My Business Diary | Gill Fielding, Nappies, Poker & Facebook Spam

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It’s been all go the last couple of weeks!  I’m not sure if I mentioned it but I’ve been appointed Blog & Social Media Manager for my local Chamber of Commerce, which is Worthing & Adur even though I live in Hove temporarily.

Creating and configuring the new blog was easy, as was moving most of the content over from Typepad where the previous blog had resided.  That job’s not finished quite yet, but the new blog was looking good enough to go live just before the AGM on Wednesday, held in the beautifully restored ballroom and bar above the Dome Cinema on the seafront there.  I’d send you to the website to have a look but I can’t work out which is the official one and none of them have any photos that do it justice, pretty poor show really, I wonder how they get ANY events business!

This gave me an opportunity to test out my new Kodak Z8 High-Definition flipcam which I used with a stereo lapel microphone and no tripod.  Why no tripod?  Because the guest speaker was none other than my old friend and business partner Gill Fielding, yes! Channel 4’s Secret Millionaire herself and I knew that, when Gill speaks, she likes to move around a lot.

I decided to film the welcome by Peter Bennett of Bennett Griffin Solicitors, the Chamber President, and the roundup of the year, by Tina Tilley, as well, and while I was a bit worried about shaky hand syndrome, I leaned my arm on a chair back and the videos came out really very well.

You can see Gill Fielding’s talk about how the economic climate is affecting small and medium sized businesses here at the new Worthing & Adur Chamber blog.

The Chamber are getting my very top level service, which I’m going to be offering to local businesses in the near future, and which I’m very excited about.  So much so, that I woke up at 7.30 this morning even though I stayed up till 2am last night catching up on back episodes of Criminal Minds (love that show!)

Yesterday, I had to write out a 2-3 page business plan for someone who I’m hoping to be working with on a freelance sales basis, because they needed to understand the business overview, products and services before they could tell me if they were interested, and it was easy-peasy because I’ve been planning it all out in my head for several months now….

With the old adage of “If you fail to plan, you are planning to fail” running through my head, it actually only took me an hour or two to get it all out of my head and onto paper but it made me realise how few times I’ve done that in the past when starting a business.  And believe me, I’ve started a few.

Perhaps I’ve failed fast enough times now, eh?  Enough times to know what has a chance of working and what will not.

Specifically, this time I wrote out in detail what the active sales process would be, which I’ve NEVER done before, as I’ve always worked on a purely “attraction marketing” or “pull marketing” basis before.

But I realise that local businesses will be expecting something a bit more hands on, more networking, telephone and meeting based than just pure email marketing and I had to design a system for that.  What are we going to say first, giveaway first, offer first, how are we going to follow up, what are we going to offer next and all that jazz.

Now I have no idea if my new sales system will work or not, but it seems logical to me and we have to start somewhere.  If we contact 500 businesses, how many will take us up on our free offer, how many will move to step 2, how many move to step 3, etc.

Because if we don’t have a system we won’t have any way of measuring if any of it’s working!

Now here’s my biggest challenge….

It’s that I’m great at creating systems but absolutely rubbish at following them systematically.

Hence my looking for someone to work with on the sales front, who is much more systematic than me.  Because a good sales process needs good follow up and that’s not me.

This is why internet marketing works so well for me, because you do the work once and set it all up, then it happens automatically thereafter.

For example, the “3 Secrets Of Business Success” videos that I created, along with the “3 Secrets / Social Media Blueprint” webinar, people are signing up to watch/listen to those every day and they are being followed up by auto-responder every day or so with the next offer, be that another free gift or a product or service.

What else have I been up to?  Well, I’ve caved in and installed ListCrew on my personal website after watching Steve Watson put it on his and gain 5-10 new subscribers a day.  It really suits internet marketing orientated sites which NicolaCairncross.com is really, and it’s not pretty that’s for sure, looking very old skool and clunky but hey, if it works…..

Essentially, you gain credits every time the box shows on your site, and that get’s your ezine listing shown on the box on someone else’s site.  Since I installed it this morning I’ve gained 4 new subscribers.

I’ve known about Listcrew for years as Martin Avis is a big fan, and I was shocked to work out that every year I’ve not had it on my site, I’ve missed out on 2737 new subscribers to my list, assuming an average signup rate of 7.5 people per day.

I’ve had a bit of a tussle with my online Strategy Session process this last couple of weeks – for some reason nobody is filling in my form.  I sent out an email that got about 500 clicks to the info page and then about 120 clicks on the “Book Your Strategy Session” button but then not one single solitary form filled in.

You’d think it wasn’t working or something, but no, I tested it and it worked fine.

Initially I had quite a daunting looking form (apparently!) asking such tricky questions as “what is your annual turnover” and “what is the value of your average initial sale” and “what is a customer worth to you over a year” – questions which you would think any business owner would know the answers to.

But my mastermind group said it was too scary and daunting looking so I changed it, and just had the button on the info page jump to an opt-in page where people put their name and email in, to be then jumped to a much less scary looking survey type form, with just one or two questions on each  page of the survey.

Well they still came to the info page, and then clicked the button to request a strategy session but then didn’t put their name and email in the box.

I’m absolutely stumped so if you were one of those people, I would welcome your feedback as to what went wrong for you!  You were obviously interested in the service I was promoting but something stopped you filling in the form to talk to me.

I don’t bite and I’m not going to sell you something you don’t’ want or need, that’s not how I work, really!

If you want to see what I’m talking about, here’s the link to the page that starts the whole process off >>>

I was mystified and cross to see a text message sent to me by one of my clients late last night.  How did Facebook send 1131 invites out last night via my mobile phone to presumably my Gmail contacts?  I wouldn’t mind but a) it makes me look like a spammer and b) they couldn’t even spell it right – this is what it said “Don’t no how but have sent out 1131 invites on Facebook, Nicola”. For god’s sake….

If I hadn’t been up watching Criminal Minds way too late I would never have known…

What’s coming up this week?

I’m being flown up to the Proctor & Gamble Pampers Nappy factory outside Manchester on Thursday along with some of the other experts on the Pampers iVillage Experts Panel, this time to talk to some celebrity Mummy Bloggers, which should be fun – my area of expertise for sure.

And……. it’s the end of season Poker Tournament at The George in Henfield tomorrow, so I’m trying to get all my jobs done so I can just go and have fun!

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