Want to Learn How to Build a Business Not Just a Blog.. for FREE? CLICK HERE Now to Find Out How!

Notice how there has been a lot of people giving away stuff lately… not just things like reports and audios… we mean solid things that people would otherwise have bought. Look at Camtasia a few months ago when they offered a free copy of version 3… it was a great move on their part.

Why are companies doing this more and more?

Because the strategy works… it gets people talking and spreading the word and looking at what you have and if they like it they tend to want more of what you have. With Camtasia, the version 3 was a great version and there was really no reason to upgrade but we can guarantee you that alot of people probably did.

Well here is another awesome offer that is a great product from Chris Malta over at World Wide Brands and it is once again 100% FREE. No shipping charges, no hidden fees, no upsells or anything else. We can pretty much guarantee you will like what you get and find value in it… and if you don’t then please let us know because we were impressed. Click Here to check it out!

Solid Plugin for Increasing Sociability

Yesterday we received an email from Becky Sanders of http://www.preblogging.com/ about a plugin of hers that has been getting some pretty good feedback. The plugin is called Increase Sociability and is suppose to be able to help increase your Digg & StumbleUpon traffic by reminding those visitors to vote for your page.

The plugin is based off one of our favorites called What Would Seth Godin Do. What Beckys plugin does is it displays a custom message when visitors come to your site from either Stumble Upon or Digg and the message can be customized however you want. She also has added an extra section to allow you to create a custom message for what ever referring domain you wish.

This is cool and if you think outside the box can be pretty effective. For example, lets say you have a JV Partner that is going to make a blog post about your blog. You can create a custom response and have it appear only to people who come from that site and you can target it directly to them with a special offer only for them. That offer could be a special gift, download or discount.

Another example is if you are getting good results on a different social site other then Stumble Upon or Digg, such as Mixx or Propeller… with Increase Sociability you can customize the message for when ever someone visits from those sites.

Do not underestimate the power of creating custom greetings for your visitors!

Overall, we think the plugin is great… we do have three suggestions for possible improvements… not sure how hard or easy these would be but Becky if your reading, here they are…

1. More custom fields –> Be great if you could add as many as you wanted, but having a couple more at least would be great.

2. Able to target specific pages only on your blog –> This could allow you to create a more targetted message to the visitor on that page.

3. Have a great big picture of us on the settings page –> Well ok, maybe this one is not a great idea.. but the first two were.

Overall.. a solid plugin… great job Becky!

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17 Moos » ~ ~ Random Post

In the previous post called “Content Creation Madness” we took our focus off of the keyword research for a little while to focus on getting the initial content for the blog started. Now that the content is in the process of getting created, it is time to go back and start up the “Diamond Digger” to find us the keywords that we are going to want to focus on for making lots of MOOney!

The tool of choice for us is Brad Callen’s affiliate elite, it is a very cool little tool that has lots of great features but our hoofs down favorite is the AdWords Campaign spy tool. The reason this is so powerful is it will track for you which keywords are being advertised on consistently by the same people and the power in that is if the same advertiser is spending money on the same term for 2 weeks straight, there are only two things going on. Either they are making a profit or they are an idiot… and in our experience 90% of the time, when the advertisers has an ad showing for 14 days, the ad is profitable.

Disclaimer –> This strategy does not work for 100% of the markets out there. Occassionally you may come across a market that does not have a lot of words being advertised on with PPC. This does not mean the market can not be profitable, but you will want to make sure and snoop around at the competition and see how they are monetizing their sites. When there are a lot of PPC ads, that is usually a good sign that there are an abundance of affiliate opportunities available.

Lets Get Started…

Reminder that Affiliate Elite is not a free software but we are not going to lie to you and say that we do this with free tools just to please a few readers. This is the tool we use for this job, this is the tool we used for this cowpetition and this is the tool we recommend you use if you can afford it.

Step 1 –> Open Affiliate Elite and select the project type “Analyze Adwords Competition”

Step 2 –> Click on “Add Campaign”

Step 3 –> Enter a campaign title, leave Google selected and leave the “number of times to run each keyword” at 1 and then click OK

Step 4 –> Click on “Add Keywords” and paste in your list of keywords and click OK.

Step 5 –> Now click on the “Scheduler”

Select “Daily” and then “Next”

Select to “Run the Check” Daily and click next and then select when you want to run it and then click “Finish”

Step 6 –> Now click on “Options” and then change the “Use SE Courtesy” to “15 to 20″. This is important so that you do not get your IP blocked from Google. This process will run in the background and you want to have it have it run slow and steady to ensure you get all the results.

Click Here to Enlarge This Image

Step 7 –> Now click on “Run Now” and run the initial process.

Step 8 –> Now click on the close X in the top right corner

and since you have the scheduler running, Affiliate Elite will stay active in your task bar.

To reopen Affiliate Elite, just double click on the icon in the bottom corner of your screen.

Step 9 –> Now you are going to let Affiliate Elite run for 14 days straight and at the end of the 14 days you will know exactly what words are “Diamonds”

Remember the reason we use this strategy is because we want to try and eliminate as much of the guess work out of the market research as possible. By finding out what the competition is using and making money with in PPC, we can then take those results and transfer them to SEO. Next week we will walk you through what to do with the words from Affiliate Elite.

In the next post we are going to talk about setting up the blog and how we need to focus on both the human visitors and the search engines.

As always, we look forward to your questions and feedback about this post

Keyword Lesson Series:

1. Lesson 1 - Keyword Research: What are you Basing it On?
2. Lesson 2 - Keyword Research: the Cart before the Cow
3. Lesson 3 - Keyword research: What for may we ask?
4. Lesson 4 - Keyword Research: Show me the Money… Words that is…
5. Lesson 5 - Keyword Research: Diamonds in the Rough
6. Lesson 6 - Keyword Research: Start Up the Diamond Digger
7. Lesson 7 - Keyword Research: Shiny Diamonds Everywhere

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26 Moos » ~ ~ Random Post

In the previous COWpetition post called “Keyword Research Diamonds in the Rough” we walked through the initial stages of uncovering a profitable niche. There are now two directions we can go…

• 1. Dig for long tail terms first and then start on content
• 2. Start the content going and then come back for long tail terms

Now for the most part, we would usually start with option 1 and then once that was initiated we would move into the second task, but once again this particular time we are time restricted and need to get content started ASAP.

The first step was to identify the topics we would be covering. We have the initial words we know we need to focus on but the challenge now is to get good quality content as fast as possible. There are two options we have…

• 1. Outsource: Get others to write for us
• 2. Write it ourselves

As mentioned before, one of the criteria for selecting this niche was to have a market we know and because of that we are able to write a lot of the content and it is content we are passionate about and so it is easy to write. If we would have selected a niche that we had no interest in, then the process would have been painful. We would have needed to research and then figure out how to rewrite into our own words and YUCK… no thanks… not when in a rush!

So we listed all the topics and highlighted the ones we could write about. Then we grouped together the remaining content to be outsourced.

The options for outsourcing are many, there are sites like scriptlance.com, rentacoder.com, elance.com, mechanicaturk.com (an Amazon service) and more but personally we do not recommend starting with them. We go into detail on using them later but not now. The reason why is a lot of the writers here are trained on mass keyword writing and the content is usually very poor quality. This strategy is very effective for creating sites that are just AdSense focused or if you personally have time to edit and rewrite every article they send. With our time constraint this was NOT the best option for us.

Our Preferred Content Source –> Forums

Forums are in our opinion one of the absolute best research tools available online. You get instant access to real life conversations from those that are in the market. You can find what the problems are, what the current solutions are (if there are any) and who are the experts of choice. What is wonderful about forums is they are often occupied by people who are passionate about that topic and just love to talk about it.

Step 1 –> Create a job description and put it on your blog. On this page explain what the content would be for and how it must be created and also put the payment options and a email address.

This is very important because when you are getting back to potential writers you can direct them to this page instead of always retyping the information. An example of a job posting would be…

Start of Example –>

Need detailed reviews written for the following popular games for the specific gaming system…

PS3:
> Keyword Phrase 1 Here
> Keyword Phrase 2 Here

Wii:
> Keyword Phrase 1 Here
> Keyword Phrase 2 Here

PC:
> Keyword Phrase 1 Here
> Keyword Phrase 2 Here

Xbox 360:
> Keyword Phrase 1 Here
> Keyword Phrase 2 Here

Reviews must be…

• In English
• Not focused on making sure the keyword is repeated, instead just write about the topic
• Have correct spelling and grammar
• Be 400+ words in length minimum
• Contain non copyright protected screen shots from the game
• Reference good resources for getting cool cheats for the game
• Mention news worthy info about the game as well (if there are any)… like updates that are coming, new versions release dates and so on.
• Must be 100% unique and written by you and the copyright of the work will transfer to us
• Written from an experienced player of the game.

If you only have experience with certain games that are not on the above list and you want to write only about those individual games, contact us and we can work that out.

We are only interested in top quality content and authors are paid after content is reviewed.

Once paid the author transfers 100% ownership of the content to the owners of GamerzReviewz.com

If content is good there will be regular content from you needed.

This line is where you would put how much you would pay or other options that are available

If interested please contact us at email@yourdomain.com

<– End of Example

Step 2 –>Now you want to find and list the top forums in your market. To do this simply go to google.com and yahoo.com and search using…

“keyword phrase in quotes” forum

Step 3 –> Visit each these forums and bookmark the ones that have a lot of recent activity and topics that directly relate to your market. Make sure there are not only a lot of initial threads started but a lot of replies in the threads as well.

Step 4 –> With your list of forums, go back and find out who the top posters are and send them a private message. It is very important that you take your time here and craft up a very professional message to send them and initially do not mention anything about finances, just ask if they would be interested in writing for your blog.

You will find that occasionally you find someone who just loves to write and as long as they can have thier name and a link with the content, they will write for free. Now do not get all excited here… very few do this but a few of you will get lucky here

After the initial reply, most will ask for a price and this is the time when you give them a link to your job page.

IMPORTANT –> Make sure to SPELL CHECK… nothing spells unprofessional like poorly spelled communications.

Step 5 –> If you do not find writers from the above step or want more then it is now time to post job requests in the forums directly. Some of your requests will get deleted, so do not get worried about that. Some forums are very strict on what and what can not be posted in them. For your job request make sure to put a link to your job posting and if you are not allowed to post you can PM a regular contributor and ask if they would for a few bucks through PayPal (where there is a will, there is always a way :twisted:) .

Step 6 –> Post a job on Craiglist.com. Craigslist is an extremely popular classified ad site that get LOADS of traffic. Every major city in North America is covered and a few international ones as well. Each city has its own dedciated sub categories and a lot of them of 100% free to post jobs on.

WARNING–> They are VERY strict and VERY cautious about spammers, so do NOT be surprised if your first couple get deleted at first. Keep tweaking the ad and resubmitting it and look at what others have put in their ads and try to copy their formats. There are some cities, like New York and LA, that cost money to use but there are many like Toronto that are free and get a lot of traffic. The one thing to note here is that you must be willing to pay for the content when you advertise with cragislist, but you will find good writers that are passionate about the topic.

Test & Track… YES YOU NEED TO!

This is no time to get lazy and do not think that you are one of the lucky ones that do not need to do this. What you want to do is get a lot of different writers, writing for you at first and then filter out the best ones. If for example, you need 50 articles, then get 10 different authors to write a couple each and then filter out who wrote the best for your needs and then get them to write the rest. Out of the initial few you will get a few that are flaky and will be late, not good writers or do not ever finish.

By using this strategy you can get a good amount of content done in a very short time… and it is VERY good content!

Now that we have the initial content creation started our next step is to get the long tail research started (this is easy to do and get set up, but takes 2 weeks to get the results) and once this is done it is time to install the blog, fix up the theme and install the plugins. The next 2 posts will cover these topics.

As always, let us know your feedback on this.

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35 Moos » ~ ~ Random Post

If you have been involved in making money online for more than a couple of years, you will remember that as recent as 2 years ago all that was needed for market research was to find a program that could generate mass amounts of keywords for you. You really did not care too much about anything except getting the biggest list possible.

Today, that is a risky and ineffective way to go. The search engines are getting smarter all the time and their goal is to serve their customers the absolute best search results they can. In order to achieve this, they have hired incredibly talented people to help them design complex algorithms that allow them to automatically filter out good sites from bad sites.

One of the more recent technologies that have been getting a lot of attention is called Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI). What this technology (algorithm) does is it tries to imitate the thinking process of a human visitor to do its best to determine if the results of their query are relevant to what the person would be searching for. So when looking at a web page, it would look at the content from a perspective of how a human conversation would take place.

The easiest way to understand it is to think of an example. If you are sitting in your buddy’s garage looking at his new car, do you just say:

“Wow, I love red cars. That is a nice red car; I would love to go for a ride in your red car. How much did your red car cost?”

No! Of course not, because that is not natural. Instead the conversation would probably go more like:

“Wow, I love the color red on vehicles. That is a really nice set of wheels; I would love to go for a ride. How much did your car cost?

See how the keyword “red cars” is not even used? That is because most conversations are not so direct or specific. The human language relies on a lot of assumptions and generalities. When you read the second phrase, you understand that there is a red car but you are not beat over the head with the keyword phrase itself.

Now if that was a 500 word article, I am sure you could actually fit the word “red cars” in there, but as the above example shows, you would use other terms as well. Those other terms are terms that are commonly used with the primary term or topic of the conversation, which means they are related.

Another example would be a forum conversation. If you spend any time in forums you will know that when a topic is started, it is not uncommon for it to head in an entirely different (although related) direction. So for example, a topic on “Scuba Diving Goggles” may be started and after a couple posts some one might comment about how they got this great set of diving goggles at a store when they were diving in Fiji. Another person would then refer to that and talk about an experience they had scuba diving in Fiji and some other locations they have visited. Another person might then relate to another location the previous person referenced and how they had a great scuba diving instructor there who recommended a certain type of goggles.

Now, the above example is just that, an example, but this is very much the same as how human conversation is. The mistake many niche bloggers make is they get content that is too focused on a specific keyword and only that keyword. What ends up happening is the content is useless from an end-user standpoint. This strategy has had its time and place, but in the last year alone, many improvements have occurred (especially in Google with LSI) and this strategy is becoming less and less effective.

Content needs to be focused on themes and created like a conversation. You need to not focus in on one single word, but instead focus on the theme for the topic and what conversations occur around that theme. With the use of LSI, Google is better able to determine the relevance of a website by quickly comparing its content to that of existing websites that Google considers trustworthy. So if your web page does not contain the verbiage that is frequently associated with the subject matter of related sites, then the new website will not be considered to be part of that theme or market, which is not good from a long term rankings perspective.

So when you start your market research you need to keep this in mind. We are not looking for those magic individual keywords, we are not doing keyword research but we are doing is Market Research. This will become very clear as we move on.

Where to Start? How About Selecting a Niche?

As the saying goes, the first step is always the hardest. This is very true for individuals starting out for the first time with market research. We can hear the cries now:

“Where Do We Begin?”

The question you first need to ask is what type of business are you creating?

1. Do you want to create a blog that is something you will personally author and become a known name for?
2. Do you want to create lots of small niche specific affiliate focused blogs?
3. Do you want an online store front for your current off line business?
4. Are you creating blogs to turn around and sell?
5. And the list goes on and on

You see, if you can not answer the question of “what you want to do”, then you really can not move to the next step effectively.

Question for You –> What type of business are you creating?

John Cow Answer –> For this contest we are creating a blog that we want to turn around and sell in 30 days. This means we want a market that has a potential for lots of traffic, has lots of passionate people, is already a proven market (we do not have time to test new markets), we know where to find contacts (because we know the market) and is something we are familiar with so we can ensure that the content is good for the time frame we have.

IMPORTANT –> Do not worry about boxing your self in to one type of business. For example, you might want to start a blog on a specific market that you want to be personally known as an authority for. This does not mean you can not later create small niche sites that promote affiliate products, but what it does mean is that can not be your main focus right now. You want to distinguish the two because it influences the decisions in the next step.

We Know the Business… Now What?

As you can see from our breakdown of reasoning, there are limitations to the type of market we can select because of the criteria for our business. We would not want to pick an emerging health niche that we have no interest in or knowledge about because the research and testing would be too time consuming. For us this next step was to brain storm all the markets we…

1. Already know there are markets in
2. We have knowledge about
3. We know how to find contacts in
4. We see similar “market related” sites selling at sitepoint.

The last 2 points are the most important in our opinion. First of all by us understanding the market, we know exactly where the people are that are influencial in this industry. Not that this can not be researched and found but we are very limited on time with this challenge and to create the absolutely best results we need to purely stick to what works… very little room for exploratory research. The second point was critical because we want to know that these types of sites are actually selling… which really is the end result we are after.

So we brainstormed all the possible markets and 4 immediately came up…

• Video Gaming
• Mountain Biking
• Karate / MMA
• Online Business

These are four markets we are knowledgeable in and are some what passionate about. So we now broke down this list and gave points to the specific ones that best met our criteria and we came up with the selection being “Video Gaming”

This market has lots of passionate people, we are knowledgeable about, know where contacts are easily found and appears to have related sites selling (or so it appears).

STOP –> You may have chosen to start with building a different business model such as niche specific blogs that are purely for promoting affiliate products and generating Adsense revenue. If that is you then you need to check out the “Market Research” series that we started a couple weeks back.

So Now We Have Our Market — What’s Next?

Now we need to map out our plan and time frame. We know the goal, we talked about that in the previous lesson, but now we need to map out how we are going to reach that goal in the needed time frame.

This is where we absolutely LOVE dry erase boards. Since starting full time online we have never been without a dry erase board and the reason is they are perfect for standing up and putting in front of you what you need to accomplish.

Obviously you do not need to go out and buy one… but it is what we use and so we are telling you about it

The first step is to list all the tasks that need to have done and we designate them into short term (Urgent Need), long term (Non Urgent but Important) and “Maybe” tasks:

Urgent Tasks: (Need to be done first above everything else)

• Decide on specific niche in the “Video Gaming” market to target
• Initial content decided on using LSI principals
• Domain set up with the blog installed
• Design and graphics started
• “Link Bait” Content ideas agreed upon
• List of sites to contact for joint ventures
• Plugins installed and set up
• Gmail account created
• Feedburner and aweber account set up
• Get legal documents in place (privacy and so on)

Non Urgent but Important Tasks:

• Niche specific content for blog and promotions research (will explain difference from initial needed content tomorrow) using LSI principals
• Social site accounts set up
• Videos planned for promotions
• Start Contacting potential JV partners
• Start viral marketing engine
• Maintenance plan

Maybe Tasks (these are ideas that came up that could potentially be scope creep and so we will look at as time allows). We are not posting any of these here, but if we have time to implement them we will share them. Some are ideas we have not seen tried before and since this is public to all.. sorry not sharing them yet.

The above is just a general summary of the tasks that are needed to accomplish our goal, yours very well may be the same. One thing to note is that because our end goal is to sell this, we have to keep this in mind for all services and accounts we create, they will need to be made available with the purchase.

Task For You –> Create a list of all the tasks you know need to get done and put them into three categories

• Urgent & Important
• Non Urgent and Important
• Maybe

Tomorrow we will walk you through each of the above tasks that we listed and how they were broken down and assigned.

Start of Cow Rant –> Garry Conn quit crying that we have not mentioned our niche yet… why have you not publicly mentioned yours yet? We have everything out in the public for everyone to see. Do you really think we give a care what market you are picking, that would only slow us down. Instead of complaining, do yourself a favor and actually read the training we are providing and maybe you can actually stand a chance…. awww who are we kidding, you are going to get killed here. <– End of Cow Rant

As always, please provide feedback on this post. We are exposing all to you readers here and we hope you appreciate it because we sure appreciate you all!

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54 Moos » ~ ~ Random Post

“Give a person a fish; you have fed them for today. Teach a person to fish; and you have fed them for a lifetime.”

Our desire is to have you succeed by following our system. That means that we teach you exactly what you have to do and show you the tools we use to get the job done. What we cannot and will not do however, is the work for you. Creating a successful business online is no different than creating a traditional brick and mortar business… It takes perseverance, money, time and most of all, hard work and commitment from you.

What we are going to show you over the next few weeks is not about “Get Rich Quick” schemes. Instead, we stand strong to the concept that you do it right from the beginning and your rewards will be for the long term. You see, most get rich quick systems are based off of ways to “Cheat” the system. We on the other hand, believe in working with the system to achieve incredible results.

To begin, ask yourself a few questions to better understand the reasons for running a business online:

#1 Why Are You Doing This?

Before you can start into any part of your new business, you need to ask yourself this one extremely important question:

Why are YOU doing this?

You need to stop right now from wanting to rush into just building a blog. Take a step back for a moment to try and understand the big picture. You have probably heard the saying:

“You can not see the forest for the trees.”

What that means is sometimes you can get so caught up in little details that you miss out on the entire big picture. If you want to truly know where you are going then the best bet is to step back, look at the entire picture and then map out what you want. So asking yourself “Why you are doing this” is one of the first steps in being able to truly understand where it is you want to go.

Some examples of “Why” might be:

• to help a current business expand
• to make some extra cash on the side
• to be able to quit your job and work for yourself
• just for fun
• you fill in the blank here

Question to You –> Now it is your turn. What is the number one reason you are doing this?

JohnCow’s Why –> For us the answer to this question is to Prove Market Authority. We want to prove to our readers that we know what we are talking about, it is not about winning, it is about social proof. After 30 days we want the posts and the blog that we built to speak for themselves.

#2. What do You want to Accomplish? What is Your Goal?

You may think this is the same as the first question, but it really is not. Why you are doing something is not the same as what you want to accomplish by doing it. This question takes the first one to a deeper level because it makes you look at it as more than a far off dream but as an attainable goal.

If your answer is “to make some extra cash”, then you probably have a set amount of cash you want to make. Perhaps it is to help pay off a debt or to afford a new vehicle. Whatever the reason, now is the time to figure that out.

Do not shrug this off! It is so incredibly important and so often overlooked. We guarantee you the people that are very successful online all have answered this question. This comes down to work ethic, you need to take the time to build your solid foundation, and then once that is established, everything else will fall into place.

So How Do You Set a Goal?

Let’s say you make a $40,000 a year salary and want to be able to quit that job to work full time online. The first thing you will need to do then is understand exactly how much you need to live on and then double that (this is the formula we used when we started).

So for our example if you make $40,000 but feel you could live on $35,000 then that would be $70,000. Now that you have a goal of $70,000 as a yearly income, the reason you double it is because you will have to pay taxes, health insurance, employees (even if just outsourcing) and so on. 50% is generous but the last thing you want to do here is short change yourself.

Next you need to figure out exactly how much money that is per day. So take $70,000 and divide it by 365 which equals approximately $192 a day.

So now you need to ask yourself, how are you going to do that? Break that value down to smaller goals. So for example, what it might look like for you is:

• $100 - Affiliate income
• $70 - Adsense / Yahoo Pub / Chitika / Pepperjam
• $30 - Advertising on blog

(this is just an example)

Now it is time to pick a time frame that you are going to achieve that goal. You want to be aggressive here, but you also need to be realistic. If you have never built a blog in your life and to say you are going to achieve that goal in 30 days, it is not going to happen.

A realistic example might be to create a time frame such as:

• 1 Months - Earning enough to pay for itself
• 3 Months - Earning $1000 per month
• 6 Months - Earning $3000 per month
• 1 Year - Earning $5800 per month (Your 1-Year goal)

Once you have your first goal accomplished, then focus on your second and third. Once that final goal is reached make another one and this time go bigger!

Make sure you do not create for yourself an unrealistic goal either! We agree full and well with the concept of aiming high, but one of the biggest reasons many people get discouraged with their progress is they start too high. If you are just starting out, set a goal to what you can live on and then once you achieve that you can then focus more time by being able to do this full-time and you can start to reach for the BIG goals.

If you already have a goal, then congratulations! You are already ahead of the majority.

Something important to note is that you need to stick to your plan and not focus on what every other marketer is telling you. Once you have a plan in place and start to see what is working for you, then simply repeat the process. If a new product or strategy comes out and looks good then figure out how to implement it into your current strategy. If it does not fit then leave it alone! If it does fit and makes something easier to do then great! Keep it and keep moving forward!

This is so often the spot that people get hung up on. They have a plan but then Mr. Marketer comes along and says to do it this way instead, so we stop what we are doing and start over again, or even worse, do nothing while we analyze the situation and waste time and money.

Get back to the basics, start with a goal and create yourself a firm foundation first!

Once you have this goal, you will want to print it out and place it somewhere prominent that you will be able to see everyday that you are at your work station. Every morning before you get started, focus on that goal and what you are going to do today to get close to achieving it.

Question to You –> What is your 1month, 3 month, 6 month and 1 year Goal?

John Cow’s Goal –> For us the answer to this question is focused only on a short term goal that in 30 days (because of the cowpetition time line) to have created a blog that when put on the market at sitepoint.com is sold as a complete “Business” solution for the buyer.

#3. Make a Commitment

Now for the hard part. We talked about this in the previous lesson but in our opinion it needs to be repeated again. Writing out why you are doing this and what you want to accomplish is easy. Anyone can take a few minutes and write down a bunch of simple words. What is going to make the difference from making these just a bunch of words to making them an actual goal is that you need to make a commitment to what you wrote down.

As we have said a couple times before, this is going to take hard work on your part and that means that you are going to need to commit time to this every day.

How much time?

That depends on how fast you want to succeed, but we recommend that you spend at least 2 hours a day on this for at least the next 6 months if you want to see any measurable results. So in order to do that you are going to have to clear your schedule to allow for 2 hours a day to be spent on this.

That might mean that you have to drop a favorite pastime for awhile or stop watching a favorite television show. Maybe it means that you will have to stay up a little later every night. Whatever it is, you need to decide now and make a commitment that you are going to dedicate that time to growing your business.

The best way to do this is to map out your week ahead of time. This is one of the reasons we love the Franklin Covey day planner systems, because they are based around the principal of putting first things first. That means you need to look at your schedule and plan ahead of time when you are going to accomplish your important tasks.

By looking at your week, you will start to see a lot of opportunities that you could be doing something more productive. Once you identify your areas, you can then plan those times for working on your business.

Get a timer!

One of the absolute best things we have ever got ourselves to help improve our time management was an electronic egg timer from Wal-Mart. What you can do is if you know you can work one hour in the morning before work and one hour in the evening when you are usually watching TV, then you set the timer for 1 hour and put it in front of you. Once you press start on the timer then all distractions are off. That means you shut your door, unplug the phone, put in ear plugs (or listen to music if it helps) and do not randomly surf the web! Instead, commit yourself to being effective for that time. If you are having a hard time finding time in your schedule for these 2 hours, the last thing you want to do is waste them.

Important Reminder - “Work Ethic”

You see the internet and computers are supposed to make our lives simpler. We can process difficult calculations in milliseconds, create dynamic presentation, find information on just about anything by simply typing in a couple of search terms or talk with people around the world as if they were in the room next door. The problem with this is people often assume that since it makes all these things so much faster and simpler then it should be able to do the same for making money. There has got to be someone out there that has made some program that you simply push a little red button and “POOF” in mere seconds you are generating income.

The answer to that is a resounding.. NO!

Yes, there are great programs and material out there, but none of them, I mean absolutely none of them, are a big red button that allows you to sit back and do nothing.

We are sure you have heard of the 80/20 rule. This rule is incredibly universal in its scope because so many things fall into this. For the MMO market I would dare say it is more of a 90 /10 rule but for the sake of argument we will use the 80 / 20.

What this means is that 80% of those that buy any software or ebook, will never actually use it to its full potential. That means that 8 out of 10 people will either never even open the software or ebook or they open it up and read through it but give up because it looks like it takes too much work.

Then you have the 20%. This is the small group of people that actually are making a living online, they are the people that realize revenue is only generated through hard work, that no software or ebook is the end all be all of solutions and they actually read through everything and use the solutions how they were designed.

Our hope is by the end of this contest to have made you one of the 20% NOT one of the 80%!

Last but not least - Get Rest

Yes, it takes work, yes you are going to have to be a little busier than usual to get your business off the ground but the one thing your body and mind need is rest. We highly recommend that you take off one day a week from all work activity. That does not mean you cannot do work around the house or go fishing, but what it does mean is you completely remove yourself from your job.

This day should be dedicated to getting rest for your body (sleep in and or take an afternoon nap), do what you love (go for a walk, play with your kids outside or go fishing) and just enjoy yourself! More often than not, entrepreneurs who are starting out work themselves into a medication of some sort. They get no rest, no time to unwind and their body starts to react. Stress, depression, obesity are just some of the end results!

Life is your most precious gift, so enjoy it!

In tomorrows post we will walk through the market we selected, why we selected and how we organize our market research for immediate and long term needs.

Talk to you then!

PS - Yes we know by posting this stuff we are helping our cowpetition competitor… but thats fine… hopefully they will learn a few things they can teach to others as well

Oh and PLEASE Let us know your thoughts on this post please… our hoofs are all cramping up from typing so much!

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