Wednesday November 14th, 2007: Issue #858
My little rant on Monday about my daughter’s problems getting her school to take her university application forms seriously hit a nerve with a lot of people.
It seems that teachers who don’t take the process as seriously as they should are a worldwide phenomenon. I’ve had emails from many other concerned parents in the UK as well as messages from America, Canada, Australia and India saying that many schools there are just as lax about such an important thing.
Our situation is now resolved - but it took Delia speaking with three people at the school before the teacher who is at the root of the problem deigned to call her back.
The woman was completely unconcerned that Lauren’s application had been sitting on her desk for weeks and said ‘well, it isn’t officially due in until January anyway.’
Yes, the ‘rules’ may say that January is the final date, but all the universities we visited stressed very clearly that they deal with the applications as they come in, so anyone waiting until the last minute is going to be at a severe disadvantage as popular courses will likely be filled by then.
When Delia pointed that out to the teacher she just said ‘that’s not the way it is supposed to work.’
I won’t go into details, but suffice it to say that Delia got cross. With the result that the teacher promised to send the forms off within the hour.
Hello … real world to teacher … how about listening to what the universities say that they do rather than follow some guidebook? Or would that entail taking some personal responsibility?
Lauren’s forms have now been completed and submitted. I wonder though how many other young people have bust a gut to write the best applications, to work towards the best future they can only to have a rulebook quoting jobsworth put that future in jeopardy?
I don’t care whether it is in Lahore, London or Louisiana, Bombay, Brisbane, Boston or Bristol, our kids’ education is important. And idiots in any country shouldn’t be allowed to put that at risk.
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Kickstart is a bit later than usual today because I’ve been reading.
A couple of weeks ago I was sent an new ebook to review, but it coincided with my going to America and by the time I got back I’d forgotten all about it.
Yesterday morning I received an email from the author ‘reminding’ me that the book launches today and wondering what I thought of it. The author, Chris Freville is a really nice guy who I’ve met several times at seminars so even though I was busy, I set aside a few minutes to scan the book.
Damn him. It was way too good to scan and I spend a couple of hours reading. Then I printed it out and took it to bed with me. Even then I wasn’t finished, so I had to sit and read the rest this morning.
Now I’m running behind, but it was worth every minute.
The book is called ‘Web 2.0 Traffic Stampede’ and it is a cracking good read.
As I’ve said several times in Kickstart, Web 2.0 has crept up on me while I’ve still been trying to understand Web 1.0 and largely leaves my either confused or cold. That’s all changed. Chris Freville has turned me from being a Web 2.0 dunce to a dynamo in 120 plain English pages.
I now understand things that 24 hours ago I didn’t even know existed. Things that can bring traffic by the boat load. Now that HAS to be good!
Incidentally, you might be wondering why it took me three separate sessions to read a 120 page ebook. It isn’t that I’m a particularly slow reader - it is just that I was taking copious notes as I went along. So much so that at 12.45 this morning Delia told me in no uncertain terms to “stop scribbling and put the wretched light out!”
The best ebooks are the ones that you can point to one thing you learned that will make you back ten times the price of the book. With Chris Freville’s ‘Web 2.0 Traffic Stampede’ I’ve literally lost count of the number of such gems.
Web 2.0 is here. There is no point in being a luddite about it and burying your head in the sand as I’ve been doing for most of the last year. Web 2.0 isn’t going away, so all of us who make money online have to embrace it with open arms and “Web 2.0 Traffic Stampede’ makes that so easy to do.
http://www.urlnex.us/web2trafficstampede/
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“There are lies, damned lies and statistics.” So said either Mark Twain, or Benjamin Disraeli, depending on which side of the pond you reside.
Neither esteemed gentleman can have anticipated how that phrase could be applied to the Internet!
When I mentioned my new website on Monday, I was very interested to look at my web stats to see how many people went to visit it.
That’s where the lies, damned lies and statistics come in.
Going on page impressions for Monday 12th November - the number of times a page of the site was opened in a broswer - AWStats, the program that supposedly monitors my server’s logs, reported just 54. Google Analytics was a bit more generous - they tell me that the score was 361. Google AdSense, on the other hand, are positively gushing - 1533 page views!
54? 361? 1533? Which is the lie and which the statistic?
Unique visitors should be a better figure to look at: the number of individuals who visited the site, counting each person only once. Yes, that’ll be better. Or not. AWStats shows 37, Google Analytics shows 222.
It really is getting so that you don’t know who to trust anymore! 
Anyway, what does it matter so long as they click on the links!
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As soon as Kickstart is sent off today I’m planning a session with Camtasia. As I promised on Monday, I am going to offer my special wordlists for sale for the very first time and I want to show how they can be used with the four major keyword research tools that I own: Niche Inspector, Keyword Elite, Keyword Locator and AdWord Analyzer.
What are my special wordlists?
The secret to making money, as we are all told ad infinitum, is to find a niche market.
The question that we all hear, all the time, is “HOW do I find a niche market?”
My special wordlists let you uncover niches that you never even knew existed.
Here’s what they are about.
Over the last three years I’ve been building lists of what I call seed words. I’ve gathered them from public domain dictionaries and wordlists and then spent many, many hours cleaning them up, de-duplicating them and sorting them out into usable lists.
The project now has 161 files, each one with up to 1000 words in it.
On their own, the wordlists aren’t much use, but combined with the power of a keyword research program such as one of the ones I’ve mentioned above, they are dynamite.
Feed a thousand words into a powerful keyword analysis tool like Niche Inspector and let it report back how many searches each one gets, how many Google ads each one commands and how many web pages each one appears on. Niche Inspector and the other tools can do that automatically for you while you get on with other stuff (like playing Spider Solitaire if you wish!).
When the keyword tool has finished, a few quick filters quickly sorts the 1000 out for you and shows which ones are worth investigating further.The usual suspects will be there, but so too will be keywords that you wouldn’t have thought of in a million years.
I regularly find ten or twenty great niches from a single word file.
And there are 161 of them - many of which I’ve never even run the numbers on!
The combination of a good keyword research tool and my special wordlists means that you’ll never wonder what niche to target ever again. You’ll have more niche ideas that you’ll ever be able to use.
My Camtasia video will show how I use my lists in the four keyword tools. It’ll be ready later today and I’ll send you a link to it as soon as it is ready.
I had planned to make this a relatively expensive offer. At least $147. But I’ve had a change of heart. I’d like you to get the benefits without breaking the bank. Use what you’ve saved to buy a really good keyword research tool like Niche Inspector.
There will be an order form with the video, but if you would like to be ahead of game, you can PayPal $67 to me right away - m.avis@ntlworld.com - and I’ll send you the entire zipped package of 161 files.
This offer is strictly limited to 150 sets only. Once they are gone, this offer won’t be repeated. Any payments received after the 150 are sold will be returned.
The package needs a name. Let’s call it the ‘Kickstart Your Niche Search Files’.
I’ll process all the orders by hand, so please allow time for me to action your order.
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An Inspirational Thought
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I was talking to a friend earlier this morning about how he is getting fed up with not making a success of his online marketing ventures.
Fortunately, he is a sticker not a quitter and so I have every confidence that he will hit on the formula that will work for him.
That’s what success is about - try everything and learn from all the ones that don’t work. Eventually, like Thomas Edison when he went through 10,000 prototypes, the light will go off. As he said, ‘I didn’t have 10,000 failure, I learned 10,000 ways that didn’t work.’
Look around you - unless you are one of the very rare people who are the absolute first at doing something, there are successful people all around you in whatever endeavor you are taking on.
You don’t have to copy them - more often than not that is a route that leads in the opposite direction to success because what works for their personality may not match yours - just take encouragement from one simple, self-evident fact:
No matter how hard you are finding the journey, and how many set backs you are experiencing, someone, somewhere is making it all work. Success IS possible! It CAN be done! All you have to do is keep looking until you find a route to that success that works for you.
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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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Washington Irving said,
“Great minds have purposes, others have wishes.”
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Today’s Power Thought
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What do you want to be?
I don’t mean ‘when you grow up’ - I mean what do you want to be, right now?
* Do you want to be a writer?
* Do you want to be an entrepreneur?
* Do you want to be successful?
* Do you want to be popular?
* Do you want to be an authority in your field?
* What do YOU want to BE?
I’m sure that every single one of us has a list in our heads of things that we want to be - and a much longer list of excuses why we aren’t or can’t.
Well think on this for a second:
You are what you are.
You ARE what you ARE.
If you want TO BE a writer, for example, you will remain wanting TO BE a writer for as long as your mind keeps ‘writerdom’ in the future tense.
The day you stop saying I WANT TO BE and starting I AM is the day that the future arrives in the present, and the day that you become your dream.
When you say ‘I AM a writer’ you no longer have the luxury of all those excuses. They stop mattering. The only thing that matters now is how you will find the time and inspiration to write. And if your mind accepts the idea that a writer is what you now are, it will also accept that it has to help out with all the trimmings. opportunities will open up for you so that you can sit down to write, ideas will start to flow, inspirations will start to arrive from places you didn’t even think possible.
Writing is a concrete example, but how does it work for the more abstract concepts like success and popularity?
Just the same! Once your mental process has brought the desire from the future (I want to be) to the present (I am) your subconscious brain starts to shape your behaviors so that they fit the concept that you are manifesting.
That is not to say that you adopt a ‘fake it until you make it’ approach, but that you start to see the world through the eyes of one who is where you want to be.
A popular person sees the world differently to an unpopular one and behaves accordingly. That behavior reinforces the popularity and so the attribute gets stronger.
The same with success. How often do we say that success breeds success? It really does - successful people see the world as a pool of opportunity and have no qualms about wading in to take what is theirs. By adopting that mindset, you can soon be wading with the best of them!
So today, think about what you want to be. Then instead of just wanting, start being.
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Fascinating Facts
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The ice-cream soda was invented in 1875 by William Garwood of Evanston, Illinois.
He was frustrated by a law that prohibited the sale of soda drinks on Sundays, so found himself a loophole - there was nothing forbidding its use as an ingredient!