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

… They’re a bit tough to start off with, but as you chew on them for a while, they soften up and begin to stick. Then after some time, they get a bit old and manky and you have to throw them in the bin!

And so it is with my business plans.

I’ve tried so many things, I don’t know whether I’m currently on Plan E, H or Q. So I’m going to start from scratch and outline my new Business Plans A, B and C.

Plan A
Here’s where I continue what I’m doing with my software business. Now I don’t know whether it’s the current economic climate, increasing competition or other factors but sales are not what they should be and I wonder about the future of this business. I think it has great potential but it’s a struggle and requires huge effort for relatively poor reward.

Plan B
This is where I finally decide once and for all to get into the Information Publishing business properly instead of just dabbling and thinking about it. A low-cost entry opportunity has come up and I want to really go for it. I’ll tell you exactly what it is in a moment but when I do, please hold back from yelling out “sucker!” at your screen. Think it by all means, just try not to let it out loud .

Plan C
Now Plan C is really an extension of Plan B and here’s where I get really serious about the whole thing. I don’t want to reveal exactly what this is right now but it involves a day of training and ongoing mentoring to help me started and make it all happen. Yeah, I’ll be surprised if I learn anything truly new on the day but I really think the mentoring will give me that extra kick to make sure I get on with what needs to be done. It’s expensive though. Only time will tell if it’s worth it.

So, what’s “Plan B” all about?

Well, it’s about a little trip to Brighton at the end of the month to Andrew Reynold’s latest 3-day Entrepreneur’s Bootcamp (hey, I heard you – I said keep it to yourself).

So Andrew’s at it again, doing what he does best; organising big marketing events and pulling in top speakers from all over the globe.

Now I’ve been to enough of these things to know what to expect. It’s going to be a pitch-fest. No doubt about that!

Sure, there will be some nuggets of great information given out by the speakers, but no single, coherent plan to follow. And all of the speakers are there for one reason only – to sell their products, courses or mentoring programmes. Why else would they do it?

Of course, there’s nothing wrong with that. They’re in business to make money and I certainly wouldn’t expect them to appear purely out of the kindness of their hearts. I just want to point out that whatever people think the event is about, it might not be quite what they expect.

So why am I going?

Two reasons:

(1) It’s for charity. The meagre £149 entrance fee is going straight to The Make A Wish Foundation which is a fantastic charity. I’m sure AR will make plenty of money from the JV deals he’s surely made with the speakers, plus the DVD sales later on, but he should be applauded for putting up all the initial event costs and raising so much money for such worthy causes. And I want to support that.

(2) This time, he’s thrown in some resale licenses for physical products (CDs/DVDs). Now apart from not being in “make money” markets, we have no idea what these are and how many there are.

And I’m not stupid (well, not very stupid anyway). I know there’ll be about 3000 other punters, all being given the same licenses. But if there’s a reasonable number of different product licenses (say 5) and only 10% of punters (at best) do anything with them, the numbers start to look a bit better.

I figure that if Andrew truly believes that decent money can be made with these product licenses then there’s every reason to believe that I should be able to make money with them, so long as I take immediate action.

So that’s the plan. Go to the event, pick up the licenses, try to figure out what the markets are and how to best approach them, pick my 2 favourites, make contacts to get the ball rolling and maybe look for supporting back-end products too.

Let’s see if I can really make this work the way we’ve been ‘promised’ it can.

Then again, there’s always Plan C…

Despite my New Year resolution to post to this blog every 2 weeks or so, I decided to concentrate on my business for a few months so I haven’t had the time. But something today compelled me to write again…

About a month ago I got an invite to Andrew Reynolds’ latest “Millionaire’s Bootcamp” down in Bournemouth. Apart from a £150 donation to Gt. Ormond Street Hospital (a very worthy charity in my opinion) it was basically a free event. It looked really good on paper but I quickly realised that it was going to be a re-hash of the 2005 Wembley event and “not quite what it says on the tin” (please correct me if I was wrong).

Needless to say, I didn’t go. I didn’t want to be subjected to yet another pitch-fest. Yes, there would have been lots of snippets of information that I could use to make myself a millionaire but not a detailed, coherent plan as promised.

So this morning, I got a “Greetings from Bournemouth” postcard offering me the Earth plus a few neighbouring planets completely for free and with absolutely no catch, as long as I responded by midnight tonight (well, I hope Postie managed to deliver it on time). The postcard, of course, led to a mammoth online sales page – the kind that Andrew Reynolds does so well.

Now, to my mind, when something says it’s “COMPLETELY FREE” and with “NO CATCH” and repeats this message throughout the letter, I kind of think that maybe it shouldn’t cost anything. Maybe I’m just a little weird but when it then goes on to say that all I need to do is pay £697 + VAT, I get a little peeved. Now I wouldn’t mind so much if it was a £200 donation to Gt. Ormond Street but this is money going straight to Mr. Reynolds pocket and he says “just £697″ like it isn’t really that much to ask. Not in his world maybe, but it is in mine!

There must have been some cosmic event last night where the word “free” suddenly changed its meaning. I do hope it wasn’t just a gimmick to grab attention and brainwash us into thinking the price was insignificant… No, he’d never do that, would he?

I really want to like Andrew Reynolds because I think his heart is basically in the right place and, having met him a few times, I think he’s a really nice guy. But from a marketing standpoint, every encounter I’ve had with him lately (ever since last year’s World Internet Summit actually) has left me less and less impressed. His systems surely work – they make him a ton of money out of suckers like me – but the sales letters seem to leave a bitter taste in my mouth.

And just don’t get me started on the “US-To-UK Deals Workshop” he arranged with Tim Lowe…