Well, I said I’d share my musings on business success and internet marketing on 2011 but on reading them, because of course they are written in my beloved Moleskine journal first, I’m thinking that I’m not sharing some of the more personal stuff, even though that’s what I’d be wanting to read if I was you!
So over the next few days I’m going to share my thoughts about my business year over 2011 including the answers to the following questions.
These questions were originally asked of me, in his ezine, by my mentor Rich Schefren, and you can subscribe to his excellent ezine here >>>
- What Are My Greatest Achievement / What Am I Most Proud Of?
- What Are My Biggest Disappointments?
- What Did I Learn in 2011? Both the tools I learned to use & what I learned about myself/my business.
- What Are The Top 3 Things I Learned In 2011?
- How Did I Limit Myself In 2011 & How Can I Avoid Doing That Again?
- What Are My Roles & Goals For 2012?
You can see the posts about the earlier questions by clicking the links above.
Some very cool new tools came out in 2011 and I learned to use them in varying degrees of competency as required. A few, in particular, have really changed my working life online so let’s share those first before going on to talk about what I have learned in the more esoteric, mind / success thinking arena during 2011.
So this is a post in two parts:
- Things I Have Learned (To Use)
- Things I Have Learned (About Myself / My Business / Business In General)
These tools are all used every day by me and highly recommended.I would like to point out that I’m really rubbish at reading instructions or watching tutorial videos, except where absolutely necessary, so the following tools are largely quite intuitive to use if you are a Creator / Star profile, with ADD / OCD and a 9 on the Kolbe Index Quickstart (but 2-3 on everything else!).
As many as possible are one time payments which is one of the things I look for as I really hate being held over a barrel to monthly payments, except by aWeber and TotalBusinessCart, both of which are the absolute foundations for any internet business and which I use in different ways. Hmmm, a blog post there methinks.
Disclaimer: These are affiliate links but that won’t add any more to your purchase price OR you can find the sites easily enough by searching Google if you don’t’ want to spread the love.
Catalyst Theme For WordPress – One Time Payment
The Catalyst Theme for WordPress is a fully customise-able premium theme for WordPress that is beloved by many people I know and I have it on all of my sites / blogs (although I have to outsource the customising of it as it’s a bit TOO detailed for me with my patience / attention span!).
You can make it look like a normal blog till you find your way around it (see pic) and really start customising it, you can put a landing page in front like TheBusinessSuccessFactory.com has, which looks like a normal website or you can really go to town as my sister Heather has with making it look like a blog, but with different header pics and widgets on each page. The main point about Catalyst is that the search engines love it and you can make it do pretty much anything, with a wide range of “skins” that sit on the main framework to suit every kind of business.
OptimizePress – One Time Payment
OptimizePress is a premium theme for WordPress that is used, usually in a sub-directory (but it can be your main theme) when you want to create brilliant squeeze pages, sales pages and membership site pages. The templates are great and every element is totally customiseable. Build by an internet marketer who really knew what they wanted themselves and it just works beautifully.
As someone as “graphic design challenged” as me, it helps me make my pages look very presentable, then I bring in one of my outsourced experts to make them truly beautiful when I know they convert or work, depending on what I wanted them to do.
It also has a built in “product launch process” built in which is really easy to learn and it makes your marketing efforts evergreen – I run my “3 Secrets Of Business Success” videos on it and get great pleasure out of seeing the emails come in every day, that tell me people are signing up to watch them and being moved through the sequence of videos, ending up being offered the chance to join my mentoring programme at the end. Best of all it’s all automated.
Every time I use OptimizePress I marvel at what a GREAT quality and value product it is, worth far more than they charge for it, but don’t tell them I said so LOL.
WPWishlist – One Time Payment
Another FANTASTIC quality and value product, WPWishlist makes creating a membership site on your WordPress website an absolute doddle. Their tutorials are great too.
Believe me, in the Money Gym we tried EVERY kind of membership site software and I even set everything up on Kajabi for a while, but then WPWishlist came along and blew me away. You can read my earlier review of Kajabi v Wishlist here if you want to.
WPWishlist works beautifully with PayPal, integrates with most email list hosts, allows for many different membership levels, on different sites if you want it to and host it on an anonymous type domain name, allows sequential delivery of content, membership periods of 1 week to 1 year or more, if someone stops paying it locks them out of your content.
An utterly brilliant product and if you are at all interested in recurring income, and you should be, this is a must-have, easy to learn, plugin.
PopUpDomination – One Time Payment
Another fantastic product that just keeps getting better with every upgrade is PopUpDomination. The latest version not only allows you to put a sexy fade-out background lightbox popup, you can now put different pop-ups on different pages of your site, you can use video popups (how cool is that?!!) and you can see how well your popups are performing.
There is apparently a standalone version, for peeps not on WordPress (apparently there are some still!) but I don’t know anyone who has used that one, so if you do, why not use the comments box there to let us know how it does?
PopUpDomination is a must-have tool as it quadruples your signups to your mailing list at least.
(You do have to pay tiny amounts for the upgrades but they are not compulsory and they are always worth the investment)
Easy WP SEO – One Time Payment
Easy WP SEO is a new toy for me, and not that old generally, but one I wish I’d had for a lot longer. This plugin helps you work out if your blog posts or pages are as fully optimised as possible for your targeted key phrase – as you are writing them.
I’m still getting to grips with this one but again, it’s a brilliant bit of kit and worth many times the investment.
Market Samurai – One Time Payment
I am not so well versed in Market Samurai as I would like to be and I’ve got no excuse really because their tutorials are great. I find it a bit slow to use but that’s because it’s out trawling the internet in real time and pulling back really relevent results.
However, I have learned to use it to do more sophisticated searches than The Google Keywords Tool allows and it’s a bit more reliable in terms of the numbers it returns, so you can get a better feel for whether the keywords you are targeting will actually bring you any traffic, and whether that traffic is buyer traffic or tyre-kicker traffic. Fairly essential distinction as I found out after getting loads of “feeder” sites to Position One, Page One of Google but then not enjoying any traffic to speak of.
You can also set up Market Samurai to tell you where your own site is performing in terms of position, backlinks etc., which is useful if a bit depressing at times!
Stealth Seminars – Recurring Monthly Payment
I used Stealth Seminars extensively this year with my “17 Things” webinar and it’s a great tool for creating evergreen promotions too. Stealth Seminars has a few advantages over Optimise Press notably that it works brilliantly with various list hosts so that you can send customised emails to people depending on where they watch up to in your webinar.
It was a bit like using a sledgehammer to crack a nut for me as I only got around to putting one webinar on Stealth Seminars, but if you create lots of everygreen webinars you can copy your projects over and just change the settings and videos easy enough, it’s relatively easy to learn and the support from Geoff and his team is fantastic.
That’s it for the things I have learned to use so let’s move on to the things I have learned in 2011, either about myself or business generally.
For your convenience…
- What Are My Greatest Achievement / What Am I Most Proud Of?
- What Are My Biggest Disappointments?
- What Did I Learn in 2011? Both learned to use & learned about myself/business.
- What Are The Top 3 Things I Learned In 2011?
- How Did I Limit Myself In 2011 & How Can I Avoid Doing That Again?
These questions were originally asked of me, in his ezine, by my mentor Rich Schefren, and you can subscribe to his excellent ezine here >>>
