Dot-Dash.NET

Happy New Year!

Let’s just hope that 2010 is better than 2009… which shouldn’t be too hard.

This is the time of year when people reflect on what they’ve achieved over the last year, what they want to achieve in the long run and what they need to do this year to make it happen.

For me I do that all year round so today is just another day when I’m working while most of the rest of the world is still asleep and/or nursing a hangover. That in itself brings me up to my one and only resolution for 2010:

To work less, earn more and get more done (and make more money) through passive and automated channels. So to start with let’s see how many projects and businesses I have on the go, which ones are currently yielding better results, which ones have (currently functional and potential) automation – then start looking through the 80/20 glasses. If you don’t know what the 80/20 principle is then I’ll put a link to a detailed explanation at the end of this post.

Current live projects:

Visiboost – Internet marketing services for small and growing businesses.

This is my main project and looking to explode in 2010.  So far I have automated huge amounts of the information gathering and compiling and have yet to automate a lot more and streamline current scripts and processes.  – Priority and yield – very high

Social Media Optimisation and Training.

Creating social media platforms (custom blogs and accounts with industry specific networks) and training businesses on how to leverage these for growth. No current automation in place but there is plenty of potential to automate the preparation and information gathering process. The training is done in-person and cannot be automated. Potential to also explode in 2010 and is currently yielding high results – Priority and yields – very high.

Foreign Exchange (FOREX) Currency Trading

Highly speculative and high risk currency trading that when done sensibly using correct money management and leveraging can yield consistently high returns. I won’t go into detail about actual systems but the overall strategy is to trade a system that is consistently profitable and execute a large number of small trades that risk no more that 3% of the account balance.

This can be automated using special programming languages that trade 24 hours. The goal is to develop a trading system that is no less than 70% successful and automate it so that each trade only risks 3% of the account and no more than 3 trades are open at any time.   Priority and yields – very high.

That’s probably enough to keep going until this time next year, however there’s more. These are probably just as important as the above priorities:

Play my guitar every day - even if it’s just for 5 minutes. maybe develop a learning plan/schedule and get some jazz/Latin lessons to structure learning and practice.

Maintain a steady exercise pattern – currently I do a 10k run every week, don’t let this slide for any reason. A nice ‘carry on’ resolution there. Exercise is a way of life not a resolution.

Produce an album of my own music – this is something I’ve started on and left under a (virtual) pile of papers. I’ve recorded tons of snippets of ideas, time to weave them together – collaborate with someone else if necessary

See more live music – Try and see some live music at least once every month.

New Years Resolution – Keep Going, Focus and Streamline

So that’s 2010 all planned out for Dot-Dash Innovations Ltd. Nothing new – just keep going, focus more on what’s working and ditch what isn’t.

I love the 80/20 principle – and so should you

Happy New Year!

My girlfriend tells me that like most men I’m not very good at multitasking. This isn’t good because running the business (working on as well as in it), catching good forex trades, responding to emails, chasing up outsourcers and still finding the time to do what I want to do (the reason we go into business in the first place) all require multitasking.

So what’s a budding entrepreneur to do when it’s not viable to employ full time staff yet but getting all this done requires a 28 hour working day?

Automation!

Automation is transforming the way a lot of organisations do business these days – mine included. Any repetitive computer based task never needs to be performed more than once manually. I just document the steps taken, refine the process and record it into an automated computer script that I can then run whenever I need – or schedule to run without me having to even click a start button.

Here are some examples of what is automated in my business at the moment:

Example #1 New customer creation:

Manual actions – fill in form with customer details (name, contact details, industry, website details) – 2-3 minutes

Automated actions:

1. Search customer database for customer numbers and create a new customer number
2. Enter customer details into the database
3. Create database tables for customer
4. Create customer folders on the server hard drive in the customer area correctly named with customer name/number

Time taken – less than 1 second

Total time taken – 2-3 minutes + 1 second. Manually this would take about 15 minutes.

Example #2 – Updating the records of customer backlinks (websites that link to our customer websites)

Manual actions – none, it’s scheduled to run once a week at midnight every Sunday

Automated actions:

1. Retrieve a list of all active customers in the database
2. For each customer found perform the following actions:

• Take the customer’s web address and search Yahoo Site Explorer for sites that link to it
• Compare the results to sites already in the database for this customer (imagine doing this manually.. for all your customers!)
• Enter only newly found sites into the database with a date and time (for comparisons and reports over time)
• Create a log file and put it into the customer’s corresponding folder

To do this manually for one customer could take up to 1 hour depending on how many new sites need to be filtered out of the results so as not to create any duplicate records. The whole process takes Visiboost 0 minutes and 0 seconds thanks to automation.

Example #3 – Automated Forex trading

As part of my business growth and stability plan I like reinvest some of the profits into the financial markets, currency markets in particular. My charts tell me that I miss a lot of good trades overnight and when I’m otherwise engaged. Also I don’t want to spend all my time glued to the computer waiting for trading signals. So what’s the answer?

Automated trading!

My charting software comes with its own programming language that will trade my system when the right combination of signals are all in place.

Is it flawless? No

But no trading system is – in fact software is probably better at trading than I am because it will follow the system to the letter without letting emotions get in the way. Anyway the ins and outs and merits of an automated system that trades the markets for you as you would (should if you stick to your system like a robot like the software does) is a topic for a different post.

The end result is another automated system that works away in the background while I’m working on something else.

Who’s good at multitasking now?!

So I just unfriended someone on my personal facebook account. I use the word ‘friend’ loosely because I didn’t know this person – it was one of those random friend requests who I tend to just accept if they have similar interests to mine (in this case salsa dancing).

Since adding them a few days ago I’ve had 2 messages in my inbox which have both been marketing messages – goodbye!

- Accepting your friend request does not equal ‘opting-in’ to your ‘list’ –

This is something a lot of marketers need to get into their heads when using social media to build their business. It is very easy to reach a lot of people through these networks and that can be good and bad, depending on how you do it. Let’s have a look at both approaches and the effects they both have:

The bad way - You join all these networks, go through searching and adding as many people as you can then start marketing directly to them.

Results:

• You annoy a lot of people who will ‘unfriend’ you
• Probably get your business labelled as spammy.
• Yes you might make a few sales but at what longer term cost?

The good way – You join these networks, go through searching and adding as many people as you can then start sharing content with them. This can be content on your business website or blog that adds value to these visitors and also pre-sells on you and your business.

Results – If they like what they’ve seen so far they are a lot more likely to:

• Take you up on your offer.
• If not they might refer someone else (that’s leverage!)
• link to you from their website or blog (free traffic and search engine improvements)
• share your free and high quality content with their groups of friends (that’s leverage!)
• Sign up for your newsletter (that’s opting-in to recieve marketing messages).
• There’s also a high chance that the next time you share some good free content with your social network they’ll check it out.

Effective Social Media Marketing in 5 Easy Steps

For some people creating relevant, useful and compelling content to share is a breeze. For others it’s a bit daunting. If you fall into the latter catagory then here are some steps you can take to quickly research and create something worth sharing:

1. Do some keyword research – Use something like the Google Adwords Keyword Tool to find some phrases that have large search volumes

2. Do some Q&A research – Go to places like Yahoo Answers and plug in your high search volume phrases (from step 1) and see what comes out. Look for recurring topics, questions, answers and find a popular one.

3. Find a way that your product/service/offer helps solve the problem, answer the question and generally help your target customer achieve the end result that’s the goal of whatever the question is related to.

4. Create a quick ‘how-to’ guide on how to achieve the end result the question is related to in X amount of steps.

5. Put this guide onto your website or blog with a call to action at the end to see how your product/service/offer can help them achieve this goal that much more quickly/effectively/guaranteed.

6. Summarise this guide into a bitesize chunk and share that with your social networks. A title or short description and a link to the full article on your site.

In Summary

Using this method you’re using social media the way it is intended to be used – and growing your business in the process. This intermediary step of creating and sharing content is vital, and as you’ve just seen.. it shouldn’t be that hard at all.

If you’re interested in learning more about implementing effective social media and other internet marketing strategies for your business please get in touch here

Yes…. dot-dash.net is now a blog.

Well not just a blog, more of a web site that uses wordpress but for the most part it’s a blog. I personally prefer the term “content hub” but there you go.

All ‘corporate’ and official internet marketing related content will now reside on Visiboost.com

Here I’ll cover a range of topics from technical geek subjects (how it all get’s done), thoughts and developments on internet marketing, social media, investing and forex trading. Basicaly all the stuff that’s getting Dot-dash Innovations Ltd to where I want it to be.