Just remember that there was a Portsmouth Football Club before this takeover.

When we originally spoke, you were keen to cover many other things namely

1. The history of the club
2. Feature previous players and personalities of the place
3. A “Where Are They Now?” section

Enjoy your wedding!
Cheers
Nicola

I now have the idea for the initial free gift as my main focus. Most of it, I can do myself, so I am hoping it will be done next week.

Blogging is becoming harder as there is less and less to say about the prospective takeover, players we have bought etc. But it does give an opportunity to widen focus a little bit!

One full week at this to go, so I hope to achieve something within that time, namely begin to build up a mailing list. I am just about to go away for the weekend with my family for a wedding, and I think that’s probably just what we all need at the moment. I didn’t have anything prepared for Friday so it will probably be catch up time on Sunday!

I’m very pleased with your consistent progress, and you ARE still just “following the bloody instructions” which is great.

I’m delighted to tell you that your new blog has ALREADY been ranked by Google with a Pagerank of 1/10.

Well done Matt and just keep going! Remember, the beauty of working online is that, if you are clever, you only ever need to do most of the work once and it will make you an income for ever.

My boy doing good!
Nicola

Today really focused my mind on what I need to achieve in the next week or so. I spoke to Nicola today, and she very kindly told me how well I was doing, and it gave me the confidence to really accept that my website and I (I do actually feel like I am maried to it, by the way) are ready to receive members. Despite all my whinging about Facebook, I have actually mamaged to create a fan page which has a link from my personal profile page, and a link to the website. I can also post messages on the fan page by mobile phone, and link to individual blog posts. I can also post to Facebook from Twitter and from Digg, so I am not doing too badly. My traffic is now pushing 100 visists a week with a healthy number of both new and returning visitors, so as I said, I am ready to welcome members.

My initial free offer is coming along and I hope to be ready with it in the next week. I am still pursuing a number of avenues with this in case one breaks down, but even if it doesn’t, I still then have extra content for the site once people join.

Made a bit of progress with Facebook today (I think!). Other commitments seem to be getting in the way at the moment with everything happening at once, and it is also hard at the moment to think of blog topics with the proposed takeover still not complete, and no matches to talk about.

My traffic has gone up by a third this week, so I hope that’s a trend that continues!

Starting to encounter more frustrations as I begin to need outside input for the site. I am still working on my initial free giveaway for example, but waiting for some replies and feedback.

Progress is starting to slow as other things start getting in the way. I have to start a job in a couple of weeks and there is some preparation for that. So the rate of progress is about to slow but I will still be giving it as much effort as possible.

Facebook is a massive source of frustration for me. I am still trying to get a proper fan page created with a link from my profile page. I must have created about five already, but then the photo won’t upload, or windows crashes. It takes me huge amounts of time to do anything with it, because I can’t understand how to navigate it properly and things start popping up from nowhere. This might be more a reflection of me than Facebook but I am just being honest! I don’t think there is any other way to get round this than to keep spending time on it until I am more familiar with it. I just feel frustrated and lost every time I am on it!

On a positive note, my traffic has gone up this week after a steady couple of weeks so this, if nothing else, gives me the motivation to keep going.

Red sounds very interesting please let me have more details.

Regards

Martin

“Twitter Ye Not” – Frankie Howerd.

Sorry, but I’ll have to disagree with Frankie there. I can now Tweet you from the web, Tweet you using Twitter Tools from my blog, Tweet you from TweetDeck, and Tweet on your Twitterberry (is that right, Nicola?). Still need to hone my skills with hashtags, RT(?) etc. but I’m moving in the right direction. Twittertastic!

I also have some ads for my blog page after I managed to eventually discover that Adsense needed to be activated using widgets (thanks Steve). I hope to install a forum plugin over the weekend and I also now have a new Wordpress theme to play with, Thesis. I have made a few tweaks to it, but I can’t immediately see from the design options section how to start really giving it the look I want. I’m sure this is down to my ignorance as Thesis is said to be one of the best and most versatile themes available, and if I’ve learnt anything in the past few weeks, it’s that the answer is always hidden in there somewhere!

I still aim to carry on working as hard as possible on the site during the next couple of weeks and see where it is up to then. I have made quite a lot of progress from scratch over nearly two months now, and I couldn’t have done it without the Membership Club Magic programme. Nicola has been very helpful too, keeping me on my toes and definitely helping me to move along faster. But, to be clear, the majority of the direction, instruction, and ideas is contained within the programme webinars and ‘how-to’ videos, so I would highly recommend it to anyone considering setting up a website along these lines.

Having said all that, no site will be a success without you own commitment, ideas, and vision. I have had a couple of minor setbacks with my initial free offer idea, so that is taking longer than I’d hoped but I am waiting for some feedback on my third attempt now and I need to come up with another couple of ideas should that also not come off. I won’t stop until something is sorted! I also need to keep on top of my vision for the site and replace ideas that have already fallen by the wayside. My site traffic has been steady for the last couple of weeks, with a healthy mix of direct, search engine, and site referral traffic. Visit numbers are on course to increase this week.

So, it’s just keep going really! Thanks to everyone who has been watching my progress on the google groups and via the Money Gym blog. You can now follow me on Twitter too (my new favourite thing!). My Twitter name is PortsmouthMatt.

If you are reading this blog from outside my website, you can visit it at http://www.PortsmouthTillWeDie.com

Bit of a frustrating day again today. Trying to get lots of things set up or installed which don’t seem to be working. I need to go back to it with a clear head tomorrow!

I can’t seem to make sense of Google Adsense, share my blog postings using Social Marker, or even download TweetDeck without an error of some kind.

I plan to upload some pictures of me to Twitter etc tomorrow, and hopefully sort these adverts out!

I am pushing myself very hard at the moment as most of my time will soon be taken up by other commitments, out of necessity unfortunately. Today I spent quite a bit of time thinking about monetising the site as quickly as possible with Google Adsense and affiliate schemes amongst other things. This will be a theme for a few days I think! I also watched the Membership Club Magic video about forums. I love forums, but there was a comment on the video about them sometimes attracting negative people, which is very true! Still not sorted my free gift properly yet, but nearly there I think, in the sense that I have some alternatives but I really need to get it sorted asap!