Entrepreneurs-Journey.com

I’ve created a new category for spirituality because I believe this aspect of life, especially to entrepreneurs, is very important. While business may be the focal point for an entrepreneur’s life, it’s your outlook on life that shapes what kind of person you are. Having a strong sense of self can benefit your business in many ways. The down periods and business ‘tragedies’ are not soo bad for the entrepreneur that is spiritually centred. Don’t take life too seriously is a phrase that every entrepreneur should take to heart and remember during the ups and downs of business.

I just finished reading Michael Simmons blog post about meditation. Michael is meditating, and he’s doing it a lot, which I find quite admirable. If he isn’t careful he might give up business all together and follow the path of the monk searching for enlightenment…which may not be such a bad thing and perhaps even more rewarding than business ever could be.

I’ve attempted meditation for many reasons but more often as a method to deal with tough times in my life. I realise the need for meditation and spirituality during all times of life but as I’m sure many of you can identify with me when I don’t look for help when times are great, I’m too busy revelling in the excitement. To be honest though I’m not good at meditation and I don’t put much time into it (which is why I’m not too good at it!). I find for me, swimming is the best meditative exercise I do that helps to centre and relax me.

As an entrepreneur I consider myself quite a creative person. I’m not gifted in art or music but certainly as a writer and business creator/manager I feel that I am definitely more bohemian than most. I think most entrepreneurs feel the same because we are not following the same path a lot of other people take when they work a normal job. Often the thought of a ‘job’ is not appealing and the prospect of working 9-5 for a salary is daunting. We take a risk by being different and expose ourselves to the often adverse opinions of those that believe we are making a mistake by not seeking a standard career. It takes a person of strong character and personal convictions to stand up to what can be a barrage of negative feedback from your peers and family.

I’m also more sensitive to my environment and the people around me. I live a controlled life and make sure that I eat well, sleep plenty and by choice I don’t drink any alcohol. I have nothing against drinking (in moderation), it’s just a choice I’ve made mainly because I haven’t found a drink that appeals to me more than water, juices and milks. I don’t party hard on weekends, again by choice because I prefer to get a good nights sleep so I feel good during the day. Because of this I don’t get sick too often (touch wood) and I feel at the top of my game everyday. I’m not saying do what I do, it’s possible to party and drink and have a good time and be a very successful entrepreneur, just remember moderation and balance and your health should always be your primary concern.

A spiritually fulfilling life can be very rewarding. It provides a strong personal framework that offers stability during tough times and allows you to keep perspective when business is booming. I feel hypocritical writing this - while I have a strong belief in the benefits of spiritualty, I don’t necessarily practice what I preach. It’s not easy to be disciplined but as usual, for those that put the effort in the rewards are there.

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I get a lot of queries and client registrations to my business that don’t lead to sales. Converting potential clients to paying clients is a very important process since a potential client has clearly demonstrated some interests in your services or products, they just need to be convinced. A good sales process, one that you test over time and tweak until you get the best results, is vital for success.

I used to handle this manually. I’d get some emails from clients, respond by answering their questions quickly and try and sell my services. If they didn’t bite immediately I put them into a folder called potential clients. A week or two later I would go to this folder and email all these potential clients again and try and make a sale. If they responded with a definite “no thanks” and I determined it’s not worth fighting for their business anymore I moved the email to a concluded folder for archive purposes. If they still seemed interested I moved them to another folder which in another week or two I would try again. Often though I’d get no response at all but I’d keep trying. Obviously this is a horribly manual process that took a lot of time and energy.

I improved this process firstly by creating email templates by simply using email signatures in outlook express. I would insert an appropriate sales signature to respond to a client depending on which point in my potential customer sales process they were at. In fact I still use this process to handle common queries and I find it reduces my email processing time quite significantly.

However I still got quite tired of handling ongoing sales in such a manual manner. I knew autoresponders, which are automatic response emails that are sent when a person emails you or submits a form, were a potential solution to this problem. In essence I was acting like an autoresponder myself so there had to be a way to systematize this process.

I knew my host server could handle autoresponders but it wasn’t a robust system and only allowed for a response to come if someone sent an email to a specific address. Since I handle all queries, not just sales queries, through my admin email account it wouldn’t make sense for *every* email sent to this account to get the same autoresponse. I needed to find a more powerful solution.

I searched the net and found various options, some free, some with subscriptions and some scripts you can buy and install on your server. However a friend of mine showed me an all in one solution called MarketersChoice that contains a great autoresponder system, but a lot more too.

MarketerChoice is so much more than just an autoresponder system. It has a client management system, shopping cart, digital download manager, affiliates system and more. I got so excited when I first read about all the features available at MarketersChoice and all these new business ideas popped into my head as a result. After I calmed down I thought about what I actually needed at the time and luckily they allow you to purchase a package based on your current requirements. Each module integrates with your current system quite easily and you can purchase subscriptions to new modules at any time. I’ll talk about the other features at another time and focus on the autoresponder module for now.

I went to the MarketersChoice website and read all I could about the systems. I don’t make a decision to invest a few hundred dollars a year in software unless I know it’s going to do exactly what I want it to do. The autoresponder module lets you apply unlimited automatic response emails and move users from one list to another automatically. You can even use an autoresponder to send out broadcast emails so that unique messages are sent out during certain intervals. Or you can simply log in and send out a mass email to all clients of a certain type. Let me explain by describing how I currently use the system.

I have a simple client registration form that collects basic data such as email address, names and phone numbers. I created the form myself but the MarketersChoice system can generate the html for you to use on your website. When a person submits to this form they are firstly opted in, which means they are sent an email to confirm they want to register. This is an important step because it makes sure you don’t get accused of sending spam. Only those people that want to be are included on your lists because they chose to be there.

These clients are considered “potential clients”. They haven’t made a purchase but have read enough of the website to show interest. If they don’t make a purchase they are sent an email in two weeks automatically by the system asking why and inviting them to try the service. If again in another two weeks they still haven’t responded they are sent another email. If during this time they do decide to make a purchase they are removed from the “potential clients” autoresponder to the “paying clients” autoresponder so they won’t be sent any inappropriate emails. This allows the ongoing sales “chase” to be handled automatically and I no longer have to manage my clients in folders in outlook express because they all go into a very secure and customisable online client database at MarketersChoice.

You can stipulate how many emails are sent to an autoresponder list, the time duration between messages and customize each message in the timeline. It’s an amazingly powerful system. You can use this to subscribe people to an eCourse that sends out a new course email every two weeks. You can use the system to manage paying clients to send out a request for feedback after a certain period of time being on the paying client list. You can set emails to offer discounts or free samples to try and convert potential clients or reward long term loyal clients. If you want more information I suggest you read the FAQs at the MarketersChoice site.

These are just a small sample of the possibilities available with just the autoresponder module. I should warn you though that there is a learning curve with the software and you will need to devote some time to set it up properly. Once you get the hang of it though it just sits there and helps you to convert clients. What more could you ask for!

Yaro Starak
Web Marketeer

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Max from Yabbyland sent me over a link to this great article about public relations. He also mentioned it in one of his blog entries.

Quote:’Our startup spent its entire marketing budget on PR. At a time when we were assembling our own computers to save money, we were paying a PR firm $16,000 a month. And they were worth it. PR is the news equivalent of search engine optimization: instead of buying ads, which readers ignore, you get yourself inserted directly into the stories.’

I spend a lot of my time putting out posters to advertise BetterEdit. I choose this method because it consistently brings in results and it has very good ROI (return on investment). Posters only cost a few cents each and the time and energy to put them up. Max keeps reminding me that I need to factor in my opportunity cost for putting these posters up, or at least calculate an hourly fee to account for my labour. If you look at it that way I perhaps should be investigating in other means to advertise, or at least look to hire someone to poster for me (I’m doing both these things, just not very quickly). I find campus postering is also a good way to get out and away from the computer so I partly do it for the exercise as well.

I’ve always known PR and news in general is a great tool for marketing a business. Reading the eBay story and Napster story reinforced this concept since both companies benefited the most from press coverage more than any other form of marketing. Richard Branson’s antics again show how important it is to have the press spread the word for you (Richard Branson, the brand, is powerful). Even I have used PR a little in the past by getting a couple of articles in local newspapers published which brought in clients and cost me nothing but time to arrange.

I should thank Max again for pointing out that article. It’s reminded me how powerful the media can be. I’ve started to make queries into learning more about the PR industry and make some contacts with some local PR people and firms. Perhaps it’s a waste of time spending an advertising budget on traditional forms of advertising. They just don’t compare to what some good PR can do for you. Even if the PR is sensationalistic and negative it can often achieve results simply by turning the eyeballs to your website and creating awareness.

A news story isn’t perceived by the public as an advertisement. It’s read as content, something of interest, not a sales pitch. An advertisement evokes a knee-jerk repulsion reaction in the mind of the consumer just like you feel whenever a salesman calls you on the phone. A sales pitch is annoying. A news story is interesting. They both may be aiming to achieve the same thing, create awareness of a business, but the public reaction can be quite different.

Due to the current trend of using blogs as content and news resources the PR industry is changing. It’s conceivable that you can manipulate the blogosphere as your PR channel of distribution. Blogs certainly are not looked upon as advertisements. In fact they are even further removed from advertising than normal magazine or newspaper articles are. An article in a magazine is news. An article in a blog is a personal recommendation by the author. It may well be that tomorrows media is driven entirely by the blogosphere and public relations will be about convincing enough bloggers to write about your story and your business.

Yaro Starak
Blogpreneur

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Currently I live between Canada and Australia or Toronto and Brisbane to be exact. I spent four months in the Toronto winter over December -March. During this time I had my first taste of Apple iTunes but unfortunately as I do not have a Canadian credit card as yet I couldn’t actually make a purchase.

For the one, maybe two people that aren’t familiar with iTunes, it’s Apple’s online music store where you can sample and purchase music. I had a ball playing with iTunes because of the sheer number of tracks available. When you walk into a “bricks and mortar” music shop like HMV you can see a reasonable selection of music but to actually sample is a pain in the ass. I can’t really remember the last time I bought a CD to be honest. With the advent of iTunes, a reasonably cheap ($1 CAD per song in Canada) legal form of music downloading has become available.

Apparently the Australian iTunes Music Store is ready to serve tunes which is good news. While there has been no official news from Apple confirming the launch and as I check the Apple Australia site and itunes.com.au at the time of writing it doesn’t appear to be available yet, which is a bit disconcerting because today is the 28th, the rumoured launch day. Most of the rumours have been coming as a result of Australian actor (and ahem…musician) Russell Crowe leaking that his music will be available on iTunes for $1.80 per track. Another local musician, DJ Bexta, has also stated her tracks will be available. I wonder how much of this leaking of information isn’t just some well timed press coverage by Apple ensuring solid traffic to iTunes at start-up.

My main concern is the price. I appreciated that Canada iTunes could keep the price at 99c per track even though the US iTunes is also 99c per track. So far the rumours for Australia is anywhere from $1.30 to $1.80. One dollar is such a nice round number. I assume the price is heavily determined by negotiation with local music companies for licensing fees.

While in Canada I also sampled Napster (which has a horrible colour theme on its website) and read a bit into the current MP3 and digital download industry. ITunes was by far my favourite purely based on the simple price. Napster has a subscription offering as well as a single price option but files won’t stay active unless you keep your subscription. Add to that certain files can’t be downloaded onto certain mp3 players (which is also a limitation with iTunes) and it all got too complicated.

In my opinion, while iTunes is a big step in the right direction there still isn’t an ideal offering - an mp3 store where I pay $1 per track and I can do whatever I want with the music - download to any mp3 player, play on my computer and burn to CD. I understand the need to halt illegal reproduction and distribution of the files but the balance at the moment is still too restrictive making the illegal file sharing offerings such as LimeWire and Soulseek that much more appealing to users.

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Wired News: “Podcasting will soon break out of the “pod” and onto the public airwaves. The world’s first all-podcast radio station will be launched on May 16 by Infinity Broadcasting, the radio division of Viacom. Infinity plans to convert San Francisco’s 1550 KYCY, an AM station, to listener-submitted content. The station, previously devoted to a talk-radio format, will be renamed KYOURadio.”
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First blogs rise to prominence as a force for news and content. Now radio is becoming another outlet for personal content distribution. I wonder if in the near future there will be such a thing as a “journalist” and instead we all will be contributing to global media distribution.

For an interesting take on a possible future of media and news distribution see what the Museum of Media History thinks the year 2014 will be like.

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