Who's Linked

Welcome to the daily diary section of the LinkedIn Made Easy blog.  The purpose of this section is to keep you updated with all the juicy bits about what’s happening with this experiment in the power of social media.  It’s here that you’ll find the highs and the lows, the statistics about how it’s going , the number of connections I’ve made, the numbers of ebooks sold, the amount of money generated for Charity, and the amounts paid out to affiliates.

Well what a 30 days it’s been.  To say that I have been seriously challenged myself would be an understatement and I have learnt an amazing amount about a great many different things, some of them are personal and some of them are business and marketing focused.  I have however, not managed to reach my target of £400,000 in 30 days, in fact I’m just a shade short of it …. by just about £399,660

The final figures on Day 30 of the challenge are:

• Number of books sold – 187 (just under 6 books per day)
• Money Raised for charity – £374
• Amount paid to affiliates – £83
• Costs of processing the sales – £99.36
• Total amount to go to The Hysterectomy Association – £459.77

These bald figures though, don’t reflect the other ’successes’ that the challenge has had which include meeting my objective of ‘proving’ that social networking works for all businesses regardless of their starting point.  The social networks proved to be the greatest source of activity on the website and consequently sales and it would be fair to say that almost everyone that actually visited the LinkedIn Made Easy sales page on this site bought the book – according to Google Analytics there were 94 unique visitors to the page and 82 books were sold through it – this is an amazing return on investment.

I also have so many people to thank and will do so over the course of the next few weeks by writing about them on the blog.  Once again, it was links from the social networks, blog posts and twitter that were responsible for most of the visits to that book page.

As a result I’m going to keep the challenge going – I want to raise £400,000 for charity but now I’m not putting a time limit on it.  I will continue to write on this blog, I’ll continue to keep people posted and I will continue to donate £2 from every book sold to either Kiva or the BCCT.  In the coming weeks I’ll be reporting on where the money has gone to and how it is going to be used as well.  The reason I’m focusing on these two charities is because the other two that I would have liked to support didn’t bother to come back to me at all.

If you have been on LinkedIn in the last couple of days you will have noticed that they have updated the home page just a little

No longer is there a left hand menu, it’s all driven from the top menu and that’s not the only change!  It seems that Google Chrome doesn’t like to interact with the Google Presentation application on LinkedIn either!  Unfortunately there is no way to tell which of the various applications is at fault when it comes to diagnosing things like this and eventually it will get worked out.  So my recommendation is that for the time being, if you are Chrome user who is using the Google presentations application, that you revert to IE or Firefox until the problem is sorted out.

And for those of you who bought the LinkedIn Made Easy ebook recently, I just wanted to let you know that there will be an all new, updated version coming out over the weekend and I will send you all a link to get the latest version of it.

Latest Statistics from yesterday to today

• The total number of books sold – 5
• The number of books sold online – 5
• The number of books sold for directly to people instead of online – 0
• The amount of money raised for charity – £10.00
• The amount paid out to affiliates too – £2.00
• The number of LinkedIn connections I have – 433

It is noticeable that we are coming up to Christmas.  People are either in a panic about how much they still have to do before the Christmas break or they are already winding down and attending function after function.  I’ve noticed it myself.  I’ve not been well and my own activity has been ‘lacking’ should we say.  I’ve also had some big projects and presentations to complete and prepare for, as well as the ‘usual running a business’ activities that take place on a day to day basis. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve not been well this week, had a nasty throat infection and at one point lost my voice entirely.  However, it has not been entirely without merit either as I’ve noticed that when I take my eye of the ball and am not putting in the effort that I normally do that, guess what, people engaging with the project dry up!! Read the rest of this entry »

When it comes to marketing and social media it is worth bearing in mind that you can never know it all, and nor should you expect too.  I was reminded of this quite forcibly during a conversation I had with Andy Lopata earlier today (thanks Andy, you put me back on track!), who very gently explained that I had forgotten one simple thing …. Give Back! Read the rest of this entry »

A star is born, no really … that’s what Rob Goodwin of Champagne Video Production told me today when he did a vox pop video of me for the challenge.  And what fun it was too, I got to talk about the challenge as well as the book and he’s sending me a copy to help me promote what I’m doing.  When it’s available I’ll add it to the website and you can see me in all my glory – ahem! Read the rest of this entry »

Quite a few people have been asking me what exactly is going to happen to the money that is raised through the sale of LinkedIn Made Easy so I thought I’d try to expand on it a little more than I have done elsewhere: Read the rest of this entry »

It would be true to say that small changes, undertaken regularly can lead to huge changes over a longer period of time.  Let’s take the idea of writing a book for instance, say one about LinkedIn  You might start by spending just a few minutes thinking about the sort of things that people might want to know.  The next day you could take that one stage further and write down the chapter headings.  Under each chapter heading you might have some section titles, and then you  might write a paragraph or two about each one.  In no time at all you have a book and yet, you may only have spent a very short period of time each day on writing it.  Now, you may wonder why I’m telling you this.  The reason is that art of social networking is all in the connections you make and the relationships you build with those connections.

Read the rest of this entry »

The challenge to sell 200,000 ebooks in 30 days is really starting to demonstrate with startling clarity, which is beyond even my initial expectations, just how powerful the groups you belong to can be.  And yes, for those who are attending the BusinessXchange Christmas Cooperation event, this is going to give you a preview of the presentation I’ll be giving.  For those not attending, it takes place in Blandford Forum at 7.45am on 8th December 2009 and, if you are in Dorset, is an excellent networking event. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve had some really interesting conversations today by email with some pretty amazing people both on, and off, LinkedIn.  As I hope has become already evident, my overall aim with everything I do, is to empower people to do things for themselves.  It’s the reason I picked the charities to work with that I did and the reason The Hysterectomy Association works the way it does; and it’s also the reason why I work the way I do with Grow A Better Business. Read the rest of this entry »

Two days to go till D-Day.  The project to sell 200,000 LinkedIn Made Easy e-Books in just 30 days starts formally on Monday 23rd November.  The Information Scientist in me also needs to keep a record of what happens during this period of great change too, so I’m going to start with basic stats about what ACTUALLY happens in each daily diary entry.  If there is anything you think you might like to see me record too, then let me know and I’ll keep track of that too. Read the rest of this entry »

Well, what a day it’s been today.   Not long after putting up my FIRST TWO BOOKS sold blog post last night I discovered that there was a potentially nasty legal issue which I hadn’t forseen – silly really, as I’d only been talking about the self same thing just hours earlier. Read the rest of this entry »

Today I gave a talk to a group of Artists in Shaftsbury in Dorset, based in a new collective called The Cygnet based in the Swan Centre, about how they could sell online without having to use a website.  The presentation is below, if you are interested and it’s also on my LinkedIn profile too – in the slideshare application.  After I’d finished, I made my first speech about this project and asked for their help to make others aware of what I’m trying to do. Read the rest of this entry »

I had an interesting conversation with a client yesterday about LinkedIn Contacts because in the book, one of the things I talk about is what I do with business cards I have been given at an event of some description.  I happened to mention that I will usually ask the person I have met to connect with me on LinkedIn and in 80% of cases they do.  Which means I don’t then have to worry about keeping their business card. Read the rest of this entry »

I’m getting really excited about this whole Social Media experiment and the more excited I get, the more the ideas flood in.   What’s interesting too, is that people are also starting to pop up in strange places as well, call it coincidence, but I prefer synchronicity myself, being the spiritual sort of person I am.  I’m finding all sorts of people on LinkedIn who are really interesting, with similar quirky takes on life as me, also my own network of friends that I have locally to me in Dorset are also providing me with lots of ideas – although many of them have yet to realise this. Read the rest of this entry »

Plus 40% of the sale of each book will be donated to Charity, that’s the challenge I’m setting myself.   I go on about the power of social networking all the time and one the most recent questions I asked on LinkedIn was about Social Marketing success stories.  Not those about how much money the creators of Facebook have nor about how Dell shifts huge numbers of what was previously, redundant, stock; but those that YOU and I can both relate to.  The stories that are about the individual professional, the small business and the struggling young company. Read the rest of this entry »