Self-Devpt. Nuggets™

Starting from next week, I will commence publishing ONE new post on Cost-Saving Farm Business Ideas, in direct response to each one of over 200 questions sent to me by visitors to my Farm Business Ideas website.

The First Question to Be Treated

To give you an idea of what to expect, here’s the first question I will be posting a detailed (researched) response to next week Tuesday (i.e. 4th December 2012).

Zainuddin zai_abi (who indicated he discovered my write-up on Facebook) wrote in from “Hyderabad a.p India” on the subject of “Cost for egg productions”. Here’s his exact message(Edited for clarity):

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"I have gone through your article Practical Poultry Farm Business Performance Calculations. I want to know how to calculate cost of egg production like cost per hen, cost per carton, cost of feed in details can you help me. kindly reply me."      
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I’ll be publishing a detailed post in response to the above enquiry on this blog next week.

This Content Will Be Restricted To Members-Only

Note however that access will be limited to past buyers of ANY of my products or services. Such persons will be automatically assigned personal usernames and passwords to view this premium content that will be published.

Past Buyers: To get your membership account activated, you MUST contact me (click the preceding link) stating your interest in joining my new Farm Business Ideas members club.

Other Persons: If you’d like to be able to access that “members-only” premium content post, and subsequent ones. Or if you’d like to be able to send in your question and get answers, send your message to me using this contact form (click the preceding link) for details of what you need to do.

Once you become a member, I’ll research and publish a detailed post on this blog, answering your submitted question.

Coming Soon: Educational Commercials on ALL My Farm Business Support Products & Services

In the course of the past eleven months I have learned quite a lot MORE about catering to the needs and interests of farm business prospects. This has been through the many web contact form enquiries, direct emails and phone calls I have received.

I have found the web form enquiries especially useful in narrowing down to the specific areas majority of my farm business ideas articles readers are interested in

Quite recently I received yet another web form enquiry from a prospective buyer of my Ration Formulator spreadsheet app. The gentleman who I will call “Y”, runs a farm business in Kano state. After I sent him purchase details, he wrote back saying:

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“Please I need a trial of (the) feed formulation excel before I send the money. Thanks”
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Like I told “Y” when we later spoke on phone, he was the very first buyer to ever request a trial version of the app.

I went on to explain to him that compared to the really sophisticated Excel applications I have built for clients, the Ration Formulator is very elementary – so that giving him a trial version would effectively amount to giving him the fully functional app.

The alternative would have been to offer him a compiled EXE version setup as a trial. However, I am still reluctant to introduce that “breed” of my applications in the local market. And then again, the pricing for those ones is much higher – and not likely to appeal to my naturally price-conscious fellow countrymen.

In subsequent phone discussions I was able to gather that “Y” was concerned that he might need to know how to use MS Excel in order to use my Excel-VB driven Ration Formulator.

And that was when it hit me. The reason he was reluctant to take the buying decision was a fear that the app had a steep learning curve.

I assured him that the whole essence of using Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) in conjunction with an intuitive Graphic User Interface (click preceding link to watch Youtube video) to eliminate the need for a user to interact directly with MS Excel.

A floating modeless data entry form is all the user needs to work on, and clicking a few buttons instantly generates a livestock ration formula.

With that clarification, “Y” asked me to send him the account details so he could make payment.

For me, that was a valuable bit of insight gained.

After that conversation with “Y”, I did some thinking and came to the conclusion that I need to stop assuming every visitor to my website will readily find answers to all the questions they may have about the solutions I offer.

That’s why in addition to publishing answers to questions you send in on Cost-Saving Farm Business Ideas, I will henceforth periodically publish “Educational Commercials” about every one of my products and services targeted at Farm Businesses.

The first will be on the “Ration Formulator”. And it will be out the same day I publish the Question and Answer post.

I built this application to help people reliably formulate balanced rations by freely using ingredients of their choice.

That’s why I am always open to exploring ways to working with buyers to make use of it to achieve their goal of successfully formulating rations to meet various needs.

And it’s been exciting to see how people from different places within and outside the country have embraced it – with great feedback too. I’ll be publishing some next week!

Final Words

So, let me summarize. I’ll be launching the earlier mentioned special members only section on my website (accessible via password only) where all of the new content mentioned in this post will be published.

All past buyers of the handbook and software get automatic ONE year of FREE  membership.

In addition, all members get a permanent 40% discount to purchase any of my other products or services whenever they want during the life of their membership.

Towards this end I’m currently building a Farmers Database based on information submitted by over 250 farm owners who have contacted me from my website. They will all be notified by SMS and email from next week.

IMPORTANT NOTE: For past buyers, to get your membership account activated, you MUST contact me (click the preceding link) stating your interest in joining my new Farm Business Ideas members club. All other persons will need to contact me for details of how to get on board.

I look forward to welcoming you!