internet business

Aug

2008

I’ve Been VERY Stupid

The other day, I realised with slow horror (and a feeling of extreme stupidity) that I wasn’t making the most of many of my email lists.

Because I tend to do things as quickly as possible now in my internet business, rather than spend time tweaking them to be perfect (I found that in that process, I was never completing anything), I realised I didn’t have a crucial element in my autoresponder sign up for this blog.

There’s no offer.

Think about that.

Let’s take this blogs notification list as an example.

Every time I make a post, I get new subscribers. Just because of the sheer number of posts now, I get search traffic to the site for all sorts of terms. So I get new subscribers on an almost daily basis now. I’ve found I might get 10 or 15 new subscribers over a day or so after a post, and then the odd one or two for a few days unless I post again.

If I could be bothered to check, I think it would probably average out about 3 or 4 subscribers per day.

Just for doing a bit of writing about stuff I’m interested in. Not bad is it really?

Don’t get me wrong , it’s taken about 12 months to get to this point, and I can see it greatly improving over the next 12 months. So if you’re not doing this yet, start today and see the benefits slowly start to appear. If you do nothing, then nothing will happen. Simple really isn’t it?

But don’t make the blunder I’ve just realised I’ve made, learn from my mistake and get it right first time.

I don’t have an offer, or didn’t have. I do now. Or at least I will have by the end of this week.

If I had an offer from the beginning, then I would likely be better off by at least a few hundred dollars – probably a lot more but I tend to be conservative about these estimates.

So the change I’ve made is, from about Thursday or Friday (when I get the chance to finish it all off), those people who join will now get to see my offer, and I’ll be using two of the new features in (the shortly to be released) SmartDD v3 to apply it.

Free Sign Ups and One Time Offers.

From that point, when people sign up to this blogs subscriber list, they’ll also get a very nice offer.

If I allow for 1% of people to take me up on that offer, then for every 100 subscribers, I’ll make some extra cash for doing nothing. Up to now, I’ve been making zero for getting subscribers to my blog, so that’s a HUGE improvement. 😉

Over the next 12 months as my list grows, my internet business will make more money, just for doing a bit of writing that I’m already doing and that I enjoy. No extra work.

The page consists of some very useful (and FREE) learning which you’ll get just by reading the page, and the offer itself, which consists of a large collection of excellent software I’ve found, plus some other useful bits and pieces.

The learning is really something you’ll want to take notes about. There are 3 Key Learning Points, plus a couple of “bonus” points thrown in for good measure. 😉

The offer page will go up tomorrow at a greatly reduced price, which I’ll leave in place until Thursday / Friday when I have the chance of completing the full sign up route.

Once I’ve put the correct route in place, I’ll be putting the price of the offer up to $67.

Until Thursday, it will be a LOT cheaper than that.

How much? Wait and see tomorrow.

-Frank Haywood

Aug

2008

A Few Blog Changes

After being ill and feeling wretched for the last couple of days thanks to a horrible stomach bug (my wife had it too), I’ve managed to do a bit today.

(Of course the nice thing is, my online income hasn’t changed while I’ve been ill.)

The bit I’ve done where I actually feel productive (although not made any more money by doing it) is to make a few changes to the blog mainly by pottering around the web.

#1 – I’ve added links to some online experts in the sidebar.

#2 – I’ve added yet another plugin called Brians Threaded Comments. This allows visitors to make a comment about other people’s comments and have it neatly bundled in a thread. Of course, people can make a comment about your comment and so on.

It’s an old plugin (things get old rapidly online don’t they?) but seems to still work okay, and looks correct in FF, IE and Opera. If you spot any oddities, please let me know.

#3 – I’ve added yet another plugin called Show Top Commentators although I think that should be commenters^* not commentators^**. It’s probably a close call…

Anyway, the plugin shows the top commenters over a period of time which I’ve set to 10 commenters and 3 months at the moment, but I might change that. There are a few different versions of this knocking around, but the best one I could find is by Carsten Albrecht.

It works as you’d expect it to without you having to mess with PHP code, and without it overriding any of your default CSS settings. Very nice. And of course it encourages people to post to get a (rolling) permalink in the home page sidebar right back to their site. Stop posting comments and after a while, you drop off the list. I really like that idea.

#4 – I also found another plugin that I’ve wanted for a while now but couldn’t find because I guess I used the wrong search terms. It’s called Configure SMTP by Scott Reilly and allows you to use SMTP to send mail from your WordPress blog rather than the default php mail function which is getting more and more difficult to get through spam filters nowadays.

As I’ve said before, even though I have both DomainKeys and SPF enabled on my domain, some email still doesn’t get through. That’s why I use AuthSMTP.com on mail critical applications such as my support desk. And that’s where I’ll now also be using AuthSMTP.com – on my blog.

So the little carrier pigeon email message you get when you leave a comment (and Subscribe to Comments – another great plugin) will hopefully get through.

Can you tell I like plugins that make my blog “sticky”? You should too, it will help your internet business.

Finally, the icing on the cake for me (and I really hope this plugin works) is Extra Sentence Space again from Scott Reilly. What a wonderful find. I’ve always disliked that HTML by default did away with the second space after a full stop (period if you’re from the US). I got fed up of manually inserting non-breaking spaces just to get that extra space back. This plugin puts the second space back again and makes your writing online as legible as your writing offline. Fantastic!

Or is that just me?

Enjoy.

-Frank Haywood

^* One who makes or writes comments.
^** An expert who observes and comments on something OR a writer who reports and analyses events of the day.

Aug

2008

Another Email Consumption Update

Okay, I think I now have a solution for me which keeps me informed by the people who need to inform me, while cutting out all the noise from emails.

The goal is to give me more time to work on my internet business by cutting everyones biggest time consumer – email – down to next to nothing.

I have a Skype account that very few people have access to.Â My closest friends online, who are just as busy as me and don’t do idle chatter, my developers, and my students.Â I might hold one conversation a week average through that medium.

I have my support desk via TicketDesk Pro which has given me back 90 minutes a day of my life by cutting support time down from 2 hours to 30 minutes.Â Most of the regular questions have the answers inside the Standard Responses (SRs).

I now have a private forum by which I can communicate with my developers, and where everything is recorded for all projects.Â No more hunting through emails.

So that I don’t have to keep checking it every 30 minutes or so, I’ve created a unique email address where all notifications of new posts or responses from the private boards are sent to.

I’ve set up PopTray with just that one email account.Â I’ve set it so that a double click on the PopTray system tray icon opens the private forum in my browser, and a middle click opens up the PopTray mail window where I can delete the new notification message.

And that 3-way punch seems to be working really well.

#1 – A Skype account that very few people have access to.
#2 – TicketDesk Pro to handle customer issues.
#3 – A private forum with email notifications picked up by PopTray.

I’m not sure if this exact set up would work for you, but it means that for me I can now largely ignore my email as the people that really need to get hold of me can.Â I’ll leave this in place for another couple of weeks and then I may at last be down to checking my email once a week.

Maybe a variation of this would work for you and you can get a whole chunk of your life back.

-Frank Haywood

Aug

2008

Direct Deposits From ClickBank

I’ve just spotted that ClickBank will now do direct deposits into your bank account.

Heaven!

No more cheques. And one less thing to worry about in your internet business – no more LOST cheques.

There are a few provisos, like your account has to have been open for 90 days and you must have received at least 3 paper cheques first, but if you’re in that position the upgrade is easy to do.Â All you need is your bank account number and sort code, click a confirming link in an email, and that’s it.

You can read about it here and here.

-Frank Haywood

Jul

2008

Support Desk Reminder

I just thought I’d post a little reminder that I have a support desk at:-

http://www.Vendiva.com/support/

which uses TicketDesk Pro my help desk software.

The reason I’ve posted this reminder is because when I checked my email yesterday, I’ve had 3 people who are clearly frustrated because it seems I’m not answering their emails.

In fact, I’ve answered all of them, including all 4 of Catherine’s (if you’re reading this), so don’t think I’m ignoring you. Email gets checked twice a week now, with my goal for it to be once a week, but the support desk gets checked several times a day.

The problem is, as I’ve said before, even though I have both domain keys and SPF records in place to authenticate my email (and I also use AuthSMTP on some accounts), ISPs insist on filtering a lot of what they consider to be business email. From their point of view, they supply internet services to home users and therefore will only allow “home usage” email to be delivered.

If you’re running an internet business, then create a business email account off your main domain, and use that instead. No more ISP filters and you can communicate fully with the world again.

But if you really want to get my attention, then use my support desk. And if you want to ease the load on yourself, get a copy of TicketDesk Pro, it’s extremely easy to use. Before TDP, I was spending 2 hours a day on support by email. Since installing TDP, it takes me no more than 30 minutes to do all my support, and that’s with checking at regular intervals.

The reason it’s all become a lot faster is because I’ve fully loaded it with Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) and Standard Responses (SRs).

The FAQs catch most problems, and the SRs catch the bulk of the rest. In practice, many of the SRs are repeats of the FAQs as some people like to be told rather than look it up. That’s okay, it takes me a few seconds to read, select an SR and add it to my reply.

I’ve come to rely on the Standard Responses so much that I’ve created often used URLs in there. So now I can select an SR, add it, then select a URL and add that too. Or I can combine several SRs to create a fuller answer.

If you’re struggling with email yourself, then TicketDesk Pro is definitely the way to go to reduce your workload. It’s easy to use and it has some great benefits.