Police in the US said that a woman they dubbed a real-life “cleaning fairy”, broke into a house and a left a bill for the housework she did. According to police, the woman entered the residence while homeowner Mallory Bush slept, did some light cleaning and then left a bill for $75 on a napkin before leaving. Unfortunately for the “cleaning fairy,” crime didn’t pay and she was arrested.
Now obviously you can’t go breaking into houses. Nor can you force work or products on people and then charge them. But if you can find a way to ethically give your potential customers a ‘free sample’ of what you sell or what you do, it could be a great source of new business. I’ve experimented with this by giving away free books, and people really seem to appreciate it and respond well.
Quote Of The Day
“If you spend your whole life waiting for the storm, you’ll never enjoy the sunshine.”
Morris West
Alternative Quote Of The Day
“A conferance is a gathering of people who singly can do nothing, but together can decide that nothing can be done.”
Fred Allen
Groove Book
Brian and Julie Whiteman founded photo sharing and printing app GrooveBook in 2012. A year later they appeared on Shark Tank, the American version of Dragons Den and in November 2014, announced a deal to sell to Shutterfly for $14.5 Million after attracting over a million subscribers. I mention it for three reasons.
Anyone who tells you there’s no such thing as ‘Get-Rich-Quick’ hasn’t heard the story of GrooveBook.
It’s a demonstration of the power of something we’re always going on about here – monthly subscription marketing.
It’s a great concept and a great product, delivery of which isn’t available here in the UK yet.
So something to learn from, take inspiration from and maybe even copy perhaps?
I once watched a superb wildlife programme about the African honey badger. As the name suggests, this animal is particularly fond of honey, and with the African bush being notably short of branches of Sainsbury’s, the only source of food available to the honey badger is beehives – with lots of bees in them.
Watching the honey badger go about its work was fascinating. Having located a hive in a hollowed out tree it cleared out debris to make a wider entrance. The reason would soon become clear – it was going to need an escape route, and it knew it.
The first foray into the hive was painful to watch. It was attacked systematically by the bees and got only a small mouthful of honey before withdrawing to lick its wounds. At this point you expected the honey badger to give up having learned a painful lesson. Not a bit of it! Time after time it went back into the hive, getting stung each time and only getting small amounts of honey in return. You almost found yourself screaming: “For God’s sake, don’t go back in!” as another visit resulted in more pain.
But as time went on, a funny thing happened. The stings got less and less as the stinging bees died off, and the honey badger came away with more and more booty on each visit. Eventually, the bees gave up the fight and the honey badger made off into the bush with the entire hive worth of honey. Victory, from what initially appeared to be a hopeless quest.
The honey badger knew the job wasn’t going to be easy from the start. He knew he wasn’t going to get something for nothing, and that pain would inevitably precede pleasure. But what he also knew was that if he kept at the job, if he persisted, eventually the resistance would be broken down and his goal would be reached. Of course, he had an alternative. After going into the hive for the first time and getting stung so badly for so little he could have thought: “This isn’t worth it.I’ll go and find an easier hive. ”But he didn’t, because he knew that all hives are difficult, and if you want the honey you just have to buckle down and do what’s necessary.
I’m sure the lesson of this isn’t lost on you. Many people give up when entering ‘the hive’ for the first time, after receiving the inevitable ‘stings’ and getting very little in return. They decide to go and look for another ‘hive’ where the bees aren’t so fierce. When that ‘hive’ proves equally difficult, they give up again and go to the next, and the next, and the next. Entering every ‘hive’ involves getting stung, and so they get hurt again and again, and with very little reward because each time they’re starting on a new ‘hive’ where the defences are at their most intense.
For ‘hive’ read goal, target, endeavour or venture. For ‘sting’ read problems, difficulties, or obstacles, and you’ll get the picture. No matter what you hope to achieve, there will be difficulties, and they will be at their most intense in the early stages. Giving up to look for something easier when these difficulties present themselves will prove to be a fruitless exercise. The next venture will carry with it a whole new set of difficulties for you to deal with.
A few years ago I worked with a salesman. He had an almost God-given knack of alienating, upsetting and offending everyone he met. He had any number of ways of achieving this. You would almost think it was deliberate, but I don’t think it was. This man’s sales figures were actually the best in the company, by quite some margin – not what you’d expect from someone who was guaranteed to disenchant every new prospect within seconds of meeting them.
Intrigued by the paradox, I was pleased to have the opportunity to accompany the man on some of his sales calls. At first I thought that he must deal with his customers differently to everyone else. Not so! He was equally obnoxious. So how did he succeed? Simple really. He asked everyone whether they wanted to buy, even when it was patently obvious to anyone with an ounce of sensitivity that they did not.
When they told him they weren’t interested, he ignored them. When they told him politely to leave them alone, he pretended not to notice –or maybe he didn’t notice. Then he asked them again, and kept asking until they said yes. I’m convinced that some people ordered just to get rid of him, but order they did. When it comes down to it, all that he had in his favour was a skin like a rhinoceros, and the tenacity to ask as many people as possible whether they would like to buy his product.
The bottom line is this. Unless you’re very lucky, success will not happen straight away. It takes time. Not one successful person has ever had a ‘clear run’. You’re unlikely to be the first. James Dyson, inventor of the Dyson vacuum cleaner, and now owner of a business worth several hundred million pounds put it this way: “Success is made of 99 per cent failure. You galvanise yourself and you keep going. ”Persistence is what saw him through in the end – just like the honey badger – and it will do the same for you.
Kind Regards
John Harrison
PUBLISHERS NOTICE
Dear Streewise Customer,
Take a look at this betting slip from 27th October 2020
As you’ll see, it’s a £10 bet which brought in £309.45. With what I’m writing to you about today, days like this are commonplace.
Want to find out how to cash in on this for yourself? Take a look HERE.
Heck, there’s absolutely nothing for you to do. All the bets are sent straight to you..
Sometimes a product becomes so commonplace in its generic form that we stop thinking about it at all, and the humble tea bag falls into that category. In recent years, tea companies have really gone out on a limb (well not really) by creating round, triangular and pyramid shaped bags, but now a Taiwan company really has done something different.
Charm Villa has created tea bags designed to look like a goldfish. When placed in hot water, the colours of the leaves in the tea bag show through and resemble the patterns of goldfish scales. It’s a novelty of course, but it does serve to differentiate the companies tea bags from everything else on the market.
If you’re in a market where nobody really thinks about the physical characteristics of the product, you could gain a big competitive advantage by creating something which is cosmetically fresh while serving essentially the same function.
Quote Of The Day
“Optimism is a happiness magnet. If you stay positive, good things and good people will be drawn to you.”
Mary Lou Retton
Alternative Quote Of The Day
“The secret to staying young is to live honestly, eat slowly, and lie about your age.”
Lucille Ball
Become A Micro-Tasker
Making some extra money from home, or indeed becoming full time self-employed, need not always mean starting your own business. If you have a skill or series of skills, sites like www.fiverr.com offer you the opportunity to market yourself to individuals and companies looking to outsource some of their requirements.
So what sort of work can you get on Fivver? Well copywriting, editing, design work, computer programming, cover creation, survey filling and data entry are just a few of the categories on offer. There are literally hundreds of different opportunities and there’s no reason why you should stick to just one. Some micro taskers do this full time and can easily clear several hundred pounds a week. Bear in mind that there are no set up costs or long term commitments. You can do everything from home.
Whether you’re looking for a full time opportunity of a bit of spare cash, this has to be worth a look.
Las Vegas has long been known as a place where people go to get married, but there’s a new growth sector in town – divorce party planning.
The newly divorced are no longer content to let the event slip by, marked only by bickering, recrimination and lawyers fees, and are celebrating in style instead. I just read of one divorce party planner who takes the newly divorced ‘bride’ into the desert with her friends where she gets to let loose on her wedding dress with a machine gun!
With almost half of weddings ending in divorce, the market is huge and totally untapped in the UK. Not everyone wants to celebrate a divorce, but I can see it becoming more popular and socially acceptable in the years to come.
So here’s a question for you – what kind of events and activities could you arrange for the newly divorced? It doesn’t have to be as ‘negative’ as the destruction of a wedding dress but there are certainly plenty of woman who would welcome the opportunity for a bit of creative destruction.
Quote Of The Day
“The best way to make your dreams come true is to wake up.”
Paul Valery
Alternative Quote Of The Day
“You know you’re getting old when the candles cost more than the cake.”
Bob Hope
The T Shirt Millionaires
We’ve written here in the past about Teespring, an online company that takes all the hassle out of designing, producing and marketing your own T Shirts. The company is going from strength to strength and sold 6 million shirts last year, all created by site users. According to the company, hundreds of people have made in excess of $100,000 from the T shirt trade via Teespring, and at least ten have become millionaires.
The way that it works is that Teespring handles everything including online display, payment, manufacturing and shipping. You simply supply the ideas and assist with sending potential customers to the site in return for a pre-agreed slice of the revenue.
Businesses don’t get much more simple or risk-free to set up than this. There’s very little to lose by giving it a try.
My daughter sometimes photographs her food and then uploads it to Instagram and other social media. I thought she was mad, but apparently a lot people are doing it, and one restaurant has decided to make the whole thing a lot more professional. South Africa’s El Burro restaurant has installed a device that enables customers to take professional style Instagram shots of their food. It’s a lighting set-up which allows smart phone users to get top class photo’s of the food they’re about to eat.
The people behind the idea are the Wi-Fi network providers used by the restaurant, who want to showcase what can be achieved using their system, but this has to be a good idea for the restaurant too. If you can get customers uploading enticing photographs of the food on offer, then that has to be good for business. Many Instagram users have hundreds of followers. What a great way to get a free advertisement out to a lot of people.
Is this an idea you could use? Is there a way you could encourage your smartphone-owning customers to upload pictures of your product to their Instagram followers or other social networks? Running a competition might provide the necessary impetus.
Quote Of The Day
“When someone tells me “no” it doesn’t mean I can’t do it, it simply means I can’t do it with them.”
Karen E. Quinones Miller
Alternative Quote Of The Day
“Laughter is the best medicine – unless you’re diabetic, then insulin comes pretty high on the list.”
Lee Evans
The Anger Relief Centre
Ever felt like just smashing something? Then you need to go to the Smash Happy House Stress and Anger Relief Centre where you can do it in safety and with the owners blessing. The company offer a range of destructive options including beer bottles, bar glasses and coffee cups. You can even beat up a mannequin with a baseball bat.
Customers include war veterans, stroppy teenagers, angry parents and heartbroken lovers. Everyone is given safety equipment and then left to create havoc. The company offer birthday and party packages and expect an upturn in business next year.
It’s perhaps needless to say that this is in America, but couldn’t the same thing work here? If Americans enjoy, or get relief from smashing things up, I’m sure people would here too. There could be serious money to be made… and it sounds like fun!
