I wasn’t sure whether to write this post. I don’t normally like to talk too much about my personal life – it’s private. But I’m reminded that people connect to people. And one of the fastest ways of doing that is by being honest.

For the last couple of months I’ve been pretty much out of the loop in marketing. I had an international house move in December which certainly takes up a big chunk of time. Been ill too. Then I followed it by feeling depressed. I don’t know if I had actual depression, but I’ve never felt so blue in my life before – ever.

Winter can be a miserable time for a lot of us, especially in colder climates. For me it has come at the same time as moving countries. I didn’t really want to do that, but for the sake of my family (mainly my kids’ education) I’ve done it. We’ve moved back to a cold – very, very cold – climate from a warm one in Spain. And we’ve moved back to the hustle and bustle and road rage that we’d previously left behind. The shock of the cultural differences has reminded me how much I loved the Spanish lifestyle. It suited me.

This picture shows you the view I used to have:

My View

I now have a view out onto a busy main road. It’s not as attractive!

But when I see how happy my family is I’m glad we made the move back. It came at a cost to me though. I’ve left behind friends, a climate and location that I loved and a lifestyle that fit me like a glove. To be honest, I wasn’t prepared for how low I’d feel with this move.

Luckily for me I’m not really someone who ever gets down – I can’t remember ever feeling like this before in my whole life. And I’m getting used to all the differences now, so that initial depression has lifted and I’m getting back into the swing of things. My usual cheery self has returned, just about.

It does mean that an upcoming project has been delayed, by about 6 weeks or so. I’m creating a new product – a service that builds niche blogs for you, automatically. It should be ready, live and available in about a week, hopefully. There are a number of unique features that will prove invaluable, I hope. But more of that nearer the launch time.

To anyone affected by delays in my doing things I’d like to apologize. Sometimes life gets in the way of the best of plans. And it reminds us to enjoy the day, while we still can, because tomorrow might bring changes.

To those of you who are thinking about breaking into internet marketing for the first time, I would say jump in. Learn as you go. There’s never a better time than today to get started. You almost certainly won’t make $100,000 in your first month – or even your first year. But you’ll never make a penny until you’ve taken your first steps.

Why not take your first steps today – I’ll even help you out by providing software to get you started.

To anyone who leaves a genuine, engaging comment to this post I’ll offer you a free copy of my e-store shopping cart, SublimeSalesPro – yes, it’s a bribe to encourage more comments. And just so we’re clear, ‘interesting post’ as a comment does not qualify for a free copy! If you can’t genuinely contribute to the discussion, don’t. Buy the software instead.

I know from my site statistics that quite a few people read this blog, but very, very few leave any comments so I’m willing to bribe you to interact. If it works, I’ll probably offer more such goodies in the future – good stuff. If it doesn’t work out then I won’t offer such freebies.

Oh and by the way, if I get more than 10 genuine comments I’ll pick my favorite one and put together a package of resell rights material for setting up an online store using SublimeSalesPro – I’ll also do the script install, if required. And just to encourage people to comment sooner rather than later, if I get 30 comments I’ll close the offer. If you want a copy of the script, comment early!

I’ve just received my copy of a new course on sales copywriting.

For most of us, sales copy is the one thing that will make a huge difference to our revenues. You can have a great product, you can have traffic and a great looking site, but if your sales copy doesn’t convert visitors into customers, you’re throwing money away – every visit. So it makes sense that anything that can help us to achieve more sales with good copy is definitely a good thing!

Here’s the problem: most of us aren’t very good copyrwriters. There are lots of reasons for that. So some marketers turn to other people to write the copy for them. And that costs. If you get someone to do it for $500 you got a bargain. If you’re launching a serious product it might cost you thousands. That’s why I’m interested to see whether this $97 video course lives up to its own sales copy, which is very persuasive. Then again, it wouldn’t be much of an advert if their own copy was no good, would it!

Hot Copy Flowchart

HotCopy Downloads!

The whole product is massive. Some of the individual videos are 179 mb  in size – and that’s when they’re zipped!

It will take me a little while to go through the whole course, but I’m especially interested because I have a couple of product launches coming up in a week or so. I’ll be seeing how this course can help me with those.

Once I’ve finished the whole course I’ll update this post with a full review, warts and all.

I should disclose here that one of the course marketers is a personal friend, but we know each other well enough that he’ll expect me to say what I think of this course, bad or good. If it’s bad, I’ll tell you and of course it’s good I’ll be very happy to tell you that too.

UPDATE 3rd November 2009: Although the rest of this review is