Kickstart #895: A man of the soil
______________________________________________________
Kickstart Today
______________________________________________________
Monday March 3rd, 2008: Issue #895
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’
______________________________________________________
Greetings!
I subscribe to Google Alerts - I can recommend the
service as it gives you a very quick way of finding out
when websites mention either your name or products (or
any other phrase to tell it to monitor).
But once in a while I scratch my head in puzzlement.
This morning, for example, an email arrived from Google
telling me that a web page has just mentioned my new
program ‘Keyword LSI Spy’.
‘Great!’, I thought. More publicity!
The I looked at the alert more closely and saw that the
page in question was my own one at
www.kickstartrecommends.com - and that was distinctly
odd because neither that page, nor any page on the
entire site, makes a single mention of Keyword LSI Spy.
In fact, I haven’t updated the site in ages. I don’t
know what Google think they are monitoring, but clearly
it isn’t what ‘I’ think they are keeping an eye on for
me!
#~#~#
Today is my youngest daughter’s 14th birthday. Happy
Birthday Charlotte!
It seems incredible that our baby is growing up so
fast.
#~#~#
My second vegetable bed is now finished. Phew! that was
hard work as when I started digging into my lawn I
found that there was about a ton of old builder’s
rubble buried underneath it in just the exact spot that
my soft fruit bed was destined to go. No matter, a few
aches and pains later and the 15-feet by 4-feet bed is
now double dug, raked, de-stoned as much as possible,
edged with a wooden border and planted up with ten
raspberry canes and a rhubarb plant. More fruit bushes
will follow when the season is right.
Meanwhile, over on bed 1, that too has now got a smart
wooden border and has been deeply dug through with four
big bags of farmyard manure (well rotted) and raked to
a very fine tilth. And, nestling under a cloche at one
end, are my first 30 onion sets. When the soil warms up
a little more there will be carrots, parsnips, beetroot
and all kinds of other tasty treats.
Gardening is a very strange idea, I’ve come to realize.
It cost a fortune to buy all the materials to get
started - which means that an economical return on
investment is highly unlikely for several years (if
ever). It cause aches and pains of such severity that
crying in public is always a strong likelihood. And for
people like me who have the attention span of mayfly,
it is endlessly frustrating to have to wait seeks of
months for anything to happen.
But my goodness it is addictive! I’ve got a ton of work
to do today and so getting out into the garden is
unlikely to happen - I miss it already!
#~#~#
As today’s installment of The Foolproof, No-Nonsense,
Kickstart Guide to Making Money Online is about setting
up a WordPress blog, it seems appropriate to tell you
about a new product that I’ve been testing out.
It is called Easy Blogs Pro and it comes from Kim
Standerline and James Lee - two people I hold in
particularly high regard.
The idea is very simple - you set up a WordPress blog,
and EasyBlogsPro will fill it with a constant stream of
on-topic, well-written articles - completely
automatically. You don’t have to lift a finger. The
articles come from one of two top-rated article
directories - iSnare and Article Marketer - who send
them to you just as soon as they list them.
Easy Blogs Pro comes as a script that you install on
your server (don’t worry, it is easy to do) and it is
truly a set-and-forget system.
Two weeks ago today, on February 18th, I set up a
WordPress blog at http://business.articleninja.com and
installed the iSnare version of the Easy Blogs Pro
script to feed it with articles on aspects of business
that I preselected from the iSnare site. Up to now, the
system has added 247 articles to my blog. More are
added every day, in a natural, organic way.
The blog has had absolutely no promotion, it has no
backlinks and I’ve added no plugins whatsoever. Apart
from adding a slightly prettier theme than the
WordPress default, it is straight ‘out-of-the-box’. And
yet, my stats show that over 200 people have visited it
already.
As you can see, I’ve created the blog as a subdirectory
of my domain articleninja.com domain - in theory that
means I could create as many blogs as I like on other
subdomains all for the price of one domain and hosting
account!
My next step will be to spruce up the
business.articleninja.com blog and add several
different monetization methods. Then it will be on to
making more blogs to serve more niche markets.
The value of automated blogs like thses is two-fold.
First, once I’ve put AdSense and affiliate products on
them they will return some income, but second - and
more importantly from my point of view, they will
provide me with a frequently spidered source of links
to other money making sites I own in the same niches.
If you are into niche marketing in any way,
EasyBlogsPro will be a boon to you - I highly recommend
it. http://www.urlnex.us/easyblogspro/
###############################################
Who do you know who would love Kickstart Today?
Don’t keep it to yourself - send them to
http://www.kickstartdaily.com today!
###############################################
______________________________________________________
The Quote of the Day
______________________________________________________
John Dewey said,
“We only think when we are confronted with a problem.”
_____________________________________________________
Today’s Power Thought
_____________________________________________________
You know, I don’t want to get all philosophical on you
today, but the more I’ve been working on the garden,
the more it struck me at how growing your own fruit and
veg is a perfect metaphor for business in general. Here
are my eleven gardening tips that, with a few words
changed here and there could just as easily apply to
Internet marketing or running your own business of any
kind.
1. You have to have a plan. Crops need to be planted at
the right time to grow, and a gardener has to plan his
or her year out - at least in general terms - well in
advance.
2. Preparation is the key to success. You can’t just
plonk a plant into the ground and expect it to
flourish. The soil has to be enriched, dug, and
improved so that the fledgling plant has the best
chance of survival.
3. You can’t make it up as you go along. There are
people out there who are happy to give you advice - so
learn from them. Buy their books, watch their TV shows,
listen to more experienced gardeners. Reinventing the
wheel (or wheelbarrow) is a waste of time and almost
always leads to failure.
4. Learn what works for you. If your garden is useless
for growing carrots, don’t grow carrots. If you do
really well with strawberries, plant a few extra this
year.
5. Success is a process, not an action. You can’t just
do it once and forget it - a successful garden needs
continual nurturing and care.
6. The right tools make life so much easier.
7. You have to learn to recognize the best time to reap
your rewards. All crops have an optimum time when they
can be harvested. Too soon and you don’t get the yield
and too late and you risk them spoiling.
8. When you start to get results, share the bounty with
your friends.
9. Keep an eye open for weeds and pests. A small weed,
pulled up when it is an inch or two high is no problem
to anyone, but leave it a few weeks and you’ll have to
deal with a deep rooted monster.
10. Keep your secateurs sharp. Pruning is an essential
part of maintaining a healthy and productive plant.
Never let your shrubs get overgrown.
11. You’ll never do it if you don’t enjoy it.
Now, the whole point of me writing that for you is so
that you can think about how those gardening thoughts
can be turned around and applied to your life and
business. I’m sure you won’t have any problems with
that at all.
_____________________________________________________
The Foolproof, No-Nonsense,
Kickstart Guide to Making Money Online
_____________________________________________________
Session 7 … My Kingdom for a Blog.
Today’s session is short and sweet.
Now that we have looked at buying a domain name,
arranging hosting for it and making the two work
together by setting the nameservers appropriately, we
have everything we need to set up our first website.
The easiest kind of website to start with is a blog. a
blog (short for Web Log) is a kind of online journal
that you can add posts to like diary entries. Of
course, you don’t have to use it as a diary - your
posts can be on anything you like, but the software
that runs it makes the process of adding new entries as
simple as using a word processor. Easier, in fact,
because you don’t have to worry about thousands if
icons that you’ll never need (like you do with Word!).
The other good thing about a blog is that the search
engines love them. the have recognized that blogs tend
to be frequently updated and added to - characteristics
of web sites that the search engines rate very highly.
So long as the hosting account that you’ve bought uses
CPanel (a control panel that certain hosting companies
provide), installing a WordPress blog is a matter of
clicking on a couple of links and filling out your name
on a form. It really couldn’t be easier. Hostgator does
provide a CPanel, so if you’ve followed me so far, we
are good to go.
In this case, a video is the best way to explain the
process of creating your blog. I’ve recorded the whole
thing from start to finish and even with my
explanations and ums and ahs, it takes just 5 minutes
or so. The actual process of setting up the blog takes
me about 2 minutes when I don’t have to ex[plain it.
http://www.keywordlsispy.com/imkickstart/video4/
The raw, out-of-the-box blog that you get is pretty
basic and dull looking. But don’t worry about that. In
the next installment we’ll take a look at how you can
change the way your blog looks and behaves - without
knowing anything about HTML, PHP or any of that
technical stuff. This is true point and click.
_____________________________________________________
Fascinating Facts
______________________________________________________
Dogs that live in cities live an average of three years
longer than country dogs.
Is it a case of pampered pooches?
______________________________________________________
Products you may enjoy
by Martin Avis
______________________________________________________
* ‘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
#~#~#
Do you enjoy Kickstart Today? Please tell your friends!
http://www.kickstartdaily.com
Let me know what you think - about anything! To contact
me, please reply to this email and remember to put
‘Kickstart’ in the subject line so that it doesn’t get
filtered.
Visit the Kickstart Blog - Your comments will be very
welcome: http://www.kickstartdaily.com/blog/
Kickstart has a forum too!
http://kickstarttodayforum.com/