My Business Diary | Pampers, Business Bartering & 3 Secrets Of Business Success

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I have had the most exciting and incredible few weeks since I last blogged!  Been too busy doing it, to write about it, but here I am with an update now.

The MOST exciting thing I’ve got to tell you is I’ve learned to do an embedded “table of contents” in a Word document, which I can update every time I make any changes to the document.  You have no idea how happy this has made me!  Took all of 2 minutes research on Google and then a bit of concentration to implement but it’s going to make my life so much easier!  I’m only half joking about it being the most exciting thing, so read on to see what I’ve been up to…..

Touring The Pampers Factory

I went to Manchester a week or so ago, in my capacity as a Pampers iVillage Expert (I do Money & Work At Home) to meet the other experts, some celebrity mummy bloggers, have lunch and tour the factory, which was fascinating and great fun.  We enjoyed a couple of short presentations from Chris Horner (Plant Manager) and Fleur Turncock (Site Leader) and we got to pull some nappies apart to see how they were made and try out the gel stuff inside to see how much water those tiny nappies can hold nowadays – answer: a LOT which is reassuring to mums.

The thing that REALLY stood out was the passion and dedication of Chris, Fleur and the other Pampers (Proctor & Gamble) employees.  We saw a presentation about the history of the plant from 1870 up to date and met some of the guys and girls on the factory floor, who told us that they loved working there, and that some of their fathers and mothers had also worked there – they were really proud of that.  It was heartwarming to see.

The mummy bloggers were lovely and very fascinating to me particularly as they were enjoying monster amounts of traffic, but had no clue mostly about how to monetise that traffic.  I’m talking 30,000 unique visitors a month in one case!  I’ve had follow up calls with one of the other experts already, who specialises in helping mums with sleep problems and she’s sitting on a goldmine potentially.  My thanks to Rachel, Jovana, Lucinda and Chris from Fleishman Hillard PR who organised the day.

Smack Me Round The Back Of The Head Will You?

As I’ve mentioned before I’m still neck deep in Rich Schefren’s materials  – going through the two business programmes I signed up for in 2007 (BGS) and 2009 (GPS) which also includes the Founders Club materials, listening to Rich’s extensive Q&A webinars where you learn as much from other’s dilemmas as your own.  I’ve been thinking very deeply about The Business Success Factory and what I want it to look like.

Well, last weekend Rich released his new Founders Club report “Beyond Traffic” and it was just in time for me as I was starting to experiment with Facebook advertising.  I printed off the report and discovered that there is no point paying for traffic (the most reliable kind) if you are not converting and extracting the maximum value from your existing traffic.

I’m certainly convering the traffic to subscribers ok, at around 20-25% which is awesome.  But I realised (cue big smack between the eyes!) that I’m not actually selling anything from the site.  Duh!

Bit embarrassing really.

Yep, I’ve been so focused on delivering massive value via the webinar and free videos and building my mailing list, that I’ve forgotten to actually make an offer on my website – of any kind.

Well, there is a Website Marketing MOT offer buried on my Free Stuff page but that was pretty much it.

So I started thinking, what can I offer on my website that might help me get some value from my existing traffic, so that I can re-invest that value in more paid traffic.  And the thing that jumped out at me immediately was…………… my new book that I’ve been working on over the last year, on and off.

So I sprang into action, dug it all out, put the compenents together and it really took shape very fast.  I worked day and night for several days, only stopping to sleep, eat and watch the odd episode of Britain’s Got Talent and Criminal Minds and a week later….

The 3 Secrets Of Business Success Book / The Secrets Of Success Interviews

I’m now thrilled to announce that my new book is nearly ready to send to the publisher and it’s not one book but two!

Called “The 3 Secrets Of Business Success” I wanted to include the full transcripts of all the interviews I’ve been doing with successful people over the last few years from business, property, internet and stockmarket – what we used to call in the Money Gym “The Four Lanes Of The Wealth Highway”.

But that made the book too big – twice as big!  So I’ve made it two books.   The second one is called “The Success Secrets Interviews” and includes the full transcripts from interviews from Jenny Armato, Brett McFall, Alan Forrest Smith, Simon Zutchi, Andy Shaw, Martin Avis and more are being added all the time.  I dig deep in an attempt to find out what REALLY makes the difference between successful people – even those “in between fortunes” – and everyone else.

Then the “3 Secrets” book synthesises the nuggets of gold from those interviews, along with all the stuff I’ve learned from coaching hundreds of aspiring and successful business people over the years.

For the first 100 people to pre-order, they’ll get some very special bonuses, including the MP3’s of the recordings AND the chance to send in their story or a  review and get their business mentioned in the book too.  Plus a 30 day £1/$1.60 trial of my mentoring programme valued at £197 / $315.

Because it’s not going to the publisher until I’ve worked through it a couple more times, anyone who orders from my website right now will get all the updates for life, free of charge.

Find out more and take a look at the “table of contents” here >>>

Making Global Business Bartering Simple

While on the train to Manchester I was reading Jay Abraham’s “Getting Everything You Can Out Of All You’ve Got” and came across the chapter on Business Bartering.  I’ve come across this concept before and have always loved the idea of bartering (getting involved in the Portobello Road LETS scheme while pregnant with Phoebe back in 1995).

But while trapped on that train I was struck by how powerful the idea was and how cool it would be to set up a website to facilitate that bartering process.  Not wanting to go off half-cocked without doing any research, as is my wont, I purchased an exhorbitantly expensive 3-hours T-Mobile hotspot package and started to do some searching online.  Not much around online except the quite promising looking Bartercard which is huge in Australia but only just launching over here.

Thank god! I thought, there’s one business I don’t have to start myself LOL.  But I was a bit mystified as the Bartercard website, while having a lot of content,  didn’t really say if you had to pay or not, to get a card, but seemed to imply it was free.  Loads of testimonials from happy businesses, but some talked about an investment.  Could I find any more info anywhere?  No.  I couldn’t puzzle out the business model (how Bartercard made their money) so I did a search on Google and found some press about the company, which is quoted on the stockmarket in Oz apparently.  So there is money changing hands somewhere and they are selling franchises / licenses per area in the UK now.

The only option seemed to be to put my phone number in, which I’m always VERY reluctant to do as I HATE unscheduled phone calls.

Sure enough, after I got back, just as I was heading out of the door for an appointment, the bloke from Bartercard locally rang me.  I complained that I hadn’t been able to find out any real info on the website, and although he protested it was there, he was unable to tell me where to look.  He started to spark up his laptop to try and find it himself, but that crashed and by that point I’d run out of patience.  I gave him some very direct feedback about how they could improve things.

So in the end, realising that there would be a significant investment when he did eventually get around to sending me the info, I decided to start a nice little ezine where subscribers could list the things they could offer for barter – goods or services – and also list their needs, for a minimum subscription of £1 or $1.

A URL, some hosting and a wordpress website later, the Business Barter Club was born and you can get involved and get some more info immediately – no annoying phone calls – here >>>

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