Wow! What a weekend!

I don’t make it to many internet marketing “events”, but this weekend I had the chance to help out Tim Brocklehurst with one of his TheFreedomClass workshops.

The workshops are designed to get people totally up and running with their own MyViralSpiral3.com site, including a blog, their own info product and affiliate program and show them how to start getting traffic in to build their list virally.

So by the end of the weekend they’ve got everything in place to start building a REAL online business that will last.

I’ve had MVS3 for a while now as I recognised how powerful it is when I saw Tim present it at Robert Puddy’s BritPack seminar last year, but hadn’t had time to get to grips with it properly, so the weekend was also the ideal opportunity for me to do the same as the students, get it all up and running and building me a list virally.

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John Thornhill Offers Some Sound Advice…

I read an excellent post from John Thornhill last week called Is This Why You’re Failing Online

There’s some cracking tips in the post to help people actually “take action” and get things done..

but the reason I’m mentioning it is because he quotes a classic “plea for help” email he received from one of his subscribers, and whilst his reply to the subscriber and the reply he got back is sadly typical, it’s one of the lines in the original email that caught my attention..

“I’ve tried everything and I’m at a loss”.

I’ve also tried everything and I can say from my own experience that it’s not the right way of doing things if you want to be successful and build a profitable business online.

The more things you try, the less you actually get finished.

My business is far healthier since I decided to concentrate on just one or two areas of internet marketing, specifically writing information products of my own and building email/subscribers lists, although I admit I do still sometimes get sidetracked myself.

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Do you ever switch off your PC or leave it sitting idle doing nothing?

I do sometimes, but most of the time my PC is doing something for me even when I’m not there..

I’ve posted about using technology in your online business to automate processes like email broadcasting with aweber, but that’s not the only way you can make your life easier.

I get a lot of traffic to my blogs and sites from videos that I’ve created and uploaded to video sharing sites, but when I started doing this I quickly realized doing it manually was just too time consuming to be practical.

So I went looking for an automated solution.

There are a few systems that will automate the process of uploading videos to video sharing sites, so it did take me a while to compare the different features and benefits and the relative price points.

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I’m still not sure I do..

I’ve been using Twitter on and off for a couple of weeks now, I’m still updating on a fairly sporadic basis I’ve not quite got in to a habit yet, although adding the Twitter plugin to this blog has helped to remind me.

I actually signed up for an account at the end of Jan, but when I logged to check it out, I really didn’t get it..

It was only thanks to Matt Backak  deciding to “follow” me that I went back for another look, partly because I had no idea you could “follow” someone, and partly because I had no idea how Matt had found me or would want to follow my “Twitters”, I still don’t know why..

I checked out Matt’s page and suddenly “got” the idea of following someone else’s twitter’s so promptly started “following” a whole bunch of people who’s name’s I recognized and suddenly started to “get” it, a bit, although it does seem that people use it quite differently.

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should you include personal stuff, like what’s going on in your life, in your emails to your list?

most marketers don’t seem to, probably on the basis that they want to concentrate on the “marketing message”, which I can understand and appreciate, and I do it myself on most emails, but then there are days where I just gotta share…

I keep track of the click thorugh rates for all the emails I send out (yet another spreadsheet), partly so I can see which subject headers work well, and partly for tracking the conversion ratio, as well as trying to judge the level of “interest” in a topic, and I have noticed that click through rates do seem to go up when I’ve included something about what’s going on in my life.

I steer clear of doing it just for the sake of it and limit “personal stuff” to when there’s something vaguely interesting to write about, or something that fits in with (or compliments) the subject of the message/promotion.

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It’s a good job I spent some time last week setting up some blog posts ahead of time, I seem to have fallen behind a little bit, sometimes it’s hard to find the right balance between working online and living “real life”..

I guess I’m fortunate that I’ve been doing this internet marketing thing for some time and my income isn’t totally reliant upon sending out affiliate marketing promotions to my subscribers or posting stuff on my blogs.

I’ve got a whole bunch of “niche” sites that bring in a nice “passive” income from sites in other non “internet marketing” markets, like health, computers, games and even stuff like tattoos and hairstyles!

Many of these site haven’t been touched in months, if not years, and still bring in affiliate commissions on auto-pilot. I guess all the time I spent learning about SEO (search engine optimization) was worth while after all..

Most Newbies don’t seem to realise that it’s actually easier to target these “Niche Markets” to start making money online, rather than going straight in to the internet marketing niche.

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Got no newsletters of interest to post about today, there may have been some, but I’ve just been too damned busy to bother reading them, that’s just how some days go.

when you spend all day in front of your PC working online it’s dangerously easy to lose half the day just reading email and checking out the latest new “must have” thing on offer, sometimes you need to be real hard and just ignore it all, if it’s something you really need, it’ll come around again..

So today I’ve got my sister here, my kids have been staying with her for a few days while they are on their “half term” holiday, and she brought them around tonight to stay with me for the weekend, so we’ve just had a big roast chicken dinner and now I’m going to soend some time helping her to get to grips with her blog.

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Welcome to my new blog!

The site’s not actually new, it’s been here since way back in 1999, I’ve just not done anything with it in well over 2 years, possibly longer, so I thought it was probably time I set it up as a blog and used it to post something vaguely useful, hopefully…

My name is Matt Garrett and I’ve been making money online with website for the last 6 years or so, although I only went full time about 2 and a half years ago.

You could say that I’ve “been there, done that, got the t-shirt, ate the pie” for most different ways of “trying” to make money online, from paid surveys, forex trading and “high yield investment programs” (aka scams), to mini-sites, niche sites, AdSense sites, adwords ppc campaigns, expired domains, domain parking and most recently (and most profitably, at least since the early adsense days) info product creation, list building and blogging, hence this site becoming a blog..

So what am I going to post on this blog?

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