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.

Why would a marketer be so careless? –  you may well ask.

The answer exposes another pitfall for the new marketer – distraction.
I became distracted and lost focus.

To be fair to myself, one’s first grandchild is definitely a major distraction, especially when he and his mother come to stay for an extended visit. My daughter normally lives in London and I am in New Zealand, so we have not seen each other for several years.

I am learning things about babies that I had forgotten; one is how much of your time they can consume without you realizing it. This baby, (Theo), is so much fun!  Of course, my own babies were, too, but now I am able to re-live all that, with the advantage of someone else to look after the less attractive bits (think sleepless nights!).

Anyway, I’m back with a new time management plan which should enable me to spend part of each day studying and growing my business, IF I can tear myself away from Theo’s beguiling laughter…

So how can this guy, Craig Beckta, whom we’ve never heard of, right? (well, I haven’t, anyway, and I think I’ve bought just about every affiliate marketing product that was ever created!), how can he be claiming to have found secrets we didn’t know about?

I was curious, couldn’t resist taking a look. The sales page itself is a pleasure to read, drew me in straight away. I reckon that this Craig Beckta must know something about marketing, because the quality of the salescopy and the whole sales process are an education in themselves.

It turns out Craig is just an average guy who was able to secretly join the ranks of the super affiliates and gain the respect of internet marketing gurus at the same time. All with free traffic methods and without a mailing list…Really?

Free traffic? No mailing list? That sounds like me… so I purchased the Secret Affiliate Code.

I’m so glad I did. I can tell you, you don’t want to miss this. If you’ve been struggling to find the missing bits of the affiliate marketing puzzle, or if you’re up and running but would like to do better, this is for you.

The Secret Affiliate Code has got to be one of the best marketing systems out there; it’s a carefully crafted, detailed, step-by-step affiliate marketing battle plan and also an ongoing educational resource. Among the material there is over an hour of step-by-step “video footage” of Craig, showing exactly what he does and how he does it. Since he somehow managed to make 6K in one week using only free traffic methods, I don’t know about you…but I think that makes it well worth looking into his secrets.

And Craig holds nothing back: he exposes the inner workings of a $6,484 landing page, shows us the very best methods to turn Blogs and Squidoo lenses into cash hungry machines, discloses four “closed door” methods to make super affiliate sales, and undercover tactics to get red hot, ready to buy traffic that will convert into paying customers. If that was not already enough, there are over 2 hours of bonus audio interviews with Willie Crawford, Eric Rockefeller, Alex Goad and Charles Kirkland, where Craig prises a few of their secrets out of them.

Yes, there is a One Time Offer, and this one is cleverly priced to seem like not much to add to the price of the initial product. I went for the OTO and I promise you, it’s incredibly valuable. In fact, the OTO on its own is well worth the price of the whole package.

Now, I know you are probably thinking this is going to have a large price tag, but no, it’s a steal, really! I’m not allowed to reveal the price of the Secret Affiliate Code, but I promise you, it is affordable. In fact, it’s ridiculously cheap, and there’s a secret code hidden on the sales page that knocks $20.00 off the price –  if you can crack it.

Sorry, I can’t reveal how to crack the code… that would spoil your fun.

But if you want to have a go, click here: Secret Affiliate Code

You must know by now what happens when you sign up for a free offer? Yes, that’s right, you eventually end up on a sales page, which is only to be expected. We are all here trying to make a living, and to do that we are selling stuff. It’s just that this week in particular, I seem to have overdone my signups and I’m not going to have time to give each of them the attention it deserves.

One of them does stand out though, and I’m really glad I stumbled onto it. It’s The Secret Affiliate Code, the first product from a new marketer, Craig Beckta. The Secret Affiliate Code has come into my life at exactly the right time – its just what I need right now. I signed up for the product, and for the OTO (believe me, I have become pretty good at resisting the beguilement of salescopy, so that’s how good the sales page is). The price is very reasonable, and I reckon this will be a valuable resource both now and for a long time to come.

There’s a large pdf manual. After a quick look at it, I was so excited, I printed the whole thing out so that I can read it sitting comfortably in a chair, or in bed. There’s heaps of other material as well, that I haven’t had a chance to look at properly yet, but right now, I’m setting out to write a review of the product to submit to article sites.

I won’t go on about the Secet Affiliate Code here; I’ll be posting my review on this blog so you can read more about it there. In the meantime, I recommend you go take a look at it for yourself. Here’s the link Secret Affiliate Code

Oh, and there’s a secret code on the sales page. If you can crack the code, you  get $20.00 off the price if you decide to buy.

Afterwards, feel free to come back here and write a comment. I’d love to know what you think.

I have just recently completed the first run of John Thornhill’s Personal Coaching program (which I highly recommend, by the way). I wasn’t planning on taking Mike up on his offer of all this free stuff, because I figure I’m not advanced enough for all that yet. But on John’s advice to “watch and learn”, I went through Mike’s sales process, signed up for all the free offerings, resisted all the upsells and one time offers (because I thought I’m not ready for them yet) and I learned a lot (including that I wish I had purchased Mike’s one time offer – it is a bargain!)

If you’ve been undecided about whether to look at Mike’s offer, I urge you to do so right away, before it closes on Sunday. And don’t do what I did and miss out on the one time offer – it could be the best investment you’ll ever make for taking your online business forward.

Drop whatever you’re doing and go here right now. Watch the video; read the whole page; follow the instructions. You’ll thank me for it in time to come.

It’s only just now sinking in, after months of concern (due to a problem with the pregnancy) that he would be born prematurely, worrying about my daughter, worrying about how small the baby would be if he was born very early, he’s here. He’s fine, only a month early and doesn’t need to be in an incubator, and my daughter is well too!

Geographically, I am on one side of the world, and they are on the other, about as physically far apart as it is possible to be. But, thanks to the wonders of modern technology, I have a photo already.

I am pondering a puzzle, though. On my side of the world, he was born on June 2nd; on his side of the world he was born on June 1st: what date will his birthday be?

I’ve been dabbling online for about three years, joined John’s “Powerseller Challenge” about a year ago. It was just one of many products I spent money on but did not apply myself to. I was an Internet Marketer’s dream customer, buying every new thing to land in my inbox and focusing on none of them. They say “the money is in the list” – this is surely true if you have people like me on your list!

Over the months, John began to stand out as someone who knew what he was doing. I liked his honest, friendly approach, so when his Coaching Program became available, it was an easy decision for me to sign up. I thought the price was fair, and I was pretty sure I would get value for money. I was right.

In 16 short weeks I have gone from being technologically incompetent to having two blogs up and running (go here to have a look at the other one), a product created (you can view sales page here) and listed on clickbank, a bonus product and a 7-day minicourse related to my product, complete with its own landing page ( minicourse opt-in ). I had to start a second blog, because the niche I chose for my product had nothing to do with Internet Marketing, which was the subject of this, my first (and now somewhat neglected) blog.

The Coaching Program has certainly been intensive, but I loved the fact that I could follow along at my own pace. My technophobia slowed me up a bit at times, but it didn’t matter. All the material I needed was there, and if I struck a problem (as I did several times) John and Daniel were easily available to sort me out. At no time did I ever feel that I was left to flounder along on my own.

The main presentation of course material was by video. Each video was short and devoted to only a single, small step, which made it easy to find what I wanted when I needed to go back to refresh my memory about something. A handy checklist provided each week made it easy to be certain I’d completed all the work necessary before advancing to the next stage.

I have progressed from being someone who could barely do more online than press the “BUY NOW” button, to being someone who has researched a market and chosen a niche, chosen and purchased a domain name, can set up and manage a Wordpress blog, create material and upload it to the internet, manage an autoresponder account, list items on clickbank, create material for affiliates, create my own product, write a sales letter and create a sales page, write articles and submit them to article directories and much more besides. This all feels to me like an enormous achievement. My confidence level has soared.

I can thoroughly recommend John Thornhill’s Personal Coaching Program to anyone who is ready to learn the Internet Marketing ropes.