Personal Notes  | August 30, 2009 By andrew | 32 comments

The Gazzman Challenge – 25 Things about Me.

Well readers, within our student forum, someone (Gary Simpson) thought that it would be a good idea for some of us to come up with 25 things about us to share on our blogs – and then to ‘tag’ 5 other students to do the same.

So here goes:

1. I’m half an inch taller than Tom Cruise, medium build and 10 years older than I actually look.

2. Which leads me neatly on to one of my most redeeming qualities by far – my modesty.

3. Although I have a very sporting history, my favourite pastime for some years now has been Golf. As of last weekends win, I now play off 8.

4. When I was 19, I taught windsurfing and waterskiing for a living – off the south coast of England. On one particular day, I thought it would be a good idea to try and straddle one of the buoys marking out a skiing lane. It was only the thickness of the wetsuit that saved my manhood. The guys in the boat, were so cracked up, they couldn’t steer the boat straight.

5. On one of my windsurfing jaunts, I was once joined by a pod of Dolphins for about 30 minutes – just them and me on my board – amazing.

6. I’m qualified as a registered care manager (child care and mental health).

7. I spent four years trying to help straightening out young offenders – with some success.

8. At age 29, I decided to try my hand at university. As with everything I do, it was full on or nothing. I got my degree, but my degree got me nowhere.

9. I trained in Shotokan Karate, three times a week for Five years and attained my first dan.

10. My first job from school was working in a sandwich factory, making sandwiches for British Airways – what a laugh that was. One reason why I no longer eat cheese and pickle sandwiches.

11. Once worked as a groundworks labourer and laid about 10 acres of blocks for aircraft standing at Gatwick North Terminal.

12. Did you know that it’s still English law for all males over 8 years old to practice for 2 hours every Sunday morning with their Longbows and to have a bow and a quiver full of arrows on standby for call to arms. When I discovered this, I enrolled on an English Longbow making course. I made my bow, which I still have and a quiver full of arrows. I can hit a 1 metre diameter target at 50 yards and flight an arrow 250 yards.

13. I followed my first degree by doing a four year doctorate. One of the few things I’ve started but failed to finsih – mainly due to my supervisor being an egotistical a*** h***.

14. My son is fascinated by fire and I’m still not sure whether or not he’s a pyromaniac. The day I went about casually lighting the barbecue, brought this inherent and dormant danger into full focus. I did what I usually do – gave the barbe a few squirts of petrol (from the container for the lawn mower) and lit a match – kabooom. My eyebrows, eyelashes, fringe and favourite Quicksilver T shirt blown to smithereens. Unbeknown to me, my son had helped daddy out a bit by dosing up the barbe in preparation (while daddy went to find a match) with about half a litre of petrol.

15. My favourite tipple is red wine and favourite variety is a nice Pinoir Noir – mmmm – unless I’m doing a barbecue and then I prefer a large bucket of water.

16. I once owned a retail shop in partnership with my parents, selling equestrian, fly fishing and shooting (clay pidgeon) gear. Got invited to go fly fishing with a ‘lord’ (won’t name hime here – wonderful old guy) which continued for several years.

17. Learnt how to tie my own flies and caught my biggest brown trout on one of my creations (5lb 9oz).

18. My biggest fish was caught in December in the middle of the English channel – when it was so cold, I thought everything would get forstbite and drop off – and I mean everthing. Anyway, it was a 19lb Cod.

20. I’d been driving about 12 months and my parents car was parked in the garage right up against something I needed to get at. I reversed it out and stopped – got out, got the bag I needed – got back in the car and attempted to re park it. It was the first automatic I’d ever driven and by the time I’d sorted out that there wasn’t in fact a clutch – I’d crashed into the back of the garage (because I floored the accelarator) and brought the garage roof crashing down on top of me.

21. I’ve supported Manchester City since Asa Hartford and Joe Corrigan (who are they?)

22. I love to cook – but sometimes take on more than I can chew (get it?) and end up with something that looks more like a dog’s dinner.

23. I love my family and kids so much and often have that terrifying feeling that I won’t be able to provide for them.

24. At the millenium new years eve party, I sang ‘Mack the Knife’ and got a standing ovation – but ended it on a bad note (yet another tantalising use of words) by tripping over the mic lead, down 3 steps onto a table full of buffet food (mostly dips and cream).

25. I once sat for over an hour, writing out 25 things about me.

Everyone I would have tagged off the top of my head have already been tagged and as I can’t currently access the forum, I’ll edit this post tomorrow and add the victims names then.

Thanks for reading – I trust you now know me a little better?

Okay – here are the chosen FIVE:

Huddson Lee / Petra Weiss / Karen Kalata / Dave Whittle / Rich Cardarelli

Sorry Guys (and Girls).

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Personal Notes  | August 24, 2009 By andrew | 8 comments

When the S**T Hit’s The Fan – Keep Positive.

I’ve spent all day learning how to set up a giveaway product and getting most of it done with the great help of fellow student Paul Hooper – who I now consider a best friend. What a great guy – a rare person in this day and age.

Anyway, I’m just doing some tidying up – updating the description details and other stuff in the giveaway site, when for no apparent reason, it stops allowing me to login.

It tells me that my email doesn’t exist on their database and then when I try to register using the same email address – yep, you guessed, it tells me that the account already exists ?

So is this the moment when you pick up your PC and throw it out the window?  Very nearly, but not quite.

You see, I recognise this as one of those life events that will happen and do happen from time to time. The important thing is how you deal with it. The worst case scenario if I can’t get back in, is that I can probably use most of what we’ve produced for another giveaway.

Only a short post, but I needed to do something to calm down and get things off my chest.

Thanks for listening.

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Internet Marketing  | August 20, 2009 By andrew | 18 comments

A Supercharged Rich Schefren – Pioneering the Future!

I’ve purposely left this for a day, because I just had to gather my thoughts and regain my composure.

You see, on Tuesday night (UK time), my mentor arranged an amazing one off, surprise webinar for us – his Marketing with Alex 2.0 students.

Thanks to Alex’s close association with this man, we had the great privilege of listening live to the guru’s guru – – for nearly two hours.

This is the guru who has been responsible for mentoring literally dozens of multi millionaire gurus (like Mike Filsaime) and of course, Alex (who is well on his way to his first million).

Now let me tell you, Rich’s brain, I’m sure, must be operating at a very different level to the majority of us mere mortals; but one thing’s for certain, this guy really knows what’s what in the marketing world. In just the two short hours he spoke to us, he shared a huge amount of incredible knowledge and left my mind, for one – buzzing.

Suffice to say, we’ve got a lot of information to assimilate and get to grips with – but rest assured – you’ll also be benefiting from our good luck and good fortune in the not too distant future.

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Personal Notes  | August 14, 2009 By andrew | 20 comments

For Internet Marketing Success – Make a CHANGE!

I really wanted to get this posted this morning, as I’m attending a wedding today and I’ve just got to share something with you from last night’s webinar with Alex.

My wife (Colette) is running around like a mad thing, trying to motivate our two boys and getting our four year old daughter all ready to be the flower girl (scattering petals down the isle of the church).

What am I doing?  I’m typing this, because I’ve just got to share it’s simplicity and it’s power before I’m sidelined by the wedding.

During the webinar, Alex mentioned something that hit me between the eye’s and made a big impact. He said this:

“If you’ve been working hard, trying to make things happen, but without much success, then you need to change what your doing”. Well that’s it! Does it impact on you the same way? If not, let me put my slant on it.

You see, I view it like this: To get the things you haven’t had before, you need to do the things you haven’t done before. (I bet Alex uses this slogan one day!).

So if you want to achieve your goals and the success that you desire, you need to take a look at how you’ve been doing things and then change it. Think of this way – how many people keep doing the same thing over and over again, expecting a different result and then when it doesn’t happen, they give up. This applies to the majority of people who want to succeed on the internet.

So what does changing things involve? Well I think it’s simple in one sense, but more difficult to actually make a start on; and this is the reason.

Most people don’t make the conscious decision to push themselves past their comfort zone. When faced with a difficult task or doing something new, their subconscious immediately tells them “you can’t do that because excuse#1, excuse#2, excuse#3…  and so on.

So now that you know this and are aware that this WILL happen to you – what are YOU going to do about it?

I think by now, you’re on board with me? If so, here’s what to do. Review what you’ve been doing up to now (don’t rush it), make a plan of attack and include things you haven’t done before and most probably don’t know how to do. Now that you Know that your own subconscious is going try and block you, make a concerted effort to push yourself through your own comfort zone.

I’d really love to get feedback on this post. Does this make the impact on you that it made on me?

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Internet Marketing  | August 11, 2009 By andrew | 12 comments

Social Marketing for Traffic – Update!

I promised that I’d report back, so here’s an update of my traffice generation research and activities.

Facebook.

When I spent some time looking at what Facebook was all about, I almost fell into the trap of underestimating it’s potential as a social marketing tool.

You see initially, I simply thought that it was a good way of keeping in touch with friends, family and anyone else you know – say people you went to university with.

The easiest and most obvious way of utilizing the Facebook profile to work for you is by linking it back to your main blog, website or other online presence – thus promoting your offer, product or whatever.

But if we look beyond the obvious, there are also some other really cool ways that can generate potentially, a lot of your way.

For instance, the bulletin application of Facebook has an important function. It serves as an instant message board for all kinds of announcements that you could make regarding your product or offer. This means, you don’t have to contact people individually.

It is also extremely useful in connecting with your customers. Just post all the details  and the relevant URLs and wait for the increase in click-through traffic.

You also have the option of using the Groups application to build an interest group around a topic or theme.

This can also help in marketing strategies, as you can promote yourself as an authority on the product that you are offering. This is an interactive facility, helping you to build your authority with your group.

There’s no doubt that Facebook offers a great deal of potential.

Delicious.

I won’t describe what Delicious is in great detail here, because you can easily visit the site and read the ‘about’ page. But essentially, it’s a social bookmarking service that allows users to manage and share web pages.

The important feature is that web pages can be tagged, which as a process, highlights ‘hot’ web pages.

For us then, this is one of its most valuable features, because you can see whats hot in your particular area of interest (such as ), by checking out the popular tags.

Now, If you know what’s hot in the topic/s you’re most interested in, then it makes sense that you could then write a post around that ‘hot’ talked about area.

Stumbleupon.

The way StumbleUpon works, is that it helps you find and share websites that you find interesting. To get it started, you choose your personal preferences and just click Stumble! Stumbleupon then coughs up high-quality pages that match your preferences.

The reason you receive high quality pages, is that they have already been rated by the Stumbleupon community with either a thumbs up or a thumbs down rating. This is great for surfing, because (hopefully) all the dross has been filtered out.

The only potential problem I can see with this is that it all comes down to individual taste and what one person may think is poor, someone else may like. But on the whole, I’m sure it’s a system that must work well, because 8.5 million surfers use it.

Another great feature of  how Stumbleupon works, is that a personalized browsing tool actually learns what the user has liked in the past and continues to provide similar quality web sites based on what it’s learnt from your
likes.

In addition to the above, I’ve also written a list building article and submitted it to Ezine, Goarticles and Article City. I’ve put my blog link in my signature and instructions in the body of the article for navigating back to my free report.

I’ve also been commenting on blogs and started to track down relevant forums to register and leave comments – again making sure that my blog link is in my signature.

I’ve also been Twittering on a daily basis, slowly building new followers.

Hope some of this helps with your strategies.

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