No Money? No Excuse!

Here’s the first of what will hopefully be a weekly Clicks & Leads vzine – so much more exciting that a boring old ezine eh?

In this episode I share my thoughts on the reasons for doing this, talk about what to do if you don’t have any money at all (and why that shouldn’t hold you back) and finally share (from my cosy bed, it’s freezing here) what’s on the blog and the podcast this week. You’ll also get insights into what it’s like to live and work in Greece.

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Clicks And Leads is a “tongue in cheek” digital marketing Vzine by entrepreneur, author, podcaster, speaker, Nicola Cairncross. You can also subscribe to the video podcast on iTunes.

Some of the insights shared in this week’s Vzine…

So today, I’m going to be talking about being resourceful versus having resources, because I’ve had a couple of emails from people who have said, as a response to my nine word e-mail, which is a Dean Jackson thing which you send once people have been through your entire autoresponder series and not bought anything, or not joined anything, or not participated in anything, like a free webinar for example.

So, the nine word e-mail goes along these sort of lines, it goes “Tell me, so and so, the name, are you still interested in blah?” And the blah is whatever they joined up your newsletter for at the time.

So, for example, my nine word e-mail would go “Quick Question” in the subject line, and it says “Are you still interested in building an online business?”

Now, that sort of covers marketing your own business online and also just starting an online business. I get responses from that, You’ll be amazed, if you add that into your e-mail sequence towards the end, then you will get responses from people and they will tell you what’s going on in their lives and it gives you a chance to converse with your clients or potential future clients.

So, I got an email back from someone who said, “I’m going to have to pass this time. I haven’t been able to get the funds.” Now I’m not sure what he thinks he’s gonna need funds for, whether he was talking about joining my membership site or whether he was talking about participating in one of my programs, but actually, I give an awful lot of stuff away for free.

You can actually start an online business for pretty much nothing. If you’ve got ten dollars for a domain name, you don’t even really need that. You could just start something on wordpress.com or blogger.com. I always say that if you don’t know what to do, start diarizing or notating or documenting, as Gary V. calls it, on a free blog, your journey from being clueless to hopefully being a hero, from zero to a hero.

That will bring you followers, because people will start to pick up on what you are doing. They’ll start to share your blog posts with their friends, especially if they’re a little bit further back than you. So just say that they find your blog about three or four weeks after you start it, and you’re starting to move along because you’re starting to find some gurus to follow and webinars to attend, and free courses to do, like for example the ‘Smart Passive Income’ Pat Flynn course on podcasting, or the Lee Pages course on Facebook ads. You’ll start to find some resources and you’ll share them on your blog, hopefully, and other people will start to follow you on that blog. Someone’s talking to me on Facebook Live, excuse me.

If you don’t have any resources, which is funds, for example, you can get started but you have to be resourceful. Every single time you come up against the thought “I can’t do that because …” You then need to think “I need to get resourceful now.” For example, I want to do a weekly v-zine and I’m not, by any stretch of the imagination, good at graphic design or editing. I can just about edit the podcast every week. So I’m gonna get my daughter Phoebe to do this for me. She’s showing a lot of promise with her own Youtube videos and I’d like to encourage her.

Now, if you didn’t have a Phoebe or you don’t have any money to pay someone to do your video editing, the thing you could do is you could go to your local technical college or college of further education and find someone who’s doing film studies, and see if they would like to do some editing for you, say for three months.

Then all you’d need to do is talk into your camera or your iPhone, which I’m doing over there to Facebook Live right now, and then upload the bits to a drive folder or dropbox folder, and then the film student could come along and edit them for you into a weekly v-zine, so obviously you know you have to take the word because I’ve just made it up.

The other e-mail I got this week was from someone who has been receiving … he’d obviously filled in the survey, a deep dive survey which I’ve been doing according to Ryan Levesque’s Ask principles, that’s a great book by the way, you ought to get that one.

He has been offered a free download of my new app which just went into the App stores and Google Play stores for Android just this week. I was offering that to the people who completed the survey first, because I wanted them to have first crack at the opportunity to get in on the competition which could win …

You know, all you’ve got to do with the competition is download the app, review it in the iTunes store or the Android store, the Google Play store, and then send me a screenshot of that review. Then once a day I’ll pick one person who’s reviewed the app and I will give them 45 minutes of my time to talk about whatever they like. It could be podcasting, could be online business, could be marketing new existing business online.

But, this person had such a blinkered view of how many resources he had, he totally missed the fact that it was a free app. He totally missed the fact that it was a free competition, and he totally missed the fact that he could enter and get 45 minutes with me to talk about his business, or his potential business, or his online business idea.

So, just by having a scarce, limited mindset, he was missing that he could have won some time to talk about his potential … Or indeed, if he had a particular problem regarding lack of resources, he could have used that time to talk about that, and I could have helped him to become more resourceful.

So, you’ve got to start, especially if you want something. Don’t give up just because you want something and you haven’t got any money. Don’t give up just because you want on online business and you think it takes capital to achieve that. It doesn’t.

You can start with nothing. I started with nothing.

I started with nothing more than a domain name and a … we didn’t even have blogging software in those days. It was just a five page website and a weekly text only e-zine that I sent out to my growing mailing list. So please do not use the lack of funds excuse, because that’s what it is, on me because I started with zero funds. It was only by becoming resourceful that I was able to start an online business and grow it to the stage that it’s at now.

It’s all about becoming resourceful and thinking – Leave the “Okay, no I can’t do this because …,”and start thinking “How could I do this? How could I find someone to help me? How could I make a joint venture with someone? How could I make it worth someone’s while?,” like Phoebe who wants to go into video editing so I’m going to get her to do mine for a little while, which will give her something on her portfolio.

In fact, actually, within … how long has she been doing her videos? She’s been doing her Youtube videos about three months now, and as well as her old Mum asking her to help, she had her first client meeting with someone who wants her to film them doing cooking stuff for his new Youtube channel. So it’s already bringing a paying client within three months of her becoming resourceful and learning how to do a skill that’s valued online.