I spent so many hours working on them. I also spent hundreds of dollars paying to have custom designs and logos made. I kept thinking that if I could just do this one thing or that other thing, then they would start paying off. It felt like I was on a mouse wheel, always running, but never getting anywhere.

No matter how much effort I put into them I just couldn’t get the traffic I wanted. Even the traffic that I was getting didn’t convert into revenue. I suppose I made a few pennies a day from adsense, but nothing substantial

As my frustration mounted, I started to look for information that would help me finally get my websites converting. I literally spent thousands of dollars on programs, videos, books, coaching, etc. I studied everything from product launches to mass control to video.

I was getting tired and running out of resources.

One day a friend of mine told me about some free training called the 30 Day Challenge. He asked if I was going to follow along with it. My first impression was “no way”. I figured that if the information I had paid thousands of dollars for didn’t get me where I wanted to be, then a free program certainly wouldn’t. I was a bit jaded about some of the programs I had purchased and the lack of results

He kept asking me about it and so I finally took a look at it. Then I decided to give it a try, so I registered a brand new domain name, runningshoesexpert.com, and decided to follow along with the 30 Day Challenge. I also found a buddy to work on it with me.

I was astonished at what happened!

I literally just set aside everything that I knew and followed the instructions given during the 2008 Challenge. Step by step. My buddy and I just did what the videos told us to do. That included everything from how to structure the blog, choose the keywords and create backlinks.

Within a few weeks I was amazed to see that our brand new website had taken the #6 spot for a rather competitive keyword. By the end of the challenge that year our site was getting an average of 180 visits per day.

Fast forward a few years now and that website is #1 on Google. It gets 1200 to 1500 visits per day and generates enough revenue to pay a mortgage payment, every month.

Just in the last year I’ve repeated that first success again and again for other keywords and sites. But it really started with the Challenge and Ed Dale back in 2008.

He’s at it again. It’s still free. It still works. And you can Learn all about the Challenge here.

If you decide to do the Challenge this year, leave a comment below and tell me how it goes. There’s nothing like making your first dollar online (except maybe making your second

Truth be told, there’s a little more to success in internet marketing than what you might have read. In fact, there’s a lot more. The reality of it may sting a little. Be patient, it does get better.

The Dreaded Day Job

If Michael Gerber (author of E-Myth) is accurate in his description of the typical entrepreneur then your aspirations toward success in business may indicate that you are already a highly skilled technician. While Gerber sets his sights on helping you achieve your dream of entrepreneurship, today I’m going to attempt to build a bridge between that dream and the reality of your rent (which is probably due tomorrow and you’re devoting your valuable time to reading my blog…).

What’s the bridge? Well, it’s a Day Job. And they aren’t as easy to come by today as they have been in days past. At least that’s what the media suggests.

I actually think it’s a sellers market, if you know how to sell yourself. What’s that? Did I just drift back into IM land when I’m supposed to be talking about getting a “real” job? Nope. Not exactly. Well, maybe there’s more overlap than you originally thought.

Make Money Today

I’m really excited about your ambition to be wildly successful. I really am. However, if you realize that you just need to fall back to plan B for a while and catch up on some bills, there is ABSOLUTELY NO SHAME in getting a day job to get you there. You might find that it actually propels you forward!

This video of a presentation I did should shed some light on it. Depending on interest I may do an in depth series on each point I cover in this presentation. Please leave comments below telling me what you think.

He understood the universal constant in life that you get what you pay for. In entrepreneurship this is especially true. The harder you work, the more you are likely to accomplish. But it can be easy to trick yourself into thinking that aimless busy work is productive work. The fact is that if you don’t have an objective (aka, A GOAL) then you might easily keep yourself busy, but never really make any progress.

I have to confess that for most of my life I HATED Goals. For example, consider a sales goal. If I make a goal to sell X dollars worth of some product, that’s nice, but I really don’t have control over whether I meet my goal or not.

I have no control over whether I reach a goal

Before you head off to the comments section to tell me how wrong I am, hear me out. What I mean is that my ability to reach the goal is dependent on someone else making a decision to give me their money in exchange for my product or service. It’s his decision to buy, regardless of how persuasive I might be. I simply cannot make that decision for him.

So in reality, I don’t have any control over whether someone makes the decision to purchase from me or not. The same is true for getting optins on a website, visitors to a web page, donations for a cause, etc. Most goals worth setting depend on external factors, and those are always out of our hands.

I think that’s why goals always depressed me. I could make any goal in the world, but I felt so powerless to reach it. In my twenties I had an epiphany on the subject of goals that was really empowering. Even though I didn’t find a way to hypnotize my prospects to buy something from me or control those pesky external factors, I did discover a way to reassign my personal accountability away from the goal by splitting the goal setting process into two categories: Goals and Commitments.

How a Commitment is different than a Goal?

The epiphany came when I realized how goals differ from commitments. A commitment is something that I have absolute control over (at least relatively). For example, If I decide to do publish 20 comments on my facebook page, that’s not a goal, it’s a commitment. It’s completely within my power to accomplish it and doesn’t rely on anyone else making a decision. Sure there are external factors, but they aren’t related to human decision. They’re things like internet connectivity or my car starting. If I’ve really made a commitment I can find an internet connection at a starbucks and take the bus if my car breaks down.

The same decision independence is true for creating 20 backlinks, dialing 20 phone numbers, knocking 20 doors, etc. It’s key to understand that following through with these commitments doesn’t necessarily mean that I’ll speak with 20 people, since I can’t force someone to pickup the phone or answer the door.

The point is that a commitment is something I can say that I will do and the only person that can prevent me from doing it is myself. I think you’ll see in just a minute why this is so powerful…

More than a semantic argument. It’s empowering

I promise that I’m not trying to make some coy play on a semantic difference between two words (goal and commitment). Quite the opposite is true. I’m trying to provide a separation between two very distinct mental states. Splitting goal setting into two parts, one over which I have complete control and another over which I have very little control, empowers me to make a plan with specific action items that I know I can get done. Have a look at this diagram to see what I mean.

You might have noticed that I actually put a third component as a precursor to a Goal. The Object of Desire is a slippery devil. In many cases it can be hidden, forgotten and even deceptive. Think about it this way: What value is there in Green paper or small metal discs? None really. You see, it’s not the money we value. It’s the stuff that we can get with the money that we value.

We don’t really want $1,000, or even $1,000,000. What we want is the car, or the house or the freedom from debt or the once in a lifetime vacation… I think you get the idea. So when you set a goal to make X dollars in sales, it’s important to allow your mind to travel in two directions at once. You want to make sure that you know why you want to reach that goal (your object of desire) and what steps are most likely to help you reach it (the commitments you make).

Example: get 200 unique visits per day for keyword “xyz”

Let’s say you wanted to get 200 unique visitors per day from organic search results to a page on your website each day. There are some things over which you have complete control. These include getting a specific number of backlinks to your website every day, choosing a keyword that gives you a plausible chance of success, creating optimized content for the target page, etc.

There are also many things you can’t control, such as whether those backlinks stick, whether the search engines find and index those links, whether the search engines give you improved SERP results for those keywords. While you can increase your chances of getting clickthroughs by writing a good page title and including appropriate meta description details, you really don’t even have control over whether people click on your site even if you get the search engines to put it in the top spot.

So to reach the goal of getting 200 unique visitors a day to a web page, you make commitments to create backlinks and produce the best optimized content you can on the target page.

Now, going back upstream, it’s just as important to make sure you understand what your Object of Desire is. For example, you might be stroking your ego (think “coolest guy on the planet” wars) or you might be interested in saving someone’s life (think “donate children’s hospital”). The better you understand and the more you can shape your Object of Desire, the better prioritized your Goals will be and the more motivated you’ll be to follow through with your commitments!

Your game plan and the Feedback Loop

The strategy then is to identify a goal, followed immediately by creating a specific list of commitments that you have power to act on independently. The commitments you make should have a direct correlation to your goal. Now hold yourself accountable for completing your commitments, which you have power over, not whether you reach your goal, which you don’t have power over.

As time passes you end up with data that will either confirm or invalidate the usefulness of the tasks you’ve committed to do in terms of how they relate to your goal. If the data is positive, then you stay the course and continue on with your daily commitments. If the data is negative, you don’t have to change your goal, but you can instead change your commitments to see if another approach will work. There’s a chance that you’ll end up changing your goal, but it will be based on data, not whim.

This is called a feedback loop. As you change the input (your commitments), you observe the output (realization (or not) of your goal). Depending on the output, you may change the input. You might also adjust the desired output if a set of inputs is unable to help you achieve the desired output.

Throughout all of this, try your hardest to be honest with yourself about your real object of desire and let that understanding guide you to set the goals most consistent with what you want most. You might snicker when I say “be honest with yourself”, but the deeper you look to figure out what your real object of desire is, the more likely you are to be surprised by it.

Free Yourself!

Stop living as a hostage to Goals that you don’t have any power over. Instead get scientific and separate your goal setting process into two parts: Goals and Commitments. Then follow through with your commitments to reach your goals! Best of luck.

The reason I wanted to post it here is that it turned out to be a good tutorial about using a fantastic free tool (Inkscape) to create graphics for your website. I actually show you how to use Photoshop too.

You can download the HD version below the video. If you watch it on the page, click the full screen button so that you get all the details.

Download in HD

Onsite vs. Offsite

First it’s important to understand some backup terminology. An onsite backup means that the data for the backup and the data for the production website exist in the same physical location. This might be like making a backup of your computer onto an external hard drive attached to your computer. This would protect you from a hard drive crash, but if your house burns down then both go up in flames.

Offsite means that the data for your backup and the data for your production website are in different physical locations. If one place burns up, the other will still have all the data intact.

There’s a benefit to each type of backup. An onsite backup, such as an external hard drive, can provide a much faster recovery than downloading the data from another site. Offsite backups are more resilient to acts of God (and kids).

Backup in the cloud (Amazon S3)

When it comes to your website, it turns out that the hard drive at your house qualifies as an off site backup. Even better than your hard drive is Amazon S3. There are two reasons why choosing a cloud based service is more appealing than your hard drive.

1. You can automate access to it from your website
2. They manage redundant, fault tolerant data storage for you

What to backup

I think many bloggers (those that create backups at all) use the WordPress export feature and feel confident that they have everything they need to recover their website in case of a crash.

It turns out that several things are missing. First is that even the most disciplined person can find it difficult to login regularly and take frequent backups. Since a blog is an evolving opus, constantly changing, it’s important to take frequent backups. Another problem has to do with the ‘rest’ of the information on your website.

What about all the pictures, audios and videos that you upload, along with theme and plugin files? This data needs to be included with your backups in order to restore your website. Without it, you would be able to restore little more than the text content from your site.

So, if you insist on taking manual backups then make sure you use FTP and grab the wp-content folder of your WordPress website in addition to the XML file that you export.

There’s a better way

If you don’t want to worry about all these details and risk messing them up then you’re in luck. I found a great plugin which I’ve been using on all my sites for about a half a year now. It’s called Automatic WordPress Backups. To get it up and running all I had to do was provide it with my Amazon S3 account information and it took care of the rest. It manages creating backups on a regular schedule and maintaining historical backups too.

The cost for S3 storage works out to be pennies a month, and for the peace of mind that it brings, that’s CHEAP!

How to restore

In the event that you need to restore your data, you can most likely find someone on elance.com. In fact, if you’re restoring after a hosting company crash, you could probably even give them the backup file from your S3 account and let them work through the details. It turns out to be pretty easy. Here’s the process I would follow:

1. Ensure that you have the domain configured and pointed to a directory on your host
2. Upload WordPress (you can probably use cPanel if you want to)
3. Delete the wp-content folder and upload the folder from your backup
4. Create a database and import the database file from your backup
5. Update the wp-config.php file with the connection information to your new database

Hopefully you never need to go through these steps. but if you do, you’ll be glad that you took the time to setup Automatic Wordperss Backups. Post a comment if you have any questions or need additional help.

To answer the question of structure, offer and content I’ve put together the video and a PDF below showing one of my favorite models. I’ve seen components of this model used tons of times by loads of people, but I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a single diagram that outlines the entire process and helps you plan your content, email lists and so on. I hope this is useful. Here’s the video:

Click the full-screen button on the video so you can follow along better…

In this video and PDF I can’t possibly tell you everything you need to do, but here are some of the most important concepts to keep in mind.

• List segmentation is crucial (separate lists for prospects and buyers (thanks Jeff Walker))
• Free content should be an extract of the most valuable gems you offer in your paid content (thanks Eben Pagan and John Reese)
• your autoresponder sequence should focus on consumption of your content, whether paid or free
• Use downsell and retention (before you go) sales letters to increase margin

Download the PDF here:

My current favorite platform for membership websites is WordPress using MemberWing and Aweber. It’s a no brainer for me since I can have a new membership website up and running in an hour, with all the bells and whistles.

There are other models that I can put together if there’s enough interest. This one is super easy and can work very well since it uses reciprocity by giving them access up front to your best material and reducing their risk since they get to see some of the content before buying. One other model that I really like is the 30-day free trail, or $1 trail. Frank Kern is a master of that model and I recommend you follow one of his launches to get an idea. Mike Filsaime is also fantastic at the upsell/downsell on offers like this.

After you’ve watched the video and read through the PDF, let me know what you think and if you have any questions by posting a comment below.

I searched for “wordpress 2.9 video tutorials” and to my great surprise I couldn’t find a good video tutorial. I found videos talking about new features in WordPress 2.9, and I found some that talked about plugins for WordPress 2.9, but none that just showed someone how to post to their blog.

SEO can be a funny thing, because I highly doubt that there aren’t any good video tutorials out there. For whatever reason I just couldn’t find them. So I went ahead and made a short video showing the basics of posting to a WordPress 2.9 blog. Since I love MemberWing I went to the trouble of showing how to include paid vs. premium content in a blog post.  Have a look below (it’s HD, so you can make it full screen and easily see all the details).

By the way, in WordPress 2.9, all I had to do to embed that video was paste the YouTube link (that’s amazing). In all my years developing software I haven’t many tools that meet the need like WordPress does. Hopefully this short tutorial video will get you on your way.

If you know of other tutorials or have questions, post them as comments below. I read read every comment.

That’s really too bad since one of the projects I’m working on right now could benefit from some artistic ability.  I’d really love to call on my brother for help (he’s insanely artistic and creative), but he’s also very busy.  So I did what anyone else would do.

I went to you tube to learn to sketch people.  Here’s the video I found:

And here’s my first attempt at copying what someone else is good at. Which, by the way, is the real point of this post. I don’t have to be good at something if I have access to someone else that is good at it. As long as I observe well and take good notes AND MOST OF ALL, I have to do something with what I learn.

Let me know what you think of my first person sketch in the comments below.

how to sketch people - practice from youtube video

That got me to thinking about what I see as the biggest obstacle to completing either the thirty day challenge, or the challenge of getting any idea off the ground.

I once heard that “The simplest solution is usually the best”.  That was in reference to Occam’s razor, a principle that dates back to the 14th century.  When it comes to achieving any vision of your’s and you have identified parts of that vision that you don’t know how to do, the simplest solution is to ask for help.  Unfortunately there are a few cultural oddities in our present day that prevent people from asking for the help they need.  In other words, we tend to complicate the otherwise simple solution of asking our acquaintances for help.

Do you speak English (or asking the right question)?

First off, last night while I was helping my friend get over one of her major stumbling blocks I couldn’t help but remember this video that I saw on YouTube a couple of years ago.  It’s hilarious, and there’s a lesson behind it (at least I want there to be one so I can post it here).

I’m going to try to s t r e t c h a lesson out of that video and say that the lady asked the wrong question.  Rather than just asking for directions to the garage, she asked if he spoke English.  That gave him a chance to make a good game of her.  Besides, it wasn’t what she really needed anyway.

The “major stumbling block” that I was helping my friend with last night had to do with WordPress (which I love and use, by the way).  She had successfully installed a wordpress blog on her site and begun to look into themes (way to go!).  Among other things she wanted to know:

• how to update/modify her WordPress theme (such things as images and fonts)
• how to create new pages, categories, posts, etc.
• how to decide whether to create pages or posts for different types of content

Here’s the problem: before she called me I think she already decided that the technology was too difficult to figure out or that she wouldn’t be able to do it.  She did absolutely the right thing in calling me, as I’ll try to show below.

Assume that you can do it with the right help

The first little lesson to take away from this is to assume that you can do it and that you have the capacity to understand it.  This might sound stupid simple, but to show you that it is a stumbling block, I’ll tell you another story.

I have another friend that I’ve been helping do web site stuff for years.  He has actually had websites and uploaded images and other things to them.  A few weeks ago he sent me an e-mail asking how to get an e-book up to his site.  I told him how to do it in a reply.  He sent back asking me again how to do that.  I then sent him a click-by-click list of instructions to do it.  When I saw him a couple weeks later he still hadn’t uploaded his files.  He “assumed” that it was more complicated that what I had told him to do in my e-mail and so he never even tried it.  Read that again.  He never even tried to upload the files because he had already decided that there was more to it than the list of instructions I gave him.

How many items do you have on your to do list right now that you have already decided are beyond your capacity or understanding and so you haven’t even started them?  Whatever they are, go and highlight them right now and in just a minute I’ll tell you how to get them done and check them off.

American Pride (or how Walmart and credit cards stole my education)

Go back 200 years and America looked a lot different than it does today.  As with many things, there’s good and bad that comes with change.  Back when agriculture was the primary means of making a living (or should I say, staying alive), folks didn’t have a luxury of spending years in college, falling back on unemployment or just going to the store and picking up some food on their credit card before they got their next check.

Instead they relied on each other.  They imposed on each other.  When someone moved to a new area he instinctively went to those who had already farmed there and asked what worked and what didn’t.  Sometimes an experienced farmer could make something new work, but that experience comes after years of making the basics work.

Back then an education meant imposing on people and having an end in mind (like growing crops to stay alive).  It also meant that within a community there was a necessary diversity of skills and abilities.  After all, how could they barter to get a range of goods if they all did the same thing or grew the same crop.  An education back then meant acquiring practical skills through your association with others and your own testing.

Today I think there is a real tendency to assume that modern Universities in all their pomp and prestige contain a solution to every problem.  While it is flabbergasting (yes, that’s the word of the day) to imagine the amount of information and knowledge they contain, real life skills and education are as much your responsibility today as they were 200 years ago.

Don’t let your pride rob you of opportunities to learn.  Expect to try and fail.  Plan to impose on others that already have a practical skill that you need.  Don’t let yourself fall back on the dole of unemployment, or worse, a lifetime 9 to 5 job.  I think you’ll be surprised that most people feel like they get the better end of the deal when asked to do a favor.  Try it.  Ask someone to teach you something they know really well and see how appreciative they are to you after teaching it to you.  Or you could just think about the last time you taught someone something that you were good at.  How did it make you feel to see him get it?

Stop pretending to be Wonder Woman

So at the beginning of this post I asked “how do you know when to ask questions, mastermind, outsource, quit, change direction, etc.?”  I think that’s simple to answer.  The “WHEN” is always.  In our society and communities we’re surrounded by people that have real needs.  We have real needs, but we’ve conditioned ourselves to think that we should “do it alone” or that asking for help automatically equates to unecissarily imposing on others.

That’s a load of crap!

Yes, there are ways to go to far.  If I give you a list of steps to do something that you asked about and then you ask me to actually do it for you while you eat a donut and watch Oprah then I might feel put out.  But if you have your mouse in hand and a vision of where you want to end up and you think that I have some specialized knowledge that will get you there, then stop trying to be a super hero and just ask me.  As I help you I get better at:

• helping
• doing
• participating

That last one is really important and I hope it has come through in the theme of this post.  We are much more likely to succeed in collaboration than in isolation.  So the next time you find yourself depressed or frustrated, staring at your computer screen at 1:30 am wondering how in the world you’ll ever learn everything you need to be a super internet marketer, just STOP.  Back up far enough that you see the vision of where you want to be.  Write down on your to do list the things that you think you already know how to do and the things you don’t know how to do (or pull out the list that you highlighted at the beginning of this post).  Then…

Do the unthinkable (aka, the simplest solution)!

For each task that you don’t know how to do, write the name of someone you know that is most likely to know how to do it right next to the item on your list.  Then send out e-mails briefly explaining your vision and the thing you can’t figure out.  ASK your friend, co-worker, client, vendor or whoever else it turns out to be, to help you do it.  Don’t be too surprised when you get the help you need and find your vision taking shape.

When you’ve done this a few times, come back here and post your experience as a comment on this post.  I can’t wait to hear about it.