Let’s Reconnect on October 17th!

The Michigan Office

Well, it’s been a while since we were able to meet. I am now situated in my new home in Michigan and the chill of the Fall air is beginning to bring changes in the leaves and bones! Michigan is great. We are all loving the change of pace and lifestyle while being a bit apprehensive about the Winter about to happen all over us.

What’s Up This Month?

Our next meeting is scheduled for Saturday, October 17, 2015 at 4:00 Eastern time. Ed and I were talking about what we felt were the current needs of the group. Because I have had so many inquiries and so many new signups to the mailing list, we have decided to review the basics of starting an online business. What do you need to get started? How much money will it cost? How to find a niche? Where to get help? All the basics.

I also want to discuss leveraging online resources for people who do not have an online presence. How can someone who has a skill set, such as great marketing skills, get known for those skills and ultimately get paid for those skills after being discovered online?

Finally, we will catch up to date on how everyone who has previously started business online are doing. There are some amazing and eye opening stories I am hearing and can’t wait to share them with the group.

We hope you will bring your wisdom and knowledge to the table as we all gather to help one another get out of the 9-5 and into a situation where we have the ability to be free.

Make sure you are on the mailing list because that’s how I will send out the Google Hangout invites. Just fill out the form on the right. For those of you in the Michigan area, please contact me personally and I will give you directions to the house.

Google Hangouts How Tos

We will be meeting via Google Hangouts. Please make sure you are familiar with how to do that well before the meeting. I am unable to offer support right before and during the meeting.

Google’s Tutorials
YouTube Tutorial

Enjoy,

February Meeting

On February 7, 2015 we will have our first meeting for 2015. A lot of progress has been made on many fronts, especially with April, Buddy and Marilyn’s Amazon businesses. The Christmas season was very, very good to them!

PowerPay

This meeting, we will be introduced to PowerPay! PowerPay is a credit card merchant services company that allows you to earn some serious commissions on anyone you sign up with their service. Alison Gerrish is my contact with them and she will be introducing us to their systems via a recorded video. The cool part about PowerPay is that they also allow you to earn commission from anyone your friend signs up as well. It’s a little like a multi-level marketing plan without the frills, just good solid residual commissions you earn from anyone you sign-up and anyone they sign-up. Alison will tell us all about it.

Finally, please make sure you are on the official mailing list. If you have not filled out the form on the right, do so right now so you can stay up-to-date as we help one another find freedom for our families!

Dana Haynes

August Reboot!

The August meeting is expected to be a pretty amazing meeting.

I have just completed my Facebook Advertising campaign and it netted over 100 new opt-in email addresses with thousands of views of my ads. I will show you the ads I used and how the program works and what I have done with the leads. This activity is a result of my participation in Amy Porterfield’s Profit Lab class. Hey Amy, care to pop in and introduce yourself this month?

Quirky!

Marilyn introduced me to Quirky.com. It is a website that will take your idea and turn it into a real product. A quick look at their website tells a beautiful story of amazing design and creativity and how folks are making a very nice income… just because they shared an idea!

FBA Update

The Amazon FBA program continues to produce income for April and Marilyn. They will update us on their earnings and the things they are learning. April will talk about her experiences of being able to do the program, quite successfully, from the road. Mobility is a critical part of our philosophy here at Freedom for the Family. We must have all three elements of T.I.M. (Time, Income and Mobility as we learned from Tim Conway of The Foolish Adventure Podcast.)

Get your Seat!

If you are in the Fort Lauderdale area you can attend the meeting in person. We also live stream the meeting for those of you who are not local or who would simply prefer to attend via the internet. To accomplish this, you will need a Google+ account and be a member of our circles. Email me HERE if you need that info.

Well, that’s it for now. I look forward to chatting with you on Saturday, August 9 2014 at 4PM Eastern.

Enjoy!

Oops! June 14th… Not June 10th!!!

Greetings from the FPEA… Florida Parent Educator Association.

Here is a quick update, more of a test actually… to see what it would take to get a post up and online with video… all remote, not relying on any of my standard office support techniques.

Remember, part of being free is not just having enough income to support the family while you are building your business online but it is also as much about having the LOCATION freedom as well. Remember TIM! Time, Income and Mobility.

This is from my Homeschooling convention in Orlando, Florida.

Enjoy!

I have just launched my first Facebook Ad Campaign as a result of participating in Amy Porterfield’s (@amyporterfield) Facebook seminar.

To arrive at this point, I needed to create a product to sell. I created a product called “Flash Cards for Visual Learners.” I made an ad, a short video and put it all on a new Facebook page. You can see that at https://www.facebook.com/homeschoolconnectionus/. Please click the link, find the movie and the ad and take a good look at the whole page.

This is important for those of us who are helping one another here at FFtF. As a result of this laborious series of tasks, I feel pretty equipped to help others do the same thing, advertise on Facebook.

Facebook offers some really powerful targeting tools, giving you the ability to direct your ad to very specific categories of people. I am using this technology to display my new Facebook Ad to Homeschooling women between the ages of 25 to 80 years of age. I will be sharing the results at the June 10th meeting.

Please take a look at the Facebook Ad, fill out the Opt-In and let me know what you think of whole process. Tweet about it, promote it to your Facebook friends and tell anyone you think that could benefit from the FREE Flash Cards for Visual Learners! It is a very short test. After 5/25/14 these cards go on sale for $4.99 per download.

What an amazing process this has been, I can’t wait to share it with you.

Enjoy!

Howdy.

Today I am in Miami attending the BuddyPress conference. BuddyPress is one of the core technologies that run the website here at FFtF… and yes, I will give you an update tomorrow at our monthly meet up. Here’s what else we are planning…

• Marilyn and April can update us on their FBA progress. It’s pretty good.
• Dana will review Amy Porterfield’s Facebook Marketing seminar.
• We will be looking at OmniFocus and Things task management software.
• Dana made his first Affiliate Commissions at Amazon!
• Lot’s More….

I will be sending out an email from Google Hangouts tomorrow morning so you will have the coordinates to tune in if you can’t be at my home at 4:00 PM Eastern.

Enjoy!

David Allen’s “Getting Things Done”

I am in the process of diving in and tearing apart David Allen’s “Getting Things Done” book. I am doing this because it has been beckoning me for about five years from a variety of angles. Just about every website I peruse as I develop “Freedom for the Family” talks about this book and Allen’s system for Getting Things Done. You have probably seen it somewhere as GTD.

An Empty Head

Allen explains that our mind should be used for creating things—not holding things. He is on a quest to help us free our minds and emotions from the burden of trying to remember all that stuff we need to do. His secret: put it all into a trusted system from which you can not only recall it at a moments notice, but organize it all too.

I am a veteran if Stephen Covey’s Time Managment course, and a master of the DayTimer system. As such, I have been intrigued by all the attention given to this book and the methods it offers. This is not a method that relies on or teaches prioritizing your work. It forces you to look at your tasks as projects and then ask revealing questions about the nature of the task and what the appropriate next action should be. It forces you to really think about the whole process in terms of the small actions required to complete, even monumental tasks.

Testing, Testing…

I have begun implementing the suggestions he makes and I gotta tell you, it feels pretty good. Allen is as much about making us feel free, as he is about giving us a system for managing our stuff. While my jury is still out, I can tell you that I will be diligently learning and implementing all aspects of the GTD methods that seem right for me. The system works. The problem is that it was incubated in the 80s and 90s and published in the early 2000s, when there were no cloud storage methods such as DropBox that enabled synchronized storage across devices. For an on-the-go entrepreneur, sharing is vital. We need access to all our stuff, including our to-do lists, everywhere, all the time. The good news is that this is changing, because modern software packages deal with it. I’ll talk about that in a moment.

A Great Fluid Task List

My impetus for diving into this now, is that I have been struggling with my calendar program’s to-do list feature. I love a good, organized, to-do list. If I can have things in categories and set some priorities, then rearrange things as my fluid schedule changes, I can be pretty happy and pretty productive. My current calendar program, BusyCal, which I highly recommend, has a basic to-do list which can be manually sorted, the items are shared, but the sorting is not shared across computers or platforms. I can create a grand to-do list on my laptop, which shows up on my desktop computer—minus the sorted order. Last week, I began looking for alternatives for just the to-do list function and found a bunch of solutions.

GTD Applications

There are many applications that work really, really well for creating and managing project lists or to-dos.The two I am looking at are OmniFocus and Things. This month, I will be diving into OmniFocus and will provide a complete review of it when I am finished. So far, I can tell you that it is a pretty deep and pretty rich application. Data entry, used to clear things off your mind and get them into a trusted system, is easy and ubiquitous. It does not matter what you are doing on your computer, a keystroke brings up a panel. Type your thought, hit enter and you’re done. The idea is captured and you are off and running without missing a beat. The very fact that you have written down a thought or a gotta-do gives you the right to forget about it. This is liberating!

Both OmniFocus and Things have been constructed around David Allen’s system so, for me, it is the perfect storm as my need for a better to-do list, Allen’s philosophy and software, all come together pushing my pursuit of the perfect system for managing all the stuff in my life forward. The creators of these software packages, realizing that Allen’s system was created in the pre connected world, have updated, modified and packaged their software to fill in the gaps time has carved. Allen himself seems to support their efforts and recommends their products.

See it in Action!

In our May meet-up we will be discussing the GTD philosophy and demonstrating the OmniFocus software. I hope you will join us. We meet at my home in South Florida and online so our international and non local friends can visit too via Google Hangouts. If you would like to join the mailing list for the meeting notes and announcements, fill out the form below. There are no membership fees and there is nothing to buy. We are just a group of like minded entrepreneurs trying to help one another develop our online business so we can experience Freedom for the Family. Put this on your to-do list for May 10th at 4:00pm Eastern.

 
Enjoy!

Live Stream from YouTube

This month, for the first time, we recorded the entire meeting and it is now available via my YouTube channel. Click in the video below to watch it.

Websites Mentioned this Month…

Pat Flynn’s Smart Passive Income Website

The Podcast when Pat interviews Jessica Larrew – A Must Listen!

Jessica Larrew’s Website about Amazon’s Fullfilled by Amazon Program

Amazon’s “Fulfilled by Amazon” Website

The Amazon Web Services information

My Affiliate Link to the Profit Bandit Software – Click to Order.

You will also need a label printer for getting your stuff properly labeled. Here is the one we are using.

Thanks to all who participated. I look forward to seeing you all next month.

Enjoy!

You’re Fired!

In November, my wife was fired from her 16 year career with a nationwide Office supply chain. She prevented a shoplifter from leaving the store with over $600.00 of toner supplies. This type of theft is considered a felony. While it is legal in my state to use (even deadly) force to prevent a felony, it is against an unwritten store policy that employees should never interfere with a shoplifter—you must let them walk. She was aware of this policy, but when the event unfolded, her sense of morality, her deep devotion and absolute loyalty to the company sprang into action. She correctly assessed the situation, saw no danger and acted. She successfully recovered the toner and shortly thereafter, an arrest was made! Sure, we could debate the several issues surrounding the incident, but these are the facts.

She suspected she may get in trouble. She imagined that she would be written up, reprimanded or perhaps even suspended. All of these would have been reasonable and apt corrections, but the choice was made to “separate employment,”  an extreme, insensitive and harsh reaction, given the larger view of her outstanding, unblemished career. To this day, we do not know who made this decision; the details will be forever hidden behind a faceless, heartless, soulless corporate bureaucracy.  And yes, we have pursued every avenue of appeal, including legal. We live in a state where an employer can fire an employee for any reason, without consequence.

We have never felt like correction was unwarranted, it is just that it was so overreaching and harsh. There was no examination of the overall picture—who the employee is, what her family needs might be, her unwavering loyalty to company and career. Why would you fire a 16 year employee Continue reading →

I am nearly finished with my series of articles about dealing with passwords over at Accularian.com. Here is a link to each of the articles. It has been a blast to write them and my plan will be to go back over the entire series, finesse them, then turn the whole series into an eBook. It should be a massive best seller, after all, everyone hates dealing with passwords! One more article left and I’m off!

Here are the links:

• Part 1 – None Shall Pass!
• Part 2 – Into Password Purgatory!
• Part 3 – Facing Yourself
• Part 4 – The Power of Root
• Part 5 –  Bracelet, Keys and Quill
• Part 6 – The Squires
• Part 7 – Coronation

Enjoy!