Before I begin I would like to share something my lovely fiancée, Susan gave me the other day – I’m not sure whether she was referring to me……

“As time passes by, you realize there is nothing perfect; However as time passes by you also realize there are times when things are perfect for you”

I have just released by first free eBook on the Internet, this makes me very proud – just like Susan’s wise words above, Read the rest of this entry

Rich Schefren who is one of Alex Jeffreys‘ mentors and to some very successful business people online and off the internet gave a guest presentation the other night to Alex Jeffreys’ class.

Boy did he make some powerful statements, this is a guy who is really on top of his game and his presentation and business skills are second to Read the rest of this entry

I am thinking of putting together a free ebook to help any budding internet marketer that doesn’t know where to start and has read many different things but they are either too long or too difficult to follow through.

I have been through the process myself and it is quite simple, but when I did start off I knew what needed to be done but I didn’t know where to begin so would be more than happy to share how I got up and running from my own perspective. Read the rest of this entry

Anyway to recap of what I have been up to the last few days………

Alexs’ Thursday session I did my usual hit my head on the keyboard – a full day in work, throw in some travel and putting 3 unruly young kids to bed and there was nothing left in the tank, so I really had to give up on it.

Friday until Sunday was spent helping with my Son’s 4th birthday party which was like a military operation and getting the kids christened on Sunday has made a very busy weekend.

Throw in the fact that my brother came to town and insisted on visiting every pub and staying up until 1 in the morning 2 mights running also made it extra exhausting, rolling out of the taxi at midnight then having my 2 year old daughter just on my head at 6 am -what more can one say?

So that’s my excuse for not getting the video up and running, even though the video has been scripted and re written by my better half……..

Back to the session, I have just gone through Alex’s recording and I would say the email marketing part is the part I have enjoyed most on this coaching course.

What was delivered was simple but powerful – I was particularly impressed with the approach of splitting your list into:

• Those that Open the mail and click the link
• Those that open the mail but don’t click the link
• Those that don’t open the mail

So your targeted follow up emails to each are appropriate to their original response, you don’t want to spam customers and you want to incentivize non clickers – what a gem that piece of information is!

So my next task after the video is building an ebook as a giveaway…………..

If anyone outside the program wants some pointers with email marketing then I am more than happy to very good tips.

Before I start I thought I would share the following quote from Barack Obama, the US president.

“Making your mark on the world is hard. If it were easy, everybody would do it. But it’s not. It takes patience, it takes commitment, and it comes with plenty of failure along the way.

The real test is not whether you avoid this failure, because you won’t. it’s whether you let it harden or shame you into inaction, or whether you learn from it; whether you choose to persevere”.

This is a quote which I think many of us should remind ourselves of, myself included.  Do not let the fact you have failed at some point put you off your future goals..

Anyway back to the course, between Module 4 and 5 we were given the task of building up large amounts of traffic by several means, com,menting on other blogs and video marketing, etc.

My progress thus far in the last week has been as follows:

I have commented on around 70 other internet marketing and small business blogs all over the internet, not neccesarily just to say Hi but to also add to value to conversations where possible and maybe add to posts that dont always show the full content relevant to that post, or even state something if I don’t agree.

I believe that this serves many purposes, some of which are:

• giving my own credibility to others,
• learning from other blogs – I have a gained a lot of valuable information,
• creating friendships,
• creating communities
• creating back links to my own blog ,

the list goes on…………..

Have added the Google Feedburner application to my Blog so that readers can get email updates everytime I post an entry, an excellent traffic tool without actively selling to your readership, also good for SEO I think. I’ve no idea whether it helps with SEO, but as it is now a Google owned product, it must be beneficial somewhere.

Have Setup Skype for the first time ever, all you need is a set of headphones with a microphone attached and it works, the only thing I am finding is that I am getting all sorts of requests from the wrong people, but its easy to block them if you need to.  Again, you need to have your Blog address in your credentials, another way of driving traffic and helping your SEO.

Wordtracker SEO has been added as a Firefox addon to help with keywords when you wirte a post, how cool is that?

I have setup my You Tube channel, left the video thing low down on the list for several reasons:

• The Blog wasn’t setup properly for lots of traffic, I wanted the Feedburner and content there before going for the visitors
• Its been documented on previous posts I dont like cameras
• Its new to me so I didn’t know how to do it
• The camera wasn’t working

The above are all excuses and yes I need to remind myself what Barrack had said above, so this task is next on my list, watch this space.

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Stephen Pierce really nails what mentors such as Alex are trying to get across to us

Essentially the video talks about the selling process being as follows:

You SHARE information to create value

You SHOWCASE your knowledge in the market place

You SELL based on the value that you have created

Click the link below to play the You Tube video

He puts his point across in a very dymanic and energetic way, a bit like Alex does.

I have continued to strive across the Blogoshpere and comment on blogs outside our student community in order to add value and hopefully in time get noticed.

The approach as has been advised which I like to think I do anyway is to add value to discussions without pimping my stuff, in most cases without even referring to what I am doing.

Whilst doing this I have created a spreadsheet capturing each address date entered comment and the attribute each blog has.

One thing I have noticed is that many of the top rated blogs as rated in Winning the Web out of the 20 I have done so far do not seem to have the conventional option boxes or do much with video which surprises me.

Its been an extra busy day as I have finally got round to getting a new theme sorted out from Studio Press.  I’ve gone for the education theme trying not to be the same as anyone else (apologies if I have) and it cost around $60 less the discount.  Anyone doing the same make sure you Google a discount code, I think mine came to $53 in the end.

Being an almost total Wordpress newbie i didn’t have a clue how to re organise the boxes – what a b****, now I do thanks to Paul Wilson who pointed me in the right direction, I think I owe Paul a beer.

I knew it had to be easy rather than hacking into PHP codes and messing around.

Thats enough for now, I’ll try to stay up for the next session – hasn’t the week come round fast!