Kickstart #898: Saying thank you
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Kickstart Today
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Wednesday March 12th, 2008: Issue #898
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 Martin!
The wind is still battering us. My poor palm tree is bending all
over the place - I hope it has strong roots!
Goodness - there is another metaphor lurking in there. If we, as
people don’t have strong roots, be they family ones, a good
network of friends or financial or emotional stability, the
inevitable stormy batterings that our lives will certainly
experience at some time or other will buffet us around and often
rip us free of our moorings.
But if we have something to hold on to - and that may be
something as prosaic as a few month’s emergency money tucked away
in the bank, or as fortifying as a family that will knit together
around us in times of crisis - we can weather most storms that
come our way.
That’s certainly something to remember when your life or business
is going well - build your roots!
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Why is it that ordinary people, like you and me, can see the
consequences of our actions, but as soon as people are given a
little bit of power they lose the ability to see beyond their
noses?
I speak of politicians, of course, who - seemingly the world over
- enact policies that the average citizen could have told them
way back at the planning stage were totally unworkable, and
worse, often dAMAging to the very people the government professes
to want to protect. Everyone can see that the policies are
flawed, except for the politicians.
Perhaps elected office induces a kind of dyslexia - or at least
dAMAges a person’s ability to project effect onto cause.
My question is, of course, rhetorical.
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My new Vista computer came with a 90-day subscription to Norton.
Not being one to look a gift horse in the mouth I decided to let
the Norton cr&p run its 90-day course.
But I’d forgotten just how much I hate it.
It is already nagging me incessantly to renew my subscription
even though the 90 days aren’t up yet, and yesterday it insisted
on running an update process, which I suppose is fair enough.
What isn’t fair enough, though, is that after it had updated
itself, it insisted that I restart my computer.
Insisted.
I had two choices - click on the button in the Norton alert box
that said ‘Restart Now’, or click on the little red ‘X’ to close
the alert box. There was no ‘restart later’ option.
As I had a ton of important programs running - I’m writing a new
PHP script and had four browser windows open, plus 6 scripts in
TextPad (not saved) and Paint Shop Pro with some unsaved, but
vital images open - naturally, I clicked on the red X. Bang!
Doing that closed all my programs down without any further
warning and restarted my computer.
Clearly, when Norton says restart your computer, it isn’t messing
about!
Thanks Norton. I lost about an hour’s work there.
Yes, I should have saved everything, but I didn’t expect a big
brother program to wade in start throwing its weight around.
I lost some work, but Norton lost any last chance it may have had
to win me back as a subscriber.
AVG here I come!
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Here is a salutary warning for anyone who plans to sell things
online.
A couple of weeks ago I recommended a book called Mafioso
Marketing. It is a good book and one that I’m sure a lot of
Kickstart readers would enjoy.
In fact, quite a few did buy it, and the feedback I received was
very positive.
But the book’s authors, JD Swanson and Jason James, hit on a big
problem …
…. they sold a lot of their book in a very short time, and
PayPal decide that the sudden influx of cash into their account
looked suspicious. The result - their account was frozen by
PayPal for ‘up to 180 days’!
Isn’t that peachy - you work hard to create a product that people
want to buy, you build an army of affiliates who want to promote
it, you even warn PayPal in advance that an surge of sales is
expected (yes, they did that) and still the behemoth that is
PayPal pulled the plug on them right when sales were peaking.
Nice.
I’m sure the guys will get things sorted out with PayPal
eventually, but that ivory-towered edifice moves at its own slow
pace - no matter how many people’s businesses they mess up in the
meantime.
There is a lesson to be learned by all of us - don’t put all your
eggs in one basket - especially if that basket has PayPal stamped
on the side.
The guys have since moved the sales processor for Mafioso
Marketing across to ClickBank and things seem to be settled down
for them now. But it must be galling to work incredibly hard to
create a success, only to have it hampered because it was ‘too
successful’!
The price of Mafioso Marketing increases by $20 at midnight
tonight, so if you are one of the few people who haven’t yet
bought it, now is a very good time - here is the ClickBank link:
http://www.urlnex.us/mafiosomarketing/
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In between writing this edition of Kickstart I went off to a
lunchtime meeting of my Rotary Club - the Rotary Club of Sidcup
(incidentally, our website is at http://www.rotary-sidcup.org if
you’d like to take a look).
Today was a very special lunch because it was our annual
Community Lunch where we invite local dignitaries and people who
are important in our community. The Mayor came along, as did
another Councillor, as did the local fire chief. But the real
stars of the show were people who give their time voluntarily to
help others. Local Parkinson and Alzheimer’s Society volunteers
were invited, representatives of our local hospital’s League of
Friends and many other people who selflessly give of their time
to help others.
Of course, the limitations of the size of our meeting room means
that those invited can only be a representation of the many
people in any area who organize and run such groups and societies
to benefit others - but it is important to say thanks to them.
One person is singled out each year to be honored as the
Community Lunch Person of the Year and today it was a man who,
despite being blind and physically disabled himself, runs a club
in Sidcup for other blind people to attend. As he said, if he
didn’t run it, some of his members would never have an
opportunity to get out of their homes.
Every community has people like that who beaver away, unknown and
largely unthanked. Certainly unrewarded.
Today it was really nice, albeit in such a small way, to thank a
few of them.
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The Quote of the Day
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Albert E. Dunning said,
“Great opportunities come to all, but many do not know they have
met them. The only preparation to take advantage of them is
simple fidelity to watch what each day brings.”
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Today’s Power Thought
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Do you remember those variety show acts where a man would walk on
stage with a small suitcase, put it on a table and then open the
lid to allow a woman to unfold herself and step out of it.
I used to enjoy seeing contortionists fit themselves into
impossibly tiny spaces. How sad it is that variety has all but
disappeared!
But I digress.
The contortionist has to be supremely flexible to be able to get
into the box.
Most of the time we preach the need to think out of the box and
have come to see something that fits tightly in a small space as
being a sign of mental inflexibility. ‘You’ve got to think
outside the box’ has become a mantra that seems to be repeated
more out of habit than through any real understanding.
The truth is that most of us are too inflexible to get outside of
our box.
Think about that contortionist again - but instead of marvelling
at how she gets into the suitcase in the first place, imagine how
you’d feel if by some miracle you had found yourself shut in
there.
In a few seconds your muscles would be screaming, your tendons
would be cramping, your joints would be aching.
When the lid finally came off, the miracle wouldn’t be how you
got inside, it would be how on earth you would get out again.
That’s where the real flexibility comes in.
Thinking outside the box is every bit as hard. If you’ve spent
years with your mental processes bounded by artificial barriers,
it won’t matter how many ‘gurus’ tell you that you’ve got to
unfetter your mind and step outside the boundaries. Mental cramp
will prevent you from moving a muscle!
That’s why you need to start slowly and build up your mental
flexibility little by little.
After all, the lady in the box didn’t wake up at the age of 30
and say ‘I think I’ll become a contortionist today!’ She trained
her body over many years.
Napoleon Hill talks a bit about the need to develop flexibility.
He makes the very good point that many people make the mistake of
equating flexibility with pliability, when they are really
completely different.
Flexibility is about learning to adapt to change, seeing
solutions that are off of other people’s radar and developing the
ability to assess a situation and seize an opportunity while
everyone else is still working out what’s going on.
Pliability is bending to other people’s will, becoming a
yes-person and allowing others to do your thinking for you.
Learn to develop your own mental flexibility and you will not
only see the world outside of your box as a more inviting and
easily reached place, but you will find that you become more
comfortable inside as well.
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The Foolproof, No-Nonsense,
Kickstart Guide to Making Money Online
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Today’s installment is about making WordPress blogs more useful.
The basic WordPress installation is great. It does all the things
a basic blog should do - allows you to make posts and manage them
quickly and efficiently. The developers, sensibly, decided that
they would design WordPress with an open framework so that
third-party developers could build small additional programs -
called plugins - that would add all kinds of extra functions.
A few of the more specialized plugins are commercial programs in
their own right and are sold as such. Neil Shearing’s 10-Day Cash
Secret plugin that I recommended in Kickstart is one such. That
one allows you to use datafeeds from affiliate management
programs to feed hundreds or thousands of affiliate-linked
product posts into your blog.
But despite there being a few plugins that you have to pay for,
the vast majority - thousands in fact - are completely free for
you to download and use. You can find over 1600 of them at
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/ - some are brilliant and
some make you wonder why anyone would have bothered to create
them, but all are free and easy to install, so experiment!
Most bloggers never need to pay for a plugin at all - you’d only
do so if you needed the functionality it offered, and were pretty
sure you could use it to make your blog more profitable.
In today’s installment of this course I plan to show and tell how
easy it is to install and use plugins and how to go about finding
some of the best ones around.
When you become more proficient with WordPress you will start to
wonder ‘how can I get it to do this, or how can I achieve that’.
More often than not, someone has had the same thought before you
and has created a plugin to get the desired effect.
The video today is short, but it shows you exactly how to install
three of the main plugins that I use on all my blogs. As time
goes on, we’ll look at other plugins and how they can enhance
your blog and your visitors’ experience of it.
http://www.keywordlsispy.com/imkickstart/video6/
In the video I mention my ping list - you can download my list
from http://www.keywordlsispy.com/imkickstart/video6/ping.txt
In the next installment I’ll start making blog posts - in fact,
I’ll put all the installments of this course on the blog.
See you then.
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Fascinating Facts
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Kleenex tissues were first introduced in 1924 as facial cream
removal wipes. It was only two years later that Kimberley Clark,
the manufacturers, started getting letters from customers
suggesting that the tissues could be used as disposable
handkerchiefs.
However, the sale of the tissues in the first place was a
splendid example of a company opportunistically finding a new use
for an existing on-the-shelf product. Kleenex had originally been
invented during World War 1, under the name ‘cellucotton’, as
alternative filters for gas masks because cotton, which filters
were normally made from, was in demand for surgical dressings.
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Products you may enjoy
by Martin Avis
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* ‘Unlock the Secrets of Private Label eBooks’ (Ideal for
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* ‘You CAN Write Articles’ - Anyone can write articles to make
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* ‘14 Days to Total Time Control’ - The book that will help
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* ‘Keyword LSI Spy’ My new script that lets you find the exact
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in your articles - and a whole lot more!
http://www.keywordlsispy.com
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