bdunn

11 ms·

61.
by bdunn 13y ago
I've had great luck with retargeting on the FB news feed. Here's my writeup: http://planscope.io/blog/putting-retargeting-to-work-for-you...
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by bdunn 13y ago
This is exactly what I think I'm proposing to do. If you come across Planscope and think, "Interesting. I'd like to play around with this" you can - quickly - and with no time requirements. But once you have a real life
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by bdunn 13y ago
"A free trial where I give you my credit card number isn't free." It is when you aren't charged for anything. It's basically a way to qualify a (future) customer. ...Also, what paywall were you hit with when creatin
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by bdunn 13y ago
Done :-) It works wonders off normal organic traffic, I'll enable it again after the HN rush dies off.
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by bdunn 13y ago
"Signing up" implies creating a few database records and logging someone in. When I say "onboarding", I mean a deliberate attempt to transition somebody into the workflows and uses of the product.
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by bdunn 13y ago
OP here. I'll refund the last month's payment regardless when canceling, no matter how long you've been a customer. The goal isn't to trick people into paying. The goal is to make it feasible for one person (me) to suppo
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by bdunn 13y ago
Some services don't send invoices (which really, really bothers me. I don't want to remember that I'm paying for a service after looking through my AMEX statements.) Others, like KissMetrics, sends you an email a few days b
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by bdunn 13y ago
Norfolk / Virginia Beach area here.
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by bdunn 13y ago
1) A book is an asset, and provides long term revenue (even though it diminishes over time without some form of marketing / outreach) 2) A book establishes a customer base, and Pete can provide future offerings to this pool. 3) A book
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by bdunn 13y ago
There are quite a few points of contention to be made with your comment: First off, to group "24/7 on-call Wordpress support" with passive income is... well, a very, very long stretch. on things which have real social purp
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by bdunn 13y ago
This could serve as a really nice method of securing consulting engagements without the typical formalities of prospecting consulting engagements. I think $99/mo and especially free fall way short of things like "copywriter help&q
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by bdunn 13y ago
My mastermind group spun off from Mixergy.com. But starting a Mastermind group is easy: find some friends who are in a similar position to you, and propose that you formally meet once a week. If you're local — great! Show up at a coffe
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by bdunn 13y ago
Fantastic post, Justin. I'm a member of a mastermind, and spend most days in a Campfire room with fellow bootstrappers. I work from home and don't have coworkers. Being able to have immediate access to really smart people who comp
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by bdunn 13y ago
(Author, but not submitter, here. A few friends on Twitter asked for a writeup of what I was doing with retargeting, and the guys at Perfect Audience ended up submitting it to HN. Not sure how I'm "growth hacking".)
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by bdunn 13y ago
AFAIK there isn't a way to set a CPC with Perfect Audience newsfeed ads. I plugged in a weekly budget and that was it.
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by bdunn 13y ago
I've been writing quite a bit over the last 1.5 years on bootstrapping Planscope / my other products: http://planscope.io/blog/category/bootstrapping-and-products...
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by bdunn 13y ago
A monthly retainer, though try not to sell it based on the amount of time they reserve of yours each month.
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by bdunn 13y ago
I manage to build + support Planscope ( https://planscope.io ), sell my two books (very little support necessary, outside of the occasional download links ending up in spam), and run a monthly workshop single handedly in ~20-30 ho
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by bdunn 13y ago
I get what they're saying. I run a weekly newsletter, and often my "call to actions" are asking people to reply. Of the 6.5k people on my list, I've probably chatted in one way or another with at least 20% of them. It&#x
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by bdunn 13y ago
Once the book is done, it's done. But marketing is a long term effort. I've recorded dozens of podcasts and interviews, included call-to-actions in my newsletters, written guest posts, etc. But I'm consistently able to bring
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by bdunn 13y ago
Yep, email's in profile.
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by bdunn 13y ago
I have a few hundred emails in GMail labeled "Success Stories" — but I have no idea what the total net benefit of my books have been... as that figure goes up each day as my readers bill more time :-)
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by bdunn 13y ago
I've self published two books now ("Double Your Freelancing Rate" and "Sell Yourself Online: The Blueprint") Together they've netted me a little over $100k in revenue. 1) Don't write in a vacuum. Build an
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by bdunn 13y ago
(HitTail user here.) It has a proprietary algorithm that looks at the keywords people are finding you with and letting you know which long tail keywords you have a clear shot of ranking high (e.g. position #1) for so you can write specific
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by bdunn 13y ago
I launched Planscope in February of 2012, and by the end of the first month, a little less than 30 people converted from a trial to a paid account, many of which are still around. I credit a pretty aggressive campaign of relentlessly unders
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by bdunn 13y ago
https://training.kalzumeus.com/newsletters/archive/services_...
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by bdunn 13y ago
Exactly. I like using the faucet analogy: when you're paying a consultant, you're getting value for the time they're "on the clock". Employees have onboarding overhead, aren't fully utilized, might require payi
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by bdunn 13y ago
Nope, same last name. Pretty positive the insurance company knows we're married. It did mean, though, that I have my own policy and my kids are under my wife's policy. So if my wife and kids go to the doctor a bunch and pay their
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by bdunn 13y ago
You mentioned "family", so I'm going to assume you're married. At least here in Virginia (I'm no insurance expert), a group is 2 or more people. My wife is officially a shareholder of my company, and so she and I ha
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by bdunn 13y ago
When we link freelancing rates with salaries, we can easily get led astray by: "OMG $200 an hour — that's like $400k a year full-time! That's insane!" If you're looking to augment staff as a contractor, whoever hire

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