Your Compass In The Fog Of Overwhelm

Nicola here from The Money Gym,writing to you on 1st January 2010 with my third very important message….

Think about this for a second………..

In the olden days, humans were able to find their way around the globe, in any kind of weather, even if the fog was so bad they were unable to see a few feet in front of themselves….

How did they do that?

http://www.TheMoneyGym.com/silverelite

They were able to find their way forward because they had some deceptively simple tools…

Tools that were simple to use but were so sophisticated that they delivered exceptional results every time…results you could depend on…

Those tools were….

The Stars and a Compass.

Yep, that’s pretty much all they used to sail ships across the vast oceans, to go somewhere so far away it literally took months, if not years to get there and then to come safely home again.

Would it surprise you to discover that there are some deceptively simple tools you can use too, to navigate your way through all the financial confusion you might be experiencing right now?

Well, no!  I’m not going to tell you about those tools, I’m going to show you….how to create and use them yourself.

http://www.TheMoneyGym.com/silverelite
Warm regards

Nicola, Judith & The Money Gym Team

P.S.      Watch our brand new video to discover some of the simple but effective tools we use to navigate our way around our financial world!

http://www.TheMoneyGym.com/silverelite

SEO For Beginners

You remember I talked about Raphael, my new taxi-service buddy from St Kitts, BVI?  I wrote about him on the blog recently and how well he looked after us….and just yesterday there was a comment on the blog from someone who wanted to book a taxi tour for six, on St Kitts in March.

Just think about that for a moment.

That’s pretty amazing isn’t it?  Some woman writes on her WEALTH CREATION blog about Empress Coaches, on St Kitts, over the other side of the world and within a week or so, he’s got a booking enquriry out of it.

How did that happen?  Because the search engines love blogs, especially Wordpress blogs.  They love the way they are set up apparently.  I also included

I just went to Google and put in “taxi service st kitts” and lo and behold, my blog post is No #5 on the organic search results.  If you put in just “taxi st kitts” it comes up No #8.  That’s amazing.  This is how it looks…

Need A Taxi Service On St Kitts BVI? | The Money Gym
Our New Friend Raphael Originally uploaded by TheMoneyGym We wandered out of the port, looking for the train station, for a tour of the island only to.
www.themoneygym.com/blog/2009/01/need-a-taxi-service-on-st-kitts-bvi/ – 45k -

So you can see that having the key words Taxi Service St Kitts in the title of the post, and the metatags, without it even being in the first line of the blog posting…hey!  I can improve the results even further by editing the first line of the description!  In the words of Gordon Ramsey……DONE!

And Raphael doesn’t even have a website yet!  Just think, if he had a website with the key phrase in the title, the meta-description and the meta-tags…….wow!

The other interesting thing is that there are NO Google Adwords ads when you put that search term in Google.  If Raphael boned up on how to do Google Adwords, he could be the ONLY ad over on the right hand side.  And if he used the little known but totally legit trick of making sure his ad was shown, no matter WHAT key phrase the searcher typed in, he’d be there every single time.

Do you think that would help him grow from two Empress Coaches empire to three, then four….now I know there is probably not much competition for the key phrase “taxi st kitts”…actually there are 337,000 pages returned when you type that in, and most of them are not about St Kitts.

However, when you use a simple tool I know about, to search how many of them have the phrase “taxi st kitts” in the title of the page, you find only 114 pages competing with my blog post.  Or Raphael’s website, if he ever makes one.

What has all this to do with your business?

Just think for a second what your idea customer might be searching for on Google.  They usually have a problem, in which case they put in the solution they are looking for (if they know what it is) or they actually type the problem in.

So, for the Money Gym, the problems could be “how do I make more money” or “how can I pay off my mortgage” or “how can I get out of debt”.  Key phrases there are “make more money”, “my mortgage” or “get out of debt”.

There are 16,900,000 pages competing with you on the key phrase “pay off debt”.  But only 9,740 pages competing with you that have the key phrase in the title of the page or the URL itself.

That levels the playing field a bit doesn’t it?  Do you see how easy it might be to dominate the search engine results by blogging on topic and just paying attention to a few simple rules?

Front page of Google anyone?

Would it interest you to know that the majority of the new visitor traffic to our site comes from Twitter, Facebook and Ecademy?  So much for those who “don’t get” Twitter!

If you find this intriguing, and want to get more traffic to your business website, I’m going to be hosting a free 2-hour webinar this Wednesday 11th February from 6pm-8pm GMT.  This will be a visual presentation as well as audio, with a good amount of time allocated for questions and answers about your business.

I’ll be covering some totally simple traffic generation techniques, dead easy search engine optimisation, and the benefits of building a community around your business, in the form of social networking and a membership site for your visitors and customers, and you really need to be there.

It will be recorded so if you miss it, and you have registered, I’ll send you a link to the recording, so you can listen afterwards.  Line spaces ARE limited so don’t miss out and secure your seat now.

Just book yourself onto the webinar here>>>

There is no charge, but you will have to go through the shopping cart process (no credit card details needed though).  Then you will recieve an email that will tell you how to register for the webinar and get all the details to watch live, or view the recording later.

Look forward to seeing you there!

Wealth Coach Diaries: Nicola’s Week

STREAMLINING…..

Sometimes, something great creeps up on you and suddenly the time is just right to put it into action.

We have just crossed our 2007/2008 end-of-year at The Money Gym and compared with 2006/2007 it’s almost unrecogniseable.  Together with the input from Judith and Steve, what I have learned from Ecademy and Rich Schefren and other mentors, we are finally within sight of the inspirational picture Andy Shaw painted for The Money Gym back in 2005.

In 2007/2008 we tried new marketing methods, introduced new products, bundled things together, got professionally written sales letters for our two core products, created and then finally ironed out most of the wrinkles on the membership site.  Hmmm, well nearly.

I got to grips with online video, MySpace, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Wordpress blogs, I started a live TV show at Justin.tv (ok, so it’s been a bit on hold the last few weeks but it will be back) and we came across some GENIUS experts and some mind-blowing wealth creation techniques to share with our members.

So what’s 2008/2009 going to look like?  Streamlined, that’s what.  Judith sent an email prior to our quarterly focus meeting next week, that just made so much sense that we have put some of it into action already.

The product / marketing funnel looks like this….

FRONT END

1.  Various free reports upselling to….

2.  Money Gym ebook – bundled with 30 days Silver Membership trial upselling to….

3.  Money Gym ebook / paperback – bundled with 90 days Silver Membership trial

BACK END

1.  Money Gym Silver Membership – ongoing membership of our community, very affordable, including virtual / telephone wealthcoaching with optional workshops at a big discount

2.  Money Gym Gold – 1:2:1 wealth coaching with Year 1 workshops thrown in free, ongoing lifetime membership for free, which after Year 1 includes the option to purchase one-off wealth coaching sessions from any of the coaches.

3.  Money Gym Events – face to face wealth coaching / experts at specialist workshops

That’s it.  Nice and simple.  Works for us, certainly works for our clients.

SEARCH ENGINES

Our Google Analytics across our sites / blog is finally working properly thanks to the lovely Caitlin and the sterling techie efforts of Steve who somehow seems able to interpret and implement the incomprehensible (to me!) instructions of said Caitlin.

Next step to set up “goals”, so that Google can track how many of our unique visits actually do what we want them to.  This is click to the upsell page, and then actually buy and ebook / ebook upsell.

I want to know, definitively, if we get 1000 unique visits, how many click to buy, and out of those, how many buy the upsell.  Then how many take up the free trial at the membership site, and out of those, how many stay past the first month, second month, third month, six months, one year….etc etc.

Good info = good decisions.

Then we restart our Google Adwords campaign, to drive traffic to our ebook sales page again (now the complete product / marketing funnel is in place) and then the next step is…..

Google Website Optimiser.

This is where you use the might of this free tool from Google to test hundreds of versions of your sales pages to work out which one of the many combinations sells best.

I have NO IDEA conceptually how that can work but I trust Google enough to know that it can.  I can’t wait!

SLEEPOVERS

Somehow I have been inveigled into letting my kids have two back-to-back sleepovers – two friends each.  No idea how that happened, as Steve and I had previously said “no more!”.

Friday night is the 13 years old girlies, coming here to get ready for Snap @ The Honey Club, a police run disco at a proper grown up nightclub in Brighton.  The mums & dads take it in turns to drop off / pick up, and somehow…I agreed to let her have her two mates over afterwards.  They want chinese to eat afterwards so I’m heading to Tesco for some ready made meals – marginally better for them than take-away!

Tomorrow night it’s Nelson’s turn, with two little boys he will be taking over the lounge so they can have fun with the Playstation and a couple of movies.  The boys are marginally more bearable than the girls, whose incessant giggling does my head in!

I can’t remember ever giggling that much!

Your Cash – Get Control!

Nicola Cairncross recommends:  If you want to get control of your money, and discover whether you are going in the right direction financially, I highly recommend the Cashflow chapter in The Money Gym ebook (see pic on right for link).

There are two elements to good financial control;  one is to keep on top of and manage your cashflow, and the second is to take a quarterly snapshot of your assets, liabilities, income, outgoings, and overall net worth.  Both of these can be easy to do, with the right (simple) tools. 

Do not disappear up your own derrieres with details, on this one folks!  Remember what one of my first financial mentors, Gill Fielding always says, the best deals can be worked out on the back of a fag packet,and so it is with keeping control of your finances.

On the spreadsheet front, the one on P12 of the book is the old one we used to use, and it’s very good still.  But we now use a different one for our own accounts, one given to us by Greg Ballard of Passive Investments (www.AskNicolaCairncross.com/Recommends/Passive in case you don’t know them – I’m happy to take advice from someone who can take £10k on a credit card and turn it into over £30 million in property in just 10 years!!)

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