The Four Hour Work Week Project – Allison Reynolds

About a year ago someone I follow on Twitter was saying how their major site had been hacked and that they had cleaned it all up but Google was still treating them like persona non grata. They were at a loss what to do. So I sent a tweet to @mattcutts and asked if he could do a friend a favour by explaining what was still wrong with his site. Matt answered straight away.

Sometimes the most obvious things are the most difficult to perceive.

Like last week where I was all in a huff ‘n’ puff about why was it that people all around me were forming these great business partnerships and yet none seemed forthcoming to me. Now usually my self esteem has oodles of spare to get me over rough patches but the day job is really, REALLY unpleasant at the moment and my reserves of fairy dust are low. So I said to myself, why waste time speculating… just freaking ASK. So I did.

I follow 200-odd people on Twitter and so scoured through the list and picked 24 people that I admire, respect and are go-gettin’ types. I set up a Survey Monkey survey asking 5 basic questions.

1. Would they do business with me

2. Had they ever thought of doing business with me

3. What are my strengths

4. What are my weaknesses

5. What advice would they offer me

In the first 24 hours 12 responded and in 48 hours 14 have. Which in survey terms is an awesome response ratio.

So I got answers – great answers!

You might want to give this a go too. make sure you are wearing your thick skin rain-coat because when you ask for brutally honest opinion, some of it it will sting (but only because ALREADY KNOW

This time a vibrator in….coffee beans? Like it has just fallen out of someone’s kitchen canister…. er…wha?

What’s this an ad for? If you hadn’t heard of Market Samurai how would you know you wanted it? I find this really odd…

This isn’t business related in any way. It is a subject that has bothered me for some time and daily there are stories that add to my ill ease about the path western society is heading. The new ism is fatism (or obeseism if you like). Like racism and sexism, in many cases the victims have no say over what their weight is and yet the media (and many of us) celebrates deriding this group of people.

The issue isn’t necessarily eating habits. In the 1970′s the average British/Australian diet was 100′s of calories higher than the current one. Exercise wasn’t “exercise” back then, it was playing outside till the lights went out; or if a teen hitting the disco and burning off the zillions of calories you consumed during the day. Worrying about weight was not something we as a society was overly concerned about.

Children today are not permitted free play like back in the day. They are ferried too and from music and ballet classes by car. God forbid letting your child walk to school – what are you? some kind of child neglecting parent? don’t you know there are thousands of pedophiles out there just dying to get their hands on your kids>!>! The calories may be fewer, but so is the activity.

These children grow up a size that they have no control over, and by the time they have control the damage is done. I was listening to an interview on ABC Radio about a 27 year old woman who had lap band surgery. She was 107 kilos and had been dieting since she was 7. After 20 YEARS of messing around with her metabolism it was completely stuffed and the only solution was invasive, potentially dangerous, surgery.  This woman has as much chance of naturally changing her size as a blck person does at changing the colour of their skin.

So I wonder whether the next time the TV starts telling you that the obese are causing damage to the health system and the economy whether you will continue to buy into the new ism.

I have always wanted to own Allison.com.  Alas the chances of me doing so depends on Rolls Royce going out of business and I don’t wish that on them at all. You see, back in 94 they acquired Allison Engines a US motor company and the .com domain. They stuck an auto redirect on it to www.rollsroyce.com and there ended that story. The Allison.net address is owned by an email address reseller for people wanting an email account ending in allison.net.

So I did the next best thing and bought allison.co . It didn’t come as easy as the other.co domains I bought, they were simple transactions against which there was no opposition (pretty easy when you are buying for micro niches) but someone had also wanted allison.co and so the battle began.

Actually it went the way of most auctions with the person who wanted the domain dropped a bid on 15 minutes before close and I waited till 5 minutes to go and kept bidding till I topped their proxy bid. There were no further bids from them and voila!

Whether .co is weighty with Google or other search methods time will tell. Literally, new TLD have the disadvantage going up against aged domains which Google does use in their search algorithm. Good news though with Google has pledged to treat .co sites as global sites unless they have Colombian content (keep your cocaine sales to a .com if you want a bigger market).

Phew! For the last two weeks I have been laying low and not talking or posting anything about the Reality Challenge; and for good reason. I had to make sure that the people participating actually turned up under their own steam. That might seem like an unwelcoming kind of way to run things, but to get the best people who have the best chance of completing what they start, the initial qualifying step is for them to actually do what they said they would do.

The first batch of people that were coming last week all failed the “turning up” test. I bet each one of them thought “well it’s OK –  Someone else will be there and I am too ashamed to send an email to say I am not coming” (thanks to the one person that did email to drop out ).

This week however I had the opposite with  self motivated (and fabulous!) people turning up. We had a great session and I have high hopes for their success as we move through the Challenge.

There is only one “secret” to success and that is turning up and putting in the work. Common sense really.

If you are not aware of  Ed Dale ‘s The Challenge (formally the Thirty Day Challenge) then please check it out so you know what I am talking about.

For those that have participated you probably know who I am, a short refresher.  I have completed the last 4 challenges and have been a moderator for the last 2 years. I am usually the naughty one, making inappropriate comments and heckling Ed. The one that looks like she is having a great time (which I am ) I am also a mad keen believer in not TALKING about working, but actually working. This year I want to try something new with people who are completing the Challenge in Sydney, Australia (keep reading if you are from other places because you can try this out too).

I am looking for people who want to focus their Challenge work and get it DONE. They need to be able to make a commitment to at least one weekly 2 hour session in a work space environment . We will work for 90 minutes  (3 x 25 minute sessions with 5 minute breaks) on the Challenge and then 30 minutes on coffee, cake, chat.  The venue will be in the Hills or Parramatta depending on numbers.  Depending on numbers and commitment there will be 1 to 3 sessions a WEEK on a Wednesday Morning, Friday Morning and Saturday Morning. You only need to come to one but can come to as many as you want as long as you commit to those days EVERY week.

Unable to commit? Well forget completing the Challenge, you won’t with that attitude.

Dates, times and venues are non-negotiable when announced. If you want to succeed this will be the first of the sacrifices you need to make.  No apologies from me, work is hard and inconvenient. Makes the rewards from that work so much sweeter.

I can guarantee you that you will get more done in that time then you will ever get done by yourself. FULL STOP.  I will also tell you I am like that bootcamp trainer, I am NOT going to accept lame half arsed excuses as to why you CAN’T. I am an ugly unfit overweight woman with Multiple Sclerosis, a full time job, and Sphynx cats, I have damn good reasons why I can’t…. but I still TURN UP and DO.  And so shall you.

If you really want to do this thing  (and I KNOW you farted around last time, wasted time, enjoyed all the warm fuzzies and kumbaya without putting in the hard yards to deserve them!) then fill in your details below.

If you are NOT in Sydney then why not set one of these up yourself. Drop me a comment if you have questions and I’ll email you back.

What’s in it for me? Well a couple of things -

1) I love to help people succeed. So yeah I’ll be getting my jollies helping you do good work.

2) More people will get to know who I am and then will pay good money for expertise/time with me.

3) I LOVE being creative, and leveraging work with creativity, and so I will be filming the whole thing to make an online reality TV show (you can opt-out of appearing on that, or you can become a STAR)

If you are positioning yourself as a market leader then you are bound to hit some negative people along the way. Whether you are the brazen “newcomer” or the entrenched expert, there will be someone, sooner or later, who is going to disagree with you.  So what do you do?

Be Professional, Always

One thing that you will have over 99% of the people in your niche is that you are deliberately there. Most people in your niche are just following their passion, enjoying the attention and rewards that come with being a market leader and have not cultivated any kind of professional demeanor to go with that position. When someone seems to be cutting in on their action, they can get quite nasty. Alas, the least professional will get the most nasty.

Currently, in one of the niches I move in, there is discord between one person who has created and run a forum for the last 18 months, and a member of that forum that was banned for giving her professional opinion (she has years of professional working experience and is studying to formalise that experience into recognised qualifications).  She has now set up her own forum focusing on that part of the niche and is moving to become a market leader, after all she does do this for a living outside of the niche.

Rather than get snotty in her new forum and cause issues with the old, she posted her forum philosophy and went on her way building her own community. Professional.

This seems to have incensed the guy who runs the other forum and he has posted his own “philosophy” that is neither professional or pleasant.  Guess whose community is going to benefit most from which leader – a community that is lead by a true professional in the field who is not engaging in mud slinging and is sharing her knowledge, or a community that is led by a leader interested in only keeping this part of the niche “for himself”.

Because you know why you are there as a market leader, have a plan and know where you are going, then you will be able to keep your cool if a situation like this crops up for you. Have an opinion, maintain that opinion if it is something you feel strongly about, but allow others to have theirs too. Do not engage in mud-slinging, rather put on the pretend business suit and turn your attention to what is best for your followers, niche and your business (and if you are doing the right thing whatever you do will benefit them all).

Niches Are Not Ladders

If you are moving to become a leader then you really need to grasp that a niche is not a narrow ladder that only one person can be at the top of.  There is not one niche where there is a single “leader” in that field – not one – none. Sooner or later there will be someone that comes along that is just as passionate, or focussed on a slightly different part of that market, and they create their own following.  You don’t need to “bump” someone off the ladder, you just need to keep moving forward and up.

If you think there is only one spot on the top then you will be focussed on the people that are already there, and not on the community that you are building. Remember you are a professional, not a prize fighter.

One of the quickest ways to expand your following is to hook up with someone else in your niche that has a following. I talked about the folly of that first forum owner ignoring the business opportunity of working with me in a previous post .  Combine my list with his list and there would have been a larger JV playing field and we both would have profited.  No matter, I shall work with the new forum to help build and expand so I can JV there.  I don’t believe there is only one place at the top, and neither does the other forum owner. We are in it for the betterment of people like us, not to make sure we are the ONLY ones to profit from our knowledge.

Thanks to Kevin Steele for the picture

One thing you need to run an internet business is occasional access to…the internet. Alas that was sorely missing on my almost week away, with a massive degradation in wireless signal reducing access to less than dial-up speeds.  Rather than get pissy about the whole thing, I spent the time thinking through how I could further increase my offerings to the Sphynx Cat world.

I soft launched another part of the Sphynx Cat Network that went quite well and has opened the door to several other opportunities. It is possible, though still not banking entirely on it, that there’s enough of a market to maybe, just maybe, earn some money from it.

We shall see.

A long weekend that is.

A stray comment from Kim McGuiness (managing director of Network Central) at a networking lunch this week has prompted me to try a little experiment. Kim was talking about how she sees me on Twitter  doing my Twitter thing and how “good” I seem at using it to communicate and network.

That started me thinking about how long I have been communicating on the internet. I was more than shocked to realise it’s …*ahem*… over 20 years!   I have definitely put in my 10,000 hours and can claim my expert badge in the field. But how to make a business out of something that comes as second nature to me?

hint hint

The plan is to see if I can get the business up and a customer signed up before I head back to work next Thursday. Oh and I will be working from our place in the bush which has it’s own set of challenges.

Can it be done? Let’s see!