A journey from Internet marketing stasis to business mastery and financial freedom (I hope)

Ever since reading Gerber’s E-Myth books and Rich Schefren’s original “Manifesto” document, I’ve become a big fan of creating systems within my business and describing them with process maps.

If you don’t know what a process map is, it’s a simple flow chart that describes how to do something. You have start and end points and then boxes containing the steps needed to complete the process, all linked by arrows so that you can easily follow it through. Sometimes you might have a decision box that asks a question and the flow branches depending on the answer.

Click on the example image to see it full size.

I currently have about 14 process maps that I use in my business. Rather than sit down and try to think of all the processes I need to map out and then draw them, I like to create them when I’m actually doing the task. That way, I know I’ve got all the steps in place at the right level of detail and my set of process maps therefore grows organically over time. Most of my maps are hand drawn on squared paper then, once they’ve been refined and corrected and when I get the time, I draw them using a software package. I happen to have a copy of Microsoft Visio so I use that but there are some much cheaper programs available that will do the job just as well (Google “flow chart drawing software”).

So why do it?

The main reasons that I create process maps are for consistency, to avoid making mistakes and to avoid having to think so much. They’re also a very good way of documenting the business so that anyone can do the work and can also be a valuable asset if the business is ever sold. At another level, you can use them to analyse the business and see if there are any areas that can be automated or made more efficient.

Some of the processes (such as “Order Processing”) I do on such a regular basis that I don’t need to refer to the process map each time. But even then, I sometimes get distracted part way through or I might be feeling a bit fuzzy headed one day so it’s really useful to have the process map there to refer to, just to make sure I’m doing everything I need to do.

Where they really come into their own though is with the occassional, monthy or annual tasks. I have process maps for performing the monthly payroll and filing my annual accounts with the Government, for example, that are extremely useful. I’d hate to have to figure it all out each time and I wonder how I managed without them before.

Even seemingly simple processes can benefit from being documented in a process map. I have one for paying cheques into the bank. I mean, how hard can that be, right? Well, first of all, the vast majority of my customers pay online by credit card or by bank wire transfer so it’s rare that I have to deal with cheques. That means that, however simple the process might be, I’ve probably forgotten what’s involved each time so the map is a useful reminder. But in this case, even a seemingly simple task like paying in a cheque has quite a few steps. I need to locate the customer invoice in my accounting package and mark it as paid, move the printed invoice from my “unpaid to chase up” section to my “paid” section, fill in all the right deposit slip entries and do a few other accounting chores. It’s a real pain actually. I hate being paid by cheque. But having the process map certainly makes it all easier.

Now one of the reasons I’m mentioning all this about process mapping now rather than at any other time is because of the “OMS3 Process Maps” launch that may or may not have escaped your notice during the last few weeks.

Without going into too much detail, these guys have set up a consultancy business using a large and cheap labour force in India to take some of the grunt work out of business by doing a lot of the traffic generation work for paying customers. They say they have more clients than they can handle so best of luck to them. But what they’ve just launched is a set of process maps that they use to do all this work, the idea being, why figure it all out yourself when you can buy their ready-made and ‘proven’ processes.

Now I pretty much ignored the whole pre-launch thing and didn’t even read the sales letter but, almost on a whim yesterday, when it did actually launch I bought the package. Now I’m not actually interested in all of the processes they have described. My main motivation was to see just how they’ve put the process maps and supporting documentation together – a kind of education on how to do it properly as it were. I also thought the $97 price was a reasonable expense if they lived up to expectation.

So what did I think?

Well let me get my negative, moany criticisms out of the way first. The download instructions were incorrect and some of the downloads had the same name. I think they really should have spent the extra 15 minutes or so to use a consistent and systematic naming convention and structure for all of their files, especially considering the whole point of the exercise is to make things simple and reduce errors. As it was, I had to rename a lot of the files and come up with my own naming convention.

The quality was also a bit disappointing. I’ve looked at most of them now but the one on sending out a press release initially caught my eye because I’m about to do that myself. Now I’m not entirely sure what I was expecting but the described process goes something like this:

1. Gather the information from the client.
2. Pick an online free press release site.
3. Enter the details and hit “Submit”.

And that’s about it. The supporting documentation shows screenshots of this for a single chosen site. To be fair, there is a small amount of info at the back about what makes a good press release but this particular process map itself has little value (for me at least). Maybe if they’d provided their list of free submission sites that may have had some use.

It reminded me of all the ’sales letter generation software’ that I’ve been pitched over the years. You know, the ones that say they can generate a complete and professional looking sales letter in less than 5 minutes. All you have to do is supply all of the words and pictures…

I’ve said that even simple process maps can still be very useful and maybe the press release process was a poor example (some of the others are better) but, overall, I’m not very impressed. I haven’t yet seen any major insights into extra steps that I might be missing in order to be more successful.

On the positive side, erm… well, it shows how little you need to put together to create an info product to sell. Also, if they really are using this information to train their staff to do this work then it’s an indication of how simple the process maps and supporting documentation can be while still being effective. And that’s useful to know.

I was recently asked to write more about what it is I’m actually doing to make money on the Internet (as I promised I would). It made me realise that I hadn’t done a lot of that so here we go…

One caveat though… while I am earning a living essentially off the Net, I don’t want you to confuse me with someone who is very successful at it and really knows what they’re doing. I know a lot of theory but putting it into practice is another matter altogether. I’m learning as I go along and that’s what this blog is really about.

How I’ve Made Money

1. My Main Business

Okay, this is my primary earner. Without getting too specific, I have a product that I created and have been selling online for the last couple of years. It’s a software product so it’s delivered digitally over the Internet just like an e-book would be. For various reasons, there is an overhead associated with each sale and also commissions to pay but the overall profit margin is very high. If I could just sell more of it then I’d be earning a comfortable living rather than just scraping by.

Most of my time is spent working on this business. It’s tempting (oh, so very tempting) to kick off one or two other projects to bring in multiple streams of income and I do waste a lot of energy trying to resist this temptation. This business is only scratching the surface of its full potential and if I drop the ball now then it could be catastrophic.

Most of the marketing for this business is Internet based though an increasing amount is going offline (and yes, that is more expensive). I’m making good use of a lot of the Internet Marketing things I’ve learned but because of the target market, some of it just won’t work so I have to play around to discover what I can use and what I can’t.

As and when I get the chance, I’ll try to write about some of my marketing experiences with this business.

2. Underachieving

I was one of the successes of the first 30-Day Challenge back in July 2005 (though Ed never did add me to the Hall of Fame for some reason). It took a while to find a suitable niche so the whole thing – product, web site, sales letter, ad campaign, everything – was put together in about 15 days and my first 2 sales rolled in on the last day of the challenge.

As soon as it was over, I got straight back to my Main Business and left everything untouched. In the 2 months that followed, it pulled in about $680 (not profit). Not a huge amount but enough to convince me that the system worked. Getting my first cheque from ClickBank was also quite a thrill although they’re a bugger to cash over here in the UK.

I could have continued with this but my Main Business was demanding all of my time and I also had a bit of a problem. The niche was (and I believe still is) quite a good one but my product, that was knocked up in about 7 days, was not, to put it bluntly, of sufficient quality. While returns are to be expected, I was wasting lots of time processing them and responding to emails so in the end I shut the whole thing down with a view to doing it properly when I get the chance. That was over a year ago but I may still do that.

How I’ve Lost Money

1. AdSense sites

You may be asking yourself how someone can actually lose money with AdSense sites? Sure, it’s easy enough to put up a site that doesn’t make any money, but how to you actually lose money?

Well, first there’s domain name registration and renewal fees. They may be cheap but if your site doesn’t earn anything then that’s money straight down the toilet. Then there’s hosting fees though, in my case, I’ve got an unlimited hosting account so I don’t consider that.

But the biggest incurred cost is all those crappy software tools that the gurus told me I must buy to automate site generation and send all that spam to my blog, etc. It’s true that some of them were so bad I managed to get a refund but I still wasted hundreds of dollars on that stuff for a total return to date of about $3.72 (ah, the sound of flushing is still ringing in my ears).

Now clearly I didn’t do it right but if you’ve read my earlier posts on the subject you’ll know that I’m not a big fan of making money from AdSense in this way so I don’t need to go on about why I haven’t tried to fix the sites.

2. Other stuff

I’ve lost money buying into BizOps and various other dubious endeavours that, quite frankly, I don’t really want to waste time talking about. They’re outside the realms of Internet Marketing anyway.

How I’m Planning To Make Money

First off, I’m not about to give up my Main Business. This is my bread and butter and it has good growth potential. I just need to improve everything about how it’s set up and being marketed, and that’s what I’m learning how to do, especially with the help of Rich Schefren’s Business Growth System.

In parallel with that, Mercury is about as close to a “normal” type of niche Internet Marketing project as I’m going to get for a while, so that will be a good opportunity to put everything I’ve learned (and am learning) about IM into practice. As I’ve said though, this is a long-term project in a subject I’m truly passionate about so I’m not about to try and make a quick buck out of it.

Beyond that, we’ll see what happens. I’m not the kind of serial entrepreneur that can juggle 15 different niche sites and projects all at the same time. I think those 2 projects will keep me busy enough.

What Next?

There’s not much point in me talking about my Underachiever project, especially as I’m not actively working on any more now. But what I’ll try to do over the next few months or so is detail some of the things that have been working (or not working) for me in trying to market my Main Business online.

That’s all for now.