The Internet Marketing dream? Running your online business from a beach? Yeah right!

You know that I live the internet lifestyle right?

Running my business from a deserted beach while the kids play happily?

Yeah well sometimes it works well and you feel like Richard Branson.

And sometimes it doesn’t and you feel like a PROPER tit.

Guess which one happened to me last week?

Yep – I’m a 36DD cup!

It was the Easter holidays here in the UK and the kids were off school so as usual we decided to wander.

I think I’ve mentioned before that we have a ‘grab bag’ that contains all the requirements for ‘mobile business’ such as various leads, headsets, adapters, pen drives, spare power supplies, notebooks,and other stuff that we need to run the biz.

It just gets chucked in the car whenever we wander off, along with my netbook and our iphones and suddenly everything it totally portable.

We could (and have) run things like this for weeks and even months at a time.

So this particular morning it was raining and windy so we decided to go beach walking for a challenge.

I had a last check of my emails before we left as I drank my morning green tea and all was fine. Peace and calm.

Then for some weird reason I decided to check my ‘divert’ folder.

I have ‘divert’ folders for most marketers whose lists I subscribe to. Their emails go directly into this folder and don’t hit my inbox becuase I find them distracting.

If someone is launching something on the same day as me, or a similar product, I find that if I’m aware of it, it makes me think a little too much about whether I should change the time of my launch, or put a different angle on the product so they don’t clash.

Whereas if I don’t know, I don’t give a crap. Hence my divert folder.

But this particular morning I was skimming through and I noticed John Thornhill’s folder.

I hadn’t seen what John was up to for ages, so I clicked on it.

Well by total co-incidence (and this is the absolute truth – not some cruddy IM ploy) he’d just sent out a JV invite for his latest WSO.

And it was due to go live that very day. I knew the product too and it was a good offer

I now had two choices:

I could spend half an hour writing a promo, grabbing an affiliate link, working out the international launch time (EST/EDT and all that) and risk getting verbally (and possibly physically) abused by my lovely wife who was herding the kids into the car…

Or I could follow the internet lifestyle and launch the whole thing from the beach…

I chose to live the IM dream and launch it from the beach using my trusty iPhone 3g.

WHAT a mistake.

That iPhone is now about to be listed on eBay and the latest model sits on my desk in it’s place as I type this.

Back to the story….

In the car I emailed John T and asked him what time GMT the launch would go live because I intended to send the details to my PA along with the promo email I was going to write and let her send the promo out via Aweber at the correct time.

John got back to me with the time and I wrote my promo on my phone while eating sushi as we stopped off for an early lunch. I also got my affiliate link sorted out.

All going well and I’m feeling like a real IM dude.

We got to the beach and the sun came out. It was gorgeous and wild and windy and my nose got sandblasted. We walked for miles.

The launch was due to go at 4pm.

Earlier that day at about 1pm I’d emailed my PA with full instructions and asked her to set up the promo and send it at four PM.

At 3.30pm I’d had no reply. This is something that NEVER happens.

I checked my iPhone to see if the message had been sent successfully and found to my horror that my phone had moved itself over to ‘nobhead mode’ and despite having an almost full battery kept restarting itself every time I tried to load a webpage or access my email.

I just couldn’t access my email or the promo I’d written earlier.

I now know that the email I sent to my PA actually WASN’T sent.

By now it was 3.45 and it looked like the promo wasn’t going to happen.

This wasn’t life and death of course but I’m stubborn and was determined to go ahead with my plan.

I left the rest of my family to wander round and sat on a rock with my wife’s iPhone (a 4S model) to see if I could make the deadline.

The first thing I needed was access to my email. I tried to add my email account to my wife’s phone but I couldn’t remember the password so that bombed.

Luckily I COULD remember the affiliate link I’d set up so I reckoned that if I could log into Aweber I could do the launch myself.

5 minutes to 4pm by this time.

If you can send out a promo on time you’ll make more sales. People are on multiple lists so they tend to check out an opportunity from the first link they see. That’s what I’ve found anyway.

So after three failed attempts I logged into Aweber (I remembered the password for that one luckily) and by expanding the screen and working on a section at a time I managed to write a (very short) promo and send it from Aweber complete with affiliate link.

I couldn’t get into my email account so had no idea if it had been sent successfully.

Here’s a picture of me pacing up and down as I’m sending out the promo. I’m extremely grumpy here and muttering words that you only usually hear from possessed people with Tourette’s syndrome.

So what did we learn from this, in terms of being able to successfully market on the move?

1. Make sure that when you get a new phone you BACK UP all the info that was on the old one, including a folder with relevant passwords.

2. If you work as part of a team, as we do make sure that all info is duped across all devices.

3. If possible set up as much as possible from your office first. If I’d uploaded the promo from home I could just have logged in on the beach and cicked one button to send it

I finally got my promo out at around 4.14pm. I didn’t know it had gone out until I got back and could plug in my iphone to charge it for long enough to check my emails.It still obviously wasn’t working properly though

It wasn’t a disaster because at the end of the day it was just a promo I was sending out, and it would probably have been better to just abandon the whole thing.

But in the past on numerous ocassions I’ve launched my own products from various locations away from home very successfully.

So this was a good lesson I think.

On the whole I’m glad i didn’t abandon this promo for two reasons. Firstly I’ve generated sales into four figures and it’s also paid for my new iPhone.

And secondly because it’s a great product that I highly recommend.

I only lost about an hour of my day at most, and because of my lifestyle I’ll definitely continue with my mobile marketing.

It might be better to put a new system into place though…

Any ideas?

Comments welcome



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6 responses to “The Internet Marketing dream? Running your online business from a beach? Yeah right!

  1. If we’re supposed to feel sorry for you mate… forget it!

    While you were enjoying the beach, I was spending 6 hours creating a bonus page for the same product… AND YOU’RE still beating me ion the JV leaderboard…. lol!

    But at least I can smile and relish the fact that I had a 4S before you ;).. haha

    Hope you didn’t spoil the kids time on the beach by being less attentive mate 🙂

    Randy

  2. Good moment by moment on how to do it at the beach
    I am in a similar boat
    ‘In a van down by the river’
    Actually a van at a beach in Kailua, Hawaii

    With my old HP laptop
    In between snorkeling & push ups
    Updating the social media sites
    with new posts of the websites & blogs

    Been following you, Tony, for most of 2012
    Now I know why
    Thanks for reaffirming that my choices in lifestyle
    isn’t absolutely unfounded
    Please continue your confirmation to us that it is possible
    Bill

  3. Again, you crack me up, Tony!

    I got that email of yours and I didn’t “feel” your angst and I don’t remember it being short. So all in all, user experience was up to the usual standards and you gained only a few gray hairs to go with the new four figures generated. 🙂

    So far I haven’t had any major issues while away other than when I didn’t bring my laptop one time when I was at Disney World and that was the trip an affiliate decided to do a major promotion of one of my products. I kept sneaking away and hoofing it the quarter mile to the lobby to use their guest computers to make sure there weren’t the occasional download problems.

    I’m off on vacation tomorrow where my biggest problem will be sneaking computer time when no one is looking.

    Peggy

  4. Tony Shepherd

    Hi Guys – thanks for posting.

    Randy – have to say I’m not a big fan of bonuses unless they’re very relevant to the main product (which yours are) because they detract from letting you concentrate on putting the main method into action.

    Some bonuses are just plain daft – wayyyyyy too much material to digest.

    Peggy – I’m glad you didn’t feel the angst. Almost cracked the glass on my phone writing the damn thing.

    Enjoy your holiday, and don’t take up too much time on the computer!

    Hi William – keep on living your ideal lifestyle. Think it’s a bit warmer where you are, but I’m glad you;re finding something you like on the blog. You’re always welcome here mate

    Tony

  5. Hi Tony,

    I’m on holiday in Penally near Tenby as I write this, using the pub across the roads’ wifi from my daughters bedroom as it works from here – and in the pub too of course, hehe. (My 8 year old daughter calls it “hi-Fifi” – kids eh?)

    It wasn’t the plan to do it like this, my wife has a Samsung Galaxy W that also works as a wifi hotspot and we were going to use that with our laptops while here. Problem is… Next to no bloody 3G signal unless we go down to the beach and it’s not exactly beach weather.

    Still, the pub works well enough even if there’s a few drop outs. I’ve worked it out that I need an hour a day actually online keeping in touch with contractors and what’s going on, and another hour at my laptop doing “proper” work.

    I don’t think I could keep it up like this for another few months yet though, I’m still too “in” the business and not enough working “on” it yet. Getting there though. Ups and downs. Swings and roundabouts. You know what I’m talking about. 🙄

    But we both know it’s possible right? Just got to find someone who can do the things we can and then hope they don’t wander off to do it themselves.

    We’ll get there… 🙂

    -Frank

  6. You guys are lucky !! I’m stuck in my college tutor day job with observations next week and a huge mailing list of ehemm… ‘2’ subscribers at the moment :o)

    Ok give me time and I’ll have a go at these JV mailings when my list is a bit healthier … but for now I can only watch you guys and enjoy the banter between you …

    Much more entertaining than the telly (that’s why I don’t own one!)

    Good luck with John’s leaderboard chaps and chapesses :O)

    all the best

    xxxxcarlxxxx

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