Wealth Coach Diaries: Nicola’s Week

This has been an AMAZING couple of weeks for lots of different reasons. It’s been so busy that, not only have I not had time to play with my new sewing machine, but, for only the second time this last year, I was unable to write the ezine!!

My twitterings kept the blog updated and my Twits also fed out to my Facebook and MySpace profile. The blog being updated by Twitter also fed out to my Hubpages and Ecademy, so all major social networking went on as normal.

The weekend before last saw the “Money Gym Presents…Property” with the ever popular property multi-squillionaire and all round good bloke, Greg Ballard, holding forth about property investment and the property market in general – dynamite stuff as ever. Judith and I updated everyone on our Rent2Own exploits and the band of merry Money Gym rent2own devotees grows and grows – David Lee, what have you started?

Later in the day, my old matie from Las Vegas and Sussex, Maria Davies, came to show us how we could buy a luxury villa in the Caribbean for just £1000, and invited us to one of her open evenings. I’ve never been very keen on overseas investing, but the combination of luxury, Caribbean, and Maria buying TWO herself (she ain’t no property fool!) has got me very very interested. It’s an income strategy after the first four years too, with demand for Caribbean holidays growing and growing all time. Maria has another fr*ee Open Evening coming up in London and you can book your place and find out more here at

http://www.caribbean5starinvestments.co.uk
Talking of Caribbean holidays, I’m hoping that our Money Gym Wealth Creation & Internet Marketers Cruise (with Mike Filsaime) in January will take us to a couple of the islands that Maria’s lot are building on, so I can have a look while I’m out there! Just £500 per person for eight nights, the return flights to Miami are £400, so it’s a dirt cheap holiday in the sun. There are six Money Gym allocated cabins left (and there are some that hold three so bring the kids even if you are a single parent – they will be well looked after in the kid’s club) so secure your cabin (and all the extra Money Gym goodies) here at http://www.TheMoneyGym.com/holidays

Then……….felt really sick with a 24 hour bug on Thursday but recovered in time for Tim Brocklehurst’s Freedom Class weekend on Saturday/Sunday/Monday. This was an intensive three day workshop where he taught us how to use the amazing Viral Spiral system to grow our lists virally. We were amazed by the incredible and inspirational Ange Wayne, and some of the othere excellent speakers included ever exuberant marketing maverick Alan Forrest-Smith and Martin Avis, who gave a great presentation on how to build excellent relationship with your subscribers.

By the end of the three days, we walked out with a turnkey online business, although some of us were not sure how we did it! Brillaint “over shoulder” back up from Matt Garrett and Rob O’Callaghan

We stayed at the TOTALLY FABULOUS Hoxton Hotel in Great Eastern Road I think it was, and while it only cost about £97 per room per night, I was blown away by the rooms, the bathrooms, the funky lounge, bar and restaurant, the hot and trendy guests/locals, the live dj’s on Friday and Saturday, but the best thing by far was the staff. They were not just helpful, can-do and smiling, they positively beamed fun and job satisfaction. You just can’t bottle that – if you could, service in this country would be an amazing thing. See http://www.TheMoneyGym.tv over the coming week for some videos….very funny when I caught Marcus De Maria at 8am, who was hosting a workshop at the same venue.

I talked to the Bar/Restaurant Manager – Richard Moul who was frighteningly young and energetic (and a real whisky expert!) to find out what his recruitment policy was, only to find that he recruits for attitude and personality and then whips them into shape after. It only bloomin’ works. We had some fantastic customer service experiences there and I will be staying there as much as possible in future even if I have to get taxis about to my workshops and meetings.

The Freedom Class was amazing – what can I say? Many many thanks to Tim Brocklehurst for his patience, his organisation, laying on of three great speakers – one of whom Ange Wayne, Change Strategist, flew over from Australia especially. She was amazing, Alan Forrest Smith was on fire! Martin Avis was wonderful on how to build a great relationship with your virally fuelled list (it was great to meet him properly at last) and one other who has asked not to be mentioned for her own reasons.

Genius move, putting Ange on, on the first day, as we were struggling a bit and she talked in a compelling, almost hypnotic way, about success, choice and responsibility. Tragic that Steve missed that bit as he was carted off to A&E when his heart went into Atrial Fibrillation – they kept him in overnight at the Royal London, but he still managed to win the challenge on the Monday, having done so much homework beforehand.

Luckily Tim had a camera crew on hand, so Steve can catch Ange on the DVD’s. You can find out more about her at http://www.AngelChange.com – a play on her name (it’s not all about angels, phew!) and her home AND office is based in Angel Place Building too! Amazing speaker, awesome.

From Tim’s mailing for Steve (his prize) Steve has gained over 250 new signups and his blog and first email has attracted a new client already – someone who owns a Champagne business – NICE!

I’m so thrilled because I managed to come home, take one of my articles and turn it into a rebrandable free report, working through the process. From putting up my free report in three places so far, I’ve picked up 10 new double opted in subscribers today already and it’s only lunchtime. That’s amazing.

I’m also thrilled because I have created my first ever Facebook application. I was making a Blidget (widget for folks to feature the Money Gym blog on their websites) and it offered me the option to make a Facebook application out of my Blidget. Of course I clicked yes, and was walked through several stages to create my app. Now, if you don’t realise how exciting this is, just think about how viral this could go. If even half my 447 (as of today) friends feature the Money Gym app on their profiles, and half of their say….50 friends like what they see and feature it….that’s our blog on 5587 profiles….man, that’s powerful.

My brain was FRIED after all that techie, detail stuff, but I still managed to make it to my Monday Night Poker Game at the Crown & Anchor in Shoreham. On Tuesday I took it easy and fixed Head Chef, Andy Quinn’s laptop for him (well, Steve did) and set up a Facebook group for the Crown & Anchor, whose new website is taking ages!

Had coffee with one of my poker buddies, Paul Stanford from 4Momentum on Tuesday, he’s a business consultant and we talked about how to take The Money Gym to seven figures from six, and how to get him blogging and how to wrest control of his website and hosting from the current designers who want to charge him for every little thing and won’t give him access to his own CPanel.

Kids off school today (yet another Insect Day!) and off to play poker live again tonight, private game, first invite so honoured and a fixed buy in, for those of you who are worried about a wealth coach apparently gambling. My Monday nights cost me £12 and inclued dinner, for heaven’s sake. It’s cheaper than the pictures.

When this ezine is written, I’m off to check my property messages and see if the deal that fell out of bed due to a solicitor offering business and not legal advice, has come back on. The vendor turned out to be someone who used to work for me at The Acacia, as a maid! How small is this world really?

Have fun, I will be when I slow down!

Nicola

Twitter Updates for 2008-06-29

• Hectic night out, working on a new re-brandable report to give away (must get dressed at some point) #
• Does internet marketing count as a hobby? Well it gets me away from poker and my new poker buddies I suppose… #
• @robocallaghan – hmmm good point, I was just trying to justify working while the sun is shining outside LOL #

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Twitter Updates for 2008-06-28

• @paul_turner – of course, if you want it enough and you are open minded #
• Just been followed by @24hBerlin who is following 2731 people on Twitter, is that the most so far? #
• @paul_turner – for the benefit of everyone else, we are talking about creating wealth in one’s life LOL #
• Anyone want some HugoBoss XX Women perfume? Don’t like it now I’ve got it home! #

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Twitter Updates for 2008-06-27

• all the old DJ maties from Esoteric Records days becoming my friend on Facebook – only Danny Tenaglia & Tony Humphries to track down now! #
• Looking forward to seeing my ex-husband’s face when he spots Benji Candalario on my friends list – Lewis Dene says hi! too, Irving #
• Must stop twittering and start blogging – what a week it has been! Ezine to write, adswap to organise and new report to make rebrandable #
• Wondering if anyone knows how to get more Text Widgets on a Wordpress blog? Desperate for more! Tweet me or email nicola@themoneygym.com? #
• @mattgarrett – what was the name of that frighteningly young bar/restaurant manager at the Hoxton Hotel? need it for my ezine! #
• Thanks @swatson38 – Steve saw my Twitter about text boxes on Wordpress and solved my problem! Magic stuff…. #
• @Steve_G_Watson – ooooh changed your name then #

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Learning To Love….Wordpress

OK, I admit it, I’ve had a love/hate relationship with Wordpress. I’ve been a deliriously happy Typepad user for years, attaching it to my site by means of a nice neat button, and back again to the site, to get the SEO. My blog had a 4/10 google ranking and my site had the same, so benefited from the many links backward and forward. Since moving my blog to Wordpress and hosting it on my domain, that has remained at 4/10 and the blog is now 3/10 even though it’s got many more original posts on it than the Typepad one.

After the last World Internet Summit in London 2007, however, I took on board that all the “big dogs” are using it and when my buddy Mike Stewart said “I don’t know why I’m using it but Armand told me too!” I came home, downloaded the software for free from www.Wordpress.org, tried some plugins and after a long frustrating weekend trying to get it to work, I gave up on that one.

Then I turned to ex-internet coaching client Lea Woodward for help, as she was much more techie than me and had an army of geeks to outsource the tricky bits to.

Turns out my server 1and1.co.uk needed some serious tweaking before it would let me hook up my new MySql database with the blog software. Most hosting like my preferred one FunkyDomainNames will let you do a very sexy one click install from the CPanel – takes nanoseconds.

Of course installing it is one thing, making Wordpress look nice and do what you want it to do is another. I struggled for weeks to get images in my posts! For this you will need to choose a “widget ready” theme AND install about 20 different plugins.

Here is my list of the Top Essential & Most Sexy Plugins For Wordpress

** Please feel free to comment below and let me know which plugins I am missing **

1. Akismet - stops comment spam and comes pre-installed, you just need to activitate it (in Plugins) and then add your API key, which you get from setting up an account at www.Wordpress.com

2. OneClick – install this first, by downloading the zip file to your computer, extracting the files and uploading via FTP the main OneClick folder to your wp_content > plugins folder on your server. Go activate it in your Wordpress control panel, then thereafter, after you have downloaded the zip file for any plugin to your computer, you can do everything else from within Wordpress. Remember to use the pull down menu to choose plugin rather than theme, as it defaults to theme.

3. Sign-out-reminder – does what it says on the tin!

4. Wordpress-automatic-upgrade.1.1 – this makes the business of upgrading your software effortless, if you choose the “automatic” option. Amazing to watch!

5. Feedburner_feedsmith_plugin_2.3 – you need to open a free Feedburner account and “burn” a feed for your blog. Not only will Feedburner give you better statistics, but you can monetize your blog posts and feed page with Google Adsense.

6. adsense-manager.2.5 – put your Adsense publisher CA in here and monetize your blog

7. better-comments-manager1.5 – helps you manage comments more easily and picks up inbound links to your blog

8. google-sitemap-generator.3.0.2 – automatically generates and updates your site map for Google

9. Maxblogpress-ping-optimizer.zip – if, like me, you save each post about five times, before you are happy with it, this plugin stops your blog spamming the ping sites, particularly ping-o-matic, who can block your blog for over-pinging! MaxBlogPress has some nice plugins generally.

10. ImageManager2.41 – never again struggle to put pics in your posts, or have to upload your pic to your server before you can use it, or worse still, LOSE a pic that you just KNOW you uploaded/used before on your blog. This plugin did disappear last time I upgraded my Wordpress software but I just reuploaded it using oneclick and it worked fine again.

11. All-in-one-bookmarking-button – puts that sexy little bar at the bottom of all your posts that enables your visitor to digg you, stumble you, delicious you or technorati you (and many, many others)

12. TwitThis_for_WordPress_1.1 - if you twitter – and you should as it updates your blog with your twits, you can twit on the move, it updates your Facebook and MySpace Profile and it twits to your followers when you post on your blog (AMAZING!!) – then you need this on your blog! not sure which of the Twit tools listed here does what, but you need both (take it from me!)

13. Twitter-tools.1.1b1 – as above!

14. Viddlercomments – enables people to post a comment using video via their webcam on your blog – watch this one grow and grow!

15. Max-banner-ads – just getting into this one but man, it’s really, really good. Enables you to put your own banners or OTHER PEOPLE’s in various locations on your blog, and gives great stats. You can start to charge for banner ads on your blog!

Hope this was helpful. and if you hit the comments link (or the little camera) you can leave your favourite plugins for us! Cheers, Nicola

Twitter Updates for 2008-06-26

• Creating a Facebook app for The Money Gym – see my profile on FB to try it out – what fun! #
• @swatson38 – welcome to Twitter Steve! Show him some love guys and follow Steve Watson on Twitter! And on Facebook http://snurl.com/2pehu #
• I need five users of my new app on Facebook to be able to submit it to the directory – will anyone help me out? http://snurl.com/2peiv #
• @robocallaghan consider it done matie! #
• @sarahnewton as long as it’s not Lady Marmalade! #

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Rebrandable “Millionaire” Report!

Here it is! My first unique content rebrandable PDF report “How To Become A Millionaire In Five Years Or Less” for my Money Gym MyViralSpiral site. So proud. I have to confess Steve helped with the graphic, using the software recommended on the weekend but I did most of the rest of it myself.

Just click the picture to be taken to a page where you can put your name and email in, to download it for free.

Then, you will be offered the chance to sign up for the Viral Spiral service while you are downloading it, if you do, you can take this PDF report, rebrand it with your affiliate ID’s instead of mine, give it away yourself to grow your mailing list, AND make affiliate commission on the “back end” if anyone buys our ebook via PayDotcom.

Twitter Updates for 2008-06-25

• ok, new report created “How To Become A Millionaire (In Five Years Or Less)” to upload to http://snurl.com/2opwi ready for peeps to rebrand #
• Steve working on graphics, I’m working on squeeze and download page #

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Twitter Updates for 2008-06-24

• back from The Freedom Class – massive thanks to @timbrock @robocallaghan and @mattgarrett for all their hard work #
• the COOLEST app on Facebook ever??! Check out my profile on FB to see it in action and earn commissions on your profile – RadicalBuy #
• @secondfriends 5278 #
• here’s the link http://tinyurl.com/5cv9el – scroll down and look for the RadicalBuy link in my mini feed #

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Twitter Updates for 2008-06-23

• Alan Forrest Smith was the best I’ve ever seen him so far for @TimBrock – Day 3 of the Freedom Class – yehar! #

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