Hey guys,

This is just me having a bit of fun and getting some more practice in front of the camera, I’m trying to be myself on this video without letting my nerves get in the way. I’m definitely getting more confident in front of the camera. I actually managed to smile on this video

What I took from watching this video back was, that I need to either stop myself moving around so much, or do my videos sitting down. I tend to feel better doing them standing up, but if I can’t stop moving about then I’ll have to do them sitting down and get used to it.

Another thing I’m learning to do, is not worry too much about what people are going to think of me, that was the biggest thing I had to get over before doing my first video. I’m definitely seeing improvements on each video I’ve done so far, athough I’ve still got a long way to go before I’m ready to appear in my first Hollywood movie.

Here is the video that I said I would produce in the last post. I finally go to grips with Camtasia Studio, and you know what? It’s really easy to use, after watching the great tutorial videos that camtasia provide for you that is.

So this video basically shows you how to easily search for, and install WordPress plugins from within your WordPress admin control panel. This saves you a lot of fuss and messing about with uploading it to your server with an FTP client (FTP software). I only recently discovered I could install them directly from within the control panel, I had been using FTP to upload each plugin. So as you can imagine that ws a huge waste of my time, so just in case any of you didn’t know about this, I thought I’d make this video to make you aware of this feature.

I hope you enjoyed the video, please let me know what you think as it was my first attempt at this sort of thing.

Which Plugins Do I Have Installed On My Blog?

This is a question I’ve often wondered when looking at other peoples blogs, so I thought why not make a page on my blog listing all the plugins I have installed on MY blog. That way anyone who would like to model their blog on mine can easily do so.

I also thought it’d be a good idea to include a short description of what each plugin does. So that is what I’ve done, you will now find the ‘Blog Plugins‘ tab at the top of the page, underneath the title.

But to save you needing to click away from this post, I might as well include the list here too, so here goes. But you still might want to visit the ‘Blog Plugins‘ tab, depending the date you are reading this. The blog plugins tab will be updated whenever I install a new plugin on my blog, but this post here will not be updated.

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)

As promised, I’m going to walk you through setting up your first list in Aweber. This guide is assuming you have already created your account, so if you haven’t already done so Click Here to sign up. The sign up process is pretty straight forward, & you get a 30 day money back guarantee. I will also add that the if the small monthly fee bothers you, once you’ve got a couple of hundred people on your list, it has the potential to pay for its self. I will go into some of the things you can do to get people on your list in future posts, but for now let’s just concentrate on setting your opt-in form up.

1) Login to your Aweber account, then from the menu at the top of the screen, left click on ‘My Lists‘

2) Left click on ‘+ Create a New List‘

Before I go through setting up your autoresponder I’m going to talk a bit about what exactly an autoresponder is. & why you should use a paid subscription service like Aweber, which is a thirdparty autoresponder service, it’s also the service that I personally use.

Firstly, What is an Autoresponder?

An autoresponder is a basically a piece of software that allows you to collect & store peoples email addresses, when they opt-in through a form, such as the one in the top right sidebar of this blog. It also allows you to set up a series of pre-written emails to go out at specified regular intervals. This means you can send out emails without the need to be at your computer, you could just set whatever emails you wanted to go out over a weeks period, then come back a week later & all those email will have been sent without you having to lift a finger.

Why you should NOT host your own autoresponder!

(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.