Ray Harries' Blog

Hi all,

Following on from my last post I’m sure you’ve noticed how much we’re all suffering from information overload which in turn leads to a lack of direction and a marked lack of action.

We spend so much time trying to assimilate the barrage of information coming at us down the superhighway that we end up not knowing our Firefox from our Explorer and not knowing what to believe and which direction to take. A sort of information paralysis takes us over. At least, I know that’s what happens to me!

One tendency that is on the increase is the amount of bonuses we’re offered in order to get us to buy a product. Now I know that we all like a freebie but – come on – do we really need all the extras that are thrown at us? Let’s face it, most of it we wouldn’t look at  twice if it wasn’t free and we’d certainly not pay good, hard cash for it.

I for one would rather see good, high quality content, selling on its own merit but sadly I fear that I’m very unlikely to see this happen.

Or am I sensing a change in some marketer’s attitudes? I hope so for the sake of my hard drive. It’s getting awfully cluttered with cr*p these days. S’pose that means a spring clean is in order.Hey ho, it’s a hard life.

Here we are at week 4 already. Although I’ve only posted a couple of blogs I’m feeling that old curse known as “Writer’s block” already. So I reckon that the best approach is just to sit down at my computer (is that an old-fashioned term, now?) and get on with it.

I’ve always believed that the best way to learn something is by practice. That is, get in there and get your hands dirty. Internet marketing is no different.

For example, I spent ages procrastinating about building a website. I didn’t know what html meant, I wasn’t sure that it would look any good, I didn’t know how to upload my site to a server….. and so on and so forth. Talk about dodging the issue.

I bought a couple of turn-key sites which as you can imagine were absolute junk. I invested in several ebooks and a course or two and eventually put a site of my own together. It wasn’t very pretty but it was my site, and boy! was I proud of it.

I showed it to my friends and family and they were totally underwhelmed. I just put it down to jealousy.

But then it dawned on me. I had this rather cosmetically-challenged site but unless I actually told people about it nobody knew it was there.

So although I’d finally got off my butt and done something, I hadn’t concentrated on the whole picture. I now had to learn about lots more scary stuff like Search Engine Optimisation and Adsense and so on. Which is when I realised that I needed a mentor. And not just any old mentor but someone I trusted.

Now, I’ve got a website online which sells ebooks and this was created by John Thornhill. As a member of the planetsms forum (planetsms is John’s eBay identity) and my association with John I soon realised that here was a very genuine guy, so when I saw that he was offering an internet marketing teaching course I was very interested, to say the least.

Once again procrastination got the better of me and I was too late to enrol in his first course but I put my name down to be notified as to when the next course would begin and sat at my PC as sign-up day dawned, both index fingers poised and ready to pound those keys and sign up as soon as I could.

As yet I am unsure as to which direction my efforts will be taking me but you can be sure that I’ve learned a valuable lesson. Do your due diligence first and then get in there and just do it. Nobody says it has to be perfect first time out of the stable but unless you get your act in gear your baby (sorry!- your project) is never even going to see the light of day.