Susan Boyle | Wild Horses | Update

Well, back in April 2009 I wrote about Susan Boyle and her inspiring story. If you have been wondering what Susan Boyle’s been up to, and indeed if she is ok, then here she is in HD singing her new single “Wild Horses” singing on the America’s Got Talent final.  She looks fine!

Banana Bars, Birthdays, Britain’s Got Talent & Bladerunner

I’m writing this after a Bank Holiday when I actually took three days off from the computer  completely.  It was my daughter Phoebe’s 14th birthday and what with the whirl of (her) social activity, my feet hardly touched the ground.

http://www.phoebesoremekun.com

She kicked off with an under-18 party at The Pier Club in Worthing, then off to her dads’ for a night, then back to ours for pressies, a trip to Brighton to get her first and hopefully her last piercing (I know! but I did promise when she was about 9!!) and then to Prezzo’s for dinner with the family.  They call it belly button piercing but it’s not, it’s the tiny bit of skin above the belly button, and of course it was filmed for YouTube.  Not by me, I was just there to sign the form and avert my eyes, but by her mate, Keturah, who was done last month.  It did look very pretty with the pink “banana bar” against her brown tum and PunkTured Studio was very clean, funky and nice – great name for the place and a good website too!

Last week’s business building / wealth creation activities included speaking for the inaugoral Brighton & Hove Property Networking event, where they had a good turnout of more than 50 property investors.  One of the other speakers was a young chap called Liam, who recognised the income potential of HMO’s when he was still at college, and has subsequently built a successful upmarket HMO buying and renting machine, always near to universities or hospitals.  Classic stuff and I hope to interview Liam on a webinar soon.

The really exciting thing about Liam The HMO King though, is that he’s been on Britain’s Got Talent, but although he was hoping to be featured on this Saturdays show, I couldn’t spot him.  He is a dance act and while he couldn’t divulge how well he did, he was smiling.  This week another contender for the singing crown emerged though – Jamie Pugh, lorry driver by day and pizza delivery man at night.

Jamie kept the story of his wife dying of a brain tumour recently as secret as he didn’t want the sympathy vote, not that he needed it.  He sang another song from Les Miserables “Bring Him Home” and I’m thinking that, obviously in spite of the name, that musical has got some cracking music in it.

Could Jamie be the next Tom Jones?  So, my top three tips for the top on Britian’s Got Talent are, so far, Shaheen Jafargholi, Jamie Pugh and Susan Boyle, in that order.

Back to the point of business building / wealth creation, I also picked up my magnetic car stickers, which I hope will stimulate some interest in my Rent2Own activities locally.  I drove home with them on and within an hour I got a Facebook message from someone who lives in London but has a rental property round the corner, who had spotted me driving though Shoreham – talk about co-incidence them being there at that precise nano-second.

I’ve pretty much given up on trying to advertise with the Worthing Herald, whose advertising department seems to specialise in doing every thing they can NOT to take my money.  In this day and age, why they can’t just keep your card details and run your ads every bloomin’ week, I don’t know.  You have to check your ad in case they miss it off AND call them every four weeks to renew it.

Leaflets next, but I need to get a bit more of a sniff of a deal before I can justify that, as it will cost in the region of £500 to do the Worthing area. I feel that’s the most cost effective way to attract vendors though.

Another weird thing happened this weekend, my sister heard from my mother, who apparently lives in Hull.  It was her 70th birthday recently and it made me feel very weird to think I have a 70 year old mother who I never see.  I’ve written about my mother before, on her birthday last year

Apparently she’s been saving for her funeral, but something happened and she had to use the money.  So she’s saving up again which can’t be easy on a pension.  We all found that very odd, because 1) when you are dead, what do you care who pays for your funeral?  and 2) we can probably afford to bury her between us by now.  Morbid thoughts perhaps but perhaps it becomes more important as you get older?  I just want to make sure the dying speech by the replicant Roy, in Bladerunner, gets played at my funeral, along with some great tunes including the entire Nu Yorican Soul album, to remind people that’s where I’ll be when I go, watching the attack ships off Orian and busy being the Black Gold Of The Sun.

Thinking about my mother being 70, made me realise that I’m nearly 50. She had me when she was 18 and then sister Heather 18 months later – and my father was away at sea all the time – can you imagine how tough that must have been?  I had my babies in my thirties with a very involved husband and that was hard work enough for me!

I certainly don’t feel nearly 50 – I feel more like my mid-thirties.  HOwever, my ankles are a bit stiff in the mornings and I do have to move books about in that middle aged way, to read in light that is not so bright. I might have to get some pinze-nez to wear in the evenings….LOL.

Have fun on the wealth creation journey, we always do.

Nicola

Board Meetings, Blog Disasters & Brilliant Reports

It’s been a very odd week – great fun in most places and one very scary bit!  I’ll tell you about that first….

Yesterday, all of our 1500 odd blog postings and thirty carefully crafted blog pages just simply disappeared from The Money Gym Blog!

I had hardly done anything on the blog yesterday, having been working with Judith on our Silver Elite infopage, and Steve was out playing golf on a rare day off.

I had uploaded a page and some photos to our server, not the blog, I’d approved a couple of comments, one of which was a bit random but nothing sinister looking, I’d added a video of Susan Boyle, from Britain’s Got Talent, to our blog posting about her “overnight success” and that was pretty much it.

Steve came home and we had a long discussion about something else, before he looked at the blog in passing, to find nothing there!  Well, we both completely freaked – how can it have happened?  He had just finished all the pages for the various levels of the new membership site, about 60 new members had joined this week, from the old site, and while all the members info was still there……….no posts or pages.

We both felt very ill for a little while, Steve at the idea of having to recreate all that work, and me at the idea that something I had done during the day had made it all go wrong.

This really was the worst disaster to happen to me in about 15 years online.

The weird thing was that when I looked to find a backup, which I do everytime we have to upgrade the Wordpress software, my entire blog directory was gone from my computer’s “Websites” folder.  I did have a computer crash recently but I managed to retreive all my websites folders from the backup, which I do online every day.

We swung into fix mode, with Steve concentrated on looking online to see if he could find anything about a virus or on the Wordpress forums.  I twittered the issue and that went onto Facebook, and by the morning, one of my Rich Schefren’s GPS classmates, Clay Franklin (@ClayFranklin), had come back with the idea of contacting our server, and seeing if they could restore our site from their last backup.

Which they did for the smallest sounding $15 I’ve every been happy to pay in my life.  But we still don’t know what happened!

Even more strange, our Clickbank page has suddenly been getting lots of traffic from a hoplink called fjautohits and a URL that looks very odd.  About 400 visits in the last week!  And we’ve sold an ebook a week for the last three weeks, when we have never sold a dicky bird via Clickbank before! We are now listed in the Marketplace whereas we haven’t sold enough to stay in there before.  We have a gravity listing and everything.  At this rate, we will sell five items on five different credit cards, and actually get paid by Clickbank!

As I say, very odd, because I actually started to read “Clickbank For Newbies” by Harvey Segal this week, and gave up in despair at how complicated it is (Clickbank, not Harvey’s book!)

On a lighter note, on Wednesday we headed into the depths of the country, to the Alexander House Hotel & Utopia Spa, for our Money Gym Quarterly Board Meeting – and let me tell you they are never boring!
Judith brought along her flip video to replace mine, which I broke on holiday, and Steve got a quick shot of the conference room, which was very grand (yet reasonably priced including lunch and wi-fi) and discovered that Flip Videos can zoom….did you know that?

We went over our plans for the rest of 2009 and 2010, and Judith asked some very pertinent questions about each of our projects

One of which, Silver Elite, is launching its pilot programme shortly – we are inviting any Money Gym Silver paying member of more than three months standing to participate, as well as anyone who bought more than one ticket to the Property Extravaganza.  The headline runs “If You Definitely, Positively Know That In Order To Succeed With Your Wealth Creation…You Need Your Hand Held, Your Bum Kicked & Absolutely Nowhere To Hide…” and it’s aimed at those who want more accountability but who can’t afford Gold yet.

Debbie Winterbourne, Gold For Christmas winner, did a three month update for our Google group and highlights include…here’s what she had to say…

First I have to say how much I have enjoyed these sessions. They have really opened my eyes as to how to run a profitable business. Here are some steps I have taken:

1. I now have seven bank accounts! They include a contingency fund, an odds and sods account and a catastrophe fund. I have separated out my income streams into (a) legal consultancy work (b) business at=2 0Quantum House (c) a property account for my buy to let and (4) my personal bank account. With Nicola’s help I have created spread sheets for each bank account which shows me at a glance, which ones are working well, and where I need to make adjustments; Also a big thank you to Eileen who visited Quantum House and showed me how to use spreadsheets!

2. Nicola has helped me do three Google adword campaigns comparing different keywords and adjusting budgets, so as to attract maximum traffic to my website;

3. I have done a thorough investigation into my beliefs, behaviours and attitudes about money. the main thing holding me back was fear of paperwork! With Nicola’s help I am streamlining my business, and although I need to spend time setting up the various systems, hopefully sooner or later, I won’t need to worry so much about excess paperwork; I also worked out my rack rate and am now more aware of what I should be charging in order to earn what I want;

4. We clarified that I needed a volunteer office manager to take care of organising the bookings of room at Quantum House. Initially I did not think it would be possible to find such a volunteer. But I gave it a go: put an ad on Gumtree and got six replies! I have now interviewed everyone. There were a couple of bad apples in the basket, but today I hired a wonderful woman who will be the office manager for two days a week starting tomorrow! I am really over the moon about this and would never have taken the action had not Nicola encouraged me that it would work! As a bonus my new office manager has a degree in marketing plus experience of event management and room bookings!

5. I have joined a couple of websites at Nicola’s suggestion to try to market the room for hire. I have had a few bookings already! Money Gym client Lucy also put me in touch with various TV companies who might need a room for their auditions at short notice. Thank you Lucy!

6. I have hired four virtual assistants who have really taken a load off my shoulders in terms of email marketing and data mining.

There’s plenty more, but I am really thrilled with progress so far.

Debbie Winterbourne
http://www.trainingroomforhire.com

On the rent2own front, I’ve been talking to one lady in Cyprus (came via Twitter) and one in Spain (via my Google Adwords campaign) who want to sell their villas, and who might be interested in doing that on a rent-to-own basis.  The legal situation in Cyprus seems a bit tragic though with many people not having access to their title deeds, and on a par with the Land Title Deed mess in the Malaga area of Spain (remember Antonio Banderas’s villa repossession?) so I don’t know….

My magnetic car signs are coming along and I’m looking forward to picking them up – they are leary in the best Rick Otton tradition, and really stand out.

Steve will be able to take them off, when he drives it, and then I can put them back on when I do.  I don’t care how daft I look, if it attracts potential vendors.

Britain’s Got Talent | Susan Boyle | Dreamed A Dream (And Achieved It)

I’m always banging on about overnight success taking at least 10 years but Scotland’s own Susan Boyle, who stunned Britain’s Got Talent judges and audiences alike this Saturday, took nearly 47 years to become an overnight success.  Watch this video and enjoy! I’ve been watching it daily and loving it!

There are so MANY wonderful moments in this video – from Ant & Dec’s gleeful little boy expressions, to Simon Cowell’s sigh of happiness – he’s already offered her a record deal apparently.

The media from the UK to Australia are running stories and even my internet marketing maties are Twittering about Susan Boyle from West Lothian Scotland, a collection of little villages apparently!

Here’s a video of Susan singing “Cry Me A River” on a charity CD from 1999.

Other highlights from Saturday include the dance act Flawless and you can watch the YouTube video here >>>

BTW, YouTube disabling the embed function for some of these videos must be losing them market share eh?