Author Archive
Internet Marketing Memberships Sites Reviews
Posted by: | CommentsSince starting this website and my mentoring with Ed Dale I have tried 3 different internet marketing membership sites.
The first was Michelle McPherson’s Crowd Mountain
I joined this membership site after downloading a couple of Michelle’s free tools that were made available joing the launch. My primary interest was to try out her promotion tools but once inside I discovered, that despite the sales pitch saying otherwise, not all the tools were available before the trail period ran out which defeated the object somewhat.
That, together with pretty confusing website usability led me to ditch that subscription. There are different levels of membership and since I was on the basic level I kept clicking on links to end up on a page that said I didn’t have permission to visit that part of the site. I found that very frustrating since it was like have a carrot dangled in front of you and then snatched away again.
However, her training is very comprehensive and, if you’re a newbie looking for clear and easy to follow training, then Michelle McPherson is worth checking out. She certainly knows her stuff and it’s refreshing to have a woman at the helm for a change and a rest from the surfer dude hype that permeates a number of internet marketing products.
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The Immediate Edge
This is Dan Raine’s and Ed Dale’s membership site. I took advantage of the $1, 7 days trial offered earlier this month and was very impressed with what I saw inside. I simply don’t have time at the moment to take advantage of all that was in there but I would definitely consider signing up again, once I have more of a regular system going.
This is cutting edge stuff most suited, in my opinion, to marketers with some experience and success who want to take their business to the next level.
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Jason Katzenback and Jason Potash are the people behind this one. They were offering a $1, 14 day trial which I signed up to because I’ve had dealings with them in the past and like their products and their customer service. My intention was a sneak peak inside to see what they were doing with the possibility of signing up again once I was making more money from the internet marketing business.
However, I was so impressed with the way their training is organised and the very fast and excellent reponses you get to questions in the forum that I decided to stay in for another month. Also, there was a promise of the 5 Day Traffic Blitz which is a fast way to familiarise yourself with the promotion tools and, hopefully, a way to make some quick cash.
I decided a while back not to join any more monthly subscription sites until I had the money upfront to do so but I thought it was worth the risk with this one since I might make the money back through the traffic blitz. Alas, that was not to be. At least not so far anyway. But I did win $25 for a forum post so it’s not all bad.
Not to mention I was inspired to get all poetic. Since my win was announced in rhyme I thought I should respond in kind. You can read my efforts in my next post.
Bet you can hardly contain your excitement in anticipation . . .
Taking Stock and Remembering Market Leadership
Posted by: | CommentsMuch of the time, since starting this site, it’s felt like I was fumbling around in a kind of fog. Sometimes I seemed to be clearly following a process, such as when I was looking for an outsourcer or doing the 5cft challenge. But much of the time it’s felt like I was over complicating things by signing up for new courses or products whilst trying to get my Critical Focus Time blocks done.
Yesterday, I completed the 5 Day Traffic Blitz and felt pretty exhausted after sending in my report and after a full on couple of weeks. So I was happy to go to the cafe, with no work to finish, and just do a couple of crossword and soduku puzzles.
Now, it feels like time to stand back, take a couple of days break and plan for the next phase.
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Having dabbled with a few different approaches since March I’ve now reached a point where I feel I can blend them together and I’ve come up with a system which I hope will work for me. I’m much clearer on the way I want to go about things and what I do/don’t enjoy doing.
I have a plan which I want to start on Monday and follow for the next 4 weeks but first I thought it would be useful to take stock of what I’ve discovered so far and where I stand on the various products/approaches I’ve tried out and I’ll be posting about these over the next few days.
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With regard this Internet Marketing Coaching site . . .
. . . I had a 1:1 mentoring session with Ed today and, beforehand, was a bit stumped as to what I would talk to him about. When I checked my stats I was particularly pleased to see that I was now at positions 2 and 4 for my main keywords so was happy that I had something positive to report.
However, Ed wasn’t particularly impressed since this is a Market Leadership site and I was reminded again, that it’s not position that’s important but traffic. It’s easy to forget that. So, most of the mentoring was around the Market Leadership stuff.
Not thinking about Search Engine Optimization on a site is quite difficult for me because I’ve been following the SEO approach for a number of years. I will continue to do that elsewhere in my business of course, just not here.
Given that, I need to be posting more frequently about what’s important to me and worrying less about keywords etc.
To illustrate the point, despite doing well in Google I am still only getting an average of 13 unique visitors a day and, if this wasn’t a Market Leadership type site, I’d be ditching it at this point since the traffic potential from an SEO approach is way too small.
So, one part of my 4 week plan will be to post here, each week day. I’ve done that before on my previous blog and found it to be quite a challenge so I shall be experimenting with the best way to achieve this. Also, I’m not sure how much personal stuff to include without turning people off.
But there’s only one way to find out so here’s another opportunity to fail in the field and not in my head!
If there’s anything you’re curious about or would like me to write about just ask. (Note to self – check if contact form works!)
Since this site, is a Market Leadership one it should be all about expressing my opinions in the market. So ask away . . .
5 Day Traffic Blitz
Posted by: | CommentsAs if I didn’t have enough on my plate with managing this website, bringing back to life a couple of old sites, doing the 2010 Challenge, taking part in the mentoring and starting to do more internet marketing coaching I started another mini challenge yesterday called the 5 day traffic blitz. But, although there’s a danger of creating some internet marketing overwhelm again I not too worried about it as it’s only 5 days and it is related to what I’m already doing. It’s more of a strategy experiment than a wandering off in a new direction.
All my sites need traffic and I’m still working on nailing down the approach that works best for me. I have my article marketing ticking over nicely and my bookmarking by hand so now I’m looking for other things to add to the mix.
My taking part in the blitz came about because Jasons Katzenback and Potash opened up their Web 2 Mayhem membership for a 14 day $1 trial. I joined because I was curious to see what their strategy is, fully expecting to leave after 14 days. It’s a monthly subscription and I didn’t want to take on another one of those but I was so impressed with their product, support and expertise and with the community in general, that I decided to stay on for another month. Especially as the 5 Day Traffic Blitz was looming.
Apparently, when Jason K asked the people who were not renewing after the 14 days why they weren’t doing so, the number one reason given was that they wanted faster results. Nothing new there then! 
As a result they put together a “quick-start training designed specifically to get results within a few short days”. Since I was already using the tools and was very impressed with them I decided it was worth risking one month’s membership to see what I could achieve with the blitz.
Yesterday we got an introduction video which brought out 2 key points:
- You need to already have a web site or page such as a Hub page, Squidoo lens, or Ezine article to promote. So it’s not for total newbies.
- You need to allow 2 hours a day to work on this.
After watching the video I did some keyword and market research to determine which site/page I would be promoting, as from past results, the choice isn’t obvious.
I have chosen to promote a new affiliate product within a niche that I’ve had some success with in the past but I don’t, as yet, have a page up for it. So that will be the next thing to get done before the blitz proper begins later today. And, yes, before you ask I’ve already done my CFT blocks for today so this isn’t a diversion.
I will have to fit in today’s 2010 challenge lesson though.
Preparing To Fail the 2010 Challenge
Posted by: | CommentsIn Day 4 of “Ed Dales The Challenge” Ed talks about setting expectations and making a commitment to completing the challenge. But saying you’re committed and actually making a commitment are 2 very different things. When my internet marketing coaching clients tell me they’ve made a commitment to something I ask them how they know that for certain. For example, if they haven’t blocked out time on their calendar, it usually shows me that the commitment has not been fully made. You never really know you are committed to something unless you take action that demonstrates that and continue taking action. A good first step, after allocating time on your calendar is to complete the “preparing to fail” exercise.
This exercise starts from the premise that most of the time we know in advance what is likely to trip us up and prevent us from being successful. We make our excuses and prepare our stories, in advance, even if only at the back of our minds.
Getting those excuses out of your head and onto paper gives you the opportunity to confront them and decide whether or not, this time, you’d like to do things differently.
In the case of the 2010 Challenge ask yourself:
If I fail to complete the 2010 Challenge what will be the reason?
What else?
What else?
Keep asking yourself “What Else”? until you have come up with all the possibilities you can think of.
Here are some 7 common excuses that people use when starting something new:
- I don’t have the money – Ed has pretty much ruined this one since the Challenge is free.
- I don’t have the time – Again, the fact that it’s only 30 minutes a day makes this one hard to sustain.
- I don’t know enough – Well, that’s the point of the Challenge – to teach you how.
- Other people will stop me.
- I don’t have enough energy, don’t feel well, feel too stressed.
- I’m not clever enough.
- I don’t want it enough.
If you’ve been reading my blog I bet you can guess what my personal favourite is. Yep. That’s right. ”It’s too boring”, closely followed by number 7. But knowing that in advance meant I was forearmed and when I truly made the commitment to growing an internet marketing business (remember I’ve been playing around in this arena for years) I followed a strategy that would minimise their effect on me. Namely, joining Ed’s mentoring program and taking on a personal coach, paid for upfront.
As far as the 2010 Challenge is concerned you probably don’t need anything quite so dramatic but you DO need to do something to demonstrate to yourself that you are truly committed to this.
You could try the above exercise, join a team as recommended in the forum and make yourself accountable, make a public announcement by leaving a comment here, or whatever works for you. Doesn’t matter what it is but just saying you’re committed is not enough. You need to demonstrate that commitment.
Take action now and, if you start to falter, feel free to skype me on challenge.100 and I will help in whatever way I can.
Ed Dale’s The Challenge – Day 4
Posted by: | CommentsDay 4 of the pre-Challenge is all about setting expectations.
As we know, the focus of The Challenge is on building the foundations of a successful internet business and making your first dollar. In any business the people who are successful are those who do what is necessary on a daily basis.
In the 2010 Challenge that means “Testing a niche and looking for that right combination of factors that tell you to move forward. Testing your actions from each of the modules and measuring your results. . .
The most crucial thing to get from the entire Challenge is to just stick to it. To put in those thirty minutes a day, for those seven days, for those seven modules. Turn up and be prepared to work, spend that thirty minutes a day, take the action required each day. That momentum adds up to taking you a step closer each time to being successful online.”
Ed is convinced that, more than for any previous Challenge – effort will be rewarded.
And, having grappled with the “whole turning up and getting the work done” thing I can confirm that eventually, if you just keep at it, the right work habit will begin to form. My early days of applying critical focus time were tough and, if I hadn’t signed up for the mentoring, I wouldn’t have stuck at it. But now I get the work done much faster and with less moaning and I am transforming myself into a person who can run a successful business.
One thing I find very useful when I start a new venture is to complete a “preparing to fail” exercise which works on the assumption that most of the time we know, in advance, what’s likely to prevent us from being successful. Read my next post “Preparing to Fail the 2010 Challenge” for more details.
Ed Dale Challenge – Days 2, 3 and Optional
Posted by: | CommentsSince I don’t work at the weekends I had a few days of challenge to catch up but they were despatched pretty quickly since I’m familiar with most of this.
The second day was optional, aimed at those who were completely new to this and covered:
- An overview of Market Samurai
- An introdcution to the The Challenge Forum
- The importance of teams and how being in a team for The Challenge can be beneficial to your Challenge experience and details of some of the software and hardware tools that can help you get the best of your team experience – using Skype for conferencing and meetings, and Google Groups, Google Docs and Dropbox for sharing files
- Having meetups with people in your area and the value that doing so can bring to your Challenge experience
- Downloading Content
Day 2 – Getting familiar with Twitter
Day 3 – Introduing Google Chrome the browser recommendation for The Challenge in 2010 and the following extensions:
- Chromed Bird, which makes it very easy to interface with your Twitter account from within the browser from both a monitoring and tweeting perspective.
- Kuber Pagerank Checker
- Ultimate Chrome Flag which provides information about where a site is hosted geographically
- Google Global, which allows you to conduct Google searches as if you were doing so from another country. This will be very useful for me since I often want to see US search results but, because I live in the UK, they are not the default.
- RSS Subscription Extension, released by Google themselves, which allows for very easy one click subscriptions to blogs and sites with RSS
Ed Dale The Challenge – Day 1
Posted by: | CommentsThe early days of the challenge are about getting settled in and finding your way around the information and tools. So let’s jump straight in.
Day 1 – Action For The Day
Go to Ustream and sign up, connect it to your Facebook and Twitter accounts and spend some time getting familiar with the interface.
Should have taken about 15 minutes at most but I managed to lose an hour and a half faffing about trying to decide if I wanted “work” stuff on my Facebook profile and how it worked with Twitter etc. I found some instructions, in the Challenge forum, on how to stop work stuff showing up on your Facebook wall, but as I don’t use my FB account much I decided not to connect to it at all.
The reason you want to keep work stuff separate from your personal FB account is that, anything posted will show up on your friend’s walls and, I hazard a guess, that most of your friends and family are not interested in internet marketing info and pitches.
Later in the challenge there will be some instruction on using Facebook pages and at that point I will start addressing the business side of things at FB.
With regard Twitter, I connected my account with Ustream but have no idea what the result of that will be. I’m not so concerned about this as I already post work stuff there.
Too Nervous To Think Up A Title
Posted by: | CommentsI got up this morning wearing my internet marketing coach hat, primed and ready (or so I thought) to offer coaching during Ed Dale’s 2010 challenge. I went to the computer and, next thing I know, I look up and an hour has passed. And since then 2 more hours!
This is a classic example of fear and procrastination working their evil and stopping me before I even start.
At times like these, I’m not even able to notice the thoughts that are operating but I know they are there because I feel nauseous and my hands are shaking slightly – classic symptoms of fear.
Blimey, you may be thinking, what an earth is she preparing to offer that has her in such a tizzy?
- – - Nothing that I haven’t done in other forms, hundreds of times before.
- – - Nothing that isn’t a great love of mine.
But that’s the thing about fear of course, it’s not rational!
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My intention had been to write a blog post about preparing to fail the 2010 challenge but I was stopped in my tracks.
So, being a believer in the old adage to “practice what you preach” I have taken myself off to a more productive environment. And I’m writing this in my favourite cafe armed with a capucchino and panini.
But, even the lure of those treats was not enough to move me initially so I had to resort to another favourite tactic of mine – dipping into my “inspiration file”.
Today I chose to rewatch Jonathan Fields’s video ‘Turning Fear Into Fuel‘ and that finally got me moving.
Towards the end of the video he addresses the audience and asks who’s sitting there, NOT doing something that has the opportunity to make them come alive and yet would do it if they were 100% certain they would not fail?
Well, that would be me then.
I love coaching.
It certainly makes me come alive.
My client’s love my coaching.
So what’s there’s to fear?
Well, this is Ed’s baby and he may be mad at me for offering coaching without asking his permission and this may be the one time when my coaching is crap and people might send me hate mail and I might get really, really bored with it and other people taking the challenge may resent my offer and question who the hell I think I am to step in here and I could be wildly successful and find that there is no way back and I might discover that internet marketing coaching is not as great as I think it might be and I’ll have spent all this time and energy on a website that is now redundant and way too personal to sell and then what the hell will I do for the rest of my year of mentoring with Ed and . . . and . . . and . . .
Well, I think you get the picture.
So, let’s cut to the chase here . . .
Do I want to do this?
. . . Yes!
So what’s the next step?
Create a Skype account solely for the 2010 challenge and tweet about this post . . .
. . . done!
Details of my 2010 Challenge coaching will follow. Unless, of course, Ed contacts me and tells me to remove this post and/or my inbox starts to fill with hate mail and . . . no . . . wait . . . hang on . . . done that. Been there.
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If you are reading this and NOT doing something that has the opportunity to make you come alive please Skype me on challenge.100 and let’s get you onto the next step.
Jonathan Fields’s Turning Fear Into Fuel Speech
Posted by: | Comments“I cannot resign myself to the notion of living the rest of my life in a vacuum of regret.
I cannot resign myself to the notion that I will have spent time on this earth with never having done anything to actually come alive, out of fear.
And I cannot fathom that in some way, in my action or inaction, I may have taught my daughter . . . to do the same.”
- Jonathan Fields
Hoorah, hoorah, I’ve Something To Say
Posted by: | CommentsIt’s been 2 weeks since my last post and for a moment there I thought I might never have anything interesting to report again! There’s been a bit of a lull in the mentoring, so no 1 on 1′s with Ed or webinars to write about.
My outsourcing project has also ground to a halt so, for the most part, I’ve been plodding on, head down. After trying out 2 different outsource workers and having them both disappear on me I decided to take a break and rethink my strategy as I was spending huge amounts of energy on it without positive results. I’ve been trying out 2 automatic submission tools and, once I decide which one I’m going to go with, I’ll probably, outsource that work, one piece at a time and build from there.
I’ve made a change to how I organise my CFT blocks, after doing the exercise I mentioned in my “critical focus time backwards” post . Putting pen to paper I realised that working at the pace I was, with the time I have available, I was already at full capacity both in terms of sites and tasks. So I reduced my CFT block length from 45 to 30 minutes which gave me more available work slots. This also had the added bonus of speeding up my work. So now I’m getting more done in less time and with more time to do it! The result is I now have 4 sites in my work rotation.
I feel I’m making real progess now in putting together a system that works for me and the discipline of keeping on, keeping on, is paying off.
The brilliant news is my plugging away is bringing measurable results.
Fan fare of trumpets please . . .
I’ve hit the top 5 on page one of Google and, although my main keyword only has average traffic potential, I am expecting that traffic to pick up from here on in. So more people should be finding me through the search engines who are looking for coaching. This means it’s now time to turn my mind to what internet marketing coaching packages I’d like to offer.
Ed has suggested that any mentees taking the 2010 Challenge should lead a group so that’s one possibility. I’ve mentioned elsewhere, I’m most interested in coaching people who, although not newbies, are having very little success so I could form a group around that. Hmmmm. Wonder if I could set up a forum we could use on this site . . .
Long term, I would like some local clients so I could do some face-to-face group coaching.
If you have any thoughts about what coaching packages you would like to see or what has worked for you in the past, please leave a comment below. I’m all ears!
