So many things are claiming my time just now. First there is the baby – my first grandchild, for anyone who hasn’t read any other posts in this blog. He and my daughter are living with me at present; that’s a whole new subject that deserves its own post!

I’m moving house, well rather, I have put my property on the market. This means I am having a huge de-cluttering. There is a large bin (9.0 cubic metres) outside my gate, and old furniture, magazines and years of hoarding are filling it rapidly.

One way and another, I am neglecting my blogs, and I’m struggling to keep up with the course.

The course is great. We are in week 8, at the stage of choosing a niche for which to create a product. This has always been a stumbling block for me in my efforts to make progress, but I am following John’s videos and believing that my path will become clear.

The last few weeks have been very exciting: the first thrill was getting my graphics from Planet Divinity

I am so pleased with them (the graphics). I asked for a simple design, and that’s what I got. The service was prompt, communication was clear and friendly, customer service and support have been excellent. I can’t recommend these guys highly enough to do them justice.

The next major step was John’s webinar – his first, not that you’d have ever known. It all went pretty smoothly. What a team we have aligned with John – Dave from Planet Divinity and Daniel, who is John’s technical support person. Daniel has helped me many times (even on a Sunday) and I can’t thank him enough for his prompt, courteous service and his patience.

And now we have the forum. What a great resource this is going to develop into -  members of the class are already helping each other out. It’s obvious we have a wide range of abilities amongst our members and an interesting mix of personalities.

So now, we are into sorting out our strengths, interests, talents and areas of expertise and researching possible topics for product creation. I think I almost have it sorted, but not sure. Now Daniel, in one of his posts in the forum, said something about a 36 hour day.

When he finds one, I hope he lets me have a copy!

For me, the orange RSS feed icon was one of those things.

I noticed it from time to time on websites I visited – “subscribe via RSS” would be the invitation. But why would I want to, when I had just filled in the optin form and then confirmed my email address? With all the other stuff vying for my attention, the RSS feed issue just wasn’t compelling enough to make me do something about it.

That is, until I started to focus on my time management (or rather, lack of) skills. Somehow just recently, it has filtered through to my awareness that the bold little orange icon can save me time. Ahha! Now I’m a bit more motivated.

I thought I’d go online and find out all I need to know, and then write a post for my readers – well, that sparkle of inspiration and excitement lasted as long as it took me to google “RSS feeds” and discover that there were 288,000,000 entries! I clicked on the first one, which happened to be Wikipedia, and there was just too much information for this total technophobe!

After a bit more research, I remembered that I can drive my car perfectly well, but I have only a very limited understanding of how it works. After that, I felt much better.

Here, in the tiniest nutshell, is my understanding of RSS feeds:

RSS stands for “Really Simple Syndication” (there are other definitions, but that seems to be the most popular).

From the readers’ point of view, subscribing to RSS feeds allows you to easily have the news/blogposts/information updates that you are interested in sent to one place, where you can access them all on one page without having to visit each site individually.

You need a feed reader. There are many readers, but I have google reader, which seems to be a popular one.
To get google reader, sign in to your google account and select the reader option, or go to http://www.google.com/reader

This page will open.

Play the video. I have read many articles and watched several video clips about RSS feeds, but this little gem, while very short, seems to give as much information as I needed to get started. 

For me, now, it’s a case of using RSS feeds for a while to become familiar with what I can do with them and how they can help me. It’s quite possible I’m the last person online to start learning about that wonderful little orange icon, but if any of you want a good, written tutorial about getting started with RSS feeds, one of the best I found was on Paula Brett’s blog and I recommend you read it and save yourself the hours of research that I have done.

Here’s the link to Paula’s tutorial.

So for the rest of this week, I’m taking the opportunity to plan and write blog posts (I promise to write not too much about the baby!) and articles.

If you’ve signed up to the waiting list for the next John Thornhill marketing masterclass and you’re wondering what you’ll get if you decide to part with your money, here’s a brief outline of what we’ve achieved so far:

• We’ve chosen and purchased a domain name
• Purchased a hosting account
• We have our very own websites, in the form of Wordpress blogs, up and running
• We’ve put an optin form on our websites for people to subscribe to our blogs
• We’ve taken the first steps towards that most important IM activity, building our lists.

And under John’s guidance, we have done all this ourselves!

When you think that four weeks ago, most of us had done not much more online than purchase stuff we couldn’t work out how to use, that is enormous progress!

Stay with me over the next 32 weeks while I put John’s teaching to work.
Please remember, I am technologically, vertically and memorably challenged! Well, at least being short’s no problem where computers are concerned, but difficulties with technology and remembering sure are!

Now, what was I going to do next….?

Last year, I enrolled in, but did not quite complete, John’s first coaching program (no fault of John’s, my personal life got in the way). So when I saw that John planned another class, I joined it without hesitation.

John Thornhill’s marketing masterclass is more than twice as long as his original coaching program, and I understand it will include more material. We have so far just covered the technical setting up aspects – buying a domain name, setting up a hosting account, getting a blog up and running, starting posts and so on.

For me, I already had all this set up from last year, so it has just been a case of reviewing the class material each week to see if there is anything new, to refresh my memory, and to make sure that everything is still working the way it should do.

And already, there is new information. That’s why I am so excited. John Thornhill’s marketing masterclass is bigger and better than his earlier coaching program. I learnt heaps from that, and I am looking forward to consolidating that and learning heaps more.

John Thornhill always over delivers and I know this class will prove to be no exception.