Copywriting--Cracked up as it's made out to be?
It's embarrassing. It's been well over 10 days since I purchased Ken Evoy's SBI and I'm still at the point of getting the 600 page manual printed. I had somewhat envisioned that I would have that done by the time Michael Green released his "How To Promote a Product" product. Sigh. (The manual is due to arrive from Quebec on Wednesday. Close to $20 CDN to have it UPS'd to me--and 8 days.)
School is full bore. I dropped my advanced medical terminology. Not because I don't want to learn more medical terminology (that would a heck of a thing for a pre-med, don't you think?) That leaves 4 classes...er, 5 classes or 6, depending upon how you count. There's "Medical Law and Ethics" class, required for getting a phlebotomy certificate. There's the 2nd quarter of my EMT class--which I'm taking from a different instructor than the first quarter.
I changed from taking a Saturday class to a TTh evening class because I thought I was going to take some practice MCATs on some Saturdays thru Princeton Review. I bought a whole stack of MCAT prep material, just about everything except ExamKrackers, which I already had. The guy I bought it from, John, recommended against taking TPR--"Save your money. You have everything you need." He got a 34. I think I'd be pretty happy with a 34. I got a 29 9 years ago (9 in verbal--my bane.)
So, let's see, that's 2 classes. Then there are the two hand-in-hand PE classes--"lifetime fitness" and "lifetime fitness lab". That's why I was walking last week. This week I managed 2.5 miles in under 50 minutes. Only 17.5 more hours of exercise until an "A" in the lab :).
The 2 other classes are html classes. This is so I can 1) do some website work, maybe for others; and 2) I have a website, a forum, that I want to get up, for re-entry students (at, not to surprisingly:
Watch this link :) I have the webhosting company, installed phpBB2 over the Christmas break, but still need to create the "guts" for the board. Having phpBB2 installed is kind of like having your house framed...you still have to do the interior finishing. That webhost is on a system which provides me with a shell account--I more-or-less inherited the account because I had ISP service with one company which was bought by Verio and the ISP service was dropped, but they kept the webhosting. Since I was 1 course short of a Unix sys admin certificate, you can guess I kinda like Unix.
It seems like there are a zillion other things that went on this week that I didn't write about. I tried to put links up along the side bar here, and they did show up--but they are gone now.
It was interesting looking at the blogger code--it looks like it is some sort of xml, as far as I can tell. The other significant occurrence is that I was up late Sunday night and so was tired when I got up for my 8:30am Monday class. I paid for it though--in real dollars. On my way out of the parking structure after class I left the parking brake on, and didn't discover it until I got off the freeway about 15 miles later. $465.55.
Ka-ching!
(With globalization, which makes software jobs uninteresting because they can be -- and have been -- shipped over seas. Medical jobs, those involving patient care, are a lot harder to ship over seas. What my experience this week taught me is that car repair might be another secure job. Hmmm....bloody hands or greasy hands? Malpractice insurance or no. I don't think we've come quite to the point of seeing female car mechanics as a usual thing. However, over half the medical students in the U.S., I understand, are women. A far cry from when I was first in college where their numbers were around 10%).
Talk with you later... :) And remember:
re-entry-students.com forum, coming soon
Adventure: printing 600 page manuals
Adventure: Virus checking
Exercise
600 page manual
Well, Julio at citiegrafix has printed my manual, and it will cost nearly $20 cdn to have it shipped to me! Wow! Maybe post would be just as good? I mean, that's 50% of the cost of printing it. USA Expedited Parcel (10 days) : $12.85, according to Julio. Another mail has been sent back to Julio.
In the meantime, Sam got
his Kinko's to print it 2-up. I'm a bit jealous. And then, he's offering to print it for others for $25 + shipping -
here
Virus checking and more...
Last night was our yearly parish post-Nativity dinner. That was good. One of my dinner-mate's computer had stopped working correctly. Another member of our parish, an IT guy, took a look at it. Well, person #1 didn't use anti-virus software, no firewall, etc. The IT guy said: your computer has several viruses, spyware, hijack-ware, etc. I freaked a bit. I went home and downloaded the
kasperksy virus checker. They said my download would freely check for viruses, but if I wanted them removed, I'd have to buy the virus-checker. Fair deal.
Result? Well, the scan took about 8 hours on my 5G 500MHz machine. I had about 8 different viruses 56 times. Alarmed, do you think? Actually, not. Kaspersky checks your outlook express dbx (folders) files. Within those, yes, I had many emails which had virus-laden attachments. I don't open attachments. No. Never from anyone I don't know. Never from something on an email list. Rarely if I know the person.
exercise
Yesterday I walked 2.3 miles in 50 minutes. I have some arthritis, and it really didn't help the arthritis, yet. I went to work on my web assignments in the school's computer lab, but left after being in too much pain. Bone pain I understand. But my left thigh muscle hurt. Hungry, tired and in pain, I went home. I almost didn't make it to the parish dinner.
Wow! Two great experiences in the last two days.
1. Actually using a cgi script to capture information on a form and email it.
2. Tonight! In EMT class, even though it's not in our scope of practice...we got to drop ETs (Endotracheal Tubes). Well, not on people--but still. First time using, no, wait, holding a laryngoscope. When I was a paramedic back in 1977 we weren't allowed to do that. It's not a trivial procedure. You have to go a bit against your own inclinations. You can't put the blade too far back (my first problem), and you need to pull up on the laryngoscope. So, there you are, the manikin has his mouth wide open, facing toward the ceiling, and you put this L-shaped device (laryngoscope with blade) into the manikin's mouth and down its throat--and pull up! Pulling up is a very important part of the procedure--but it's not a very natural posture. I'm surprised someone hasn't tried to improve upon the situation. Any way, I got it in--put the BVM onto the tube and the lungs inflated. It's easy to slip up and put the tube into the esophagus. However, if you can visualize the vocal cords (a necessity), it's not too hard to place the tube.
Yesterday...yesterday.
I ditched the celebration of the Feast of the Nativity--except for the dinner at Cathy's. I don't know how many people finally showed up, but she said that after she counted the kids (mostly teenagers) there would be 35 people--hence, this year, a buffet. Cathy has been having me as a guest for a few years now--she has a beautiful home and a talented family. Oldest son Nicholas just finished his first term in college: 3 A-plusses and 1 A. Alex is a dynamite soccer player. Mischa cooks. He got his Christmas present and prepared some chicken for the dinner with it: a George Foreman grill! Dad, Paul, is a lawyer and an outstanding soccer coach. He took their team to first place in the nation last year for the league they're in (don't ask me, I don't know; but we watched them on ESPN!)
Great food. Great people.
Perhaps one of the most interesting discussions was that of Doug's son, Declan. Declan is a miracle child. He was *cured* of an incurable disease through prayer and the intercessions of St. John Maximovitch. You can
read the story here
Yeah, I know. A bit unbelievable. Even though the folks listening to the story were all Orthdox Christians, I think we all were in a bit of disbelief. After *miracles* happen to *other* people, you know, the ones you don't know. Let's put it this way: Doug relates that Declan's Jewish doctor now has an Icon of St. John Maximovitch.
Now, lest you think that someone who is a Saint lived long ago in a far away place, you need to read about St. John
here . (If you want more, there are a couple of books written about his life
one is here
St. John is also called St. John of Shanghai and San Francisco. Yep. San Francisco. From 1963-1966. Lest you think St. John was stuffy--be assured he was not. He used to give his shoes away to people. Aside from being charitable, I don't think St. John liked wearing shoes. Had a few words to say about ties, too.When he was alive, a lot of people thought that he behaved "un-bishoplike" (he was an ArchBishop). One of the orphans he brought over is active in our church. She wrote a children's book about St. John and his relationship to a pigeon, which he called "Goolya"--which you can read about
here
Eeeuuuu... I can see how St. John would look at me for missing the Feast. Not good. I don't have a real good reason, except I hadn't slept well the night before, and I was on fire for starting strong in my html classes.
Well, for those of you who prefer not to think of religion (and I understand, some of you have very good reasons for this.)--back to marketing discusson.
Phillip, of Quikonnex fame, who tried to convince me that quikonnex was the way to go, wants to speak to me
here
That's all well and good. But, I'm stubborn--or something. If he wants to discuss Q with me: 1) I don't want it to be private--let everyone be able to read and learn; and 2) it defeats the purpose of putting up a blog. Don't you think? What do you think? You can add to the blog by clicking on the "comment" button below.
Since folks on Michael's
forum were talking about being #1 in Google, I thought I'd Google this blog. Nope, not there. I wonder if blogspot is on Google's ban list. I'll have to investigate that in my copious spare time. The reason I did this was not to (there's a term for it, sort of "vanity googling") be vain, but because I maintain you can get #1 in Google--all you have to use is the specific keywords. The problem, as one poster on Michael's board is finding out, is that #1 in Google doesn't result in 1) traffic (you have to be #1 in highly searched for words); and 2) you have to have a website which is well-designed, attractive, and, well, as one person suggests--basically leads people down the primrose path to sales (he was complaining about not getting enough sales--someone suggested putting up a "mini-site"). Mini-sites, to get back to Sitesell, are not recommended by Ken Evoy.
Come to think of it...I stopped to make a call to the printing company in Quebec
here. They sent an email, but in my copious inbox, I didn't see it. That's because it was just under someone's name. So, I've now arranged to have the SBI "Action Guide" printed out and sent to me. Sam, on MG's board, was encouraging me to use SBI (
sitesell) and that I had inspired him, I guess to approach local businesses. In Silicon Valley, are there businesses that *aren't* online? Maybe. I just heard an ad from register.com to get people up on the web with domain name and site in 20 minutes (!), for about $20 (and unspecified contract.) I wonder how much it costs to get the names of people who newly registered for businesses?
I wrote up my list of projects--these are independent of school, and studying for the MCAT--I have 5. Whew. (This blog is not among them). Combining school and projects (after all, the html classes are there to support my internet business efforts) I managed to put up a form in html (actually, copy and pasted, but had been reading about forms in my html book), install and modify the mail_form.cgi script, and fill out the form and get it sent to me. Whoopee! One question--why does it always put my email address, even when I change the mail_form.cgi script to say something different. Must be the web hosting company's doing.
One project is a collaborative ebook. My partner likes my ideas! Very cool. Step-by-step. Another is to put up a sales site for a set of ebooks that I bought the rights to. I set up an account with 2checkout yesterday. Step-by-step. I guess, with 2CO that they don't do "affiliates" like clickbank does. Oops. Maybe should have gone with CB.
Well, I need to get on now. Have to study for my EMT test tonight, a test of what we learned last quarter. It sounds a *lot* like our final. Shock. Consent. I wrote up about a page of things that the instructor said would be covered...in 50 questions!
And, I need to upload my html files to my webserver so I can access them from school.
Take care, and hope you have a good day.
Oh wait...I have something very cool to share with you...let's see if I can find it again :)
a search engine for internet marketing fora. Cool, eh?
Well...I decided to bite the bullet and get the "Action Guide" printed, at the suggestion of Natasha
see here
Natasha, btw, runs
the site on dreadlocks, as far as I can tell.. :)
But...a funny thing happened along the way. I sent the Action Guide to Kinko's. "Please print 2-up double-sided." They can't. The AG pdf won't let them rotate the image. So they can't do 2-up. So, I've written to SBI's support, which I hear is excellent. 4-6 hours is the promised response time.
Phillip recommends using channels, from quikonnex.
see Phillip's Q site here
(BTW -- fwiw, the "quikonnex" name took some effort to, uh, "make the connection."--it's probably not going to be something I will readily remember--just a piece of constructive criticism, Q).
I suspect channels may be the way to go. Maybe. They've been around for a while haven't they? Just not in this form? Phillip wrote that you don't need to download software anymore to use it (but in my brief excursions, I didn't find out how.)
Will channels be the way to go? Well, I think they need to be made simpler for the average person. Right now I don't want to sign up because it's another piece of technology that I'll have to learn. And, between SBI's 600 page document, the MCAT and 24 units, and a few other ideas I have on the plate, I have enough to learn at the moment. What will it take to make channels successful? Well, email really didn't catch on in the pre-web days until aol made it very easy for the average person to use, as well as added tremendous value. This, btw, is sitesell's advantage--they make putting up a website very easy for the average person. Just follow the dots.
see sitesell here
On another note, my Inspiron 5000's screen died a bit before Christmas. In searching for a replacement...I bought
this auction . (So, after a while, this link won't work.) Why do I mention this? Because the seller, Brad Small, was just an incredible delight to buy from. So, if you are ever looking for a used computer and Brad is selling it, tell him I sent ya. He's a great refurbisher.
This blogging thing is interesting. I keep thinking of things I want to add. I need the complete blogger's guide to blogger.com, I guess.
Well, I have met our first roadblock -- I'm inexplicably laid up with side pain. This won't stop me, but it will slow me down. As I mentioned on Michael's forum, Ken doesn't require a literal 10 days. So, if you are following along with me, this will take longer than 10 days--but the important thing is--continue to make progress.
BTW -- how does one take 29 units...well, first of all, that will be 4 fewer--
but taking this many units wouldn't be possible without distance learning.
Highly recommended. Want to get a certificate in e-commerce, all online?
a public education online degree in e-commerce
The reason I'm dropping one of the courses is because it supposedly is
a distance class--but has 6 on-campus meetings! (That's one every other week in the quarter.) Doesn't qualify, in my book.
Ken Evoy's manual is 600+ pages long. He suggests printing it out. He even has a link to a piece of software where you can print it out two pages of document per page of paper. That's still 300 pages! He also suggests throwing in a buck or two and have it bound. 300 pages. Yep, binding sounds like a GOOD idea. If you print it. Which I won't. He suggests, as one possibility, to take it to a copy shop. I don't have the computer set up right now to transfer 16M to a copy shop (what, by Zip Drive? CD?--nope, don't have any of those.)
Then he suggests taking 5-6 hours and reading the manual--once over, just to get the 30,000 foot view. Okay, I'll do that. Gulp. He says there's lots of pictures. The first 20 pages really are about using Acrobat Reader--which, btw, mentions v3 and v4 but not v5 or v6. BTW - those who complain about AR 6.0 being 32 M (16M compressed download)--guess what? Ken's Manual is 16 M. I stopped reading last night because a) it was late; and b) I managed to get AR into a state that clicking on the page side margins didn't transfer me to different places in the document, but rather, changed the document page size (you know, 100%, 200%)--incrementing each time I clicked.
BTW - many thanks to Wendy, from Michael Green's forum, who was kind enough to read my blog and let me know that I messed up my affiliate link to sitesell. It's fixed now. Thanks, Wendy!!!
MCAT stuff--internet marketers, you're more than welcome to read on, but I don't think this will be of much interest to you.
So...I am reading about sigma bonds and pi bonds. And sp, sp2 and sp3 orbitals. I've got examples of sp and sp2 orbitals--but when do sp3 orbitals happen? Inquiring minds want to know. Electrochemistry is the next topic I'll be reading about.
Well, I've got 580 pages to read, so I better start to work!!!
Talk with you later.
Oh yeah...just to let you know, Wednesday is a holiday for me, so I will be spending the day with friends, eating and drinking...so, I'm not going to count that as one of the 10 days :).
Hi...welcome.
I've been on the internet for a long time. In fact, I had one of the first public email accounts back in the mid-1980s, from a company named "portal". I remember when I saw my first web page...it was at Sun Microsystems, where I was working as a contractor; it was http://www.nasa.gov, I think--and had these just gorgeous pictures of the earth from space--the browser was the mosaic browser, from NCSA. Several engineers from there, particularly Marc Andreessen came here to Silicon Valley and with Jim Clark founded Netscape (here's an interesting interview with Marc from
Marc's Interview )
It took me a little longer to get interested in e-commerce. (I was using the internet for daytrading.) I don't know when I bought my first book on succeeding in internet marketing, but I certainly have a digital pile of them now. Maybe this is a situation you can sympathize with. That's one of the reasons I'm writing this blog.
It all started when I found Michael Green's internet marketing forum just a few weeks ago. (
Michael Green's Forum ). I'm not sure how I stumbled onto it. I just know that I opened an email where he was giving a description of what was going on on the forum, in particular, about a particular thread about a young internet marketer whose rapid ascent into the rare air of internet-market-gurudom was having an equally rapid descent. (Reminds me of some of the stocks my friends and I used to trade :) I, of course, had just recently bought some of his products. Oops.
Once there, other things caught my eye and I posted a couple of questions. One forum regular answered with a video -- over 6 Meg! Talk about positive re-enforcement! One of the discussions started over something called "SBI" -- Site Build It. Now, in my wanderings, I had run across SBI before; in fact, it was one of many, many affiliate programs that I signed up for--and promptly forgot. I only vaguely remembered SBI. As the discussion progressed, I decided to investigate SBI for myself. Here is what I reported:
SBI review
BTW -- if you want to visit SBI, could you please use my affiliate link?
Visit SBI here
So, I have taken the plunge. The "twofer" deal that SBI is offering was just too much. I have signed up. I have already downloaded the first parts. Within it is a 10-day "plan". But, it seems much more upbeat than just a "plan." Ken's emails are believably encouraging. It inspires me to think that the time invested with him *will* pay off.
So...I am going to start his 10 steps. The only problem(s): school starts tomorrow. For some strange reason, I signed up for 29 (!) units. In addition, I'm studying to take the MCAT (Medical College Admission Test) in April. I have at least 4 1 foot stacks of books sitting on my kitchen table to help me prepare.
This is where you, my reader, comes in. I want you to share in the joy of my success, because I think you will be vital to my success. You will share in this "experiment" with me, to see what kind of results I get by following Ken Evoy's 10-day plan. If I'm successful, you will see how I got there. If not, you will find out what NOT to do. In any case, I'm hoping that you will be able to learn from my own experiences.
After the 10 day plan, it will almost be time for Michael Green to release his latest product, which I have signed up for. So, we will see how that works, too.
(BTW -- in re-reading Ken's affiliate e-mail, he has a several step-by-step plan on how to succeed, so maybe I'll write about working that plan, too.)
Well, that's enough writing for now! Better get to work, reading Ken's next step.
Oh yeah, and I need to post this blog to Michael's Forum, in case anyone is interested.
Happy New Year -- and, before you leave, please expend a few clicks of effort to fill an empty stomach:
FEED! Thanks!
