As a young boy I looked after him and his sisters – they lived with their mother at my family home and became part of our extended family.

Nobody was expecting anything, his general health was fine. It was all a bit of a shock – he was still a young man – and tragically it follow his mother’s death last year.

He was fine this morning and by the evening he was gone. Who knows how long we have on this planet?

I’ve been thinking for a while of taking a break from internet marketing.  I can’t provide the energy and focus it requires right now and I have the sense that I’m focusing on things that, ultimately, may not be all that important in the bigger scheme of things. It’s important to earn a living, for sure, but it’s important not to be consumed doing so.

The sudden death of my cousin suggests that maybe that’s true. I haven’t seem him or his 2 sisters for a while. I meant to do it when I came back to this country, but all my time seems to be spent in front of a monitor.  I’ve got my priorities wrong in so many ways.

I have a couple of projects that I’ll hand over to somebody to continue with – I’ll pay them to run them for me, but I won’t be investing all my personal time in them. I can’t. Other people can handle them better than I can anyway, even if I still had the drive to see to them personally.

My own health has suffered because I haven’t taken care of myself. It’s so easy to be swallowed up by this exciting game called internet marketing, but sometimes you just have to ask what it’s all for.

So, for those reasons and 100 others too personal to detail, I’m saying ’see you around’.  I hope each and every one of you gets what you want out of IM and enriches your life and your family’s in the process. Just remember to stop and smell the roses along the way sometimes.

Good luck to you all,

Maybe we’ll meet again online sometime in the future.

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I’ve just had a few weeks of things going wrong.

I launched a rather nice membership product/service recently – that’s going well – and after some of the feedback I got I decided to update the WordPress plugin that runs the service. Adding the couple of extra features that people wanted seemed a good idea.

Well, it would have been if it hadn’t taken over 3 weeks instead of a few days, as I originally anticipated. I made the mistake of promising timescales that just didn’t happen – bad idea. I don’t code WordPress plugins myself so the best I can do is take the word of developers giving me timescales. Unfortunately, they sometimes give you optimistic timescales.

Lesson #1: Until it’s in my hands and working, a new piece of software is not finished and ‘due dates’ are not set in stone. Be honest about that and expect hiccups. Developers are only human and they can’t always know how long something will take.

Lesson #1a: You can’t promise something that isn’t 100% within your own control. I can’t really promise something that somebody else is doing. I can give an estimated date, but unless I’m the one doing the work, I have to build in some hiccup time.

What made it worse is that one developer disappeared on me so I had to find a replacement fast. The replacement made all the right noises and understood my deadline and promised the work was easy enough to complete on time. Then he told me he couldn’t do it at all, the day after it was due….

Lesson #2: Sometimes, people will say anything to get the job – a promise is not the same as the delivery of that promise.  Measure by delivery, not the intensity of the promise.

So what to do? Once bitten, twice shy, right? Twice bitten, well that’s really shy! How about employing 2 different developers at the same time to make sure one of them comes through? Sounds like a good safety net to me.

Except if they both deliver the code you have to spend time testing both sets – it takes twice as long. Multiple coders may be a good idea if you’re sending a space shuttle up into space, but for a simple WordPress plugin modification I think it’s overkill.

Lesson #3: Don’t overcomplicate something because it’s gone wrong in the past. Be realistic about why it went wrong instead.

I recently lost internet connection for a couple of days and decided to work at my brother’s house. I’ve now realized that when I bought a desktop machine recently, to replace my dead laptop, it wasn’t exactly something I could drag around with me. It didn’t seem like a big deal since I have a couple of older laptops I could use.

Or I did, until my laptops decided not to play. I’ve had 3 separate laptops die on me – the last one on the day I took it to my brother’s house to use his wifi. In fairness they are all old machines and they were backup to the backup, so they were overdue for retirement.

Lesson #4: My desktop machine is fast and cool, but it relies on my internet connection. If that goes down I can’t work unless I have a reliable machine I can actually take where the wifi is. So I need a new backup laptop now – I’m sure my wife thinks that’s just an excuse to get a cool new toy, but I don’t want to be without the means of doing what I need to do ever again – at least as far as I can avoid it.

Once I had the updated plugin (which now works great) I tested it and that took a fair chunk of time. That’s ok. I then realized that I could speed up the production of the content for my service if I used a slightly different technique. Cue another day of testing.

The new technique I use works and it works really, really well. I estimate it will now save me about a day every month which is pretty cool. Better yet I can use it on other things I have planned so I’ll get extra mileage out of it.

Lesson #5: Sometimes it’s worth a little bit of extra time now to save time repeatedly in the future. I think some people call that “sharpening the saw”.

What’s the end result of this?

• I have a working plugin which is designed in a more flexible way for any future updates.
• I have a method for preparing content that eliminates drudgery and minimizes chances of mistakes
• I know of a couple of developers not to rely on!
• I’m aware of a weakness in my setup that I can now take care of

I can’t pretend it’s been fun – the stress of trying to get what I felt was a simple change done in a timely way for the members is something I’d rather avoid. I don’t like the feeling of letting them down, making them wait for their update.

I have, however, spotted ways to guard against such things in the future. I’m sure other things will crop up, but at least I have some coping strategies for these ones.

So what’s the point of this post? It occurs to me that some of you must hit roadblocks when you’re trying to set up internet income streams. How many of you don’t manage to break through those roadblocks? How many of you could break through those roadblocks if you kept going?

That’s the point, I think. Keep going. If an obstacle comes up then keep going, until you’ve gone round it, or removed it, or ignored it – whatever you need to do to get to the next checkpoint.

Then do the same with the next obstacle. I sometimes think they’re just a way for life to check whether we’re really serious about doing something!

So, do you have any roadblocks you haven’t managed to conquer yet? Add your comment and let me know.

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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:

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!

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It’s a relatively simple technique and in my first month I made a few hundred dollars. By increasing the number of sites I expected to make even more the following month. What happened turned out to be very different from what I expected.

I made virtually no sales. I’d calculated that I should have made many hundreds, possibly into the thousands. The amount of money I made was about $60.

Ok, these sites are set it and forget it sites. You don’t need to keep going back after they’re made, which is always an attractive proposition because passive income like that is easy to multiply over time. That’s where my first mistake came in. I did set them and forget them. I didn’t check them as I know now that I should have done.

Traffic has been going down – along with my search engine results positions – and since this was a new technique I was testing I was disappointed. Maybe the technique doesn’t work longer term? I should have known better and trusted my instincts.

What’s happened is that someone has hacked those sites. They diverted any search engine bot traffic to a page of links of their own choosing. That made my sites look like a real spammer’s paradise. It’s no wonder they’ve gone from first page of Google (I had position 3 for many of them!) to completely off the map. Here’s the thing though. When I checked the sites in a browser they looked fine. It was only the search engines who got the spammy page that had been put on my sites. Of course the search engines are the very ones I’m relying on for organic traffic, so going from #3 page 1 to invisibility was guaranteed to cost me money and lose me traffic.

It’s fixed now and I know what to check for. That’s one mistake I shan’t make again, but in the meantime it’s cost me the affiliate sales I should have made plus the cost of the domains that are now effectively trashed because they’re off the chart as far as Google are concerned.

I should have been getting about 50-60 unique visitors a day on each of those sites. I’ve been getting 1. Even with 1 visitor I made about $30 so far this month. Just by the law of averages if I’d have 50 times the visitor count there’s a fair chance I’d have made over $1,000 this month. It’s been an expensive lesson to learn, but I’ve learned it. I hope you can learn it without the need to suffer it.

Just because a site is said to be set it and forget it, that does not mean you should forget it! Check it regularly, look for foreign files that you didn’t upload. Changed your passwords regularly and don’t use the same one on all your sites (I never use the same passwords and my sites still got hacked – I have my own theory as to why, but let’s say I’ve cancelled that hosting plan).

If you find a decent niche and start making some money on it, keep an eye open for any changes. Even a sudden spike in traffic can be a problem because it might indicate someone is spamming – that can happen if you have an affiliate program on the site. I learned that lesson the hard way too, when I got shut down because someone decided to spam a great offer I was making…

Summary: keep an eye on your sites. They’re your lifeblood and their value can be destroyed by other people. Don’t let them put their hand in your pocket and rob your family of what you’ve worked for.

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Seems on Friday, 30th May, they’re going to have about an hour’s downtime when they won’t be processing payments – so nobody can buy your stuff during that time. At least that’s how it reads to me.

I’m just hoping they don’t break anything like they did a week or two back, when IPN got busted for a while. IPN stands for Instant Payment Notification and it’s the bit that makes it possible for your customer to pay you and then be redirected to a download page to get their stuff.

A couple of days after that they started canceling a ton of subscriptions, it seems, where there was no reason to do so – at least according to the subscription members who contacted me.

Not their best month, I think.

As I say, I’m hoping they won’t do anything that hurts us with this maintenance, but with systems as complex as theirs must be, it’s impossible to tell until it’s too late. A couple of weeks back I wrote about the special offer 2Checkout were having. You could open up an account and get the sign-on cost returned. I did just that, for the sole purpose of having a back-up payment processor for the future.

Boy, am I glad I did that now.

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It’s a script that increases the price after each sale so it’s useful for putting a little bit of time pressure on a potential customer. Especially when, as in this case, I’m offering a valuable bonus in its own right. Because it’s a valuable package I don’t want it to sit there forever so I’m limiting the sales.

So my hosting account Cpanel told me I don’t have enough disk space to work on the database.

Not right – I have plenty of disk space. There’s an issue with the hosting server.

I’ve spoken to my hosting company and they can’t do anything immediately. They’re a good company, so I expect they’ll have this fixed well inside 24 hours (very well inside), but it’s now put my plans on hold because I can’t set up the script.

Good job I hadn’t left it to the last minute. I think it’s always a good idea to build in a bit of downtime when you’re planning something. You never know when you might need it.

So I’ll switch to a product I’ll be launching next week and spend my time productively on that, instead.

It actually took my hosting company more than 24 hours to fix the problem. The first time round the live service agent had to pass on the details to the more technical support team and didn’t pass on all the information I had provided about the problem.

End result: they had to start asking me what the problem was all over, but this time by email. The service tech. who handled the issues also didn’t seem to understand, despite being told exactly what the issue was. He clearly didn’t read the information I had provided him, because he tried to replicate the problem by doing something totally different and told me I had plenty of space.  That was not the actual issue.

Anyway, it’s resolved itself now and I believe it was a temporary issue with the hosting company’s own machines, rather than my bit of space that I rent from them. Fortunately I’ve spread my various sites around different hosting companies so if a major problem occurred with any one of them I wouldn’t be wiped out.

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