So here we are coming towards the end of 2009, and it has been a great year for me…

It was this time last year that I properly got interested in the whole make money online concept, but unlike in the past, this time I decided to take the plunge and get my very own website online.

Having my own website was something that I had been worried about doing in the past, it was the thought of all the technical stuff involved. But now that I’ve taken action and done it, using all the guides that are available these days, I found it was actually quite simple, and I now realise I should of done it sooner instead of putting it off.

My very first website was www.Online-Auction-Success.com , which I didn’t mention in my recent eBook Traffic Guide For Newbies because it wasn’t a very successful site, it was a project that I started with little knowledge or planning, and was somewhere that I was sending my eBay customers to at the time.

I’ve decided it’s about time I posted an update of my progress, and what I have been doing recently. This is actually an idea I came up with after visiting Jacinta Dean’s blog. Jacinta has been doing weekly posts of her daily tasks, and I’ve been meaning to do something similar for a few weeks now.

I’ve decided not to do a list of my daily tasks for the week, as I doubt I would keep up with it. So instead I will try and do one of these posts, once a month, as I think this will be less of a chore for me!

I wasn’t really writing things down much back in August, so I’ll start in September.

Now I can see how important it is to keep a journal of your daily tasks, this is something that Alex Jeffreys talks a lot about in the coaching. So if you haven’t started to keep a journal yet, then I recommend you to start one today!

I’ve just finished watching the latest coaching call, Module #5 – Traffic Tornados. As the title suggests this module was all about the best ways of generating traffic. Most of the ways were totally free too. So I will give you a quick summary of what was covered, and then some time in the future I will make individual posts and possibly videos, going over these methods in depth.

At the start of the call Alex first reminded us about Module #1, and how we need to stay focused and have a plan of attack. Now a lot has changed since I made my plan back in Module #1, so soon I will be adding all that I’ve learnt since then into my master plan. I’ve only been doing weekly plans so far, this time I have enough knowledge to know what I want to be doing for the next 90 days. And I’ll still be learning more stuff on top of that, but that statement is always going to be true, even after the coaching has ended, because as humans we never stop learning new things.

Well after much stress &and many takes I finally managed to record my very first video. I decided I might as well make this a welcome video for my blog, so you will now see this video in my sidebar over to the right.

As you will probably be bale to tell while watching it, I was very nervous. I’ve never EVER recorded a video of myself, in all my life, so this was a pretty big deal for me. I’m really glad that I decided to take action and just get it done though, I actually kind of held myself accountable in a comment on fellow student, David Walker’s blog, although I didn’t fully commit & say I’d definitely get one done. But that comment made me feel that, because I’d said that I would practice & try to produce something, I felt that I MUST get a video uploaded today, even if it gave me a headache in the doing. (which it did)

Bonus Call #1

This was a bonus that Alex arranged earlier in the year with Maria Andros. It was all about video marketing, and if you haven’t heard of Maria Andros, she is known as the Queen of Video Marketing.

Here’s a few key points that we learnt from Maria about how to market ourselves using video:

• Just be you.

• Let your audience know who you are, don’t be fake.

• It’s not who you know, it’s who knows YOU that matters.

• Video converts upto 600% higher than text alone.

• Do keyword research to maximize your visibility when people search YouTube, and more importantly, to help you rank high in the search engines.

• Be inspiring, and don’t forget to smile.

I actually managed to pluck up the courage & make my first video today, it’s a welcome video for this blog. You”l either be beable to see it now, or very soon in the sidebar to the right. It’s not brilliant, but it will do, the main thing is it’s brought me out of my comfort zone.

As I’ve not made an update on where the coaching is up to since the first module, I’m going to give a quick summary of the ALL the modules right up to date. This is going to be the first of 2 posts.

Module #1

This module was all about goals & planning ahead. Here are a few of things we learnt:

• To start small, but think big. This basically means although we are just starting out, there is no harm in thinking about the big things we will be able to achieve in the future. By thinking about the things we want to achieve, we can then start to plan backwards from that end goal, to find out all the things we need to do, learn or outsource in order to achieve it.

(Please note, if you purchase by going through the links in this post I will receive a commission)

I’ve not updated my progress for a while, so here’s an update of what I have achieved since my last post:

I’ve updated the blog theme, signed up with Aweber, added an opt-in form & gift to my blog, set up Google Analytics to track my traffic, submitted my site to some RSS feed directories, and set up a profit pulling platform. So as you can see although I’ve not updated my progress here for a while, I have been quite busy behind the scenes, most of the time sticking to my plan. Although my current earnings online to date are zero $0. Doe’s this bother me? No, I’ve only just got going & I’ve not even started to drive traffic to my site yet, I would also rather concentrate on building my list right now than make money anyway. I’m sure you’ve heard the saying “The money is in the list” right? Well I believe that to be very true, & I can understand why having a mailing list is so important, so that is what I’m putting all my effort into. And I would strongly advise you to do the very same.

So last time I said I would go further into why I am now about 95% more productive than normal, & I’m being serious when I say that, I really was getting nothing done. Well as I said in the last post, it’s all about having a plan, but not just any old plan. No, it has to be well structured & organized, you see I have made business plans in the past, but I was doing it blindly. My idea of a plan before was, have a few ideas, write them down, then somehow try to make them work. When I think about that now it is no wonder I wasn’t getting anywhere, it might have been a plan of kinds, but it wasn’t organized.

So what Alex has made us realize is, “Know that end goal, & plan backwards from there.” The whole planning backwards thing sounded funny at first, but it’s obvious that is what you should do when you really think about it.

Hey everyone!

Yes today is the first day, of the rest of my life, & also my first blog post here.. Yay!

Let me introduce myself, my name is Paul Lear & I’m 27 years old. I have started this blog to document my journey as I learn internet marketing, from my Mentor, Alex Jeffreys. If you haven’t heard of Alex Jeffreys,  just run his name by google, & you’ll find plenty of results for him. I was lucky enough to get a place on his coaching program, Marketing With Alex 2.0.