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.

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

Viddler Done Good!

Just in case you miss it in the comments, here’s a lovely personal email from Donna DeMarco @ Viddler.  As a fledging video maker whose partners regularly take the mickey out of the shaky panning, questionable taste in music (I like it!) and painfully slow action, not to mention how rough I look sometimes, the words in bold (the bold added by me so you can’t miss it) made my day! 

I am determined to press on with video as a marketing tool, so I am cheered.  The wordpress plug in Donna refers to, means you can comment on my blog postings with your own video recorded on the fly with your in-lappie camcorder – HOW COOL IS THAT?  C’mon, I dare you!  Get the lippie on and go for it.

“Good Day, I’ve just finished a breakfast here in the states – humble pie. My sincere apologies for suspending your account. We’ve been inundated lately with “cash gifting” ponzi schemes and “buy this now” videos. Not the type of content that represents the viddler community. The community can flag videos for various offenses, including spam & copyright. We manually delete the content on our backend based on the flags, title, tags, usernames, etc. We got over zealous when we saw “become a millionaire” in the title of a flagged video and suspended your account. Your videos are informative, well produced and interesting – You even have our wordpress plugin! I could try to blame it on the ghosts at Hazlewood Castle, but it is our mistake. And as a result, we are reviewing our process and will look into sending an email when an account is suspended. We’ve also instituted a “trusted user” status – of which you are now one.Thanks for using viddler!

Donna
co-founder, viddler

Video Blogging – Zero to Hero in 60

If you have been thinking that you want to start blogging, to promote your business, then I have some great resources for you.   Blogging for business is all about people getting to know, like and trust you and if you click on Mike’s links below you can find out how companies from tour operators to bug exterminators to carpet showrooms are all getting in on the act!!  You just have to check out all the case studies but the Carpet Depot one is an absolute classic – scroll down and click on the “who works here” video.  Makes me want to go to Atlanta, Georgia for all my carpet needs – they are all so sweet!

There are a number of inexpensive turnkey solutions to do streaming video online, the best of which is Armand Morin’s Generator suite of products including InstantAudioGenerator and InstantVideoGenerator.   However, easy to use as this is, it will lock you into a small but recurring payment for the life of your website.  If you are not at all techie minded, this is probably the best solution for you however and Armand’s products have some nice little extras like being able to quickly record a video using the cam on your computer and send out your message as a video postcard – great click through rates on those, let me tell you. 

If you want to learn how to do it yourself, step by step, and get more skilled while still using easy-to-learn tools, then you need to get to know my audio and video mentor - Mike Stewart - you can check out his great – and very inexpensive – tutorials here (which I have and I swear by!)  

http://www.fromthedeskofmikestewart.com

Mike owned – and may still own for all I know – his own recording studio in Nashville and speaks at every internet marketing event as he’s passionate about using audio and video on the internet. He has some very inexpensive tutorials on DVD or to download, and walks you through all the equipment you need (and never more than you need!)

He has just released a great one-hour audio with Tracy Childers, of FLV Producer fame and here’s what Tracy had to say about it.

“This certainly is an exciting time to be on the cutting edge of video. The past 3 years have been absolutely amazing.  The great news is that more is yet to come. I just finished an interview with Mike Stewart “The Internet Video Guy”. We talked about using video on the internet and what the latest and most effective trends are. The interview is just over an hour long and we posted it for you online at:
http://www.tracyandmikevideo.com You can listen to the whole thing from the site or you can download the mp3 file. It’s in the top right corner of the page.  Look for the Yellow Play button or the mp3 download. You’ll definitely want to hear this call. Wait until you hear the results he shares that he and his clients are getting with, “Video Landing Pages”. If you don’t know what that is, don’t worry we explain it specifically in the interview. http://www.tracyandmikevideo.com Have a great weekend and keep making more videos! Best of Success, Tracy Childers FLV Producer

You can also view this video about how to go straight to video blogging with Wordpress, using a custom template, by InternetGenius, which I found on one of my new homes www.viddler.com/wealthcoach

Only So Much Grazia You Can Read!

You know things are bad on the boredom front when you start looking forward to the One Show.  It’s a bit like South Today but a teeny bit livelier.  A teeny bit.

I’m two days into recovery from the removal of my gall bladder operation (see the whole procedure here on YouTube - I didn’t dare watch before but fascinating now, watched it three times so far) and when the drugs have kicked in the boredom also kicks in. 

When it hurts I’m happy to sleep, when it doesn’t I’m swapping from blogging, to poker, to reading to watching day time tv including endless re-runs of Homes Under The Hammer (I’m quite enjoying the latter when not shouting at the TV “Don’t sell, WHY are you selling?!!”

Then you think “I can’t stay in bed any longer, I’m getting up” and like an old lady stapled in half, you totter to the bathroom and by the time you get there you remember what you just went through and why you were in bed in the first place.

Steve is being an absolute angel (well, he says it’s not actually making much difference me being in bed!) and even the kids are behaving themselves ……largely.

It was the drain that is causing the pain apparently – must have been attached to my lung by the feel of it.  Still, I’m able to haul myself upright on my own today, shame as it was quite fun being winched about by the gang!

Tomorrow I’m going to work the “machines behind the scenes” on the Money Gym Gold wealth surgery webinar, then spend the day learning how to podcast etc, using our new Wordpress blog as taught by my audio and video mentor Mike Stewart.