As one of the first investments in your blog income business for 2010 consider signing up for an offline bootcamp for online smarts.  Have you ever gone through a hair tearing blogging experience? You know, you go through the tutorials, put up the blog on Wordpress, check it, blow on your fingernails, polish them and give yourself a pat on the back.  Hah!  Success! … or so you think.

Monday, I am going through my Inbox and there is an email from Twitter advising me of a direct message from Steve Atwal:

“Valentina, happy holidays! Just checked your Blog – very nice, but lots of bad links. Buzz me if you want to chat over coffee..”

Steve and I belong to the same Internet Marketing Mastermind Group.  As mastermind members we of course support each other.  I know that Steve is an IT and an IM type  (good combination to have) and am at once pleased and upset; pleased that he visited my site, upset that there are lots of bad links.  Yes of course I buzz him.  It just so happens that we both have time and within the hour we are chatting over lattes at the local Starbucks, laptops up and running.

I visit my Blog Income Life and am horrified when a series of 404’s keep showing up in my categories.  A quick check in the categories section in my wp-admin shows that they are all set up properly.  Steve has another idea and quickly zeros in on another possible problem.  He has me go to the Settings, and walks me through several options.  It’s like having a personal trainer.  Within minutes the problem is corrected!  MINUTES!

Frequent visitors here know that I am a self avowed non-techie.  The mere thought of anything beyond the barest minimum in the world of HTML, c-panel, FTP and what have you is enough to give me a nosebleed and a crushing migraine.  I have in times past spent hours, no, really, HOURS on fixing a small problem and here, within minutes the problem was solved.

One of the issues at hand is that many of us who are into internet marketing are not into tech fundamentals.  We lose a lot of time trying to right a small error, time that could be put to better use.  It’s just like when we first got our computers, we learned by pecking here and there even though there were plenty of hands-on  introductory courses available.  How much faster would we have been able to navigate our computers and put the many available tools to use had we attended those introductory courses?

Returning to the question posed at the start of this post: have you ever gone through a hair tearing blogging tech related experience?  I have no idea how long those links were dead or if for that matter  they were ever live.  Steve holds a hands on bootcamp for people just like me. It is exactly what I need – a series of hands on evenings at the end of which I will be in the comfort zone when working with my computer , no more 404s or other strange messages that leave me gazing in clueless wonder at my  screen.

If you are a non-techie type who is blogging to earn an online income I encourage you to find a Steve in your backyard.  Register, tuck laptop under arm and heist yourself off to  a bootcamp to brush up on your online navigational skills.  Guaranteed.  You’ll be glad you did.

To Your Awesome Blog Income Life!

Valentina