Focus and Depression

Another week goes by and another Monday rolls around. It is all a big struggle - everything is telling me to Focus and the vast range of things that need doing scream out STOP because you do not know where to start.  Then when the small things do not work out, the black dog that crouches in the shadows is just waiting and growling and saying "told you so. You are a loser!!"

So it is time to get back to one thing at a time to work out a winning way that brightens up the dark corners and encourages the black dog to sneak back into the shadows a little further out of reach.

So in the spirit of making life even less focused, I spent a whole afternoon with friends, Dean and Yvonne mapping out a strategy for launching Dean's new book, The Nine Human essences for Business Success.

.

Dean has self-published the book and now wishes to get it published on Kindle and run a full scale online launch. Here I am thinking I can help with this launch. It creates a forcing device to keep me pushing forward on leveraging the tools I have bought and the things I have learned. And after all this is why I signed up to join The Number One Book Club. Step One - work out how to publish to Kindle. As it happens this does not look like a major task - take the basic Word document; convert to HTML; add in the right Headings for SEO purposes and work out how and what to hyperlink. There are a few technical things to worry about - document needs to be less than 50Mb in size and graphics are size constrained and tables do not work. The marketing programme is all about building an audience and establishing Dean as the authority in his field. Well he ought to be as he has been preparing this text for over 15 years.  Still waiting to hear back from Dean and Yvonne but it is radio silent.

The email focus saga continues - piece by piece I am pegging away at getting rid of emails though an Inbox which has 1,215 unread emails does not look like a focused Inbox. I had written a stack of rules in Outlook to streamline the inbox into a series of other folders. This was not really working for me as I use more than one device to access email (PC; iPad and Android Phone). So today I have been migrating rulkes across to my mail provider. I buy in a service from Fastmail.Fm to manage my emails rather than using free service from Hotmail or Gmail. The service is relatively inexpensive; provides me a lot of data storage and a range of supporting features which I use for Domain Name forwarding for example. The best feature is the wide array of aliasing that is possible. I can set up an alias account from any domain name I own and send and receive emails from there - no need to do that in the domain registrar. Today I discover a nice set of filtering rules to add to Fastmail's spam filter. before long my Inbox will be more streamlined - and I can then process emails I want to read in my time.

Day's getting short before the training ride for Cycle Around Australia 2013. Have been doing some training - a little less than I had hoped on account of some tough weather interventions (excuses really). Have equipped teh bike with new brake blocks and tyres. Tyres ordered on Wednesday last week were ready in Sydney for delivery on Friday from BicycleHero.com in Seoul = awesome delivery and free shipping for orders over $100. One more day to prepare and it is onto the road to drive to Bairnsdale, Victoria = things to do

Last item - markets have been my area of focusing too - been itchy with some massive profits on JPY trades as the new Japanese government takes action to protect their export economy. Just waiting = good news when the trades are positive. Keeps up this way I will have paid for my extensive training programme at Trading Pursuits and recovered a good slice of my investment in FX Trading - turning a corner (though this is always a dangerous game to call before the big boys have finished their part of the play.

Email Marketing pet hates

I had promised myself that I would start 2013 with a whole lot more FOCUS and some more active blogging. Cannot really say that is what I have achieved but hang - it is only January 9 and the year is but a puppy.

Step one is underway. I had over 2,000 unread emails in my Inbox collected over the December period

Followed some key advice to reduce the amount of emails one could be tempted to read. I am steadily taking myself off mailing lists, left, right and centre. I have also been writing some rules into Outlook to filter emails into buckets for processing later or for deletion. Thinking I need to create these rules at the mail server end so that I do not see them on any device that I can access. Would be great if I could copy rules from Outlook to my mail server. I am guessing I may be able to. Setting up some email management principles along the way that I will build into my outbound email activities. My pet HATES for email marketing are the following and the PENALTY will be as follows:

Immediate consignment to SPAM and DELETION folder

• No Unsubscribe opportunity on the email - immediate consigment to SPAM and DELETION folder and I mean Immediate

 Unsubscribe

• Using different names even though they come from the same place/person. 
• Subject line all in Capitals
• Subject line that does not match the content
• Passing off as email from Facebook; Twitter; LinkedIn; Clickback
• Email addressed to Hey You - I have a name or you can just politely write Dear Sir or Colleague or Customer or Friend or something simple like that
• Email with no genuine and usable content - add some value to an already cluttered life

Three strikes and you are out

• An unreasonable amount of emails. This is a vexed question as clearly some people are offering incredible value for each email and they are worth reading. I was led to believe that 1 a day is a good benchmark. For example Gary L has sent over 200 emails since November 14 - that is more than 3 a day
• Emails for which the subject matter does not fit the original basis for me agreeing to receive your emails. If I have subscribed to your newsletter on FX trading, I may not be interested in Wordpress themes
• Emails from Support area that are not Support emails but selling emails.
• Emails where the hyperlinks do not wrap and have to be cut and pasted to be usable
• Email about a product I have already purchased - I will ask for a refund of purchase if you keep doing it.

Feel free to add your pet peeves to the list- when i have a good list, I will publish some principles of good practice

PS I have done a few more things on my list of Focus. Most importantly the Cycle Tourist has been seen on the bicycle building up some leg strength for an upcoming mountain ride next week