See how the half-term time off didn't stop all the startup planning

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It's half-term week and roughly-speaking a week off from many parts of the startup planning. I've not switched off completely and sitting as a passenger in some car journeys along with other spare time gives me the chance to write a few blog posts, tweet some marketing links and check my fiverr gigs. It's important to keep an active present with things like this and most of my gigs offer services that I can produce in less than half an hour on my smartphone. Even if I need to conduct some research then a smartphone can take care of that. In fact, there's little that I can't produce at short notice.

I think that a slow build of what I do is the way forward. I've written and self-published several books now and I'm starting to sell my writing services more on fiverr. And writing is something that I really enjoy. If writing my books brings in a good income and writing for others can supplement that whilst I'm running an estate agency then I'll be very happy.

But it's getting to that next level that is taking that time. My reviews on fiverr have all been five star and my clients have been incredibly happy with my writing. I need to be able to turn a few gigs every now and again into several high-paying jobs a week. With my trust levels at their highest, I promote my gigs in my blogs and on Twitter to keep up the exposure levels. It's gaining exposure that will help to keep things moving on.

And it's research into this marketing exposure that's at the front of the thoughts in this blog. I have started to look at different ways if getting my blog exposed to a larger audience. For example, I've applied to have my mystery shop blog featured on the blogs section of mumsnet. Also my estate agency blog is featured on real-estate network. It's by having these extra outlets that I feel I can get my work noticed. By having my work noticed I can get more readers, more orders, more happy customers and the cycle continues. And that's how the theory goes.

A short blog today, but keeping the thought processes moving and the words flowing will always help.

See why using outside help for some of your business needs frees up time for you to do what you do best

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As part of the process of setting up my own business, I have had reason to look in different parts of the internet for all sorts of ideas. Sometimes these internet searches are planned and sometimes a little bit of serendipity comes into play (see blog here - http://245daystogo.blogspot.com/2015/06/stumbling-across-ideas-and-answers-when.html )

I think that as the business develops, I will need outside help in some areas of what I attempt to do. For instance, I won’t try to conduct my own legal affairs – I will leave that to the expertise of a solicitor. I won’t want to spend hours of my time checking and filing my own accounts – I will make use of an accountant that knows their way around the tax rules.

And it was while looking into different professional business service providers that I came across the company Adactus - http://www.adauctus-gmbh.ch/en/

Being a well-established company that provides more than one service gives Adactus a head start when it comes to helping out startup companies such as the one I am putting together. In the early days of my estate agency business I will be trying to run the show from home but will have to spend a lot of time out on the road. And the question that this asks is “how will I be able to provide an office service for my customers?” I want them to be able to pick up the phone and speak to someone from my company but I hope to have my time filled with appointments at client’s houses. Adactus could provide an answer. They will provide a high-quality and professional telephone answering service in several languages, call acceptance and transfer, and a virtual secretary from Mondays to Fridays from 8:00 to 18:00, outside these hours – a voicemail service.

Tax is always a taxing question for any business large or small, so looking at what might be a tax beneficial status is something that many companies have looked into. You can have a discussion with Adactus about their company registration services after contacting them via their website. They can offer potential tax-related benefits for foreign companies, as they are based in Switzerland. Switzerland has one of the most beneficial tax rates in Europe along with a politically, geographically and economically stable infrastructure. That is highly attractive to foreign companies which choose to change their address to Switzerland.

As I stated at the start of the blog, Adactus are experienced in several areas that could help the average startup or the slightly more established company to get ahead in business. I try to look at business from several angles and highlight companies that I have used or would consider using to help me set up my small business. Recently I have shown how RawShorts and Fiverr could help a new or small business and I will keep on exposing good companies to my readers of this blog. If you have any questions about this then please do not hesitate to comment on the blog or get in touch with Adactus directly via their website.

See the different marketing ideas I'm using to sell my books

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I've been looking at ways to expand the sales of my mystery shopping book. It's had some initial interest and I want to capitalise on that interest and turn it into book sales. There have also been a couple of positive reviews already. It's one of those things that every time you talk about it, other people are really interested in what you have to say. It's a topic that everyone has some interest in, either what you do or becoming a mystery shopper themselves. To assist with the book I've started a blog that mixes hints and tips from the book with my daily experiences as a mystery shopper. Each blog entry prompts the reader to take a look at the book. The blog can be found here.

I have also set up a basic promotional YouTube video to help with the book sales. The idea behind these two things is to get people to like the look of what is going on and then go on to buy and read the book. But the next questions I have are-

• How are people going to find the blog or the YouTube video?
• Who is my target market?
• How will I reach them?

The people who I think will be mainly interested in mystery shopping are university students and the mothers of children that are at school. I live quite close to a university city so I thought that the below poster could get me a bit of traction. I'm going to put it up in a few places around the city that I know students frequent. I hope that more readers of the blog might mean more book sales. Finding the mothers might take a little bit more doing. I'm thinking that the forums mothers frequent such as mumsnet might be somewhere to look. I know from sites like Money Saving Expert  don't allow people to advertise their own products on their forums so mumsnet may be the same. Aside from these two areas, it's a case of searching and thinking more about potential readers and how I can reach them.

The poster looks like this-

Wish me luck!

See the free easy tool that's helped to promote my blogs and books

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It's been quite an eventful week in the small world of Amazon Kindle book selling with my book "The Secrets of Mystery Shopping: How to Become a Mystery Shopper" receiving quite a lot of interest and a lot of questions. Amazon don't really give you a great idea of sales figures, as I always find their reports sketchy until the month is over and the money is in my account. This is largely because of Amazon Prime, which gives people the chance to read some or all pages for free and then you, as an author, are given a percentage of the Amazon Prime fund. This is based on the proportion of reads your book got from everything available on Prime.

The immediate, personal feedback has been good, though and I know of a growing number of people that have told me they've bought the book. Friends, family, work colleagues and then their contacts (reached via Facebook) have been buying and I hope it to be my biggest seller yet.

To go alongside the book, I've started a blog. The purpose of this blog is threefold-

1- To promote the book

2- To give people an insight into what a mystery shopper does

3- To give people an idea of the good things that you can get out of mystery shopping

I've seen more interest in this book then any of the others that I have published so I hope that it continues to create a few waves. And I hope that it helps people who are interested in mystery shopping to get a start in the industry. As with all my books, if just one person gets something out if it then I think it will all be worthwhile.

I also used some spare time this week (precious commodity that it is) to produce short animated promo videos for two of my books. I used a website called www.RawShorts.com to produce the videos and many of their templates are free. The videos are as follows-

THE SECRETS OF MYSTERY SHOPPING

HOW TO SELL YOUR HOME

If you don't think that you can use a site like RawShorts, then an alternative would be somewhere like www.fiverr.com where someone will be able to produce you a promo video for as little as $5.

The idea is that they give me a little more exposure for the books and offer a different way for people to find my blog, my books and me.

See the book that will help you on your mystery shopping journey

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My Amazon Kindle book called The Secrets of Mystery Shopping : How to Become a Mystery Shopper was released yesterday. This is one of my books that I have published as I look to generate an income in the run up to opening my own business. The idea is that these books bring in a (modest) income as the estate agency starts next year and I go without an enlistment income for the first few months it takes to get properties on my books and through to sale completion.

The book was available to pre- order on Amazon but there was a little bit of a wrangle between me and them about the pre-order and edits to the book so the pre- order was cancelled and the book launched immediately.

When I uploaded the book file when setting up the book for ore-order, there was no mention of any issues in updating the content in the run up to launch. So when I went through the final edit of the book, checked and updated the contact details of all the mystery shop companies I was ready to upload the final file to the Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing site. When I got there, this book was greyed out and I couldn't access it to update. I contacted the help desk and was told that for the 3 days before the release, the book was unavailable to edit - I'd missed the deadline by about an hour! Although I didn't know I'd missed a deadline because there wasn't enough information there to tell me.

I was gutted - the choice was to wait until after it was released and then change the book file -meaning that any pre-orders would be unable to access the updated file. Or to withdraw the pre-order title, republish as a ready to buy book and have my customers read the full experience. This meant that I would lose the ability to set books up to pre-order for a year. I went for the second option as I couldn't see the value in having someone pay for what wasn't a full book.

So, here we are, it's published and I've set up a blog (here) and a twitter feed @mysteryshopper74 to help with the exposure.

It's available on the Amazon Kindle store now, so take a look and see what you think.

See how changing blog presentation should improve click through

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I looked recently about a different way of presenting the work that I carry out over the internet.

http://245daystogo.blogspot.com/2015/09/a-different-way-of-presenting-my-work.html

It's about looking at headlines that will prompt the reader to look further into the article. Many of my blogs are publicised on social media and I'm looking at how the initial words get someone to read through and get interested. I've taken on this way of looking at my blogs as well as starting to formulate how I will put this together for my photography.

The result in a couple of places is starting to show dividends and I have stared using these style of titles in my blogs-

How To Sell Your Home

http://how-to-sell-a-home.blogspot.co.uk/

With titles such as "Find out how to highlight your home for the best sale price" and "Use this selling tip when marketing your home" give interested readers enough information to read through the hyperlink and maybe take in more of the blog whilst on that page.

The mystery shop blog

http://mysteryshopperblog.blogspot.co.uk/

This is another new blog and is designed to help sell my new Kindle book-




It has titles like "See how a quick 2 hour mystery shop can be profitable" and "Find out how I earned money with a shopping trip to a local coastal town" which again are designed to get people to read through. If they then like the content, it may trigger a sale of the book.

I'll report back on here how the sales of these products go through and the response to the blogs with these new titles.

I'm starting to resurface back into the world after the eye operation

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I'm starting to resurface back into the world after the eye operation and the recovery period. After the operation and the recovery period I've been finding that even the simplest of tasks leaves me tired - until today.

I've re-started my gigs in fiverr, with the hope that they bring in some income that I re-spend on fiverr itself. There's a vast array of items that I can see myself spending credit on, and some others that are interesting as well-

• I will ghostwrite, proofread and edit your ebooks and kindle books
• I will write a 500 word introduction for your book or ebook
• I will illustrate your book
• I will design a Sensational Book or Kindle eBook Cover
• I will advertise your book or bookish product on my book blog
• I will add PERMANENT Facebook likes
• I will post PERMANENT Amazon review 
• I will write about your site in my Real Estate Site

There's a wide array of things to be ordered on Fiverr, and probably a whole host of other things that I haven't even come across yet.

During my time on the Fiverr website I've done a few Gigs that I've been really interested in, and I'll share a bit of detail with you on the latest one. I have explained how the website works on recent past blog posts, so I won't go into too much detail there. And also to say that I won't be giving updates on every Fiverr Gig I conduct but in the early days it's been quite interesting.

The below blog link is a sponsored link through Fiverr, where the producers of the product wanted more exposure for their products and to create some back links for their Etsy shop-

http://inofftheblogpost.blogspot.com/2015/09/so-your-child-wants-to-be-footballer.html

The products themselves are great, but it was thinking about how to frame them into the context of who is reading my blog on football, and who is likely to buy the products when they've read the blog. I worked on the different angles available to me and then decided hat they aspirational aspect was probably the best way to go, as it is still too early to go heavy on the Christmas theme.

In all, I'm very pleased with the way it went and the fact that I'm resurfacing onto online life, if not the real world quite yet.

The products can be found at -

https://www.etsy.com/listing/247211206/personalized-christmas-stocking-custom?ref=shop_home_active_3

https://www.etsy.com/shop/TheBusyElfWorkshop?ref=hdr_shop_menu

homeestates

Fiverr

Seller

I am a writer - I write all the time. I have several blogs, have written three books (so far) and I just love writing. I will write positive reviews or articles or mention you in my blogs in clear English. I'm new to Fiverr but I'm incredibly passionate about what it can empower.

Three weeks off work after an eye operation leaves hours for reading

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It's been a while since I've been on any of my blogs and the main reason for that is an eye operation I had last Thursday. It was quite a major operation, and the main recuperative source of recovery has been to lie face down for fifty minutes out of every hour, day and night for five days and five nights. Quite frankly, it's been horrible.

What it has allowed me to do is catch up in some television (what I would have done without the ipad, Sky Go and the iPlayer I'm not sure) and catch up on some reading.

I've had a stack of books I've been meaning to to read for a while now. It's not that I haven't been reading at all, it's just that I've been reading other things. I think at the rate I'm going (and I still have nearly 3 weeks off work left) that I'll have read everything I currently own before Christmas and I'll be ready to start again. It's not been management, marketing and estate agency books for a little while though, and I need to get back into that as a matter of urgency.

The books I've been reading have been fiction with a little 1970's non-fiction work thrown in-

Brewster by Mark Slouka

This was picked up at Poundland and I found it started slowly hit really fired up towards the middle and end as you could see the potential conclusions forming before the actual end. It's a coming-of-age book set in small-town USA and I'd recommend anyone to read it - there's a style in there that engages and brings in the reader.

The Runner by Christopher Reich

This is an old book I picked up at a charity book sale for 50p and it was gripping. It's set at the end of World War II and is about a US attorney trying to find and stop a German soldier from a plot to reignite the war in some way. The book moves along at a great pace and is something that's difficult to put down.

Strange Days Indeed by Francis Wheen

This is a summary of some of the stranger, more paranoical aspects if the 1970's and was interesting in parts - particularly for someone like me who missed most of it! The fanciful situations and correspondences that politicians got themselves into made it feel like a fiction work. Some of the things you just couldn't make up.

The conclusion of reading these books, particularly the fiction books, is that I want to add some fiction to my bookshelf on Amazon. To do this, I need to take some steps towards making my work more creative and I need to think about some simple areas of creative writing. To this end, I'm going to sign up for a course on creative writing - I looked into one offered for free by the Open University last year. And I'll look again at a course in this area. I've decided that I'll skip photography level 2 course this year. The course at the college I studied level 1 last year has already started and I can't drive there for at least another 2 weeks, the next nearest course is on a Tuesday night (my only late night at work) and the next nearest is £400 more expensive than the others.

After the creative writing course, I'll look to a marketing course that's starting in January and I'll be ready to go back to photography next school year.