Hi,
The last three days have been amazing.
Gary Rockis and I got together in Toronto for three days to plan the re-launch of the Ultimate E-Book Teleworkshop Series. It was a lot of work – some fun – and incredibly rewarding. Let me share just a few things to keep in mind as you plan your own projects.
Have a budget. That almost seems like a no-brainer, doesn’t it?
Take the time to make an excel spreadsheet and list all the expenses and anticipated revenue. It helps you find the obvious items you’ve overlooked. For example, halfway through the process I realised I had left affiliate commissions out of the budget!
It also gives you ideas. When I remembered to include affiliate commissions, it also popped into my head that 1ShoppingCart.com lets you set up a two tiered commission system. That means all the experts I’m interviewing can pass this on to their affiliates and make a small commission on sales they generate.
Here’s how it works: Clayton Makepeace does an interview and is an affiliate. For every sale generated through his affiliate link, he gets a 50% commission. Then he lets all of his affiliates know about this project. They sign up through his affiliate link to become affiliates for the Ultimate E-Book Tele-workshop. This ties their affiliate ID to Clayton’s affiliate ID. Then Clayton makes a 10% commission for each sale they generate. (I get 40%, Clayton gets 10% and they get 50%.)
Automate the accounting. This is why I’m partnering with Gary Rockis.
Gary has decades of business experience, and he’s a nationally-recognised author with American Technical Publishing. Gary is having his accountant set up “the books” for this project so invoice/payments/receipts are all tracked automatically.
You can see how that saves everyone a lot of work.
Communicate, communicate, communicate…
Johnny Meehan is the tech guy – he does all the web site work. Gary is the financial guy – he looks after the business end of the project. I’m the creative type – I write the copy, get the ideas, and be my screwball self.
Fortunately, e-mail makes communicating easy because you can CC everyone. The thing is – you have to send the e-mails. And this is what’s so important:
Take your time when you write an e-mail. Open a Word file and type out what you want to say. Run it through spell-check (I gotta remember that), and read it over before you copy/paste it into an e-mail.
Something else I do is write an outline of the e-mail before I start actually writing it. This isn’t for every e-mail, of course. But when I’m writing an update for Johnny and Gary, I want to be clear, cover everything, and still try to keep the e-mail as short as I can. These guys are busy, too, and have their own businesses to run.
That’s it. Three things to keep in mind as you plan your own projects. Let me know if they’re helpful, and if you have questions – feel free to ask.
Conrad