Keep a firm grip on your business

I read Richardson's "The Power of Advertising" recently. Written in 1910, it still stands up as a valid guide to advertising and marketing.

Pages 30 and 31 particularly stood out for me, since this is a lesson that I've had to deal with several times, but only now think I have a handle on it.

These pages are an appeal to businesses to keep the control of their product in their hands for as much as possible, and only give the retailer the ability to sell on your behalf. They can add additional value through advertising, marketing and service on top, but the core has to come from you, and the core reward has to go to you.

"To achieve this result calls for hard fighting... Weak-kneed methods are not very much good when the retailer has to be dealt with; on the contrary they usually result in making him master of the situation. He demands and gets, his own name on your goods, the trade becomes his trade, the public recognizes him, and then he starts cutting down profits."

"The goods may be yours, but so long as the brand is his, he can get them made up where he likes - he controls the price, the quality, the sales."

"Put your own brand on everything you manufacture and use the modern method of advertising to make the public acquainted with that brand and what it stands for."

"Every time the manufacturer yields to the retailer's demand for private brands he gives birth to a competitor for his own business."

"Keep a firm grip on your business; show confidence in your goods by trade-marking them with your own brands; keep the trade in your own hands in such a way that you will derive the full benefit of the demand you create."

Now, obviously I have to interpret this for the year 2016.

When I sell online courses, I am now:

• Using the platforms as sale platforms only
• I do not attempt to white label the pages:
• that puts my url in the retailer's hands
• that makes me reliant on their html and page layouts
• that means I rely on their landing pages
• I want to use them as final sales page and checkout process 
• I build landing pages on my own sites
• I build FAQ pages on my own sites
• I have multiple retailers - as long as I rely on a single retailer I am at their mercy, I maintain my courses on multiple sites so that I can switch between them if T&Cs change in ways I don't like.
• I have a single 'preferred' retailer that I link to for the check out process, and that is behind a short url that I can edit quickly to switch between vendors

I'm breaking my rules slightly by blogging on blogger. This is clearly not my own platform, and I am to some extent at Google's mercy.

I have my books on multiple sites and link to them as necessary.

I opt out of 'platforms' sales and special offers, e.g. Udemy discount every course down to $9 every week as a 'quick act now sale', I do not take part in those sales, and I use them only as an 'organic' sales source rather than my main retail channel.

I've spent the last few days, pulling more content and landing pages on to my sites and moving away from vendor sites as much as possible to give me more control over the messaging and allow me to switch between retailers more easily.

There were many other lessons in this advertising book from 1910. I recommend it.

• A. Richardson's "The Power of Advertising" on Archive.org

On Creating Static WebSites with docpad and hugo

One thing I've grown to distrust is Wordpress security.

This is less of an issue now that wordpress makes upgrading to new versions easier, and partly auto updates.

But I've been investigating static website generation to try and avoid this issue. After all, who really wants the hassle of updating wordpress, when you need to focus on consultancy and product development.

I could simply host on wordpress and have them update the security etc. Or move everything over to blogger, (but I'm really only doing that as a temporary measure). And I don't use that for my main sites.

And I like the flexibility that having control over the web server gives me:

• creating custom client areas
• adding extra software etc.

As a result I investigate docpad, and it was pretty simple. It has a lot of flexibility because of node.js but there were still things I couldn't do very well that I wanted to and the rss generation broke recently (and that is an essential feature for me).

So I migrated over to Hugo yesterday.

It took a few hours to migrate (about 4), so nothing too bad.

It has some 'bugs' i.e. the docs suggest that the rss feed should generate as rss.xml but it comes out as index.xml

It has some missing 'features' i.e. the 'where' clause handling on the 'range' selection doesn't handle custom Params yet.

But, I was able to work around all of that.

Benefits over docpad for me:

• slightly simpler to use
• more active development
• no plugins required for rss generation or template handling
• easier to test because in server mode the permalinks are (localhost) I can actually test it locally without links being external (I use xenu to check)
• much much faster than docpad

Drawbacks:

• less powerful longer term
• harder to generate .php files etc. (so I'll need to create some sort of post processing step for some of my sites)

But the rss works, the sitemap is generated automatically. Helper pages e.g. indexes are generated automatically. There is a lot of flexibility to explore.

I'll see how I get on with it over time, but for the moment.

• cd <sitedirectory>
• use "hugo server -v --buildDrafts --watch" for development
• use "hugo" to build for production release and copy the contents of 'public' to the website

I found a set of useful tutorials over at http://npf.io/

More Online Webinar Meeting Services: AnyMeeting.com and Spreecast.com

I have previously used Skype, MeetingBurner and Google+ for small meetings with clients and webinars and now it seems like there are ever more competitors in this space.

And the services seem to become ever more affordable.

Two more services to add to your evaluation list:

• AnyMeeting.com offers meetings for up to 200 participants for free (ad supported)
• Spreecast.com seems to offer free webinar streaming for unlimited participants

Consultancy in the USA

Or "We don't need no stinking consultants... unless they are from a big consultancy company"

I periodically get requests to consult in the USA.

Great.

So how do I get a visa to do that?

• http://travel.state.gov/visa/temp/types/types_2665.html#5

Whoa, I need my 'prospective employer' to file a petition with a bunch of government agencies. Because they will do that for a couple of days consultancy from an independent consultant.

Oh, and if they do, then any contract that I had with them would probably come under IR35 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IR35). Which for a small independent consultancy pretty much doesn't work.

From http://london.usembassy.gov/root/visa-wizard/pages/visawizard006a.html

"The performance of any skilled or unskilled labor - even if it is unpaid - is most always prohibited. This includes performing work in the U.S. as a trainer or consultant"

Note the - unpaid part there. So even if you turn up for 'meetings' because you want in on the Waiver scheme, and don't get 'paid' for work. You are not allowed in.

Apparently there used to be a " B-1 business visa" which allowed for this. But no longer.

A B-1 Business Visa does not allow "consultancy" work.

• http://london.usembassy.gov/niv/b1apply.html

The UK is part of the Visa Waiver Programme, which allows British Citizens to travel to the USA for less than 90 days - and it includes business, so long as the business activity isn't money related i.e. you could do meetings, but not paid work.

So where does consultancy fit? It doesn't. there are no Visa's that guarantee entry into the US for 2 or 3 days of short term paid consultancy to companies in the USA.

You have the risk that even if you get to the states, immigration don't let you in. You might mention 'work' instead of 'business' and then you are likely to get turned away.

It seems as though a "B1 in lieu of H1B" is required where someone from a foreign company, paid by the foreign company can work in the USA. If the consulate issue one, and if the immigration officers allow you entry via it.

Most consultants and trainers then, I suspect are essentially illegal migrant workers. Whoo hoo, way to go government immigration rules. Of course the UK has very similar rules and visas to the US, so US consultants should find it equally hard to gain entry into the UK.

Of course there are no restrictions on remote working.

Collating content for e-mail Newsletters

Some of my blogs are 'non-core'.
Like this one.
I set them up so I have a topic related channel and can write up what I need to, without polluting my 'core' brands.
At some point, this might become core, so I try to keep it very focussed and add value.

For my core blogs, I've started writing an e-mail newsletter. And I wanted to collate content for it, over a month, so that when it came to write the newsletter, I had all the content I needed at hand, to make writing the newsletter fast and easy.

There are a lot of services out there now which 'seem' to want to help you do that. Pinterest, Flipboard, etc. etc.

So I tried a few of the popular services that seem aimed at doing this:

• Flipboard didn't seem to want to let me collate individual items, it seems to want to pull in feeds. Well I already use NewsBlur for my RSS feeds. So I don't need that. Account Disabled within 15 minutes.
• Pinterest wants to help you collate individual items so that you have a pin board of 'stuff'. Sounds good. But as soon as you create an account, Pinterest throws up a 'follow 5 people' dialog. I don't really know what to do with the system at this point, so I randomly select 5 people, just so I can move on to see the site. But now I hav a Pinterest home page filled with random junk. Should be simple to fix - just unsubscribe from those 5 random people and... no can do. Account Disabled within 5 minutes.

Clearly, its just me. All I wanted was something to pin things to that I found on the web and share it and ...

So I fell back on the old stalwart. EverNote.

I created a notebook for each newsletter, then started adding items into the notebook.

I tend to copy and paste stuff, rather than use the browser EverNote plugins.

A useful feature I like on my Android devices is the twitter integration. With Twitter you generally have to 'favourite' tweets, but that is a little too public for my sensibilities. But on Android I can 'send to EverNote' and the tweet I want to follow up on, or curate, is added to my EverNote without anyone noticing.

Sometimes, it pays to keep it simple.

Trim your LinkedIn groups on a monthly basis

Linkedin groups are a massive source of frustration.

I was starting to lose all hope of finding any value in them.

But since I was investigating online training, I wanted to find some linkedin groups for that. As I wrote about previously.

Linkedin has a limit on the number of groups you can join - probably to save your sanity. So I had to unsubscribe a few groups.

Linkedin hide the 'leave this group' option. You need to be in the group, then use the 'more...\ Your Settings' link and there you will see the [Leave Group]' button.

My strategy for choosing groups to leave was:

If the number of members is small then, check the recent posts:

• If there were none of interest in the last month - leave the group
• If the questions, or answers annoyed me, leave the group
• If there were no posts in the last month - leave the group

I stayed in a few groups just because of this size of the membership base, and purely for future marketing reasons.

I will repeat the above 'trimming' process on a monthly basis. This will probably help keep me sane.

Working Remotely with Google Hangouts

I recently spent a day working remotely with a team in Romania through Google Hangouts.

We had a few connection issues along the way, I don't think any of that was from Google Hangouts, it was because of local wifi connection issues.

Google Hangouts makes it really easy to setup a group meeting, and remember this is all for free.

You can keep them private and only invite who you want.

The participants can all see each other, and you can share your screen easily. In fact, any participant can share their screen.

There is a chat window for sharing links.

Most impressive of all, was the remote desktop sharing. So I could operate their computer remotely.

I'm not sure I'm ready to use this for webinars yet. But certainly for face to face calls I'll use this as a default rather than Skype,