Podcast: Michelle Falzon From Pow Wow Events
May 15, 2009 by Tyrone
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Michelle Falzon’s Success With Pow Wow Events
Michelle Falzon is the CEO of Pow Wow Events who is our featured guest on the podcast. She is a very motivated entrepreneur and has done exceptionally well taking this company to the next level. The reason for this interview with Michelle was because Pow Wow Events has achieved phenomenal success in Australia and I wanted to know how it was done.
Pow Wow Events has served more than 250,000 Australians through the provision of quality business and personal education via live events, books, audio and video programs. Since Pow Wow Events started in 1994, it has produced over 800 events ranging from small workshops for 20 people to filling auditoriums of 6,500.
Pow Wow Events’ promotes and markets the programs and products of speakers such as Robert Kiyosaki, Maurice Goldberg, John Burley, Carly Crutchfield, Dolf de Roos, Brendan Nichols, Blair Singer and many more.
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Top 10 Tips To Increase Your Blogging Productivity
April 3, 2009 by Tyrone
I have been working from home for just over three months now, in the beginning I found it hard to focus and my productivity dropped, especially in the summer months when the sun was shining and beckoning me to go out. Today I’m going to share a few tips that I have put in to practise…
- Write down special goals – If you work from home, you have to do this – There are just too many distractions and no boss watching over your back every minute of the day. On my table I have a small card that I write down 2 mission critical tasks for the day. That way I focus on the most important tasks and outsource the rest.
- Wake up at the same time everyday – Set a time to get up each day and stick to it. I get up at 7.30am to exercise, then have my breakfast and start work around 10am. I stick to 4 hours of work a day.
- Turn off phone and instant email notifications – Having constant interrupts makes it harder to stay focus. I make sure there are no interruptions when I am writing a blog post because my readers want the best from me. Don’t you?
- Exercise – I find doing exercise in the morning gives me so much more energy and motivation for the day, if you don’t regularly do exercise, try it for one week and see how you feel. Your mind will be clearer for the day and you might shed a few kilos along the way!
- Tidy office – Keep your office clean by filing away piles of paper. If you have notes written down, transfer them to your computer and put a reminder to complete them. That way you will have less clutter and paper lying around.
- Music – Not for everyone but I find music really helps me work during the day. Put something light and soothing on in the background.
- Daily schedule – Even though you are working from home and don’t have to follow the usual office rules, try and set out a daily plan for yourself – start at the same time, have lunch at a set time etc – I find it helps to have a daily routine.
- Just do it – If you are like me you have certain jobs that you try and put off because they’re dull or take ages, make sure it gets done first thing in the morning when you are fresh and motivated.
- Outsource – Even though you can do a job doesn’t always mean you should do it – why not outsource that boring coding job which will leave you free to concentrate on more important jobs or jobs that you enjoy doing more.
- Close your door – If there are distractions at home, like people calling round or noisy kids, make it a rule to not be disturbed when your door is shut.
All of these are pretty obvious things to do but if you don’t do any of them, give it a go and see if your productivity improves.
Tyrone Shum
Increasing Blogging Productivity
Top 5 Powerful E-commerce Plugins For Wordpress
Today I’m exploring the top 5 e-commerce or shopping cart plugins for Wordpress. Yesterday I wrote a topic about Using A Blog Vs. Using A E-commerce Website, and this article continues from there listing the commercially viable e-commerce plugins to use if you are considering selling products or services to your readers.
eShop
The eShop plugin allows you to open your own store right from your blog. You can sell anything from eBooks, software to even PLR product with this plugin. At the moment it only utilises the Paypal payment system to receive money and is also compatible with Wordpress 2.7+. Visit the plugins homepage to get a more detailed description of the shop’s features.
ShoppThe Shopp plugin is a featured filled online shopping cart for your blog. It’s been designed to make it easy for just about anyone to setup online store in minutes while giving users the ability to easily customise every aspect of the shopping experience. This particular plugin does cost money and for a single license it is $55US or for a developer’s license it will cost $299US. The difference between them is how many times will you be using this plugin on different blogs? If you’re a business setting up ecommerce sites for clients then the developer license will be worth the cost. Also Shopp offers different payment options, such as Authorize.Net, eWay Payment, HSBC ePayments and PayPal Pro which will each cost an additional $25.00.
WP e-CommerceThe WP e-Commerce plugin is a state-of-the-art e-Commerce platform with a focus on aesthetics, web standards and usability. This seems to be the free e-commerce plugin that is most commonly downloaded by users from around the word. It does offer many features and lots of options for users.
WP Live-ShoppingThe WP Live Shopping plugin is a widget that enables you to display all relevant live shopping offers within your Wordpress blog. You can add the widget to your sidebar and customise its appearance within the Live Shopping option panel. You will also need to have a Live account setup in order use this plugin.
Visit WP-Live Shopping Homepage
YAK Shopping CartYAK is a simple shopping cart plugin for WordPress. How it works is it associates products with blog posts, where the post ID also becomes the product code. There is an options screen in the admin section that allows you to configure settings for the shopping cart and had 3 additional pages for showing and fulfilling orders, for product management, and basic sales reports.
YAK Features
Tyrone Shum
e-Blog Reviewer
Focus Brings Long Term Results
Over the past 2 years of venturing out and running my own business and not working full-time in a job I have tried numerous business opportunities. I have tried businesses in providing student accommodation, share trading and options, renting and selling paddles to dragon boat clubs and selling toilet odour eliminator products online. This was opportunistic thinking and diminished my efforts as I got started by adding more work rather than focusing on one business. It was all very tempting to try and run them at the same time to see which one would take off. Unfortunately there was no focus and when times got tough I jumped across to work on the business that interested me more.
Opportunistic Thinking Is Bad
If you are like me and see that everything is possible and always keeping an open mind about business ideas, then you will find it irresistible to try new ideas. Trust me I’ve learnt the hard way. So how have I changed this? I’m a huge fan of Yaro Starak’s blog – entrepreneurs-journey.com and one day he wrote a post about his coach Rich Schefren who was launching a new coaching program. As usual most internet marketers have a system to launch their new products and give away a lot of free quality information that can be applied straight away. They do this so they can build rapport with you and show that their information is useful before they start their sales pitch on you. As I knew the information was free and they just wanted my email address, I downloaded Rich’s eBook, the “Internet Manifesto“. If you haven’t read it, I would recommend you get a copy of it immediately.
The Change in Mindset
After reading the “Internet Manifesto”, I had a profound moment that I would change the way I operate my business. My mindset went from “thinking opportunistic” to “thinking strategically” meaning if I wanted to build a long term business I would have to set up the right systems and hire staff to leverage my time. I realised that I couldn’t do everything myself. Rich’s famous flowchart accurately shows how most Solo Enterpreneurs run their Internet Businesseses today. (I’m one of them and have taken action to outsource a lot of my work since then)
Since then I have taken action to sell my businesses that are not part of my goals and made a mental decision to not start new business opportunities.
Focus Is Key
Since I was compelled to find out more, I downloaded the rest of Rich’s series of books which are listed below:
- Internet Manifesto
- The Missing Chapter
- The Final Chapter
- Attention Age Doctrine Part 2
- Maven Matrix Manifesto
- The Entrepreneurial Emergency
Through this series I learned that I needed to focus on one task at a time, not five at a time (today’s generation calls it multi-tasking). Making that shift helped me improve time efficiency and also get tasks completed that generated more money. Additionally, you need to use your strengths to focus on a task and learn to outsource the rest that you are not good at. This is the key to long-term success in any business.
Tyrone Shum
Focus Strategist
Plan Or Not To Plan?
January 5, 2009 by Tyrone
I just couldn’t sleep last night having so many ideas running through my head so I decided to stay up writing down my thoughts. I formulated a 2 month plan of how to implement these ideas and I am very proud of what I have laid down as a foundation. So you must be wondering what I wrote down? I can’t quite tell you in detail of what the grand plan is but I will give you details on the strategy I used and how it can be applied to any business.
Brainstorming Your Thoughts On Paper
The first thing I always do when I get ideas is to write them down. I would grab a large sheet of paper, something like the butcher’s paper or A2 size. Then in the middle of the page I would write down the name of my business and then start jotting down my ideas around them. It doesn’t have to be in any sequential order as long as you can get your ideas down on paper and I wouldn’t worry about how neat it is.
Once I have written down all my ideas, I will start to circle the ones that I think would be profitable for the business and then choose and prioritise 5 of the ideas. Why only 5, when I may have like 20+ ideas written down? Most of the time by having too many ideas can be overwhelming so I choose 5 to start researching and doing due diligence on. By taking baby steps it helps me to focus on the tasks leading to the big picture. I will come back to the other ideas once these ideas have been implemented.
Connecting The Ideas To Formulate A Plan
The fun part is now connecting the dots just like the ones you see in a puzzle book. Let me show you how I do it. Once you have the 5 ideas prioritised from 1 to 5 then you are able to use this to start doing your research and gathering the information required to turn your idea into reality. Start with the first one and in my case my first idea was to gather subscribers to the blog and ask them to sign up for my weekly Hot Business tips. Most readers on the Internet don’t just subscribe unless there is an appealing Free gift. Therefore coming up with this eBook that you can get here and giving it away for Free is one of the ways of asking a reader to subscribe. I have spent hours creating this eBook to provide value to my audience and hopefully they will come back to this website because they see the information I offer useful and practical. In turn I can build an audience of subscribers who will be able to take the information I provide for FREE and apply it to their business.
So you ask, where do I get the information to write this eBook and what information to include that will provide value to your audience? The first thing is to know what target market you are speaking to. Then research what they want and write about it with your opinions and your story. Most people don’t want to read about facts but want to relate to your story and how you did it.
Therefore take your first idea and begin researching what you need to turn it into reality and remember to take baby steps to achieve your goal. Once you’ve implemented your first idea then move onto the next one and so forth.
Planning to Win
At the end of the day when you have written down your ideas, prioritised, researched and taken action to turn this idea into reality, we want to see results. In this case we are talking about the bottom line, which is MONEY. So when you do your research you need to definite a clear dollar value of how much the idea will result in. That way you have a set goal allowing you to lay a path of “how to” achieve this result. As in my example of gathering subscribers, I have a goal to introduce 10,000 subscribers by December 2009. Through a group of selected subscribers I will offer an opportunity to be part of my coaching program and this program will generate $100,000. As you can see I have a defined goal from the idea I prioritised and this is how we plan to win!
Tyrone Shum
Strategising To Win
