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…

The title reminds me of some nursery rhymes I was reading to my kids the other day, where the words rhyme in spelling but not when actually spoken. I ended up trying them out in different crazy accents until I found one that worked!

So a year’s gone by since my last post and I could easily give up on this blog altogether because I really don’t have the time for it, but I’ve had a burst of renewed enthusiasm so here I am.

I’ve spent the last year focussing on my main software business which has done well. Of course, it could always be better and I’m about to put a lot more effort into marketing the business (mostly online). However, I’ve noticed a significant levelling off or even a downturn in business over the past few months. I haven’t worked out yet whether it’s due to the current state of the global enonomy or other factors. What I do know is that I’m concerned about being reliant on this one income stream and want to try a little side project.

If you’ve read any of my earlier posts, you’ll see that, a year or so ago, I was planning a niche info project (something I was calling my “Mercury Project”), but that still hasn’t really got started because I’ve been so busy with the software business.

The trouble with Mercury is that there’s no existing info products out in the marketplace to sell as an affiliate to get started. There are plenty of associated sites selling related hard goods so I know the market is potentially quite strong. But, as an info product marketer, it would mean creating my own product.

That’s fine because it’s what I really want to do but the niche is a bit like “how to build a summer house” and the way I want to create my product is to actually build that “summer house” and then show step-by-step how it’s done.

Except that my “summer house” (the actual Mercury Project) is going to take me years to build and I can’t wait that long!

Well, I have a new plan brewing and with my new early morning “get ready for the day” fitness routine, I’m getting fairly excited about the prospect.

I’ll write more about it soon (I promise)…

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.

Well, that’s not strictly true. This post should have been called “How I Stopped Myself From Spending Yet Another $97 A Month”, but in my little world, that amounts to pretty much the same thing.

I’ve been very good lately. I’ve unsubscribed from the worst offending emailing lists but I’m still subscribed to tons more. I know I ought to unsubscribe from them all but I’ve set up a filter system so that most of them automatically get filed away as soon as they come in. That way I don’t even see them. I figure that they don’t take up much disk space and I can use them as a giant reference swipe file should I ever have the need.

However, some of the lists defy filter rules because they keep changing their from address or for other reasons. These are fairly easy to spot in my Inbox and I usually just grab ‘em and drag ‘em into a “For Filing” melting pot and forget about them.

But old habits die hard. Sometimes a subject line will catch my attention. Especially if it’s from a guru on my whitelist. And when that happens, there’s every chance that I’ll get sucked into the marketing pitch and swallowed whole. What I need is a system that can trigger a Red Alert lock-down of my PC with flashing lights and klaxtons blaring – the works! Sadly, all I have to rely on is my weakened will-power.

This one was good. So good in fact that I had the order form open ready to fill in my credit card details without even reading the sales letter properly. That’s the work of some master pre-sales effort.

You’re probably wondering what it was all about. Well, it was a pitch for Dan Raine’s “Immediate Edge” newsletter at $97 per month.

Now I only have the powerful sales/marketing blurb and a few cliquey testimonials to go by but I reckon it’s probably quite good and may well be worth the money. It’s supposed to explain everything in simple terms and provide technical solutions. Instead of just saying “set this up”, Dan apparently gives you the scripts or code to actually do it. Nice.

The main teaser is something ‘truly amazing’ called the Lightsqueeze page that is supposed to be a modern Web 2.0 version of the Name-squeeze technique that everyone uses these days. No details on what exactly it is of course. You have to sign up for that.

I like the name “Lightsqueeze”. It’s very catchy. But every time I see the word, I keep reading it as Lightsabre. I don’t know why. Maybe it’s because I’ve been catching a bit of Saturday morning kids TV with my children including an advert for the new Hasbro Lightsabres. These look much better than the old ones because they’ve managed to get the extending part to go right back down inside the hilt instead of sticking out a bit. Cool! I was hoping someone might have bought me one for my birthday today but no joy…

So, where was I?

Oh yes, I was just about to part with some money on a regular basis. But in a brief moment of common sense before I hit the “Submit” button, I decided to dig a little deeper and find out who this guy actually is and what the program is all about.

Now this may be old news to you but due to my auto-filing email filter system, the $15K Challenge last August completely passed me by. In essence, this guy Dan was challenged to make $15K profits from scratch in 30 days with a budget of only $150. He blogged the whole thing so people could follow along with what he was doing as it happened. It’s just the sort of thing I love to read about (somebody doing something for real) and in fact I made about 5 pages of notes from it. I recommend you scroll to the bottom of the blog pages and hit the “Next Page” links until you get to the start and read it from there.

Basically, he got the resale/reprint rights to a bunch of e-books and other bits by subscribing to one of these membership sites that has tons of this kind of stuff. Then he set up a membership site with free content at one level and extra content at a $27 paid level. Because he didn’t have the budget to advertise, he made extensive use of forums and MySpace to put the word out. He didn’t spam and only used ‘legitimate’ posts (more on that in a moment). He also made it viral by using ‘refer a friend’ techniques and an incentive to make affiliate commissions.

Dan almost made his target with about $12K profit. It was all very impressive and fascinating to read about.

But a few things niggled me about the whole thing and it makes me just that little bit more jaded about the whole Internet Marketing world. I’m not about to get onto my moral high-horse and spout forth about what people should and shouldn’t do to earn a living but I wonder whether I have it in me to do the same kind of thing.

A lot of marketers earn money by finding a profitable niche and exploiting it. Nothing wrong with that except for the proliferation of crappy, ‘non-content’, keyword-rich AdSense sites that are clogging up the Internet and wasting domain names that could be used for decent sites (but don’t get me started on that one again…).

What bothers me though is the way in which the exploitation occurs. Many of the products (e-books) are of low quality (and I wonder if the marketers even bother to look at them, but that’s an aside). They knock out these membership sites using what’s available but then what happens after they’ve made their quick buck and exhausted their supply of resale e-books? Do they develop more and improve the site for the members to continually add value. No, they move on to the next project, the next niche and the next membership site. After all, you’ve gotta have more than one to make any serious money in this business.

Of course I’m pessimistically generalising here. I’m sure there are some excellent quality and great value niche membership sites around and the top gurus are always stating that their teachings should only be used for high-quality offerings. But how many marketers actually do that? Most are in it for the quick fix and just don’t have enough interest in their chosen profitable niches to make them good enough.

I mentioned ‘legitimate’ forum posts earlier. This means no spamming. The usual technique is to place your URL in your signature and write posts that simply comment on other peoples posts or ask questions. Often, the marketer has no real idea about (or interest in) the subject so they just appear knowledgeable, sometimes by re-phrasing questions they’ve seen elsewhere.

It’s a clever and effective technique but that’s all it is. A technique to market your offering. You could argue that it does no harm but does it actually contribute to the forum and the community that uses it? Probably not. What’s the point of asking a question if you don’t care about or even read the answer?

And I’d love to know the percentage of actual MySpace users compared to the number of registered users. How many of them are fake identities created by Internet Marketers pretending to be real people to exploit others. I think it would be ironic if MySpace (and other sites like it) became full of Internet marketers sending marketing messages to all of the fake identities of the other marketers.

Like I said, I’m not trying to say what’s right or wrong, I’m just wondering whether I would feel good about using these techniques myself and, if not, whether I have any future as an Internet Marketer.

Right, rant over. Back to the original plot…

Knowing that Dan Raine had been setting up these membership sites and was now providing The Immediate Edge newsletter to demonstrate techniques and supply scripts, I thought it would be a good thing to get. It might well fit in with some plans I have for my Mercury Project.

So what happened?

Well, quite simply, I realised that I just wasn’t ready for it. I’m doing other stuff right now. I don’t have a bunch of niche sites and products that I want to “take to the next level”.

I’m really trying hard to stick to the principle of only buying what I can use right now and not be suckered by the pressure of “limited availability”. These things always come round again in one form or another because these marketers are always looking to make more money.

So that was that. Mind you, I still have the order form open in a browser… It would only take one click…

In some eariler posts, I talked about starting project Mercury as a hobby that can evolve into a business. I think there’s a big difference in the approach when doing this compared to taking an arbitrary niche topic (of little interest) and trying to build an instant business that can bring in the readies as soon as possible.

For one thing, the gradual approach will allow me to slowly build momentum with highly personalised and unique, high quality content that the search engines love so much. It will also allow me to feel my way through the topic, discover what people (potential customers) will be interested to know about and form friendships with like-minded people (potential partners).

Having said that, I have enough ideas about marketing and the longer-term view of the business side of things to know that if I set it up right from the start then things will be a lot easier later on.

In good-old Internet Marketing tradition, I won’t reveal exactly what my topic is (yet) but instead will use the generic “Sausage Making” niche that worked so well during the 30-day challenge.

So I can immediately see the following long-term objectives, though there will be others:

• A personal Sausage Making project blog
• Articles about various aspects of Sausage Making
• Information products including e-books, videos and audios
• Physical information products along the same lines
• Reviews of Sausage Making products
• The sale of Sausage Making products either directly or through affiliation
• A discussion forum for Sausage Makers
• The creation of a Sausage Makers club with local group meetings
• Provision of other Sausage Making resources

If you have followed Internet Marketing for any length of time then, perhaps with a few exceptions, all of these will be fairly familiar to you as ways to build a Sausage Making “Virtual Real Estate (VRE) Empire”. But because this is a topic that I’m extremely interested in, my goal is to take it slowly and make it the best it can possibly be, and with my own spin on things.

My step-by-step plan is currently this:

1. Choose, register and get hosting for 2 domains: 1 for the blog and one for a resource site. I could use just 1 but I want the blog site to be just about my Sausage Making project with the resource site being more generic. There might also be search engine advantages to splitting them (as long as they’re on different hosts or IP addresses) but that’s a secondary concern.

2. Investigate and choose a good Content Management System (CMS) for the resource site. As I progress with my own project, I will discover information that I will want to turn into articles or references, even just for my own purposes. I could slap these up as simple Web pages but, long-term, I know I will need a better way of managing them and I don’t want to suddenly find myself having to convert what I’ve already created. I also want it to be as quick and easy to add content to the site from anywhere to save myself effort but also allow others to add content later on.

3. Set up the blog with a suitable template and customise it as necessary, probably adding AdSense blocks (though I might save those until later).

4. Start my own Sausage Making project and, at the same time, report on my progress through the blog.

5. As I work on the project I will keep a detailed log in addition to the blog (possibly on paper) and record videos and still images of progress. These will later be used for resources and to form the basis of information products. It’s probably worth mentioning at this point that the project is not something that can be put together in a week. It may take a year or more so I’m really in this for the long haul.

6. Slowly build up the resources site and as the content reaches a reasonable level, turn it into a free membership site. This will allow me to start building a prospects list but it can also have the effect of making the site users feel more special, particularly if what they’re joining is called a “club”. It’s tempting to set this up from the start but I don’t think it will work without a certain level of content. Even a free membership site has to offer a compelling reason to sign up.

I could go on but that’s plenty to be getting on with and I don’t want to plan too far ahead because a lot will depend on what happens along the way.

Income is not the goal at this stage though I expect to make a small trickle through AdSense and perhaps a few affiliate product links. Instead, the aim will be to build a community of Sausage Makers that can add to the content and provide a ready market for later plans. This may sound a little under hand but it’s not. I think it’s fair to make money from people if you’re offering them things they desperately want to buy.

So there you have it. Basic plans for a small niche business.

You absolutely must play to your strengths if you have any chance of success. This is the message from Rich Schefren in his Business Growth System course.

In his book “Good To Great“, Jim Collins says pretty much the same thing. If you don’t play to your strengths, you can build a good company but not a great one.

It’s a scary thought. What if I’m not playing to my strengths – am I going to fail? And how do I even know what my strengths are?

So one of the first tasks that Rich sets in the course is to identify your own particular strengths using various methods. As a Brit, trained in the art of modesty all my life, I’m not used to thinking about what it is I’m actually good at. I felt a little uncomfortable doing this initially but in the end I found it very enlightening.

One approach is to ask friends and family what they think since an outsider’s perspective can offer unexpected insights. I actually failed to set this one up at the time but I may still do this.

Another, more introspective approach is to recall achievements you’ve made throughout your life and then try to identify what skills were required for each one. You can then look for patterns. The actual achievement doesn’t have to have any relevance to business, it’s more about personal traits and characteristics.

To give you a personal example, as a child I was a good chess player and also good at sporting activities (running, throwing, batting, PE, rope climbing, etc.). Later on, in my teens, I represented my school in athletics and completed a half-marathon. And one of my most enduring memories from the age of about 15 is getting up at about 6 am, 7 days a week to deliver local newspapers in all weathers for very little pay just so that I could save up to buy something I particularly wanted.

Now you might be thinking that my strength here is something to do with sport or fitness. Well, fitness certainly does play a part but the key traits that link all of these acheivements together are actually “determination” and “persistence”. Determination to be the best, to win or to reach the target. Persistence to keep going until I finished or got what I wanted.

And as I look back over my whole life, I see those same traits popping up everywhere. Now I know that I can call upon these strengths whenever I need to because they’re a part of who I am.

One of my favourite exercises for identifying strengths was actually mentioned in Rich Scheferen’s “Manifesto” and, surprisingly, wasn’t part of the Business Growth System course materials at all. At the top of a blank piece of paper, write the words “One of my strengths is” then underneath list 20 good qualities you have or things that you think you’re good at.

And don’t be modest. Try to reach beyond any self-limiting beliefs you might have. This is not something you’re going to show to someone else and say “look at me, aren’t I great, I’m so good at all these things”. No, it’s a personal and private list to give you a better understanding of yourself and boost your self-confidence.

Having created your list, don’t ponder it, just put it somewhere safe and get on with whatever else you need to do. Then repeat the same exercise every day for about a week. The key here is to start with a blank piece of paper each time and not refer to any previous lists you’ve made.

Although a 5 or 10-minute time limit is a good idea, I personally felt that it was more important to have the discipline to keep going until all 20 slots were filled. What you will probably find is that the first 10 are relatively easy but then it becomes harder to think of things as you reach the bottom, even though you know you found 20 the day before.

The real fun starts at the end of the week when you can pull out all of your lists and examine them. What you’ll find is that your most dominant strengths will appear on every list, usually near the top, but when you put them all together you will probably find at least 30 strengths that you have. These are the things that make you tick. Some of them you’ll think of as plainly obvious but others (often near the bottom of the lists) will amaze you as things you hadn’t really considered before.

However you identify them, these are your strengths. The particular combination is unique to you. It’s what makes you special.

Since this is a blog about me, I was going to list some of my strengths that I’ve identified but thinking about what I’ve just written, I realise that might be inappropriate at this point. Aside from the personal and private nature of my list, I think there’s a danger of comparison. Your strengths will be different to mine, though possibly with some overlap. Mine are not better than yours and yours are not better than mine. Rather than worry about what other people can do that we can’t, we need to focus on our own strengths to discover what we can excel at.

I’ll leave you with that thought in the hope that you’ll be inspired to find out what your own strengths are. Comments welcome…

In my last “New Year” post I said that I was going to focus on my business without being distracted by other opportunities and, at the same time, start the Mercury Project that I’ve been thinking about and planning for so long.

Nothing wrong with that is there?

Well, what if I said that Mercury has a business element to it? It doesn’t have to but it certainly could be set up to make some money. So am I now pursuing two different business opportunities at the same time and contradicting myself?

It’s an interesting question that I have to ask myself. The obvious answer is “Yes” but it goes much deeper than that.

Ever since I first encountered the world of Internet Marketing and Information Publishing several years ago, I’ve been trained to see things in a different way. Now everything is an opportunity to provide information and make money. “Having trouble with your end of year tax returns? Here’s a special guide to get you through it easily… Need to create some standard business letters and documents? Here’s a bunch of guidelines and templates…”. I’m sure you know what I mean. Whenever I encounter a problem with something, chances are there are other people in the same boat that need helping. When you start thinking like that then you have no end of “ideas” for business projects. That’s before you even start thinking about hobbies.

Of course, not everything necessarily will make money but the potential is there in practically any subject you care to choose.

So what about Mercury? If I was trying to choose an arbitrary niche topic for maximum income potential then this would not be it. The numbers simply don’t add up. My research suggests that the potential is limited with low search numbers and not much in the way of existing info products to prove the market, etc. If this was an Underachievers project then it would most definitely be rejected.

But Mercury is something I want to do for myself. Something I’ve wanted to do for a very long time. Something I’m going to do regardless. It’s really a hobby. But at the same time, my training won’t let me ignore the potential for turning it into a money-spinner. All I need to do is structure the project in the right way. But why should I bother if my research indicates that it won’t be a financial goldmine?

Well, here’s a thought: What do you think would have the greatest chance of success for you – a project based on a topic within a really hot market that could make you loads of money but bores you to tears, or a project based on a topic that really interests you but has much less potential?

Opinion is divided but I think it depends what kind of person you are and what else is going on in your life. Some gurus will tell you to follow the money and just get yourself interested in the topic (after all, it shouldn’t be hard if it’s going to make you a stash of cash). And if you can really do that over and over then you’ll probably become very successful.

At the simplest level, you could create a cheap little info product, slap it up on the Web with a few AdWords and leave it to just bring in the dough. But if you really do have a lucrative niche then you’ll want to do a lot more than that to make the most from it. You’ll need an opt-in page, a fully loaded autoresponder, an ongoing newsletter, articles, back-end products, affiliate offers and a host of JV partners to work with. Otherwise “you’re just leaving money on the table” as the gurus like to tell me on a daily basis (usually when they’re trying to sell me stuff).

All of that requires a LOT of effort, so it better be worth it. And if you take the simple approach you won’t make nearly as much so you’ll need to replicate the process over and over with different topics. It can be done, of course, but finding good topics is difficult, at least that’s been my experience, and how many uninteresting topics will it take to wear you down?

Then there’s the issue of quality. Whether you outsource product creation and everything else or not, do you think that the final product, the Web site and everything related to the operation will be better or worse for a topic that you are or are not interested in? Nobody (in their right mind) wants to put out rubbish products but I think that a lot of the rubbish products out there are due to the fact that the marketer really doesn’t care enough for the subject matter to make it better.

I’ve come to the conclusion that this type of approach is not for me at this stage in my life with an existing business and family taking up a huge proportion of my time and energy. I want to enjoy whatever I spend time working on. It has to matter to me and be of sufficient quality for me to be proud of the work.

So if it’s not obvious where this is leading, another approach is to choose a subject that has some special interest to you or something you at least know a lot about. Ideally you should be passionate about the subject as this will give you the motivation to make it all happen. This approach is especially good if you’re just starting out and can’t afford to outsource because you’ll really need something to keep you going.

I strongly believe that if you create a business that’s right for you in an area that interests you then it should make you money. It may not be a short-term hit but if your interest is high then you will put in the effort to build the business slowly, create multiple products, service the market’s wants, build a reputation, survive and actually enjoy yourself in the process.

And that, to me, is what Mercury is all about. It will start as a hobby in whatever time I can find to spend on it. But by thinking of it in business terms from the start, I can slowly build up momentum and turn it into a long-term source of income.

I’ll let you know how I get on…

Let me start by saying that I don’t go in for New Year resolutions. They tend to be fairly artificial and short lived. To my mind, you shouldn’t have to wait until New Year to make important changes. Having said that, if any time of year is a good time to make resolutions then New Year is as good a time as any!

And this year, I got strangely inspired. This had something to do with watching “Adaptation” on New Year’s Eve, a quirky film about a screenwriter trying to adapt a difficult book. That led to talking with a friend about writing a novel, at which point I dug out my copy of “No Plot? No Problem!” by Chris Baty. This is a hugely inspiring book and not just if you’re thinking of writing a novel. It was a key influence on Ed Dale to create the Underachiever 30-Day Challenge in 2005.

So here’s what I’ve decided for 2007:

1. I want to do something amazing in 2007. Something I can look back on as a great personal achievement. It won’t be a novel but I do have a project in mind; a project I’ve been thinking about for over 20 years and never yet been able to get going on. Well, now I’m determined to make 2007 the year I seriously get started on it. I don’t want to give any details at this point but I’ll codename it project “Mercury”.

2. I will focus on my current business and not let any further opportunities pull me away, no matter how tempting they seem. If I can stick to this principle, it should save me a lot of stress and anguish!

3. I will leave no more than 2 weeks between posts to this blog. I’d really like to post every week but I’m also realistic and past performance shows that this one will be tough. This is about me committing to finding regular time to write about all the things I need to get out of my head.

So there we have it. A new year with all the Xmas hassle out of the way and a chance to do something amazing.

I wish you an incredible year and something amazing for yourself!

I have to admit that I found Module 2 quite tough. I’m starting to get my head around being a “Mediator” and what that means for my business but it’s still all a bit wooly.

Yesterday, I managed to stay very focussed on my business and got a lot done in double-quick time. As a reward to myself, I listened to the Module 3 call. It may not sound like much of a reward, working through nearly 2 hours of audio and 150 presentation slides, but I was really looking forward to it and this gave me some much needed motivation to get my other tasks for the day done and out of the way.

This module was much more to my liking. Much more concrete. I could see exactly where it fitted in and how it would impact my business. I got very inspired and fired up to think about my niche area, my vision, mission, values and beliefs. I got started on it late last night and made further headway this morning.

It was about then that I had a bit of a relapse…

Maybe it’s something I had at the weekend (I have a nasty food intolerance that can knock me right out of whack if I’m not careful) but I’ve been feeling very run down ever since. I took my eye off the ball this morning and suffered the consequences.

So what happened?

A new ‘business opportunity’ arrived in the post from our good friends Andrew Reynolds and Tim Lowe and I basically spent (wasted?) most of the morning looking at it and getting myself into a flap about what to do.

I’ve been following Mr. Reynolds for many years and can see that it could be a good opportunity for the right person. It’s essentially a training day on how to take $135,000 worth of new info products and sell them with ongoing mentoring to help follow it through. Such a brief summary doesn’t do it justice but I don’t want to give any more details here. That’s not really the point of this.

The real point is the problem it presented. And the problem was this: I was very tempted to take the offer.

Now one of the things about being on Rich Schefren’s Business Growth System is that he tries to get you to focus on just one business or project at a time. When you do that, your one focus becomes all that matters and you become immune to the multitude of ‘opportunities’ that come knocking. You might miss something good but that’s a million times better than trying to do two things or, worse, trying to grab every opportunity that comes along. That only leads to doom and failure. I should know.

Of course I could take on this new business and do quite well from it. After all, I’ve been studying it for the last 2 years or so and I know exactly what needs to be done.

But if I did, I would end up losing focus on my existing business or perhaps even abandoning it altogether. This is the business I’ve spent the last 3 years building up. The business I’m only just scratching the surface of its full potential. The business I was so fired up about first thing this morning.

What was I thinking?

Well, the offer is now in its rightful place in the bin (that’s ‘trash’ for all you States-siders). And I’m happy about that. Focus has been restored. I can breathe deeply and relax again.

But not too much, there’s work to be done…

(Go on, leave a comment, you know you want to!)