Okay, so as you can see from the title of this post and screen shot below, I have managed to build my list from 50 to 2000 subscribers in around 15 weeks, which means that I managed to hit my target goal of 2000 by 1st APRIL. (See My Goals For 2010 for more information)

And as I said in my previous post, I’m going to share with you what I did to build my list to that figure in that space of time.

My very first subscribers came in September from me tweeting about my various free offers on Twitter, I had been building my Twitter following since April 2009, and had built up around 4000 followers, mostly targeted to the Internet marketing and make money online niches. So I was lucky that I’d done that.

This post is a little overdue, but first I don’t want you to think I started the year off slacking… Far from it!

I have been very busy behind the scenes concentrating on setting things up to build my list, and I’ve also been working on a few things that will hopefully help bring some extra money in to fund things like Aweber, hostsing, etc…

I will most likely blog about my other projects when I’ve had time to see if they bring in the desired results, and what ever happens I will more than likely create a product for you to benefit from, be it about my success or otherwise… And of course I will make it free of charge to my subscribers!

I’ve also spent a good amount of that time planning for the weeks and months ahead, so I’ll move on now and state my goals for 2010 to the world, something which I’ve never done before might I add…

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.

The time as I write this is 2am here in the UK …. I was just about to go to bed actually, but I simply had to get a quick blog post published about this right away!!

As you may know back in July I enrolled on Alex Jeffreys Coaching Program – Marketing With Alex. And In this short space of time I’ve gone from having no website/blog, no list and no idea….. To having my own blog, regular visitors that leave me comments, and a steadily growing mailing list… And Alex’s business knowledge to go with it.

It has to be one of the best decisions I ever made, as I’m petty darn sure that if I hadn’t of found Alex when I did, I’d still be going round in circles right now!

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!

As you may recall in my last post I said I would be posting some tips to help you improve your Alexa rank. I found quite a few tips, here are the beter sounding tips I found that may help you improve your Alexa rank. If you would like to know more about what Alexa rank is and how it works, please see my Improve Your Alexa Rank Challenge (Part 1) post.

Top 10 Tips (In no particular order)

1. Install the Alexa Toolbar – Seeing as Alexa rank is based on how many people visit your site per day, who have the toolbar installed. Install “Sparky” The Alexa Toolbar for Firefox today! Alternatively you could install another firefox plugin, which also exchanges data with Alexa – Search Status.

Hey everyone!

This is an exercise in creative blogging that, The GazzMan, AKA Gary Simpson, has introduced to us over in the Marketing With Alex private forum.  It all started with Gary writing 25 things about himself, then he picked 5 random people who he wanted to know more about. And each person who takes up the challenge is to then pick another 5 people out of our fellow students.

I’ve actually been tagged by 3 people, Roger Edwards, Mick Fallon, and Steve Wakefield. Anyway I’ve finally got around to listing my 25 things, so here goes.

1. Paul was born and still lives in Manchester, UK.

2. Paul loves animals, and especially cats.

3. Paul feels strongly about cruelty to animals, seeing and hearing about it upsets and angers him.

4. Paul was once pinned up against a fence by an Alsatian dog, while it overtowered him and repeatedly barked at him. This happened when he was about 4 or 5 years old. His mum managed to distract the dog eventually and he was able to get away unharmed.

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.