andrewmurrayhq

May 2015 Recap

May 2015 Recap

Another month in the books.

First off, I wanted to start my recap by repeating what I said last month which is that I am no longer working with Michael Somerville.  I've run into a few people who were still unaware of the fact that we are no longer working together in any capacity, and have not been for months.

As for me, I am happy moving on and doing my own thing.  The reason I mention this again is that it is important to me that people know that we are no longer in a partnership and that I have moved on to other projects.

That being said, May was perhaps the least stressful month in my business in months.

Finally I feel like I can really move forward strategically. It's a great feeling.

New Opportunities:

We joined a new business in May, and are really excited about building a stable, long-term residual income.

To launch it, Marie and I did a series of 3 videos that were very well-received on her blog, MamaNetworker.com

Video 1: Announcement

Video 2: Building Wealth In 7 Years

Video 3: Residual Income: The Truth

7years

In particular, the 7 years to wealth video was controversial.  We had some people who were upset by the timeline of 7 years, and even more who were excited by the non-hypey, realistic timeline of the 7 year length.

As you probably know if you're been following us for some time, we are not into hyping things up.  We are into real changes in real people's lives.

We'll definitely be talking more about this business, but if you missed the replay of the webinar we did, you can catch it here.  (And I highly recommend you watch that as soon as possible.)

New Training

We started building our new centralized training site and tying up some loose ends in our business that needed to be re-arranged.

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It's too early for an announcement, but there is some good movement behind the scenes.

I have also started to move some of our existing products from Ontraport to Zaxaa.

zaxaa

The main reason is that the affiliate program was so lacking at Ontraport, and I wanted to make some changes to allow affiliates to have a better experience and access to better statistics.  I decided NOT to move to JVZOO, because I think listing a product on JVZOO can lead to a lot of distractions as the JVZOO platform is extremely aggressive about selling products to members – regardless of the quality.

Once somebody is an affiliate on JVZOO, they get hit with multiple pitches for products that are really not necessary.

New tools

I've been using Ducksboard to have a centralized dashboard of important metrics.  Ducksboard has recently been taken over by New Relic.

This is one of the things that has been lacking in my business, and I want to get better at centralized reporting and metrics in the back half of the year.

I had an issue with one of my self-hosted email services, and it’s frustrating, but finally resolved after much back and forth.

Apparently there was a problem between MailJet and Sendpress.  And because of that, mailjet closed my account for an extremely high bounce rate of 17%.  (Which is extremely high since these were all opt-in leads I generated personally, which was caused by an error in the software, which was frustrating since they could not fix the fact that their own links were being incorrectly created.  And it took forever going back and forth to try and find a solution.  Oh well, part of being an entrepreneur.

Move on.  Next.

The other tool that I have fallen in love with is ActiveCampaign.
activecampaign

In truth, I’m moving away from Ontraport.  Ontraport is great in certain aspects, but terribly clunky.

But Ontraport taught me the importance of email automations.

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Email automations are just so much easier to set up and construct in ActiveCampaign.

I’ll do a blog post of video on this in the near future, but there is a WORLD of difference between a basic autoresponder like Aweber, and an email service like Ontraport or ActiveCampaign or Infusionsoft that allows automations.

And looking forward into 2016 and beyond, automations and reaching the right people at the right time is a critical skill.  The days of just email broadcasting your entire list is gone.
Automations (+CRM integration) are the only effective ways to communicate with your ideal prospects.

By the way, you can get a free trial of ActiveCampaign here:

(And if you have an opt-in list, you can import your list from Aweber.)

Family

We finally got to open up our cottage eat the end of May, and unfortunately we have a roof leak after the harsh winter.  So we need to replace the roof.  Ah, the joys of home ownership!

I’ve started coaching soccer again at the U8 level, and Jack really loves the fact that I'm the coach.  In fact, I think a lot of the kids really like me being the coach.  I’m seeing some great improvements in a lot of the kids this year, and particularly in some of the core ideas I presented to them last year – this year the seem to be getting it and starting to do it.
soccer

We've also been watching some of the FIFA World Cup Soccer, and Jack has a deeper, more intrinsic interest in watching soccer and understanding it.  I can see he's always learning and engaging.

The homeschooling group we are a part of has been great.  Jack is really having a good time with the kids.  And I'm always amazed how genuinely friendly and warm the kids are.

Lastly, Jack started getting some group golf lessons with 4 of his friends.  He loves it.  Such a trip to see him skipping all over the course enjoying himself.
golfing

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Options and DS Domination:

I missed the event for DS Domination, unfortunately, for personal reasons, but I'm really excited about what's coming out of the camp.

You can catch the updates and why DSD2.0 is a new bad-boy in the e-commerce world try this e-commerce platform instead of the defunct DS Domination

I'm working on a new marketing system for promoting Options Domination.

It is ready for free beta access right now.  Contact me if you are in Options Domination (any team) would like a free beta account.

I expect to have a variety of front-end entry points, and implement some prospect tracking and alerts as prospects go thru the marketing funnel, which will allow you to separate good prospects from tire kickers automatically.

Overall, it’s been a very busy month.  Events, kid activities, new launches, and fixing up a lot of my business on the back end.

And it seems like I’ve been pulled in a lot of different directions.  Ideally, once some of these little things get wrapped up, I can focus more, which is something I’ll be looking forward to.

How was your month?

3 thoughts on “May 2015 Recap”

  1. Monte Bertrand

    ack! ducksboard isn’t accepting new members. you’re lucky you have an account for free for a year, looks like.

    i am going to have to try something else until they launch their new thing.

    have you tried New Relic?

    I have an improve.ly subscription and have been meaning to get it fully configured. have you done anything with them?

    still trying to figure out the best solution for lifecycle/full funnel analytics.

    1. Hi Monte. Yeah, ducskboard was acquired by New Relic, whom I have not tried.

      I’ll be looking into Geckoboard in the next month or so, since they seem to have the widest integrations. I think having a central dash is good practice. Esp since I have income from so many different channels – and the income in internet marketing can change quite a bit from month to month.

      I know I need to dig more into conversions, and Improve.ly looks good. I’d be interested in having a chat with you about them and how you plan to use them.

      Thanks for sharing.

      1. Monte Bertrand

        Ohhh, forgot Geckoboard! Yeah sounds cool. I’ll check that out.

        Yeah I’ll touch base with you this week about this. Thanks a million, brother

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