Paull Hamilton.com

This post will be one of those heart on sleeve moments.  I am looking at the clock in my office and it´s telling me that I should have been in bed five and a half hours ago, the time is 4.50  am..

It´s not that I don´t need to sleep, I do, I´m feeling totally drained.

Alex Jeffrey´s sent me an email about an hour ago saying that it was very important and that I should to go to his blog, so I did.  He has made his first video of 2009 in which he talks about his plans for the year ahead.  I watched the video intently as he describes how he intends to go away on holiday, and whilst he´s away from all the stress of his normal working environment he will make his plans for 2009 in which he will blast his way to a million dollar turnover for the year.

As I watched this video it hit me like a sledgehammer, what the hell was I doing watching a video of Alex at 4.30am !!

We all have busy lives and have to fit things around work and all the other mundane tasks that life throws  at us  but, what am I doing still awake at 4.30am. The reason I´m sat here at stupid o´clock in the morning is because the forward planning that I had laid out for myself at the beginning of this year SUCKS like a big one !!

The comment that I left on Alex´s blog was that I would love to position myself as a male version of Maria Andros, minus the earring =O) and that I would love to reach a target of $7000 a month by the end of this year. There will be as much chance of finding a snowball in hell of attaining that goal  if I don´t get my act together, and quick. As we all know any one can be a busy fool.

On so many occasions during this course I have nodded in all the right place when  Alex spoke to us about planning ahead, what a chump I´ve been. I had noticed from my previous visits to  Gary Simpson´s blog that he has a free Ebook about time management, needless to say I now have a copy that I will use diligently.

Later today I plan to get a couple of tattoos on my behind with the phrases KOTOBOT (keeping on top of being on top) and on the other cheek,  Fail to plan,plan to fail !!

Sorry to ramble but it´s now 5am..

If you are anything like me you have a lot of browsers open at any one time. This can cause quite a few problems, one being it tends to slow down your computer. I came across a great little extension for Firefox the other day, Thumbstrips.

Basically it creates a filmstrip of thumbnails across the bottom of your screen that shows your browsing history. Each of the individual thumbnails is clickable so you really only ever need to have one browser open at any one time. Perfect for me, because I think my record once was 34 browsers open at once !

You can find the Thumbstrip extension at Firefox Thumbstrips

The last two days have been pretty intense on the work front. We had our second marathon webcast on Friday evening in which Alex discussed in great detail the various methods of driving traffic to our respective sites.

The one thing Alex did refer to quite pointedly was, when trying to drive traffic to you own site by posting comments on other sites ´´DO NOT PIMP YOURSELF´´ This statement was brought to light by a comment that was placed on another students blog. The commentor was again a fellow student who felt quite strongly that including your own sites url underneath your comment was tantamount to spamming.

I have to admit that I have up until last night been guilty of this heinous act. Thinking about it logically there is no reason to include a second url because if you format your url in the comment bio box using the http format your name will be clickable anyway. Obviously if people read your comment and it is of interest to them, they will have the opportunity to click on your name and then go to your site.

The comment in question was left on was on Gary Simpson´s blog, go across and find it. Gary has a great blog so stick around for a while.

Obviously before you even think of driving an avalanche of visitors to your site you must have something that will hold their attention, so make interesting posts. They don´t just have to be relevant to your particular niche, make some posts about you, but make it light. I never stay on a blog longer than 30 seconds if the first post is as dry as dust.

The only thing I would say though is keep the posts coming thick and fast. Today I went on walkabout around a a lot of my fellow students blogs and I was very surprised and saddened to see that quite a high proportion of them seemed to be dormant.. if you don´t post on a regular basis why would your prospective readers have a reason to stay, and don´t forget these people could one day turn into a paying customer, surly reason enough to try and hold their attention !

The phenomenon that is Twitter was spoken about in great detail last night. Again one of the biggest mistakes you could make on the big T is to twitspam. Like all those crappy sales pitches that you are constantly deleting from your inbox, spamtwits have exactly the same effect, people will dismiss you very quickly as a spammer, so don´t do it.

The whole idea behind Twitter is to build casual relationships, did you hear that CASUAL. Don´t go and make a twit of yourself by twittering on about how great your blog is or how fantastic you new product is. Give your fellow twiters a chance to get to know you, and if you say something funny or interesting then maybe if you are lucky they may want to find out more about you and what you have to offer.

Alex was raving about a comment that Maria Andros had made about her own profile page. You normally see people linking back to their respective blogs, not Maria she links straight to a squeeze page for her video marketing course, GENIUS !!

Maria is getting a hell of a lot of optins per day using this method, it does not take a mastermind to work out how very lucrative this simple but very clever action will be.

Alex then went on to talk about how to use Google for searching out your competition. If you type into the search bar allintitle: (then place the websites name that you want to investigate), you will be able to find out such details as who´s linking to them, very useful ! The other technique is to type in allinanchor:(then the sites name) again a lot of very useful information can be gleaned by using this simple search technique.

There where lots of other free tools spoken about that are freely available to use. I read an article that spoke about 11 of them that you can use for traffic and seo purposes, please read below.

11 of the Best (Free) SEO Tools and How to Use Them — Isnare.com …

Google Adwords Traffic Estimator – this is a free tool provided by Google, which provides Adwords advertisers with an estimated cost of running a PPC campaign using specific keyword phrases. Use it like this: export the exact match …

As I mentioned earlier in the post don´t get into the bad habit of spam posting because you are not only wasting your time you also run the risk of getting a bad rep. The other point is try to keep your blog evergreen with regular posts, and then as kevin Kostner was told ¨they will come¨

Wow, I´ve just come off from the fifth webcast with Alex Jeffreys and tonight he had a guest speaker.

The lady in question was non other than Maria Andros aka The video Marketing Queen. She had me spellbound as she spoke of her meteoric rise in the video marketing niche.

In the space of 10 months she went from zero the well  over $100k ! just by harnessing the power of video.  She spoke with utter passion about her career, in fact I would say that her passion even rivals that of our very own Alex.

I cannot believe the amount of information she delivered tonight,quite incredible. The main platform that Maria uses for her own video promotion is YouTube, and she imparted  to us some very useful tips for producing  our own videos.

For example being authentic and don´t try and  bluff your viewers. I think for a lot of people this is common sense, but I can understand perfectly what she means. The time I have seen sales pitches that are so cheesy and so obviously a hard sell even though the presenter is trying not to come over as selling to you, yea right. You know the type of sales pitch that you normally see on the late night. shopping channel

The one main truism that I heard tonight is that as consumers we are not stupid. The days of the hard sell are well and truly dead.

Slightly off topic, but still quite relevant was an email that I received from Michael Cheney. I laughed so much at this video because Michael got the idea that Maria was talking about tonight totally pegged.

He sang a version of Hallelujah but changed lyrics to fit in a product he was promoting, total genius

The whole point is though, that as a consumer I would be far more inclined to buy the product from Michael rather than anyone else because he made me laugh ! A very simple concept but oh so powerful.

Tonight when Alex had his turn to talk, he told us of an amazing competition that he was running with a total prize fund of $3000, does this guy over deliver or what !!

For the competition we have to produce a video and promote it on Youtube. The most original video will win $1500 and the video that atracts the most traffic will also win $1500. Needles to say I am going to try my hardest to get somwhere in both categories. So wish me luck and on the with the filming, is that my cue now Mr Demille !!