Kickstart #894: Try, try again. No thanks!
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Kickstart Today
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Friday February 29th, 2008: Issue #894
Kickstart Today is published three times each week for
opted-in subscribers only. Publisher: Martin Avis.
Your comments are always welcome - to respond to
anything you read here, please click ‘Reply’
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Greetings!
Its funny the things we do in the name of hobbies.
My vegetable plots are coming on well now - two of the
five are dug and almost ready to have the first seeds
planted under cloches.
Yesterday I went to our local garden center and spent
almost £100 ($200) on seeds, cloches, posts and
panels, bags of manure and whole load of other stuff
that I ‘really need’.
Of course, the likelihood getting even half of that
back in the value of the produce is slim.
But hey, its a hobby, isn’t it, so the money doesn’t
count!
There is a marketing lesson in that: people who are
newly obsessed about their latest hobby are the
easiest people to sell to.
Even though I now have a small library of glossy
gardening books adorning my bookshelves and piled up
beside my bed, I’m sure that if I came across an ebook
on ‘How to Produce an Endless Flow of Delicious
Vegetables from Your Own Back Yard’ I’d rush to buy
it.
When you’re in the ‘keen-as-mustard’ phase of any new
hobby, you just crave information - at almost any
price.
#~#~#
I’m tempted to give up on movies for a while.
Normally I like most films I see - some are better
than others, of course, but most have some redeeming
qualities. But lately we’ve hit a bad run. First I was
less than enthusiastic about Sweeney Todd, then I was
revolted by Rambo. Then last night we thought we’d try
a comedy.
Jack Black’s new movie, ‘Be Kind Rewind’ is the
biggest load of rubbish that I’ve had the misfortune
to sit through for a very long time. Utter bilge.
I’m way too mean to walk out of a movie, but after the
first 15 minutes I was sorely tempted. But I stayed,
hoping it would get better. It didn’t.
Even Danny Glover - an actor who I really like -
failed to lift this mess from the floor. In fact, he
acted it as if someone was blackmailing him to be in
it.
Please let a decent movie come out soon - I’m losing
the will to keep driving to the cinema!
#~#~#
Apart from a gentle reminder about the excellent
Mafioso Marketing ebook that I recommended on
Wednesday - http://www.urlnex.us/mafiosomarketing/ -
there isn’t anything to buy in today’s Kickstart. So
kick back, look forward to the weekend and enjoy!
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An Inspirational Thought
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Rules for being Human.
by Dr. Cherie Carter-Scott
You will receive a body.
You may like it or hate it,
but it’s yours to keep
for the entire period.
You will learn lessons.
You are enrolled in a full-time,
informal school called life.
There are no mistakes, only lessons.
Growth is a process of trial, error
and experimentation.
The “failed” experiments are as much
a part of the process as the experiments
that ultimately “work”.
Lessons are repeated until they are learned.
A lesson will be presented to you in various forms
until you have learned it.
When you have learned it,
you can go on to the next lesson.
Learning lessons does not end.
There is no part of life that doesn’t
contain it’s lessons.
If you’re alive,
there are still lessons to be learned.
“There” is no better than “here”.
When your “there” has become “here”,
you will simply obtain another “there”
that will again look better than “here”.
Other people are merely mirrors of you.
You can not love or hate something
about another person unless it reflects to you
something you love or hate about yourself.
What you make of your life is up to you.
You have all the tools and resources you need.
What you do with them is up to you.
The choice is yours.
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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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Lisa M. Amos said, “Entrepreneurs average 3.8 failures
before a final success. What sets the successful ones
apart is their AMAzing persistence. There are a lot of
people out there with good and marketable ideas, but
pure entrepreneurial types almost never accept
defeat.”
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Today’s Power Thought
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Today I’m taking the unusual step of commenting on the
quote of the day.
It is by a lady called Lisa M. Amos. There are quite a
few success quotations attributed to her, but so far
I’ve been unable to turn up any information on who she
is.
There is another similar quote from Thomas Edison that
goes, “Many of life’s failures are men who did not
realize how close they were to success before they
gave up.”
Or one from Elbert Hubbard: “The line between failure
and success is so fine that we … are often on the
line and we don’t know it. How many a man has thrown
up his hands at a time when a little more effort, a
little more patience, would have achieved success. A
little more persistence, a little more effort and what
seemed like hopeless failure may turn to glorious
success.”
As my old grandmother used to say, What a load of old
toffee!”
It is really easy for successful people to point
fingers at those who have failed and say ‘if only
you’d carried on a bit longer’.
It is effortless to blame other people’s shortcomings
on a lack of persistence.
And it is downright dangerous to blandly advise people
to keep on going in the face of a constant lack of
results. Surely it is better, sometimes, to cut your
losses than to keep on flogging a horse that is barely
a skeleton anymore. Keeping on when there is no hope
of success is just as likely to bring you ruin as a
miraculous turnaround.
I try to be positive in Kickstart, and have fallen
into the trap of advising people to ‘keep at it until
you succeed’ in the past, but the more I think about
it the more I’ve had to accept that human nature just
doesn’t work that way.
It seems to me that ‘if at first you don’t succeed,
try, try again’ should be rewritten as ‘if at first
you don’t succeed, find something you are better at.’
I’ve done lots of things in my life that didn’t work.
If I’ve learned anything at all from those ‘failures’
it is that they almost all went against either my own
nature, or broke the fundamental rule of marketing:
give people what they want, not what you think they
want. And that goes for bosses and clients as well as
customers.
Persisting with those ill-conceived projects would
have wasted my time, squandered my money and caused
all kinds of heartache along the way - with very
little chance of a positive outcome.
To think that success is hiding behind the door of
every failed enterprise is just plain silly.
But … and this is a big part of the difference
between successful people and those who count
themselves as failures … before you throw it all in
and say ‘Martin told me to quit’, before you decide
you are not a success, you first have to define what
you really mean by success.
Let me give you a personal example.
When I started out online I had no subscribers, and no
sales.
After a few months I had a few subscribers (a very
few) but still no sales.
Was I, at that point a failure? No, because I’d
defined my ‘first stage success’ as getting someone to
read what I was writing.
After a few months I made a sale. My first affiliate
commission! It was for $25 and my bank charged me so
much for cashing the check that I made about $3 on the
deal.
Three dollars for three months work. Was that a
failure? Should I have given up?
No, because my success measure said that if I’d made
one sale I could make more.
After maybe six months I was making on average a
couple of sales a week. Not the ‘Internet millions’
I’d half expected. Failure? No, because every month
got a little bit better. And I could see that I was on
the right track.
In our lives today we are conditioned to need instant
results, immediate gratification. And most of the
time, we think we don’t get it because we focus on the
most desired final outcome.
“I want to be a millionaire, and if I don’t make it
within 6 weeks I’ll have failed.”
But if we’d started out by thinking ‘if I can make
$100 this week, I’ll have learned skills that can be
leveraged into making much more’ then we’d be a
massive success!
I seem to be arguing against my own premise, but I’m
not.
To keep going against the odds just because a success
coach tells you that winning may be just around the
corner is the triumph of hope over reality.
But to measure your success waypoints in advance,
however small they may be, allows reality to triumph
over hope. You may still be a failure when measured
against someone else, but when measured against
yourself, your are succeeding at every step.
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The Foolproof, No-Nonsense,
Kickstart Guide to Making Money Online
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I’m going to start out today by answering two
questions that have been asked by a few people
regarding hosting and the various plans that Hostgator
offers:
Q. 1: “How come the $24.95 Reseller plan gives 24gb of
webspace and 250gb of bandwidth but the much cheaper
$7.95 ‘Baby’ plan gives 600gb of webspace and a
massive 6000gb of bandwidth? Is it is mistake on
Hostgator’s web site?”
It did seem odd, but although I thought I knew the
answer I asked Hostgator for myself. Their 24/7 live
chat facility is very efficient and I had a detailed
answer in seconds.
Here is what they said (paraphrased): “The Reseller
plans are more expensive (and offer less in the way of
storage and bandwidth) because they are intended for
people who want to sell hosting solutions to their own
clients. The Reseller plans include a lot of extra
software and backend support for the reselling
functions that are not included in the cheaper general
hosting plans. In addition, the Reseller plans allow
each domain hosted to have its own CPanel, whereas the
general hosting plans administer all domains through
one CPanel.”
The support operative then went on to confirm that
yes, the low cost Baby plan is the best choice for a
person who simply wants to host multiple domains and
does not wish to resell hosting plans themselves.
So there you have it - save yourself money and opt for
the cheaper - and far better value Baby plan. With
600gb at your disposal you’ll be able to host more
websites that you’ll ever be likely to need.
Q. 2: “I just tried to buy the Hostgator Baby Plan but
instead of being charged $7.95, I was charged $9.95.
Is that right, and why the difference?”
I like Hostgator, and have most of my domains hosted
with them, but I don’t like the way they (or a lot of
other big companies) quote prices. There is a word
missing on their price list: ‘from’.
If you buy the plan and pay for three years up front,
then yes, it works out to the equivalent of paying
$7.95 per month. But if you actually choose to pay
monthly, then the price is $9.95 per month.
Clear? I don’t think so, and I wish they would express
it differently. But the reality is that at $9.95 per
month this is a great bargain.
Okay, I’m going to buy a Hostgator Baby Plan right now
to use with the domain we bought in session three:
www.imkickstart.com. I’ll video the process, so let’s
hope it is as easy as I remember!
#~#~#
I’ve made a quick video showing the process - but
rather than show it here (it is very straightforward)
I’ll just put it on the blog for this course when it
is set up.
The only thing that confused me, was that I thought
the purchase process was finished, and went off to
wait for a confirmation email, but nothing arrived. A
quick chat with the livechat support person told me
that I had needed to log into the Hostgator billing
website to pay my invoice - something that for some
reason hadn’t happened in the normal run of the sale.
Whether that was my mistake or their system, I really
don’t know, but sorting it out took only a couple of
minutes and all now seems to be fine.
HostGator: http://www.urlnex.us/hostgator/
#~#~#
The Foolproof, No-Nonsense, Kickstart Guide to Making
Money Online.
Part 6: DNS Settings - making your domain and your
hosting account work together.
Having bought both a domain name and a hosting
account, the next step of the process is to connect
the two together.
That entails changing the domain’s DNS setting.
Whoa! Is that techie jargon creeping in?
A bit - but let me explain.
When you type a website URL into a browser, you use an
address like http://www.kickstartdaily.com
That’s a nice, easy to use URL that we humans can
understand, but computers work a bit differently. They
prefer to look stuff up in databases.
So when you type that URL and click on enter, your
browser sends a message to a special computer called a
nameserver that looks up kickstartdaily.com and tells
where on the Internet it can be found.
When you first buy a domain, from GoDaddy or anyone
else, it’s nameserver is set to point to a holding
page on the domain registrar’s server, but that’s not
much good to us. We want to point our domain name to
our own hosting account.
When you buy a hosting account, the company
(Hostgator, in the case of today’s example) sends you
an email giving you their nameserver address.
It will look something like ns322.somename.com
Make a note of it because you now have to go back to
your domain registrar (GoDaddy or Namecheap or whoever
you registered your domain with) and plug that new
nameserver address in.
This is one of those things that is dead easy to show
you, but complicated to describe in text. So here is a
fast 3 minute video:
http://www.keywordlsispy.com/imkickstart/video3/
This video shows the process at GoDaddy - but all
domain registrars are similar.
#~#~#
Now that’s cleared up, the next thing we’ll do is set
up a WordPress blog.
Already we can start to build a real website that the
search engines will love to send traffic to.
But that will have to wait until Session 7.
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Fascinating Facts
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Every cubic mile of seawater contains, on average,
$120 million worth of gold.
But getting it out - now that’s the problem.
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Products you may enjoy
by Martin Avis
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* ‘Unlock the Secrets of Private Label eBooks’ (Ideal
for anyone who is a member of the excellent
PLRproEbooks site): http://www.plrsecrets.com
* ‘You CAN Write Articles’ - Anyone can write articles
to make money online. This $7 ebook shows you just how
easy it is. http://www.youcanwritearticles.com
* ‘14 Days to Total Time Control’ - The book that will
help you control the time IN your life, so you can get
on with having the time OF your life.
http://www.totaltimecontrol.com
* ‘Keyword LSI Spy’ My new script that lets you find
the exact words that the search engines love to see on
your web pages and in your articles - and a whole lot
more! http://www.keywordlsispy.com
#~#~#
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