Nicola’s Week: Wealth Coach Diaries
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Moodling, Canoodling & Just Saying Yes!
My daughter’s school has sent home information about their new online elearning environment called Moodle, accessible from any connected computer apparently. I first heard about Moodle via Chris Barrow as he played with the idea of using it to run the elearning / content management system for his dentist clients. I downloaded it and had a look at it for our Money Gym clients, prior to our membership site, but it was one of of those Open source programmes, a bit like Joomla and AMember and even really Wordpress, which unless you ARE ACTUALLY a rocket scientist, you have no hope of installing and then successfully working with yourself.
I have had a look around, in her account, although the bare bones are there and the initiative is brilliant, there does not seem to be any actual content yet. Phoebe hasn’t seen it yet but I’m sure she will be delighted to cut into her MSN and texting time, to do her homework online, which I now will actually know about! NOT.
Busy few weeks for speaking engagements as I’m off to Yorkshire this weekend, to stay at Hazlewood Castle on Sunday night, ready to speak to the Yorkshire branch of The Institute of Directors breakfast meeting on Monday. It’s a 4.5 hour trip each way, so the laptop batteries will be fully charged up, and hopefully the train to York from Kings Cross will have a power source! It had better had!
Then to London the following week (15th April) to speak for Danny Rampling’s Entrepreneurs Club International, then off to Milton Keynes on 19th April 2008 for the 2nd National VA Conference & Awards Ceremony then possibly to London again (TBC) on 22nd April 2008 for Tamkin Riaz’s London Club Entrepreneur
I joined Karl and Ben from www.Conversion-Rate-Experts.com on their Mastermind call today, and was interested to find a good cross section of people there. We all had an interest in internet marketing and info products, but everyone also had a “real world” business too. Great fun to hear what everyone had been up to the last month and what their challenges were.
Mine is still the old conversion of traffic to ezine signups and e-book sales. We have knocked the SEO on the head for a while, as it simply was not converting like the organic traffic was. I tried some new Adwords tactics learnt from the “Dominate Google Adwords” report but they didn’t convert either, so it’s back to the drawing board again. I’m going to just run the organic traffic for a week or two and see what happens. I’m perplexed though, as our raw server stats are very different to our Google analytics stats, by hundreds of unique visitors per day, so I’m asking Karl for his advice about that, as he’s very up on all the Google tools, particularly Google Website Optimiser, which instead of letting you track what is called A/B split testing, allows you to track what is called multi-variable testing.
So instead of just testing one headline against another, or a red headline against a green headline, or a video or no video combo, or an auto-start video versus a non-auto start video, or a signup box with one sub-head, versus another sub-head, it allows you to create many many pages, with all the variables running together, and identify which multi-variable combo converts best to subscribers and/or sales.
My poor little brain is stretched even thinking about all that, much less implementing it, and I’m not going there yet, but Karl says it’s the only way to go long term. However, hardly anyone is using it yet, according to Google. No wonder, eh?
Easter brought it’s usual existentialist angst as the kids headed off to various sleepovers, parties and Thorpe Park with their dad, freezing apparently.
Sarah, my sister, and I are trying to decide what we want to do - for fun - with our lives. My problem is that I love my work and I love to work, but feel like I should be doing more, more “normal” stuff. I look out of the windows and see “normal” families walking along the beach together and I think “what on earth are they doing?!!”
Do I need a hobby I wonder?
Heather Cairncross “the singing, non-blogging sister” as she shall henceforth be known, is travelling with the Monteverdi Choir right now, with Sir John Eliot Gardiner, with “St John Passion”. When she’s home, she gets a bit stir crazy too and, now the little cottage in Shoreham is finished and the novelty of the Executive Worm Farm has worn off, she has joined not one, but TWO rambling clubs.
Loves to walk and now has a ready made gang to walk with. I might give it crack one Sunday but the thought of being caught in the rain, six miles from civilisation…..eeeuuuuuuwwwww.
Sarah and I have decided that there is no way to know what we might enjoy, so the only thing is to try everything. We are going to try Heather’s Wednesday evening dance class at the Assembly Halls, we will try and go to the live jazz at the Hare & Hounds more often.
I quite fancy learning to sail but Sarah, despite being born of a sailor and being lately married to one, gets seasick apparently. Landlubbers!
Perhaps we just ought to adopt the tactics of Danny Wallace in the great book “Yes Man”
**And this just in from my mate Sharon.**
“Dear Nicola, Great to see you on Thursday, here is the link to the campaign I’m working on, Stand Up For Tiny Lives. It’s all about encouraging the government to put as much into research about why babies are born too soon - a growing problem - rather than just ploughing money into treating them (important as that is too!) It just takes a couple of minutes to sign the petition. If we don’t do anything at least 25 babies will continue to die each week, that is nearly a whole class of school children - EACH WEEK.
I know you are into internet marketing, and if you take a look under REAL STORIES there are some great videos of people talking about their experiences, the Claire and Cameron story is particularly powerful. Many of us have had children and at some point there may be grandchildren, wouldn’t it be great if we knew a lot more about - and could prevent - premature birth by then. Many Thanks, Sharon”
Say YES to everything!
Have fun, we might do!
Nicola
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