Category Archives: Housekeeping

Today, instead of writing a blog post I drafted an ambitious plan to grow the audience of this blog, continue to produce quality content, and convert visitors to more business. Business being more clients and selling products.

It’s not too fancy. It will require “stickiness” and work. But both of those things make me feel better about changing my strategy.

I don’t want to reveal my entire strategy now. But the blog should look different in the near future… and you should still be getting 2-3 “authority” posts per month.

Wish me luck. And of course, this counts as a blog post for today. But tomorrow I will be eerily silent.

Cheers!
Stephen

I’m exhausted from a long week. Still have a lot to complete this month. I haven’t finished my product that I promised Ryan Healy and I still haven’t completed the March Ready Spaghetti Challenge. And that’s all on top of my copywriting projects.

Crunch time! But later… because now it’s time for happy hour. Enjoy your weekend.

Blog Post To Start Your Weekend
Jason Lesiter posted 5 Questions With Dean Hunt. The answer to question #5 stuck out to me.

I mentioned the other day that even though I was happy I’d posted to this blog every business day for 5 weeks straight and am still going strong… I might switch to another strategy. Answer #5 explains why. I feel like I need to lay down some more ground work before I can properly leverage daily blog posts.

From My Life
Last night for St. Patrick’s Day my girlfriend gave me a scotch ale from the “Pelican Brewery” on the Oregon coast. My sister got married there and it was perfect! The beer was good too, look out for it if you enjoy a good beer.

Song To Start Your Weekend
This weekend in particular, I need a song to start my weekend! I gave my best this week!

If I accomplish everything I want to this month… it will be EPIC. You can imagine that I’m super busy, so let’s get straight to this week’s happy hour. Here we go!

Great TV Show
Addicted To Hardcore Pawn: Ben Settle recently revealed he hones his copywriting chops by watching negotiations on the TV show, Hardcore Pawn.

I checked it out and it’s pretty entertaining, my girlfriend even came around when I described it as “shopping.” (See, I was using negotiation/copywriting tactics on her.)

Nailed-It Blog Post
Michelle Macphearson is on my shortlist of blogs in my RSS reader. Here’s another telling productivity post that demonstrates why: Too Busy Shipping To Care.

From My Life:
Meeting up with my sisters and their spouses tonight to play Ticket To Ride. If you want to make a leap from lame games like Monopoly and Sorry to the “German” style boardgames that win awards, this is supposed to be a great first game to do it. I wouldn’t know, however, since tonight will be my first time playing it. Cheers!

Song To Start Your Weekend
This was an easy choice

Scientists have proven the faster something moves the slower time goes by relative to that object. They did this by putting one atomic clock on an airplane and one on the ground. After flying the atomic clock around for a few hours, it proved to be a fraction of a second behind the atomic clock that stayed on earth.

When things move faster, time slows down.

But I could have told them that. The older I get, the slower I move and the faster time seems to go by.

This week flew by, here’s your Friday happy hour!

Nailed-It Blog Post
Found an old blog post this week that stuck out to me. Primarily because the title of the post describes productivity in a nutshell. The blog post was titled Momentum and written by Michelle Macphearson.

Nailed-It Blog Post
This fun post from “The Art Of Manliness” claims to reveal how to organize a speech or text to ensure maximum persuasion. Good stuff.

Nailed-It Blog Post
And this is more on the recent news hitting the SEO circuit – the manual penalties of JC Penny and Overstock. This time Grizzly gives more reason to believe you shouldn’t worry about it.

From My Life
I’m just about done reading End The Fed, a book by Ron Paul about the United States’ monetary system. If you’ve never looked in to the fed before, this is a good place to start. It’s obviously biased towards the Austrian economics position, but you may find it hard to argue.

My girlfriend is a natural saver. When I explained to her that the federal reserve robs her of cash by setting artificially low interest rates, she finally started to understand why paying attention to government matters.

And when I told her a sales tax would allow her to save money tax free as opposed to an income tax… well, let’s just say this persuasive libertarian is making some intellectual ground with her.

Song To Start Your Weekend
Thanks to Ryan Healy for choosing this week’s song.

It’s been an interesting week. Freezing weather, snow days, a car that won’t start. (I’m writing this in the car as I wait for jumper cables.)

I joined Ryan Healy’s challenge to create a product per month starting in March… although I’m still not sure I can commit to a product every month, I’m going to at least give it a shot.

Next week we start the Ready Spaghetti SEO challenge, so I hope everyone’s ready. And hopefully we’ll also have a guest post from Ryan McGrath.

With that, here’s your happy hour and enjoy the weekend!

Nailed It Blog Post
Keith Baxter weighed in on .edu links after Overstock was just manually hit with a severe penalty in the search engines. Apparently their strategy was to get universities to link to their products by offering discounts, and Google found out about it. Keith gives a logical defense of continued use of .edu links.

Nailed It Blog Post
Jason Leister wrote an interesting, maybe even inspiring, post on “work” vs “Work.” It spoke to me, tell me what you think!

From My Life

I got a testimonial this week from a copy critique that made my day…

“wow wOW WOW! Last year I paid $1000 to one person, who will go unnamed, for a critique of my site and got 1/10 of the insight you delivered.”

Song To Start Your Weekend

If you haven’t seen Shaheen on Britain’s Got Talent, you’re missing out. It’s a couple years old, but it’s great. Check it out.

Is it the weekend already? Yikes. Time is flying by and things are moving so fast – we’ve got 5 people including me who’ve decided to try the Ready Spaghetti March Challenge.

And Ryan Mcgrath has agreed to trade guest blog posts with me. Looking forward to it.

Here’s hoping more people will join them next week. Cheers! It’s time for happy hour.

Awesome Resource
Keith Baxter has an awesome free resource for finding valuable sites to get links from, namely .gov and .edu sites. An email is required, but this EDU Link Finder is a great tool.

Nailed-It Blog Post
Ryan Healy just wrote a blog post about Ubermedia, creator of Tweetdeck, having an app suspended. Ryan makes a great point about the unacceptable risk of building a business on someone elses platform.

And if you read in the comments, we expand the conversation to diversifying a business to avoid risk. Diversity is key in business.

Check it out: A Twitter Business Is A Bad Idea

From My Life
For Valentines Day I cooked a Chicken Fettuccine Alfredo using this recipe for sauce. Tasted great! My girlfriend told me she would order it at a restaurant – and believe me, from her that’s a compliment.

You should try it: Better Than Olive Garden Alfredo Sauce.

Song To Start Your Weekend

I love The Strokes. Julian’s solo album was fantastic. And I look forward to hearing the rest of their newest album (yet to be released). Here’s the first single.

I’m looking for other bloggers interested in trading guest blog posts. Meaning for one day I’ll write a blog post for your blog, and you write one for mine.

Interested? Leave a comment letting me know.

And a happy Friday to you too. I woke up this morning to a package from an unknown sender. Turns out it was a free laptop from Google! I’ll take it.

Apparently I was accepted in to their pilot program where I will be reporting bugs as I find them with the laptop and it’s OS. Sounds good to me. Happy day.

Now on to my contest.

Thanks to everyone who has entered the contest so far. We have 12 comments and need 8 more. If you haven’t already tweeted about the contest, please tweet something like Ryan Healy did:

Win SecretSalesWeapon.com free. Leave a comment to enter. Need 20 comments – only 12 so far. http://bit.ly/go5oQL

And don’t be afraid to @mention someone you know personally who could benefit from the domain.

OK, here we go. Here’s your happy hour!

“Nailed-It” Blog Post:
Ian Daniel Stewart wrote a blog post stressing advice that never gets old. I was just reminded of it’s brilliance yesterday when working on a new writing project (an ebook).

Ian is the guy who helped me create this theme indirectly through his wordpress tutorial.

“Nailed-It” Blog Post:
If you’ve ever taken Gary Halbert’s advice and read his list of books, twice, taking notes the second time… then you remember that he also had a set of ads you should get your hands on and read. Well, I admit, I skipped this step when I couldn’t find them all.

Well apparently THE Ryan McGrath has found them all. And he made a blog post linking to them all. Thank you RYAN.

From My Life:
What is there to say other than I got a free laptop!? Actually I’m excited about something else. If you follow me on twitter you may have seen me linking to Tyler Fortier’s new album, “.​.​.​And They Rode Like Wildfire Snaking Through The Hills ‘Neath The Scarlet Sun.”

Tyler went to my high school a couple years behind me and has apparently gone on to make awesome music. Love this concept album that consists of songs from characters in the wild west. It’s unique and awesome.

He’s also got some other great music at his Myspace Page.

Song To Start Your Weekend
Check out October 26th, 1881 from Tyler’s concept album above or She Ain’t Your Girl at his Myspace page. They’re great.

Thankful for this weekend. Got lots done and more to do. I should probably listen to the Dog Days Are Over from last week’s happy hour, but we’ve got to move on.

Here we go, here’s your happy hour.

“Nailed-It” Blog Post:
Ryan Healy was busting out blog posts this week like Lindsay Lohan on stimulants… you know, like coffee.

One in particular describes a smart way to create and launch products effectively: How To Create And Launch Products

And the other is a reminder to all copywriters who never forget to cater to skimmers: don’t forget to cater to non-skimmers! Eugene Schwartz – “It Is The Copywriter’s Job To…”

From My Life:

Just watched Inception this weekend. It was awesome! Probably not in my top 5 though, so I thought I’d share my favs.

1. The Departed
2. Jaws
3. Signs
4. The Shawshank Redemption
5. Rocky

I used to collect movies. Until I realized Netflix could just be my collection. All my movies are now being stored in a warehouse and guarded by security. I’m kind of a big deal

Song To Start Your Weekend:
Ever heard of this guy. Not new by any means, but my dad just introduced me to him. Here’s trouble by Ray Lamontagne, you may recognize the song

Have a great weekend!