internet business

Survey – Pseudonyms – What Do YOU Think?

I was having a chat with someone the other day on the subject of using a different name to market with other than your own.  I know lots of people do it, and we were wondering how far the practice goes.

So it’s survey time.

Hey, if you have the tool to do the job, then why not go for it? 😉

If you have 2 minutes, take the short survey.  You’ll get the results immediately after completion – just make sure to bookmark the results page to see the updates as more people complete it.

http://www.frankhaywood.com/iss/index.php?survey=f413aa

-Frank Haywood

Posted by Frank Haywood in internet business

Have Your Own Software Developed

Before I get into the meat of this post, I first want to say this isn’t an affiliate promotion. I’m not earning anything for this. Okay?

A friend of mine called Jason Anderson is running a special deal where you can kick start your internet business and have your own software developed by a team of people he’s assembled. Why? Because they’re looking to make their name known in the industry. They’re a new start up and need a bit of publicity.

I won’t go into the details here, you can read all about it at:-

http://www.prosoftwaredeveloper.com/

(They can develop in PHP – ASP – ASP.NET – C# – C++ – JS – AJAX – JQUERY – DBASE – MySQL – SQL – Access – Oracle – Flash.)

I promised I’d do a promotion for Jason when he launched PromoCodeSoftware.com (developed by the same team that will be developing your product), but I forgot because I was “busy” and I’m a pillock sometimes… and he was too polite to keep reminding me, which is all I really needed.

Jason doesn’t know I’m doing this, and it would be nice if you at least took a look at his offer.

Now I know I might be creating my own competition here, but the way I see it is it’s a big world, and there’s plenty of room for us all. I’ve just had an email from him as I’m on his mailing list, and 4 of the 10 slots have already gone. You can read why there’s only 10 slots on the site.

So if you’ve got this great idea but you’ve been having problems finding a developer (it took me months to find the two guys I have working with me), go take a look at his site.

http://www.prosoftwaredeveloper.com/

-Frank Haywood

Posted by Frank Haywood in internet business

Email Consumption Update

A few weeks ago, I said I’d cut down on my email, and that I was going on a low information diet. In reality I was already on the low information diet, and I was just reducing my intake even more to improve my internet business.

I know this is going to sound a little shocking to some, but for several years now I haven’t read a newspaper or watched the news. My reason for that is I just find it too damn depressing, and it distracts me from living my life. So I cut it out.

If the news is really important, then I’ve always figured that someone would tell me, or as happens more often nowadays, they ask my opinion.

When I had a job, that stance served me well as the office would be chattering about whatever the newsworthy item was about, and I’d ask a couple of questions, get some stares and a few dropped jaws because I didn’t know anything about it, and that would be it. I was updated.

Watching people walk away shaking their heads made me smile.

And before you say “yes but you could never hold an informed opinion about anything”, I say so what? The news as it is reported is made up. It’s someone else’s opinion of a second or third hand recollection of something that might or might not have happened the way they think it did.

History is the same. The ultimate winners always become the good guys and get to write history the way they want to.

Anyway, I always accept “news” with more than a pinch of salt because we’ll never know what really happened, just what was reported. Why hold an opinion when you don’t know all the facts, and why bother in the first place? Most (99.99% +) “news” doesn’t affect the day to day running of my life.

It’s just an idle entertainment.

So back to email…

As you might know if you’ve been reading my blog for a while now, I’ve cut down on email checking, and at one point got it down to three times a week, and even twice for a couple of weeks. The call was strong, but I resisted.

But because I’ve been doing a lot of communication with one of my developers (David) over a project or two we’re in various stages with, I found myself checking my email more and more, and soon I found myself checking one email account two or three times a day again. Grrr.

I don’t have to check my email for any support issues as I now use TicketDesk Pro for everything.

As an aside, I now find I can answer all my support questions once a day and it takes me 30 minutes. That’s because I have my own copy of TicketDesk Pro help desk fully loaded with Standard Responses, including pre-defined URLs. The answers to most questions are just a quick select and “add” away. (That’s a killer benefit of TicketDesk Pro.)

So the email problem has reared its head again, albeit on a smaller scale, and I stopped to have a think about it. I need that communication with business partners and staff, but I don’t want to be distracted by other things while I’m checking my email from those people I *want* to hear from.

Thirty seconds later I had my solution. A private forum. Perfect.

We can hold all discussions about various projects and issues in different threads. Everything is held together, no more searching through emails, and more importantly, no distractions. It should actually improve all our productivity. All I have to do is leave it open in my browser.

So at some time in the next couple of days I’ll set that up, probably on an existing SMF forum I have as I really like the way SMF works.

My email consumption should go back down to checking twice a week. Remember my goal is ONE hour per week to handle all email.

Yeah I know that sounds severe, but if you don’t have goals, you don’t have directions.

So what do you think? Could you achieve an hour a week to check email? What do you think of my forum idea? Do you know of a better solution?

-Frank Haywood

Posted by Frank Haywood in internet business

Making PLR Pay

Just how hard is it to turn PLR into PLR (private label rights into “producing lotta riches”)?

Well, if you’ve never done it you might be forgiven for thinking that it can be very hard. After all, you have to be a bit of a writer – don’t you?

No, I don’t think so. I think it’s perfectly possible to do it well if you can speak normally. You can speak normally, can’t you? You really *don’t* need to be a good writer.

Here’s the thing: Private Label Rights materials pay off, because they do what most of us are not good at doing. They get us started. It’s a big task to start with a blank page and try to think of things to say. That’s a big task even for professional writers! They have a fancy name for when they can’t do it – “writer’s block”.

The fact is that most people find it easier to look at what’s wrong with something that already exists. Then they can change it, bit by bit. Finally, they have a complete article, or product, ready to sell. Let me give you a little test, to prove it to you.

I want you to read the next few lines and *in your head* work out how you could say it better. Actually say it to yourself in your head – or even out loud if you prefer.

“When time comes to making a whole bunch of money but you cannot think what it is you should do to do it, you should spend some time on your own to think about what it is you should do and then you’ll come up with a plan to do it.”

Go ahead – fix that in your head. You don’t have to type anything.

Did you actually try that little exercise? Did your version sound better than mine? It should – mine was awful. Deliberately awful, but still awful.

So, what’s the point I’m making?

*You* just edited and fixed an entire paragraph.

How many paragraphs do you think you have to edit and fix to get a full article all spruced up? It could be as few as 8 or 10.

It’s really not as hard as you think, is it? Here’s where human nature comes into play. If I tell you to edit 600 words that sounds like a lot. If I tell you to edit 10,000 words your brain will flip! 10,000 is a *lot* of words. But the reality is that you don’t edit 10,000 words. You edit a few at a time. So instead of thinking about editing a full article, or ebook, think about editing just 1 sentence.

Honestly, doesn’t that sound a lot better? A lot easier, too?

You see when you’re faced with a big task, you really can’t do it all at once. But for so many of us our brain thinks that we *have* to do it all in one go. But because we get to make the rules, we can take 2 goes – or 50 if you want.

Will it take longer doing it that way? Well, not really, because if you get overwhelmed by the full job you’ll never do it – so it will take forever. And just the fact you won’t feel stressed out should help you work faster too.

If you have some plr articles sitting around, gathering dust, here’s a suggestion for you.

1) Commit to editing 1 article.

2) Allow yourself the luxury of editing *only* 1 sentence a day. This is a strict rule! Do not do 2 sentences, even if you feel like doing it. Do 1 sentence and then save your article, ready for tomorrow. Strictly 1 sentence a day – no cheating!

3) Each day, open your article and continue where you left off. Edit another sentence. On some days it might take you literally 15 seconds to make the changes. Nobody on this planet is so short of time that they can’t find 15 seconds.

4) As you continue, remind yourself that you have less to do now than you did yesterday. Each day you have even less to do than the day before. The job is getting smaller every day and you still only have to edit 1 sentence today.

5) When you reach the final sentence, edit it and save your article. Then, look back over the full article and see just how much you’ve edited – more than you thought you could do when you began. And you did it all 1 sentence at a time.

For fun, compare the original article and your edited article. Take some pride in the fact you did it. You edited an article.

6) Submit your article to at least one of the many article directories.

Congratulations!

But let’s also be realistic here. You wouldn’t want to work at that speed if you had 100 articles to edit. But always, always, start with 1 article and 1 sentence.

My guess is that somewhere along the way you couldn’t help yourself and you edited more than 1 sentence. By telling yourself you were only ‘allowed’ 1 sentence, you made it irresistible to do more. That’s just human nature. So always tell yourself you’ll edit 1 sentence. When you do more – and you will – you can reward yourself for doing better than you committed to.

That’s just a little trick that makes it easier to do the work without freaking out. Here’s another one that might work for you. Let me explain it with a story.

I hate swimming. I mean the mind-numbing up and down, boring repetition. But I love the feeling I get afterwards. So for me I set my target of say 50 laps. Then I count down from 50. In other words every lap I do I have a reducing balance. So in my head I see ahead of me 50,49,48,47,46…

If I count up, it takes ages before I seem to have done any significant numbers. So counting up goes 1,2,3,4,5. Doesn’t feel like much progress, but counting down I know it just keeps getting easier. It’s easier to do 40 laps than it is 42 laps – that’s a given. So my routine just keeps getting easier to achieve. That works for me – try it and might work for you. If you have 12 paragraphs to edit just count down after each one. 12,11,10,9,8 and so on. If it doesn’t work for you just stick with the 1 sentence at a time tactic.

If you’re writing material from scratch it’s really just the same. Commit to write say 1 paragraph and when you’ve done that, stop for the day. I guarantee you that you won’t be able to stop after 1 paragraph most of the time. But the fact you have given yourself permission to do so takes all the pressure off your brain.

To show you exactly what I mean I’ve created a video showing how I edit a plr article live, following these rules. You can view it at

http://www.sublime-products.com/articles/edit-plr/

-Amin Motin

Posted by Frank Haywood in Guest Posts, internet business

80% Of What You Do Doesn’t Make Any Difference

This is a reference to Pareto’s rule which says something like 20% of this gives you 80% of that.  It’s otherwise known as the 80/20 rule.

When I worked at Land Rover, our logistics department used it all the time to make stock decisions.

Here’s an example.

20% of your customers will bring you 80% of your business.  (eBay know that, and we’ve seen them acting on removing some of the unwanted 80% recently.)

Conversely, 80% of your customers will bring you only 20% of your business.

So where would you spend your time?  Working with the 80% or the 20% of your customers?

And… 20% of your customers will gripe all the time.  80% won’t.  😉

So the title of this post is a bit of a mind shock if you’ve never come across Pareto before.

80% of what you do won’t make any difference to your internet business.  In actual fact, it’s probably closer to 95% or more.

So how do you know which is the best bit?  Which is the bit you should be doing more of to get the best results?

I think the best answer to that question is “experience”.  It’s only by doing everything to begin with do you learn how to sort the vital from the dead wood.

Once you begin to get a feel for it all and you start to see the light, it becomes easier to see how to improve things.  I’ve had people write to me and tell me how important this or that is, when I already know for a fact it makes very little difference.

It might be important to them, but it’s not important to the bulk of other people.

But of course, you can only get to that stage if you DO things first.  Planning and thinking is all well and good, but getting stuck in is where the money is.

Have you actually done anything today?  The sooner you do, then the sooner you can sort out the 20 from the 80.  Or the 5 from the 95.  Or even the 1 from the 99.

-Frank Haywood

Posted by Frank Haywood in internet business