Monday May 21st, 2007: Issue #803
We spent a few hours yesterday afternoon at a car boot sale. I don’t know what such sales are called in the US, but you turn up with all your old household junk in the back of your car, set up a table alongside dozens of other people doing the same thing and customers come along and haggle with you. Like a garage sale from the back of your car.
We agreed to do it to support the nursing home that Delia’s mother is in - the pitch fees go the the home. In the end we didn’t sell all that much, but it did make us declutter part of our house to some extent. Now we have bags of unsold junk in the store room! I guess we’ll have to do another sale to get rid of the rest.
It never fails to amaze me how much junk people will buy. We had people sorting over our stuff even before we’d got it out of the car - professional boot fair scavengers! They are on the lookout for a bargain and don’t seem to mind how much they pay! In fact, over half of our total profit came from the people who snapped up what they thought was the ‘good’ stuff an hour before the doors officially opened!
I have to say that I don’t think they did get many bargains from us - but even if they did, we were glad to be rid of some of the rubbish.
#~#~#
The London Lunch went very well again. This time we stayed in the restaurant until after 9 PM - or at least, half of us did. There were some excellent conversations and most people will have made some great contacts.
Networking isn’t just about doing deals and requesting JVs. It is also about sharing ideas, finding points of contact, enthusiasm, inspiration and motivation. Regardless of whether or not you end up ‘doing business’ with the people you meet, the mere fact that you’ve met them does you and your business a power of good.
#~#~#
My favorite website building program, XSitePro, is very soon going to become even more powerful.
Paul Smithson emailed the other day to say that version 2 of his amazing program is due to be released later this year. He is being secretive about what new features will be involved, but knowing Paul, they will be well worth waiting for.
XSitePro, in case you haven’t come across it before, is a program that lets you build websites very quickly and easily. It is rather like an easier to use FrontPage or Dreamweaver, but the difference is that XSitePro was created by Internet marketers for Internet marketers, so it doesn’t leave anything to chance.
And, very importantly, it creates ‘real’ websites - not gimmicky ones that are all about tricking the search engines. XSitePro sites are built by hand (your hands), using content that you provide. All the hard parts of site building, the code, the layout and the linking structure are handled by the software, leaving you free to get on with making great content. However, as XSitePro includes quite sophisticated SEO analysis of the content you produce, it even helps you there!
Personally, I love it and even though I can do all the complicated stuff, I much prefer to leave it all to XSitePro. After all, why spend time over the tedious stuff?
What I particularly like about XSitePro is that it lets me create sites with loads of pages, so I can create quite complex silo-like sites - but then not show those pages until they are ready. In other words, I can have a big site being worked on on my own computer, but only upload the finished pages to the server. XSitePro will only show the pages I want in the navigation and on the sitemap. Each time I save and upload the site, everything is automatically updated to reflect my latest changes. It is so easy (far easier than it it to explain!)
Take a look at my latest work in progress, http://www.kickstartrecommends.com and you’ll see that even though I’m working on sections for blogging, forums, $7 books and several others, they don’t show up on the live site - and won’t until I’m happy that they are done. Incidentally, I’ve only uploaded that site so you can see it today. It hasn’t been spell checked and I’m aware of a few other errors. None of those reflect on XSitePro, which is doing its part of the job perfectly! Human error is something else entirely!
Now, why would I be telling you about XSitePro now, when there is a new version on its way?
Simple. Paul Smithson has said that the new version will be more expensive. I don’t exactly by how much, but an extra $100 has been suggested.
But here’s the great deal. Paul has also said that anyone who buys XSitePro now will get the new version as a free upgrade. In effect, pay the old price now, use the best site building program around for a few months and then get the latest, more expensive version at no extra cost. It sounds pretty good to me.
There is a very professional video on Paul’s site that explains a lot about how XSitePro works. It is well worth watching.
http://www.urlnex.us/xsitepro/
If the thought of building a website has been putting you off getting started in Internet marketing, XSitePro is the answer. It’s a piece of cake.
#~#~#
And now for something not so good.
Delia and I went to see a new movie called ‘Magicians’. It is billed as a comedy (erroneously, in my view) and stars two guys who apparently are quite popular on British TV right now. Apart from having seen them in ads for Apple computers, I have no idea who they are, and after seeing Magicians, have no wish to find out.
The basic premise of the movie is that the two guys are a famous magical double act who have been friends for years. When one has an affair with other’s wife (who is also the act’s assistant) the partnership is strained.
When the husband accidentally decapitates his wife in the guillotine illusion (that goes wrong) the partnership dissolves.
Neither man can make it on his own and some years later they both enter a magic competition to try to restart their failed careers.
That’s the story. Unfortunately none of it works because the idea that these two hopeless morons could ever have been famous professional magicians is totally unbelievable. And even though this is cinema, where illusions like the idea that a 97-year-old Bruce Willis can still save the world are regularly give credibility, this was a suspension of belief too far.
Within the first few minutes of the movie - when the act is supposedly at the height of their power - the audience is lost. And, in the case of Delia and I, never regained.
I’m far too mean to walk out of a cinema after having paid the usurous price of admission, but ‘Magicians’ made me come closer than ever before. Now THAT would be magic!
______________________________________________________
An Inspirational Thought
_______________________________________________________
There is a delightful Chinese saying:
‘Many thanks for pushing my wheel.’
It means thank you for your recommendation.
It often follows another traditional saying, ‘I hope that you will remove the weeds that obstruct my mind.’ (A request for advice and guidance).
We DO have weeds in our minds, all of us, and we ARE often like wheels resting against a wall. Sometimes we can tend to the weeds ourselves, and sometimes we can set our wheel rolling without outside help - BUT most of the time we don’t.
So if someone else helps me to remove my mental weeds and set my wheel in motion I am not going to hesitate to let them - and thank them heartily for their efforts.
###############################################
Who do you know who would love Kickstart Today?
Don’t keep it to yourself - send them to
http://www.kickstartdaily.com today!
###############################################
_______________________________________________________
The Quote of the Day
_______________________________________________________
Ralph Waldo Emerson said,
“For every minute you are angry, you lose sixty seconds of happiness.”
_______________________________________________________
Today’s Power Thought
_______________________________________________________
Here is a business idea that I know from personal experience can save huge amounts of wasted time.
Meetings, when held in formal office surroundings, have a way of dragging on. However good the chair person is (if you are lucky enough to have one) or how detailed the agenda, something always seems to get added to the end that makes you sit, bored out of your brain for much longer than you’d like or need.
Well try this next time you have a meeting arranged with a small number of people. Change the location to somewhere casual.
Starbucks is good, the car park is better!
Without the enforced formality of the office surroundings, people tend to stick to topic. I don’t really know why, but it does work.
If you are all sat in Starbucks, for instance, finishing your coffee is a psychological trigger to get up and leave. There just isn’t the urge to stay for the sake of it.
Car park meetings are even better. Nobody wants to hang around there for too long, but everyone can briefly say their piece before they all go their different ways.
I worked with an ad agency a few years ago who had two meeting rooms.
The first one was a bare room - no furniture of any kind - except for a steel bar running from floor to ceiling in the center of the room. About five feet from the ground, attached to the bar, was an ‘elbow rest’. The idea being that if you needed to meet with someone you could lean on the bar and chat, but in no way was it comfortable. Meetings there rarely lasted more than 10 minutes!
Their other meeting room was a glass box, five feet to a side and about eight feet tall. Inside the box were two padded benches facing each other.
If anyone from the agency needed a meeting with an outside contractor, that was the place to do it - in full view of the whole open-plan company. Needless to say, meetings there tended to be over very quickly as well!
Any important client meetings that would not suit either little room were held in a nearby hotel bar, and presentations were held in the hotel’s conference facility.
I’m not sure that such radical solutions would work for many companies outside of the advertising industry, but they worked for them and saved a huge amount of wasted time.
Meetings can be one of the biggest drains on the most valuable resource you and your company have - time. Try and find ways that you can use to keep them to a minimum and you will have a massive advantage.
_______________________________________________________
Fascinating Facts
_______________________________________________________
In Victorian times, ladies were taught to never put books by male and female authors next to each other on the shelf unless those authors were married.