Thursday, 9 th September 2010

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Why My Personality Defect Cost Me Thousands! - March 2010

Hello and welcome to the March edition of the APD newsletter.

At last, some nice weather here in the U.K, Monday and Tuesday last week were wonderful. So, I took a day out on Monday and Alison and I went for a nice walk around the Hertfordshire countryside in the sunshine.

It was absolutely wonderful to be out walking without a coat for the first time in 2010. It sort of reminded me that we haven’t had a holiday for a few months! Mind you Lee and I have been hugely busy as you will have seen with the launch of Internet Marketing Strategic. If you haven’t joined yet, and you are interested in making some money online, get along and join. It’s free, and you have my promise that it will always remain free.

So far there’s great video tutorial series on running your website (everything you need to kow about control panel), affiliate marketing, SEO and Adwords. There’s also loads of eBooks and website and Wordpress templates…oh, and a huge file of website graphics…all totally gratis.

Join Internet Marketing Strategic Now…it’s free!

There will be more great info added soon, so make sure you use it to help you get yourself up and running and making some money on the Internet. Even if you know what you’re doing there’s still some great resources, you have nothing to lose.

And, if you know someone else who might be interested do them a favour and tell them about Internet Marketing Strategic

I have also totally revamped the APD site during February, so you can now find that at APD Internet Marketing - loads of Internet Marketing product reviews and links to all of our own products, which brings me nicely to…

..the launch of my Life Mastery System.

I’m giving you the “heads up” on this because it’s at a special introductory price at the moment, only for APD subscribers…so get in quick before I withdraw the offer.

What is it? Well, it’s the distillation of how I turned myself around from no-hoper to the lifestyle I’ve always dreamed about in just a few months.

It’s a short concise eBook (with some bonus items) that shows how I learned from some of the “money-power” giants of this world. How I learned to control time, money and therefore my life and destiny.

It’s hugely powerful stuff that shows you how to break down time and money into their smallest component parts, exercise absolute control over them and then build powerful money making systems from those minute parts.

You see, most people just do not understand time and money at the most basic level. If you can master the art of doing this, you gain complete and utter control over your life and destiny.

Life will be dancing to your tune, not the other way around!

Please go and have a look at www.control-your-life.info/Life_Mastery_APD_Offer.html

Be quick though as I will be taking this offer down on Friday12th March 2010 and then it’s gone forever…even if you plead with me :>)

O.K, I hope you’ll indulge me blowing my own trumpet a little this month, it’s not very often I take a major chunk of newsletter space to do so :>)

So, let’s get on with some money making info for you.

I talk to a lot of people over the course of any given month and obviously, being in “Internet Marketing” I tend to talk about the subject an awful lot. In talking to many people on this broad subject, one of the things that comes up time and again, particularly for those just starting out, is how do you build a website? I’ll admit it was the same for me.

I don’t know about you, but I have a chromosome lose that dictates I just HAVE to know how everything in my business works. So, as sure as night follows day, I had to know how to build a website :>)

So, I am going to make a very bold statement right here, right now.

This “personality defect” has cost me many thousands of dollars over the last four or five years!

Why, I hear you ask?

Well, it held me back in terms of the time it took me to learn how to build even the most basic website. And, it also held me back because the websites I built were, not to put too finer a point on it…complete and utter crap!

There are three issues here.

Firstly, the time issue, which I have alluded to already, secondly a tools issue and finally a training or knowledge issue.

I’ll take these in turn.

Time, I’ve talked about time many times before and by now you will know my view that time is a very precious commodity indeed. This life of yours is NOT a trial run. This is it, you get one chance and once your race is run that’s it…there is no more. A bit unnerving that, isn’t it?

So, if you’re like me and not wonderfully good technically do one of two things. Either, get yourself some proper training in order to make your self good…or get someone who is good and time efficient at building websites to build yours for you.

By default we have gone into the knowledge aspect of this here. What I will also say is that gaining the knowledge can be very time consuming and costly as well.

Where did I go wrong? Well, I guess I tried to learn Dreamweaver, which is a fairly complicated program, by myself from the ground up. It was a stupid task when I should have been concentrating on the making money aspect.

So, talking of tools, there are now tools that can make your life a whole lot easier. I now use Blue Voda, and it’s great, it’s also FREE - yipee! If you can use Word, you can use Blue Voda with about an hour in the online tutorials.

It’s a great tool and when I do build sites, it’s what I now use and I am now reasonably proficient.

However, it’s still NOT a good use of my time…if I’m honest I have come to enjoy pottering around in Blue Voda, but I can get “lost” in it for hours on end. I repeat it’s not a good use of my time.

So, when it comes to technical stuff, if you enjoy it and you are good at it, then great go for it. But if you are not that way inclined…outsource!

I use Rentacoder and Odesk. I’ve stopped using Elance because prices were going up and I just didn’t seem to get what I wanted on the ocasions I did use it.

When you outsource you do need to be prepared to “kiss a few frogs” first. I had a situation where I was looking to hire someone to do a one week “socialisation” project for me.

I ended up hiring a young lady from China, first time I had used her and she was quite aggressive on pricing and closing the deal. I felt she really wanted the work so despite a slight nagging feeling I hired her.

She never did a drop of work, and I ended up having to go through arbitration to get my money back. I guess the lesson here is trust your instincts, if something appears to be too good or doesn’t feel right, be more diligent in checking it out!

But don’t be put off, because this is a very cost effective way to get work (of all sorts) done and after a while you find a number of suppliers that you trust and deliver good work on time and to budget.

I now have a list of “go to” suppliers for websites, writing, SEO and socialisation.

Outsourcing is how you really start to leverage time in your favour and I have become a great fan. It has also taught me that I don’t have to understand in finite detail everything that goes on “under the hood” of my business…I still like to know though :>)

Oh, and just before I go, one other little trick I have used to good effect in certain circumstances is to use the local University for technical resource. I have developed links with a couple of local educational establishments that have Computer Science departments.

One two occasions I have used final year students to do web development work for me. This is a real win/win as the student can use the project towards their course and you get a young, enthusiastic and hungry technician who is very keen to please to do your work for you…for beer money!

It does take some time and effort to find the right people to talk to and to gain trust, but it can be a worthwhile tap into some excellent resource.

And talking of leveraging time, I had to go out in the rush hour this morning! My daughter came round last night and stayed over (she can’t resist my amazing roast dinners), so I had to get her to college by 9am this morning! It’s a seven mile run, door to door, and it took….54 minutes.

What a waste of time and life force! Although clearly I enjoyed extra time with my daughter, but…I queued in traffic for most of the seven miles! Frightening, why would you want to do that just to go to work? Stay at home and make money online, it’s much more fun!

O.K, that’s it for March, I’ll be back just after Easter with the April newsletter. Argghhhh, Easter, haven’t we only just had Christmas?

I’m sure time goes more quickly the older I get…but that’s another subject for another day.

Until next month, have fun and make money!

Cheers now

Derek