In three weeks and a day the first quarter of the year will have come and gone.  If you are serious about your blog income business this is the time to take a quick overview of where you’re going, where you are and where you’ve been so far this year.

Reviewing your progress in anything that you do is critical to success.  Goals drive success.  So you need to review the progress of your goal for the year.  I review by day, week, month and quarter.  I don’t spend a lot of time on all the details, but come the end of a quarter,my blog income business undergoes a microscopic review. Year to date results are tallied  and adjustments where necessary are made.

This is a good time to take a quick overview of the current situation vis a vis your blog income goal.  With three weeks to go there is still time to save the bacon.

Am I on track?

NO!

Do I know how far off track I am?

YES!

Here is a quick way to review your progress and maximize your internet marketing performance:

1.  Goal.
You can do this for any part of your life, but for the purpose of this blog and post let’s stay with your blog income business.  What was your goal for the year?  .

A common annual goal is to achieve a certain income.  Assume that your goal is $100K  for all your internet marketing streams.  A very simple plan might look like this

1Q = $10,000
2Q = $20,000
3Q = $30,000
4Q = $40,000

Total = $100,000

2.  Progress to date:
What is your year to date income?  With three weeks to go, if you do not make some quick adjustments will you achieve $10,000?  If not how far off the mark are you?  If the shortfall is just a projected thousand or two, what can you do to turn up the heat.

3.  High Gain Activities
A quick review will tell you what in your marketing mix has worked the best and brought you the money to date.  You will notice that every time you took action there was an upward  spike in the results.  Very quickly identify the action that brought you the most income.  Take that model and ramp it up for the rest of the month.  If it is affiliate marketing that is the major contributor, see which affiliate product contributed the most to your bottom line.

4. How Many Sales Needed?
If your current track projection shows that you will be $2000 short of your 1Q goal, what are the steps that will lead you to reaching $10K?  Ask yourself these questions:

a)  What is the commission for each sale?
b)  How many clicks to reach one conversion?
c)  How much traffic  per click?

For ease of calculation:
commission per sale:  $100
clicks to make one sale: 10
traffic to generate 1 click: 10

Armed with this information you come up with this formula
2000 visits = 200 clicks
200 clicks = 20 sales
20 sales @ $100 commission = $2000

5. Which Piston Is Firing  The Traffic Engine?
Look through your statistics to identify which marketing action drives the most traffic.  Isolate it and increase that marketing action in direct proportion to meet and deliver the additional numbers.

This is also a good time to look at your second quarter.  Based on your 1Q results what are the action steps for the coming quarter.  What adjustments do you need to make?

Look at your business as sailing.  When you sail you know what your destination is.  You have a mapped out route.  Depending on how the wind is blowing, how the currents are running and daily weather changes, you need to continuously tack your sailboat to reach your destination.  A review of your  results is just tacking your internet marketing business to success.

In short:  review, correct, continue.

A little over a week ago my dear old laptop that I called Big Money died.  Poof!  Gone!  Panic engulfed me as reboot after reboot failed.  Bluescreen, Fat 32 rebuild successful but the mouse would not cooperate and I could not log in!  My whole internet marketing life dwelled in that computer!  Life looked dismal.   Blog Income was dead.  I was dead.

After the initial shock I went shopping and got me a brand new snazzy looking Toshiba job.  The first thing that I liked was that the prices for PC laptops have really come down and boy, do they pack a lot more toys and whistles than dear old Big Money had!  But of course there were additional items to purchase, such as configuring the new darling – which I quickly christened Money Magnet – transferring everything from Big Money, a new office software package, Outlook which is I can’t live without, and of course the extended warranty plus those pesky taxes that the government seems to insist on.  Add it all up and the computer has just doubled!  Ouch!

Never mind – this one is called Money Magnet, ergo it will attract money, not like Big Money which didn’t quite get the gist of is moniker that it was supposed to MAKE, not cost, big money!

Granted at almost 5 years of loyal service Big Money had run its course but OMG!  Everything of any value rested in that sleek silver rectangular thing called a computer.  We had a relationship.  It had traveled the world with me.   All my courses including the videos, all the PDF’s that I downloaded, all my original work that has been published online as well as off, all my usernames and passwords!  They were all there!

I vowed that never, NEVER, again would I be so careless.  From here on in, I would backup everything and if you haven’t been backing up all your valuables then its time you do.

Job One:  Terrabyte external hard drives can now be had for under $100.  Another option is to backup everything in a cloud … new term for me too.  Basically what it means that all your content can be stored somewhere out there in uber space, with the clouds sort of like self storage boxes in the sky.  There are free ones but as you need more and more storage room, you have to either upgrade to a paid version or open yet another one elsewhere – now we have clutter.

I was recently introduced to DropBox.  You get some free space and can increase that with referrals, or just bite the bullet and buy what you need – it can always be increased.  What I like about this system is that it is so user friendly for us non-tech types.  Just drag and drop.  I had a huge file that I wanted to share with my friend.  The attachment was way too big to send by email.  I was faced with either breaking it into several pieces or creating an online document that would be hyperlink downloadable. The notion of each option took me down into a tizzy downward spiral and I kept putting it off.

Dropbox to the rescue.

First I created a share file in my dropbox with my friend’s name.  Then I dragged the whole schmiel into that file and voila!  Just like that my friend had full access to the goods!  Check Dropbox out (yes, that is an affiliate link

Job Two:
Create a document for all your products that need a username and password.  Yes, store them on your computer for ease of access but also up in that cloud or Dropbox.  Go low tech if you need to and write them down in a notebook along with other important data and put it somewhere safe. I actually did have a lot of my usernames and passwords in my little black book.

Job Three:
Keep your computer free of clutter.  It’s not just your closet that needs a good cleaning. Go over what you have on your computer.  Do you really need everything that you have there?  What about things that you downloaded years ago but have not even cracked open yet?  If you are still married to the thought that you will someday read those files move them over to your new storage in the sky.  My dear old Big Money got so bogged down with downloads that eventually I could not even defrag it as there was less than 15% free space (actually less than 5% which is a cardinal sin).  I started to toss things out but the space was slow in being freed up.   While at it go to all of your email accounts, or  your Outlook;  if you haven’t read it and the dateline is a month or older, be ruthless, be strong:  DELETE!  Ditto your “sent” and “junk” files

Des out at Affiliate Progress has some good suggestions on how to use Filezilla and FTP to back up all your sites as well.  Hop on over there.  She writes good stuff – makes tech seem like a cake walk.

Come to think of it – spring is a mere two weeks away.  That closet is getting rather full.  I am sure that there are clothes there that will never see the light of day again, at least not on me.  They belong to a different era – one that was slimmer!   Yeah.  Bundle them up and take them over to the local goodwill store!

To Your Awesome Blog Income Life!

In a recent conversation an interesting thought was lobbed to the small group of us.   We all professed to enjoy reading.  Everyone had their favorites.  Then someone said that yes, he liked to read – a lot but had recently moved away from spending as much time on reading as he had before.  Why?  Because someone else had said something to the effect that if you spend a lot of time reading, you are reading someone else’s thoughts, their ideas, that your own thoughts and ideas are fashioned by that of others and that you do not, therefore, think for yourself.

Now there’s an original thought – at least it is the first time I heard it, so to me it was original.  At first blush it seems to make sense.  But on closer examination, does it?

Just how original is anything?  It is said that there is nothing new or original under the sun, just interpretations, applications and adaptations and what we do with or how we put to use that which is not new at all.

I love reading.  Always have.  Fairytales and fables were a favourite staple of mine in the early years of schooling.  I think I learned to speak English much faster because I learned from something that I enjoyed.  The stories were rich in imagery, the language simple.  It seemed to me at the time that anything was possible and even though I was keenly aware that these were just stories, it was easy to take on the role of the hero or heroine of the story.  In short, they lit a fire in my belly.

One of my teachers in grade three was Miss Natalia.  She was one of the few lay teachers the school had and we children just simply adored her.  She was at once beautiful, smart, and because she did not wear a nun’s habit, relatable.  Her job was to teach us how to write proper sentences and perhaps we may have even gone to writing paragraphs at the time – but certainly no essays as yet.  At the end of the year she gave each of us a book, a different one for each child.  How she decided on the book I don’t know, just that she must have given much thought to each choice.  Mine was Lorna Doone, by Richard Doddridge Blackmore, first published in 1869.  According to Wikipedia, it has never been out of print.

Every summer we escaped the sultry heat of Yokohama and spent the months with my grandparents in the mountainous resort of Karuizawa. That year I took my book with me and over the course of two months read and re-read this classic tale of romance, intrigue, collusion, treachery, war and finally victory by the right, the good. Of course the hero and heroine lived happily ever after!  I was hooked.

From then on the local library became a weekly destination for me.  I went there every Saturday after completing my chores to return books and borrow new ones.  I got to know the librarian very well and she always had some suggestions.  She introduced me to magazines and other genres of writing such as mystery, adventure and science fiction.  As the years tumbled one after the other, if the library was not busy, we would even spend some time talking about a special article, or an author. That along with what I learned at school fashioned my thinking, which, according to the observation of my colleague’s friend above was not mine at all, that perhaps just plain brainwashing.

Hmmm.  Is none of us brainwashed?

But what if instead of brainwashed we used another word?  Schooled?  Well informed?  Knowledgeable?  Expert?

Ah, the beauty of semantics.

It seems that at different times in my life, a different read presented itself.  When my children were toddlers there I was immersed in fairytales again reading tales of Snow White and Puss in Boots and such at bedtime to my children.  Simultaneously my children and I were introduced to Dr. Seuss and Maurice Sendak whose iconic book Where the Wild Things Are particularly endeared itself to my son.

Raising a family and eventually working outside the home left little time for personal reading, at least for books.  I found that I could snatch an hour here and there and that was plenty for reading articles in magazines.  My favourites became The New Yorker, Harper’s Bazaar and Vanity Fair – god, once again I fell in love, this time with Vanity Fair.  At first I dismissed it as yet another T&A publication on  the magazine stands – certainly the covers do nothing to dispell the casual observer from this initial dismissal and it does indeed share shelf space with other magazines of that genre.

These days I have time to read books again.  They are not always literary tomes – in fact, hardly ever are.  No, these days I am more likely to have my nose immersed in the pages of How I Made My First Million On The Internet by Ewen Chia, or F.U. Money by my friend Dan Lok.  I also like to read anything by Malcolm Gladwell. I have all his books.

Malcolm Gladwell was first thrust into the limelight with his best seller The Tipping Point.  I don’t necessarily reach for best sellers, they are often nothing more than the end result of a well conceived and orchestrated marketing campaign – but might we, internet marketers take a page from that observation?  Nevertheless, pick it up I did. Immediately I was mesmerized by this author.

There was something completely different about Malcolm Gladwell.  His writing style wasn’t exactly riveting.  Paragraphs run on for in some instances a whole page and often I found I had to reread something to get the gist of it.  No. It certainly wasn’t his writing style that captured my attention, it was well, that he was different.  He did not think like most.  Like an engineer or a scientist, he looks at things and sees what others do not, but unlike engineers and scientists he writes in a layman’s language, so even though his paragraphs may be cumbersome at times, they are completely understandable.  Malcolm digs deep, questions everything, presents his point of view without necessarily being judgemental.

So what has this got to do with independent thinking or the lack of it when all you do is read what others write?  I am currently reading Gladwell’s What the Dog Saw.  It is a collection of his original essays that were published in The New Yorker Magazine where he has been a staff writer since 1996.  Each chapter is such an essay.  I read one here and there, in between my other readings.  I like them because they are thought provoking and as such need time for proper digestion.

This morning, before sitting down at the computer to write this post I read the chapter “Something Borrowed.  Should a charge of plagiarism ruin your life?”  Ironically it is about originality and just how original is original.  He talks about copyrights and stolen intellectual property.  It is far too complex to discuss here, but essentially, we come back to the saying that nothing is new or original under the sun so indeed, if we read just what others write, do we think for ourselves or do we just parrot that which has been ingrained in our sponge like brain?

I think that it’s both.  Reading what others write opens up horizons.  Moreover, the more we read the more likely we are to run into opposing opinions which then hopefully, engage our brain into thinking for ourselves.  At the very basic, while I enjoy reading the articles in Vanity Fair, I do not always agree with the slant taken on the topic by the journalist.  I acknowledge that a journalist is not devoid of subjective content and has earned his or her stripes to be so, having graduated from being a reporter to that elevated distinction of being a journalist.  So to bastardize Nitzsche’s “I think therefore I am”, I’ll say that “I disagree therefore I am independent”

Of course our values and philosophies have been fashioned by much in life, that what we read being just one of them.  But if we were to subscribe to everything we read, we would be mere robots making no distinction between the different washings that our brains undergo

… or how else would you explain  the Malcolm Gladwells of the world?

Yes.

Between Olympics, workshops and a computer that finally went to its final reward in the sky there was no “Week That Was” last weekend.

Got my new computer – a snazzy looking black lacquer Toshiba job with more space in it than I know what to do with. I could no longer defrag my dear old laptop because space available was below 15% – this one has 4 times as much space on the hard drive.  I know, over time that space will be filled too.  Oh nooo…. I will move lots of stuff for storage to a cloud, or buy an external hard drive. Or both.

Do you name your inanimate objects?  For example does your car have a name?  Mine doesn’t.  Several cars ago it did.  It was given a name by my daughter.  Her toys had names, she reasoned, so why wouldn’t a car.  Yes.  She still names her cars.

I name my computers.  Do you believe in the power of the word?  There has been a lot written about NLP (Nuero Linguistic Programming).  My dearly departed laptop had a name, I called it Big Money.  Perhaps my intentions weren’t clear.  The idea was that with the use of the laptop the Big Money truck would drive UP to my driveway but what happened was that it drove AWAY from my driveway.  I don’t regret it one bit though. The big money was spent on courses, so I chalk it up to education.  My brand spanking new laptop is named Money Magnet.  Do you think I did better this time?

So to the Weeks that Were – summary of posts published since my last weekly review.  If you haven’t read the post  in full these summaries give you a glimpse.  If one catches your attention hop on over and read the whole meal deal.   Comments are welcome and encouraged.

An Open Letter to Nathan Hangen – 22/02/10
I hang out at Nathan Hangen’s Blog.  I buy his products, the latest one being Beyond Blogging and am a great admirer of his but a recent post on his blog got my hackles up so I put on my boxing gloves and gave him the old one two in an open letter. He was OK with it.   To read what it was that got me in the ring with him and his reply, read the whole article which addresses blogging on blogging.

Blog Income To Go Under Knife – 23/02/10
At my regular   Monday night Internet Marketing Mastermind meeting, I had this blog critiqued.  There were lots of good suggestions.  The recurring theme of the comments suggested that it looked, well, a bit too cluttered.  I had already clued in to this and it was good to have my hunch confirmed.  Readers are encouraged to send in more suggestions.  Read the full Blog Income article.

Blog Income Month In Review: February 2010 01/03/10
Each month I review the results of this blog.  My current push is to increase traffic as I believe that all else will fall in from there.  Did I achieve my traffic goal for the month of February?  Yes.  Two valuable lessons learned which I think everyone can apply to their own blogging agenda.  For the full report just log on to Blog Income Month in Review

Twitter and All That Social Media Stuff
Spent two jam packed days learning about the basics of Social media at Matt Astifan’s Workshop.  We learned how to Twitter, all about Facebook and the importance of You Tube to internet marketing.  Am I an expert now?  Absolutely not.  Read about my experience and why I plan to play pretty with Twitter and other social media sites,

Is Centralizing Your Internet Marketing Services The Best Option?
When buying your services for your internet marketing business is it better to bundle and buy from a single provider or should you spread out and buy independently?  There are pros and cons for each.  Weigh in with your preference in the comments section.  Read full Centralizing Services article.

Alright!  We’re up to date!   Tomorrow: Sunday Morn Musings!

Well, call me a nutcase but I don’t buy into it.   For online as well as offline I like to decentralize and that’s true for my  personal as well as blog income business services.  It may mean a little more work but that’s the way I prefer it.  Centralizing in my view is surrendering unnecessary control and no, I am not a control freak (at least I don’t think so).  It’s the way my daddy brought me up and for good reason too!

This is a conversation I have had on and off for many years.  For the last few it seemed to have retired into a dormant state .  A few weeks ago it stirred, awoke and surfaced again and it just won’t go away.  I thought you might like to weigh in with your point of view on this – besides I’d love to know what your opinion on this subject is for while not exactly earth shattering it does impact every one of us in some way or another.

Central or regional management?  That has been an age old battle in the corporate world and depending on the trend, objectives of the company or the personal preference of the top man at any given time, companies have taken one route over the other suffering confusion, issues  of resentment, loyalty and trust in the transition.  It seems that when a company’s fortunes are  contracting the troops are reigned in, when fortunes  are on the rise employee empowerment becomes the modus operandi.

Centralized management may be an operative model for corporations and governments too, but I question its validity when it comes to You Inc., especially to those of us who are on the internet to earn an online income.  The issues are small, but then as you grow so will the issues.

There is a school of thought that subscribes to centralizing as much of your internet marketing as possible.  Some of the biggest names support the concept.  Bundle up as many services and buy them through one provider whenever you can.    The obvious pro for such a system is that you have everything ready in one spot, don’t have to go looking for things – they are all there under one roof, so ease of access and efficiency rule.

But I prefer to purchase my services independently rather than bundled and directly from the vendor if possible.  My father was a business man.  Historically my family have had to fly by the seat of their pants – long story but it began in 1917 in Russia when the Russian Tzar lost his country and his life, whilst my grandparents on both sides merely lost their country.   So this might be taking it to the extremes but my father often told me that how not having all the family eggs in one basket enabled them to first make a life in China then Japan eventually Australia … and then here I am, in Canada!

What I learned at my father’s knees was that one should not give up control over that which is yours.  So I come by this bullheadedness quite honestly.  At the most basic level of my blog income business I buy the following services separately:

-         DOMAINS: I use a broker, Go Daddy, even though I may be paying a bit more than if I used another broker because amongst other things, I find their services and support to be outstanding.  No Go Daddy is not the actual registrar of domains and to be honest, I,m not sure but I don’t think that you can buy domain names directly from the registrar.

-          HOSTING: I could, but don’t, have Go Daddy host my sites, instead I use Hostgator.  Hosting is their specialty and once again I have found that their support has been exceptional.  On the reverse side, I could but do not buy my domain names through Hostgator.

-          BLOG PLATFORM:  I choose to use Wordpress Direct.  This is a second layer, if you will, on Wordpress.  This appears to be contradictory to my mantra of buying direct from the service provider.  I have good reason.  For someone like myself who is not the best at tech type stuff (and not wanting to be a master of all) I like this platform because they offer full support.  They do the initial heavy lifting but I still have direct access to the back end admin area of Wordpress.  Once again I could but do not use Go Daddy as my site platform.

What if I had decided to use Go Daddy as my one stop shop for the above three services and something went wrong.   I don’t just mean that Go Daddy would go down.  An extremely successful internet marketer I know had come to some sort of an impasse with his domain broker.  The breakup was not pleasant.  Imagine the additional work he would have had to go to move his many, many sites from the domain broker’s basket   Fortunately, he subscribes to the same principles that I do.  All he needed to do was move all his domains to another broker.  The adjustments were minimal.

I have spoken with people who bought their domains through their hosting service.  The hosting service disappeared.  They had no idea how to recover their domains. Moreover it was not clear if it was the host company or themselves who were registered as the owners of the domains.  Eventually after much hair tearing they were able to find the domains and come to a happy conclusion .   In my instance, should Hostgator run into difficulties I know  that my domain names are not affected.

This is just an example.   It is obviously over simplified.  I use it to illustrate my point.

As you begin to earn more and more from your online business you will want to outsource some of the daily tasks.  What are your thoughts on this?  Would you prefer to centralize, appoint a company to handle the many aspects of your business and just deal with one person?  Or … would you rather select individuals who specialize in certain tasks and have them report to you?    Which model do you think is better suited for you?  Why?

This is not going to be a step by step dissertation on how to run your social media campaigns – just thoughts that flooded my brain as I sat through two very interesting and even fun filled days.  I think when you can say workshop and fun filled in the same sentence it has to have been a successful event.

We were a small group of five – I think it safe to say that each of us was a confirmed social media neophyte.  None of us quite understood the “why” of any of this phenomena but  were in agreement that we needed to get with the program and see how we can apply it to our own businesses.

Of the three disciplines Twitter was the one that captured my attention the most and entertained me the most, probably because it is like being in a foreign country; it also stretched my mind which surprised me as I had a tendency to dismiss all this babble on the net as just being mindless prattle about nothing.

We spent the better part of day one on this phenom and by its end each of us was a bonafide tweep – yes I know, there is this devil in me that wants to say twit but no, there are no twits on twitter, just tweeps who send out tweets in 140 characters or less.  Now correct me if I’m wrong because I have also heard the word peeps but would those be the tweets who are your followers?  You know “ … have your peeps get in touch with my peeps…” kind of idea?

First thing I notice as I am sitting on my very own perch “goldenkoi”  is that this is a very noisy world. Because I already had a twitter account set up from when I took the 30 Day Challenge last summer I actually had a small following of tweeps.    Spending just few minutes in my domain the tweets kept running like a ticker tape at the stock market.  After just 7 minutes I had well over 36 new tweets!  Now how the twit am I supposed to keep up with all this?   Imagine what the home perch looks like of  someone who has thousands and thousands of followers?  Ah but that’s not the point.

The point is relationship building and here was a revelation … for the longest time I believed that he who has the most followers wins, but the emphasis has shifted somewhat, it is now quality over quantity and how do you attract quality?  Keywords, my dear, keywords.  The right keywords attract the right followers and you can engage in short but meaningful conversations.

These conversations bring a whole new meaning to the phrase short conversation – at a max of 140 characters these aren’t even sound bites!  They are … aah, tweets!

Now trust me these birds might be short on their vocabulary but they’re no birdbrains as they have mastered the art of twittery and can lay a clear and distinct path of breadcrumbs that lead to a conversation that actually makes sense. The mastery lies not in just tweeting about “What’s happening” but in participating and engaging with others on a topic.  It takes a bit of time but I am told that soon I too can learn the nuances and proper use of just tweeting, RT (reply to), @ (the tweet or tweep), the URL and the somewhat confusing hashtag #.

Since attending the workshop I have visited my perch several times and selected a tweet to follow by clicking on the  appropriate links to see how far I can follow a conversation – gosh, I’ve even tweeted a few times!  You know it’s kind of fun.  After following only a few breadcrumb paths I have come to the conclusion that there are some really smart tweeps (and tweets)out there – it challenges the brain to be creative and I have come across bits of brilliance that are nothing short of awesome.

If you don’t have a Twitter account yet hop on over to http://www.twitter.com and open one.  Choose an appropriate username.  Here once again I committed the cardinal sin – my username is goldenkoi which means squat when it comes to either blogging or internet marketing.  When I first started visiting forums I chose that as my handle.  To me it has meaning.  I grew up in Japan where the koi is revered.  The fish comes in colors of red, white, grey, black and shades of gold so “goldenkoi” has intuitive appeal to me.  Matt suggested that I check to see if the domain was available – of course not.  GoldenKoi.com belongs to someone in the business of selling koi fish!

You can have several accounts with Twitter but not so with Facebook – so choose carefully as to how you want to brand yourself.

I found it interesting that in terms of developing online relationships there is a structure and that Twitter is where it begins.  Look at it as a funnel if you will.  You meet people at Twitter, get to know them better on Facebook and eventually that leads to loyal followers on your blog.  Sounds like a long and protracted process but it isn’t.

In my Internet Marketing Mastermind group there are members who have met key and influential people in their business that they would not have otherwise and those people were just as likely to be in their own backyard as somewhere across the world.  Aside from the growth in their social capital this process has also grown their businesses and bank accounts.

It is easy to get lost in the social media world and to let the time just drift away.  Be cautious.  Allow yourself a small block of time for your social media marketing.  I would say that 15 minutes twice a day is sufficient time to spend in this area of your business especially if you are just dipping your toes into it.

To Tweeting to Success!

Valentina

How about starting with the end?  The Olympics.

The Olympics Closing Ceremony was on the last day of the month – yesterday.  We in Vancouver had the distinct honor of hosting the world to the 2010 Winter Olympics.  What an exhilarating experience that was!  I have to admit that many a time I absented myself from my computer and spent the hours glued to the TV, watching as the best of the best squared off each other for that most desired of metals – gold!

There is so much I could write about these 17 days.  As always I am amazed at the strikingly small difference between the finalist and the last – fractions of seconds.  That would beg the question that perhaps this is just a crapshoot, that on any given day the last place athlete could just as easily be a first  place finish.  But then you need to look deeper – and when you look at the performance of each athlete at world class events leading up to the 0lympics, the results have typically been consistant across the board.  Top three almost always place top three.   It makes me think that the athletes have the same potential, their talent is outstanding – so what is it that makes the ultimate difference?  That would make for a good topic for a Sunday Morn Musings … and perhaps it is something that we internet marketers could take a page from.

And speaking of which, there was no Sunday Morn Musings this week!  Nor was there a The Week that Was.  For that matter there were precious few posts in February (just 15) and only 2 in the last week!

You know how they say that the road to hell is paved with intentions – and they do.  My intentions were to post on Saturday and Sunday.  Early Saturday morning my trusty albeit museum vintage laptop expired!   Yup!  It just died!  Now I have to admit that this was not as sudden as I would like to believe, for several weeks now Dear Laptop had been giving me clues that it was not long for this world, and after four and half years of loyal service with no breakdowns or glitches of any sort it wasn’t just being capricious, its just that I was  hoping that it could last another month or two – or miraculously six!

Have you ever spent a whole two days without internet?  Addiction is one thing – but the falling behind in everything is another and most frustrating.  The good thing is that I now have an awesome machine that is sooooo much faster, has lots more bells and whistles and my goodness!  Have the prices of PC’s come down!  I had a MAC as my next machine but with a difference of $2000 for the time being I thought that sum would be better put to use for marketing and earning shekels … another time cher MAC!

I have to say that I am grateful that Dear Old Laptop performed well during the two-day workshop I attended on Thursday and Friday.  Matt Astifan from my Monday Night Internet Marketing Mastermind which I mentioned in my Power of Mastermind series put on an excellent workshop on social media (more about that in the future) otherwise I would have been up the proverbial creek!

One thing about brand new computers – it takes time to get used to the new programs, the idiosyncrocies if you will.  On my old computer I had Gadwin for my printscreens.  I downloaded it here so that I could include the screen shots of my February results.  For some reason it isn’t working in the way it did – it captures everything including tool bars at the top and the sidebars.  I am sure there is a way to capture only that which is relevant, but it will probably take time.  So I’ll just give you the results below along with my comments.

#1.  Traffic:  Visits:  475 – up from 360 for January which is a healthy 36.89% .  My goal is to increase traffic by  10% – 20% each month.

#2.  Search engines delivered 5.68% of the traffic.  You may recall in my January report that SE had fallen to below 1%!   So the move up to almost 6% is encouraging.

#3.  Alexa moved up from 404,842 to 307,910.  I know that there are those who put little stock into Alexa rankings, but it is still a measure that is taken into account when the value of your website/blog is assessed – you can charge more for ads, you can sell your site/blog for more, and besides, I accepted Sam’s  Alexa Challenge at Financial Samurai to reach a ranking of under 200K by July.  Remember, with Alexa, the lower the number the better.

Lessons learned:

#1.  Publish.  Publish,  Publish.
For blogs still trying to establish themselves, daily posts make a big difference in traffic.  I have noticed that on the days that I have new content the visitors increase.  Most successful bloggers do not scale back their publishing from daily until they are well established with the search engines and have amassed a good loyal following.  Some stay with the dailies, think Darren Rowse of Problogger

#2.  Carry Inventory
Have a stash of articles ready to publish for those times when other activities (Olympics) divert your attention from your business. Carlos  Velez of Conscious Me wrote an excellent two part article over at Website In a Weekend –  Benefits of Prewriting and he’s also thrown out a Prewriting Challenge.

What’s Up for March?
My focus continues on traffic – that will be a recurring theme not only for this quarter but for the year as a whole.
- Staying within the 20% growth per month, that would be 570 – so I’ll stretch that to 600+ in traffic
- Gee, wouldn’t it be great to reach the under 200K Alexa by end of March?  Lets see how close I can get to that.
- Finally, definitely, increase frequency of posts, in February the trend was 1 for each two days – well if I can make that 1 per 1.5 days it would make a huge difference.
- Put into practice some of what I learned on social media at Matt’s workshop.

That’s it folks!

To Your Awesome Blog Income Life!

Valentina

Till then – To Your Awesome Life

Valentina

Regular readers here know that Monday night is my Internet MasterMind Group meeting – yes, skipped the ice dancing!  Never mind, making up for that today with a day down at the Olympics.  My friend Cheryll and I are going down early and see if we can get into the Canadian Royal Mint pavilion – that had a 7 hour lineup (no seriously)over the weekend and I hear that Russia House (as the hosts of the next winter Olympics) is pretty good too.

But I do digress.  To the point.  I had this site critiqued last night.    It’s something we do – one site a week.  The short of the long of it is that it is going to undergo a complete overhaul.  Even to me it was beginning to look cluttered and there were changes I wanted to make.  Visiting other blogs helps to polish and develop a discerning eye, but I had changed the theme only a few months ago and thought I could live with this one for a few more – oh say till June.

I got a lot of helpful comments from the group but the main thing appears to be the theme.  This time it won’t be an overnight change.  As with so many other colleagues who have recently undergone a similar metamorphosis, I will take a bit longer and will come up with something that will stand me in good stead for a year or perhaps even two.

I’m going to have some awesome people helping me – I hope you will join them.  I am looking for comments, observations and suggestions.  What do you like about this blog?  What should be scrapped altogether.  What needs to be added?  Any suggestions for themes?  Throw it all at me.  The more the better.   Together we’ll make a good soup.

I look forward to hearing from you – you awesome lot YOU!

Valentina

I buy your products and visit your blog often but a recent post of yours  got my hackles up.  In your post of Feb 09 “Where 99% of Bloggers Go Wrong” you pulled no punches and pretty much told those of us who are blogging about blogging to pack it up.  The topic has been done to death and extremely well by uber bloggers who cut their chops on this subject and have entrenched themselves as experts for life.  They hold top positions and rankings with all the major search engines for just about every keyword associated with earning an online income and its not likely that any new blogger can add value or anything new to that which has already been written about in every which way except Sunday.

The “A” Listers have got it in spades and who are we to think that our humble efforts would ever see the light of day or  receive the blessings of Google and rub shoulder with the likes of Darren Rowse , Yaro Starak or John Chow – just to name a few.

Whew!  Nathan, you might be right.

That’s a lot of humble pie to eat.

But not so fast my boy.  At the risk of offending someone I admire – yes, you Nathan  here are my two cents worth, a retort if you will:

I am a “Z”Lister – no, you know what, make that a “Y” Lister (recently promoted myself).  I am a shameless hussy climbing the ladder to success and I notice that there are other aspiring bloggers blogging on blogging who are riders on the up escalator ahead of me.  I notice that they have good rankings of PR3 & PR4, and even PR5 with Alexa’s below the 100K mark.  That escalator is pretty crowded but my faves are:

Glen Alsopp of Viper Chill

Dave Doolin of Website in a Weekend

Gabe Young of Free Blog Help

Pat Flynn of Smart Passive Income

Caroline Middlebrook of Caroline Middlebrook

There are plenty more and they all provide some valuable info.  Granted some of the above are not exactly wet behind the ears when it comes to internet marketing, and they brandish some sharp cyber smarts, but for all intents and purposes their blogs on blogging are.

I have learned a lot from these potential usurpers to the number one spot which is not to say that I have not learned from the current reigning kings.  But here are the reasons I like to visit the “new” blogs:

1. Inspiring.
   I can relate to these dudes.  Yes, they are ahead of me but not so far that I need to genuflect at the altar of their blog.  If they can be where they are in less than 2 years, and in Gabe’s case less than half a year, glory be.
2. Timely Information.
   Yes.  I can visit the uber bloggers blogs and go through their archives for content that is relevant to where I currently am in my blogging career.  But quite honestly, that content is somewhat wilted by now.   I realize and recognize that the basic info hasn’t changed, but I like the fresh approach that the new lot is bringing to the make money online market.  They are not so far ahead that I have to dig into back issues to understand what they are talking about.
3. Fresh Perspective
   Did I mention fresh approach?  No matter how grand the symphony a young conductor can infuse it with a new richness, a new energy, show a side that the audience may not have heard in quite that way before.  I also think of the new covers being recorded by no-name artists of the Beattles classics – and you know what?  Great as the originals are, the covers are smokin’
4. Community
   No offence here but what are the chances that a fledgling like myself would ever be noticed by oh say the likes of Darren Rowse (hey I like the guy and have opted in for the membership).  Those lower down the food chain still have the luxury of being able to mingle with us babes in swaddling clothes and actually helping us – they reciprocate with visits to our sites and leave valuable comments, they private message us with helpful suggestions, they give of their time in a way that the A Listers cannot if for no other reason than that logistics just get in the way.
5. Potential Alliances
   Just like the A Listers, this new lot is active and aggressive – they have products in the pipeline, we mere PR oners do too.  Can we ride on their coattails?  You betcha!  Can we form strong strategic alliances?  Ditto.  Can we eventually look to joint venture partnerships?  You bet your sweet bippy we can!

I don’t know why the current upwardly mobile bloggers blogging about blogging  got into that saturated niche.  My guess is that they felt it isn’t so saturated after all, that they had something of value to say.  Maybe they’re just an ornery lot who look at the face of impossibility, stare it down and grapple it to the ground.  I dunno know but I thank them.

I do know why I got this market.  Actually I was visiting Caroline Middlebrook one day and noticed that she was just blogging about her experience in blogging, talking about her success and failures and things to fix and so on.  I thought that was rather brave of her – moreover I liked her online voice, felt the sincerity and thought, hey, I can do that too.  Yup!  I quickly appropriated the idea and wrote and told her so.

By blogging about blogging, or at least my trials and tribulations and ultimate small granules of success I have learned things I probably never would have otherwise.  You see, I had been trying to get into the internet marketing arena for some time (well at least two years prior) and took course upon course.  In retrospect some of those courses were damn good, but honestly, I wasn’t fully up to them.  Almost without exception the early chapters were easy (they seemed to get easier with each course) but within a short period of time the eyes would glaze over and the brain would go on strike.

I thought about that and about Caroline and came to the conclusion that blogging would be the best way to put into practice that which I know – and I felt I knew plenty after all the credit card statements supported that feeling.  So I began my blog about blogging.

By applying things I knew I found holes.  Moreover, now that I was writing something, I had to do some checking to make sure that what I was saying was indeed so.  My atrophied internet marketing muscles began to gather strength.  I have laid a foundation, one that I can now build on.  I have launched other “niche” blogs which blush, yes, do bring in some shekels, but it is this blog that I look to as my flagship.  It is this blog that makes the others possible.

From this blog I learn.  It is my practicum.  Along the way I hope that my experiences are relevant to bloggers newer than I, that my content is helpful to them.  Because of my newbie status I still speak in a language that is devoid of blogspeak although I have caught myself drifting that way occasionally.  I am still at that place of my blog career that fledglings can look at me and say “I have a chance.”  And that is all I want.  It is a right of passage – maybe we will never sit side by side with the Darrens and Yaros and John’s, but we’ll have learned a hell of a lot by trying.

Nathan, forever your admirer …………..

Valentina