Life After The Quick Start Challenge – Week 1

Introduction

It has been a week since the Quick Start Challenge with Dean Holland and Craig Crawford ended.

Lessons Learned

The challenge was good for me because it gave me a way to come down to earth and start focusing in on  actually doing stuff from some sort of foundation and to some sort of plan. I like to think that I do have a strategic framework. It fits in quite well with what Dean Holland presented during the challenge. Here is a quick reminder of my strategic framework.

• Bring some combination of skills, knowledge and passion to bear into a strategic focus
• Choose some product focus within the strategic focus and decide what you are going to promote or sell
• Build an internet marketing engine that identifies prospects, turns them into your raving fans and sell to them
• Keep the engine running and adjusted as conditions change.

Now the challenge for me has really been in that word FOCUS. You see I have built reasonable followings in a number of niche areas in yoga, in bodyweight training, in cryptocurrency, in foreign exchange, in cycling, even in affiliate marketing and copywriting. On some of them I was making really good traction, for example, in Bitcoin, I had built a sales pipeline that was generating returns 300 times what I had invested. I had a small group of affiliates driving product sales and it was working really well. The circumstances changed and I no longer had a viable product to sell.

I worked out also in my niche areas like bodybuilding and yoga and cycling that affiliate commissions were not large enough to drive meaningful income without a major investment in traffic building – we are talking major. The game is called LEVERAGE. I did explore a different leverage model and do have a few niche businesses in physical products that aim to leverage the power of Amazon.com marketing to build a base. Think quadcopters and coffee machines and cooking equipment. What I have learned from a good friend is that the rules of the Fulfillment by Amazon game have been changing and are not yet settled. Winning takes building brand power and inventory investment in high ticket items. Quite frankly, I have not had the energy to take that on.

With all those niche areas you can imagine what my life in front of a computer is. The best word is Flip Flop or Hamster Wheel. I flip from one thing to another. I start new initiatives and never really complete. Everything inches forward slowly but never really enough to deliver consistent results.

The truth of it all is I never really pinned down a strategic focus and even if I did I did not get product focus – except in Bitcoin. It was working until the rug got pulled. Of course I could start to build my own products from the ground up or I could go back to my massive skills and knowledge in business and management consulting and start building my own coaching products. I am just not ready to get back to that just yet – maybe I will. The real problem I have is I have a head full of ideas and every time I get one of those emails offering blue skies I can generate half a dozen ideas on how it might work. And a new project begins. See my cure for Shiny Object Syndrome

Focus and Leverage

This is where the sales pitch at the end of the Quick Start Challenge comes in.

Leverage. Dean Holland and Internet Profits provides LEVERAGE. As certified partners we get leverage in a number of ways.

• Leverage a working Internet Marketing Engine. We do have to implement our own version of it with our preferred toolsets or use those provided
• Leverage higher price points with premium products offering higher commisions
• Leverage recurring revenues through memberships or newsletters or coaching or masterminds
• Leverage Dean’s commitment to staying at the forefront of affiliate marketing through is research and development efforts.

The big question is can I actually pull this off? Will this simply land up being the same as every other shiny object I have purchased?

The answer is going to lie in 2 places really.

1. Is the product suite good enough and can I sell it? I know from the Facebook group for Internet ProfitsPartners that there are 1,384 memebrs. They will all have paid something close to what I paid to join the program. There is at least $2 million worth of evidence that the product is good and fit for the market it is addressing
2. Can I focus enough to get the job done? The answer to this comes down to the WHY.

During the Quick Start Challenge we were asked to work out our number. This is the number that drives your dream life. You see I have not had a job since I sent out my last invoice to a client 15 years ago. I live off my investments and my future has depended on my ability to grow my investments enough to cover the annual costs of life. This is what I wrote:

I want to build my business so that it generates half the revenues that I generate each year from my investing activity. That way I will be able to navigate a safe passage through the next market collapse without having to change my current lifestyle.

Over the last few weeks, I have been reminded about my number. The market selloff has smashed my portfolios – in ONE month my pension portfolio has dropped over $100,000 in value. My WHY just got a whole lot more important.

Back to the story. I had outsourced my investing portfolios to a fund manager. He was doing well enough But I felt that he could do better. So I took on the job of educating myself in investing across markets, across instruments and for good markets and for bad markets. In my first year after my investment manager stopped doing business in Australia, I produced returns that were double what he did. I made it my job to make it happen. It is working. How did I do that? I set different objectives and invested in my own education and I focus. I think and act about markets every day.

With the same sort of FOCUS I am convinced I can get full value out of being an Internet Profits Certified Partner.

In the week since the Quick Start Challenge, I have been focused:

• Got the certification done in two days covering 8 modules with about 60 to 70 minutes of video to watch in each
• Laid out some new paid ads on LeadsLeap promoting one Internet Profits lead magnet. I chose to do it direct to get started. Next step is to complete building my opt-in pages onto my own list. So far I am getting about 10 clicks a day but no opt-ins
• Went back to one of my toolsets for building Twitter followers, Staged.com. Discovered that the Engage part of the application was not working. Support ticket needed to get that going again
• Went through Days 1 to 12 of the 30 day Challenge. Most of that overlapped with the Quick Start Challenge but I sat through all the videos again
• Started work on the first opt-in page. Internet Profits does include a white labelled page builder. I have to decide whether I use it or persist with Convertri, which I can promote. Learning curve will be much the same for both initially but the fact that all the Internet Profits stuff is built in their page builder means I will lose speed later if I use Convertri
• I did a few mailings for my charity fund raising and raised another $400 based on emails sent and one personal donation. This brings me just short of A$3,000 for October. I did also ride my bicycle with over 150 kms done in a week. I did discover during the week that some corporate mail servers are blocking my homemade URL shortener. I am not sure if it is the way the cloaking is done or the choice of registration. I use Mexico as my country of registration, home to a bunch of drug cartels. I have registered a new .com domain and will try that
• Completed GDPR compliance work for EU visitors to this website using a WordPress plugin I bought when GDPR was at shiny object stage.

Made it on the Wall of Fame

Resources

Domains: I have used 1and1.com for years. They recently merged with IONOS.com and are now a large European provider. I like the pricing especially renewal pricing. New customers can get $1 domains and private registration for free. Get your domains at IONOS.com

Credits:

Focus image embeded in my featured image photograph is by Nick Youngson CC BY-SA 3.0 Alpha Stock Images