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Working hard and hardly working September 7, 2007

Posted by Niels in : Personal, Work , 8 comments

I took my name off of Pickup 101’s upcoming Seattle workshop. For what I get paid, it’s just not worth losing my entire weekend.

My understanding is that Mystery Method instructors get paid 20-30 times as much as we do for heading a workshop. Some people would be bitter about that, but I never really expected this to be a source of income for me. I’ve gotten a lot of non-monetary rewards from teaching. Hearing about pay discrepancies like that just motivates me more to get my own business going.

I’ll continue to teach in London for as long as those workshops last, but if I want to make money it’s time to do my own thing.

I’m still hammering away at the thirty day challenge. We got a little behind, but I’m finally up to Day 23 - “From traffic to conversion”. Our site’s getting about 40 hits a day but we haven’t made any sales yet.

The 30 Day Challenge guys say to expect about 1 sale for every 200 visitors, so we’re not doing too bad, and today we installed a new tracking link. We can now tell how many visitors are coming to our site, how many are clicking through to our Amazon sales page, and hopefully soon we will know how many of the people who view the sales page are actually buying.

In the meantime, we’re throwing up more content on other platforms around the web. We’re starting to realize that the phrase we’ve optimized for may not be attracting users who want to spend money. For example, you could get to the top of the google rankings for “home depot hours peoria”, but you’d have a tough time selling anything because your visitors are all looking for one very specific piece of information.

Craig and I are going to plow through the rest of the challenge regardless, though. We’re learning a ton and when we start over from scratch in a few weeks we’ll be able to do it right.

Your thoughts?

Great people, great life. Today kicked ass. September 5, 2007

Posted by Niels in : Personal, Work , 1 comment so far

I met a guy at the NWIAG mixer who runs a fashion consulting service for businessmen. That’s pretty similar to the social training classes I’m interested in, so I set up a lunch meeting with him at the Columbia Tower Club. We connected, traded some great ideas, then I headed off to work on my Thirty Day Challenge stuff (we’re already up to #6 on Google and are getting traffic, now the question is if the traffic will buy…). Hanging out in the Tower Club Library, I met a woman who used to work with the Dale Carnegie Institute who wants to chat more about our respective takes on social development (awesome) and another woman who is a business coach and suggested Discover U (the Seattle version of the San Francisco Learning Annex, an adult training center) as a great way to get started teaching. Another fantastic idea!

Craig then discovered another networking event through Zoodango four blocks away, which we of course headed to. There were only two people there, the CEO of Zoodango and one of his friends. Both of them had been contestants on past seasons of The Apprentice, so we traded reality TV stories and business ideas until it was time to head to…

Volunteer ushering with Alexandra! We saw a great play (The Mojo and the Sayso) at the ACT Theatre, for free of course, because we were volunteer ushers. The nice thing about volunteer ushering is that you can take any open seat, which was how we found ourselves front row and center. I was close enough to blow out the candles onstage.

After the show we headed off to a free dinner at one of Seattle’s finest restaurants. Dinner was delicious, but the chocolate-ginger cake with muscatago (? some kind of sugar cane that only grows in volcanic ash?) ice cream blew my mind. Drool…

Your thoughts?

Copywriting is king, even on Craigslist September 4, 2007

Posted by Niels in : Personal, Work , 2 comments

Thanks to good copy, I sold a desk in a few hours that sat on Craigslist for an entire week with no takers. My original ad was very traditionally sales oriented - it listed benefit after benefit, then covered the features, then had four pictures of the desk. The ad was up on Craigslist for almost a week and I had only one person contact me.

A few days after I listed the desk, I listed my old bed as well. The ad was very simple, basically saying that I got the bed off of Craiglist a year ago for $50 and now wanted to pass it along by selling it for $40. I made sure to include a benefit rather than a feature in the headline (”relax in a queen-size bed” vs. “a relaxing queen-size bed”) and listed the features at the end of the ad. I figured since I was only selling the bed for $40, I wouldn’t need good copy.

My phone rang off the hook all weekend while I was at Bumbershoot. It good so bad I finally just took the ad down. I put it up again last night and sold the bed soon after waking up in the morning.

Apparently, that was good copy. Know your audience, build rapport, and all that.

So I threw out my desk ad and pasted in the bed ad, replaced the word “bed” with “desk”, took out all but one photo, reposted the ad, and within hours had sold my desk for $80. The buyer even threw in a few extra dollars to replace the saran wrap that I used to hold the drawers shut for transport.

Good copy makes a huge difference. Learn to do it right.

Your thoughts?

Adventures at Bumbershoot September 3, 2007

Posted by Niels in : Personal , add a comment

Had a very successful weekend at Seattle’s Bumbershoot Music Festival. Got free tickets from Alexandra and once inside proceeded to score free tickets to a comedy club, free movie passes, another $140 of free Bumbershoot tickets, VIP entry to the Bumbershoot shows, discovered an awesome cabaret to attend in the very near future, and signed a 12-year old fan’s chest. Oh, and the shows and music were pretty good, too.

Your thoughts?