Brisbane Internet Business Meetup

I’m speaking tonight at a local networking group that I belong to, which is basically a meetup.com club for people in Brisbane that are interested in online business.

My presentation is on ‘Effective Google Advertising’ and I will be giving the audience a general introduction to AdWords before moving onto some inside techniques of succeeding with Google Adwords (pay per click) advertising. I’ve published the PowerPoint here for everyone to download after the night and refer to….

Click here to download powerpoint presentation on ‘Effective Google Advertising’.
Click here to download PDF version of the presentation

clickbank

Woooot. Today was a great day, I finally made it to triple digit sales for one of my ebooks on clickbank!

It seems like so long ago now that I got into information products, but it was only 9 months almost to the day. I’ve read so many books and completed so many training courses since March 2009, that it feels like I absorbed more in that time than my entire high school life.

I probably did actually, as high school was mostly about chasing girls and partying every chance we could get.

Long story short, I was watching a Yanik Silver seminar… it was probably the info players workshop where it’s just him in a small room with a bunch of people. He made everything sound so straight forward and achievable for anyone. I don’t know exactly what it was that attracted me, because I’m a designer by trade and don’t actually enjoy writing content. But when I heard that you can just create an eBook on any subject that is of interest to me, I thought it would be a great way of having something tangible to show at the end of a research process.

I’m always going through research processes, but usually I just walk away with the knowledge and a bunch of new skills. This way, I could compile all of my findings into a coherent publication that was simply exported into PDF format to sell as a digital product.

So with that, I embarked on a mission to learn everything I could about a particular type of fishing that I really enjoy and began a strict routine of writing useful, easy to read articles every night and early morning. About 3 weeks later, absolutely brimming with pride and a bunch of new information that was previously unknown to me, I completed my project with a beautiful cover design and a well planned website to market the book.

I never actually sat down and wondered how many would sell or how much money I would make, all I wanted to prove was that I could actually sell a copy to someone out there on the Internet and they would find the content useful.

It was a Sunday night that I launched the book, I setup an AdWords campaign targetting all the relevant keywords and then had my ads running within minutes. Much to my surprise, I sold my first copy within 5 minutes. When I saw that email notification come through from clickbank I was grinning like an idiot and kept repeating something like ‘it works, if friggin works!’.

These days I upsell my eBook customers into purchasing the soft cover printed version to increase revenue, so the overall sales figures are higher than 100 copies but I’ve officially sold my 100th digital version as of this morning. At $75 per copy, that is a nice little earner for my very first ebook in it’s first 8 months. It won’t buy me a new boat, but it pays for a few sport fishing charters around the world each year  and I get to write off the cost on tax because the trips are classed as research.

Man, I love the Internet!

customer service

Good customer service is a touchy subject for me. I give it in every situation I encounter, and if I experience bad customer service then something inside me just wants to teach that person a lesson.

Before I starting working on the web back in ‘97, I worked in the hospitality industry for many years. I mention that because if you work in a restaurant then not only do you have to learn people skills, but you gotta be able to handle complaints and negative feedback. Basically, no matter what is being shouted you must remain professional and do your best to empathise with the customer.

Now when it comes to the Internet, I encounter a fair bit of either bad customer service or just plain silence. It amazes me that website owners and online businesses can treat their customers this way, I wont even try to explain or rationalise their reasons, but it’s pretty obvious that more often than not the person on the other end of the email only wants to communicate if you have something nice to say or money to hand over. Often, they don’t even want to hear from you to take an order. Some people are just bad at interaction I guess.

So the ability to work through an issue or fix a problem is pretty rare if you ask me. I see it with small websites, I see it with big websites. People from all levels and countries display this behaviour, some worse than others but I wont name names.

I thought that this would be a good topic to write about today, because I am currently experiencing an issue with a website that I’ve paid money to. Now I can’t really say that it’s bad customer service, because I haven’t actually had a response to my 1 email and 2 support tickets yet. Let’s just say that this issue revolves around a lack of customer service. Now that might not be as awful as bad service, but it’s kinda in the same ballpark. I’m sure in time, this will be resolved and put down to a break in communication, but not everyone is as patient and forgiving as I am. I’ve already witnessed a barrage of negative comments on a certain forum, all stemming from the same issue of either getting no response from this organisation or having huge troubles in getting a response.

They say that the most valuable customer is the one you already have. Which to me, means that you should put twice as much effort into keeping a customer than finding a new one. So if somebody has already gone through the decision process and decided to buy your product or services, it doesn’t make sense to ignore their questions or take days to respond.

I can feel a rant coming on, so I think I will just conclude this post with a little bit of wisdom I learned once that changed my view (for the better). I don’t remember the guys name, but he was basically telling me that he LOVES to get customer complaints.

I thought he was crazy, and replied that I hate getting complaints from customers and would sometimes (at that point in my early adult life) argue or insult anyone that dare complain about my website or service levels.

He then said that the reason why he loves getting complaints, is because  they are worth ten times more than a compliment. When someone complains, they are giving you direct honest feedback which can then be used to improve your business. If someone writes to say thanks, they’re not going to tell you how to improve. When someone makes a complaint, they are clearly communicationg what is wrong with your service (which should then be taken as an opportunity to improve).

Once I reframed my way of thinking to be in line with that, my life changed and my business changed. Not only do I avoid all confrontation these days, but I seek out complaints so that I can improve my business and myself.

So if you’re reading this and you don’t look at customer service and complaints like I do, perhaps you could think about it for a minute and consider changing your perceptions. At the very least, if you’re offering products and services online then give people clear options to contact you and make sure to reply promptly. Even if you can’t give a full response, let them know you received the message and will get back to them shortly.

increased productivity

I like to think that I’m pretty good with time & productivity. I’ve read a bunch of books on time management, I make daily lists of tasks and set goals, most days I work around 14 hours… but at the end of the month, although I produce more results than the average bear, it still doesn’t quite add up to the sum of my efforts.

When the reality doesn’t match the perception, something needs to be checked! It’s human nature to fool ourselves and make excuses, so I like to use these kinds of cues to evaluate how I can improve my action (or at least the way I view things).

For this particular situation, I figured that I needed to improve my methods in order to be even more productive. It would have been easy for me to continue comparing myself to others and resting on my laurels, but comfort zones are the devil! Repeat, COMFORT ZONES ARE THE DEVIL!!

So shortly after I had this realisation last month, I noticed something from James Schramko that spoke about some guys that had setup the SEO BrainTrust. I’m always keen to listen to what others are doing in the SEO world so I couldn’t resist opting-in to their site and watching the promo videos. Long story short, after listening to Dan Thies for a while he started talking about maximising results by “chunking” your day. This got my attention because I’d recently started to comparmentalise my work day into focussed chunks instead of my usual style of manic multitasking.

Then Eben Pagan sent me an email this week for his wake up productive blog and in one of his videos he started to talk about chunking also.

Hmmm, I think the universe is trying to tell me something.

Eban also spoke about the pillars (which I’m learning about in his guru course) and how I should be spending 40% of my time on customer generation, 20% on conversion tactics and then 10% on content. Damn, this is where I’ve been going wrong as traditionally I will spend around 80% of my work week or more on content. Being a web designer, it’s second nature for me to sit down and smash a heap of websites to pass the time. I’ve incorporated SEO tactics into my development cycle, so that was my contribution to traffic generation. But now I see how I had everything ass backwards! This is why I’m able to punch out a bunch of websites and info products each month, but the financial returns don’t match my efforts. This is why I’ve been making small incremental improvements to my turnover but no leaps and bounds.

Houston, we have an ‘ah ha’ moment!

So today was officially the first day of my new routine. I spent the first 4 hours on traffic generation, then 2 hours on coversion tactics, now I’m going to work on content. I’ll post the results at the end of the month and report how the stats and revenues have improved.

CONCLUSION: Do one type of task at a time and prioritise the allocation of time to each task.

ps. turn off your email client and just check it first thing in the morning and then once more towards the end of the day. This eliminates the largest contributor of distractions and allows you to work without interuptions. Trust me, the world wont end if you’re not checking your inbox every 20 minutes!