After the big improvements I am seeing with One Week Marketing Plan I decided it was about time to start excelerating the growth of my online business and finally fell for FirePow. If you have read my last post on the CB Notify plugin and other tools you can use to make your job with ClickBank easier, you could see a screenshot of the earnings I made in a day with CB.

I am grateful for these earnings that I accomplished because of the One Week Marketing Plan but also realise that I am still far from where I want to go, there still are days that sales are slower and others that I see a big jump of 3, 4 or more sales a day. So I am working hard on making the process of money coming in more consistent and reliable.

If you have been a reader of this blog, you must have seen some “messages from the Universe” and this morning I received another one that made me write this post:

Very simply, Mirjam,

the more that you accept responsibility for,

the more power you have.

Doesn’t that rock?

Love,
The Universe

Thought that was a really good message, and it certains holds truth for me. See, I have been fluttering around for way too long, trying all sorts of things like many other people do when they first start out making money online. Many of these people never get any further than making a few bucks online and give up, thinking it isn´t possible for them.

But really, the only person responsible for your earnings online, is you.

The so called “money making products” aren´t responsable for your earnings (or lack of earnings in most cases) nor the advice you take from others. The only person responsable is you. YOU.

In a world that has come accostumed to blaming all the bad on others, the MMO scene really isn´t any different. So many people blame the bad products, the scams and whatever they can think of to not take responsability for slow results. They claim it can´t be done, that they work hours and hours a day, they have thrown away money on crappy products, they can´t afford to sign up for excellent services or training and the list of excuses goes on and end.

And of course, the latest newest excuse is a widely accepted one, the worldwide financial crisis.

Well, I have had enough of it! I have had enough of the excuses, I have had enough of all those negative thoughts and people, saying that “IT” can´t be done, holding on to their negative believes that in the end only bring them down even more!

See, in my area of Spain, unemployment has gone up in a shocking speed, latest news I´ve heard was that the percentage of people unemployed in my area is approaching 20% and unemployment in the whole of Spain belongs to the highest of Europe, yet one of the biggest Spanish football clubs was able to pay a total of over 150 million euros to buy only 2 new players (Kaka and Ronaldo) …

People around me all talk about the crisis, about so and so losing their job, about no money being available anywhere and I am seeing many foreigners trying to sell their homes so they can return to their countries and at times it seems the country has gone mad. The newspapers all feature horrible stories about people in need, disasters and accidents and yet another scam some political hotshot pulled off.

Yet, when digging deeper and skipping over to the job vacancies, I see plenty of jobs available, even more than say 6 months ago. I talked to a friend of mine who wanted to renovate part of his hotel and he kept complaining that it was impossible to find people to do the job. I think the crisis is in the head of many people, and of course I know many people have been laid off and many banks and big companies have fallen down from their pedestal, but really …

YOU are the one responsable for your own earnings when working online.

I know that sounds hard, and I am probably kicking many people in the behind or offending them by saying it so bluntly, but before starting to shout at me, take a real honest look at your own situation, and instead of spending a lot of time complaining  and bitching, moaning and blaming others, put that time to work in a productive way and change your mindset!

If I am able to increase my earnings the way I have been doing lately, you can too!

Now, back to the title of this post, I really do believe this is the best time to start excelerating your business growth despite the financial crisis, I´d rather say that the financial crisis going on everywhere around us, should be the biggest impulse to grow your business and stay far ahead of others that aren´t willing to put in the elbow grease.

So, I have been building blogs, I have been building lenses and OWM projects, I have even started writing my own products to start selling online (and no, they don´t have anything to do with the MMO scene, rather the subject is my true passion, horses and all sorts of therapies) and been trying to streamline the process to get more done in less time.

A big step I have taken the other day was signing up for FirePow, a tool to put blogging on high speed. I had heard of it many times already and looked at what it would do for my business (or what it claims it could do for that matter) but to be honest I was constantly put off by one thing and only one thing, the monthly cost of $127 and I am sure many of you would be put off by that as well.

And yes, it did hurt a bit to pull out the ol´ credit card and put my words into action, but the way I see it is that I can completely combine the OWM with FirePow and but my whole blogging business on speed, saving a lot of time while taking advantage of the built in tools to increase promotion (and thus more sales coming in!)

So far it has been 3 days since I have signed up and in those 3 days I have managed to set up 2 new blogs and almost completed the work I want to do in order to have them being updated for the next 2 months on autopilot, with unique, interesting and informative quality content, videos and pictures. The actual set up took a few minutes which included installing wordpress, theme and plugins for both blogs so that was a big time saver. Actually amazing to see that being done from the same control panel inside FirePow without having to go all different places, cpanels and ftp servers.

Now, to be fair and honest, 3 days is far from enough time to have all the knowledge and experience to be able to give a full complete review, so I am only sharing my experiences and thoughts so far, at the end of my month you can expect to see a full review and results of what I have managed to do with FirePow so sign up for my RSS if you are interested in speeding up and growing your online business.

Some of the excellent features I have been using so far:

• Universal panel to control all your blogs at the same place
• Instant set up of new blogs complete with wp software, themes and plugins
• Free videos that explain all the features of FirePow in a visual manner
• Automatically pulling content for your keywords to build your blog
• Automatically find free stockpictures from within your post, keyword based and added to your posts
• Automatically adding RSS to different RSS directories
• Automatic bookmarking set up to 20 bookmarking sites

Like I said, I am still far from using all the tools that come in the FirePow control panel, but so far I can only say that I am well impressed and have good hopes for it paying for itself in the next month or so and more. I still have to explore all the tools to create many backlinks to my blogs, part of that is the private blog network they have in FirePow containing hundreds of blogs where you can post your short articles with links, and I haven´t fully explored the RSS and social bookmarking yet, although touching the surface on that is already proving to work.

So you might think, Mirjam, you always keep saying that you aren´t gonna spend another dime on mmo products and yet you forked out $127 for blogging software and yes, that is a very legit thought.

Maybe you remember that a few months ago I wrote about having problems with Squidoo and not being able to log in to any of my squidoo accounts. That problem has since been solved and it basically had to do with my internet connection, but still, it lingered in the back of my mind that all my work at squidoo could dissappear for just about any reason.

And yes, I still believe OWM is an excellent way to learn how to make money, how to do keyword research, find profitable niches and products to promote and set up promotional products. It has actually taken over most of my other online work and is starting to form a major part of my income, not just through Clickbank but other affiliate networks as well.

However I have come to the point that I don´t want to have free resources to become the major part of my income, especially since I don´t have any control over those resources so I want to use the OWM lenses created as a means of back up support to my own sites. After all, I do have control over my own sites, can sell them if I want to and build my website portfolio, and the squidoo lenses are a great way to give extra weight to them.

The FirePow blogging software now actually enables me to build new blogs in a very short period of time, promote them, automate them and take them along in my OWM projects and the way I see it now, it is looking to be the perfect combination.

I will be posting on this combination more over the course of the next few weeks as well as share my personal experiences with this blogging software, but I´d be happy to see your thoughts, questions and comments, maybe you have been working with FirePow already and want to share some insider tips with me!

One last note, if you do decide to have a look at the FirePow software, you will see that you can actually import your excisting blogs into the FirePow control panel and use the promotional tools on those blogs, but unfortunately this feature is under maintance at present so if that would be your only reason to sign up, wait. I have already contacted the online support (pretty cool to have online chat support as to not waste time waiting for your questions to be answered!) and they have told me it would be a few more days. I will of course let you know once this feature is up and running again.

If you are still reading (sorry this became a pretty long post nearing 2000 words LOL) I hope you have a great weekend and think about all the things I have said in this post…

You are the only one responsable for your online success!

Check out the FP blogging software

I just wanted to give you a last update on my article marketing and One Week Marketing Plan challenge before I am off enjoying life offline for a bit.

As you could already have seen in the other updates, I didn´t get to work my regular schedule of setting up my promotional plan because of problems I have been experiencing with Squidoo. As it turns out, the problem is related to my internet access which is a really poor connection, seeing that I live out in the country side and have no landlines here to get a high speed connection.

Anyways I really do hope to get that sorted in the next few months or so, seeing that without a good connection, I am losing a lot of time as you might imagine.

At the start of the challenge I had set up 6 squidoo lenses and added content on them and then went on doing the steps in the One Week Marketing Plan. Now for any of you who is struggling to make money online, I really think it is worth to have a look at this program, it is not just great for beginners to get the idea of how to set up an online promotion, for those who have been working online and felt they were not getting good enough results, this program goes into a lot of detail and lays out a plan and working schedule. I know I got a lot out of it so far!

So, I had the lenses, went on to doing off site promotion and also set up a website of my own that would be supported by article marketing and the squidoo lenses, or at least that was the basic idea until I ran into my squidoo problems and wasn´t able to access my lenses to adapt them and link more.

That I gotta say, got me thinking big time about the use of free sites to promote a product. Now the basic idea behind the one week marketing is to use just sites that are free, so apart from investing some money into learning the ropes (investing in your own skills!) there is no other investment required because all the tools you use are free. However, and I think Jennifer, the author of this plan, is right when saying that as soon as you can, you should spend some money on buying your own website and use the free resources explained to promote that website, giving it more authority in Google because of the already set up pages on high PR sites.

Seeing that I could not fully use Squidoo for this project, I immediately set up a website on my own domain to make sure I could continue with my challenge and would use the squidoo lenses to back up that domain. Hope that makes sense to you all!

What I have seen so far

Keeping in mind that my project has only been “live” for a week now and a few article directories are still in the process of approving my articles that I submitted, and the initial problems I had with my squidoo lenses, I can only say that the project has been a success so far for a number of reasons:

• I was able to stick to my working schedule even though a lot of unforeseen things happened
• I am already seeing traffic coming in on my squidoo lenses and on my own site
• I am already getting hits on the product I am promoting
• And the best of all, I already got one sale!

Plus posting this challenge online has already done a few other things I wasn´t really thinking of when starting. I have gotten a few ideas for future posts that might be of interest for you, so if you haven´t signed up for my RSS you better do so now to make sure you don´t miss out on my future posts.

I have been doing quite a bit of article marketing over the past week and been playing around with different ways of distributing articles, how to write them to get more hits and what to do to increase views. So I think a post will be coming up soon, going more into depth on how to write articles for article submission, what to do and what not to do and things you need to understand when getting into article marketing.

Instead of just submitting to EzineArticles, I have been trying out different article directories, and another future post will be a more detailled post on different article directories, how to use them and what to look for. They are all different and offer different options when it comes to building links, so you better not miss those posts if you want to go into article marketing.

Another thing that has happened these last weeks is being invited as a guest writer on different blogs. Now I know I said a month or so ago that I wouldn´t be doing any promotion for this blog anymore, meaning I wasn´t going to be using any of the “social link building techniques” so widely promoted by everybody and their dog. It is still too early to tell what the impact will be for that decision, but for now I can share that my rss subscribers have gone up with 25 this last week, and google analytics is showing me an increase of 20% in visitors to my site.

I can only say that I am really happy with that and want to take this moment to give a thanks to all of you visitors, leaving interesting comments both here and in my mailbox, I highly appreciate any feedback and the support is wonderful.

Back to the invitation to do guest posts, I am still thinking of that and will probably send you an article if I find them good enough to post on another blogs, just know I am not forgetting about it

The last thing I saw actually made me chuckle, I was being called the “Buzz Killer” by Caleb because of my post on using massive traffic techniques and whether you should follow the hype or not. I would like to repeat here that if what you are doing right now is getting you the results you are after, by all means keep doing that.

If however you are not getting the wanted results by spending hours and hours of work and effort maybe it is time to think for yourself and analise those efforts in order to find a more productive way to work. I will be posting more of my own thoughts on that in the near future as well.

I will be keeping you guys updated of course on my little challenge project but for now I am going to prepare myself for a nice little break and enjoy life offline for a week or so. It will be my birthday this Sunday… time flies when you are having fun … and I am having my mom and a friend over for a week to celebrate and have a little holiday here on the sunny coast of Spain, so if you wonder why there aren´t any new posts for a while, it is because we are having a blast!

See you back next week!

My dream ever since my childhood was having my own horses and dogs, and the most important part of the dream was always, having them close to me, living where I was living as well.

Today, I have my 3 horses living around my house, and whenever I go from my office to my kitchen to make a cup of whatever, they will leave their hay and walk around the house, showing up in front of the kitchen window to see if it is their lucky day and mom tosses out an extra carrot or apple.

I also have 3 dogs who follow me wherever I go and give me a lot of love and companionship. They were all “rescue cases” when they entered my life, one was so tiny and underfed she was about to die and has now grown into one of the dearest animals I have ever had in my life, the other two were both up on “deathroll”, convicted without trial by their owners who claimed they were too dangerous or impossible to handle. They both turned out to be amazing creatures who atmost will lick visitors to death.

I have lived in this place for 3 years now, and when I first found this spot I was in a real hurry to find a place to live, having only 2 weeks to find a place suitable to have horses and dogs, close enough to my new job and most importantly, affordable. It was a real lucky break the moment I walked in the door and I felt at home straight away.

I finished moving only 1 day before I had to start working my new job (yep, as a car salesperson) and lived out of unpacked boxes for months, just not having the time and umpf to finish unpacking after the long hours I was putting in.

I must say, I have been really happy here, even though it is a rental place, but lately this nagging feeling won´t stop telling me it is about time for me to move on again. This time hopefully to a place I can really call my own. You see, many years ago all I dreamt was living in a peaceful place with my animals near me, but never did it occur to me that it should be on my own property. I got what I thought I wished for, but time has come to dream bigger.

Last week I was talking about it with my mom about different possibilities, maybe even running some holiday premises off of a property to bring in extra money, and only the day after I was sifting through a local magazine where I saw this “finca” (Spanish country home) announced for sale. I hesitated a bit since my financial position isn´t really ready to take on a mortgage at the moment, but picked up the phone anyways and made a call to inform about the place.

An hour later and a lot of information richer I had learned about another location available in my favorite area which just sounded too good to be true (and way over my budget, that is probably why it sounded too good to be true) but the guy on the other end of the phone offered to send me some pictures anyways so I could think about whether I wanted to have a look at the property or not.

A few days later I was having breakfast with my friend and when talking about this property she happened to know the owner and suggested to go and have a look since we were nearby, but she also said the property really wasn´t what I was looking for, the main house being in need of a lot more than just some TLC.

When arriving at the finca however, again I had this instant feeling of being at home.

There was a lot of damp on the walls, cracks, ugly tiles against the walls (something typically Spanish), a really awful tiny old fashioned kitchen and weird layout of all the rooms, but somehow I could just see through all of it and see real potential.

There was a huge terrace outside though and I could just see myself sitting there, in the shade, enjoying the absolutely fantastic views with my laptop in front of me, working away on my websites, having the occasional dip in the pool and picking fresh fruit from the trees or having a nice barbeque with my dearest friends and laugh the night away.
So we went on, looking at the rest of the property which also included another small house, reasonably new, two floors containing two apartments which were the main source of income for the current owner, functioning as holiday rentals with their separate entrance and own terraces. Things were already starting to look a bit brighter and we went on, down a little road to another house, a wooden one, which in the future was going to form part of the income as well and set in a beautiful spacious location, with several fruit trees and many plants, flowers and the occasional palm tree.

If that wasn´t enough yet, there was this huge area of flat land with trees offering shade on those hot summer days and I could already see my horses having an amazing time eventhough they would not be able to show up at my kitchen window anymore.

When leaving the property we started talking about the place and its ups and downs and my friend was really summing up all the negative sides of that particular finca, especially the part about the main house that she felt just wasn´t my style and I was almost agreeing with her, she made some very good points.

So why am I writing this, at 3.30 am while I should really already be sound asleep?

Simply because I can´t get that place out of my head, making calculations and going over all the things which need to be changed in order to make the investment profitable and even run a small business on the premises. To me it felt like much more than just some property, it felt so peaceful and quiet, so full of potential and vibration and just waiting there for me.

And the more I think about it, the more I start looking at the possibilities and options, the more I am becoming convinced I should really give it my best.

It is Time to Dare and Accomplish Bigger Dreams!

When opening my email this morning there was “A Note from the Universe”, little inspiring messages I receive, this one I wanted to share with you because of it´s spot-on relevance and kind of freaky coincidence:

Remember you once told me, Mirjam, that if ever all of the circumstances in your life were aligned just so, your soon-to-be friends were in all the right places at all the right times, and the financial markets, social climate, and global energies had all reached optimal points… you´d want to be gently nudged as a subtle sign that it was time to start doing new things, saying new things, and visualizing so that you might catch these gargantuan waves of change and surf to dazzling new heights?

TODAY IS THE DAY!

Hang ten!

The Universe

PS. Oh, Mirjam, I also wanted to remind you something about a fabulous large property with planty of land and Cadbury Fruit and Nut Bars… go figure. 

How cool would it be to have a way to automatically record all your thoughts?
It has happened to me so many times that I would be doing something away from the computer and all these great sentences and thoughts would get into my mind. Good ideas to blog about, interesting questions and different views, only to find they had vanished into thin air as soon as I turned on the old laptop.

I have notebooks and bits of paper just about everywhere you can imagine. The living room, kitchen and lately even in the bathroom; there is nothing like a relaxing shower to have my mind wonder off. My purse is filled with quick notes dotted down on napkins and the same goes for my car.

All these notebooks and bits of paper are filled with short keyword phrases that I can’t seem to be able to put together once I finally sit down and start typing. They are only causing more clutter and frustration.

Those wonderful sentences that lifted my spirit while still inside my head, turn into dry and empty string of words without a soul…

The day I bought this domain I thought it would serve me as a spot to collect all these random thoughts, a fixed place where I could gather all the information and advice found on the Internet and felt was interesting.

But after blogging only for a short period of time, it feels like that initial goal just is not enough anymore, or maybe it is because the process of growth has already started kicking in and I’d better catch up fast. At least that is how it feels to me.

The everlasting search for new input and knowledge has put my mind on overload, but at the same time I feel so enriched when I stumble upon a really awesome blog packed with little gems. Many times they have information on how to improve the quality of blogging, SEO tricks, design how-to´s or newbie blog no-no´s, making me laugh inside about my own stupidities.

The posts that really inspire me are the ones that give me a sense of recognition, letting me know there is actually a real person sitting on the other side of the screen, no matter how far away you can almost feel their passion for what they do, and reading between the lines you realize they really care about what they send out into the world.

And by doing so, they make you go back in time, read stuff they have written weeks, months or even years ago, not wanting to miss out on a single word. Every time you go back to their blog, you just hope there will be a new fresh post to enjoy and think about and if there isn’t, you know you are given some extra time to read through their archives, before taking in more freshly written content.

Today I had to think about the goal I have with my blog, and while the road hasn’t yet been completely set nor clarified, I know in my heart what I desire this blog to become: A Blog with a Soul, reaching out to others and maybe even touch them with my words.

I am convinced I will get there, one post at a time.

At times I feel like a fish on the dry, convinced of my swimming capabilities, yet having a hard time to stay alive, grasping for air.

In my post Keeping the Momentum Going earlier this week, I already talked about the feeling I have had for the past time, the feeling that I really need to organize and schedule things in order to get them done. While commenting on somebody’s post a few days ago, I felt I am not the only one who struggles with the same things I am going through.

However, the only one who can change this feeling is Me.

When I first started learning about affiliate marketing and other ways of making money online, I immediately felt that was the right way for me to go. I had already been running a website years before in a niche on one of my passions, in a language that I could hardly speak and had great difficulty writing in.

And without doing a lot of linking or SEO and with a horrible design which to date still makes me blush, the website actually had well over 30.000 unique visitors a month.

That particular website has since stopped to exist, but even now, after 4 years there are still over 1.000 pages linked to it… If only I had known then what I know now, that website would have made me quite the extra pocket change.

My problem now is different though, it seems my mind keeps shattering in all directions but the right one, and even though I am putting in 14-16 hours a day of “work” and scoring 70 points in my little system, none of my projects are really working the way I would want them to. Because every time I am working on something, my eye falls on yet another interesting “opportunity” that I really need to check out as soon as possible.

Staying motivated this way is pretty hard to say the least so this morning I decided to go back to basics, getting out of the cycle I have been in way too long. I moved my temporary work area from the living room couch back to my office that I had cleaned and decluttered last week with all the best intentions of actually using it.

And for the rest of the day I am only going to focus on 1 project that needs to be tackled out of the list of all my unfinished things to do.

After a week of hard work, with the weekend in sight, I felt I had earned the pleasure of going out for breakfast. And while I was enjoying a deliciously warm, crispy bun with Manchego cheese and butter and a tea I was looking back at my accomplishments this week.

For as far as the goals I had set on Sunday evening, they are already met, writing daily in several blogs, creating 10 new links every day and getting to meet and greet with other bloggers. So far so good!

The biggest change I am noticing at the moment is the change of energy. Don’t know exactly how to describe it, but I feel more energized when facing my tasks at hand, and once finished, I just continue doing more, searching for more opportunities, thinking and planning ahead. I also faced up to my landlord who I had been avoiding for 2 weeks after a dispute over my energy bill, him claiming I owed him another 200 euros while I was sure he was wrong. At times it is just easier to stick your head in the sand and just pretend problems are not there, but it really started to make me nervous of being in my own house, not wanting to run into him.

So, I went to his place to have another talk to sort things out and I ended up not having to pay anything more and that it was his “mistake” after all. So, my nerves have calmed tremendously, he even gave me a big bag of freshly picked sweet oranges and a big crate of tomatoes of his own land! (Still wondering what to do with all of them, but I guess I will be making litres of tomato sauce and freeze it).

The biggest relief was not the produce that he gave me, nor the 200 euros that I saved, but knowing that I had faced the problem at hand, returning my peace of mind again.

Another positive thing is that I was given 3 offers to write reviews, which I gladly have accepted, so my paypal account is going up, plus I received the check I mentioned earlier which has already been deposited at the bank. Things are starting to pick up and it is great to see that all my effort, time and hard work is finally paying off, just when I was about to throw in the towel and start thinking of accepting a low paid job in the neighbourhood.

The only problem I encountered this week was last night, while trying to upload a new script to set up a directory on one of my domains. All of a sudden, the blog that was up and running for over months without problems had disappeared in thin air, making it impossible to enter the domain.

If this has ever happened to you, you probably understand the stress and worries of the situation, so I spent all night into the wee little hours trying to recuperate the contents, hours consulting a friend of mine who is way more computer literate than I am, and many mails back and forth to my hosting provider.

This morning, it was finally back up and running like it always had, but my stats obviously had taken a dive, from 300 daily visitors to zero. One good thing came out of it though…. people I had never heard of started contacting me to ask me what had happened to my blog, since they could not enter it anymore! What a great push to find out it is actually read and appreciated!

All in all it has been a wonderful week and I hope many more like this will follow, with positive movements and things going up.
I could surely do with this energy boost, which has made me feel more confident in my possibilities and show me I am on the right road!

So, if you are reading this, I hope you are doing great and have a super weekend, I sure plan on having a great one!

 

Todays note of the Universe:

Never underestimate human spirit, Mirjam.

Especially not your own.

It comes from the finest stock, if I do say so myself.

Be the ball!