Long time – no update.

Well despite a whole load of effort, this project has gone nowhere so far – now obviously the Guru’s typically tell you at this stage that its all your own fault for not making it happen! Well in fairness that has not happened on this occasion and Neil Stafford has been left scratching his head and sharing in my frustration!

These two marketers are amongst the nicesest guys I have met and are clearly VERY good at what they do – but ultimately the result is what counts and something has gone badly wrong here with me currently showing 2 ebook sales for a £6k investment after nearly 2 years.

Rather than start again, Neil has offered to support me with a different project – details to be revealed here shortly!

How are you getting on with your own projects?

Best wishes

David

Well life has been very busy with a new job but the New Power Coaching project with Neil Stafford from Internet Marketing Review has never been far from my mind.

To be honest progress has been very slow, but since I last updated the Blog there have been 2 sales, albeit 3 months apart.

The main problem is that although traffic has been building very nicely (over 1000 uniques and 3000 page views per month) they are just not opting in for the free report.

At Neil’s suggestion I tried a Survey Monkey a few months back to try and identify who was visiting the site – in return for responding I offered them a free audio interview I did with Neil – unfortunately despite mailing the whole list (100 names) 3 times I only got 6 replies of which only ONE was my target audience.All my instincts are that the niche I have chosen is not commercial but Neil still seems to feel otherwise – and he is the Internet Marketing Guru and not me!

To try and improve sign ups I have asked for his assistance and once that is addressed we can work on improving the Auto-responder sequence.

If that doesn’t work then we have to rethink the whole approach!

Regards

David

The new e-book project rolls on and we are so nearly there – I’ve raised a couple of concerns and Neil Stafford as ever the brilliant mentor has challenged me to justify whether the amendments are sufficiently important. A really good challenge and in fairness I was probably trying to be too perfectionist in some cases which would of course cause unnecessary delays. On the other hand I’m keen to be proud of what I eventually publish so in some other areas I have requested a bit of a review which iis currently underway.

Meanwhile, in order to get other parts of the sales page set up, I had to go an sign up for a name capture / autoresponder service. That was great – I ‘ve been dying to have a go and had no hesitation in signing up with Aweber. The set up process was so easy and so was the process of setting up the opt-in page. The one on this blog was my first effort and I’ll be changing it soon – but on other sites the form looks really neat.

The thing is, it’s a lot easier to set the thing up than to get somebody to click on it – but as I say ‘one challenge at a time’!

Anyway, the thing is the nice people at Aweber have given me my very own affliate code and hence the enormous banner ad to the left! If by any chance you haven’t already signed up, then go ahead and click it – you’ll either get 30 days risk free trial or a shorter trial period for a few bucks – see what the offer is.

Catch up soon!

Davidl

Well we’re really starting to motor now, and the site is expected to be up and ready to take orders by the end of this month – no pressure then Neil!
So far this month we’ve reviewed the draft book and sent back for final amends. We agreed the domain name and the title for the book and also agreed the art work for the sales page.
I’ve also received an advance copy of the audio product which is Neil talking to me about the subject of the book – sorry guys but the subject is still TOP SECRET at this stage. I couldn’t listen to it myself ( something about ones own voice) but my family have listened to it and they all assure me it went really well. Copy for the sales page is currently in progress – we’re definitely getting there!

In early February the first draft of the e-book was finally received. It certainly seems a long time since the subject was agreed upon and the brief written. In some ways preparing for the telephone interview should have happened before the brief for the book was agreed as nothing focuses the mind more than an impending telephone interview!
That preparation was really good as it defined for me the precise angle that I was trying to come from. The problem of course was that the book was written to a brief that predated that direction! Therefore there was a bit of rescoping required, although nothing too extreme!
Personally I found it really hard not to get stuck in and start re-writing the book as no matter how good the ghost writer is, they are never going to use the same ‘language/semantics’ as you are. Anyway at that point in stepped Neil Stafford with his excellent coaching skills to challenge me as to whether the amendments were really necessary. In the event, I tried to be as amendment ‘lite’ as I could be and I await the final draft with some trepedation
Whilst this has been going on we have agreed domain names and book titles and Neil has engaged copywriters to start work on the sales material.

January 2010

E Book Project
Can’t believe I didn’t update the blog after the last one – that was the big day when I was going to record my telephone interview with Neil Stafford.
The call went really well and the preparation certainly paid off. The only think I found difficult was that sometimes my brain was trying to recall what I had prepared earlier at the same time that my mouth was engaged in speaking! Not great but I think I got away with it.
Anyway Neil seemed pleased with the results and has promised me a copy to review – trust me I won’t be listening to it but my daughter and wife have already pre-ordered their copies in advance!
The writing of the e-book has been delayed by the author so we’ll just have to sit tight on that!
Secret Project
In my last post I mentioned a secret project I was working on – well that started in early December and was something called the Rich Life System which is all about Sports Trading ( and is nothing to do with IMR). I’m not going to go into major details here but suffice to say it has been a bit of a distraction and has resulted in a refund being requested. If anyone is thinking about getting involved then please feel free to contact me.

Well there’s definitely a head of steam building on this project.

Having submitted my suggested headings, I had another telephone conversation with Neil Stafford of Internet Marketing Review fame to discuss next steps!

To be honest the couple of weeks since our last discussion gave me time to absorb the concept we had come up with and I’m delighted to say that it still feels like a really good idea. Luckily Neil felt the same way and very quickly we had agreed the content of the e-book and have enough information to brief the writer.

Whilst we await the first draft – with a lead time of something like 30 days, my next ‘homework’ is to think about writing my own introduction to the e-book so that it is personalised to me. We are also starting to think about the first upsell product (which is likely to be an audio product) and I need to think about 15 possible areas within my niche to investigate as research material.
I really pleased with the way this is progressing. I’m trying really hard to stay relaxed and simply do what I’m told. The funny thing is that with the coaching, I am relieved of the responsibility of worrying about ‘whether it is a good idea’ and can just get on with the implementation.
Hopefully the next update will be to say that my 15 areas have been submitted to Neil and that the e-book brief has been accepted by the writer and work is underway.

Cheers

Well after much apprehension I finally had my first telephone consultation with Neil Stafford from Internet Marketing Review as part of the New Power Profits coaching mentoring programme.
The reason for my apprehension was that I had quite a lot was resting on the outcome of the conversation. I may well be unemployed by the end of the year (or should I say more positively self employed but no income!) and this mentoring programme is a major plank in my survival plan.
It had been a little over a month since I had submitted 4 possible niches to Neil and frankly I was beginning to feel that none of them was worth pursuing – but meanwhile I had gone back to the drawing plan and begun to identify other possibilities.
Now here is evidence of one of my (many?) weaknesses – according to the famous Myer Briggs personality test, I am a strong creator/innovator with hardly any implementation instincts! However I did also come out quite strongly on ‘Inspector’ which I guess means that whilst I don’t want to do it, I can spot the error in someone else’s work! (Maybe I was well suited to being a Bank manager after all!)
So true to form, I was looking to move on from my previous ideas and start thinking of some more.
As a great coach, Neil was ready for me. When I told him I had come up with some more ideas he said great – why not progress some of them yourself whilst we press on with one of these 4 you’ve sent me!
So with that we started to evaluate my suggested niches and Neil’s main question in each case was ‘why’ had I come up with the idea.
In all 4 examples he felt that there was a good market but that in order to make it work, we would need to differentiate our product with a marketing angle, and ideally, that angle would be my personal experience with the subject.
For example, one of my suggested areas was stress management. A huge area and a lot of competition, but a hungry market none the less. Neil’s comment here was that the products (in our arena) that tend to work best are where the author has a personal story of how they came up with the own formula for solving the problem. Thankfully I do not have such experience.
He also pointed out that you would need to be comfortable emerging yourself into a topic and that some people should exercise caution with some of the ‘darker’ topics – the analogy I drew here was that a recovering alcoholic would be well advised not to get into the Beaujolais niche!
Anyway we moved through my ideas and settled on one where I had come up with the top line topic but hadn’t realised, until we talked it through, that our family experience would provide a good angle for an information product.
The next steps are for me to flesh out the idea a little more and to come up with some suggested chapter subjects and identify some suitable sources of information. For his part, Neil is going to check out some related magazines whilst he is in the States and have a chat to a contact he has who is in a similar niche. My work is due to be done by the end of the weekend and hopefully our next 1-2-1 will be within a couple of weeks when we should be in a position to agree the brief for the writer – and that sounds frighteningly close to an implementation plan for a creator/innovator like me!

Whilst preparing for my big telephone consultation with the 2 Neils of Internet Marketing Review I’ve been trying to find some other ways to practice some Internet Marketing techniques – baby steps but good fun:-

A friend of mine reckons he can tip horses and was trying to work out how to market it. Lets do a blog says I and when we’ve generated enough of a following we’ll move it onto a paid e-mail service with a bit of Adwords to help generate traffic. No rush, just see what happens.

www.horseracingbettingtips-blog.com went live end of September – for October my only objective was to get the site indexed and maybe start ranking. For the fun of it I decided to use Twitter (@horseracingbettingtipz) to promote the mostly daily updates.

Using Twitter as the only means of promoting the site we’ve generates 238 unique visitors for the month with an average of 3.15 visits per visitor and 36 Twitter followers.

For November we will strengthen the Blog with some related articles to try and lift the ranking (page 14 out of 13000 competing pages for the main domain name phrase) although I was chuffed to bits for a number one ranking (not out of many) for the search “1525 aintree sat 24th oct” (broad phrase match).

Hopefully my friends tipping form will continue on it’s current trend which will increase pressure on me to try to increase traffic!

On track I guess. Having joined the New Power Profits coaching programme, I attended a Blueprint day back in September. At that, 2 other attendees and I met up with the legendary Neil Stafford and Neil Travers of the Internet Marketing Review for an intensive day of training. That was really good – my inner skeptic was expecting just another rehash of old information – but that was not what we got. Of course much of the underlying information reflected the contents of the New Power Profits DVD set – but much what made the day so enjoyable was meeting the guys face to face and hearing their interpretation of the information and more importantly how to make it work.
Our homework was to go away and identify 3 potential Niche areas and submit our research to the Neils by the end of September. They would then double check our research and follow up with 1-2-1 telephone calls in October to agree which Niche to take forward.
For me niche research has always been my entry barrier to this business. I have lots of interests but somehow none of them seem to fit the bill. I am now the proud owner of several note books filled with various ideas created over the years, none of which seem to have got off the drawing board. However the focus of trying to hit a deadline really did work and in the end I got there and produced 3 niche topics, each of which met the required metrics of keyword search volumes, competing advertisers, Youtube traffic, Twitter traffic, Hubpage links and competing Clickbank products. Phew!
Well that put me ahead of all my previous efforts with my deadline met and  I’m looking forward to my telephone consultation a little later this month. As I say, on track!