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Kickstart Today
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Wednesday August 20th 2008: Issue #951
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!
If I had a dollar for every email I’ve had since Christmas
telling me that the Kickstart Archive hasn’t been updated, I’d be
a lot better off. Not the ‘Bill Gates’ kind of better off, you
understand, but certainly the ‘bills paid’ kind.
There are many and various reasons for the lack of a current
archive – most of which are due to either incompetence or
laziness.
My own.
My plan was well-intentioned. Posting Kickstart to the blog (for
that is what the archive is) was never a big job, but it was a
boring, time-consuming one. After writing Kickstart for several
hours and then battling with the sloth-like interface that
EmailAces can sometimes be, I just got tired of then having to
spend another 15 minutes reformatting Kickstart so it would look
okay on the blog.
And all for what? The traffic was never very high anyway.
So I decided that come the New Year, I’d set up the blog so that
I could post to it by email – and just add the blog’s email
address to the Kickstart mailing list. I’d automate the process.
We all know about well-intentioned plans, don’t we.
It turned out that posting to a WordPress blog, while simple to
some people, was impossible for my poor old brain to understand.
I followed the instructions to the letter (I thought) but try as
I may, none of my attempted email posts ever showed up on the
blog.
Something was very wrong and I had no idea what. I searched
Google for answers. I posted for help at forums, but the silence
was deafening. Either nobody knew how to do it, or they didn’t
want to let me in on the secret.
By now, it was February and I realized that I would have to bring
the archive up to date manually, and give up my plan to take over
the world by automation.
That’s when the laziness kicked in. If I’d thought that posting
one edition of Kickstart on the blog was a pain, suddenly having
to post six or so was an agony. I put it off.
And as with all things that you put off, the problem got bigger –
and even easier to put off again.
Fast-forward to yesterday.
I was just about to finally throw in the towel and scrap the
archive blog completely. It was getting more and more out of date
and I really couldn’t see any way I was going to find the time or
the patience to post what was, by now, a huge heap of 124 back
issues of Kickstart.
But just before I hit the delete button to consign the entire
blog to the digital graveyard, I thought I take one last look to
see what the stats were. The last time I’d looked it was
averaging just 10 visitors a day.
To my absolute surprise I found that it has been consistently
getting just over 100 unique visitors a day – day in, day out,
for months. With no promotion, no new posts and more annoyingly,
no real attempts to capitalize on the traffic.
Now I might be lazy and incompetent, but I’m not silly enough to
lightly throw away a blog with that kind of traffic. Especially
as it seems to be quite good quality traffic that averages nearly
6 page views per visitor! And all of it coming from Google and
Yahoo at no cost to me.
I decided to have one last all-out attempt to crack the mystery
of posting by email to a WordPress blog.
With a great deal of concentration, I finally found the problem –
the reason my emails all those months ago had never turned into
posts. It worked at last!
Nearly.
There were a couple of problems.
The first was that I could get Kickstart to appear on the blog,
but none of the links that appear in each issue would show up as
‘live’. They were just displayed as plain text. That was
annoying.
The other problem was that every email I send out through
EmailAces has all the unsubscribe information automatically
appended to the bottom – not really the kind of stuff you want
showing up on a blog.
The upshot of those two snags was that if I did post by email, I
still would have to go into the blog and edit each post.
Hardly the automation I’d hoped for.
But I like to think that there is an answer to all problems –
even if you have to make it up for yourself. So that’s what I
did.
This morning I’ve been hard at work writing a bit of PHP code
that patches one of the core files in the WordPress setup. What
that code does is scan emailed posts and turn any URLs it finds
into live, clickable links. It then looks for a special marker
that I can easily build into Kickstart and deletes any text it
finds after that point.
It works like magic!
So well, in fact, that I’ve already posted all the back issues to
the archive – the whole process took very little time at all –
and all future Kickstart’s should be automatically posted at the
same time you receive them by email – with absolutely no extra
work needed from me. Including this one.
Check it out: http://kickstartarchive.com
Now that’s what I call automation!
The one person I’ve spoken to on the phone this morning has said
that I should write a special report on how to automate posting
to WordPress blogs by email. He thinks there is a big market out
there for it.
I’m not so sure. Was this a problem uniquely of my own making –
due to my own peculiar mix of incompetence and idleness? Or are
there a lot of people who’d like to learn how to do it?
Let me know what you think – if enough people are interested I’ll
write it up – and give away my PHP code as well.
Of course, now I’ve got the blog automated, I’d better sort out
some way to make some money from all that nice traffic!
#~#~#
I’m afraid I rambled on somewhat there – so I’ll have to keep the
rest of Kickstart fairly brief!
It’s one thing being able to automate posting it to the b log,
but quite something else to finish writing it in the first place!
#~#~#
I heard something while I was watching our astonishing track
cycling team win almost everything they attempted at the Olympics
that really resonated with me.
When asked why and how the team is so good, one of their top
coaches said that they have been applying the principle of
‘Aggregation of Marginal Gains’.
The idea of AMG is that there are a million tiny things that you
can do to be better, but most people concentrate only on the
biggest and most obvious ones. He said that his team focus on as
many of the tiny things as they possibly can – in the knowledge
that each one may have only a negligible effect, but take as a
whole they are exploded into a league of their own.
It certainly isn’t the easy way to success, but by goodness, it
sure seems to work! Seven gold medals out of ten races shows that
AMG is incredibly effective.
How can you and I apply the aggregation of marginal gains to our
lives and businesses?
#~#~#
I’m reading an amusing – and fascinating – book at the moment (a
real-life book, made out of something our parent’s used to call
paper) called ‘The Importance of Being Trivial’ by Mark Mason.
In it, Mr Mason talks about his search for the perfect fact and
wonders why it is that some items of so-called trivia make your
eyes glaze over, while others make you want to rush off and share
them with everyone you know.
It’s a fun book and one that plays right to my heart. I’ve always
loved trivia (as any Kickstart reader will know) and have AMAssed
a significant collection of books filled with astonishing nuggets
of utterly useless information.
I love the quote, early on in the book, when Mark Mason talks
about their mutual joy at finding absurd and astonishing facts
with a like-minded friend. The friend says, “When you’re a child
you’ve got this sense of wonder at the world. Everything’s
AMAzing. And as you grow up you either lose that or you don’t.
That sense of wonder either gets eroded or it doesn’t. Mine
hasn’t. I find the whole world interesting.”
Yes! Yes!
I could have written that myself. But instead I’ll just be
content to share with you the astonishing – nay, mind-boggling
knowledge that when he was ten years old, Keith Richards, the
dissipated face of the Rolling Stones, was a choirboy at Queen
Elizabeth II’s coronation.
#~#~#
Nothing to buy today. You can breathe easy! 
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The Quote of the Day
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Winston Churchill said,
“We make a living by what we get. We make a life by what we
give.”
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Today’s Power Thought
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There is a five letter word that makes your life tough.
Actually, ‘tough’ is the word, but with its letters slightly
rearranged: OUGHT.
I ought to do this. I ought to do that.
As soon as you put that horrible little word into a sentence, you
also add three more secret, silent and invisible letters: BUT.
I ought to do this, but …
Sound familiar.
It is another example of how out choice of words, even in the
conversations we have inside our own minds, can influence the
outcome.
Avoid words that have a hidden second half and aim to maximize
your use of words that are a complete statement in themselves.
I WILL do this. I WILL do that.
No clause. No get out. No excuse.
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The Foolproof, No-Nonsense,
Kickstart Guide to Making Money Online
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*** Catch up with parts 1-26 of the Foolproof, No-Nonsense,
Kickstart Guide to Making Money Online at http://imkickstart.com
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Fascinating Facts
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The ex-boxer and grill man, George Foreman has four – possibly
five – sons. They all have the first name George.
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#~#~#
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