Kickstart Today Archive

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Kickstart Today
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Friday March 14th, 2008: Issue #899

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’s been a busy morning here. My day started a 4.45 am as I had
to drive to the airport to pick up my daughter Hannah and her
friends who have just spend a very enjoyable week in New York
City.

I suspect there may now be an alcohol shortage in Manhattan, so
if you are there and think that prohibition has returned, Hannah
apologises!

Oh to be young, free and single again!

#~#~#

The next London Lunch is only two weeks away and 20 of the 25
places are now booked.

If you want to be one of the final five people to secure your
place, please let me know asap. You should have had an email
telling you where to send the cash, but if not, email me and I’ll
get you the details.

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I’ve had some pretty odd spam over the years, offering to enhance
me in places that I didn’t know I need it. But today took the
biscuit. I received a real, snail-mail letter from a company
called ‘Stiff-Strips’ who guaranteed me that sticking one of
their patches somewhere about my body would guarantee that I had
a rock-hard - well you know the rest - for 24 hours!

24 hours! What would they expect me to do with it for 24 hours?
24 minutes would be more than sufficient!

Delia said that at least I’d have somewhere to hang my coat - but
I think she’s been secretly sending off for things behind my
back. Maybe I should buy some - that’ll teach her!

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If ever I needed proof positive that I live in a country where
the lunatics have been put in charge, I found it today.

The health club I go to is very nice. Expensive, but a pleasure
to belong to. One reason is that they attend to little details
that you don’t get at run-of-the-mill clubs.

For example, we have a lovely swimming pool with a sitting area
overlooking it. That area, which is separated from the pool by a
low wall, has chairs and loungers to relax in, newspapers to
read, soft drinks and water and, in a very nice touch, a big bowl
of fresh apples and pears that members can munch on to our
heart’s content - all constantly replenished by the hard-working
and very attentive staff.

Well this week the club had a visit from the local Health and
Safety officer.

And now we can’t have fresh fruit any more.

Apparently, the H&S moron declared that someone *might* drop an
apple core or a bit of pear on the floor, and it *could* get
kicked out into the poolside area where someone *maybe* could
slip on it and fall.

In all my time at the club I’ve never seen someone drop an apple
core on the floor, and even if they did, the cleaning staff
would, I’m sure be on top of it in no time. But H&S people aren’t
concerned with the real world. They prefer to invent increasingly
unlikely scenarios so that they can say that they have done their
job.

Unfortunately, we are all complicit in the idiocy because we have
persisted in voting in successive governments who are all too
happy to abdicate common sense and who are hell-bent on removing
any shred of personal responsibility from the population.

I think that the Health and Safety Executive should issue a
decree that states that Health and Safety officers should
henceforth be banned from entering any building that the general
public has access to. My reasoning is that it is clear that the
mere presence of the H&S nincompoops is enough to raise the blood
pressure of any sensible person to dangerous levels, could
possibly induce stress levels that could lead to heart attacks or
apoplectic fits, and may eventually lead to a risk to the health
of the H&S monkey as outrage and aggression in otherwise
meek-mannered folk hits new highs.

But will they see sense, I somehow doubt it. They have those
wicked apple cores to deal with first.

#~#~#

Speaking of which, a young lady was arrested by the police here
in the UK recently and charged with “Unauthorized disposal of
biological waste on land that is unlicensed for such purposes”.
It is estimated that it will cost the taxpayer over £5000 for her
case to be heard.

Clearly the callous creature deserves to have the book thrown at
her and be hurled into prison for many a year.

Her crime?

She threw an apple core out of her car window into a field.

Unfortunately for her, and for the UK taxpayer, she hadn’t
noticed that a police car was behind her, driven by someone whose
application to join the Health and Safety Executive had been
rejected on the grounds of not having a sufficiently
well-developed sense of humor.

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The Quote of the Day
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Henry Ford said,

“Failure is an opportunity to begin again more intelligently.”

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Today’s Power Thought
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We’ve all heard the expression ‘Today is the first day of the
rest of your life’. It is true, of course, but it doesn’t say an
awful lot.

I prefer to think that today is the best day of my life.

No matter what happens today, it will be my best day ever!

How is that for starting the day with passion and enthusiasm?

If we all were to start each morning with the dual intent of
making each day our most enjoyable and most effective, imagine
how incredible our lives would be.

And best of all, we get to do it all again tomorrow!

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The Foolproof, No-Nonsense,
Kickstart Guide to Making Money Online
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Today’s installment, part 10, of the Foolproof, No-Nonsense,
Kickstart Guide to Making Money Online is the last that is
specifically aimed at newbies. Up to now I’ve been covering the
basics of how to get a blog up and running - a skill that I
believe every budding Internet marketer should master.
Thankfully, as you will have seen, it is really quite easy.

Armed with this knowledge, you can build as many websites as you
like - there need be no more excuses!

After all, making money online may not be as easy as some
so-called experts may have you believe, but it really isn’t all
that hard either - but without a website of some kind, it is a
whole lot more difficult. Blogs are the ideal ‘first websites’
for absolute beginners as they are easy to build, simple to
maintain, need no technical knowledge to speak of, and are loved
by the search engines.

Later in the course we will look at how to build more traditional
websites, including squeeze pages, sales pages, product download
pages and all that good stuff, but for now, if you are just
starting out, stick to cutting your online teeth on a blog.

The video today will show you how to start making posts (it is
very short, so no time wasting here!) but here in the text let’s
take a moment to talk about what your posts can and should
consist of. http://www.keywordlsispy.com/imkickstart/video7/

The term ‘blog’ is a shortened form of the phrase ‘Web Log’ - the
original term coined to describe a type of website that acts as
an online journal. The idea was that you would post to a blog a
bit like you would a pen and ink diary or journal, recording
events from your life.

Of course, that soon expanded to include posts about all kinds of
things.

In fact, it didn’t take long for people to realize that a blog
could be used to display almost any kind of subject matter that
needs to be updated or added to on a regular basis.

Blogs started to appear that were, in effect, product catalogues.
People saw that they could post about their latest products - or
affiliates learned that they could post reviews of items that
would get them commissions.

The line between ‘traditional’ website and blog started to blur.
And as the software that blogs were build upon (for example,
WordPress or Blogger) became more sophisticated, and the
third-party addons such as visual themes and plugins became more
useful and user-friendly, so the ways in which blogs could be
used has increased.

Alongside all of this, and probably driving it to a large extent,
the search engines quickly came to see that blogs were an answer
to their prayers. Search engines have long struggled to provide
searchers with that Holy Grail of objectives: up-to-the-minute
results. Google and their friends want to serve up the most
relevant search results, but they also are desperate to serve up
the most recent. Blogs, they quickly saw, are updated all the
time. People are posting new stuff on them every minute of every
day, and while the content of the posts may not always be totally
on-topic, they were certainly up to date.

As a result, the search engines found ways to monitor when bogs
are updated and as soon as they find new material appearing they
send in the bots and the spiders to see what it is all about.

Whereas a traditional website can often take weeks or months to
get into the search engines, blog entries can regularly be found
on the top results pages within a few minutes of being written.
I’ve regularly had product reviews that I’ve written appear in
Google’s top five results within 15 or 20 minutes of my posting
them to my blogs.

There is no sign of this phenomenon slowing down either. It is
still a win-win situation for both the SEs and bloggers.

So, while it is easy to get your posts into the search engines -
and initially into high rankings - keeping them there can be a
challenge.

It seems to me that the search engines like to get the most
recent blog posts listed very fast, but then, over the next few
days, they take a harder look and decide if the content of the
blog post is really as good as it needs to be to warrant high
rankings. That’s were your skill as a blogger comes in.

Writing blog posts is a very similar skill set to writing
articles. You have to stay on topic, have a coherent theme, make
your primary keyword both obvious and focused and, increasingly
importantly, have a good range of LSI words within your post so
that the search engines can accept you as an ‘authority site’.

If you are unsure about what LSI words are, or how to find them,
my Keyword LSI Spy tool is the answer - you can learn more about
LSI in general, and take a trial of Keyword LSI Spy at
http://www.keywordlsispy.com

Blog posts can be as long or as short as you like. If you write
short ’snippet’ posts, consider writing them more frequently and
showing more to a page (10+). For longer posts, you can blog less
often and show fewer posts per page. For this course, I’m
displaying only one post per page - for the reason that I want
the search engines to see that each page is on a focused topic.

Another kind of blog that has become popular with Internet
marketers is rather rudely called a splog - a spam blog. These
consist of little in the way of fresh, personally written content
and are usually just autoposted private label articles, directory
articles or ads. Purists decry them, but I don’t. They have their
place. Sometimes they can achieve good search engines rankings in
their own right - especially if they latch on to a keyword or
niche that isn’t well served with ‘full-feature content’ blogs.
Oftentimes, though, they don’t get highly ranked in the SEs, but
they do provide you with a platform to link back to other ‘money’
sites that you may have in their niches.

Neil Shearing’s 10 Day Cash Secret WordPress plugin -
http://www.urlnex.us/10daycashsecret/ - and Kim Standerline’s
excellent EasyBlogsPro scripts -
http://www.urlnex.us/easyblogspro/ - both automate the production
of blogs that are based on externally sourced information. Both
work very well indeed - but some people are still wary of
creating blogs that are not personally written. To that comment I
say that there is nothing at all stopping you from using either
of these scripts to augment your own blog. Sometimes you can’t
write blog entries every day - in some niches, once a week would
be pushing things - but with affiliate ads being fed in regularly
(using Neil’s script) or well-written, on-topic articles being
posted direct from the main articles directories, your personal
blog can be kept fresh, updated and enticing to the search
engines while you are waiting for inspiration to strike!

The very best kind of blog to start out with is one that covers a
topic you are personally knowledgeable about. My uncle is in his
70’s, doesn’t know a blog from a burger, finds NotePad too
complicated, but has still managed to build and maintain a very
creditable blog at http://magicderris.com which has, in a few
weeks, already started building a list of regular visitors. His
latest stats show an average of over 20 unique visitors every day
- and growing. And with absolutely no publicity. It is almost all
coming from natural search engine traffic.

The next step for him will be to add a few monetization ideas -
primarily AdSense, affiliate products and an ebook or report of
his own.

Anyone can become a blogger - it just takes a commitment to
succeed.

This installment has been much longer that I anticipated, so I’ll
stop here. Next time we’ll look at a different aspect of Internet
marketing, but meanwhile, you can now review the whole of this
course so far at http://imkickstart.com/course/ - please feel
free to visit the blog and leave your comments!

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Fascinating Facts
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Here in the UK we had to endure the government’s annual budget
speech this week.

The Chancellor of the Exchequer stands up in Parliament and
‘opens his budget’.

That phrase has come to mean that he makes his speech, but the
origin of the phrase is the little bag that the budget speech is
traditionally carried to parliament in. In French, the bag was
called a ‘bougette’ - which simply means ‘little bag’. So he had
to open his bougette to deliver his speech.

Now, the little bag is a battered red briefcase that was made for
William Gladstone in 1860.

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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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