Christmas, City breaks & holiday time - what does it mean to you? To me it means...

This week I have mostly had a family holiday. Plus tested and completed my first software outsourcing project.
Which was nice.

I did manage to have about a hours walk yesterday, but it was negated by the buffet restaurant we had the family lunch in later... Although in respect of weight loss I am hoping for a roaring success!

I have a sneaky feeling todays post will be a bunch of paragraphs of all the things I did. And for once the list of not done list is shorter than the done list. Mainly because I didn’t write one, but also because I had so few things planned for this week, I managed to do more than I intended.

I know some people try to be different and tell me they are not going to tell me to plan my year ahead this week, but heck – that dude with the magical product launch formula does it so then obviously so must I. :o) (sarcasm) I am a follower after all (/sarcasm)

I did say plan SOME, and to my shock I discovered that I can set a goal for this year by looking at what I realistically can earn from one of my ventures. Although there was one flaw – I didn’t have an exact measure of how long it takes for me to create one of them nugget things from start to finish. So I spent all of the morning yesterday working on it. Then I spent another hour in the morning today before the office demanded a good tidy up and the living room requested a vacuum and some business demanded attention in town. But I basically found out two things

Lesson 1:
The first proper pass at a full nugget took me 7 hours to complete. I must be a sucker for punishment as I hate to create something that isn’t original, but why on EARTH do I put in the effort to use my own words if people only re-write it anyway before they put it in their responders or their content rotators even though the nuggets are so short it is strictly speaking not necessary?!?
Which leads me on to Lesson number two.

Lesson 2:
I am now able to generate a vast and comprehensive compendium of research information on ANY niche you give me relating to competing digital products, related websites and paperback or hardback books on the subject.

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So basically, I have found out that I am gaining access to some markets that could mean that I could realistically gross a very tidy sum in 2006. Although I knew that would be made possible for me this year. I am just so grateful it’s happing.

Other than that I am being subjected to all sorts of essential oils and ointments at the moment to help me focus. That and the boost of energy that is building are going to come in very handy as I work on a solution to fit everything in.
And you know what for next week, I know that I will be one of a very few people working on the Monday. I’m meeting a client in a hotel to start on the project I am working on with her. On Tuesday Pauline starts her new job and I have to send in the contract for mine. With me now becoming the primary childcare dropper offer and picker upper, it means I have a fixed amount of time for the next two weeks where I can kick things into motion. After that and for at for at least the next 6 months I have mainly afternoons and evenings at my personal disposal. The good thing is that I am set to learn a lot of great things from the job that I have taken. And it is getting me out of the house.

It is very tempting to create a schedule, but the way I have done it before never worked. I will find a new way of doing it that is flexible enough for my “life”.
Oh and the blooming tax returns!

Star signs, heart disease and hope to all!

This week has been a LOONG week, which is a good sign.

Over the weekend a commissioned a job on a freelancing website, and I am worried that my choice of developer was a little hasty as I ended up going for the cheap guy.

It’s my first outsourcing job and so far it’s a good experience but I asked loads of questions first from the developer to make sure they knew what I wanted.

Then I picked someone else instead - J

What else is there to report? As I said it’s been a long week so let me start back on Monday and see what I did then; Research – writing – editing, getting a part time job (in marketing) to keep the bank happy on a long term basis. Pauline also spoke to the business bankers. They have as much power over the decisions as a male praying mantis has over his fate if he chooses to copulate with a female praying mantis.

There upside to the chat with the business bank though is that the bank staff – once again – decided to buy some of our books. The staff members at this branch are insatiable!

Tuesday I spent all of the afternoon with someone discussing a potentially very lucrative offline venture. I’ll have to see what comes of it, but it’s all good.

Wednesday I took the liberty of doing some Christmas shopping, without actually having anything to buy. So I ended up in my coffee shop drinking coffee and checking out some more information about an affiliate program related solution I have been looking for. I will learn this tool one day as it is rather amazing to watch what it can do. And I haven’t even had to pay for it yet!

Thursday was effectively wasted as I sat down to look at the list of people I could contact about the nugget thing. The immediate urgency has been taken away and the panic has therefore dissipated and I am doing something that used to bug me and my manager in my sales job before I left – I pre-DIS-qualified leads before I even had a chance to qualify them. That might only make sense to sales people. It wouldn’t have meant anything to me before I had sales experience.

I will pick up my walks again as I had put them off when my cough was getting worse. ( I do wish there was an easy way to get to see a doctor! ) Amazing what a massive dose of vitamin C can do for you.

Today? It’s the day before Christmas and I have had other things to do than business! J

Next week? Lose some weight, get more exercise and get a little bit of planning done for next year. ( and get those products ready for launch – the magic pill one is nearly ready but Pauline has taken Christmas holiday now that the bank has stopped harassing her.

Thank you to the banks for helping me understand I am among the successful people - they will know that soon!

I think it is time to just have some change around here, just to liven things up.

It’s not like the rest of the week has had any excitement in it – oh I lie!

Although, as Gary kindly reminded me on Tuesday, I get what I focus on, so I will only point out that I gratefully received some financial education from not one bank but 3 this week. One of these educational sessions resulted in our mortgage balance receiving a rather generous credit as the bank in question realized they had rather substantially overcharged us interest for a rather lengthy period of time. As that was the last lesson we received this week I am expecting the money to start flowing our way again.

There is other evidence to support this as well – Pauline’s http://www.calendars4all.co.uk/ website has nearly sold out of stock on all but the Couples calendars.
Amazon sales have picked up and so has Ebay and a few other figures are pointing in the right direction. So now I know I am on the right track.

The offline business idea is moving along nicely and again, I managed to achieve some clarity on my second call with Gary. I also spoke to Martin a sterling chap (congratulations to Hannah and Alex by the way) about a few things that if nothing else, I will learn a tremendous amount from. My 4 pages of notes are still on my desk but the will be transformed this weekend as I have a number of things to get on with in order of priority:

- get on and create more money making products for the markets I have to hand
- approach new market opportunities for additional, related services to those that I already work with.
- automation & outsourcing opportunities ( found the seeds for a solution to both of the things I spoke to Gary about )
- website strategy and restructuring of the collective publishing website.

Paulines 11 years experience and accreditation in a particular field makes her the perfect author of what I hope to become a series of books utilizing her expertise to solve peoples pains. I mean, is ANYone here at all in the market for something that helps them become more productive by making your brain think clearer, make you better at concentrating on one thing for longer periods of time and makes you focus on the right things?

Anyway. I’ve got things to get on with. Ebay stuff and more, so apologies for not writing more. The rest is in my private blog on the link below.

PS, needless to say I am grateful that I have been given the opportunity to feel a bit of pressure. Strangely enough though, both Pauline and I are blissfully looking forward to the excellently successful years ahead.

Thanks,
Jon

Friday progress has been made available in the private forum

for those of you that watch this in RSS, the private update has now been made here

http://www.themoneytipsreview.co.uk/forum/

The public update will be available later this evening when I am home again.

I hope the battery on this laptop hold out until after I have posted this!

Jon

Yellow Alert.

Friday Progress 9 December

What was my throw-away comment at the end of my post last week?

“I’ll play with thingamablog”.

Apart from launching a bunch of ebay auctions and launching ONE of the 3 niche nuggets – I haven’t done much else. It’s fun to play with though and the draft function is pretty darn handy if you want to pre write the bulk of your blog posts in one sitting.

Funnily enough, my niche nuggets are perfectly made for that J

I have no idea where this week went. It’s gone and I can honestly look back and it and struggle to remember what I achieved. There is the roll of wallpaper full of my business plan mind map for my niche info publishing offering.

I have increased the price of the niche nuggets simply because I started them off too cheaply.

I have started to throw my name around on the warriors forum. Although I doubt my nuggets will be of any value to anyone there as the content seems to be too targeted for them. We’ll see when I have enough posts to post a WSO. And at a REGULAR retail price of $10 – I have thoroughly shafted myself.

Lesson learnt: Don’t price yourself too low basically!

I have also had to have meaningless exchanges with the bank managers again and have off loaded some more assets to pay off parts of the overdraft.

Thankfully when I worked at IBM I won a wad of John Lewis vouchers so we are scrounging for damaged and reduced stock at Waitrose these days ( At The Haut Couture end outlet of British grocery stores ). We may not have a regular income coming in every month, but goose pate and German smoked ham are the sort of treats one has to suffer with when one has to purchase food with vouchers. Makes it all more fun in my book J but it’s scary how many of these vouchers we have to hand over in comparison to how much something similar would cost as the WalMart representative in the UK. ( Asda )

So that’s my life this week. I’m glad I didn’t realize this could be happening when I left employment, but hell is it better than what I had before!

I’ve some how managed to misplace my links to NPB so until I find that I have to look for content to add to my other sites manually.

And in all this rush to make more money, the publishing business marketing & sales has been neglected to my peril. But heck, it’s Christmas soon and I’ve run out of money in 4 weeks – well not strictly true – my nuggets are making me money. Time to find the market offline.
I have defined my target audience, but I would love to come up with what my USP would be. I have a pretty clear idea how I can reach them – someone offering me an opportunity to take on a part time job runs a marketing company in Southampton so I might speak to him and see what I can offer his customers.

I have some more details in my private forum before the end of the weekend – I have a wedding to go to for someone I hardly know full of a punch of people I hardly know – so I must obviously be meant to meet someone that could benefit from my business services.

Next week? Get rid of this Lung Cancer nugget that is doing my nugget in! I am going insane over it.

I also have two more I can work on, but to be honest, the nicheology forum is dead as a dodo and we’ll see about the warriors forum.

Hunting money is certainly NOT the attitude to take to generate a massive income quickly!

Money, Internet Marketing & jobs from home!

Last week I said that I wanted to make efforts to make more money.

And I have.

I have done lots more than I had expected as well, mainly because the bank that “helps” us with our publishing business has decided to provide us with “added motivation” to get off our butts and work.

Thankfully Pauline has secured herself a part time job that will help her deal with some of her own debts as well, and I gave her some work to do with my niche nuggets.

So next week I will have 3 more to release, taking the total to 5.

I’ve considered and pretty much rejected the idea of starting a membership site for them for the usual technical reasons, but the feedback so far is against the idea as well.

But with the banks rather crass approach to our business I will have to put something rather effective in place in the next few days to boost turnover and income all over the board.

I will put NPB back into operation again on a domain I have and build content on that domain with the template I have modified.

I also have a couple of clickbank things to sort out and I can sell one of my products on there initially as well then.

Plus I will push more stuff on ebay and create some more traffic to the various sites I have. (Although the conversion is diabolical on the traffic that is getting to it already and I’m not doing anything about it because I’m afraid I don’t know what I am doing.)

So I have loads of options – a bit of a curse – but at the moment the bank has provided me with a very strong motivator!

I honestly don’t know what to write next. I will work more to make more money. Come to think of it, I will just this minute start work on an idea I got relayed to me by Martins next excellent product ( which I’d love to sell Martin if you’ll let me! ) and see how it works out.

Lessons Learnt?
Don’t quit your day job if you rely on a JV to provide you with your income. Bitter? Not at all – just wiser. Hence why a paid membership site is not something I would like to do ever again.

Oh, and I’m playing with a thingamablog.