Kickstart #968: A mystery, a rollercoaster and a spur of the moment idea
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Kickstart Today
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Friday October 10th 2008: Issue #968
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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In case any editions of Kickstart don’t make it your inbox,
please bookmark the archive at http://kickstartarchive.com
Greetings!
Wednesday was a big bounce day. Nearly half of all the Kickstarts
that I sent out were returned to me as undeliverable. I know I
have problems with deliverability, but that was excessive even
for me! Hopefully, whatever caused the problem will have gone
away and today’s Kickstart will arrive safely.
It does show up the inherrent unreliability of email though.
That’s why every issue of Kickstart is now archived at
http://kickstartarchive.com within minutes of it being sent out.
Please bookmark that site so that if circumstances beyond our
control prevent your Kickstart from turning up, you won’t miss
out.
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I get a lot of emails from Kickstart readers who are new to
Internet marketing, asking me to help them solve a problem they
have with their hosting accounts.
Invariably, the problem is not something that has gone wrong with
their hosting account (as they assume), it is a fundamental issue
with the account itself.
Almost all of these problem cases turn out to be due to the
person having bought horrible hosting. believe me, there is a lot
of horrible hosting around.
You can usually tell if a hosting account is going to cause
problems. It will be strangely cheap, oddly unprofessional, and
probably won’t have Cpanel as standard.
And nine times out of ten, the only help I can give is to advise
the poor person to cut their losses and get themselves some
decent hosting from a reputable host company.
Please don’t try to save a few bucks by getting horrible hosting.
Do yourself - and me - a favor and buy something decent from the
word go.
I use Hostgator and have never had any real problems with them.
Certainly, for the relatively simple needs that most newbies
have, they are hard to beat.
http://www.urlnex.us/hostgator/
#~#~#
Starbucks have been in the news recently for their excessive
water consumption. Ridiculously, they insist on having a sink in
every one of their stores that has water running in it all the
time the store is open - and in some cases, 24/7. This is
patently unnecessary and a massive waste of a vital resource.
But my observation of the way my local branch works suggests that
water isn’t the only thing they waste.
I was in the line a few days ago to buy a cup of green tea (I
hate their coffee). This was the process:
I gave my order to a man on the checkout.
He wrote my order down and passed it to a man on the coffee
machine.
He, in turn, passed the slip to a man who was standing behind the
original order taker.
This third man then made my green tea in a cardboard cup. He then
passed it to a different man who was a kind of messenger.
The messenger man then passed it to another man standing behind
the man at the coffee machine.
This 5th man then proceeded to pour the contents of the paper cup
into a chine mug, and threw the paper cup in the trash.
He then passed the mug of green tea to the man who was serving
completed drinks to the long line of people who were waiting.
Six people and a wasted paper cup just to get one mug of green
tea that could just as easily, and probably much faster, been
supplied to me by at most two people, without any waste of paper
at all.
Why do Starbucks need an army of pointless people to slow down
their service so much when Costa Coffee and Nero Coffee can offer
equally slow service with just one person behind the counter?
Madness.
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Sorting out emails is a nightmare, isn’t it. If you are like me,
and get a steady flow of emails all day long, it is so easy to
mark one to be answered but then completely forget as it scrolls
off your screen in minutes.
I’ve spend a lot of time of the last few days adding loads of new
filters to my email program (Thunderbird) to sort incoming emails
into more efficient folders. Now, for example, any email that
comes in from a Kickstart subscriber who has ever written to me
before, will be filed in a ‘Subscribers’ folder - hopefully
making them much easier to find and reply to.
A lot of emails fail to arrive, but that isn’t always the only
reason they don’t get answered. Sometimes they just get buried in
the avalanche!
I hope that in future fewer will suffer that fate.
#~#~#
This has me stumped.
About two months ago I was moving a bunch of old sites of mine
from one server to another.
In the process I messed up the new DNS settings for one of them.
It was a very old made-for-adsense site that I built maybe 4
years ago . Completely crap and full of duplicate content - every
one of its 71 indexed pages is identical! (By all common sense it
should have disappeared from the search engines years ago, but
for some unknown reason it stayed and has been making me a small
AdSense income ever since.)
Anyway, I messed up the DNS setting and so the site became
’server not found’. As it made only a few cents a day, I never
bothered to get around to fixing it, so to all intents and
purposed, it has been dead for two months.
Except that AdSense don’t seem to have realised that. Every day
they show that the site gets around 30 visitors and credit me
with a few cents in AdSense money. Regular as clockwork. it works
out to $2-3 dollars a week.
And this from a site that can’t be accessed.
Google Analytics show that the site receives zero visitors a day
(as it should) so how on Earth is AdSense registering both
visitors and clicks?
Can anyone shed any light on this ghost site?
By the way - no, I’m not going to say what it’s URL is. I’m not
silly enough to kill a golden goose, even if it is dead and a bit
smelly already!
#~#~#
I just spent a few minutes watching the news on TV and they were
showing the opening of the New York stock exchange. Within
minutes the Dow plummeted 700 points and then just as quickly
recovered to show a few points gain on the day.
What a rollercoaster!
It is down again right now, and the UK’s FTSE100 is also having
another dire day, having dropped below the psychological 4000
points mark several times today for the first time in years. With
such incredible volatility in the market, who would be a
financial trader at the moment!
Give me the Internet any day. I may struggle to understand half
of what goes on, but the other half doesn’t give me ulcers.
#~#~#
My special offer on my Keyword LSI Spy script - $20 off for
Kickstart readers - is ending this weekend.
If you haven’t bought it yet, you have until Sunday to do so at
the knock-down price of just $47. The official price is rising to
$97 very soon, so this is a great deal that won’t be repeated.
You can find out why it is so popular, and take a no-cost
test-drive of Keyword LSI Spy at the website:
http://www.keywordlsispy.com but don’t try to buy it there.
Instead, if you decide that it is just what you need to help you
to find the exact words that the search engines really want to
see on your websites and in your articles, send me $47 by PayPal
to m.avis@ntlworld.com and I’ll get it to you right away.
Please note that Keyword LSI Spy is a script that you will need
to upload to your domain, on your own hosting account. It has
been designed to be simplicity itself to install - no settings or
permissions to worry about. Just upload it and start finding the
secret words that could make your website float to the top of the
search engines within minutes.
#~#~#
Did you look at the ‘Habit Busting’ program I recommended on
Wednesday? I see that a lot of Kickstart readers did buy it - if
you are one of them, I’d love to hear from you when you’ve
progressed with it. And if you read on, you’ll see why you will
hear from me very soon.
The biggest habit that I bought it to try to combat is my
deep-seated urge to procrastinate. Other things are always more
interesting than the ones I’m supposed to be doing.
Fortunately, I’m able to harness it on occasion and focus my mind
on the task in hand, but those rare moments are far less frequent
than I’d like.
I know with 100% certainty that if I could learn to avoid the
temptation of procrastinating, just 25% more than I do now, that
my productivity - and my income - would go through the roof.
And in a time when none of us can be certain of our future
incomes, that kind of boost to our earning power has to be a good
thing.
I consider ‘Habit Busting’ to be a great investment (and in fact,
a very small one - the low price might surprise you) and one so
important that I’d like to see every Kickstart reader benefit
from it.
In fact I’ve just had a spur of the moment idea.
I will email every Kickstart reader who buys ‘Habit Busting’ with
a link to download my own ‘Kickstart your Life and Your Success’
ebook at no cost. It will be a gift from me to you, made with no
obligation. Even if you ultimately refund ‘Habit Busting’ -
although I’m certain you won’t want to - you can keep my book.
If you’ve already bought Habit Busting through my link I’ll have
you details and will email you over the weekend, so there is no
need to get in touch (unless you want to!)
Find out more about Habit Busting and beat your own
procrastination habit at http://www.urlnex.us/habitbuster/
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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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John W. Gardner said,
“The creative individual is particularly gifted in seeing the gap
between what is and what could be (which means, of course, that
he has achieved a certain measure of detachment from what is).”
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Today’s Power Thought
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Homer Simpson has a saying: ‘If a thing’s hard to do then it
probably isn’t worth doing.’
If you don’t know who Homer is, then all I can say is that
whatever he says, you should do the complete opposite.
Yet, those silly words of his are so often the real meaning
behind our actions. We try, fail and give up.
Why have we grown up to be that way? Kids don’t have that
defeatist attitude. Kids fail to swim for months before they
manage to say afloat. Kids often even hurt themselves when they
fail to ride their bike the first or second or third time. But
they don’t say, ‘It’s too hard so I’ll give up.’
Kids WANT to succeed and they know deep down that they WILL if
they keep on trying to do the hard things long enough.
How many of us adults could sit a math exam? It would be MUCH too
hard, right?
But thousands of kids do it all the time. And most of them
succeed!
There are all kinds of psycho-babble reasons why we learn to
expect failure as we grow up, but none of them really count for
anything.
I believe 110% that we can unlearn that stupid self- defeating
belief. All it takes is a little bravery.
Have a go.
It doesn’t matter if you fall off your bike or sink to the bottom
of the pool. Look around you - other people are succeeding, so
you know it CAN be done.
All you have to do is keep on trying and pretty soon it won’t be
hard anymore. And it WILL be worth doing.
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The Foolproof, No-Nonsense,
Kickstart Guide to Making Money Online
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*** Catch up with parts 1-28 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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It’s on the tip of my tongue …
You know - the word for not being able to remember words.
Oh, what IS that word?
Lethologica.
There. But will you remember it tomorrow?