Micheal Savoie

The holidays are coming and I am scared to death!

It is less than 30 days until Christmas and I have a lot to be thankful for. My wife is recovering well from her spinal fusion surgery that she underwent almost 4 weeks ago. I wholly expected her to be using a walker at this stage and she is getting around very well without assistance, she is finally back home now that she doesn’t have to use the walker (she stayed with my folks because our hallways are tight for walker navigation).

I am thankful for the vacation, sicktime and personal time I accrued over the last 5 years at my job, because I have been out since October 30 because of a hernia, and I am scheduled for surgery on December 6th! I am thankful for the insurance that I have through my job, that makes $70,000 hospital bills into $9,000 hospital bills and then leaves only $2000 for me to deal with.

But I am scared to death.

My surgery is coming during the last week that I have vacation time left for, the next 3 weeks will be unpaid (at least from my job – I have short term disability but they only pay 60% and they discontinue paying your insurance premiums during that time). That leaves my business to fully fund my bills and groceries for the next 4 weeks (I get paid every two weeks) after my surgery.

Again I am thankful that I have over $800 in commissions coming in during that time. Not to mention the direct to paypal payments from affiliate products that I sell from people using Rapid Action Profits as their affiliate program. I can bring in over $100 in a day if I am at my computer sending out emails at my standard pace of 1 to 2 per day!

This additional time I am having at home has helped me develop a longer range plan for my business, including a “Legend Platform” as Dr. Ben Mack calls it for my future business development. I am going to brand myself using the processes outlined in an ebook I recently acquired from Walt Laurel and Ben Mack (among a larger cast of super heroes of the Legend Platform creation world) called Your Relevant Truth. This ebook goes into detail about the different stages of the Legend Platform and helps you to figure out what you want your customers to immediately think about when your name or your business is mentioned. You will definitely want anything that Walt offers you for workshops and seminars, because you are going to see a different side of Walt Laurel.

Walt is one of these professional looking guys that exhibits his passion for this subject when he is on stage! You will get a lot out of him as the adrenaline (and red bull) get him revealing topics that he can explain so that you can understand them, rather than reading and having to reread, Walt can make it understandable. I have worked side by side with Walt Laurel and I have seen him first hand interacting with people, teaching and training.

But I am still scared to death!

I was signed up for both Mark Hendricks’ 12 Days Of Christmas and Santa Sal and now I am finding out that being part of one is a violation of the terms of the other, so I am going to avoid both of them. It really bothers me that two marketers have to be divisive about this during the holidays.

Here is the scoop… Santa Sal is paying for free referrals and level 2 referrals for his Christmas giveaway. It is great for marketers with medium sized lists, because it gives them a chance to earn a little holiday cash, and it gives them a chance at commissions on an upsell. I never was fond of getting paid for my referrals for a free download, but this is a little different, because there are lots of downloads available. I have found that the person paying for the leads is going to get the people from my list whether I promote it or not… so I might as well get paid for it, right?

But Mark Hendricks calls it selling your list, thereby violating your terms of service when you tell your subscribers that you won’t share or sell their information. I think that is the wrong logic there, because you are not selling the list, you are getting paid for those people who decide to sign up for the downloads. It is a referral fee in much the same way you get paid from the CPA vendors for someone entering a zip code. Some of those CPA firms give up to $5 for a simple zip code. So why can’t a person get $1 for a signup using an email address? It isnt selling your customers.

If I were to copy and paste my database into a text file and email it to Santa Sal and he would cut me a check or Paypal me some green, then I would be selling my list.

But I am not going to play the semantics game, because I am good friends with both Sal and Mark and I don’t want my participation in one or the other event to ruin my relationship with either of them. (Even though neither of them has time to call me and say hi!)

So seeing two Santas beating up on each other is bringing me down and scaring me. I should be more confident about the future of my marketing, but the upcoming time away from work and the Christmas holiday with 3 teenage daughters wanting high end electronics and clothing has my stomach in a knot (which is probably a good thing, because it keeps it from coming out the tear in my abdominal muscles, which would be a bad thing) and makes concentration a little more difficult.

I should just keep this all to myself, but I was told that bottling it all up is a sure way to develop something worse…

I appreciate all the prayers that everyone said for my wife, and I am hoping the prayer warriors are back at it for me next week. In the meantime, I am working hard on making sure I am providing as much value as possible to my Extreme Product Explosion members. Thanks for being a loyal reader, and tell your friends about the Floridian Beverly Hillbilly and this blog!

Have an amazing day!

Micheal Savoie
softwarerebel.com

PS – I am going to offer a second class on Product Creation Tactics for $197 to the first 20 people to sign up for this. This class will consist of 2 Teleconferences per week for 4 weeks with email followup and a once a month mastermind call for as long as we have people showing up consistently. This one will begin December 10th with a 14 day holiday for Christmas and New Years Day. I wasn’t going to overdo it, but I want to make sure that I am equipping as many as possible for the New Year.

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