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!

Tags: Wealth Coach Diaries by Nicola Cairncross
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I’m embarking on an interesting project at the moment….turning my Money Gym ebook into Wealth Twitterings.  I’m trying to turn each Wealth Tip into a twitter of 140 characters or less, but I’m finding that each Tip makes a few twits so I will end up with more than 101 twits, more like 365 which is one twit a day.  I’ve done six today already because I’m impatient….check them out on this blog on the daily update, or visit http://www.Twitter.com/wealthcoach to follow  us, and then download Twhirl which is great fun, to keep up to date.

Tags: Highway #2 : Internet Marketing by Nicola Cairncross
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Here it is! My first unique content rebrandable PDF report “How To Become A Millionaire In Five Years Or Less” for my Money Gym MyViralSpiral site. So proud. I have to confess Steve helped with the graphic, using the software recommended on the weekend but I did most of the rest of it myself.

Just click the picture to be taken to a page where you can put your name and email in, to download it for free.

Then, you will be offered the chance to sign up for the Viral Spiral service while you are downloading it, if you do, you can take this PDF report, rebrand it with your affiliate ID’s instead of mine, give it away yourself to grow your mailing list, AND make affiliate commission on the “back end” if anyone buys our ebook via PayDotcom.

Tags: Highway #2 : Internet Marketing by Nicola Cairncross
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When The Money Gym launched it’s first “Passive Income - 90 Day Internet Challenge” and sent out our press release, little did we think that we would trigger a spike in Google Trends tracking of the key phrase “passive income”.

Here’s how we explained it:

“Whilst the coaches at The Money Gym (www.themoneygym.com) are huge believers in the importance of educating ourselves about the various ways of creating wealth, they are equally aware that nothing beats learning by doing. So, they’ve decided to encourage people to just get down and do it with The Money Gym Passive Income Challenge.

Nowadays, we are always hearing about the big bucks that can be made on the internet, millions of dollars/pounds in one day sometimes, and the concept of making money while you sleep is an exciting one — if true. Wouldn’t it be fantastic to sit at home in our pajamas eating left-over Easter eggs, watching Jeremy Kyle on the telly and stopping only briefly to see how many more sales have pinged into our Paypal account?

Just one ebook sale per day @ £20, from one one-page website, would make an extra £7300 a year — enough for a new car or a couple of nice holidays. Two or three ebooks doing the same would make £21,900 — nearly a full time wage. The beauty of the Internet is that you do the work once, and the money keeps coming.

But the reality is that many people end up making a tenner here, twenty quid there, but never get much further.

In contrast, Nicola Cairncross, founder of the Money Gym, has built a six-figure business marketed entirely online and once made £14,000 in one weekend from one mailout. She knows exactly why people run out of steam in the quest for passive income — in her experience would-be internet entrepreneurs often aren’t prepared to focus attention in one place, on one thing, for long enough to make it work.

Nicola suggests focusing on just one thing - one information product, one niche or one passionate interest - and take consistent regular actions that include:

• Creating a web presence — a sales page, a brochure site, a blog. All of them preferably.
• Capturing visitors’ details, encouraging them to subscribe to ezines (online newsletters).
• Turning visitors into raving fans by providing regular, maybe even daily, valuable content.
• Having a system to automate the selling of our product.
• Replicating the process.

As Nicola says, “like creating wealth, making money online is simple but it’s not easy, you have to get off your “assets”, learn new skills and take some action”.

To encourage — or even bully their Money Gym members to success, Nicola and business partner Judith Morgan have decided to set up an Internet Challenge. It’s a three-month personal challenge for anyone who has day-dreamed about creating passive income, or perhaps started but fizzled out along the way.

Anyone can join them for what will be a three-month personal challenge by visiting http://www.TheMoneyGymClub.com and joining the club at Silver Level.

Already people are getting excited about their goals, swapping resources and information…with Nicola on hand to keep everyone focused. And The Money Gym are further incentivising their new Silver members and supporting them in the Challenge by giving them free lifetime access to Nicola’s 12-Step Internet Marketing Home Study Course - which retails for £1450 - and membership of a private email support group. This will provide encouragement, resources and a kick up the backside!

The Money Gym has helped hundreds of people along the road to financial independence (and created millionaires along the way) via their 1:2:1 Money Gym Gold wealth coaching programme. It is a powerful, practical down to earth programme that teaches participants a solid and proven way of creating wealth, with a choice of ways to suit your personality. These could be a choice of, or a combination of high risk, high return investment, solid bricks and mortar, or building a business that you can sell or use to set you up for life”.

So 60 days in, how are the participants getting on?  I thought I would ask them to update you here on the blog - which apart from inspiring you all, will give their projects a useful link from a blog now ranking 3/10 on Google Page Rank. 

So guys, who is going to be first to step up to the comments box?

Tags: Highway #2 : Internet Marketing, Success Thinking by Nicola Cairncross
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When I first started the Money Gym, and wrote the “Financial Intelligence 101″ tips, that grew into The Money Gym ebook, one of the most popular sections was the Property Investing Section.  Everyone wanted to know about investing in, and making money from property.

In the early days, when we used to host the Money Gym workshops at The Acacia, my much loved boutique hotel and my latest venture into property investing, we used to cover “The Top 10 Ways To Make Money In Property” and we used to simply tell people about them, they used to go off and investigate the one they liked the sound of, then we would coach them from there.

However, one day, a couple of guys came along who blew most of our “Top 10″ out of the water. 

Out of “Top 10 Ways To Make Money In Property” only three of them remain.  Which ones?  Aha, you will have to wait for the next few days to find out that!

After we heard about how these guys invested in property, we simply couldn’t, in all good conscience, just tell folks how they COULD invest in property, but we felt we then had to share how we felt people SHOULD invest in property.

Now this went right against all accepted coaching law and wisdom, I can tell you!

But hey ho!  Wealth coaching has always been different - a mix of training, mentoring and coaching, rather than pure coaching itself.

At The Money Gym, we aim to save you time, money, and stop you making expensive mistakes.

Mistakes like I made with buying that hotel in the first place.  If these two guys, my mates Greg and Andy, had been around in 2003, there is NO WAY they would have let me buy it.  They would have stopped me making THAT half million pound mistake.

Side note:  You will see in this week’s ezine, I talk about the difference between “failure” and a “mistake” and it’s an important distinction to make if you are an entrepreneur.  Essentially, a failure is something that can bury you but you can learn from your mistakes.

That hotel was a mistake - some would definately see it as a failure - but I choose now to see it as a mistake.  A very large one true….. 

One that taught me a VERY LARGE LESSON!  In fact, SEVERAL very large lessons.

I will never forget the moment in the garden of The Acacia, when Greg or Andy uttered the immortal words that made me realise that buying it had been a mistake and told me why.

1.  This hotel will never make you the amount of profit that would make all the work you put into it, worth it.
2.  You have a lot of your own money in this business and you will struggle to ever get it out.
3.  When you have had enough and you do want to sell it, nobody will buy it, unless you find someone as daft as you were, to buy it in the first place.

Hmmmmm…..

They like straight talking, those two.  And that is one of the things I most value about Greg & Andy. So many people won’t tell you what you need to hear.  Nobody around me in those days did, that’s for sure.  Hence the mistakes.

So, five years on, here we are, still making mistakes but not so many, and certainly not failing, and together with Steve and Judith, two more straight talkers, they are still two of my closest friends and mentors.  Whenever I want some advice about business and life, I go straight to Greg, and to Andy for property market / business marketing / creative / internet input.

So you can imagine how thrilled I am that Greg still comes to London, to present for The Money Gym on property investing.

I can’t imagine how much longer he will do that, as we are pretty much the only presenting he does outside their own Open Days.

He’s coming to the Southwark Rose on 14th June and really, you should be there. 

* If you have questions about the current property market, you should be there.

* If you have questions about your business proposition, you should be there.

* If you just want to see a down to earth, authentic, funny, FANTASTIC speaker, you should be there.

* If you want to recharge your wealth creation batteries, and hang out with some like minded people, you should be there.

That’s five “shoulds” in five lines, I’m about to get struck off the Eurocoach List!

Book your place here - still some Early Birds left as I’m late promoting this due to half term.

http://www.TheMoneyGym.com/MGPresents/property2.htm

See you there!

Nicola

p.s.  Greg always sells out fast so get your space booked now.

Tags: Highway #1 : Business Success, Highway #3 : Property Investing, Success Thinking by Nicola Cairncross
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I’ve hosted two absolutely fascinating webinars since last week’s ezine, with Claire Raikes, the “Business Blog Angel” and Tim Brocklehurst “MyViralSpiral”. Covering wide ranging topics from internet marketing to business success, it was interesting to note that I don’t “know” either of them in the traditional sense, but because of their web presences, their recommendations and the fact that the Money Gym is a client of Tim’s and Judith is a client of Claire’s, we not only felt comfortable, but had a rocking good time!

You can hear both webinars at http://www.MoneyGymRadio.com.  I could have talked to Claire for hours for sure (but we had another call lined up!) and Tim and I did over-run somewhat…….I can’t wait to see them both in action at the “Money Gym Presents……The Internet” workshop next Saturday. Why not see if there are any early bird places left?

Steve has revamped our Affiliates page too, which looks much better and easy to use now. There are some graphics to use - book covers and banners for the site, and some code for videos you can put on your site very easily. The membership site makes layout a bit tricky but Steve is really getting his head around it - combination of techie and arty - so it’s much easier to use now. If you want to recommend The Money Gym, there are lots of ways to do that and earn some passive income so check out his new page - renamed the Affiliate Center

Summer, as usual, has taken me completely by surprise, this year, although my first born, Phoebe’s birthday on 3rd May, traditionally signals a burst of hot weather…….I well remember labouring through the hot night in my water bath overlooking Wormwood Scrubs (o yes!) which combination of pain and heat did NOT make for very attractive after-birth photos!!

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Tags: Wealth Coach Diaries by Nicola Cairncross
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My ex-business coach, Chris Barrow just posted a blog post entitled “How Can We Be Expected To Work In Such Conditions?” and really, I have to agree with him! http://tinyurl.com/5wvbbe

I woke up at 6.30 this morning to another day of glorious sunsine - and the beach just over the road.

I’m tempted to just get my swimsuit out and grab my iPod and catch some rays while listening to a bit of Rich Schefren and swotting up further on the Rent2Own concept - perfect for these market conditions and a great cashflow generator!  But no, I have to go to London today.

After getting ready in a leisurely fashion, Steve will drop me off at our sleepy little station, and I’ll enjoy a largely empty train direct to Victoria.

I’m off to go to lunch at The Ivy, with Judith and Sue, Money Gym member and winner of our Women Talk Money Challenge, notably the person who increased her income by the most ££ in just three months.  Sue managed £25,000 plus - marvellous!

We always like to make prizes for clients at the Money Gym things that Judith and I want to do!!  Later this afternoon, we will be joined by Peter Stanley, of “Property Made Simple” fame, who is down from Manchester, and a member of my now defunct first mastermind team.  Not seen Peter for ages.

Then it’s off to the Rex Cinema in Rupert St, Soho, to meet my sister and enjoy the book launch for Michelle Magorian’s new book. 

My opera singing sister Heather shared a house in Walthamstow with Michelle back in th 80’s - they were so poor in those days they literally had to break the ice in the loo due to NO CENTRAL HEATING!  Now Michelle is an acclaimed author with tomes including “Goodnight Mr Tom” starrring the late John Thaw in the film of, and she has a film deal sorted for the new book already.

Home again on the train, and as it will be a late night, I’ll have a lie in tomorrow, as I dont’ have to get up till the 11am Money Gym Wealth Surgery webinar for our Gold clients.

Why am I telling you all this?

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Tags: Wealth Coach Diaries by Nicola Cairncross
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Some more thought provoking replies to my “Wealth Creation Is Simple, But Not Easy - Discuss!” posting on our private Google Group……

“There’s also the need for energy - lots of it and alertness and the belief that you can”

“The need for certainty is a killer for action”

“Learning new skills – challenging my worst phobias:  numbers, money, technology, spreadsheets!  Talk about getting out of one’s comfort zones!”

“Perseverance as opposed to a “get rich quick” concept”

“Challenging fundamental inherited beliefs about money - the only way you
make money is to go to school, work hard, go to uni, work hard, get a
good job, work hard …..”

And Sarah Rourke, the “Audio Pod Artist” contributed a brilliant posting on the topic:

“Ace topic, Nicola - here’s my tuppence worth:
 
I think not only challenging beliefs but managing to exist as a wealth creationist in a sea of doubters - other people’s resistance can be hard to overcome.

One of the things I’m learning to do about this is not tell people things i.e. not tell my parents what I invest in (it terrifies them) not tell others close to me when I sneakily start a new side project (all within my core business of course!). And most importantly, I’ve learnt to keep my trap firmly shut when people talk about property and crashes etc - better to say nothing than wind myself up.
 
Then there’s a big stumbling block for lots of people and that’s the ….

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Tags: Wealth Coach Diaries by Nicola Cairncross
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Our new client Chris sent me this amazing email - which as you can imagine made my day!  This is why we do what we do at The Money Gym.

“Hi Nicola,  I wrote an extended piece, feel free to do what you will with it. I have enclosed this just so you have more information. You can pick and choose or use what you have written I don’t mind either way.  Please check out the Blog at http://www.chrisogle.typepad.com/ for much more flesh on the bone of the first 10/11 days or so with The Money Gym.

The BeginningI attended the 2nd National VA Conference held at Milton Keynes on Saturday 19th April 2008.

I was there as a sponsor, 1 of 3 men in the room amongst 80 self motivated women. Our sponsorship was to promote the burgening relationship between the host of the VA Conference (Carmen MacDougall) and and IPS with our i-Tr@der business platform. i-Tr@der enables small businesses to run their entire business, accounts, document filing, email, contact management etc. within one integrated system all through a simple web browser.During the day Nicola Cairncross presented a one hour slot on the money gym. Nicola explained (in a hurry - she only had one hour) the basics of the four wealth highways. I realised I was in only one and not performing well in that either. After Nicola had finished I spoke with her briefly, gave her my card and asked her to get in touch as I wanted to meet with her to discuss how I could perhaps sort things. She replied to my email that she did not do one-on-one wealth coaching but I was welcome to come along on the 26th to the ‘Lets Talk Money’ day in London.I was in Hungary / Budapest at the time, but signed up immediately and then attended on the following Saturday.

Let’s Talk MoneyI

arrived at 9:58, two minutes to spare, the public transport system had contrived to prevent me attending but I had battled successfully through. What a fantastic day! Judith Morgan co-hosted the day with Nicola and these ladies know their stuff!! Each aspect of the 4 wealth highways was delved into in more detail. By lunchtime I had confirmed what I already suspected here is a chance to mix with some winners and a resource / support centre that would definately enable me to get what I wanted done, done. I signed up for the Gold membership seeing this as the quickest vehicle and where I would get the most assistance. This is a small investment considering the knowledge and network connections available to you, for the whole year it is effectively a single extra consulting day of my time with i-Tr@der and I committed myself to generating that extra day to pay for my year’s education and the ride!The next challenge was to work out what it was that I wanted done….

The next 10 daysI

said to Nicola, Judith and Philly (appointed as my coach with my consent) that they would be sick of me as I am an avid learner, and would pester them incessently. I tend to work long hours 6am until Midnight when I’m on a mission, and, I’m on a mission. I have given myself three months to become an Internet Marketing Guru. Not the best there is but to totally understand what is going on and how to best take advantage of it.What I discovered as I read, listened and watched was that Internet Marketing is primarily operated by either one or two man businesses. We sell into the SME market place and although our customers have already taken the plunge to use the Internet as the basis on which they run their business, none of the companies I have spoken to know anything about blogging, article submission, social networking etc. etc.So I quickly re-assessed that this is a huge market which has not even been started on yet. What had been troubling me since the start which was how could I make all of this relevent to my existing business suddenly became crystal clear. This is just as important to their business future, survival and growth as it is ours, and we have a 12-18 month window to steal a march on the competition. Even more reason to get out of bed and get cracking.

The tenth day

Closed a deal to provide £3k’s work of Internet Marketing consultancy to drive up sales from one of my customers online catalague from £1k per month to £20k per month. This has already secured the income to match what I am committed to with the Money Gym. I have also canvassed four other customers all are keen to make similar investments to use Internet Marketing techniques to increase their sales volumes.

Where to now?

I have produced a restrutured business strategy that includes Affiliate sales Products, Business Consultancy, Software deployment (our core business), and Internet Marketing sales strategy to drive up sales. Four quandrants of revenue generation all promoted through a soon to be published (end of next week) central blog. Our existing web-site is to be revamped to be totally web-friendly with carefully selected Keywords. An E-Book on ‘Running your business online’ will be written in the next two months and a backlog of 10 articles previously written will be leaked out to the internet using submityourarticle.com over coming 6 weeks.Once the next 80 days is complete I will set my sights on the Property sector and begin to build a large property portfolio. I have already had some great ideas in this area to !

Conclusion

The Money Gym has been a total revelation. The people involved here are very inspiring, you can feel that they want you to do well and the encouragement is enormous. For me it was a wake up call, get busy learning this stuff or you’ll miss out on one of the most golden moments in Internet development forever. I have made a few sacrifices to work at the speed I want, Red wine (which I love) has been put on hold for 3 months (this stuff requires clear thinking), and I am committed to starting work no later than 6:30am, writing my blog every day even if it’s midnight and I have filed the word procrastination in the bin !The possibilities in Property are even larger, but that’ll wait 3 months.

Kind Regards

Chris Ogle

(Nicola says:  follow Chris’ story and help us to boot him up the bum if he falters LOL at http://www.chrisogle.typepad.com/ )

Tags: Wealth Coach Diaries by Nicola Cairncross
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Nicola Cairncross, Wealth Coach, interviews Claire Raikes the “Business Blog Angel” on what to think about when blogging for business, and how to set up your blog for maximum effect

Tags: Highway #2 : Internet Marketing, Money Gym Radio by Nicola Cairncross
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