Frank Haywood

Do you have a mailing list? If you’ve just said no, you’re not alone.

99% of people who want to run a business (or already do so) when asked that question will say no.

Well I WANT YOU to have your own mailing list. I’ll explain why later on.

The importance of having a mailing list was something I’ve known for a while, but it was only 12 months ago that I started to build my list in earnest. Almost immediately, I realised that this was something I’d been missing out on for 3 years in business online.

Why the blimmin eck didn’t I start earlier? I just shake my head now and realise it as one of the biggest mistakes I’ve made.

I’ll tell you a little bit about what I used to do. Just a quick potted history of my career. I’m sorry if you find this boring, you can just skip to the survey if you like.

http://www.shareitwithus.com/survey.php?id=1

After leaving school, I went to work for a couple of small steel companies that were part of a larger group. I worked in wages first and then I moved into time and motion study – it was that last bit I didn’t like. I was nobody’s friend.

After 4 years of that, I went to a local technical college for a 6 month course in computing, and then found myself working self-employed through a management consultancy and contracted out to Land Rover which is just a few miles from where I live now.

After 5 years (!) as a contractor, I was offered a full time job as they realised they’d invested a lot of money in me and now couldn’t afford me to leave.

(Hah! I wonder how many thousands of times that’s happened in large companies?)

Feeling settled, I took a pay cut and signed the dotted line, and spent the next 16 years there.

Looking back, I suppose I had a pretty good career there by anyone’s standards. My biggest claim to fame was being the data manager for the projects that introduced both the current Range Rover and its predecessor, both times reporting directly to the project managers.

And I moved round the company a lot. I think I worked in all of the functions at one point or another.

The last few years though I wasn’t so settled and knew I needed to be doing my own thing. So eventually I left.

But before that, in early 2003 I started dabbling on eBay buying and selling used mobile (cell) phones. A hobby while learning the ropes.

Then in mid 2003 I decided to up the ante a little.

I’d spotted that chemical glow sticks were selling quite well and were fetching a decent price, around £12.50 ($25.00) for a tube of 100 eight inch sticks including £2.50 shipping.

So I did a bit of research…

I found a Chinese manufacturer that seemed reputable and after a bit of email tennis I committed to spend £3,000 ($6,000 USD) which I sent them by wire transfer.

I’d never done anything like this before and to say I was worried that I was never going to hear from them again was an understatement. I knew it was going to take 3-4 weeks to put my order together and then another 4 weeks before it would arrive by ship here in the UK.

I fretted about it until I received the bill of lading and the other documents via Fedex. Phew!

Then I fretted about all sorts of other things.

Where was I going to put all these boxes and boxes and BOXES of glow sticks? I cleared my garage.

How was I going to get everything through customs? I looked around and found a local freight forwarding agent that would not only clear customs for me, but would also deliver to my door.

(I didn’t even know they were called freight forwarding agents until a couple of days of research.)

So one day at the beginning of October, a 17 tonne lorry came down my sleepy little road and a mildly exasperated driver “they should have sent a 7 tonner down here!” dropped off something like 100,000 glow sticks – 1,000 tubes.

(EDIT: It was actually 200,000 sticks and 2,000 tubes – I got my calculator out! 🙂 )

I can’t remember exactly how many there were, but that seems about right from memory.

I can still feel the emotion of looking at all these boxes of glow sticks all the way up to the roof of the garage and thinking “What have I done? I’ll never sell all these! What a waste of money!”

I worked out how much each tube had cost me, including import duty and delivery all the way from China to my front door. £1.50 ($3.00) per tube.

I sold them at the going rate on eBay for £10.00 ($20.00) per tube, plus £2.50 shipping.

In 6 weeks they’d all gone. And I’d turned over a 600% profit on my initial £3,000.

That was it. With a sudden £18,000 ($36,000!!!) in my pocket, I *knew* I could make it on my own one way or another.

Things have been a bit bumpy since then, and there’s been more than a few times when we’ve wondered if we could meet the mortgage payment.

But here I still am.

No one said it would be easy.

BUT!

I could have made my life so much easier if only I’d started building my mailing list from day one.

You see, I was selling both on eBay and on a couple of web sites I owned (I’ve sold one since I stopped selling glow sticks). Two thirds of my sales were coming from eBay.

About 20% of those eBay sales were from repeat customers.

Now here’s the REALLY annoying thing. Some of the repeat customers were buying from my main glow sticks web site (cheaper prices), but the majority would only buy from eBay even though there was no advantage for them to do so.

It was a habit.

So they were paying more money, and I was having to pay eBay fees. Madness.

IF, if, if…

If I had a mailing list, things would have been a lot different.

I would have been able to run special offers, special bundles, you name it, and let my customers know exactly where to take advantage of those deals.

I must have lost thousands in whatever currency you care to choose, just because I didn’t have a list.

So, going back to the start again.

I WANT YOU to have your own mailing list.

Why? Well, you always have to look for the WIIFM – What’s In It For Me?

This is the motivator that gets people to do things. If you can point out the WIIF THEM, then people are more likely to go do it.

I *hope* with my (true) story you can now see the real benefit of having a mailing list.

And the reason I want you to start building a mailing list immediately is because with a list, you join the game. People start to take you seriously when you do a promotion that results in $4,000 in sales for them from a single email.

And of course you get half of that…

Do I have your attention?

I want you to build your own mailing list because it’s in BOTH our interests for you to have one.

I know from the affiliate payments I make each month that those that make the most money are those with a list of their own.

And with you as a list owner, I could be sending you some of those big fat juicy (sorry) affiliate commissions.

I have a series of new products that I’ll be releasing in the next few weeks and months, and the bigger your list, the more of my products you’re likely to sell.

(Yes I’ve been very busy and yes I know I should only be working on one project at a time…)

There’s a double whammy WIIFM there. The bigger your list, the more you profit. The more you profit, the more I profit.

Win-win. I love that.

So, this is where we start. Go fill in the survey and we can see where we stand today. I’ll share the results and analysis with everyone that participates.

And then you and me will talk about list building.

http://www.shareitwithus.com/survey.php?id=1

BTW – the survey script is one of my upcoming products. Very useful… 😉

Love ’em or hate ’em, you have to hand it to them. This has the biggest WOW! factor I’ve seen in a long time.

I’ll start saving up for one. I wonder if it’s Vista compatible?

Well, I’m sorry I haven’t sent out an email this last week or two, but I’ve been really busy breaking one of my golden rules.

Which one?

I’ll get to it in a moment.

I think I’ve said before in one of my earlier emails that Mike Filsaime is one of my mentors. I finally met him last September (and again in October), and I signed up to his mentoring program.

It’s greatly accelerated my learning, and that’s what I paid for.

Plus, Mike is a nice guy and I have a lot of time for him.

If you take the time to go meet him at one of the many public venues he attends and ask him a direct question, he *always* gives you a direct answer. He works on a policy of total disclosure.

That’s why I like him, there’s no edge.

He’s a marketer and he sometimes goes into sales mode, but that’s what he does – that’s how he earns his living.

So what’s the golden rule I’ve been breaking?

It takes a little explaining, but it can be summed up as "work on one project at a time with laser sharp focus".

This is one of Mike’s concepts for earning money online.

I might be generalising here, but I believe we all tend to jump from one thing to another and never focus on just the one subject. We do that because we don’t want to miss out on anything.

(I’ve missed out on a few good things by not taking action there and then, and I guess you have too.)

But we can also sometimes be guilty of taking too many little actions with no direction, or at least they may all have the same general direction, but they’re not taking us the most direct route.

So this is the concept behind this golden rule, and why and how it works.

You must only work on ONE project at a time, and with laser sharp focus. Get the project complete, get the product out there, and start earning income from it.

THEN concentrate on the next one.

30 days per project is all it should take if you’re completely focused, sometimes shorter, sometimes longer. If you’re starting out, then 30 days is all you really want to spend on a project.

And as you build and launch each one, your income increases month on month. Some will flop, some will be successful, and over time you can’t lose…

So how many do I have on the go at the moment? Umpteen. I’ve broken the rule with the best intentions of course.

And when you break the rule it spreads you very thinly because you’re spinning lots of plates, and running from one to the other.

Think of it like this. If you have a 30 day project, it takes 30 days to complete, give or take. (D’uh!)

And you can start earning money from it.

If you have another 30 day project straight after it, then that’s 60 days, and you have two products out there earning you money.

But…

If you try to do both 30 day projects at the same time, then you get this strange effect where each project now takes 45 days because you’re not completely focused on either one, making a total of 90 days to complete both of them.

But where it really all starts to go wrong is when you have another "great idea" and start working on that too. Now the 45 days turns into 60 days per project, and then guess what?

You have *another* "great idea" and nothing ever gets finished, and projects eventually get dropped to be replaced by "better" ideas.

It’s happened to me, and to a lesser extent it’s happening now. I’ve been side tracked by several projects which has slowed me down and made me very busy.

One of my projects I wanted to launch tomorrow, but that’s not going to happen now. My aim is to get it ready for Tuesday, and I should know if I can achieve that by tonight. I may have to push it back another few days.

So more news on that as it happens.

So I want to know, here’s my question to you – is that what’s happening (or has happened) to you too?

You can reply to this by leaving a comment here on the blog.

It’s worth noting that I’ve turned off the nofollow tag on all my blogs. So that means that when you post and enter your URL, it counts as a back link to your site by the search engines.

I thought you’d like that.

Now further up I mentioned that I was on Mike Filsaime’s mentoring program. It costs me $500.00 a month.

For that money, I get pretty much every item of software he’s ever released for free, plus most of his services too.

More importantly, three times a month (each Wednesday), I get to dial in and hear brand spanking new material which is sometimes with industry experts, and sometimes Mike does a brain dump on a topic he knows well.

And once a month is a call in day where I can chat with Mike or his CEO Tom Beal, or one of the other mentors (Donna Fox and Paulie Sabol) or all of them if I feel like it.

If you consider that each of these Wednesday call ins costs me $125.00 a week, how would you feel if you could get access to some of this content for a much lower price?

Well…

I can’t give you the direct content I get to hear and see as it’s copyrighted material and I just wouldn’t ever do that kind of thing.

But…

What I have for you is just as good.

It’s a VERY recent interview of Mike Filsaime talking to Simon Hodgkinson and Jeremy Gislason.

In it, Mike covers the same kind of material he does on the Wednesday call ins I pay $125.00 a week for.

It’s GREAT content. Mike is an animated speaker, and when you hear him you’ll realise just why I’m happy to pay what I do.

How much? $12.00 until the 3rd July then the price is going up.

For your money, you get an MP3 plus a written transcript of the call in PDF format if that’s how you prefer to learn.

Go get it from here:-

http://www.frankhaywood.com/recommends/mmsmf

You’ll enjoy it. 

A few weeks ago, I asked for a little help with answering a question and I received all sorts of answers. The question was something along the lines of what should I include in a short course on how to create a web page / web site.

There were a few interesting things that came out of it. Some people wanted to know right from scratch what they needed to do. Others were already way beyond anything I could teach, maybe my developer partner can help out there.

Before I release the course, I thought I’d do a few small how-to’s here and there to see if I’m on the right track with what people want.

One of the things I’ve been asked a lot about is what FTP is and how to use it.

And this subject is like most others, if you already know, then you miss the fact that lots of people don’t know. It’s easy because you already know how to do it.

It’s not easy if you don’t even know where to start.

So, I’ve created a short video explaining what FTP is and how to use some free FTP software to connect to your web site. I’ve also shown how to upload and download files using FTP, how to set "permissions" on files, also how to connect and browse your web site using nothing more than your web browser.

http://www.smartdd.com/special/how_to_ftp.php

Finally, if you do already know about FTP and how it works, then there’s something for you too. It’s something I found and I was impressed with it and so I thought it worth mentioning.

It’s not free though, sorry.

On the bottom of that video page, I’ve also placed a link to a powerful piece of software that will simultaneously update multiple web sites via FTP. This is really useful if you maintain lots of mini-sites and you need to update them all at once.

This can happen a lot!

The software integrates with spreadsheet CSV files and takes values directly from the CSV and modifies "tags" inside files and then passes those files directly to the server.

It can also be used to backup by FTP all your web sites files, images, *whatever* overnight.

Really. Clever. Stuff.

You should definitely check it out.

Please feel free to leave any comments below.

I’ve done something really cool for you. Well, I think it’s cool – you make your own mind up.

About 6-8 weeks ago, I sent out a request for help in response to requests for help that I’d received.

A few people had asked me about how to put together a simple web page and site. So I asked if there was anything that I must include in a course on the subject.

There were a wide range of answers, but the two that stood out were how or where to get the graphics for a web page, and also how to put together a page as easily as possible.

And so that’s what I’ve started to do.

I’ve used the best tool I could find at the lowest price, and I’ve created a video that shows you how to put together a header graphic. This is a real world example as it’s the header graphic for a new product I’m working on at the moment.

I’ll follow it up at a later date with more videos showing how to put together a 3D ebook and software box graphics.

And finally, I’ll put all the graphical elements together with the text into a web page in another video.

If I take it any further than that depends on you. If you appreciate the time I’ve taken to do this, then I’ll be letting you know how you can show that appreciation – it won’t cost you a penny, just a few minutes of your time.

And you’ll also learn something really cool in the process of doing that too!

If you want to find out what new product I’m working on, then you can see for yourself in the video.

To make the header graphic, I didn’t use PhotoShop as it’s so expensive. Instead I used a really low cost tool that I’m flipping about at the moment – I just wish I’d had access to this 18 months ago.

http://www.smartdd.com/special/wgc_creating_a_header_graphic.php

One word of warning about the video. It’s quite large at 30MB, so you really need to be on broadband to view it. My apologies if you’re on dial up, I’ll see if I can’t zip it up for download and viewing offline.