Friday June 22nd, 2007: Issue #814
Wednesday’s Kickstart wasn’t eaten by anything. It was never written in the first place. Instead, we left home at the crack of dawn for a 500 mile road trip to visit one of the universities that daughter Lauren is thinking about applying to.
Plymouth University is one of a few who run the course that she wants to study, three of which are all on the South Coast of England. Tomorrow we will visit Bournemouth and next week, Portsmouth.
Universities hold open days for these visits, give guided campus tours and offer short seminars and talks about the courses on offer and university life in general.
Having never attended university it was quite an eye-opener for me. I hadn’t appreciated how much of a self-contained town a university is.
It was a great day. Very tiring, but very inspirational - and not least, rather scary!
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Many years ago, when I produced my first ezine, BizE-zine, I used to create it in a special format so that people with Palm Pilots could easily read it too. That’s something I never bothered with for Kickstart, and the fashion for PDAs waned. Nobody has ever asked me for a PDA-friendly version.
Last week I had a chance meeting with an old friend. It was great to meet up with someone I’d lost touch with and we chatted for a while and exchanged cards.
He is now working with a company who are interested in WAP phone technology.
I got to thinking that with five million WAP phones in the UK alone and a growing trend back to PDAs and Blackberries that maybe a mobile version of Kickstart wouldn’t be a bad idea.
Of course I had no idea how to go about it, so I did some research and got cracking on a pilot.
I’m quite pleased with the result. It looks great on my PDA. I haven’t looked at it on a cell phone yet because my aged phone isn’t up to it.
Please take a look (on a phone or PDA). The URL is http://www.kickstartdaily.com/mobile/kst21-6-07.htm
It isn’t intended to be viewed on a PC or laptop, so if you do take a look on one of those, it’ll look terrible!
But if you can view it on a mobile media, please let me know how it looks for you.
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Speaking of forums, Robert Puddy’s one went over the 1000 members mark and the entry price was duly raised to $48. I’m not sure exactly how many Kickstarters joined, but those who came in through my link number about 100 and I’m sure there are a lot more who snuck in through other people’s links.
If you didn’t get into the first 1000, don’t despair, you can still join but it’ll just cost you a bit more. It is still worth every penny - already there is information being freely exchanged that makes any admission price seem like nothing. http://www.urlnex.us/ForumKnowHow/
Our own Kickstart Forum, on the other hand, is free to join and has a lovely atmosphere. There aren’t a lot of members (hint - if you joined Puddy’s one for $10, the least you can do is join the Kickstart one as well!) but those who are there are always happy to offer suggestions and help - or just take the mickey out of each other!
One good thing is that I seem to have cracked the spam problem at last. PHPbb forums are notorious for being spam magnets and slowing the onslaught is very difficult. But the latest very simple mod that I made to the script has resulted in zero bogus registrations and zero junk posts for over 24 hours.
We still have the odd offensive post, but Pearson Brown and John Falkinder don’t visit every day! 
http://kickstarttodayforum.com
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Several Kickstarters have taken Kim Standerline up on her incredible offer of her great membership site software for half price. Let me know when your membership sites are up and running guys, and I’ll mention them for you.
That goes for anyone who buys Kim’s software.
Membership sites are the future. The idea that everything online has to be free is thankfully beginning to wane and the world at large is coming to understand that if you want quality information you have to be prepared to pay for it.
Even membership sites with very low admission fees make a lot of money - imagine how easy it is to get people to pay $5 a month for well written, on target information. $5 is next to nothing but if you can attract just 100 people to join you’ll have a very handy extra $500 coming in every month. You can do the math - attract 1000 people and you have a full-time income!
But whether you have 50 subscribers or 5000 paying you a small fee, the amount of work you need to do is exactly the same. It is the ultimate ‘work once, and earn unlimited times’ business.
Scripts like Kim’s Easy Member Pro are designed to make the process of running a membership site dead simple. Everything is done for you so all you need do is create each month’s content and handle the promotion while the money rolls in.
This half-price offer won’t last for long, but while it does it is the bargain of the year!
http://www.kickstartdaily.com/emp-special/
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An Inspirational Thought
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Taking action is the fastest way to achieve anything, yet so many people find it a hard thing to do.
Once you have started, it is like rolling downhill on a bicycle - momentum keeps you going. But how do you start?
Here is one way - stop thinking.
They say that ‘as a man thinks, so he becomes’ but if he thinks for too long, he becomes just that - a thinker. Not a doer.
Procrastination is 90% rationalization and only 10% idleness. Stop rationalizing and just have a go.
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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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Joe Kapp said,
“Success is living up to your potential. That’s all. Wake up with a smile, and go after life … Live it, enjoy it, taste it, smell it, feel it.”
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Today’s Power Thought
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This power thought appears, on the surface, to be about Internet marketing but it really isn’t. That is just the messenger. The real message applies to anything in life.
On the Warrior Forum this morning (yes, I still go there) a guy was complaining that Internet marketers don’t make their instructions easy enough for older people. He said that because he is 67 he needs a point and click approach.
While I also like a point and click approach, I think his excuse of being 67 is utter nonsense. If his mind has slowed up that much it is due to his own laziness, not the number of years he has lived. There are plenty of people a generation older than him who still learn new tricks and still manage to get to grips with Internet marketing. And a whole lot of youngsters who can barely turn a computer on.
I wrote a reply - you might find it interesting:
I don’t think that it is an age issue at all. I hear all kinds of excuses why people won’t allow themselves to learn new things and age is just one of them.
“Too busy”
“Not technically minded”
“I’m a woman”
“I’m a man”
“Live in the wrong place”
“Too poor”
“Easily confused”
In the end, whatever reason is used to stop yourself from getting on with the job in hand is just that: an excuse.
Old age can bring some mental challenges but frankly, by the time they are severe enough to prevent you from learning to do the rather simple things that Internet marketers need to learn, you probably aren’t going to want to bother with it all anyway.
I do try to teach basic principles by using a step-by-step approach. From my own point of view it makes it easier to arrange my thoughts. However, it most definitely isn’t always the best way to teach. And can lead to even worse confusion.
Let me clarify.
If I sell a script and decide to provide a simple, plain-English step-by-step video on how to FTP the files so that even absolute beginners can get started quickly, according to the original poster in this thread, and some who have supported his view, I’d be a hero.
The reality is that I’d almost certainly be doing him a big disservice and probably confusing him even more.
You see, I would make my video showing how I FTP using the software that I own. In my case, that would be SmartFTP.
He may have CuteFTP or Filezilla or some other program.
If he really is as unwilling to learn new things for himself as he suggests (not too old, just too unwilling) then there is strong chance that showing the ‘SmartFTP way’ will confuse him completely.
“It all looks different on my screen”
“What you showed doesn’t work for me”
“My friend’s cousin’s 16-year-old says you don’t know what you are talking about”
I’d raise more problems for him that I’d hope to solve.
The ‘watch this, point here, click that’ approach can only work when everyone has exactly the same software, on the same computer with the same configuration. Unlikely at best.
Like it or not, almost everything we do online can be done dozens of different ways, with dozens of different software solutions and those of us who try to teach can never cover all the bases for those people who aren’t willing to learn the basic principles.
I’m older than some and a good deal younger than many and Internet marketing is a constant challenge. But not because of my age. It is usually my own stupidity that holds me up and I’m neither too old, nor too young to admit it.
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Fascinating Facts
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At the last official count, 92 nuclear bombs have been lost at sea.