A month in the life of a Wealth Coach…
by NicolaCairncross on February 10, 2010
in Money Gym | Diaries
The last month included Christmas and New Year. Routinely these are times for family and celebration, times accompanied by their own joys and stresses. In the Collins household there were plenty of both!
Christmas was a pleasure. Once I’d got used to the fact that my partner had invited everyone for Christmas dinner… well maybe not absolutely everyone but we did cook dinner for 12 which is the most I’ve ever had to cope with! Actually it did go pretty well, even if I say so myself. Food was on the table only 20 minutes later than predicted and the worst thing to happen was splitting a bag of frozen peas and throwing them all over the cooker with 5 minutes to go! (We’re still finding stray peas in the most surprising of places!).
My greatest professional activity over this time was project managing a property refurbishment. We bought a house before Christmas. It badly needed a rewire so we figured it was better to do the job properly before we moved in. There was also the possibility of significantly upgrading a bathroom and kitchen so we got together a team…
Dave the builder is great and masterminded most things really efficiently. He’s a real “can do” builder and so refreshing to work with. Bill the plumber was also a real asset to the team, turning his hand to wallpaper stripping in the quieter moments between plumbing jobs. The only slight problem with our choice of plumber was that he lived in Ystrad Mynach and drove a Ford Focus. Now don’t get me wrong. There’s normally nothing wrong with those choices, but given that South Wales, along with the rest of the country has experienced the heaviest snowfall for 20 years, there were times I wished we’d picked a plumber who lived in Roath and drove a 4 x 4! Still to his credit, Bill has been there when we needed him and his ability to “lend a hand” has been a great asset.
Seven Essential Financial Terms: Cashflow by Judith Morgan
by NicolaCairncross on February 10, 2010
in Money Gym | Business
I have been invited to teach some Australian business mothers the Seven Essential Financial Terms I think are important they know. Here is my first in an occasional series where I will share those with you over coming weeks.
I’ve put Cashflow at the top of my list of Seven Essential Financial Terms because failing to “manage” your cashflow can kill off your business very quickly indeed. And lack of good cashflow can kill off your enthusiasm for it even faster!
Firstly what does the term Cashflow mean? It means how much money goes into and out of your business every month.
How do you manage Cashflow? You track it on a spreadsheet. First off you predict how much you expect to come into your bank account and when alongside what expenses you plan to pay and when.
It’s often easier to plan what expenses you have to pay because you know when you have to pay rent, telephone, salaries and other regular expenses, usually every month or perhaps each quarter.
But do you know how much money will come in and when? This means predicting your income from sales and when you will get paid for each sale.
What Does A Money Gym Coach Do When She Is Off Duty?
by NicolaCairncross on February 4, 2010
in Money Gym | Diaries
More specifically, what did this Money Gym coach do when she was off duty over December and the beginning of January?
The first thing she did was to contribute quite creditably to the micro-economy of Venice. Still, her Money Gym hat travelled with her to Venice and fought to get back onto her head when she learned that Venice has cancelled the New Year’s Eve fireworks, and the Carnival celebrations! The Powers That Be in Venice have, apparently, decided that in these tight times cutting back on the things that draw tourists to Venice is an astute move. Hmm!
After that, she said a fond farewell to The Luddite Foundation, invested in an MP3 (finally) and began listening to the backlog of CDs she had, including some from T Hark Eker. On one, T Harv was interviewing another delightfully forthright ‘multi, multi, multi, multi, multi, multi, multi-millionaire’. This gentleman observed, in the most unashamedly sexist way, that you should treat money the way you – a woman – should treat a man, flattering and stroking its ego etc. Equally, he noted, you should treat money the way you treat a woman, cosseting, caressing etc. etc. But how many of us do? (And are the Venetian Powers That Be treating tourists’ money in a loving, encouraging fashion??)
Together with her new exciting technology, she then spent a fair few days enjoying the delights of Taginistan. Now, in case you hadn’t heard of Taginistan yet, this is not because it is some strangely tranquil ex-Soviet republic. Rather, it is a mythical kingdom that is blossoming from my own modest culinary endeavours. You see, a few weeks ago, I discovered the delights of the tagine. What could be better than bunging a number of reasonably well chosen ingredients into a pan (or tagine) and creating something that has an extraordinary subtlety of flavour.
So excited was I that tagines are all that the denizens of the Kaszina ménage have lived on since. This is why the house is being rechristened Taginistan. Possibly, I have become slightly carried away with my vision for this little known republic. But then it is a uniquely charming place. Unlike other “-istans”, Taginistan has, and seeks, no nuclear missiles. The preferred weapon for conflict is a small, finely wrought version of the Gatling gun that fires… coriander seeds…
When Two Tribes Go To War… Which Online Tribe Are You?
by NicolaCairncross on February 4, 2010
in Money Gym | Success
The words of the iconic Frankie Goes To Hollywood song “Two Tribes” just about sum up the storm that’s brewing in the “make money online” world, with one tribe being the Internet Marketers and the other being the professional bloggers….
But before I tell you that story…first a bit of background…
Last weekend I went to Mark Anastasi’s ListBuilding Masterclass which, I have to tell you, was rammed to the rafters and a “who’s who” of internet marketing. This was amazing in itself because this was a free three days, and usually when you give tickets away for free, you usually get less than 50% of the registrants turn up, while on Day 2, you only get 70% of those who were there on Day 1, with Day 3 being only 50-70% of those on Day 2.
In fact I think there might have been MORE people there on Day 3 than Day 1, as it was a Sunday! The crowd was definitely a high proportion of self employed and business people with the employed forming perhaps a third?
Contrast this hungry, up for it crowd at the Thistle Hotel with a much quieter little gig over the other side of town, which had been billed as a Wealth Creation seminar and was, unfortunately the gig I was booked to speak at!
The numbers expected are usually 50- 100, only 30 odd showed up and when they found out that I was speaking on internet marketing, half left, having already booked themselves onto the stock trading workshop they wanted.
Great! So I delivered my best material to a crowd of …….about 17. I think they liked it!
Why Tweeting Your Blog Is Not Enough For Big Traffic by Graham Jones
by NicolaCairncross on January 29, 2010
in Money Gym | Internet
If you use a URL shortening script, such as Yourls, you can see “live” the people clicking on anything you add to Twitter. The statistical information reveals that within a second of posting your Tweet you get almost all of the click throughs from what you post on Twitter. A minute or so later, almost all of the clicks have dried up. You can measure the life of a Tweet in seconds; it doesn’t last very long at all.
Getting people to follow your blog takes effort
So why all the fuss about Twitter? A Tweet is clearly a single blast of a blunderbuss – you get loads of impact all over the place, but the effect doesn’t last long. Yet you can find all sorts of advice from so-called “gurus” telling you that Twitter gets you tons of traffic. If you want to get more readers to your blog, you need to Tweet, they say.
And these experts are right – and wrong…! True enough, you can get increased traffic from Tweeting your blog. But it’s not smooth traffic; you’ll get the occasional peak in traffic. Now that’s not to be sniffed at, of course, but it’s not going to achieve all you want for your blog.
Here’s the problem: along comes another piece of technology (Twitter) which appears to solve the problem of getting more traffic to a blog. Whoopee everyone shouts and before you know it there is ebook after ebook explaining how you can get shedloads of traffic to your blog if you use Twitter. The result is millions of people go “Hurray, here’s the answer” and off they trot to learn everything they can about Twitter and see those traffic numbers rise. Not.
