This Week on Insight Track: Planning, Habits, and Creating Time

Hi there.  Here the latest video of my endeavours in the world of online and particularly affiliate marketing.  If you prefer to rean there is a transcript beneath the video link

TRANSCRIPT

Hey there and welcome along, Steve here again from my second floor veranda now here in Gambia.

Just going to chat about what I’ve done last week, what I’ve learned last week, or probably some of it I’ve learned before last week, but I re-learned it last week if you like. So Monday was more or less the start of the new month so it was mainly about planning, planning for the next, closing down the first quarter if you like and planning for the next quarter.

So, what I’ve learned to do very late in life to be honest, you know, I’ve run a business for a long time but I’m more organised now than I’ve ever been I think.  So I do a daily planner, monthly planner, yearly planner, obviously long term goals, sort of five year goals, ten year goals, (if I last that long😁 – I’ll be out round, And beyond),  Then bring that back down to what I’ve got to do today to get to the weekly goals, what I’ve got to do this week to get to the monthly goals, what I’ve got to do this month to get to the quarterly goals and so it goes on, so you bring it back down to daily.

One other thing we discussed on the mentoring on Monday was habits, habits that you need to develop when you’ve got an online business, or when you want to start an online business, good habits to develop.

So, my actual mentor recommends four a day, I’m going to add one to that actually which doesn’t require any effort whatsoever. So, he suggests that each day you should spend 15 minutes planning, 15 minutes on planning, filling in your planner, what you’re going to do today, what you did yesterday, what you’re grateful for yesterday. It’s good to have gratitude, something you’re grateful for every day, even if it’s just a pen, I’ve got this pen that I can write everything down so I don’t forget it.

It’s something to be grateful for and things like that, even things like “I’m grateful that I have to pay a water bill because you know there are many, many, many people in the world who don’t have access to water, so you know, thank God  , that you have the ability to pay a water bill and gave gratitude for that I”  that’s one of the things, 15 minutes on your planning, , 15 minutes outside, go outside 15 minutes and do something, sort of jog, walk, crawl, whatever, get outside, do some exercise. I generally go 15 minutes to half an hour in the morning without fail. (whatever the weather)

So next thing, 15 minutes on learning, learning something new, learning something on a personal development level, if you like, very, very important.   To be honest, I don’t like reading, so I personally do Audible, thank God for Audible. It has got me reading, listening to books again. I think the last book I read must have been, it’s years ago, not months ago, so Audible, sometimes I do read bits of a book along with the actual audio of it, but I’m afraid my patience has waned over the years and yes, I find audiobooks much better, much more to my style, if you like.

Finally, 15 minutes, 15 minutes every single day, working on your business. Now, if you combine a couple of those together, say 15 minutes where you’re exercising, jogging, walking, whatever, 15 or more minutes, you can, if you’re using Audible,  combine those together, get your earphones in, go jogging, and walking, whatever, and you’ve saved 15 minutes,   One hour of activity is actually taking you 45 minutes. Plus, on Audible, most books you can read at twice the speed, X2, there’s a setting in Audible, X2, you can read books at that speed, quite easy, I’ll read most books at that speed, or you can listen to most books at that speed, sorry, at X2, without losing any comprehension of what is written, or what is said.

So, basically, if you sort of train yourself, train your mind a little bit with it, you listen to sort of five minutes at X3, then come down to X2,  you will be comfortable with it. Probably the only person I can’t listen to at X2 is Russell Brunson, because he talks very, very fast anyway. So, now you’ve got your 45 minutes, if you listen to your Audible at X2, you’re listening to 30 minutes, so you’re getting 75 minutes out of one hour.

So, you are actually creating time. So, that’s how you create time.

My last, my last habit to get is positive self-talk.

Listen to positive self-talk every day. This needs no effort whatsoever. You just listen to positive self-talk while you’re going about your daily life.

You can as Shad Helmstetter says, repetition is the key to success with it. So, I use an app for doing that, it costs me about $20 a month, which I think is money well spent, to be honest, because I listen to self-talk on many different aspects of my life, and it has improved my mindset greatly, especially when it comes to making money. So, I say make that as a habit.  If you’d like a free 30 day trial of the app I use just CLICK HERE

So, you’ve got to stick to them. I believe the research says that if you do something every day for 66 days, it does become a habit. So, , do it for 66 days and it will become a habit.

I think most of my habits, most of the four of those, five of those, working on my business has been a long time. I would find it very difficult not to be doing something at least 15 minutes a day on my business. I’ve been in business for 25 plus years, so, , it would be very strange not to do it these days.

But the others, , I’ve been doing the others for at least 100 days now.  So they are habits and if I get to sort of 9pm in the evening, I do panic that I’ve got to get those habits done that day. (If I hadn’t ,managed to do them) So habits and good habits, very good to have.

So, last week, on the other mentorship I’m in which is with Dean Holland. We had a Q&A session last week and from that, it became clear that there is a lot of panic, a lot of apprehension about appearing online, appearing on video, about what people think about you, etc, etc, etc. I’ll be honest, although I’m here doing it, it does take a lot of doing, especially when you think that people can and do say things about you that sometimes are not very pleasant. I know some of my colleagues/associates have had very unpleasant things said about them. Over the years, I’ve had lots of abuse online, especially some years ago, the company did eBay, selling on eBay and to be honest, some of the people on eBay were very, very, very unpleasant indeed.

So, I’ve learnt to overcome that and I find that it is their problem. They’ve got the problem, not me, . Their opinion of me doesn’t matter anymore.

My own opinion is what counts. If I think I’m doing a reasonable job, which I think I’m doing a reasonable job, not brilliant, but it’s the best I can do for now. Maybe I’ll get better.

Maybe I’ll get better. I’m sure I will get better with repetition. So, it comes back to that other thing, that repetition, repetition, repetition, becomes a habit and you get used to doing it.

By the way, I’ve got some small kids here at the moment, my wife’s family. So, if you hear “wheels on the bus going round and round”, you will know what it is, . I’m not going mad and playing wheels on the bus goes round and round all the time.

It’s just small kids, there’s only so much wheels on the bus go round and round you can take when you get to my age. But that’s beside the point!

So, (Facebook) agency training next, and the last point becomes valid in this..

So, I think we’re on week four or five of the agency training, four or five of twelve and Sam (The coach) dropped in, you know, it’s time to get some clients. What? We haven’t learned everything yet. Well, I’m re-learning, re-doing it, obviously, and I also did the same thing last year.

So, what we’re doing and what I’m re-doing again, because I’m still very much a newcomer in the Facebook ad agency, game field, whatever you want to call it, business. So, I’m doing what he calls a student pitch. So, what I’m doing is sort of going onto my own personal page and putting a post that says  “hey, does anyone want to try my Facebook ads for free? You pay a hundred pounds for the advertising and I’ll do the rest of it free.

Get in touch or send me a direct message and we’ll arrange a call”

I put that on my own page, I have no qualms with that.

I thought about it a long time. I have a couple of pages where they are pages for people in the window blind industry, which I was part of for a long, long period of my life, which basically is my low hanging fruit, if you like, because I know the blind business. I don’t have a lot of research into their businesses to do, to be able to craft them the right type of advertising that they need that’s going to bring the results. So, , I eventually decided to put a post on one of them.

So, I did think long and hard about it because I did expect, I did half expect some criticism as I just, obviously, six weeks to a couple of months ago, I had to close down my window blind business. So, I thought long and hard about it. And so decided I’m going to do it.

I’m going to be totally open. I say, you know, after 25 years, I unfortunately had to close my business. But the retail side of that business was good.

And over the last two years, two and a half years, I’ve learned an awful lot about Facebook and social media in general. So, if anybody got any questions, feel free to answer me, ask me. I wasn’t pushing, I wasn’t pushing the sort of agency at the moment.

Just, you know, if anybody got any issues around social media, should they be on it, they want me to have a look at their social media strategy at the moment. Because, to be honest, most small businesses out there, all that their strategy is to post on Facebook and occasionally  boost a post, which is just a waste of money, to be honest. So, you know, it was you get free advice. (I’m here)

One, just one person  said, “This is a joke. You went bust with your company a couple of weeks ago and now you’re going to teach others how to do it”  So, I just had a polite post back that, you know, she’d been in the business, she’s been in the business only a few years incidentally, but that’s beside the point.

So I did write a reply to that effect, you know, that’s your opinion, but I’m being totally transparent. I’m not going to tell people how to run, how to scale a window blind operation to take in manufacturing, because I don’t believe that a small business can sustain that any longer, to be honest. It’s sad, but the big guys are, sort of, freezing the small manufacturers out.

It’s about getting retail customers to these people. The retail customers is where the profit lies, to be honest.(without the increasing overheads)

Anyway, that provoked an awful lot of posts on there, sort of, backing me at the end of the day and telling her she was a very rude person, to put it mildly. There were some arguments going on between themselves. I think it’s funny. But you’ve got about 35, 40 comments on the post, so, you know, you’ve got plenty of traction there.

And the last count, it was Thursday I posted, the last count, I’ve got three calls booked from it about the advertising agency. , I’ll do them a good deal. I might even do a two-week free trial for, you know, my payment will be, if they want a free trial, at the end of the free trial, if I’ve got them some good results, they will get on a video and give me a video testimonial, which I can use in my own promotion for the agency business, which, at my stage, a few customer testimonials is worth, it’s worth probably as much as I would charge for a month’s management of their Facebook advertising account.

So, the upshot, you know, it came back and it is a very positive, very positive outcome. Apart from the adverse comments I got, which did upset me for a start and I thought, well, what the hell, what does she know? And fortunately, some of the people who have been in the business a very long time, almost as long as me, some of them longer than me, did come out in support and say, you know, sorry to hear about your business and good luck with what you’re doing. So, that was a win all round, I think.

That was about all I got through last week, I think. I am working on a new project, which I’m getting, which I’m quite excited about. I’m not going to tell you much about it at the moment because it’s still very much, you know, in the, up here at the moment, it’s not going to be on paper, but I’m looking at giving people a low-cost entry into affiliate marketing and I’m also looking at having a charitable element to the, a charitable element to it so that people from poorer countries like Gambia can get in for maybe nothing for a couple of months and try and start earning.

I’ve devised a way of doing that and I’m just, I’m going to try it and see if it will work. So, that’s about all for this week.

While you are here on my blog  take a look around.  I’m always adding new posts on here which I hope give value to my visitors.  if there’s anything you would like me to cover that would be of value to, just reach out and I will make sure I post something.

Thanks for reading and see you soon.