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…

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My Goals For 2010

These are the things I am going to achieve by the end of 2010:

Business Goals

• Build my list to 10,000  (current total stands at 345 so I have a looong way to go, I think it’s achievable though)

For the first quarter of the year my goal is 2000 by April 1st (I will update this every quarter)

• To be Consistently making between $2,000 – 3,000 per week
• Get my Alexa traffic rank inside the top 100,000 (currently stands at 211,236)
• Create a successful Membership Site of some kind
• Create and release at least 2 products based on my results with things I’m doing to build my business
• Help as many newbies as possible get started with their online endeavours, and give them my full support
• Make a blog post every 1-2 weeks
• Do a WSO (Warrior Special Offer) on the Warrior Forum in February
• Create videos for my blog and subscribers every month (currently in the process of learning more about creating screen capture presentations)
• Make easy to follow action plans for each part of my business
• Do more keyword research and Search Engine Optimise this blog and rank on the first page for all my chosen keywords and key-phrases
• Add some sales funnels into the mix
• Surround myself with like minded positive people and keep in contact on a daily/weekly basis (already in process)
• Test and track everything that I do, and work on ways to improve the results
• Give myself a set start and finish time for working on my business each day, and use the time wisely. (Any internet usage after that is my leisure time.)
• Work to a countdown timer on each task to get the best use of my time, and increase my productivity
• Treat this as proper business, if YOU don’t work hard enough YOU get fired! ( this is to give me some motivation when I read this back each week.)
• Make a new pledge to myself and read it each day before I start working on my business
• Look back at these goals every day to remind me why I’m doing this, and what I want to achieve by the end of the year ( This is written in my pledge)
• Stick to a strict plan of action at all times
• Have a set routine to motivate myself before I start working each day
• Keep a Journal documenting everything that I do each day, and make it a part of my daily tasks to write it.

Entrepreneurial Goals

• Create a system that brings me a consistant flow of leads into my business
• Refer back to the MWA coaching and listen to it all again, check my notes from the first time and see what I missed.
• Work harder at branding myself
• Learn more about making video screen presentations
• Study copy-writing
• Study sales funnels
• Study SEO
• Study product creation
• Get into the habit of focusing on the positives, and irradiate the negatives
• Study motivational material

Personal Goals

• Make enough money so my dad can take a well deserved early retirement. (This means so much to me, and is the main reason I’m doing this. My dad has barely taken a day off work in 10 years, probably longer.)
• Make enough money to put towards buying a detached house for my parents, and me while I still live with them (I still live with my parents in a small semi-detached house right now, so we all need somewhere bigger now)
• Make enough money to be able to afford my own place and all the bills that go with it
• Treat my mum and dad to an all expenses paid holiday
• Do more exercise and get out of the house more
• Keep things neat and tidy and have a clean up each month (right now I’ve got papers everywhere, my desk is dusty, and I keep losing things)
• Book myself a holiday
• Book myself and some friends on a driving experience weekend at Silverstone Race Track
• Treat myself to a 50″ widescreen TV (or maybe slightly smaller if I’m still in this small house..lol)
• Purchase a PS3 once I’ve acheived some of my big monetary goals (I could afford one of these now, but I don’t want to distract myself from my business, so this will be a treat)

I’m off to start breaking this down into monthly and weekly plans now, I hope you have enjoyed this insight into my business and what I have planned for the future.

Now go and create your own plan of action, feel free to use mine for ideas… But remember that your goals and plan will be different than mine, and it is important to include things in your personal plan that will motivate you and drive you to succeed, no matter what it takes.

Also you may wonder why I haven’t really added that many expensive treats for myself in my personal goals, well for me it is making other people happy and seeing their reactions that gives me a buzz… And doing things for the people I care about is more than enough motivation for me, so the most expensive of my personal goals are actually for other people as crazy as that sounds.

It’s also so I can tell my Dad ” I told you so”… He doesn’t believe that it’s possible to make money doing what I’m doing, which only pushes me harder to make it happen… So thanks Dad.

Paul

PS- Making your goals public like I have here is the best way to accomplish them, you see holding myself accountable to you all, and displaying my goals here for all to see, is going to make me work my butt off to achieve them. Because I will be writing another post at the end of the year, like I did with  2009, The Year It All Began…., and while it won’t be the end of the world if I don’t achieve everything I set out to do, it won’t make me feel to good having to say I didn’t manage to achieve this , this and this.

Also feel free to leave a comment and let me know what you think of my goals, and if you don’t have a blog of your own yet (highly recommended) then you can simply hold yourself accountable to me and the readers of my blog by replying to this post with your goals.

Don’t be shy, give it a try!

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 worked on Online-Auction-Success.com right up to May/June, which was when I came across Mr Alex Jeffreys and his brand new coaching program, which after some thought I signed up for. It was at that point, following Alex’s advice, that I wound everything up that wasn’t making me any money in order to give all my concentration to the coaching. A few weeks later the coaching started and this blog, Paul-Lear.com was born.

Although Online-Auction-Success.com wasn’t a successful site, I believe that I wouldn’t have even considered signing up for a coaching program, had I not made that first step earlier in the year, and got a bit of experience with the technical side of things.

So if you are interested in making money on the internet, the best thing you can do, if you haven’t already, is dive in head first and get your own personal blog online, like I have here at Paul-Lear.com . Don’t waste time taking the route I took, with my unsuccessful niche blog. When you are starting out, personal blogs are the best way to go.

Referrring back to when I joined the Alex Jeffreys coaching program. Advised by Alex I started my own personal blog on a new domain name, and I can honestly say that my decision to have Alex as my mentor is the best decision I have made this year.

Here is what I have achieved since I joined Alex’s coaching program:

1. I started this blog, which as been reasonably successful.
2. I have met lots of great like minded people, and made many good friends through visiting peoples blogs regularly.
3. I have learned a great deal about how to drive traffic to a website, and I am still learning more about this each day.
4. I have learnt the importance of building a list of prospects and buyers.
5. I signed up to Aweber and I am now building an email list of willing subscribers. (which was another thing I had once put off doing)
6. I have built my email list to 215 subscribers, (bare in mind that I was neglecting my list building efforts until November)
7. I now have 4 websites online, and I’m about to purchase another new domain for a new project in January.
8. I made my first video and overcame my fear of speaking in front of the camera.
9. I made my first tutorial video using the screen capture software, Camtasia Studio.
10. I wrote my first eBook Traffic Guide For Newbies, and released it on 23rd November. It has now had 76 downloads on it’s own, and I also added it to a download package which has had 80 downloads.
11. I attended my first Live Workshop which was hosted by Lee McIntyre, and I met some great people including Alex Jeffreys, John Thornhill, and of course Lee McIntyre himself. I also met some of my fellow Marketing With Alex students there too which was cool.
12. I have started to develop a good marketing mindset, which makes it easier when it comes to creating squeeze pages and writing email copy for adswaps, and writing sales pages.
13. I have developed a love of blogging and writing, which at the start of this year I never thought I would even begin to enjoy those things!
14. I have driven many thousands of visitors  to my websites.
15. I’m now focused, dedicated and determined to succeed at Internet Marketing, and most importantly I’m enjoying it! 

I’m sure you can see from all that I have listed, that compared to where I as at the start of the year, which was pretty much a newbie, that I’ve achieved quite a lot in the last six months, and it all stems back to that one simple action I took at the beginning of the year, to get a website online. That was what started me on this whole journey, and I am looking forward to next year, where in 2010 I am certain I will achieve much more!

So if there is something you have been thinking about doing, that you’ve been putting off, just take action NOW, stop thinking about doing it and just get it done!.. You never know what it might lead to, and if you aren’t prepared to take a little risk now and then, you will never achieve very much, and you will remain at the same stage you are at now.

If I hadn’t of made the decision to finally start a website this time last year, I would most likely still be doing the same thing I had been doing for the past couple of years, which was very little other than playing computer games and wasting time watching far too much television. Now don’t get me wrong, I still make sure I take time out to relax and do those things today, I just plan my time better to fit everything in that I want to do.

I hope you have got something out of this post, and I will be following on from this in my next post, with my plans for 2010.

I would also like to take this opportunity to wish all my readers and everyone who has supported me throughout 2009, a very Happy & Profitable New Year!

Best Wishes For 2010

Paul

Images courtesy of Francesco Marino and Dan

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.

Until next time…

Paul.

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)

The main thing is I’ve done my first video, and took myself WAY out of my comfort zone, which is a massive achievement for me, as I actually have an anxiety disorder which I’ve let stop me from doing things in the past. I don’t know what is, but joining the Alex Jeffreys Coaching program has really done something for my well being, I honestly haven’t felt so good about myself in years. Even my friends and family have noticed the change in me, and have commented a few times as to how much more confident and upbeat I seem.

We are just about halfway through the coaching now, although their will be many bonuses after that. We also have access to the private members forum for life, which the value of is just priceless if you ask me. Great things are happening now, and there are more great things to come for everyone involved in this coaching.

Now this doesn’t mean that if you weren’t able to get on the coaching, that you need to get left behind, as I said in the video I’ll be sharing a lot of what I learn right here on this blog. And the bits that aren’t shared here will be shared in free reports, so there’s no need for anyone to get left behind. If you have any questions at all, just leave a comment in one of my posts on this blog, and I’ll do my best to help you.

I want to help as many people as I can acheive what I’m achieving now, okay I’m not making any money right now, but I’m moving in a forward direction, little by little. I’m doing this all at my own pace, and my main focus is building my list. And list building is where your focus should be too.

So my message is this, don’t hold back, don’t let your fears get in the way. Take action on something like I’ve today with my first video, and prepare to be amazed at yourself.

Paul.

P.S.

I’d love to hear what you think, good or bad. So please leave your comments below… Thanks

EDIT: 6th August 2009

When I got up this morning I decided that I wanted to have a try at improving on the first video, so here’s the result of that.

It actually didn’t take many takes this time, as I already knew what I wanted to say. I think this is a slight improvement on the first video, apart from the part where I had to cough..

What I will say as words of encouragement for those yet to get their video up, it does get easier with each video you make. I think I just need to work on sounding more natural in the way I speak now.