Friday July 27th, 2007: Issue #826
This has been a very strange week. It has been like waiting for the second shoe to fall, if you know what I mean!
Last Friday, our eldest daughter Hannah and her fiancé Alex exchanged contracts on the apartment they have been trying to buy for the past 4 months. In Britain, there is a gap between exchanging the legal documents and paying a deposit (which binds both parties to the deal) and actually taking possession of the property. Hannah and Alex take possession and get the keys to their own home today.
That means that our daughter is leaving home today.
We’ve known it has been coming all week - Hannah crashing around in her room packing all her worldly possessions up in bags and boxes made that very obvious! Delia and I are both feeling very strange: scared, worried, excited and very, very emotional. I’ve got tears in my eyes just thinking about it!
As a parent you always know that this day is destined to come some time. Your children grow up, get lives of their own and fly the nest. That’s the whole point, after all.
But now that day is here I’m finding it all quite overwhelming.
And now I’m dripping all over the keyboard. This isn’t doing my macho he-man image any good at all! 
I’ll be back later when my monitor isn’t so fuzzy.
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Okay. I’ve had a few cups of coffee and am back to my old self … for now.
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Questions and Answers about Unique Article Wizard…
On Wednesday I talked about one of the few membership sites I now belong to that I would never want to cancel: Unique Article Wizard. If you missed that issue of Kickstart you can read my review at http://www.kickstartdaily.com/blog/
Quite a lot of Kickstart readers went to view the UAW sales page and a stonking (I like that word!) 11% of them joined the service. If you are one of them please keep me posted on your progress.
On the other hand, if you are one of the 89% who didn’t join yet, let me know what your questions or concerns are and I’ll try to help.
Over the last couple of days I have had several emails asking questions about Unique Article Wizard and I thought it would be useful to write them up here:
Q. UAW seems quite cheap compared to other services … are there any hidden costs, or extra software that needs to be bought?
A. It is cheap, particularly when you consider the power it puts in your hands. No, there are no extra costs and nothing that you need to buy.
Q. Other article submission services expect you to register with hundreds of article directories before they will submit to them. Unique Article Wizard submits to over 800 directories so does the registration process take forever?
A. With UAW you don’t have to pre-register with the directories. Just write up your article and press the submit button. It is very quick and a whole lot easier than any other article submission service I’ve ever used.
Q. How does UAW manage to submit different articles to each directory? Does it use a built-in set of synonym replacement tools and do the articles make sense?
A. The actual method that UAW uses to make each article it submits unique is covered by a non-disclosure agreement that everyone who joins has to sign. Because of that I can’t tell you exactly how it works, but I can say that it doesn’t do synonym replacement. Long time Kickstart readers will know that I totally approve of the method UAW uses as it can only produce human-readable results.
Q. 800 directories sounds like overkill. Surely you can get good results from submitting articles to the three or four biggest directories and forgetting the rest.
A. It depends on whether you are looking for short term traffic or long term backlinks (and therefore organic search engine rankings). Submitting to a few really big directories may get you some traffic, but it will not do much for your backlinks. The search engines seem to love one-way inbound links at the moment and will look very favorably on your sites if you can get plenty of them. Unique Article Wizard works wonders there on two fronts: first it gets your article (and its backlinking resource box) on hundreds of sites that the SEs visit and spider regularly, and second, it does so in a measured, time-controlled way. You won’t get 800 backlinks in one day - they will gradually build up in the natural, organic way that the search engines much prefer.
Q. I’ve read on forums that article marketing is not as effective as it once was. Do you really think that this is a positive way to spend your time when other marketing methods may now be better?
A. Whoever told you that was probably one of those forum experts whose only real expertise is posting to forums about stuff they don’t know anything about! Let me reassure you, article marketing is alive and well and going from strength to strength for the people who understand how to do it right. Of course, with the SEs (mainly Google) starting to look out for duplicate content, it is no longer particularly effective to submit private label articles without substantially rewriting them, and even your own articles need to be changed up for each directory submission. Unique Article Wizard does that for you and puts you several steps ahead of the game.
There are a lot of folks doing very well indeed who only use article marketing to promote their websites. The rumor of the death of article marketing has been greatly exaggerated by people who would rather flit on to the next bright and shiny idea than to understand the dynamics of one thing well.
It has taken me six months of testing and monitoring to be absolutely certain that Unique Article Wizard deserves to be a central part of every serious Internet marketer’s arsenal. You don’t have to wait that long - you could easily have your first article on its way to over 800 directories by the end of today!
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Poor old Delia is suffering from a painful condition called plantar fasciitis. It is an inflammation of the deep tissue under the heel that makes walking very uncomfortable indeed.
Not good, since we are soon going on a vacation that will involve quite a lot of walking!
Her doctor was (as we’ve come to expect) less than forthcoming and offered no suggestions or treatment beyond the advice that ‘it might go away on its own’ and ‘look it up online.’
We did just that - Wikipedia covers almost everything - and have found a few suggestions.
The condition is quite common, apparently. Have you suffered from it? If so, what worked for you?
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We had a nice surprise yesterday afternoon.
The doorbell rang and when I opened the door a man said “I’m here to fit your new car radio.”
I must have looked puzzled (or perhaps just gormless) because he went on, “Your insurance company sent me. Your radio was damaged?”
Ah. Yes, my car was broken in to a few weeks ago and I had reported my radio damaged to the insurance company, but they had never mentioned it again. The damaged car door had been repaired and they had written to me to ask for a detailed list of items stolen, but no mention of the radio. And now, here was the man to fix it. Unannounced.
I’m a suspicious sort, so I sat in the car with him while he got to work, and ten minutes later I had a very nice, top of the range radio/cd player that is, frankly, a whole lot better than my old one.
And all I had to do was sign a form to say he had carried out the work satisfactorily.
No problem there!
Perhaps a letter got lost in the post, or perhaps they aren’t as efficient as I thought they were, but I certainly can’t complain that they don’t honor their policies!
Now if only I had something to play on it - all my in-car CDs were stolen in the break-in!
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An Inspirational Thought
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You are a Human Being.
Not a Human Wasing. Not a Human Willing. Not a Human Doing. Certainly not a Human Maybeing.
Being is present tense. We are here to be. Now. Right now.
Fulfill your potential as a Human by working hard on the being part. As they say, learn from the past, anticipate the future, but ACT in the present.
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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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Thomas Edison said,
“Keep on the lookout for novel ideas that others have used successfully. Your idea has to be original only in its adaptation to the problem you’re working on.”
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Today’s Power Thought
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When I worked in offices, one of the biggest problems that I saw was what I called the ‘corridor syndrome.’
People would meet in the corridors, the kitchen, the elevator, on the stairs or any one of a dozen other informal places and start a serious business conversation.
This happens because one of the parties is focused on a particular problem and has to share it right there and then.
So what? Isn’t any communication better than none?
Well no. And for one very good reason.
To the person who just ‘has to get it off their chest’, the issue being discussed is usually of vital importance. But to the other person, it generally isn’t.
The result is that one party thinks that an urgent meeting has just taken place, with a clear set of objectives resulting, whereas the other thinks that they’ve just had a pleasant chat while making a cup of coffee.
These one-sided communications nearly always ends up with misunderstandings, missed deadlines and worse.
The corridor syndrome applies to all of us whether we work in an office or not. If you have something to say to another person, make sure that they are in the right frame of mind to really hear what you are saying. And never assume that they will take resultant actions unless you have a clear and specific agreement from them that they will do so.
It might be feel a little pedantic at first, but taking the time to ensure that your communications are two- sided will save you a whole lot of heartache later on.
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Fascinating Facts
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Each king in a deck of playing cards represents a great king from history:
Spades - King David
Hearts - Charlemagne
Clubs - Alexander the Great
Diamonds - Julius Caesar