the goose

I’ll admit that I was a little under-prepared for the August Mastermind.  We had just finished a sprint minutes before the start and I wasn’t entirely sure how the evening would pan out.  We’ve had about 6 at this stage and I was wondering whether or not we’d have legs for a seventh.  With August a holiday month for many, I wasn’t expecting too many.  To some suprise however – we still managed to run out of chairs.  The room was packed and a little stuffy but I was buoyed by the number of brave souls willing to forgoe sipping a Summer Chardonnay to learn a bit more about making money online.

I’m not entirely sure what the new faces at the meeting maid of the whole thing . We got stuck in with a review of the Sprint and followed on by two excellent evaluations by two regular attendees, Helen Tonetti and Nilsson Denver.  Helen put her own www.shop4training.com up for evaluation which was a rather brave thing to do given how rowdy the crowd can get.  As it stands, the room was pretty approving.

Writing this – I’m surrounded by a hive of activity as we put the finishing touches to the second golden goose sprint. For some reason, this time around, the attendees in this group all tended to have a HR background which wasn’t at all planned. Despite that – we didn’t come up with a product in any way related to HR. We had budgeted 40 hours for the project and a good quarter of that went just into brain storming ideas. We whipped out the white board and spent three hours going through about 10 potential ideas. We were searching for an idea that could be completed and available for sale in 40 hours, would continue to sell even after we had stopped working on it and would have a ‘route to market’ which we could take advantage of. In the first sprint we relied fairly heavily on ‘SEO’ to drive traffic to the site. You could say a ‘build it and they will come’ attitute was in play. That strategy is in fact paying off if a litttle slowly. This time around we searched for concepts which we could promote directly to our contact spheres. This is a little more costly in terms of the time required – but at least we had a little more control over how many sales we could generate.

The concept we plumbed for was a ‘How to Run a Speed Network’ ebook. Ebooks are great because you can create them quickly and if you have the right topic – its fairly easy for peole to understand why they should part with their had earned cash. While the plan worked out to be over 49 hours in total but in the end we only ended up spending 42.

After our initial brain storm, and had decided on our topic, it was then down to doing the work itself. We spent about 7 hours writing the book itself with the remainder of the time allocated to various types of promotion and sales activities.

With not much time to spare we had completed most of our tasks and http://www.how-to-speed-network.com was born to the world. The final step is to send out an sales email we have constructed to our contact base. Lets see how it goes!