High Street WAM (Win A Mini) Hitchin

Today, my wife had a job to do in Hitchin. As she was only going to be there for two hours, and it takes nearly an hour to drive from my home to where she was working, it seemed like a good idea to try the High Street Win A Mini for an hour. I very quickly learned that I still have a lot to learn about this technique!

I first placed myself near some bus stops, and in the space of 15 minutes had asked over 100 people if they wanted to enter a Free Prize Draw. Not one person stopped and entered their details!

I then changed location and walked to the market square. Here I had more success. I spoke to about 50 people, and had 3 people enter the prize draw. One person has asked me to call them back when they return from holiday in November!!

The biggest surprise was meeting up with a work colleague from my place of work in London. He was interested in becoming a customer, but says his next door neighbour is a UW distributor, and he would prefer to sign up with his neighbour instead.

Location	Time Taken	People Asked	Forms Filled	Call Back	Appointments
Hitchin	11:00 - 11:45	156	3	1	Nil

Win A Mini (WAM) Experiment

On Sunday, I attended the annual Massive Action Day (MAD) hosted by the Utility Warehouse in Cheltenham, Gloucestershire. One of the speakers was John Passmore who suggested a way of cheaply gathering customers via the WAM forms. He suggested we should read his blog (http://www.networkmarketingblog.org.uk/) to see how he fared at this method. His method seemed far more effective than my present attempts of delivering leaflets, so I thought I would give it a try. Like John, I will post my results of my progress. This is for two reasons. First, will be a valuable record for myself, showing the amount of work put in to achieve any results. And secondly, I hope it will encourage anyone else who reads, this to do better than me :-)

First, I will give the statistics of my leaflet campaign. I started this back in October 2011, and so far I hae delivered 25,000 leaflets personally, investing over 230 hours of my time. So far I have netted only 11 customers and one team member. I am pretty sure I will be more successful with this new venture. I still have another 5000 leaflets to get rid of, so I still have a lot more walking to do in the next few days!

Now back to my venture today. I took my team member Maggie with me to Stony Stratford, and we both stood in the High Street asking anyone who walked past by if they wanted to enter a free prize draw. We were there for only 50 minutes. I don't know how many people Maggie actually asked who said no, but she got three people to enter the prize draw. One of those three she managed to get a call back tomorrow morning. My efforts were as follows-

Location	Time Taken	People Asked	Forms Filled	Call Back	Appointments
Stony Stratford	10:40 - 11:30	67	5	Nil	Nil

Dogs are welcome!

My wife was sent an email with the following message, which I thought was pretty cool!   "Dogs Welcome"   A man wrote a letter to a small hotel in a Midwest town he planned to visit on his vacation. He wrote: I would very much like to bring my dog with me. He is well-groomed and very well behaved. Would you be willing to permit me to keep him in my room with me at night?"   An immediate reply came from the hotel owner, who wrote: SIR: "I've been operating this hotel for many years. In all that time, I've never had a dog steal towels, bedclothes, silverware or pictures off the walls.   I've never had to evict a dog in the middle of the night for being drunk and disorderly. And I've never had a dog run out on a hotel bill. Yes, indeed, your dog is welcome at my hotel. And, if your dog will vouch for you, you're welcome to stay here, too."

 

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Activity is guaranteed to grow your Business

As some of you may know, I have been involved with a franchise business called The Utility Warehouse. I have been dabbling at this business half-heartedly for over 6 years, and I can safely say, that the income I receive from the business, has yet to overtake the amount of time and money invested into the business!

It does not mean that this business doesn't work, it just means that I have not taken it seriously enough to treat it as a proper business. Nobody told me that I needed to declare the business to the Tax Office, and be classed as self employed! As I was already working full time and paying taxes, I thought that it wasn't necessary until I started making substantial profits.

What I didn't realise is that had I employed a Chartered Accountant, I would have received tax rebates from my full time job to cover the expenses incurred on my business venture. I was told that in the first year alone, I could have expected up to £1000 tax rebate!

Instead, I finally declared my business 3 years ago, and I regularly get around £500 a year tax rebate. The income from the business is not very much at the moment, but it is beginning to go up month by month. The reason for this is I am finally doing some consistent action to promote the business. Let me explain what I have been doing.

At the end of October, I decided to invest in 10,000 A5 sized leaflets. I found a printing firm called GTEC online, and submitted this company approved advert below -

What I then did, was to set myself a target of delivering 200 leaflets a day, until I had completely delivered them all. But even the best laid plans do not always work out as you originally planned!

I soon discovered that it slows you down considerably if you try and do the leaflet drop in the dark! Also it is not a good idea to try and do a leaflet drop when it is raining (nobody will look at a soggy leaflet). Because I do shift work, my 200 a day plan was not a practical solution. As it turned out the system I finally worked out, seems to suit me best.

What I now do is deliver 200 leaflets on the days I am working late or night shifts. I do these in the morning, and it takes me approximately 90 minutes to complete the task. If it is raining, I will miss out doing the leaflet drop that day. When I have my rest days, or holidays, then I will deliver 400 leaflets. This will take me about 3 hours to complete. With earphones plugged into my mobile phone,I switch on the MP3 player, and it is surprising how fast the time goes by!

When I ordered the leaflets, I told myself I would be happy with gathering just 4 customers. The reason I chose this number is that the initial commission I would receive from those 4 customers would pay for the leaflets. Of course, every month onwards, I would continue to receive a monthly residual income (a form of royalty if you like). so far I have delivered about 6,000 leaflets, and I have successfully signed up 3 new customers. By my reckoning, I am well on target to achieving the goal I set myself.

I haven't done any leaflet drops the week before Christmas, or this week. If the weather is dry, I will be delivering another 400 leaflets on Friday 6th January. when this supply of leaflets have gone, and I have achieved my target of 4 new customers, then I will get in touch with GTEC again and order some more leaflets. What has surprised me is that I live in a small village (900 houses) on the edge of a large town called Milton Keynes. There is lots of green space, farmland, parks, and a river nearby, and yet I will have visited 10,000 homes, and travel no more than 3 miles (4.82 km) from my home!

So 2012 is going to be busy year for me, as I will be putting a lot more time and effort into my franchise business, than I have ever done before.

Is Britain becoming an unsafe place to be?

While on the way to collect my wife from work, I was listening to the Jeremy Vine Show on radio 2. He was talking about how an Australian, by the name of Timothy Smits, was stabbed on a London bus in Dalston. I admire Timothy's bravery for trying to stand up to the 3 yobs, and I sincerely hope he doesn't have any long lasting post traumatic stress from the incident.

What amazes me about this incident is how the bus driver did absolutely nothing throughout the whole incident. I was a bus driver for 10 years on London buses, and I know what I would have done. The drivers are in control of the bus and make decisions on what to do. The drivers of today are protected by a perspex barrier, so the yobs would have had a much more difficult task of getting to the driver than at one of the defenceless passengers.

On one of my journeys on route 286 (now known as 340) from Edgware to Harrow-on-the-Hill, I had some disruptive youths causing havoc upstairs. I immediately pulled over to the side of the road, and using the Public Address system made an announcement that the bus would not be going anywhere, until the youths got off the bus. When one of them threatened me, I just told him I was getting paid whether I drove the bus or sat still. He was welcome to stay on the bus until the Police arrived to arrest him if he wished. At which point the youth and his mates then ran off.

My purpose was to inconvenience these idiots. Where I stopped the bus, was on part of the route where no other service travelled, so these Yobs would have had to wait for another 20 minutes before the next bus came along. As we had radio contact with our Garage, it was easy to send out an alert to other drivers to be aware.

In my 30 year career working on London Transport (buses and Underground) I have been assaulted only 3 times. It is only the first assault that I still have the odd nightmare over, and this happened nearly 15 years ago! It was my own stupid fault for not assessing the situation properly (that the Yob wasn't alone) realising that I shouldn't have tried to tackle the Yob smoking on a train! I ended up being headbutted by one of the Yob's mates! With hindsite, I would have acted completely differently. I would have still confronted the Yob who was smoking, but I would have used a different tactic other than trying to grab the Yob's cigarette from his mouth! Instead I would have gone for the fire extinguisher and used it on the yob! (well there was a fire, right?). More importantly, I would have had a very useful weapon to defend myself with if they decided to threaten me with violence.

What worries me about society today, is how the Liberal do-gooders have eroded all forms of discipline in this country. Now, young children grow up knowing that they cannot be touched by any adult, no matter how obnoxious, violent, and intimidating they be. As they grow older they think they cannot be disciplined by anyone. In this day of CCTV, I cannot understand why schools are still not allowed to discipline unruly children in class. If a child is being disruptive in class, why can't the teacher discipline them? With the CCTV footage available, the evidence will be there to protect both child and teacher. Surely it is in society's interest to show these Yobs that they cannot continue to terrorise everyone around them with impunity. By instilling discipline at an early age, will have major benefits of having far fewer troublemakers growing into adulthood, and creating an even bigger problem for society.

The Curious Case of the Disappearing Data

There are times when I truly despair of ever really understanding the foibles of computers. What should seem easy turns out to be a protracted mess of damage limitation, and a desperate search for answers to your problem. Where is Sherlock Holmes when you need him?

What I am referring to is my previous blog (Computer Geek to the Rescue). After completing the blog on Saturday, I posted it without any problems. On Sunday, I noticed a few things I wanted to change, so I tried to edit the post, specifically, to add another picture. What happened was when I went to edit the post, all the data disappeared! All I was left with, was the title!!!

No amount of logging out, and back in again would magically restore my post!! So I started searching the web for any possible solutions.

What I discovered is that, again, I was not alone with this problem. In fact, it seems to be a major design fault with Blogger. Countless users are complaining about how the auto-save wipes out vast tracts of their data, and then they have no way to restore what has been lost. These posts have been going back years!!! Any mistake you make accidently deleting something cannot be undone!

It seems to be a problem with Blogger and Google have so far not done anything to resolve this problem. A lot of disgruntled bloggers are switching to Wordpress, which doesn’t seem to have this problem.

The other alternative (which is what I am doing at the moment), is to write your entire post as a word document, save it, and then copy it over into the data box in Blogger. This was what I had to do with my previous post.

The only thing I haven’t quite worked out how to do is get any pictures I have added to the word document, to copy over into the Blogger post field. I have just discovered a blog post by Robert Slater, that was created nearly 2 years ago, explaining how you cannot transfer pictures from word to blogger, and possible ways to to get around the problem.

Computer Geek to the Rescue!

When I came home from work, my daughter informed me that our WiFi connection had stopped working. Now normally, this isn’t a problem, as the router has been known to freeze, and all you have to do is switch it off, then on again. So this was the first thing I tried, even though my daughter had already tried this already, I was too stupid to believe her that there was something more seriously wrong with the router!

What I did discover, was that it was the wireless part of the router that wasn’t working. The router (Thomson Gateway TG585 v7) was connected to my desktop computer via an Ethernet cable, and it could access the Internet without any problems. It just would not transmit any signal for the laptops to pick up!

So I had a brainwave. I started searching the web for forums that might shed a light on what was going on. I also dug out the flimsy instruction manual on setting up the router (about as much use as a chocolate fireguard). To my surprise, I was not alone in experiencing this problem. It seems that this router is prone to throwing a tantrum, and refuse to work!

One of the forum suggestions required me to reset the router, which I did using a wire paperclip in the recess at the back of the unit, and restarting the process. This also required me to input the username and password. So far, so good. I then had to use another username and password to access the routers settings, as it was here that I could try and get it to kick-start the transmitter again. As I was going into the settings, I was asked to change the username and password, which I did, and checked to see if all the settings were correct. They were. When I exited the settings, and checked the router, it still wasn’t working. To make matters worse, I couldn’t log back into the settings, as it wouldn’t recognise any of the username’s or passwords!

So I got out my trusty paperclip, and reset the bloody router to its factory default again. This time, I ignored any of the requests to change usernames, or passwords, and went back into the settings screen. This time I followed another forums advice to simply change the channel the router was broadcasting on. I changed the channel from 11 to 9 and “hey presto!” the router started working properly again!

My wife told me that when I first started to come to grips with sorting the problem, I was like a bear with a sore head, muttering curses under my breath, and a scowl upon my face. When I finally succeeded in fixing the router, she says I was grinning like a Cheshire Cat!!