Josh MacDonald: Valuable Case Studies, Lessons and Stories

Why I Chose Morgan James

People wonder why I didn’t self-publisher rather than going with Morgan James. Some articles discuss the idea that Morgan James authors are conned into using Morgan James but that’s not necessarily true. While I’ve ran into several issues with Morgan James and my experience has been far from perfect (more on that here), I chose Morgan James for a few reasons. I’m going to go over the benefits and drawbacks of going with Morgan James rather than CreateSpace, as I did consider this carefully. This is informal review of my experience so far.

The main benefits over CreateSpace:

The team is helpful with pushing everything along and educating you on the process. They have the patience to work with first time authors, like myself.
They have the ability to place you on the shelves in book stores. I can’t speak for if I get placed, but I’ll keep you updated.
They understand internal formatting – something I had no experience with.
There’s nothing worse than telling someone you wrote a book, then telling them you don’t have a publisher.
They have been used by top marketers like Joel Comm, E. Brian Rose and Russell Brunson, for a reason.
They have connections with reputable fulfillment centres that can be sure to integrate with your sales funnel.

The main drawbacks:

New authors must pre-purchase books. After you’re published once, you don’t have to do this again.
Updating your manuscript costs money.

People also ask me why I went with Morgan James instead of going with a literary agent who could hunt up a big publishing house like Penguin or any of its imprints.

The main benefits:

I can sell copies through my own channels at a different price than the stores.
When selling through my own channels, I keep a larger percentage of the sales revenue.
They can get you to market faster than traditional publishers. My niche is based on technology which is time sensitive.

The main drawbacks:

Placement in bookstores is not guaranteed.

I think Morgan James has its place in the publishing space. It may not be right for everyone, but it was right for me. So far the first 6 months has been a good experience and I hope I can say the same 6 months from now. Talk soon.

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My Horror Experience With GetResponse

1. Their registration box doesn’t work

So first, when registering on the registration page, there are several textboxes to fill out. However, the textbox wouldn’t take any of my emails. My personal joshmacodnald.net email, nor my gmail or hotmail addresses. It just said the email was invalid, when it clearly wasn’t. Frustrating.

2. Their website is full of errors.

So I click to email them, guess what? 502 error. I got back, click the button again, okay the email form appears now. So I send an email.

3. Their email is slower than they let on.

After submitting an email to the sales department to explain you can’t sign up (a HUGE CRO issue, probably costing them 5-10% loss in sales), you’re told they’ll be in touch “very shortly” and by that, I’d expect an email within an hour. No, of course they didn’t follow up within an hour.

4. Their phone number is out of service

As I said, an hour goes by without a response so I just try to submit the form. It gives me an error message, with a phone number. Awesome! I’ll hop on call and get this sorted right away I imagine. NOPE. After calling, a pre-recorded message says the number is no longer in service. Wonderful.

5. The live chat support agent was misinformed.

So I search Google and find a live chat option, cool. I’m connect with someone right away who says the issue is I must have my DNS records set for my domain. Why? He nor I have a clue. I run A records for my VPS and I run MX records to connect to my mail server. His answer doesn’t explain why I can’t register with my hotmail or gmail.

Also, why does the email of the admin need to have this? It’s not like this is the email we’ll be sending emails from anyways. This is more so my personal email for billing, support etc. I don’t want emails to be sending from this. But with GetResponse, yes, they try to imply that you’ll be sending from your personal email.

Whatever, so I exit out of that live chat, annoyed. I go to the homepage, there is a single form that asks for an email address and a password to get started. I enter in the EXACT SAME details as before, and it works. So one registration form works, and the other does not. Talk about lost sales.

6. The editor is super laggy and disfunctional

So I finally get into the control panel. Cool. I setup an email, and the HTML editor delays every input for 1 second. Frustrating! So you don’t spot a type until you’re 5 words along and have to click back or wait for the arrows to catch up, etc. What a mess. So I wrote the email text in my local editor, then just pasted it into GetResponse.

Would you believe me if I said the backspace button stopped working within the editor and I had to refresh the entire page?

7. Their docs are out of date

So now it’s time to integrate with my existing solution. I found someone made an extension for Contact Form 7 on WordPress and GetResponse (no idea why GetResponse wouldn’t code this for their own customers – it sure would be nice), so I download the extension and it asks for an API key. Okay, so I go into my dashboard, I can’t find it in the options. So I search on Google, and find this article. I try to implement what it says – outdated. The pages and settings it explains are no longer part of the current UI.

8. Their live chat is super laggy

So I go back to live chat to clarify how to find the API key. The worst part? It lags about 20 seconds when you try to type something in, and that is sometimes not quick enough before the live agent tries to cancel the conversation before a response can be fired off.

9. They send emails you can’t unsubscribe from

Here’s another one for you: you’re basically signed up for endless emails from them. No unsubscribe link.

End rant. So, does anyone have an autoresponder recommendation?

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Bisou – Free Luxury WordPress Theme

It’s been on my agenda to master PHP and the WordPress Codex to build a WordPress theme. Last week I sat down and decided to knock out a bad-ass free WordPress theme. The first thing I realized was how many requirements WordPress forces on you. For example, on themes built for business, I really hate comments. Comments are unprofessional and generally cause problems. If you don’t acknowledge comments, customers will think you’re ignore them. If you do acknowledge them, you have to have a secretary check them daily. Besides, the comment form boxes are always unattractive, so I usually have to edit the theme to get rid of them for all of my clients.

Now for the theme. It’s pretty lightweight – under 2 MB in size before WordPress made me add a few things to take it over 3 MB. The theme features a header image across the top which is the bulk of the size, which you can replace with your own image.By changing the header image, you can completely change the entire niche of the theme, to make it applicable for almost any sort of luxury theme.

The theme features a pinstripe background which gives the theme a luxury feel, making it applicable for businesses such as modelling and talent agencies, or even for wineries, jewellers, and bespoke tailors.

The theme works great, both with the front page as a static page, or as a blog post.

Lastly, I named it Bisou for the French word kiss.

Download the theme here:

Click here to download.

Here’s what the theme looks like when the homepage is setup to be a blog.

Free Modelling WordPress Theme

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How To Get An Engaged Twitter

My Twitter has thousands of real followers which I have obtained through a number of ways. People tend to claim they are “social media expert” but I wouldn’t consider myself an expert. I just understand the system. Here are a few tips to get you to my level of engagement.

Post regularly

People will forget who you are if you don’t post daily on Twitter. I like to hit a minimum of 3-4 tweets a week, but my aim is 2-3 a day. If you get too many thoughts in one day, save them as drafts and post them on a day when you don’t have the creativity or time to craft tweets.

Post at the right time of day

You can schedule tweets, but I don’t. I like to tweet anytime from 9 AM to midnight. You could post earlier. People are always on Twitter at night, so that’s a safe bet.

Do not post links

Links are the spam of Twitter. Unless the link is of direct benefit to you, do not post it. Do not share interesting articles. Instead, take a screenshot of a good paragraph, crop it, and post that. See next point about images.

Do not post many images

I don’t get that great of results with images. Post them if they’re really good, but do not post many. Probably 1 out of 30 tweets of mine are images.

Do not retweet others

This is the same as links. Retweets can be viewed as spam. You want people to retweet you. Do not shove content in your audience’s face unless it’s of benefit to you. You do not get any benefits unless it’s a friend’s tweet, etc. Retweets don’t benefit you as much as you think they do.

Post your own thoughts, not copied

This world is in need of creative and original thinking. Twitter is spammed with popular quotes. Instead, try to make up your own quotes and explain yourself. Craft a specific way of thinking for your followers. My most engaged and popular tweets are simply random thoughts that I came up with.

A popular tweet of mine, containing advice that I came up with throughout my day.

Follow tons of other people

I use Twitter as a producer, not as a consumer. I do not view other people’s tweets, unless I look on a specific person’s timeline. I never view the newsfeed. That’s why I am not worried that I follow 5,000 people. I follow people because it makes them feel good and makes them engage in my content and retweet me. It’s these people that power every tweet to thousands of people using retweets, so following them is the least I can do. If you’re going to automated this, make sure you automatically unfollow others so your following count is always less than your follower count.

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Imaginary Value – Every Dollar You Earn Is Worth More Than A Dollar

I named this post imaginary value based off the idea of imaginary numbers. Just because the additional earnings and value accumulated that we are about to talk about are not real or tangible at this point, it doesn’t mean they don’t exist.

Ok Josh, you’re off your rocker. What are you talking about?!

When you start a software venture and it makes say $2,000 per month net profit for example. Cash in hand, you pocket $2,000 every month, before taxes. However, if you’re new to starting companies, like I was a few years ago, you don’t see the additional value. Right now, you might be thinking, “Wow, I’m only making $2,000 after all this work! That’s only $24k a year. It’s not nearly enough to justify all this work.”

One of the first things most beginners miss is the increase in company value. Let’s assume your company is worth 12 times monthly net profit. So now after 1 year, you have a $24,000 company. So if you sell out, you actually made approx. $48,000.

Then, you have things like the brand name. You won’t always own the brand but it will always be attached to your résumé. If the company takes off after you sell it, that résumé item really holds a lot of value. By résumé, I don’t just mean applying for jobs, but it will allow you to get media coverage, and if it was big enough, maybe even a book deal!

If you replicated the process of building a similar company a couple more times, you could even write a book or create a course on it. You’ll have 3 brand names (that you may or may not own anymore) that you can mention in your sale pitch.

Then you have what you learned. Experience is one of the best forms of education. You can take what you just learned, and apply it on a bigger idea next time. After each success, your chance of success increases. You know the process. You’re much less naive. It’s like my good friend Don tells me, your first million is always the hardest.

Another form of imaginary value is the connections you make. Your business likely made new connections with suppliers, freelancers, investors and many forms of people who can add value to your business. I personally owe a large portion of my success to mentors — not paid mentors but more experience people who lend advice once a month. With these people now added to my life, every aspect of my future projects will be better off with their opinion.

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Rant About Modern Education

This blog is mostly about internet marketing, but school plays a bit part of my life, so I’m going to share a bit of my experience over the past few years.

I go to University of Toronto, which is the top university overall in Canada. Getting a degree here is money in the hands. Below is the top few universities, by ranking.

So, to even get into such a competitive university, you need to have good grades. Some programs you don’t need a 90% or 95%, but rather an 85%, which is still an A or A-. So let’s say with an 85% average from high school, going into first year, you’re already in the top — say 20% of all students your age.

Now, let’s apply some statistics. I’m in computer science. So my graduation rate is 64%.

university of toronto graduation rates

Now I’m in the top 7%, if I’m still standing after 4 years. Okay, now lets apply the fact that where I am right now, I’m one of the few taking tough 4th year computer science, because many people opt for another kind of degree. This part is complicated, but let’s just say I’m taking a course on database management systems, out of choice. So cut another chunk off that percentage.

So the first midterm comes back, and the average is 50.62%. It’s a passing average. If your GPA is below 65%, you get put on academic probation. If it stays below 65% for a second semester, you get a 12 month suspension.

So now, about half of your class sees their mark, and they drop the course. They either will try it again later, drop out, get suspended by failing a different course, etc. So take that previous percentage and cut it in half. This takes us down to almost 1%.

After half the class drops (usually the bottom half) the average goes up, because the people holding it down are no longer there. Now the class average is in the 60s, maybe 65%. The administration see the average was sufficient at the end of the semester (because those who couldn’t make it, dropped it) and nothing is done about it.

Let’s not forget that the people who are holding that 50% average down are still highly intelligent individuals. They’ve made it this far. They’re all top students in their high school computer science classes, but when pooled all together, they’re all average.

This is exactly what they do with the unemployment rate — they dont factor in those out of the job market entirely.

/ end rant

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My List Of Countries To Target On Facebook

Facebook doesn’t have the option to target all countries, so you have to manually enter them — until now, when they added the bulk import option. I don’t know how new this feature is, but I do ads a few times per week and I just noticed it. They used to have a limit of 25 countries, but that seems to be gone as of now.

If you want to target all the wealthy countries in the world, or if you want to target all the poor countries, you have to import a list. Luckily, I’ve done this enough times, that I’ve already sorted countries out by GDP, etc.

Here is my list of countries with a GDP over $10,000 and sorted by population descending.

United States
Japan
Germany
France
United Kingdom
Italy
Korea, South
South Africa
Spain
Argentina
Poland
Canada
Saudi Arabia
Taiwan
Australia
Netherlands
Greece
Portugal
Belgium
Czech Republic
Hungary
Sweden
Austria
Switzerland
Hong Kong
Israel
Denmark
Slovakia
Finland
Norway
Croatia
Singapore
New Zealand
Ireland
Puerto Rico
Lithuania
Uruguay
Oman
United Arab Emirates
Kuwait
Latvia
Slovenia
Estonia
Mauritius
Qatar
Cyprus
Bahrain
Luxembourg
Macau
Martinique
Malta
Brunei
Bahamas, The
Iceland
Barbados
French Polynesia
Netherlands Antilles
New Caledonia
Guam
Virgin Islands
Jersey
N. Mariana Islands
Isle of Man
Aruba
Andorra
Antigua & Barbuda
Bermuda
Guernsey
Greenland
Faroe Islands
Cayman Islands
Liechtenstein
Monaco
San Marino
Gibraltar
British Virgin Is.

Here is the list of countries I use when targeting poor countries. These countries have a GDP under $5,000 and they are sorted descending by population. There are many reasons I need to target poor countries (hiring VAs, getting cheap likes to something, etc):

India
Indonesia
Pakistan
Bangladesh
Nigeria
Philippines
Vietnam
Egypt
Ethiopia
Congo, Dem. Rep.
Burma
Sudan
Tanzania
Kenya
Morocco
Afghanistan
Nepal
Uganda
Uzbekistan
Iraq
Venezuela
Korea, North
Ghana
Yemen
Sri Lanka
Mozambique
Syria
Madagascar
Cote d’Ivoire
Cameroon
Burkina Faso
Cambodia
Ecuador
Malawi
Niger
Guatemala
Zimbabwe
Angola
Senegal
Mali
Zambia
Cuba
Chad
Guinea
Serbia
Bolivia
Somalia
Rwanda
Haiti
Burundi
Azerbaijan
Benin
Honduras
Tajikistan
El Salvador
Paraguay
Laos
Sierra Leone
Jordan
Papua New Guinea
Nicaragua
Togo
Kyrgyzstan
Eritrea
Georgia
Moldova
Central African Rep.
Lebanon
Congo, Repub. of the
Albania
Mauritania
Liberia
Armenia
Mongolia
Jamaica
West Bank
Bhutan
Lesotho
Gambia, The
Guinea-Bissau
Gaza Strip
Swaziland
East Timor
Guyana
Comoros
Solomon Islands
Equatorial Guinea
Djibouti
Suriname
Cape Verde
Maldives
Belize
Vanuatu
Mayotte
Sao Tome & Principe
Saint Vincent and the Grenadines
Tonga
Micronesia, Fed. St.
Kiribati
Marshall Islands
Wallis and Futuna
Tuvalu
Montserrat
Saint Helena

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Software To Prune Inactive Instagram Followers?

It’s a problem many Instagram marketers get into. You build up a clients account and you get to 10,000 followers, but the problem is, you’re only getting a couple hundred likes. Your engagement is way down now due to Instagram’s new newsfeed algorithm that tries to determine the more relevant media to show. Now your account just looks silly due to the low engagement. Even though your 10,000 followers are real people, few of them ever like and some of them don’t even use Instagram anymore.

Additionally, some people purchase Instagram followers and regret it down the road.

The question is, how do I delete Instagram followers?

So I’ve decided there must be some sort of option out there that does the following:

Goes through your past dozen or two dozen photos and gets the usernames of the likers. How far you scrape depends on the activity of your account. Personally, I post about 3 times monthly, so a dozen of my most recent photos would be enough.
Then, it merges the usernames into a file, removes the duplicates and then you add in all of your followings (friends, famly, etc) which would be another couple hundred people. We will call this, our whitelist.
Next we build a second list by scraping all of our followers.
Then, we take the list of followers, subtract the whitelist and now we have a list of people to unfollow.
Lastly, we simply block and then unblock the people in that list, which will remove them as a follower.

For the time being, I’m going to code a script to do this, but if anyone runs into a similar problem where they want to get rid of inactive Instagram followers, don’t hesitate to reach out in case I make a commercial version or service.

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For Those Of You Still Not Using Rank Trackers

There are many of you who are using rank trackers already, so this post isn’t really for you. However, there are a few who have not yet jumped onto a tracking service.

I’m not going to recommend a service in this post, just because this is not supposed to be an affiliate or promotional post, but rather an informational post.

You have so many keywords, URLs and days. Multiply all these out and you have thousands of data points and it’s hard to visualize what works and what doesn’t without a rank tracker.

With a rank tracker, you can see which keywords are improving, which are not, which are steady and how long they’ve been like this. Day to day, it feels like some of my keywords never move, but then I realize I’m at #3, when I was #120 for a highly competitive term just 12 months ago.

If you don’t have a rank tracker yet, you’re causing yourself stress and disorganization and you should jump on one immediately. There are many affordable options on the market and some even have a free tier, or trial.

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4 Viral YouTube Channels That Explain Living In Canada

While this isn’t a marketing blog post, this is a post that heavily describes what it’s like in Canada, for the many of those who ask me. Here are 3 viral YouTube channels that explain where I grew up in Canada.