When Two Tribes Go To War… Which Online Tribe Are You?

The words of the iconic Frankie Goes To Hollywood song “Two Tribes” just about sum up the storm that’s brewing in the “make money online” world, with one tribe being the Internet Marketers and the other being the professional bloggers….

But before I tell you that story…first a bit of background…

Last weekend I went to Mark Anastasi’s ListBuilding Masterclass which, I have to tell you, was rammed to the rafters and a “who’s who” of internet marketing.  This was amazing in itself because this was a free three days, and usually when you give tickets away for free, you usually get less than 50% of the registrants turn up, while on Day 2, you only get 70% of those who were there on Day 1, with Day 3 being only 50-70% of those on Day 2.

In fact I think there might have been MORE people there on Day 3 than Day 1, as it was a Sunday!  The crowd was definitely a high proportion of self employed and business people with the employed forming perhaps a third?

Contrast  this hungry, up for it crowd at the Thistle Hotel with a much quieter little gig over the other side of town, which had been billed as a Wealth Creation seminar and was, unfortunately the gig I was booked to speak at!

The numbers  expected are usually 50- 100, only 30 odd showed up and when they found out that I was speaking on internet marketing, half left, having already booked themselves onto the stock trading workshop they wanted.

Great!  So I delivered my best material to a crowd of …….about 17.  I think they liked it!

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Why Tweeting Your Blog Is Not Enough For Big Traffic by Graham Jones

If you use a URL shortening script, such as Yourls, you can see “live” the people clicking on anything you add to Twitter. The statistical information reveals that within a second of posting your Tweet you get almost all of the click throughs from what you post on Twitter. A minute or so later, almost all of the clicks have dried up. You can measure the life of a Tweet in seconds; it doesn’t last very long at all.

Getting people to follow your blog takes effort

So why all the fuss about Twitter? A Tweet is clearly a single blast of a blunderbuss – you get loads of impact all over the place, but the effect doesn’t last long. Yet you can find all sorts of advice from so-called “gurus” telling you that Twitter gets you tons of traffic. If you want to get more readers to your blog, you need to Tweet, they say.

And these experts are right – and wrong…! True enough, you can get increased traffic from Tweeting your blog. But it’s not smooth traffic; you’ll get the occasional peak in traffic. Now that’s not to be sniffed at, of course, but it’s not going to achieve all you want for your blog.

Here’s the problem: along comes another piece of technology (Twitter) which appears to solve the problem of getting more traffic to a blog. Whoopee everyone shouts and before you know it there is ebook after ebook explaining how you can get shedloads of traffic to your blog if you use Twitter. The result is millions of people go “Hurray, here’s the answer” and off they trot to learn everything they can about Twitter and see those traffic numbers rise. Not.

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Are You Blocking Your Own Success?

You know how sometimes you are just meant to see / hear / read something?  Well, yesterday the very excellent blogger Yaro Starak send out a short email, linking to one of his latest blog articles entitled “Do Your Belief Structures & Behaviour Patterns Block Your Success” and as I love Yaro’s writing, I started to read it.

He talks about blind spots, being open minded and how your patterns of behaviour are anchors….all good useful and well written stuff…. and then I either got distracted or called away or started to feel guilty that I was reading for fun when I had so much to do, and I didn’t read the rest thinking I would come back to it later.

Later on, an email arrived from Steve with a link to the article, pointing out a couple of paragraphs nearer the end, that I had missed by not reading on, and which were particularly pertinent to something we had been discussing on Monday.

(Welcome home Steve, by the way!)

So, now another nudge to read this article, from the old Universe, so I did, I read it right to the end.

BANG! POW! KERZAP!

Very good indeed.  So good in fact, that I printed it out and have been carrying it around and mulling it over every since, now embellished with highlighted bits and underlinings.

SO GOOD in fact that the power of the thoughts that this article stirred up called for one thing and it’s something I’ve never done yet ……… I have started journalling.

Yep, manually writing in a book every day, something recommended by Julia Cameron in “The Artists Way” but never taken up by me, after my mother found my five year diary when I was a teen.

I’ve been thinking of starting a daily business journal, after an article I read last week by Todd Brown at Strategic Profits called “The Secrets To Greater Business Clarity” but was putting it off till the New Year, thinking I might get a lovely notebook for Christmas (it’s on my list!)

But Yaro’s article was reverberating so loudly in my head, that I dug out a new notebook Steve bought me recently and just pasted in Yaro’s article and started writing.

Here’s the first part of Yaro’s article for you to enjoy too!  You need to read to the end, remember?

“Do Your Belief Structures And Behavior Patterns Block Your Success?” By Yaro Starak

Are You Aware Of Your Blind Spots? asks Yaro Starak.

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Strange Old Week (And It’s Only Wednesday!)

It’s been a very strange old week so far, but it really has highlighted the benefits of working for yourself, from home.  The benefits of not only being flexible with your time, but with your money, and getting the best help for whatever job needs doing at the time, in time.

I was SUPPOSED to be writing up the final three BlogTalkRadio live shows, where we showed three more people how to make £10k in 90 Days EXTRA from their new or existing businesses.

On each of those emails I was SUPPOSED to remind you that we have extended the deadline for expressing your interest and joining the Money Gym Boardroom, and securing your launch discount of 30% on the whole year.

More info here: http://www.themoneygym.com/boardroom

And in time to join us for a lovely dinner this Thursday night, and then at the first Boardroom meeting, the next day, this Friday 6th November.

I was SUPPOSED to be reminding you that all you need to do is email Judith by midnight, tonight, to secure that discount and your seat.

However, the best laid plans of mice and men…….and wealth coaches…….”oft gang astray”, in the words of the poet.

Monday was a day of broken hearted, love struck teenagers, living rooms full of handymen, the first visit of new math’s tutors, frantically ironing huge swathes of curtains for said handyman to put up, then in the late afternoon, of emergency doctors appointments and shocks to the system.

Tuesday was a day of more handymen, phone calls to insurance companies and doctors surgeries, contacting specialists offices and friends coming and going with large hugs and cups of tea.

Thank goodness for friends, tea and large hugs eh?

But here we are at Wednesday, and I’ve not had a chance to write a word, and I’ve not yet reminded you about tonights deadline.

Tut tut. Sorry guys.

But, as I say, being your own boss means being flexible. Looking after things including yourself and your family. And we want to help you become your own boss, or if you are already, to be the best boss for YOU, that you can possibly be.

So, here’s your reminder and, between mentoring calls today, I’ll write up the other radio shows and get them out to you and onto the blog.

Well worth a listen.

Just email Judith [at] TheMoneyGym.com before midnight tonight, if you want to secure that 30% discount no matter when you want to start OR if you want to come along to The Boardroom dinner on Thursday and then get stuck into your business on Friday.

I’ve seen the agenda, and it rocks!

It will rock your business, your money and your life.

See you there!

Nicola

Having The Vision | Daring To Dream

In The Money Gym we find that one of the first hurdles our clients have to get over is that of envisaging and then writing down a detailed description of their “Ordinary Tuesday”.

We ask them to write down what they will be doing on an ordinary Tuesday in three years, five years, ten years time, when they have “made it”.  We want details; from the minute they wake up, to the moment they go to bed.

Where are they, what does it look like, how is the décor, which country are they in, what do they do in the morning, afternoon, evening.  Who are they with?  what are the smells, tastes, feelings around them?

It’s a powerful exercise because sometimes, it’s the first time they have ever done any visioning since they were a child – we all do it all the time when we are children (it’s called day dreaming).

Who teaches us as children to tone down the things we dream about doing, being, becoming?

I remember the very exciting day dreams I used to have – I either wanted to be a princess (but that involved marrying a prince then doing what he said, so slight snag there) or a successful business person with a big sunny corner office, in the City of London (my idea of business success was a little corporate in those days, I didn’t realise you could run a business from your spare bedroom).

So children are largely much better at day-dreaming, visioning than we are as adults but some grown-ups retain the ability.  There are also different personality types who are naturally more comfortable with this kind of thinking, and they are called Creatives.  They are found in ad agencies, the corporate world (it’s called blue sky thinking there) and lots of the creative industries like fashion or music.

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A Link & A List – How To Get Started Making Money Online

People who are very experienced at making money online always tend to forget the fact that most of the population don’t have a clue about the internet, beyond buying items on eBay or Amazon and using Facebook occasionally.

They certainly don’t know the potential for making money online, not as a full time job but as a second income.  And they certainly don’t know the basics of how to go about it.

All the infomation is available online, if you go to YouTube you can find a video to show you how to do just about anything, but the sheer enormity of the information is totally overwhelming, you don’t know who to trust and so nothing gets done.

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Skimboarding, Silver Elite & Susanne In Spain

This week has been absolutely mad!  We saw off five of them (phew!) at Malaga Aiport on Monday, and Susanne Jorgensen of  The Singles Gym joined us for a week as we packed them off at Gate 222.  She’s taken the town – no, the Costa – by storm and even the most grumpy waiter has not been able to resist her charms.

Nelson had to stay behind because he was three months too young to travel on his own, but he’s had a great time learning to skimboard and Susanne has turned out to be a great skimboard coach.

I had a great time turning the video footage and photos into a YouTube video for him as he’s all fired up now.  View his video and encourage him in his latest passion here

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Puerto Banus, Puerto De La Duquesa, Photos & Parasols

I’m very proud that I’ve managed to blog each day, while on holiday in Casares.

Why am I bothering you may ask?  Because one of the elements of the deal I’ve struck with my friends Rona & Adrian, who lent us their lovely house for three weeks, is that I’ve made them a Wordpress driven website to help them promote the rental of their property in Casares, short-term and long-term over the winter.

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How To Remain Productive When You Feel Like Giving Up” by Yaro Starak

Nicola says: One of the people I most admire in the blogosphere is Yaro Starak, from the Entrepreneurs Journey blog.  He writes from the heart, and writes well and intersperses his blog postings with techie stuff (such as the execellent reviews of blog themes for affiliate orientated bloggers) and the heart warming stories of his own journey to success, and those of others.  Here’s a great article about how do you keep going – and keep taking action – when you really want to give up, and it’s particularly apt in a week when someone close to me, who I thought would NEVER get going, has started taking massive action.  So cool.

YARO’s ARTICLE STARTS

Like most people, some mornings I wake up and feel less than enthusiastic about working. Sometimes, this feeling doesn’t stem from laziness or apathy, it’s a stronger power, a sense of futility and helplessness.

I know a lot of people look to my story of success as a source of inspiration and that is one of the greatest benefits I enjoy as a blogger, but – and I’m not afraid to admit it – I don’t always feel energized to pursue business and sometimes in my darkest moments, I even consider throwing in the towel.

This feeling is not so common for me now as I have lifestyle flexibility, a more stable income and a better mindset about work, but earlier on, it definitely was a problem. I want to explain how I overcome these moments (and still do the same thing now on occasion) to stay on track and how you can even have a productive day when you are not really feeling the mojo on the inside.

I expect you have felt similar feelings of despair or a lack of motivation at different stages of your business development, especially if you are yet to establish an income stream online that is sufficient for you to live off, or if you are right at the beginning and you have not seen one cent of return for the work you have put in.
Inspired or Dejected

Depending on your world view and personality style, when you hear of the success of others you may either feel inspired or dejected, and while it’s obviously more fruitful to look at other people achieving what you desire as motivation, as a fallible human, jealousy, depression and anger may be your initial responses.

Your mind is your greatest asset for success in business, but it can be just as strong a force of hindrance, sabotaging your efforts, destroying your work ethic and leaving you with no option but to return to the soul destroying job you promised yourself that you would never go back to.
How To Work When You Don’t Feel Like It

One of the characteristics I believe is at the heart of my success and the success of most entrepreneurs, is an ability to keep working in the face of failure and an ability to force yourself to be productive when you don’t feel like it.
Forced Smile

I remember many a time promoting my proofreading business BetterEdit, walking around university campuses placing posters on boards, experiencing a feeling of impatience, a lack of confidence and a constant inner-questioning of whether what I was doing was a waste of time or not.

It’s very hard to be confident of success when you have yet to seriously experience it. In many ways, at this stage of your business career, faith and fake-it-till-you-make-it confidence in your idea has to carry you through the self doubt, the set-backs and the slow growth.

Nothing goes right all the time. Sometimes clients will ask for refunds, or they won’t be happy with what you provide or the universe creates a circumstance you had no way of predicting, which you just have to deal with.

For you beginners out there, one of the greatest challenges you face is your battle with self doubt. Others around you will scoff at your attempt to buck the trend to start a business, your own results will come slowly and for a long time you will have to work every day for little reward. Patience and willpower are necessary at this stage.

BetterEdit offered a great lesson for me. Placing posters on university campuses proved an effective marketing method, but the return on investment was delayed. I put up a poster and it would not elicit a response for months – sometimes even years – so my “pay off” for hard work was far in the future. This meant that I had to believe that clients would come if I just kept at it for long enough.

In hindsight faith in an outcome is easy because the experience is had, before this, you’re playing with chance and believing in the possibility of success without tasting it. If you don’t have tolerance for ambiguity, you better avoid the entrepreneur’s journey.
What Can You Create Today?

One of the things I did and still do whenever I feel less than enthusiastic is to focus on output, rather than the external elements that bring me down. I might feel utterly crushed, but I know if I create something or take any productive action, I continue towards my goals.

The great thing about output is the power it has over your mood. Negative emotion breeds negative actions – lying in your bed or watching TV for example – or a lack of any action at all. If you focus on creating something and just take one little …..

Read The Rest Of This Excellent Article By Yaro Starak Here >>

SEO For Beginners

You remember I talked about Raphael, my new taxi-service buddy from St Kitts, BVI?  I wrote about him on the blog recently and how well he looked after us….and just yesterday there was a comment on the blog from someone who wanted to book a taxi tour for six, on St Kitts in March.

Just think about that for a moment.

That’s pretty amazing isn’t it?  Some woman writes on her WEALTH CREATION blog about Empress Coaches, on St Kitts, over the other side of the world and within a week or so, he’s got a booking enquriry out of it.

How did that happen?  Because the search engines love blogs, especially Wordpress blogs.  They love the way they are set up apparently.  I also included

I just went to Google and put in “taxi service st kitts” and lo and behold, my blog post is No #5 on the organic search results.  If you put in just “taxi st kitts” it comes up No #8.  That’s amazing.  This is how it looks…

Need A Taxi Service On St Kitts BVI? | The Money Gym
Our New Friend Raphael Originally uploaded by TheMoneyGym We wandered out of the port, looking for the train station, for a tour of the island only to.
www.themoneygym.com/blog/2009/01/need-a-taxi-service-on-st-kitts-bvi/ – 45k -

So you can see that having the key words Taxi Service St Kitts in the title of the post, and the metatags, without it even being in the first line of the blog posting…hey!  I can improve the results even further by editing the first line of the description!  In the words of Gordon Ramsey……DONE!

And Raphael doesn’t even have a website yet!  Just think, if he had a website with the key phrase in the title, the meta-description and the meta-tags…….wow!

The other interesting thing is that there are NO Google Adwords ads when you put that search term in Google.  If Raphael boned up on how to do Google Adwords, he could be the ONLY ad over on the right hand side.  And if he used the little known but totally legit trick of making sure his ad was shown, no matter WHAT key phrase the searcher typed in, he’d be there every single time.

Do you think that would help him grow from two Empress Coaches empire to three, then four….now I know there is probably not much competition for the key phrase “taxi st kitts”…actually there are 337,000 pages returned when you type that in, and most of them are not about St Kitts.

However, when you use a simple tool I know about, to search how many of them have the phrase “taxi st kitts” in the title of the page, you find only 114 pages competing with my blog post.  Or Raphael’s website, if he ever makes one.

What has all this to do with your business?

Just think for a second what your idea customer might be searching for on Google.  They usually have a problem, in which case they put in the solution they are looking for (if they know what it is) or they actually type the problem in.

So, for the Money Gym, the problems could be “how do I make more money” or “how can I pay off my mortgage” or “how can I get out of debt”.  Key phrases there are “make more money”, “my mortgage” or “get out of debt”.

There are 16,900,000 pages competing with you on the key phrase “pay off debt”.  But only 9,740 pages competing with you that have the key phrase in the title of the page or the URL itself.

That levels the playing field a bit doesn’t it?  Do you see how easy it might be to dominate the search engine results by blogging on topic and just paying attention to a few simple rules?

Front page of Google anyone?

Would it interest you to know that the majority of the new visitor traffic to our site comes from Twitter, Facebook and Ecademy?  So much for those who “don’t get” Twitter!

If you find this intriguing, and want to get more traffic to your business website, I’m going to be hosting a free 2-hour webinar this Wednesday 11th February from 6pm-8pm GMT.  This will be a visual presentation as well as audio, with a good amount of time allocated for questions and answers about your business.

I’ll be covering some totally simple traffic generation techniques, dead easy search engine optimisation, and the benefits of building a community around your business, in the form of social networking and a membership site for your visitors and customers, and you really need to be there.

It will be recorded so if you miss it, and you have registered, I’ll send you a link to the recording, so you can listen afterwards.  Line spaces ARE limited so don’t miss out and secure your seat now.

Just book yourself onto the webinar here>>>

There is no charge, but you will have to go through the shopping cart process (no credit card details needed though).  Then you will recieve an email that will tell you how to register for the webinar and get all the details to watch live, or view the recording later.

Look forward to seeing you there!

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