Lesson 10 - Dealing with illness when you are an affiliate or Invidual business owner

Hi folks I haven't been around for a couple of days properly as I was going through a 'down' patch (I suffer with bouts of depression), then I come back to hear that a well known business networker has just found her life tumbled onto new ground by the wheel of fortune (that is what my previous post links to and I suggest you read it because Natalie went from having a normal week as a successful business woman running an on-line business to finding out she was seriously ill - she has decided, that for the time being she wants to share her experience and find others in the same situation - hence the shout out to her and baby - as communicating with your network of friends and contacts is the ultimate way to channel the right people to the right places - it is what we spend our lifes doing!)

I was planing on writing an article about how to keep the wheels turning in a business if you suffer from an illness, longterm like depression but now finding out this I am also looking at the totally unexpected like Natalie has experienced just recently.

One in 4 of us get cancer at some point in our life's - which means time out to recover.

Then there are mental ailments like anxiety and depression - but what happens to are income stream when these black clouds come down on us ? - we need to prepare a plan for illness - a 'living will' of sorts - if we want things to carry on.

Things I can recommend from my experiences over the years:

Firstly - you need to think about your business as a whole - is it like a market stall / shop where you can just close shop and come back when you are better ? - In the UK we get free health care - so if it is something big like cancer or something requiring time in hospital - we are extremely fortunate in the fact the State provides highly trained doctors and nurses for free.

In the UK, we are often heard to grumble and complain about the care in NHS hospitals - but the reality is that although there are some bad problems going on there (like any organization has it's ecosystem problems) - on the whole the quality of care and professionalism is second to none -

And if you are ever taken with an illness in the UK - I'd recommend the NHS over anything private here, as private hospitals often end up transferring patients to NHS because they don't have the resources / equipment to deal with many problems - they are shadows of the NHS and not worth the cash from all I've read and heard about over the years.

I realize it is a totally different thing in USA - where you have to either pay or go to a city hospital if you can't afford it - I've heard horror stories of city hospitals - and private ambulances leaving dying people on roads because they didn't have insurance - this might be media hype - I don't know. But medical treatment costs over there so - you definitely need to have a back up plan to keep you earning.

The number one recommendation for keeping your business going - when you can't do it, is automation if you are an affiliate of a product like Ganobrand you can automate getting traffic, educating your recruits, by setting up the following things:

You have the 2 sets of people (that can switch from one to the other) - you have buyers (direct buyers of the product) and sellers (your recruits that earn you residual income by copying your method)

So - having a blog and / or website of your own you can capture potential buyers and sellers by automation using feedburner and / or an autoresponder - the autoresponder can provide new visitors articles/newsletters (with your links at the bottom) up to a years worth in advance in some cases! personally I am thinking of reopening my AWEBER account as they are the best in the business for autoresponders - the free ones are good practice to learn how to use functions, but AWEBER are the thing to use once you have your content prepared.

I will be setting up an autoresponder for this site soon - I recommend you join it and take note of the process - i.e you come to this blog, you fill in the form for the free ebook, you are sent to a thankyou page that asks you to confirm your request, you visit your email inbox, you click on the link in the e-mail, you are then sent to a page with the free ebook and a thankyou for joining, then you should get an e-mail once a week, sent automatically, with an article you can use in your / or on your website/ blog (or in your own newsletter to recruits) and a link to a marketing resource or coffee related item.

Once the autoresponder is set up - it is your virtual assistant waiting for visitors to your blog.

Getting visitors to your blog in the first place

Getting your blog in traffic exchanges - is an automated method once it gets going ! - I'm looking at an url rotator script (I'm not happy with the coffee review script, for my purposes, so will probably be deleting that and trying some of the other scripts - scripts are a big source of automation - when you are happy with them!)

You can send automated tweets to your twitter account by using TwitterFeed Twitter feed will take any RSS you put into it and sent it to twitter - example I am using my coffee club at SocalMedian as my content for twitter as it has all the latest coffee news,tweeters and bloggers fed into it in the coffee industry. - this could be used to read the latest going on via your phone/tablet - if you just want to keep up to date about trends by reading - join up there and add your feed if you are into coffee ;-)

So imagine you can't get to your PC, if you have set up your twitter profile page on twitter you can still follow people automatically by using Tweetlater - and it DM's them a thanks for following message (with your blog / website link in it.) Your profile page should also have the link to your blog or website.

All traffic/vistors are directed to your blog - your blog has the autoresponder and the autoresponder has the links to the affiliate programs or product you are selling.

The next part of automation to make the most of twitter - is to make sure the RSS of your twitter account gets across many social networks - this is done by using one of the codes provided by twitter - i.e the widget code - you copy the code that will work for the social network you are using - you put the code anywhere and everywhere you can on-line - that piece of code automates the driving of traffic to your twitter profile - your twitter profile - links to your blog - etc.

Those are a few of examples to be getting on with. Think - blog, aweber, twitter,traffic exchanges,social networks, widgets,tweeterfeed,tweetlater - these are keys to automating a stream of traffic to your newsletter/product that once set up work on autopilot - just about every expert I have spoken to or read up on uses these tools to drive traffic.