Automate Your Business

Archive for the ‘Getting Things Done’ Category

How many times have you purchased something with some sort of reprint or private label rights, intending to use it for one of your sites/mailing lists, and then forgotten about it?

One thing I’ve started doing is IMMEDIATELY taking action when I purchase something like this.

Now, the action isn’t to blast out an email to that mailing list.

It’s to add a note. But the note goes in a special place – my Email Marketing Checklist. This is a nice Excel spreadsheet that has columns for each mailing list, and rows for certain types of mails (link to another site, promote another mailing list, promote my own product X, send an article or tip, etc).

Then when I purchase a product with rights, I immediately add a note in the appropriate cells in the spreadsheet about the product. And I colour that cell yellow to highlight that there’s action to take.

Then, once a week, I have a task to go through that spreadsheet, and turn “yellow to-dos” to “green dones”!

Nice and simple, 100% guaranteed to work.

I read an article recently by a very well known marketer, who was explaining a particular process. It was a great process he’d talked about – one of those things that you read over and over again in different places, and suddenly you read it another time and it clicks into place. Maybe this writer wrote in a way that suited my thought processes or something…

Anyway this process relied on a web application (a free one), that you would set as your browser homepage. I wasn’t keen on that, as it would mean losing my existing browser homepage, which has links to my various sites and applications that I use on a day-to-day basis.

So I wrote something quick and dirty using AutoIt. Took me about 3 hours. However, there was one thing I wanted to do that I couldn’t find out how to do with AutoIt, even after searching the forum. Someone had written some code in the forum that looked like it met my needs, but in practice that code interfered with other applications.

So I looked elsewhere. After a bit of time trying to find the most common terms for the code I wanted to write, I found some online… written in C++, a language about which I know nothing.

Last night, over my nightcap, I submitted a request at Rentacoder. By this morning, I had 4 people submit a quote. Three of them basically said “I’ll do it for $x”, but nothing else.

One offered a bit of info about his background, and by looking at his history I learned he’d worked on something similar before. So similar, that both myself and the initiator of the other project referenced the same bit of code that I’d found online.

After about 6 mails to and fro today, we’ve ironed out a couple of “gotchas” spotted by the developer, and he can start on Monday. And although we’ve not agreed the final price, he’s given me a ball-park figure which he’ll pin-down to a specific figure in his next email.

In the meantime, I’ve approached the author of that original article (you’ll find out who it is later), and said what I’m up to. He’s interested in seeing the software.

So, if he’s interested enough to share it with his list, I’ll be offering it as a freebie list builder. It should be interesting to see how big the number is that subscribe to my list as a result, as this guy has been around for years – one of the first names I recognised as being “one of the good guys” when I started online.

Plus, the software is generic enough that I’ll be able to propose similar ventures on a regular basis, as this topic comes up again and again.

Plus of course, I’ll be offering the software here as well!

I’m hoping to have the complete software ready to roll at the end of next week, and most of that will be waiting time for the contractor to work his magic. Elapsed time on my part will be about 6 hours, I estimate, including testing his output. Add a couple of hours for a subscription page/download page, and a few follow-up messages, maybe an OTO as well, and that’s a normal working day for something that could result in a massive list size very quickly.

If you’re like me, you’ve got a pile of stuff that you’ve downloaded and not used. They could be reports, multimedia files, ZIPs, software, whatever.

Here’s a trick. Use Firefox. Use CTRL+J to open the “downloads” window, and there, you’ll see all the things you’ve downloaded.

Each download has two links next to it: “Open” and “Remove”.

“Open”… er… opens the file.

“Remove” removes it from that list (but doesn’t delete the file itself).

Don’t remove things till you’ve opened and taken action with that download (eg, read the report, installed the software, watched the video).

And keep that window open at all times.

Or, you could get hold of my File Tagger software, and it will happily show you the number of files that you’ve not yet flagged to say that you’ve read them.