All posts by Mitch Mitchell

I'm an independent consultant in many fields, so I have a lot to share.
Advertisement, Marketing

Creating Your Own Products; Let Me Talk About Mine

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Something you hear many of the internet marketing gurus talking about is creating your own products, especially information products. Supposedly there’s this big market for almost anything that’s intellectual property, and big money can be made from these things.

Well, I’m about to somewhat challenge that view by talking about my own products that I’ve created. Some I’ve talked about here, while I haven’t talked about the others. So, I’m going to do that here, with links to where I might have talked about a product before, and then talk about the other things I have. Of course, within those other links is a link to my product.

First, for this crowd, is my book Using Your Website As A Marketing Tool, which is up there at the top left of this blog. Do you know how many people have actually visited the book from this blog? Four ever; period. That’s it. Now, to be slightly fair, the last time I actually promoted the book in full was in August, but come on, only four people ever, with all the visitors I have coming to this blog? All the people who say they’re interested in making money, all the people who have businesses with lousy websites, and I could only drive four people to that site? That’s pretty pathetic. What’s also pathetic is that for each of the times I’ve written about this book, I didn’t get a single comment on that post; I’m obviously a terrible marketer.

The second thing you see over there is for my webinar Social Media, SEO & Your Business in 90 Minutes. That post also didn’t get a single visit, and I’ve driven 3 people to check out the ad for the book from this blog. At least it’s newer than the other ebook, but still,… And, once again, no comment on this post, though I did get a couple of comments when I was talking about it before I actually did the webinar. Once again, created product, but lousy marketing I assume.

Next, look to the left there under the ad for 123Inkjets. This is my book Embrace The Lead, the one product I’m the most proud of. It was a labor of love, and I worked hard on completing it before my dad passed away. I was able to get 9 people from this blog to go look at it, but that’s not really great either. It has been my biggest selling product over the years, as I sell it in both electronic and soft cover form (I’ll even autograph a copy if asked). But I have to admit I’d have thought I’d make at least one sale from it off this blog, which has never happened. I have made a sale because of my Mitch’s Blog, which is my business blog, but not this one. And I’ve had two different squeeze pages for this book, but neither has generated all that much action ever, which is why it’s a muted looking page integrated into my business website format.

Below that is my CD series Keys To Leadership, and I’ve driven 7 people from this blog to check it out, even though it got some nice comments here. Seems people were more interested in what I had to say on the blog, which was a pretty funny story, than actually deciding it was worth taking the time to go see what the CDs were all about. You know, it makes me wonder just how many people actually even use the Listen button at the top of each blog post instead of having to read some of my longer posts. Okay, that was a sidebar thing; don’t answer it. Once again, it had one of those fancy squeeze pages that I later decided didn’t work, and integrated it back into my business website.

The last two products I haven’t really talked about here, but I will now. One is called the Mitchell Manager Training Program, and is a training program for new managers who want to gain some skills in things managers or supervisors need to know, but don’t have time for a lot of deep theory. It also has a portion that talks about stress and time management, as well as a brief lesson on budgeting. Sure, it’s still around 150 pages long, but I wrote it to be fairly easy to understand. Two weeks ago I made my first online sale, as it was only maybe 4 months ago I turned it into a digital product and began marketing it in that fashion. This one has never had a squeeze page; I’ve always marketed it basically through my business website. I haven’t put it on this blog because, frankly, I figured I’d be wasting my time. After all, it hasn’t lit a spark for any of my other products.

And finally, there’s my Mitchell Employee Evaluation Module, which has always been on its own squeeze page, though I’ve thought about pulling it back within the business site. It’s about 27 pages worth of information and sheets that will help managers evaluate their employees, as well as set up criteria to use in evaluating new employees. Once again, I’ve only made one digital sale of this product, and the buyer seemed to be happy with it. I knew this one would have no interest whatsoever on this site, which is why I haven’t marketed it here before now.

So, there’s six information products that I’ve created, and how are the sales? Lousy. How is my marketing? Obviously lousy. See, a big part of the piece says to try to find out what someone is interested in, then create something towards that interest. The other part of it is that, if you’re not interested in that, how the heck can you write about it? Some of these gurus aren’t interested and don’t care about stuff. They pay someone else to write it, someone else to help market it, and collect the profits. It works best when they’re already big names in selling something else; I doubt most of us could get away with that.

And why would we want to? What could be more dishonest than that? Matt Cutts was talking about that once with a website that advertised medical services that someone needed for their mother, but when asked for more information they couldn’t give it because the person knew nothing about the procedure; they had paid someone else to write it for them so they could put their name on it. How irritated would you be about something like that?

In any case, this post has a twofold purpose. One, to highlight all of the products I’ve created thus far; more are coming as I move along. And two, to show you that even creating your own products doesn’t guarantee success or interest. This doesn’t mean don’t create new things; it just means to temper your thoughts on how successful it might be once you put it out there.

Once again, there are no get rich quick schemes.



Ultra Diamonds

Personal

How Do You Value?

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Today I had to take my wife’s SUV to Goodyear for an evaluation of her car battery. Turned out she needed a new one, and when the guy told me $190, I was in shock. He said that Hyundai’s used a particular kind of battery that was powerful, but cost more. Nothing I could do but go ahead and pay it.

At the same time, I happened to look up on the wall and saw that service per hour is now $94 per hour, and that shocked me also. I think the last time I had service anywhere other than my dealership, it was around $60 an hour, and at the time I thought that was kind of high.

Today, however, I started thinking about this concept of value just a little bit more. I wondered why I thought $94 an hour to pay for people to fix my car, which I know nothing about, is too high. After all, for my main business service in health care, I charge at a minimum $150 an hour to do what I do. Some hospitals pay it willingly; others balk a bit at the price until they realize just how much money I’m going to make for them. When you balance $15,000 against the opportunity to make an extra $1 million a year in revenue, it has to eventually seem like a pretty good deal.

Yet, it doesn’t always pay well. I’ve had some big years, but this year, with worries about a potential health care plan, as well as reductions to Medicare and Medicaid, I haven’t worked in that industry all that much. The people who would hire me haven’t quite figured out how to value what I do against what their needs are. When you don’t have a lot of money, and you’re not sure of what someone else tells you are guaranteed results, it’s hard for you to determine just what value really is.

I’ve suffered at times with trying to figure out how to price items I’ve created, along with some of the services I provide. Last week, for instance, I sold my very first Mitchell Manager Training Program online for $39.99. That bad boy is around 150 pages long, and I’m selling it for less than $40. Last year when I was talking with Lynn Terry about my ebook above, Using Your Website As A Marketing Tool, which I sell for $20 based on her recommendation of how many pages are in it.

In a way, this question of value is what I was talking about in my last post about writers lying when talking about secrets. They’re not offering anything new, just saying the same exact thing someone else has said before most of the time. There’s no real value in that; it’s just a waste of our time.

There’s also this thing about how we value ourselves, and how we value others. Value isn’t always about money after all. On my business blog in June, I wrote about a lesson my dad gave me on a personal value issue, and how I was glad to have learned such a lesson even though I was over 40 years old. I’ve also written there on how some people have either positive or negative values, and get to decide which direction they want to go.

So, how do you value yourself? How do you value your time? How do you value the worth of others and what they have to offer to you? How do you value your own products, or services, or anything else you have to offer or sell or even write on your blogs? It’s something to think about as you’re deciding how you want to write your blog, how you want to market your products, and whether the products other people market just might be something you may feel you’ll get some kind of value from.

And it’s something I continually think about as I work on this thing called affiliate or internet marketing. I don’t have that particular answer myself.

Personal

September 11, 2001 – I’m Still Mad

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Today is the 8th anniversary of the planes hitting the Twin Towers in New York City, and I’m still mad and upset about it. The last time I wrote about it was in 2007 on my business blog because this one didn’t exist yet. Last year, I just avoided the day pretty much, but decided I wanted to write on it again this year.

Though I’ve been advertising some 9/11/01 things over the past couple of days (not yesterday, though), I have to admit something. I’ve not watched a single 9/11/01 related program in all these years. I tried watching one in 2007 and 2008, but I just still am not ready.

I have to explain something here. I’ve only watched Roots once in my entire life. I was mad the entire week that movie was on back in the 70’s. Of all things, it was the one week when even school bullies decided I wasn’t the person to mess with. I didn’t talk to anyone during the entire week; I was mad every single day. I saw Amistad on a fluke, and I was mad at white people the entire next day. I take this kind of thing to heart; that’s why I refuse to even entertain the idea of watching Ghosts Of Mississippi or Rosewood; it’s also a good reason I don’t have any weapons.

I’ve also only watched one movie that would be considered a war movie in my entire life. That would be Pearl Harbor. My dad was in both the Korean War and Vietnam. Some military kids will watch these movies because they want to know what their parents might have gone through. For me, if Dad wouldn’t talk about it, I don’t want to know. I did try to watch Saving Private Ryan once, and only made it 4 minutes into the movie before I realized I just couldn’t deal with it. Sometimes, the sensibilities run deep.

Yeah, I’m still mad about what happened on that day. And I’m mad about what’s happening now. I’m mad that so many people think 9/11 was the result of something President Bush did. He wasn’t my favorite president, I’d have to say, but that’s just ridiculous. There’s no way I would ever believe the President or Vice President of the United States, or any senator or congressman or woman or military officer would have allowed that kind of thing to occur. I’m not even entertaining that thought. It was horrific, and I guess being only 5 hours away and wanting to go, but knowing they’d never let me into the city, had always bothered me. What would I have done anyway?

I’m also mad that we’ve never gotten either Osama Bin Laden or Omar Mullah. I’m mad that Al Queda, no matter how it’s spelled, has gotten away with what they continue to get away with. I’m mad that we went to Iraq when we should have fixed Afghanistan instead, even though I’m not upset that Saddam Hussein or his sons are gone; the first President Bush should have taken him out back in ’91. We didn’t need to be in Iraq; now we’re working hard to get out, but think about how much money we’ve spent in Iraq that we could certainly use now. With the extra troops, we could have cleaned up Afghanistan and already had those troops back here also.

I’m also mad that both Egypt and Saudi Arabia basically got a pass on all of this, but Pakistan was roughhoused. Yeah, we all know that many of the Afghan criminals escaped into Pakistan, and some of them may still be there, but every person on those flights were either from Egypt or Saudi Arabia. And I’m still mad because those people cheered, as did the Palestinians. It’s the only three days I ever hated those people and wished we had sent the planes over and wiped them out; now I’m just still mad. And the price of oil isn’t helping my mood any.

So, we head into another 9/11/01 ceremony day, none of which I’ve ever attended. I was lucky; I don’t know a single person who was killed on that day. But the scary thing is that I’d bee on top of the Towers 2 or 3 times, and always wanted to go back. In a random moment, I, and many other people I know, could have been up there on that day. Now we have terror alerts of all sorts of colors, and we still can’t protect our borders, and Iran and North Korea almost have nukes. That’s all a result of 9/11/01 also.

I’m not ready to let it go. But, in a few days, I will let it abate, and then deal with it again next year.

Blogging

Repurposing A Previous Post

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In my 501st post the other day, I talked about possibly going back and repurposing previous posts for one reason or another. I’ve done just that very thing, I wanted to share with you that post and the reason why I did it.

Back in March of 2008, a friend of mine sent me some videos she found where the guy on the video offered solutions for how people could get out of their credit card problems. This wasn’t a quick fix thing, but real videos that were teaching people some long term solutions. Lucky for me I already knew how the process worked, but I thought the videos were neat enough to share, and since this is a sharing blog I decided to share them with others. I wrote a post called CreditCardSolutions.com to highlight them.

Somewhere along the line, the site must have changed hands, and all the old content was suddenly gone. Now I had broken links and a page that literally made no sense whatsoever. I could have just ignored it, until I was writing that 501st post. Though my original page didn’t make the top 5, it was number six. It means there were a lot of people looking for credit card solutions, coming to my site, and finding absolutely nothing to help. Me being me, I just couldn’t let that go on.

So, I’ve gone back and basically rewritten the entire post. What I also did was leave what I’d originally written, so people could see why I changed the page up. And I optimized it slightly, with only one little affiliate ad because it fit the change I made to the content. I also changed the title of the page to Credit Card Solutions, which fits better, and obviously it’s been drawing traffic anyway under that search term, so it just fits much better.

Anyway, I hope you check it out, even though it was an old post, because now it’s totally new. Even if you don’t need the assistance, just see what I did; it might spark an idea in your own mind for some of your older posts.


eFax

Entertainment

My Top 10 Favorite TV Shows

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At this point, we all know that we love list posts, and this was confirmed by my top 16 sci-fi movies of all time post.

Now it’s time for a new list, and the idea for this one comes from Extreme John, who wrote this post about his top 10 favorite TV shows, and asked people to tell him what they were on his blog. I decided to do it here instead and link back to him, giving him credit for the idea, mainly because it allows me to talk about why I liked these shows, as he did, possibly add a short video, and of course add an affiliate link to each of them, just in case you loved the shows also and I spark enough nostalgia in you that you just have to go and buy it. No, it didn’t work for the movies, but one never stops trying, right?

I have to admit that this one is tougher than the movies were. The rules have to change somewhat, since, as you’ll see, some of these kind of have the same title. But they were different shows, so it doesn’t count. Here we go.

10. Family Guy – The first time I saw this show, I laughed like there was no tomorrow. When they took it off, I thought someone was the biggest moron I’d never heard of. When they brought it back, it told me that someone was paying attention to the fact that they had an irreverent hit on their hands, not typical fare, and people liked it. How many other shows went off the air for 3 years, then came back as a hit; oh yeah, none!

9. Flip Wilson – This was the first black hosted variety show that lasted for longer than 15 minutes, which is about how long Nat King Cole’s show lasted back in the 50’s. Flip Wilson’s show was something much different, and for four seasons, he ruled Thursday nights. Something about NBC and great Thursday night shows over history.

8. Bugs Bunny Show – This one might not count, but I’m putting it here because I just couldn’t wait for Saturday mornings so I could watch this baby. For those of you much younger, we used to only have 3 channels in the days before PBS, and, for me, CBS ruled because they had Bugs Bunny. Man, when I finally got to see them in my own home in color,… I almost burst! They shut down the embed for this one, but you can check it out here.

7. Simpsons – We owe a lot to Tracy Ullman for having these short cartoons throughout her weekly TV show. This show is now in it’s, what, 12th year, and every show is still something totally brand new and offbeat. How many Simpson characters can you name in one sitting? Can you think of any other cartoon that has so many characters in an episodic setting that you know how each one is supposed to act, let alone sound?

6. Law and Order – I was late to this show, but once I started watching it, I was hooked. I love the formula, where we establish the crime, solve the crime, then try to prosecute the crime because sometimes we didn’t quite solve the right crime and the right criminal. It’s formulaic, but it’s comfortable, and you never quite know the outcome.

5. Sanford and Son – You couldn’t get away with this type of show in today’s world, but the world was ready for a break down and laugh out loud show starring a black actor. In this case it was Redd Foxx, who had previously been known for what were then known as “party records,” or raunchy comedy records. Bill Cosby and Diahann Carroll may have come first, but those two shows were muted by comparison. White folks at the time weren’t ready for this show, but black people were; especially this clip, which they won’t show on TV anymore.

4. Star Trek – This was the show that started it all for me. This was the more serious show, at least most of the time, to its outer space counterpart at the time, Lost In Space. I have to tell you folks that I kind of owe my life to the concepts of logic and Mr. Spock, but Captain Kirk has given my the most endearing line of my entire life, something I will always live by and, I believe, others need to live by also: “I don’t believe in the no-win scenario.” Okay, that’s from the second movie, but still,… Take that, Kobiyashi Maru! What Star Trek fan hasn’t at some time found themselves humming this tune?

3. X-Files – If you can imagine a single guy looking to go out on Friday nights but having to stay in and watch a TV show first, that’s what X-Files did to me. For eight seasons this was the show that I just couldn’t miss, and man, I really wanted Scully to finally see those aliens. The science on the show was just plausible enough to pass the muster, and as a thriller it was unsurpassed as far as TV fare went, and that was good enough for me.

2. Star Trek – Next Generation – Okay, you’re probably wondering why this show ranks higher than the original Star Trek. It’s mainly because I felt like this cast was a part of my family, whereas I felt like the original Star Trek cast were people I needed to look up to and respect, more like, well, parents. Most of this cast was close to my age except Captain Picard, and tell me has there ever been a cooler short, bald man? Except for Data, and possibly the captain, these people were folks I could have hung out with, even if I didn’t understand every word they were saying. I almost cried on the last episode; now that’s dedication.

1. Muppet Show – Okay, like y’all didn’t know this one was coming, with all the Muppet clips I post on this blog. Oddly enough, not counting sports, this was the only TV show I watched while I was in college. There was just something about Kermit and his goofy friends that resonated with me, and of course the guest stars were something else. My favorite episode ever was the one with Harry Belafonte, but since I’ve already posted that video, here’s another classic that I’ve always liked, that I’ve never shared before.

And there you are, my top 10 TV shows. Go ahead, comment, share yours if you wish, and have fun with it.