My new year lesson for 2012

Brand new year brand new resolutions right? I wish . Nonetheless for those who 2011 was a roller coaster , welcome to the new year, but dont rest too long on your laurels because if 2011 was a simple gust, 2012 will be a tornado!

So be prepared.

One really important lesson I learned in 2011 was ALL THE NEGATIVE EFFECTS OF SPREADING YOURSELF TOO WIDE!

By this I mean working on all sorts of things at the same time with no real focus.

I almost forgot my main reason for my past success was an effect I call the osmosis effect, whereby your success in one thing sips through to another project just easily without you doing so much.

You arent supposed to force the osmosis effect, its to come by naturally.

The best way to explain this is with this phrase which says “Be so good at whatever you do that no one can afford to ignore you”

Last year I tried to be so good at EVERYTHING I did which didnt pay in much in returns mainly because I wasnt focused enough on ONE THING.

Here’s a quick recap of what I did last year and what I wanted to do:

 

 

1.Launched 2 wordpress plugins: Smatr SM Bar and Facebook Viral Plugin

2.Held back the launch of a 3rd wordpress plugin

3.Launched my first  free iphone application  SmatrCalculator

4.Launched optinboxdesign.com

5.Stopped and resumed blogging

6.Wanted to write 2 ebooks

 

 

Seems pretty crazy right? And all this for a one band team! Who the hell launches 3 wordpress plugins, 1 iphone app and starts a new business all in 1 year? I will tell you, one crazy dude preparing to FAIL!

Yes thats right, no focuse is the right recipe for failure!

I didnt even bother writing how each venture turned out because I was greatly dissapointed with each. Below are my sales figures

 

 

Facebook Viral Plugin: Sold  0 Copies

Smatr SM Bar: Was discontinued

SmatrCalc : Nearly 1k downloads [free] no revenue

 

 

The only exception has been optinboxdesign , which so far has brought in 1 sale and things seem to be very encouraging mainly because of the increased attention I give to it.

So the trend shows me, the more focus I give to one venture, the more likely it is to succeed!

So the take away here is that , with my experience in juggling many venture’s and business ideas, its most rewarding to focus one idea no matter how great the other ideas are.

So my resolution this year 2012

I will dedicate each quarter of the year to one business idea. And here is how its going to be

1st quarter: Optinboxdesign

2nd quarter: iphone applications

3rd quarter: ebook

4th quarter: wordpress plugins

That way I have 3 months of dedication to try and get each to a standing point!

So lets rock on and see what the new year brings to us!!!!

15. January 2012 by Martin
Categories: Case Study: Optin Box Design, Musings | 24 comments

Contest: Win a FREE optin box design + 1 Week Income Challenge round up

This post is dedicated to Alex Mathopoulos for keeping me accountable throughout the challenge despite everything. Thanks

 

So last week, someone apparently set himself the goal to generate income within 7 days! Yes 7 days! Thats pretty crazy right? If you ask me yes.

I set myself that goal sometime Tuesday the 22nd November last week.

And the goal was to make some $$$ within 7 days from scratch with a brand new idea, and a brand new website.

So here today is the conclusion of the challenge, which by the way is a couple of days late [precisely 3 days late].

And to be fair to the challenge, I did nothing on the plan , hence I officially stopped working on it on Tuesday this week.

[To be honest I was working Facebook Viral Plugin, hence I couldnt get this post out earlier]

So this is what this post will cover, sub divided in headings so you can head on over to whichever draws your interest most:

1.What the business idea was, and what I did – Beginning of post

2.Lessons I learned – Middle of post

3.Competition/Giveaway [someone gets to win something ] – Scroll right to the end 

 

So read on and thanks for sticking with me through this and read on:

 

1.The Business Idea

So here I am setting myself a challenge to start earning some form of income within 1 week, with no clue of what I wanted to do.

Just because my buddy @sal_greco had me all pumped up with his absolutely fabulous product the 4hourpower [which by the way is coming out on the 4th Dec @ 4pm how cool is that! Go check it out]

SO back to the story, I’m here looking for an idea on what I can do within one week and start earning profits.

First off I had to characterize or filter my though process:

1.It had to be automated ie I didnt want to be the one doing all the work. I wanted to be able to get up, check my email  and then push some buttons and voila

2.It had to be quick to set up ie i needed to be able to have everything set up within one-two days [remember I had 7 days for this]

3.It couldnt be a product. Even though I love developing softwares, I sure couldnt develop one within 7 days, bug free and of premium quality so it couldnt be that.

It also couldnt be an ebook because ebooks are a dime a dozen and you need some sort of social proof/credibility before someone could be interested in your ebook

4.There had to be a demand for it. The type of demand which will bring in enough orders weekly/monthly to be able to make a decent profit.

Now that I had my filters set, I had to think of different potential things I could do.

What I knew for sure was

1.I wasnt going to be a product

2….Hence the only option was to offer a service

With this in mind, I hit another stumbling block.

Being the university final year student with a thousands of words to write for my project, I couldnt learn a skill in 7 days and become so good at it I could charge for it!!!

So NO SKILLS, WHAT COULD I DO?

To be honest, ive got no single skill, na-da nothing nothing nothing. I dont mean to bash myself but im just being honest. Im just like most people out there, who watch others in awe.

But I didnt let it put me down. I didnt even think of it as defficiency to be skill-less :0

So I was left with the only option of finding someone who had the skills to offer the services I needed!

What skill did you want? You dont even know what service you’re going to offer…yet!

I went back to the drawn table [nah no drawing table, just my room] and checked my filters quickly:

-Demand

-Service

-Quick

Lots of ideas of different services kicked through my head, but for time purposes I wouldnt list everything here. I’ll just talk about how I got to it .

What is currently in demand in the blogosphere?

ie what could bloggers do with more.

I realized popup domination had  ramped a lot of craze regarding opt-ins, subscribers, lists etc. And with its success other plugins sprouted offering gazillion places to put in your box to maximize your conversions

In addition to that  you constantly had bloggers say the money’s in the list.

So this proved there was demand [my market research is crazy i know, no numbers etc, just speculation]

So what could I do to tap into this?

Come in the service

So I knew it had to do with subscribers/bloggers and that the aim was to help bloggers

-increase their conversions

But what did I know about conversions? NOTHING

So that was a closed route.

What else did I find?

I noticed that all the opt-in boxes, popups [call it whatever you like] were to generic and all looked a like.

And with bloggers like Pat Flynn emphasizing on standing out  , my light bulbs flashed.

I could offer bloggers the following service:

-Design their opt-in boxes for them, branding it and hence making it stand out to increase conversions.

So I offered to provide a custom design for their:

-Header optin box

-Side bar optin box

-In post optin box

All in 1 affordable package

Was it quick?

Yes, its quick and I could totally get this going in 7 days. All I needed was

1.domain name

2.Hosting

3.Theme/landing page

4.Set it up

5.Someone to do the designs

6.Market it

So I went to work on my new idea. Literally this took like 1-2 days thinking including a couple of the steps above.

1.What domain name could I use?

Again here I have NO SKILLS and that includes SEO so I couldnt and dont even have the materials to do some keyword research.

So I used the ole way to do research:

What will a potential client/customer type in to find my service?

Custom Optin Box Design

Popup Box design

Custom popup box design

etc

etc

I liked the names I got, but I didnt want something too long, and I also wanted something which was going to brandable:

So I settled for:

optinboxdesign

I then hopped unto my usual domain registrar godaddy and got the domain name :

www.optinboxdesign.com

Expenditure: -$7.99**

Revenue:$0

**That was after using a coupon code which I found here 

 

2.Hosting

I use hostgator for all my websites and so far so good. I actually started with both hostgator and godaddy via Michael Dunlops email course.

Where I also learned how to set up my nameservers [only skill ive got]

Given my hosting plan I didnt want to factor the cost of hosting Optinboxdesign because it didnt change my monthly fee [so you can call it fixed cost]

So my expenditure and revenue is still the same at this stage as above

3.Theme

Ive been an avid customer and browser of Envato websites mainly because ive got a thing for good design [even though i cant design].

So it was obvious that my website theme was going to come from there!

So the first dilemma I had at this stage:

WordPress Vs HTML static page

Each have their pro’s and con’s and given that ive got no skill/knowledge I had to go with which one was:

-cheapest

Getting a premium theme for wordpress could have set be back a hefty $35 which I could use elsewhere, hence buying an html landing page from envato at $8 made my decision easier

Plus I didnt really want to use the website as a content management system. I wanted it to be static ie set in stone

So what I did:

I went to ThemeForest

 

Clicked on Marketing

Then filtered the results to display landing pages only

 

 

So now I could browse and select what theme I wanted for my website. Whatever theme it was it had to :

-Have a slider to display portfolio images and what i had to offer

-Easy on the eyes in terms of colors

-Short and sweet in order not to loose the clients attention

These are all things I personally will like to see on a page as a potential client

-What you do

-What you offer

-How it can help me [aka benefits]

-How much it will cost me

So after scanning through the themes I had my top 3:

Appetizer

Korporate

Rotifier

I chose the Appetizer landing page for no particular reason other than that I was pleasing to the eyes and had all the sections I needed to use.

Expenditure: -$17.99**

Revenue:$0

** The theme costs $8 but you need to deposit some money to get that discount otherwise its $2 added unto it.

Its just some  marketing trick these websites use for example you want to purchase the theme youve got to deposit say $12,

you get it for $8 and now youve got a $4 balance, which just stays in their account till you decide to BUY AGAIN, so its basically money saved to spend later.

4.Setting it up

Now that I was all themed up I had to set it up on the website.

I could learn how to do this, but again I am busy and I needed to have some design changes made which I didnt have the skill to.

So what I did, I took a snapshot of the live page, with a chrome app called Awesome Screenshot which is a total must if you do any thing online.

With it you can take screenshots and annotate theme.

So I did this and anotated the changes I wanted done on the website . I needed

-sample optin boxes for the slider image

-some more samples for portfolio

-client testimonials

-Icons to illustrate benefits/feautures

-samples to illustrate what the clients boxes could look like

So this is what that screenshot looked like:

 

This is what I then had to get someone to do for me as well as find

-Sample optinboxes

-Icons

-Client testimonials

a.Sample optin boxes

This part im going to skip as this is covered later on in the story

b.Icons

For icons I needed images/icons which illustrated best this messages

1.Excellent customer service

2.Optimized optin box designs for higher conversions

3.Fast turn around

4.Unlimited revisions

I used “google” to search for free icons I could use and I got a few, and this is what I settled with:

 

So that was that, and I had the icons to-do ticked!

c.Client testimonials

This was to add some sort of social proof plus add some more items to our portfolio.

But seen the difficulty I had in getting people to try Facebook Viral Plugin for FREE, which I totally believe is an awesome product, I decided to scrap this part from the design.

So that was done, now I needed to send the details unto someone to set it up.

 

I used odesk and with a budget of $35 for setting up and doing some ad hoc changes, I got a few applicants and eventually had the site up and running.

Another thing to note in setting up the page is not to forget:

-Google analytics

-Buy now/order now button. I personally used a custom paypal button so everything goes straight to paypal and there’s no middleman. But this has its own pro’s and cons [Pros: No 3rd party fees Cons: No affiliates sign up]

Expenditure: -$52.99

Revenue:$0

 

5.Someone to do the designs

THIS WAS THE BIG PART

This was were all  my time was wasted. This was what could make or break the model I had setup. Hence this was really important.

Actually, this single part alone affected this whole challenge by 99%. Everything was done, everything was ready but the person who will make the clock to start ticking!

I was looking for someone who could design great looking optin boxes which were going to increase the conversion rates of my clients.

But I was looking for the impossible from the onset!

You dont get cheap AND quality in the same sentence

But I was determined to make my sentence HAVE IT!

I could do with an expensive AND quality BUT my potential clients/customers will not be willing to pay that much to get their optin boxes designed, plus it wasnt a guarantee metric/investment which could sky rocket their optins rates.

These changes were ones which only the top bloggers made to optimize their blog to the optimum to guarantee max subscribers.

Other bloggers just couldnt afford to invest that much on this part of their blog as the opportunity cost is rather high [eg you could purchase a copy of Facebook Viral Plugin instead ]

So I definitely had to get cheap and quality in the same sentence, and ALSO because I needed a healthy margin

Pricing point?

I had two aims from my pricing:

-make enough margins to make it worth it

-make it cheaper/ cheap enough for my clients to afford

So I had two people to focus on, my margins and my clients satisfaction ie value for money and another part in this, THE DESIGNERS CUT. So it was empirical I got the right pricing point and the right designer at the right price.

SO what did I settle with?

I decided to launch at $57 for all 3 designs ie

Header opt-in

Sidebar opt-in

In-post opt-in

This price was just breaking even, ie no profit. But the price will later increase to $97 when I:

-Recover my investment [monetary and time wise]

-Get enough clients for my portfolio

SO back to the designer

Trust me, getting the right staff can make or break WHATEVER you do. This is crucial and now this explains why the services Chris Ducker offer with hiring VA’s is such a success.

There’s so much to deal with:

-Proffessionalism

-Reliability

-Trustworthy

-Hardworking

-Qualified

-Decent english & communication

-Availability

All these are important qualities which you’ll be looking for. And given that its over the net its kind of hard to judge all these factors.

Hence I was on to getting the right designer, who understood the type of designs I wanted. I wanted clean optin box designs like the ones in the following links:

http://0.s3.envato.com/files/1290861/preview.jpg

http://3.s3.envato.com/files/2583138/preview.jpg

http://3.s3.envato.com/files/284221.jpg

http://1.s3.envato.com/files/298307.jpg

http://3.s3.envato.com/files/1155481/form_ad.jpg

 

I wanted something clean, proffessional, something premium worthy.

I therefore tried various recruitment avenues I was familiar with:

1.Odesk

I tried odesk, and the process wasnt quite smooth. Initially I got lots of response but their designs werent quite it.

They were the ones you see every where, the generic ones internet marketers use, promote and bundle package and sell.

I found : cheap but not quality

I needed something different.

So odesk didnt cut it.

2.Different designer forums [ie dribbble, forrst,deviantart]

I went on a crusade scouring all those websites dribbble, forrst and deviantart trying to find the talent I was looking for.

And as you would expect with the quality in those sites I got what I was looking for, but at an exorbitant price, so I couldnt proceed with them.

Their hourly rate would have put me in debt right from the start. So it was just normal for me to go elsewhere.

I found : quality but not cheap

So they didnt cut it either.

3.Enter Digital Points Forum

 

My first try with DP was just to post the job ad I had used on odesk there in the forums and expecting to have some takers.

Did it work? NO.

It seems like thats not what people are looking for ie long term commitment from the upfront.

So what did I do?

I decided to organise a contest. The contest was to design an optin box using some information provided.

I provided the contest cash prize and held it for 2 days. By this time I was running out of time for completing the challenge on time.

On the last day, before the end of the challenge, I got an entry, only 1 entry of the contest, and behold it was a winning one.

I got a designer who could provide exactly everything I needed. He could:

-Design

-Code

-Set-up the boxes on the clients site

That was the complete package I was looking for. I quickly paid him for his winning design and talked him into committing to my plan.

I had a designer now on board.

Expenditure:-$109.99

Revenue:$0

So what was the finish product?

You can check it out live here

 

And let me know what you think of it.

 

6.Marketing

The contest had ended by the time I had completed step 5 above hence I could not market anything while keeping with the challenge rules.

But if it hadnt ended I had I planned to do the following

1.Organize a giveaway contest on SocialTriggers .

Why: Because Derek, has been crazy mad about header opt-ins and their conversion rates. So it will just be befitting to host a contest for his readers to get a chance to win a custom design of theirs.

 

So I ask for your help here. If there is one thing only you can do today, can you just click on this link below and tweet to him :

 

JUST CLICK HERE

 

Thanks for the try guys! At least we got his attention

2.Design free optin boxes and pitch them to potential clients [bloggers] with the aim that they end up purchasing it.

i.e I will go to a random site, pay for their boxes to be designed, and then pitch to them our service, and if they like what they saw they could then buy it or have unlimited revisions + free installation

3.Target the big dogs, offering free designs for possible a shout out.

For example I have been following Pat Flynn’s blog for a long while now and I noticed his opt-in boxes.

I had a couple of them designed for free just for him, but he doesnt know yet.

This is how they look like:

 

So if you like them and admire my effort could you please let him know  by tweeting to him? Who knows, he might end up using them

JUST CLICK HERE

 

Lessons learned

1.The hiring the right staff could make or break your project/business/muse

2.You can do anything so long as you are deteermined

3.You musnt have ANY skill to accomplish what you want. [ though it helps to have them ]

4.Everything takes time. I didnt find my designer until the last but one day of the challenge.

5.You’ll get help only if you help yourself first

6.Dont be afraid to set a price for your product if you believe its right

7.People trust you, and not your service/product. SO gain that trust

8.Offer something you will need/use/buy

9.Always be honest, and transparent. Nothing beats honesty

10.Be ready to work your ass off to make it happen!

So did I win the challenge?

Absolutely NOT!

I didnt make any REVENUE, talk more about profit. In fact I was in debt by the end.

BUT

I created something in 7 DAYS! something I could now build on. Something I love and want to do.

So what about OptinBoxDesign ?

I am going to focus on

SEO: To rank high for some keywords and generate organic traffic

Freelance sites: I may look into hiring a VA to bid on freelance sites for design work

Hold more contests/Giveaways: I will be holding more contests and giveaways to promote the service

 

CONTEST-GIVEAWAY TIME

You’re lucky if you read right up to here and I must admit I personally wouldnt be able to read up to here. So kudos to you!

What am I giving away?

1 opt-in box design package.

This includes

-1 header optin

-1 sidebar optin

-1 in post optin

See examples on www.optinboxdesign.com

Custom designed for your blog. Done within 72 hours and installed free plus unlimited revision.

ALL THESE FOR FREE!!!!!

How to enter?

1.Follow me on Twitter : @martinsaysjump

2.Like my facebook page: Facebook/njmartinentrepreneur

3.MOST IMPORTANT:

Get someone to NOMINATE you for this giveaway and WHY YOU . [In the comments section]

Ps: you can nominate yourself  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

03. December 2011 by Martin
Categories: Case Study: Optin Box Design, Musings | 12 comments