Today, while driving home, I saw a sight that made me chuckle. The car in front of me had something on the roof. A door or a shallow chest of some kind.Only it wasn’t strapped on. There was, however, a big, hairy arm sticking out of each of the front and rear windows, all holding onto a corner of whatever-it-was they were carrying.

Although I found the sight amusing I couldn’t help but think that, safety aside, they were risking losing whatever-it-was they were carrying for the sake of not using the right equipment, or even securing it safely.

Internet marketing’s a bit like that. If you don’t use the right tools you’ll make life a lot harder for yourself. One such tool that I use and find invaluable is the Aweber Autoresponder. There are other autoresponders out there but this is the Rolls Royce of them. It’s no dearer than their competitors but the quality of their service is fantastic. Check it out here and you’ll see what I mean.

You can never start building your list too early so you may as well start with the best available tools that you can.

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.

I’m sure you’ll all be glad to know that today has indeed been a much better IM day.

Today I’ve learnt how to change my blog theme, how to set up an autoresponder account with aweber (which actually works, would you believe!) and how to get and add Adsense code to my blog.

Before I know it I’ll be a proper Internet Marketer. (Thanks to John and Daniel).

Although these things have always seemed very daunting to me, it’s surprising how straightforward they become when the process is properly explained. A bit like learning to drive a car for the first time, I suppose. There seems to be so much to learn and remember when you start. Clutch control, steering, lane control, how hard to brake, what’s this gear lever thingy for?, etc,etc. But once you’ve passed your driving test and have a bit of experience under your belt, I bet you’ll wonder what you were worried about. In fact, you won’t even think about it – you’ll just do it on auto piklot (sorry, I mean auto pilot! Told you I was a cr*p typist, didn’t I?).

Anyway, I suppose what I’m trying to say in my round-about way is not to get too hung up on the technical side of things as there is always someone who can show you how to do things. It may take a small investment of time and/or money but believe me it’s well worth it from where I’m standing.

And remember, you don’t have to know everything before you start. The main thing is just to start. The rest will come. And if your initial efforts are not exactly up to the standard that you expect, don’t beat yourself up about it. You will improve. But if you never even start then you’ve got no chance at all.

On a rather different note, I’ve got to tell you that my wife has just told me that she’s going to cut some parsley from her herb garden. I rather foolishly pointed out that the “garden” was actually one those boxes with parsley, mint and rosemary growing in it and the word HERBS stenciled on the side but she refused to be convinced and tells me that she is going to continue referring to it as her herb garden, regardless of what I say. Now that’s real go-getting optimism!

Today hasn’t been my best IM day. In fact my wife and I have spent the day cleaning house. Yeah….I know that’s not what cool internet gurus are supposed to do but for the sake of my stomach (she won’t feed me if I don’t pitch in and help) and because I like to think I’m a fair-minded type of guy who can stand his corner, I always do my bit.

And anyway, I’m no internet guru!

So there’s not an awful lot of clever, interesting stuff to write about today unless you count the really cool little application I found today. It’s called The Magic Boss Key and it allows me to hide any folder, browser or application I might be using simply by pressing the right and left hand mouse buttons simultaneously. You can download it for free at http://www.magictweak.com/?ref=mgboss
Just look for it on the right hand side of the page under Free Utilities.

Now I haven’t really got anything to hide but I just love toys, don’t you?