Kickstart #896: The week of the blogs
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Kickstart Today
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Wednesday March 3rd, 2008: Issue #896
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!
It is an expensive week - first we had Charlotte’s 14th
birthday on Monday and on Friday it is Lauren’s 18th.
Man, I need to earn some money this week to pay for it
all! 
As a joint celebration we are going up to London this
evening to see the hit musical Wicked. I’ve heard really
good things about it, so I’m looking forward to it
immensely.
Let’s hope it is better than the movies we’ve suffered
through lately!
#~#~#
In case you are not on the London Lunch announcement list
(or if you are, but haven’t received the latest
notification) the next lunch is now scheduled for Friday
March 28th.
The location is the same as always - London’s Covent
Garden - and the cost for the 3-course à la carte meal
(including the first drink) is still £30.
Tables are booked for 25 places and at the time of
writing, half of them have been reserved. The rest, I’m
sure, will go very quickly.
If you want to have an afternoon of drunken debauchery on
March 28th, fair enough. But if you’d prefer to spend it
talking Internet marketing with some of the nicest people
around, either contact me for more details, or send me
£30 by PayPal to m.avis@ntlworld.com to secure your
place.
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My running stepped up a gear yesterday. I went to the gym
with few expectations, but for whatever reason, my legs
and lungs seemed to be in tune with each other for once.
I sailed past my 2 mile target and ended up running 5000
meters (just over 3 miles).
It wasn’t fast, and it wasn’t pretty, but my goodness I
felt great at the end!
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This truly is a week for blogs! I had no idea when I
started writing about blog creation for the course that
this week would see several AMAzing WordPress-related
products hit the market.
First there was Kim Standerline’s really clever set of
scripts that pull articles from some of the top article
directories directly into your blog - creating a ton of
continually updated, fresh, quality content while you do
other more important things. To find out more about
EasyBlogsPro please visit
http://www.urlnex.us/easyblogspro/
Then today, along comes a new WordPress plug-in that is
going to take your breath away.
Neil Shearing - he’s the guy who gave away the excellent
program that lets you find blogs to post comments on a
week or so ago (Real Link Finder) - is one very clever
and canny marketer. Neil is set to launch his latest
product in a few hours time and it will knock your socks
off.
The product, called ‘10 Day Cash Secret’, is the result
of a happy accident (back to my favorite word again:
serendipity) as Neil was trying to achieve one thing and
ended up spectacularly exceeding his own expectations.
Here’s the short version of the story…
Neil and his wife Linda were experimenting with building
self-populating blogs using product datafeeds. The idea
was to create blogs with hundreds or thousands of entries
that would then provide on-topic links back to their real
‘money’ sites.
The theory was that the blogs would be easy-to-produce
and quick-to-create ’satellite’ sites that would feed
links and traffic to more important sites.
Well, the result was a great success, but it threw up
some wholly unexpected, but very welcome extra benefits.
Neil and Linda found that the ‘throwaway’ blogs started
to rank far higher in the search engines then they’d
dared to expect. For some reason, the search engines
loved them.
In fact, in one example that Neil gives, the timeline
from startup to success was astonishing:
* Day 1: He registered a domain and created the blog
using his new datafeed plug-in.
* On the same day the search engine spiders started a
feeding frenzy.
Day 3: Google sent along the first visitor. Let me tell
you, getting indexed in Google in such a short time is
pretty special - getting traffic within 3 days is almost
miraculous!
Day 10: The site made its first affiliate sale (for $255)
After one month: after its first 30 days, the site had
AMAssed affiliate sales of almost $4000.
And all that happened on autopilot. Neil created the
blog, selected his datafeed and set his plug-in to work
auto posting the affiliate product data.
Maybe an hour’s work on day one - he didn’t even do any
promotion for the site.
Clearly, Neil had accidentally hit on something big!
It wasn’t a fluke either. Neil gives examples of other
blogs that he has built in the same way that are also
working spectacularly well.
I can’t give you my results yet because I just got my
hands on the script last night, but I can tell you that
what comes with the plug-in is a set of some of the most
detailed and useful videos that I’ve come across that
explain everything you need to know to use ‘10 Day Cash
Secret’. And I mean everything. You really will not be
left scratching your head.
The product goes ‘live’ at 9am EST today.
There will certainly be a ‘first mover’ advantage, but in
the long run, I can see that a lot of people are going to
make a lot of money with this one.
Get in while you can at
http://www.urlnex.us/10daycashsecret/
(Before 9am EST that link will go to Neil’s blog - if
that happens, please try it again later.)
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http://www.kickstartdaily.com today!
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The Quote of the Day
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Oprah Winfrey said,
“It isn’t until you come to a spiritual understanding of
who you are - not necessarily a religious feeling, but
deep down, the spirit within - that you can begin to take
control.”
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Today’s Power Thought
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Think for a moment about the people you will interact
with today.
They can be put into two groups: those who are filled
with so much lifeforce that it leaks out everywhere they
go, and those who never seem to have enough lifeforce of
their own and have to unconsciously suck it from everyone
they meet.
I don’t know what lifeforce is - it is a kind of energy,
surely, but it has nothing to do with age, intelligence,
gender, race, or any of the things we normally classify
people by. It is a force apart. A vibrancy that can
uplift or depress simply by its presence or absence.
I do know that this lifeforce is constantly moving. It
flows from the people with an abundant supply to those
who are either temporarily or permanently lacking.
You can clearly see who has it and who hasn’t.
The people who have an abundant supply tend to be the
charismatic leaders. The people who others like to
follow. They are the ones who sparkle. They have ideas
that people listen to. They are self-starters. They have
an entrepreneurial spirit. They are never frightened of a
challenge.
You can have as much of this lifeforce as you want. It
won’t cost you anything at all - not even the effort of
acquiring it.
How? By making the decision to send your own lifeforce
energy into everyone you meet. The more of it that you
can mentally transmit to others, the more will flow right
back into you, until you will be so full of it that it
will spill over into the world around you.
Do I sound crazy to you?
Maybe I am, but give me the benefit of the doubt. Try it
out for a day or two and feel the difference.
May the lifeforce be with you.
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The Foolproof, No-Nonsense,
Kickstart Guide to Making Money Online
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Part 8 … Not even a pretty face.
We left off the last session of this course having just
created a WordPress blog.
WordPress blogs, as you saw, are very easy to set up, but
they suffer from a few disadvantages ‘out of the box’.
The primary one being that they are incredibly boring to
look at! The default template is very dull - but the good
news is that changing the look of a WordPress blog is
really, really easy.
You don’t need to know a thing about HTML or CSS.
There are thousands of templates available for great
looking WordPress blogs and all you have to do is find
one you like, download the files to your computer, unzip
them and upload them to your server.
Then, in WordPress itself, you click on an image of the
new template and that’s it - your blog will look great.
It is another one of those things that sounds complex,
but when you see it with your own eyes, it is very
simple, so take a look at the next video in our series to
see how the new imkickstart blog gets a smart new look.
First a quick admission - and an object lesson learned…
In the last part of this course I set up the blog in the
root directory of the imkickstart.com domain. That would
have been fine, except for the fact that in my haste I
failed to make a note of the password I used to enable me
to access the admin area of the blog.
Doh!
So this morning I’ve had to uninstall the blog and
reinstall it. In the process I decided that I’d rather
have it in a subdirectory of the site, so the URL to see
it is now http://imkickstart.com/course/
See - even those of us who have done it hundreds of times
can make a mess of it sometimes, but it really doesn’t
matter. There are very few mistakes you can make that
take more than a few minutes to put right.
Don’t let the fear of messing up stop you. I - and
everyone I know - make mistakes all the time, but we just
move on.
On with today’s video:
http://www.keywordlsispy.com/imkickstart/video5/
There’s one more thing to do when, like with this blog,
you put it in a folder. If you don’t yet have anything in
the root directory of your website - in other words, you
haven’t yet created an ‘index’ or ‘home’ page, then you
may inadvertently have a security risk on your site.
Taking my domain as the example, typing
http:/www.imkickstart.com into a browser would not lead
to a page because I haven’t made one yet. In that case,
the browser will view your site’s directory structure and
any other files that are stored in the root directory -
and you may well not want people to have access to that
kind of information.
Plugging the security hole is very easy. All that is
needed is to create file called index.htm or index.php
and put it into the root directory (sometimes called the
public_html directory.
If you make a blank file in a text editor, save it as
index.htm and then upload it to your public_html folder,
your problem is solved. Anyone who types in your website
address will get blank page.
But that’s a bit rude, don’t you think? I’d rather send
them to someplace useful than just show them a blank
page. And where could be more useful than your blog?
In my case, I typed the following into a text editor:
?>
and then saved it as index.php. Note that it should be
all on one line with no linebreaks.
Now, when you type http://www.imkickstart.com in your
browser you should be redirected seamlessly to the front
page of the new blog. And the security risk in plugged.
Next session we will change the default settings in the
blog to make it more SEO and user friendly, add a few
really useful plug-ins to add to the functionality and,
finally, make the first blog posts.
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Fascinating Facts
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On this day (March 5th) in the year 1750 the first
performance of a Shakespearean play was held in America.
Richard III was presented in New York City by the Nassau
Street Theater.
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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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