-all sausage machine. I know that more than a few of the coaching programmes I’ve seen tend to operate on a “come one, come all” basis, but that’s not how I do it.

This will be personal coaching, tailored for you. The way I think coaching should be done.

There are some provisos that come with it though, and these are only there to make sure you’re not signing up for something that isn’t appropriate for you.

#1 – The coaching will be in the IM (Internet Marketing) niche.

#2 – The coaching won’t attempt to cover things I don’t do myself such as CPA and PPC, or network marketing. I have very little knowledge of those and I’m not really inclined to find out, it’s just not my bag.

#3 – The coaching will cover things like product creation, traffic, list building and automation by outsourcing. The stuff I personally see as vitally impotant to most online businesses. I’ll give you more information on what I will cover with this personal coaching in my next post.

#4 – You’re prepared to work hard at it and work under your own initiative with my guidance. Yes as your coach I’ll do some hand holding and pointing you in the right direction, but the sooner you take responsibility for your performance the better. I can help you achieve that very useful attribute.

#5 – You commit to the ethic of product creation. To be in the “game”, you need your own products to either give away (to list build) or preferably sell, and I can’t see any reason why you shouldn’t be able to create or have one created for you after 30 days or less. Once you know what you’re doing and you’re really cooking with some useful outsourcers, a week or less for product creation is completely do-able.

On that last one, having your own product(s) is vitally important as from that point on you can start list building. The size of your list bears a direct correlation to the size of your business. Simple isn’t it?

That okay for starters?

More information on personal coaching in my next post.

-Frank Haywood

Dec

2011

2012 Personal Coaching Programme

After many requests for help I’ve received from people this year about how to set up their sites, how to create a product, how to outsource it, how to build a mailing list etc, I’m finally able to offer a coaching programme.

Unlike some marketers who only make their money by coaching others, I’m the real deal. I’m like you.

On Wednesday 7th December I’ll make an announcement as to how you can sign up for coaching with me.

This will be a little different to the usual “run-of-the-mill” progammes as you’ll be getting direct access to me via Skype or phone. And I’ll also expect you to be open to doing other projects with me under my guidance, as a joint venture partner.

It will be an ongoing 12 month programme, although you will have at least one product and web site at the end of the first 60 days coaching. Depending on how fast you can work, there’s no reason why you couldn’t have at least two products and web sites (it’s up to you), and you’ll soon learn how you can create one per week with a bit of effort.

One per week?

Well, long time readers of this blog will know that’s almost exactly what I’ve been doing over the last couple of years. And I also know there are people reading this that have bought pretty much everything I’ve ever released.

You’ll learn how you can move fast and achieve the same kind of results as I do. There have been many times where I’ve had the idea on Monday and delivered the product on Friday.

The focus will be in the IM niche and will be on product creation, traffic, list building, outsourcing and earning lots of money.

Due to the very personal nature of the coaching, you will be one of only 10 people that I’ll be working with. I don’t believe I can offer you the kind of attention you need to succeed with any more than that.

I know that some people will want to know how much the personal coaching will cost, and my first (and experienced) response to that is if you’re serious about succeeding online it shouldn’t matter. You’re simply coming at it from the wrong point of view.

This is NOT an expense, it’s an INVESTMENT. In you.

There’s never been anything more true than “you have to give to get”, so just put it on your credit card and pay it back out of the profits.

Let me put this into perspective. A few years ago I paid something like ~~$10,000~~ for coaching, and although I didn’t get everything that was advertised (shrugs) and a lot of it was unnecessary (shrugs again) I still consider that the BEST investment I ever made.

I paid for it on my credit card and maxed it out. The credit card company being the evil swines they are then upped my limit, but that’s another story.

All I want to say here is, I’m NOT going to be asking you for anything like the ~~$10,000~~ I paid.

This is SERIOUSLY affordable if you’re SERIOUS about making a go of it online. I don’t know, maybe you’ve had a bit of a skirmish already with creating a product, but it didn’t go anywhere?

We can fix that.

On Saturday I’ll tell you something very personal about me that I’ve shared with maybe two or three people over the last few years.

I’ll publicly explain how and WHY I got into marketing, and what drove me to do what I now do, and why my options became limited and why I HAD to do what I do.

Who knows? You may have a similar story.

Please leave a comment with your thoughts.

-Frank Haywood

Aug

2011

Building A List Of Buyers

Where could you possibly get new buyers in the Internet Marketing niche on your mailing list and only pay 50 cents or less per lead?

Or in my case, pay nothing at all. In fact I made a few hundred dollars on the front, much to my surprise.

Think about this for a moment now… If you could pay 50 cents for a new buyer on your mailing list, and then sell them something for a dollar, you’re ahead of the game.

Let’s put it another way.

If you could stand on a busy street corner handing out 50 cents to everyone you meet and have them give you a dollar in return a couple of days later, how many people would you give the 50 cents to? ;-)[br][br]

And how about if they gave you another dollar a couple of weeks later? And then again another couple of weeks after that.

That’s what I’m talking about.

I have to clarify here though. It’s not the same person giving you a dollar and then another and another, but when you do the maths that’s what it works out as.

Put another way, you pay 50 cents per buyer on your list, and you get 10 of them. A few days later one of them gives you $10. A couple of weeks after that, a different one gives you $10. And so on.

The effect is, it’s like all of them giving you a dollar every so often. You with me?

That then drives the simple doubling of your 50 cents to another level, because you aren’t just doubling it, you’re trebling or quadrupling it, or even more. So if you see you’re making $2 per lead over a month or so, you know that you can now afford to spend $1.50 to get that lead and you’re still making 50 cents on the deal.

That’s how you should look at your online business.

You need buyers, and you need to know the numbers and do your sums to work out how much it costs you to get a new lead. It can be fiddly to do so and consume a lot of time until you get it all worked out so that your numbers update themselves. It can be a difficulty and I don’t know of any easy way of doing it, especially if there are new buyers coming in, and old buyers leaving. It makes it hard to see which lists are performing and what the real figures are for the new buyers unless you take the time out to segment and test each new group that joins.[br][br]

That’s a bit of a royal pain, but I can see that with MASSIVE numbers of buyers coming on board and where the money numbers are high, how important it is to do this.

Let’s get back down to earth.

From my perspective, I like to keep things as simple as I possibly can and I often don’t have the patience to put checks in place and work it all out to the nth degree. As long as I can see the exercise has paid for itself a few days later, then I’m a happy bunny. Because buyers often hang around for quite a while, sometimes years.

That 50 cents cost up front could have a massive return on an individual basis. I know that many people reading this right now have been on my list for years and have bought everything I’ve released in that time (thank you!) and will still be around (I hope) for years to come.

Where then, do we get the new buyers for 50 cents or less per lead?

From the Warrior Forum.

It’s like a busy street corner that’s populated with a special kind of person that’s in the Internet Marketing niche – it’s not the only one, but it’s the busiest. If you go looking, you’ll find busy forums out there for many niches where you can do the same or a similar thing.

From my perspective and probably yours if you’re a marketer, the Warrior Forum is THE place to find new buyers. They even have a special place on that forum where you can bang your drum called the Warrior Special Offers forum.

You can go there with a product you’ve created, put up a sales page in the form of a new thread and watch the buyers join your lists.

It costs $40 to run a WSO (there are other criteria too), and another $19 to use the Warrior Plus system – which is absolutely crucial to your list building efforts.

Up front you have a $59 outlay, and as long as you can bring in at least that much in sales, you’ve broken even. It hasn’t cost you a penny to run and you’ve picked up at least a few new buyers on your mailing list

In practice, as long as you run your WSO with 100% commissions and it’s a GOOD product or a GOOD deal, you’ll get LOTS of affiliates promoting for you that you’ve never heard of before. All thanks to the Warrior Plus (WSO+) system.[br][br]

The WSO+ attracts affiliates like this.

The seasoned affiliate may check out your WSO as a likely candidate, and as soon as they see the WSO+ button on it, they go to the affiliate page to check out the offer. If your product is part of a rising price sale and pays 100% instant commissions, then it’s a very attractive proposition to them.

What the affiliate will then do is place a request with you that will allow them to be your affiliate for this sale. If you wish you can then auto-approve them for all future sales if you know who they are or they perform particularly well.

They will then send you traffic to your WSO using their affiliate link, and some of that traffic will buy. The affiliate will get paid immediately into their PayPal account, the buyer gets their product, and if you’ve created your new list using Aweber or ImnicaMail, then WSO+ will auto-add them to your list. (They still have to confirm by clicking a link, but most do.)

That’s a win-win-win. Perfect!

If you’re lucky, enough casual traffic will find your WSO attractive enough to buy and you’ll make enough money to cover your WSO. In that case, the new buyers on your list haven’t cost you a penny. You shouldn’t bank on it though.

You should be very happy to break even, and ecstatic to make money on the deal. Remember that making your money on the front isn’t what this is all about. You can make your pot of gold after the event by either selling your new buyers one or more of your other products, or by being an affiliate for other vendors or both.[br][br]

Here’s the proviso to make this work.

You need your own products that you created yourself or had created just for you.

I said this a few years ago, and it was important enough for me to stick it to the top of my blog.

Product Creation, Traffic, List Building, Automation = Internet Business.

And then again a variant on that on another site I’ll be opening shortly:-

Product Creation >> Traffic >> List Building >> Business Building

It might sound obvious, or difficult, or crazy, or easy, or not for you, or whatever, but it works.

If you choose a style or niche (e.g. mine’s web apps, WordPress plugins and scripts) then go and find out what people in your niche want… they will buy. And if they like what you did, they will buy other things from you too as long as you address what they want.

You need the power of affiliates to really make it all work, and you turn them onto promoting for you by paying them 100%.

Okay?

Let’s just quickly run through it again.

Create a product.
Put up a WSO for it.
Use the WSO+ system to pay 100% commissions to your affiliates.
Gather your new buyers onto a new mailing list.
Repeat.

You then make your money by selling other products or memberships to your new buyers afterwards.

After you’ve gone through this cycle a few times and created a few products, then it gets easier as you can sell your original products directly to your new buyers as those products will be new to them.

That doesn’t sound too hard does it? It’s also fun and you learn lots of new stuff along the way.

If you have any questions, please feel free to ask. What have I missed out? Do you need some more detail? And so on.

Fire away.

-Frank Haywood

Sep

2010

A WordPress Theme Designed And Coded

A couple of weeks ago, and just before I came down with a slight fever, I started talking about having your own unique premium WordPress theme created. Here’s the gist of it.

The same designer who created the two very successful Multiple Streams Themes for me will create a WordPress theme for you to your specifications. No-one else in the world will have a theme like yours.

You will own it outright and you can do anything you like with it. Give it away, sell it, have it designed for a client, whatever you want to do with it.

It’s yours and yours alone and we’ll have no control at all over what you do with it. It will be completely copyrighted to you:-

http://www.frankhaywood.com/your-very-own-premium-wordpress-theme/

And I also then spoke about the importance of having a game plan.

If you decide that having your own unique theme created is the thing for you, then you also need to make sure you know exactly what your game plan is and how you expect to make your money back on the expenditure. I like every project to pay for itself within at least 2 weeks of launch:-

http://www.frankhaywood.com/the-importance-of-having-a-game-plan/

Let me put it like this. If you sold your new theme directly to your mailing list of say a few hundred people and without any other promotion, then I would expect you to easily make at least a thousand dollars if you sold it at $10 a copy.

If you have a larger mailing list, then you’d make a whole lot more money.

This is only true as long as you know what you’re doing.

Now I’ve taken care to say all this because I don’t want you to buy this design service if you’re not going to at least double your money on the deal and do it quickly.

You may not care about this, but I do.

The only exceptions I can think of with this is if you’re going to give it away to promote a site and build your mailing list in preparation to making money, or it’s for some other long term promotional plan you have running, or it’s for a site you have that you want to look a little bit special.

I also want to point out that right now at this point in time, I have no idea if there’s any demand at all for what I’m offering.

I know people like to buy WordPress themes if they’ll help them make money, and I also know that clients like well designed and functional WordPress themes.

But what I don’t know is if anyone will want to dig in their pockets and have a custom theme designed and coded for them and then cash in like I have. This is certainly not for everybody.

Okay?

I’ve spoken to the designer, and he’s told me he can take on TWO jobs. The graphic design and conversion process to a WordPress theme from beginning to end will take 2-3 weeks depending on the complexity and the number of design changes you ask for.

It will go much faster if you already have an idea of what you want from a theme and can show us a site you already like the look of.

Right…

In a couple of days time, I’ll put up a buy link on this blog to purchase a theme creation and the first two buyers get the job done for them and I’ll then take the buy link down.

If you want both slots, buy one and then do it again. 😉

One of two things will happen. Either both slots go immediately, in which case the link will disappear almost as soon as I put it up, or I’ve done such a good job of asking you not to buy if you’re unsure, that no-one will buy.

I’ll say it again, this is NOT for everybody.

-Frank Haywood

Aug

2010

The Importance of Having a Game Plan

I want to talk today about how important it is to have a game plan.

What do I mean? Well having a game plan for one aspect of your business might run something like this:-

#1 – You create a new product.
#2 – You release it with 100% instant commissions using the 7 Dollar Script.
#3 – You send an email out to your subscribers letting them know it’s on sale.
#4 – You tell your buyers that you’re offering instant 100% commissions directly into their PayPal account and that here are some tools they can use to promote it – banners and the like – with their aff link built in. All they have to do is copy and paste the code.
#5 – You contact a few people who are likely Joint Venture partners and tell them it’s 100% commission. Some promote and get all the cash, and you get another pile of buyers join your mailing list.
#6 – You tell these new buyers about your affiliate scheme etc. and they start promoting for you too. Some of these people will be succesful marketers and will have their own mailing lists.
#7 – Go to #1.

Okay? I’ll testify that you can run a very successful business that way, that naturally grows over time.

Having a game plan allows you to make and take low-risk decisions. Low risk because you pretty much know what the outcome will be – long term you’ll make a profit on your efforts and increase the size of your business.

I believe this is where most people fall over.

Most people try a little bit of this and a little bit of that – which is fine – I like to try different things out too – but they don’t concentrate on their core business. The stuff that really works.

And that might be because they’ve never really found anything that works.

Or not given it enough of a chance to make it work.

I’ve found that you need to set yourself a few rules that you work with. I call them my #1 Rules, and I have plenty of them for all sorts of different situations.

I’ve found that as long as you concentrate on the #1 rules, any other lesser rules you might set yourself don’t really matter that much or don’t have a big enough impact on your business.

(This is a rule in itself, called the 80-20 rule. I do almost everything by the 80-20 rule and I think most successful business owners do too without realising it. I ask myself – “Do I need to do something about this, or just let it go?” – 80 times out of 100 it can just be let go.)

My #1 rule related to having a game plan is:-

“Every project must pay for itself as soon as possible.”

So if I take new staff on, I want to see results in 2 weeks that at least pay for their keep for the month. There are no free rides, and nobody in my business is an expense.

You could probably adopt this yourself. Think about it.

You may believe that you can’t afford to take anyone on full time. But if what they do for you brings in enough income to pay for their keep, and you end up with new products and a new long term income stream, then it was well worth hiring them wasn’t it?

But let’s say that you’re not ready to make that commitment yet and you want to see how things go.

You still need a unique new product. The emphasis here is new and unique. I’m not saying you can’t do what someone else has already done, I’m saying that PLR probably isn’t going to cut it if you’re looking for JV partners. (There’s at least one exception to this and I’ll talk about it another time.)

I’ve had many people approach me to promote products that I’ve quickly realised were PLR, and I take that as an insult because I’m quite capable of using PLR to create products myself thank you. I don’t like being suckered into promoting products that may be quite widespread as it does my reputation no good whatsoever – that’s my logic and I’m certain most other marketers feel exactly the same.

PLR is great. But it’s of no use when dealing with JV partners unless you’ve taken the time to make extensive changes to it and it really is your product. (Most people can’t be bothered and that’s where they get it wrong.)

You need something that you know no-one else has.

And you need to be able to make genuine claims like “I created this myself” or “I paid $xxx to have this created for me.”

(Believe me when I say this will make you feel a whole lot better when you come to promoting it.)

Tomorrow is your chance to have a totally unique WordPress theme created for you from scratch and to your specifications by one of my designers. They are all extremely talented, and I want to point out that it does take a (relatively) long time to put together a theme because there’s a lot of work involved in doing it.

First there’s the design itself (2-3 days), then converting to a WP theme (4-5 days), and finally the coding tweaks such as extra sidebars and additional page templates (2-3 days).

It’s a big job. If you were able to do it for someone else, ask yourself how much would be a fair price for you to charge for the service.

If like most people you wanted someone else to do it and could then find the right person with the right level of design and PHP coding skills (it’s very hard), then the designer would probably charge you a couple of thousand dollars at least, apply restrictions on what you can do with the finished product, and likely not supply the PSDs for you to edit.

My designers are brilliant graphically and their level of PHP coding ability is high (you’ve probably already seen their work), but charge a lot less than you might expect.

With a fair bit of legwork (it’s not easy finding good people), I have an opportunity to take on a couple more designers, but as I said above, one of my rules is I need to make sure I have work for them and that they pay for their keep.

As long as I can pay their fees and get your job done as well as my own, then I consider myself to have made a profit from it.

From your perspective, as long as you have a game plan and can immediately make your money back on the work, it’s well worth doing.

If you don’t have a game plan or you don’t have a clue on what to do then this isn’t for you. Wait until you’re truly ready.

Here’s two game plans that I know work well from personal experience.

#1 – Get a theme made. Sell it to your mailing list. Immediately make 3 or 4 times your investment followed by ongoing sales through your affiliate scheme.
#2 – Get a theme made for a client. Charge your client 3 or 4 times your investment.

And if you don’t have a mailing list or a client, then here’s your chance to get a product made for you and get your business off the ground, just like I talked about above:-

#3 – Get a theme made that will appeal to pro-bloggers and the IM niche. Sell it for $10 with 100% commission using the 7 Dollar Script, find a few JV partners to kick start it and build a mailing list of buyers. Promote some other related product to your new list and make your money that way.

And that’s how business is done. 🙂

You make an investment, you follow your game plan and you make back your money and then some.

Watch out for more news tomorrow.

If you want to know more right now about having a game plan and how to approach your business, go watch the presentation on 30 Day Projects.

Update: A slight temperature and an overwhelming need to sleep scuppered my plans to launch this week. I’ll get back to you with this shortly.

-Frank Haywood