Day 18 of Making it in March is about making Progress

It's Great Saving Money but we Need to Earn it First

Please note that this blog post is not selling you anything, it is simply giving you the story of Frugaldom so far.

Over the past 15+ years I have been involved in many money saving projects, worked within many industries and, throughout, maintained my status as a self-employed individual. Along the way, making significant income has never been my priority - I don't know why, I am simply not motivated by money. Getting the best bang for my buck, however, is a definite motivator when it comes to spending... when needs must, you understand.

Recently, I was sharply reminded that buying a fixy-up house for cash and then focussing almost all of my attention on how to develop the property in the most cost effective way may not be the best thing to do, especially if I intend actually living here for any length of time. For starters, property development works ONLY if the completed project is sold at a rate that both recoups all original investment and generates sufficient profits to warrant the equivalent of a fulltime income over the period of the project. Hmm...

As I said recently, we are now 3 years into what I consider to be a 5-year project but while concentrating on this, I have taken my eye off my own long term financial prospects. Creating a self-sustaining microholding is all well and good but the economic and political climate in which we live dictates that we must deal with hard cash. Put bluntly, no amount of berries picked from the fruit garden nor eggs laid by the poultry will pay ordinary household bills, nor will they pay the costs of maintaining my self-employed status. Cue some speedy research!

NYK, Frugaldom on Facebook

I haven't focussed much attention of Facebook but am assured that we 'need' to be there because 'there' is where everyone else is, apparently. If you use Facebook, please consider visiting my NYK/Frugaldom page and clicking the 'like' button so I know people are seeing it. Thanks.

NYK's Scottish multimedia sites preparing for upgrade

The NYK websites have been hanging around since the late 90s, changing now and again in between years of neglect during the more trying times that have included divorce, 10 house moves, daughter's engagement and then wedding, the birth of 2 grand children and the tragic, sudden deaths of more family and friends that I could ever have imagined possible. Just staying financially afloat has been the main focus, but so far so good. Having never had the security of a well-paid professional career, I can't miss it - hence the reason I think I'd feel cash rich if I ever managed to earn myself the UK's minimum wage!

Earn a living, I must! And that's why I now need to spend so much time pulling everything back together again, in an effort to earn the income that I need in order to budget for my frugal lifestyle of the future. I decided to call UK2, my web hosting company, on their 0800 free phone number after logging into my long-suffering control page. I was shocked at how out-dated everything was! But I couldn't believe my luck when I saw the half price sale for upgraded web services, so an investment has been made! I'm calling it an investment because I am hoping that the new and fully interactive site will pay for itself then begin earning me a small income before the house project is completed.

Fast approaching 50 and no longer a tech-savvy frugal babe, I've had to employ the services of a professional to pander to my every online need! We are currently working on design concepts that can encompass everything from blogs, forums, social media and PR/marketing/advertising opportunities to the online book shop and arty stuff, so it's a real challenge. (Sneaky peek at Wilbur, my flying pig, trying out a new page layout.)

Working on the new interactive version

Now we all know I blog and those who know me personally know I could talk for Scotland if given the opportunity, so communicating with the outside world is always a major concern of mine - I live a rural lifestyle of frugality but I place a very high value on social interaction - I'm sure it's what keeps us sane when things get tough. I've been using Twitter for a long time but only relatively recently decided to link it up with the frugaldom challenges. I love my number-crunching, so I decided to do a quick bit of research into how necessary it is to have a decent Twitter following... and proved my own point! Social media is not the be all and end all of succeeding in building yourself a customer base for your self-employment. See for yourself...

Researching aspects of social media

I won't name the businesses connected to the above figures but, suffice to say, you wouldn't expect many serious start-ups or home-based entrepreneurs to wish themselves into the unenviable position of the final listing - would you? I would!

Contrary to everything that the marketing and business gurus are saying, that tiny 260 followers Twitter account belongs to the Startups Award for 'Home-based freelance Business of the Year 2013'! I wonder if Catherine Kennard is a frugal living fan?

In conclusion, today's 'Making in March' has been all about making progress towards becoming self-sustainable in both home and working life by making plans for my frugal business empire.

The big question is, can I do all of this without incurring any debt and, at the same time, fit in my next crazy mini-adventure with my wacky friends? I am running out of time to chase the aurora borealis this winter, so I think we should infuse a little more excitement into this frugal life before the time comes to spend every minute in the garden. Better still, if the new website plays nicely on my Kindle or iPod then I may not even need to come indoors to check on my work status this summer! How great would that be?

Already setting budgets, checking travel costs, accommodation costs and route options while comparing notes with willing frugal friends! :)

Graphic above courtesy of http://www.blessedaretheweird.com/ and UK2 is an affiliated link. In their favour, their 0800 Freephone help is great, especially for someone of us whose knowledge of anything tech doesn't even stretch as far as working the TV remote control!

When Running Frugal Forums and Blogs...

Who Reads What, When and Why?

Specially posted for 'someone'.

I couldn't decide whether this post should be included here or in the likes of the Paranoid Times blog. The topic is a rather curious one but I am sure it's a familiar one to some of you reading this.

Blogs are normally more likened to diarie, but I disagree strongly with this comparison.  Diaries always conjure up images of secrets contained within private writings, innermost thoughts set down in print for the benefit of the writer, little thought ever being given to any other eventual readers. Not so with blogs - they are for all the world to find and explore, should anyone be at all interested in searching.

Here is where things begin to get a little more different. Recently, a discussion sprang up about lack of followers, comments and/or sales, despite the invisible number-crunching programmes churning out figures that suggested thousands of visitors.

With blogs, forums and websites, you can invite any number of people to visit, join or contribute but the truth of the matter is, few will! Regardless of whether they be a friend, relative or, even, spouse, few of these people will actively support your 'cause' for the simple fact that your 'cause' may not necessarily be theirs.

So let's look at how the figures pan out, as I do happen to have a websites, some forums and several blogs. Most are used purely as free space for writing about things I would like to keep for future reference, or for the purposes of checking back to see what progress has been made on certain projects, when and where. Some are relevant to what's being discussed elsewhere but, owing to their nature, such diverse topics cannot be mixed together. None of these things is aimed at generating traffic by way of the general public. Should they choose to read, they are welcome to do so. This blog is for all, it's where I give away the secrets of my money saving, frugal lifestyle, but it is not about footfall through a virtual business gateway.

Back to the numbers - I recently opened up the Frugaldom forums to the public, so we now have a slowly growing 'membership'. It's free, so anyone can join at anytime. But of those who choose to join, how many are brave enough to step up to the mark and declare their interest in money saving and frugal living? How many are brave enough to post on the forums, comment in the blogs or physically interact with others, most of whom are there for the exact same reasons?

To date, 436 usernames have been registered on the newest frugal living forums.

Of these, I deleted 176 (40.3%) because they failed to complete the joining process . This leads me to believe they are spammers or electronic, automated 'visitors' sent to infest the forum with links to websites that I wouldn't want there in the first place.

Of the 260 'active' users, only 97 (37.3%) of them have ever posted to acknowledge their presence.

Of the 97 who posted, only 28 (28.9%) of them return to post regularly. This is what I refer to as the true conversion rate - 28 posters out of a possible 97.

THIS IS A FANTASTIC RESULT!

BUT... how many of these 28 people are longstanding family friends or relatives? Not a single one!
This post has been thrown together to demonstrate how the numbers game really works - I have nothing to hide, nothing to sell and I don't track visitors to my forums, so there could be a million readers and I would never know they were there unless they took the time to register or participate in the discussions.

If you are in the business of generating yourself some income, you need to spread the word far and wide then monitor every real visitor. You need to analyse what percetage of these visitors are spending their hard earned cash while visiting your site or business. As a general rule of thumb, many marketing, advertising and sales professionals would accept 0.5% as an average result for something like a leaflet drop, while others spend a little more time preparing their leaflets - normally paying extra for sales copywriting - and look towards around 2.5%, assuming they have done their homework and targetted their advertising.

It doesn't take a genius to work out that in order to have thousands flocking to buy your product or service, you need to remember that your chances of turning a casual passer-by into a visitor (or reader) can be around 1 in 200 and then you still need to convert your visitors into paying customers or clients. Agai, this can be as low as 1 in 200. That's like one sale from every 40,000 website visitors!

What has this all got to do with Frugaldom or the frugal living and working brigade? Most of us are self-employed and/or working from home. We all need to earn a living and the depressing fact is that it's not always easy. The hours can be long, the hourly rate once calculated over each year can be a joke and the prospect of fame and riches isn't somthing often considered; those things don't drop into your lap purely with a stroke of luck.

The Frugaldom blog is about showing, by example, that fame and riches aren't always the best rewards. The sense of achievement and the freedom to pursue our own goals within our own budgets are what matters most to us. The integration of the concept of frugaleurs - entrepreneurs who have little or no debt/financial backing - is something completely new to many. It is my hope that dreams can be realised, even fortunes made, but without being indebted to a system that seems to prefer keeping the majority of people trapped by debt.

Be all you can be, set yourself free from the constraits of escalating credit or debt, speculate within your means if you have to, but be prepared to do whatever it takes (within the eyes of the law) to succeed and live a happy life, because we get only one shot at it...

That shot is now.

NYK Media
www.scottishmultimedia.co.uk

Making Ends Meet with Social Media & Virtual Networking

SHONA PROPHETT on
SOCIAL MEDIA and NETWORKING

Frugaldom and microholding are all very well, but we still need to make ends meet. Bills won't stop arriving simply because we are moving house, nor will they decrease. In reality, they are going to double, temporarily (again), while we make the transition from one house to the next.

Keep in mind that we have had to dig up everything from this garden in preparation for the move to a place that has no garden at the moment. 2011 could be a completely non-productive gardening year. But we still need to eat, pay for the keep of the poultry and have enough income to make a start on creating a cost-effective garden system that will suit our needs in years to come. (We also need to make the house habitable.)

So where, exactly, does social media and networking fit into all of this?

Simple! I need to be able to communicate with other people. I need to be able to spread the word of who we are, what we are about and how we are going about what we're doing.  I need FREE help while making the transition from the rented house to our very own  fixy-up, forever house. The bottom line is that I  need to generate an income from my time spent online - and that means being a virtual socialite, deploying tactics that can net me cold, hard, cash. I need to be SHOWN A PROFIT and that profit needs to be sustainable while other sources of income are out of action.

Shona Prophett is essential for this task, as we can't simply 'make ends meet' while renovating a house and creating a self-sustainable microholding that includes regular income generation. It needs to be a great deal more than that - it needs a supportive network of people, whose combined knowledge store can be tapped into by making the most of social media.

I'll mostly be asking questions and hoping to receive helpful hints, tips and advice. But, in so doing, I am inviting answers from social media moguls who represent themselves, their businesses and their clients' businesses, so it works both ways... it's free publicity for them and lending a helping hand to the new frugal entrepreneurs of this virtual world.

There's also the fact that I've now set up The Microholding Daily - a free, online newspaper that's generated from all the content linked to my preferred list on Twitter. You could be part of that, if you play your Tweets right.

Join us in the Frugaldom forums if you'd like to discuss this further.

SOCIAL NETWORKING, SPREADING THE WORD, THINK ABOUT IT…

The world's gone Gaga!

Everyone seems to like numbers - statistical analysis, percentages, ratios, conversion rates, the price of cheese... so I've looked at a few more. Before discussing them, I'd like you to take a quick think about these popular websites - with Apps!

I don't really 'do' Facebook, as far as social media and business networking is concerned. I do find it extremely handy for keeping up to date with friends and family, arranging social events and, in general, doing anything except work. We can share photos, reminisce, poke fun at one another and pick up from wherever we left off, even if we haven't seen one another for years.

Facebook is fun, it's where we hang out with familiar faces, it's where we go to skive, or to sit down at the end of a frustrating day and relax. OK, so our photos have probably all been digitally scanned for facial recognition, profiled, logged and listed in some Government funded, global database but, on the whole, we don't care. It's Facebook

Making your way in the world today takes everything you've got.
Taking a break from all your worries, sure would help a lot.
Wouldn't you like to get away?
Sometimes you want to go
Where everybody knows your name, and they're always glad you came.
You wanna be where you can see, our troubles are all the same
You wanna be where everybody knows your name.
You wanna go where people know, people are all the same,
You wanna go where everybody knows your name.


Theme song lyrics from 'Cheers'
"Where Everybody Knows Your Name"
by Gary Portnoy & Judy Hart Angelo

To me, that's Facebook!

Twitter, on the other hand, is about a hard and fast game. It's about the hard sell, the attention grabbing, the in your face, fast driven media. It's a digital revolution that combined the Internet with mobile phones on every level and is now threatening to outpace the national news networks and revolutionise the 'text all' facility on our mobile phones. On Twitter, there is no 10 second delay - it's out there for all to see and it's what's happening now.


In my opinion, the Twitter + Facebook combination doesn't work very well for the 'man on the street'. You just wouldn't take Wall Street, CNN and The Whitehouse staff to meet your friends at Cheers. Twitter is far too fast moving for such a cheerful, jaunty tune. Twitter, by comparison, is Rimsky-Korsakov's Flight of the Bumblebee!


Facebook's social network was launched around 2004, the brain child of college students. Within seven years, it reportedly welcomed 600 million active users worldwide. The there was a book about it's origins and now we have a film (due for release February 2011, here in UK, already released in USA).


Twitter appeared on the scene a couple of years later, in 2006. It's more of a micro-blogging site, based on the 140 characters allowed within a standard mobile phone text message. To date, it's said to have around 190 million users.


Curiously, individuals, companies, charities and other groups appear to be using Twitter as a source of gathering customers, members or participants in all manner of things, including using it as an introductory gateway to... you got it, Facebook! But the two, allegedly, have no affiliation to one another - unless you count the vested interests of Marc Andreessen. Indeed, it was reported that Twitter declined an offer worth around $500 million from Facebook. Astonishingly, the Twitter founders still don't sound sure of which direction their company is heading, other than up.


It's all very strange and beyond my comprehension. Everywhere we look we see signs, suggestions or hints of big names, but they are no longer those of tobacco, alcohol, drug or oil companies. Instead, they belong to the 21st Century World Wide Web - eBay, Amazon, YouTube, Facebook and now Twitter.

Many TV shows, including news programmes, flash up a Twitter username for audience interaction or participation. 'Tweet us @whatever!' In fact, I've even noticed a trend toward small print simply saying @whatever, without any reference to Twitter! Only those 'in the know' understand it, though.

Mobile phone networks seem to fit more comfortably with social networking than, say, retailers or service providers, although they are all begining to interact. URL shortening drives countless streams of traffic to countless websites and probably about 1% of those visitors convert to customers. But how do the numbers crunch for small players in this fast-flowing game of digital networking? Is success a dead cert or are the odds stacked against us?

With a UK population of almost 62 million, the BBC can reach over two thirds of us every week. Programmes like Eastenders can attract viewer figures far in excess of 10 million. A major event, like the funeral of Princess Diana, attracted over 30 million viewers. (So did the 1966 World Cup!) That's just UK.

Now let's go global, which is what WikiLeaks does when it hits the headlines throughout the International mass media network. I haven't looked at global figures, so I haven't a clue how many individuals on this planet have access to such things as TV, radio or Internet, but I do know that it's many, many millions and that the stakes are high when it comes to communicatioln with them all.

WikiLeaks has been mentioned several times over the past months. What fantastic publicity! Almost every newspaper, TV station and news broadcaster has uttered the name. Just like eBay, YouTube, Amazon, Google and Facebook, WikiLeaks momentarily became a household 'name'. So, how well are they doing in the publicity stakes compared to others? Keep in mind that there's no income generated just from seeing a name. (All figures correct at time of writing.)

How many people like eBay on Facebook? 411,320
How many usernames follow eBay on Twitter? 23,131

How many people like the main BBC World News on Facebook? 521,551

How many usernames follow BBC World News on Twitter? 448,671

How many people like Amazon on Facebook? 525,467

How many usernames follow Amazon on Twitter? 58,948

How many people like the WikiLeaks Facebook page? 1,557,588

How many usernames follow WikiLeaks on Twitter? 679,918

How many people like the main CNN on Facebook? 1,691,464

How many usernames follow CNN Breaking News on Twitter? 3,754,210

How many people like iPhone on Facebook? 1,872,655

How many usernames follow iPhone on Twitter? Can't find their official account!

How many people like Google on Facebook? 2,499,468

How many usernames follow Google on Twitter? 2,714,933 INTERESTING

How many people like iTunes on Facebook? 10,218,408
How many usernames follow iTunes on Twitter? They have several categories:
iTunes Trailers - 1,578, 784 : Music - 619,188 : Movies - 53,048 : TV - 45,312 : Pod casts - 43,725

How many people like YouTube on Facebook? 26,257,028

How many usernames follow YouTube on Twitter? 1,556,061

How many people like the Lady Gaga page on Facebook? 26,932,157
How many usernames follow Lady Gaga on Twitter? 7,869,076
How many like the Lady Gaga page on Amazon?

I think this tells us that virtual social networking, blogging and micro-blogging is more about negative escapism for the masses. We cannot accurately analyse the global reach of such platforms when they are subject to Government legislation, even banned in some countries, but we can begin to understand the enormity of the Internet and all the associated problems that brings with it. What I can see is that communication is key. Apple's iPhone, alone, boasts 62,949,864 monthly active users, so how many Internet users might there be?

Next, in this comedy sketch, come the big guns, those who profit from providing the masses with an assortment of negative escape routes from the harsh realities of their lives – whether they be virtual, actual, medical or psychological. Their wingmen are the financial institutions and the major drugs, food, drink, alcohol and tobacco industries.

Following them, there are the general money-makers, chasing along in an effort to entice the masses to part with their cash. Many don't care how, why, where or what for, it only matters that they succeed in generating wealth. The further down the line we go, the fewer stragglers there are with cash left over to spend. That's where we find the micro-loan companies springing up, in their hope of earning from those who have fallen by the wayside.

So what does this all mean for a budding entrepreneur, frugal or otherwise? Where, next, should our enterprising minds and spare investment capital be heading? What might be, the next 'big thing'?


Perhaps we should hold onto our hats, harness our dreams and be prepared for the ride of our lives. It could be fact, fiction and fantasy all rolled into one. It does not have to be within eyesight for us to see it, nor within earshot for us to hear it. Perhaps, even, the Mayans knew much more then than we do now.

Think about it…

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