Have You Got A Big Mouth?
October 18, 2007
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Have you got a huge mouth. I have - I’ll admit it. When I see someone being treated unfairly, or harmed in anyway, I have to speak up. And I hate being in a situation where I’m forced to bite my tongue.
And I’ve had to keep my mouth shut several times over the years. Many times during my nurse training, I was appalled by some of the practices I saw. But, I was advised by others to keep my mouth shut until I was in a position to change things.
Let me tell you, it’s tough to keep your mouth shut when you see a nurse slap an elderly patient, or refuse to take them to the loo when they ask, because they’re too bone idle.
I had to keep my mouth shut on several occasions when I was a franchisee too, because of threats against me. I just wanted to keep myself to myself until I’d found a buyer for my business. But, it is really difficult to sit there listening to some incompetent t..t brag about how himself and an arrogant 28 stone a..hole managed to force a struggling franchisee to leave the system. Then go on to describe how the two of them then went for a few pints afterwards to celebrate - in work time of course.
Don’t you just feel like slapping people like that? The poor guy probably lost a heap of money, and may even have gone bankrupt afterwards. But those two obviously don’t believe in karma. And neither of them would be capable of running a business either.
The great news is, when you’re an entrepreneur, it doesn’t matter if you have a mouth the size of Bermuda. Because you can and should use it to help improve the world, and speak out against any injustices.
Many entrepreneurs have done this, and Anita Roddick is a great example. She used her company to campaign against injustices - even when they weren’t related to her own industry. She campaigned against the gulf war. And she raised awareness of unfair trade, and slave labour and campaigned against those practices too.
But, you don’t have to wait until you have heaps of time and money to begin making a small difference in the world. I used to think you did, but there’s a lot you can do right now.
And you don’t have to wait until you have much cash to make a start. Tim Ferris wrote a great post on things you can do to help improve the world right now and you can read it here.
There are many small things you can do to make a difference. For example if you’re interested in helping a third world entrepreneur, you can loan someone £25 here.
And once your business becomes established you can use it to raise awareness of issues that are important to you. Doing this has always been important to me. And there’s a lot of things I want to change in this world so watch this space.
Think about the changes you would like to see in the world, then make plans to use your business as a vehicle to make those changes. And don’t worry if you offend some people, as they’re probably not the type of people you would want to deal with anyway.
Having a business that only has financial goals is pointless. I speak to a lot of people who want to start a business, and their only goal is to make a lot of money. But money alone will never make you happy.
The most successful people I know have been passionate about improving the world. And if they can do it so can you.
Did I Offend You?
October 17, 2007
I’ve had a really bad flu bug for the last three weeks, which I can’t manage to shake off, so I’ve struggled to just do the basics.
So, I’d like to say a big thank you to everyone who has continued to visit - even when I wasn’t able to respond to all the comments. But, I’m catching up on them now. One of my pet hates is bloggers not responding to comments. Some of them do it religiously, and from talking to others, I know it gets up most visitors noses.
Most bloggers don’t deliberately offend their readers, just as most businesses would not purposefully offend their customers. But unfortunately, there are some business owners who are extremely shortsighted. And I’ve stopped using several businesses over the years. But often it wasn’t due to bad service or products, it was just down to general rudeness.
Recently, we were introduced to a bathroom supplier who promised to pass us work and we would do the same for him in return. We’ve passed him one customer last week, and another one today. He hasn’t passed us a single one yet, but that’s not the issue.
Stuart called in today, on behalf of the second customer. The bathroom supplier was quite offhand and rude. And he didn’t bother to thank him for referring either customer to him.
Well, later on, we spoke to the first customer we’d referred, only to be told that the supplier had actually tried to steal the job from under our noses and pass it to someone else.
Naturally, I was livid. And as a result, we recommended that the second customer use an alternative supplier, and we won’t be sending anyone else his way. His greed and general rudeness has lost him a lot of sales.
Has a business offended you so much that you wouldn’t use their services again? Did you tell them why, or did you just stop using them.
Could You Turn $200 Into $400 In A Week?
October 16, 2007
Could you turn $200 into $400 in a week? And do you think it’s possible?
It’s not a trick question. I found this exercise in “I Can Make You Rich by Paul McKenna.” and it is really useful if you’re struggling to come up with business ideas, or creative ways to earn extra cash. And even if you’re not, it’s a great way to get yourself thinking creatively.
Imagine you have $200 and you need to double your money in a week. You’re not allowed to use tools from your existing business, including mailing lists. Then make a list of things you could do to change $200 into $400 in one week (£’s if you’re English). And do feel free to share your ideas in the comments section if you want to.
Now, I know I said I’d review “I Can Make You Rich by Paul McKenna” and I’ll keep it brief. Firstly, I think it’s going to disappoint the “Give me something for nothing” crowd. It’s not just about becoming financially rich, it’s about improving every aspect of your life, and also recognising and appreciating what you already have.
Paul has tried to target a broad market with the book, but I think it will appeal mostly to those who are either starting in business, thinking about starting a business, or those wanting to start up something part time.
The ideas in the book are based on NLP. It has some great exercises to try, including a really sensible approach to business planning. And you also get a free hypnosis CD, which makes it great value. The only trouble is, Paul McKenna’s voice is so hypnotic that the CD sends me to sleep.
If you enjoy the exercise - you can get the book from Amazon.com, or Amazon.co.uk.
And as I’ve asked you to share your ideas for turning $200 into $400 in a week, I’ll share a couple of mine.
I think one of these two things would double the cash quickest, which is just as well, as they may also get me into trouble. Firstly, there’s a sandwich shop near my old office. It’s the only one and gets really busy. They have no decent queing area, so people have to stand outside and wait for ages in the freezing cold.
I’d use the cash to make fresh soup, bread and cookies - all smells that would appeal to people more, and I’d steal the shops potential customers. If I got moved on, I’d just deliver round the local offices instead. And I reckon I’d almost double my money in a day or two, which is good because I hate cold weather.
Are you going to try the exercise? What would you do?
Why Shoemoney Deserves To Be Rich
October 15, 2007
If you’ve visited Jeremy Schoemaker’s “Shoemoney” blog before, you’ll probably have read that he’s been “lucky” with Google Adwords. And you might be forgiven for thinking he’d stumbled on some Magic Adwords formula. In fact, the truth is, you could be just as successful with Adwords as Shoemoney is.
But, before you go and blow your marketing budget on an Adwords campaign you might want to read this first.
You see, I’ve been messing about with Google Adwords pay per click advertising program for a year or so. And I didn’t think there was much to learn. In fact, I assumed it was just a case of writing some ads, bidding a higher amount than my competition and hoping for the best.
But my results have ranged from mediocre to bad. And the annoying thing is, I felt as though I was putting in a whole heap of work for poor returns. In reality, I was putting in nowhere near enough effort to run a successful campaign.
Then I read this post on Shoemoney’s (Jeremy Schoemaker’s) blog about his $10,000 pay per click experiment. It’s an interesting report on his experiment on pay per click for ringtone affiliate programs, and I found it useful.
So I searched on Shoe’s site for some more posts on pay per click and I discovered that he had a whole heap of Adwords accounts, campaigns and ad groups for ring tones alone. It was then that I realised I’d approached the whole adwords thing completely the wrong way. And here’s what I’ve learned so far:
1) You Can’t Just Cross Your Fingers and Hope For The Best: You need to get yourself a good guide to Adwords and read it twice. Ian Denny recommended - Perry Marshall’s Definitive Guide to Adwords, so I downloaded it. And after the first few pages, I realised I had been getting some things right, but I had been doing most things totally wrong.
2 Anything Worth Doing Takes Time: Setting up a successful Google Adwords campaign is time consuming. Ian Denny suggested that I outsource it. But, I like to know how things work before I hand over the responsibility to someone else. And I didn’t think it would take very long. But after two days (and my days are long) I have only managed to set up about a quarter of what I need to do on Adwords for one website. So, if you can’t afford the time - outsource it to someone who knows what they’re doing.
3 You Will Have Tough Competition: No matter what you do, your competitors are going to compete. That’s why they’re called competitors I suppose. And I knew one of them was using some keyword tool to hack into my site, but I didn’t care. The good news is - the changes they made aren’t that great because I was getting it wrong anyway. But the bad news is - you can bet that as soon as I’ve improved my campaign, so will they.
4 You Can Use Heaps Of Different Keywords But Not In One Adgroup: If you get hundreds of keywords from Wordtracker and put them into one Ad Group, you’ll run into a couple of problems: a) Unless you’ve set a maximum cost per click for each seperate keyword, you’re going to be overpaying for some of them. b) A lot of your traffic won’t be relevant, so your conversion rates will be poor.
5 Quality Is King: It isn’t just the amount you bid that will get your ad a higher position. Google rewards you for good quality. So, the keywords in your ad need to be the same as the ones you use in your keyword list, as do the ones on your landing page.
6 It’s Harder Than It Sounds: Google are really fussy about quality. Over the past couple of days, I’m made landing pages specially for each single keyword I’ve used, and my quality rating is showing as “Ok”. And if you bear in mind that I’m showing number one in their organic results for most of these keywords, you should get some idea on how strict they are.
7 If You’re Careless You Will Lose Money: You need to check that all your links are working, then keep checking them again and again, because if they’re not, you will lose money. Also, it is false economy to use a cheap webhost because you will also lose money if your site is down for any length of time.
8 Shoemoney Deserves To Be Rich: Jeremy Schoemaker deserves every penny he’s made from Adwords, because he must have put in hours and hours of hard work.
So, if you’re serious about running an Adwords campaign on your website, do yourself a favour and do some research first, and realise that there’s a lot of work involved.
