the goose

Having become involved in a my first attempts at creating information products, I soon realised that actually – emailing out an mp3 or ebook can be a little awkward.  Paypal or worldpay can let you take payment but you still have to send out the product – which I was doing by hand. I bought an info product myself tonight and came across http://www.e-junkie.ie.  It seems like a pretty sweet solution. You give them your ebook or mp3 and they take the payments – sending the folding stuff to your paypal (or other payment gateway).

So do I.  I’ve been trying to grapple with SEO for a wihle now.  Poor old Simona has to put up with a pretty much unending stream of questions.  I just this afternoon came across a clear and concise video giving a good overview of the whole thing.  Its from an Irish company called Interledo and the presentation is clear and concise. 

‘Detail orientation’ is not my strong point and while I LOVE the idea of people finding my service over the net and paying for it there and then – I’ve never really had the patience to sit down and iron out all the tweaks of a google adwords campaign.  I’m proud to announce my first minor success and now that I see how ‘easy’ it is – I’m going to start doing a lot more of it.  

I never really considered how important the text of my ad was.  While I had spent ages putting together keyword lists for piehole.ie – I had often just piled in a single ad description.  ’Sturggling actor?  Get some easy cash via voiceover work’.  A while ago however – I tried the ‘Ad Variations’ tab on my adwords account.  This feature allows you to run two ads with different text in the same campaign.  The result was suprising.  

You’ll have to click on the image to read it properly – but the skinny is that the first ad we used titled, ‘looking for voiceover work?’ had a 50% better click through rate AND was half as expensive to to achieve a clickthrough.  So – I’m gonna save myself some money by dropping the less successful copy.  I’ll put something else in its place to see if I can come up with a better rate next time around.  

Do you have a great idea for a web business – but don’t have the time/money/skills to make it happen?

Welcome to the concept of The Sprint.  Where 3 – 5 individuals of different skill-sets get together to brainstorm, create and launch a business… in the space of a week.

If you aren’t familiar with what a sprint is – have read here

The Rules:

• The project needs to be completed by Tuesday the 26th of September at 18:00
• There should be combined effort of not more than 40 hours
• The ownership of the resulting product will rest equally amongst the members unless otherwise specified
• The product must be ‘live’ and saleable by the project deadline

When you sign up you’ll have a chance to

• Create and co-own an online business
• Learn how to evaluate and select potential business ideas
• Network with peers interested in achieving financial independence
• Understand how hard/easy it is to build an automated income
• Stop talking about ideas and do something concrete

Location: 77 Sir John Rogersons Quay, Dublin 2

The timetable for the event is as follows:

Saturday 20th of Sept, 8am

• An introduction to automating income
• Idea generation and brainstorming
• Outline project plan

You’ll then have a week to carry out any preparatory work for the final push

Saturday 27th of Sept. 8am

• Progress review
• Project completion and marketing plan

Praise for the sprint -

“I found the idea of automating income intriguing but wasn’t sure how to get started.  The sprint event was a practical first step and has given me plenty of ideas to implementin my own business” – Des McCann – WithU.ie

Investment: €150