Oct 1

Welcome back!

Ms Internet Marketing BlogI just received this email from my sister, Nicola Cairncross, as I’m on her mailing list for The Money Gym (of course!)

I feel I have to share it here as I’ve followed the link and had a look at Karen’s blog and was totally inspired by it.  I’ve also sat in many internet marketing ‘free’ seminars – given up my time and avoided being lured into buying (mainly as I’m broke!) but always come away with something of value.

Karen, however, has come away and is taking action – I would say, MASSIVE action.  Read about it in Nicola’s email here:

***************************

01 October 2009

Dear Sarah

Can I tell you Karen’s story?

When talking to people who want to get started in Internet Marketing, there are two fundamental problems that come over:

1.  I don’t know where to start, or the right thing to do first

2.  I’m overwhelmed, too much info, too much to do, too far to go, so can’t even get started

So I’m always on the lookout for tools, tips and even tricks that might help get people moving. Because once moving, they get the most important thing working for them, and that’s momentum.

Once you get some momentum working with you, you can improve things on the move, work out what’s working and what’s not, change things, test things, and keep it all going.

I was lucky enough to be sent this powerful value statement that really resonated with me. It came from the rather wonderful Gratitude Log website that I’m using now as part of my Social Networking activities (connects with your Twitter account).

** Aim for a 1% improvement every single day **

That’s it!  I think all of us could agree that a 1% improvement is something we are capable of.

Well, the power of this is that if you do this every single day, then you will completely transform yourself and your life in less than 1 year.

In fact, if you will be 3,700 times better by the end of this year.  This is also why Einstein used to say that “the power of compounding is one of the most powerful forces in the world.”

Now, please don’t take this example literally.  Why?

Because a 3,700 % improvement is impossible!  If I could do that, perhaps I could fly.  :-)

The key idea that I am trying to communicate is this:

* Aim to be better today than you were yesterday

QUOTE ENDS

But one thing’s for sure.  If you don’t start, you won’t get any momentum going.

I always say to our clients, please just do one thing, one thing each day to move your business forward.

So I want to share with you the story of inspirational story of Karen, someone who was on Mark Anastasi’s Speed Cash Workshop at the weekend.

She’s very, very young.  She knows nothing about the internet.

But she sat in the audience just this last weekend gone and now she’s taking action, just one step, one day at a time.  Three days in, she’s got a blog, a YouTube channel, a Twitter account and she’s only bloomin’ doing it!

(I tell you, I wish I could bottle what Karen’s got and give it to some of our Money Gym members, still procrastinating about domain names and which blog platform to use months later!)

Watch her three short videos and get inspired.  Here s the first one. Read the rest of this entry »


bookmark Getting started in Internet Marketing   be a fly on Karens wall
Oct 1

I’ve just read with interest an article by Sheamus from Twittercism (picked up via Twitter) about mass unfollowing – you can read the article at http://ow.ly/s623

Basically he talks about the phenomena of people with a HUGE number of Twitter followers, coming to their senses and un-following people they’ve subscribed to merely as a way of building up their own fans.  A trick people have used and one I’ve never really subscribed to.

I mean, WHY bother?  These people must be completely dumb if they think you really are following them back… and if they are following several hundred or even thousands, they are obviously not reading what you’ve got to say anyway.

I only ever follow people I’m interested in hearing from.  I don’t expect them to follow me back.. unless they are my sister of course *grin* and that way, with the help of the very handy Seesmic desktop application, I can stay on top of what interests me and share it with people who are interested in hearing about it.  And well, if they’re not, they can always unfollow me – I’m not going to die in a ditch about it.

Because my interests are varied, I have created separate Twitter accounts so people can choose what they want to hear about from me.  I have my general one:  @sarahcairncross which shows ALL my tweets and includes some personal stuff occasionally.  Then there is my @rawrrrlife for my RawRRR.com blog about eating more raw food and generally getting ‘out there’ more.  My @classicminiclub which is not used much at the moment as it is another of my good ideas which will get attention at a later date… but will revolve around classic mini cars. And last but not least, @virtualhammock to support this blog which is based around my interest in the internet, social media marketing and making money online (hopefully sooner than later).

The people I follow on each of those is very tightly niched to each specific interest so I’m not overwhelmed and can choose to focus on one thing at a time.. this in theory will stop me getting distracted but I’ve still got to work on this :P

So if you’re just starting out on Twitter, my advice to you is to build up your following by using the application regularly and tweeting stuff that is relevant, fun and informative with the odd random curve ball in there. Add links in your email signatures, on your blogs, websites, other social media apps and stick with it.  A good guideline is to ask yourself, ‘would I be interested in reading this?’ and remember, your @ replies appear in your timeline too – so use direct messaging if it will annoy your readers or cause you to blush *grin*


bookmark Twitter   who to follow
Mar 19

Canon Digital IXUS CameraI’ve been working online for a while now, off and on, since 2000 when I taught myself html from a book and started a website creation business. I did dabble with posting video on my website way back in about 2003 using my simple little webcam but as I’m so self critical, and of course didn’t realise how ahead of my time I was, I didn’t do more of it.

Well of course, nowadays every internet marketing bod on the planet is waxing lyrical about using video as a more dynamic method of capturing your visitor’s eye, imagination and if you’re offering something half decent, their cash too.

And of course, as someone who gets suckered into reading a whole load of fantastic – and errrm not so great – sales letters/pages I have to agree with it. It’s like the Big Brother thing – people love having a sneak peak at the person behind the screen and it DOESN’T MATTER if they are sitting there being critical of your big nose or tragic hairstyle that day, they are still sitting there engaging with you.

So I’ve finally bitten the bullet and ordered a great webcam and a digital camera – my friend Flugel will fall off his chair at hearing that as I’ve been procrastinating about it for ummm a year or more. My sister Nicola is constantly frustrated at me for taking NO action as I start researching things and either take forever or give up as there’s just too much choice.

So how did I overcome my complete overwhelm at looking for ‘the right one’ for the job?

Read the rest of this entry »


bookmark What Tools Do I Need For My Internet Business?
Mar 18

Probably like you, I get snowed under with email and this week I am slowly going through unsubscribing myself from all the ‘really useful’ stuff I have coming in but NEVER EVER get round to reading!

I’m being ruthless and to be honest, it’s not been THAT hard to do.  One of the few people I’ve decided to continue to follow is Yaro Starak, an awesome blogger who resides in Australia when he is not travelling around the world doing whatever he fancies.

Why Yaro?  Well he is doing what I want to do – living his dream lifestyle and profitably and it hasn’t taken him an eternity to get there which gives me hope that if I could just stay focussed and stop procrastinating I too can get there.

The other biggy of course, is that he DELIVERS VALUE.  He shares what he learns, his viewpoints and has made himself an expert in his chosen field.  He is INTERESTING to read, talks in simple, plain English and is not feeling so scarce that he can’t divulge his opinions, tools and ’secrets’.

Looking through his site, this paragraph from the following article he wrote, really struck home to me:

“Bear in mind I’m saying this from the mindset of running a business of a certain size and living a certain kind of lifestyle. I’m not looking to take on full time employees, get an office and grow to the point where I’m committed to certain things simply because the size of the machine has become more than I can handle.”

And that’s the thing – I just have to get clear on what my ideal lifestyle IS, what it looks like, how my days will be structured and what kind of income it will take to cover that without working my guts out .. ie. become financially free.. and then some.

There are of course a mass of other little gems packed in it too and I hope something kicks you up the bum too x

How To Work Less and Earn More By Leveraging The Synergy Between People And Technology by Yaro Starak

Several years ago when I was…

Read the rest of this entry »


bookmark Working Less and Earning More   Is It Achievable?
Mar 16

Well then you have gotta read this brilliant post on MarketersBoard.com giving useful resources and insights into getting hold of great copy or inspiration for your own sales letter, blog, website etc.  Better than stabbing yourself in the eye rather than writing something from scratch yourself *lol*

Websites That Write Your Salesletter For You?  by Robert Plank

ph03414i 150x150 Websites That Write Your Salesletter For You?When you sell anything on the internet… whether you do it using e-mail marketing, forum marketing, blog posting… if you sell e-books, physical products, e-classes, even a newsletter… the best way to sell anything is using direct response sales copy.

But not all of us can be world-class copywriters like Michel Fortin. I consider myself a pretty sloppy copywriter, and althought I can whip up a headline, quick story, bullet point list of benefits, testmonials, feature list, guarantee and a call-to-action… I will never be a great copywriter.  Gary Halbert can’t hold my attention for longer than a few minutes, I’ve never read Scientific Advertising, so how do I scrape by writing average sales copy?

The answer is: practice and resources. I’ve written enough sales letters that I know what my audience wants and how I can present it to them to maximize sales.  I rarely spend more than a couple of hours writing even 5 or 10 page sales letters, and some have converted as high as 19 percent for me.

Even if you don’t have the skill or the practice, you can still hit the following sites to produce an average sales letter, enough for a copywriter to rewrite it or critique it.

Site #1: Digg.com
As far as I’m concerned, Digg is THE best place to find…

Read the rest of this entry »


bookmark Feeling pain at the mere THOUGHT of writing a sales letter?
Nov 25
Twitter Updates for 2008-11-25
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Nov 11
Twitter Updates for 2008-11-11
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Twitter Updates for 2008-11-10
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Twitter Updates for 2008-11-07
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Nov 3
CSS Tables and IE8
icon1 Sarah Cairncross | icon2 Web Development | icon4 11 3rd, 2008| icon3No Comments »

I’m a bit of a geek at heart having taught myself how to write html to create web pages back in 1999 from a great book by Elizabeth Castro. In it Elizabeth talked a bit about using CSS (cascading style sheets) to easily manage a websites look, without having to trawl through pages of html to code if you want to change a colour or font. As soon as I realised this, I was so excited and used them in every site I created.

However, it was still the norm to use html tables to control the layout of the content of the page but I was very good and made sure I didn’t nest tables within tables within tables as it slows the download of the web page and completely screws up things for people trying to view things with special readers if they have impaired vision, for example.

Well, although I’ve stopped writing my own code I still like to see what the geeks talk about and subscribe to newsletters from Sitepoint. In the one I received today, they included a YouTube video discussing their latest book about using CSS tables, which will be compatible with Internet Explorer 8 (IE8).

Personally I agree with them that this is something that developers should be paying attention to – what do you think?


bookmark CSS Tables and IE8

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