Wednesday May 2nd, 2007: Issue #797
Over the years in Kickstart I’ve several times raised the possibility of offering personal mentoring. Each time I’ve been flooded with emails from people asking where they can sign up, but each time I’ve ultimately shied away from the idea for a whole variety of reasons.
Well now I’m raising it again, but this time I’m serious.
Sometime very soon I will be launching a special membership site that will give you direct email access to me as your personal Internet marketing mentor. But, as they say in the best infomercials, that’s not all!
My plan is not to just sit here and dole out snippets of information. I want to see you succeed. That’s why my membership site will give you a heap of special content - exclusive articles, tools and tips; interviews with successful people; special deals on the latest products; a private forum.
Most importantly, you will no longer be alone. Internet marketing can be very tough, very confusing and very lonely so knowing that there is someone you can bounce ideas off of, ask advice from and keep on track with is an invaluable resource.
I’ll let you know more details soon, so watch this space.
Right now I’m still formulating the site’s structure and planning the initial content, but two things are certain:
1. Membership will be strictly limited.
2. The price will be deliberately set as low as possible - and Kickstart readers will be given a really special deal.
More soon …
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When I first launched Kickstart on October 1st 2002, I was talking to myself. I had no subscribers at all. Not one. But I knew that pretty soon I would have people to talk to because I was using a service called Subscription Rocket to get me subscribers. I’d used them with my previous newsletter and knew how effective they were.
Subscription Rocket was a kind of traffic exchange - members would show ads on their pages for other members newsletters. It worked great and very soon Kickstart had several thousand members. Some of those original Subscription Rocket subscribers are still regular readers. You may be one of them!
A couple of years ago, Subscription Rocket went belly up. I don’t know why. Their site just stopped working and new subscribers stopped overnight.
Around that time Robert Puddy told me about his Advertising Know How system. He even set me up with a free membership.
AKH is very clever in that it makes use of one of the most valuable, but most underused pieces of online real estate - the thank you page. You set a small bit of code on your newsletter thank you page and every times someone signs up for your newsletter they are shown information about a few other newsletters that they may also be interested in. It isn’t pushy and signing up is totally optional.
Great idea. So what did I do? I ignored it. Don’t ask me why, but stupidly I never even bothered to activate my subscription that Robert had given me.
Every once in a while I’d think that I really should do something about it, but kept right on putting it off.
Until Sunday. On Sunday I came across Robert’s old email from a couple of years ago with my username and password in it, so I figured I’d check to see if they’d still work. They did and within a couple of minutes I had the code I needed to add to my own thank you page.
What did I have to lose? It would either work, or it wouldn’t. Either way it was no big deal.
Famous last words.
In less than 48 hours, the Kickstart subscriber list has increased by more than 40! And you may be one of THEM! (If you are, welcome!)
My legs are now black and blue from me kicking myself over the number of subscribers my ‘couldn’t be bothered’ procrastination has cost me over two years.
I’ve already upgraded my membership of Advertising Know How to a higher level. I’m not going to let inactivity cost me with this one again!
If you have a newsletter, Advertising Know How is well worth checking out. You can join for free, but the low cost upgrade is well worth considering.
http://www.urlnex.us/advertisingknowhow/
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There are three of my wordlist packs left to be given as a bonus to anyone who buys Niche Inspector.
My video review of this excellent software is at http://www.kickstartdaily.com/nicheinspector/
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Cool clearly isn’t what it used to be.
In just a few days, with no clever SEO stuff involved, my blog is now at #25 in Google (out of 840,000) for the term ‘coolest guy on the planet’.
And as my children will tell anyone who listens, I am soooo not!
I’m told that on Google France I’m at #4! Shows how unfit the French are to judge coolness!
Despite knowing in my heart that it is all nonsense, I’m still off out today to buy myself a new pair of sunglasses.
I wonder if a Samuel L. Jackson beret would suit me too?
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The thread I started over at the Warriors Forum about why more women don’t attend Internet marketing seminars, workshops and lunches has turned into something absolutely fascinating.
It should be required reading for all seminar organizers. Indeed, some of the comments have so shocked me that I’d say it should be required reading for all men.
One thing that has particularly shocked me is the feeling among many of the women respondents that being ‘hit on’ by men is inevitable. And as that is both uncomfortable and unwelcome, they don’t attend as a result.
Wow! Are men still so Neanderthal? In all the seminars I’ve only once seen an alpha-male type ‘hit on’ a woman. But as a man, perhaps I’m just not attuned to it in the same way that women are.
One woman sent me a private message through he forum saying that at least 50% of the men she has had email correspondence with - through the Warriors forum (so these are Internet marketers, not chat room losers) - have made unwelcome advances. That is shocking.
I’m wondering, without in any way belittling the women’s experiences or fears, if much of the problem comes down to communication. Perhaps men, who are slightly uncomfortable in women’s company, resort to ’suggestive’ banter because to them, that breaks the ice. I can imagine that happening, but can also imagine that 99% of those same men would be horrified if they realized that they were being taken seriously. And mortified to think that their own words brand them as ‘dirty old men’ or perverts.
If so, then maybe we men need to rethink our small talk!
It is a fascinating topic, and a thread that is well worth taking the time to read.
http://www.warriorforum.com/forum/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=149931
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An Inspirational Thought
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Have you ever blown up a balloon and then let the air out again?
It never goes back to the same size again, does it. Once you’ve filled it with air, the rubber stretches and the balloon is forever changed.
Our brains are like rubber balloons. Every time we fill them with new ideas, thoughts, concepts and knowledge, the edges are expanded a little and nothing we can do can unexpand them again.
Real inspiration comes from allowing our minds to stretch a little further than we are normally comfortable with. That simple act of widening the window in our mind lets so much more light in that all kinds of dark places become forever illuminated.
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Who do you know who would love Kickstart Today?
Don’t keep it to yourself - send them to
http://www.kickstartdaily.com today!
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The Quote of the Day
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Charles Swindoll said,
“Attitude is more important than the past, than education, than money, than circumstances, than what people do or say. It is more important than appearance, giftedness, or skill.”
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Today’s Power Thought
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In Alice in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll wrote “Sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”
Today, I don’t know if you’ve had your breakfast or not yet, but I certainly don’t want you to believe six impossible things. Just one will do to start with.
The one impossible thing that I want you to believe today - and I really mean BELIEVE it with every ounce of your being - is that you CAN.
You CAN achieve success.
You CAN do anything that you WANT to do.
You CAN … fill in your own blank!
With that fundamental belief, anything that is physically possible is within your range. At at times, even disability isn’t a barrier if you have sufficient belief.
I read a while ago about a young man who was a successful mountain climber. He had a fall and trapped his arm between two rocks. He had a choice that most of us couldn’t imagine having to take - he could hang there until he died, or he could cut off his own arm. He chose to live. But that horrific tale isn’t the end of it.
He could easily have decided that without an arm, his mountain climbing days were over, but not this guy. He has the fire of ‘I Can’ burning like a torch inside of him.
He now has a prosthetic arm, shaped like a pirate’s hook and he is back climbing mountains like he never left off.
You don’t need to cut off your own arm to prove that you can climb mountains - and we all have different mountains to tackle in any case. What you do need is an absolute, unshakeable certainty that you CAN climb it.
When you KNOW that you CAN, actually doing it doesn’t seem so hard after all.
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Fascinating Facts
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The Sahara desert is huge. So big, in fact, that only three countries in the World are bigger: Russia, Canada and China.
There are sand dunes in the Sahara that are taller than the highest skyscrapers in America.
And because of the way that the Earth shifts around, 450 million years ago, the South Pole was situated where the Sahara desert is now.