I am grateful for all of those who so positively commented on my Are We Having Fun Yet blog. It was evident that posting other blog posts that I found useful was also helpful to others. How wonderful! So I decided to post a Weekly Wrap-Up blog every weekend sharing blogs that I found over the past week that were fun, helpful or inspiring.

Inspiration
I think we all need inspiration to keep us going when we are feeling down or lost and even when we are feeling like all is going well. A pick-me-up can do wonders to propel us forward. In Rod MacBeth’s blog post The Mayonnaise Jar and Two Cups of Coffee, he shares a wonderful story about setting priorities and remembering what is most important in your life.

Fabulous Tools/Resources
This week I came across two blogs that shared tools that I found helpful. The first is from Adam Sicinski who posted an amazing mindmap and blog post about Twitter called How to Twitter: A Beginner’s Guide. It is so complete it could have easily been an ebook. For those of you who twitter and/or market with twitter, you don’t want to miss Adam’s post.

Paul Hooper blogs about a free Squeeze Page Generator in his post called Create a Squeeze Page Using Instant Squeeze Page Generator. This is a great post if you are looking for an easy and free way to create squeeze pages.
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I just wanted to post a brief blog today to let you know about a new post at Kim Roach’s blog. It is called the Ultimate Internet Marketing Toolbox and it lists all of her favorite internet marketing resources.

Her resource list includes graphic design, wordpress themes, video production, ghost writers, copywriters, competitive intelligence and more. She has created a pdf file for downloading ease, and her post and the file contain all of these resources along with their links. As is everything that Kim does, it is quite a gem of a blog post.

Check it out. It’s a little bit like Christmas in September.

Until next time,

~Norene

Early on in the coaching with Alex Jeffreys course, he mentioned how important it was to journal about what you were doing each day. The reasons were obvious: by journaling you could see all that you have done, keep track of what has worked and what hasn’t. You would also have a template so that you could easily recreate and duplicate your success.

For me, however, journaling never took off. I just couldn’t sit down and write about what I had done in the past, and I couldn’t write about what I was doing as I was doing it — it just messed up my momentum. However, I always saw the value and so I tried to figure out a simple way to incorporate this into my day.

What I came up with is quite simple indeed. I have a text file on my desktop. In it is a simple to-do list. This list contains my daily, weekly and monthly plan. As I check off an item on the to-do list, I cut it from that list and paste it into another text file called “Done”. In this way I can monitor what has been done and what still needs to be done easily. My done file also accomplishes the role of creating a template of the steps of what has been successful.

Having these files on my desktop, I can easily see the progress that I am making (or not). I have noticed that this has increased my productivity as I want to get items out of my “To-Do” file and into my “Done” file as quickly as possible. It is also easy to add to the “To Do” list as I come across ideas that I want to implement. In this way I never spend time thinking about what my next project should be — I just look at this file.

Wishing you great success and productivity,

~Norene

Research is key! What do people want, how do you know? How much time do you have to figure it all out?

I have found the following sites that have very cool tools that have really helped me with my research. By becoming better at searching the web, I have saved myself lots of time and frustration. These tools not only make research much easier, but if research is not your favorite activity, these tools also make the process a whole lot more fun.

I hope that you find them useful too. Oh, and they just happen to be free. My favorite price!

1. Power Search Tool. This is a fabulous tool where you can target your searches for websites, files, images, videos or documents. You can also search for specific information about countries, world cities and maps. And one of my personal favorites — it has a feature called “Bargain Hunter” which will search the web for the best price for any product that you want. It allows you to perform all of these advanced Google searches from your browser. The only caveat to this tool is that it seems to work better (at this writing) in IE than in Firefox.

The video below shows the “power” of the powersearch tool.

2. Brupt file search. Brupt is a Google based search tool that lets you search for Microsoft Word (.doc), Microsoft Powerpoint (.ppt), Microsoft Excel (.xls) and Adobe PDF (.pdf) documents. I use this tool whenever I am looking for article ideas.

3. Soovle. This tool is just too fun. Soovle allows you to search within Wikipedia, Answers.com, Youtube, Bing, Yahoo and Amazon. Very cool! It is a great place to start if you don’t know exactly what you are looking for. As soon as you begin to type in a search term, Soovle will offer suggestions for related terms that help you refine your search. Warning for all self-proclaimed procrastinators: You can lose hours immersed in the fun of searching with this tool.

Any others that make research easier and more fun for you? Drop me a comment and let me know what tools you use to do research! Keep moving forward!

Until next time,

~Norene

I believe that one of the reasons it took me so long to gain a footing in the Internet Marketing world was because I did not find it fun. I would read guru after guru talking about how much fun it was to make money on line. I would think, “well if I was making a gazillion dollars a day, I’m sure I would think it was fun too!” But I found the whole concept overwhelming. Writing articles, setting up a blog, squidoo, autoresponder, PPC, affiliate marketing, social networking, forum posting, creating a list, creating emails….and on and on and on….Are You Kidding Me????

It wasn’t until I started the coaching program with Alex Jeffreys that it dawned on me one day that I Was Having Fun! The reason I was having fun wasn’t related to making money, as I hadn’t made any money yet, it had to do with the networking that was occurring as a result of the coaching program. Through forums and blogs I was learning more and more about Internet Marketing and these wonderful people that I was meeting along the way were making what had been overwhelming for years, doable. I had heard many times that Internet Marketing was simple but it was not easy. And I let that thought really paralyze me. What I found was that once I started networking with other internet marketers, all that I thought I could never do, really was easy. One step at a time.

Reading other people’s blogs, you really get a sense of the person’s personality and strengths. I came across so many really good, helpful, instructive, motivating posts and I wanted to share some with you. Today I will share some of my favorite blogs that were written in the areas of Blogging, Traffic, and Motivation/Attitude/Goal Setting.

I hope you find them helpful as well.

Blogging
If you are having trouble blogging or want to improve your blog, Matt Wolfe is truly one of the most knowledgeable bloggers that I know. One of his blogs that really shortened the learning curve for me was his blog post about plugins called The Best Plugins for Wordpress. He also has numerous short posts that are extremely valuable to the both the new and advanced blogger, making everyone who visits feel comfortable and competent due to how easy to understand his posts are. One such post was about scheduling blog posts in the future called How to Schedule Posts for Later. This was a simple post, but it gave me immediate information that I hadn’t known previously. Matt’s blog is just a wealth of information and he has a free course called WordPress Classroom that is outstanding.

Another blog post that I found really helpful was Lee Berlemann’s pinging post, Follow Up to My Additional Pinging Post. In this post he lists tons of sites that will ping your site bringing in more traffic. I would have never found and compiled this list on my own and I’m very grateful to him.

Traffic
Getting a constant stream of traffic is critical to an internet marketer’s success. The following blog posts were extremely useful to me.

Rob Willis lists 13 different tips for getting traffic to your website or blog. His list is detailed with how to set up these traffic generators easily.

Kim Roach lists 21 ways to get traffic in her blog post titled, 21 Untapped Traffic Sources. I have written more extensively about Kim and her traffic generation strategies in a previous blog post.

Another very extensive description of ways to increase blog traffic can be found on the problogger.net website. Additional information on what might be causing a decline of traffic to your blog can also be found on the problogger blog.

Motivation/Attitude/Goal Setting
One of the most important part of an internet marketing business is to maintain a positive attitude and to keep motivated. I found several excellent posts about this topic.

One of the best posts I have read about goal setting I have mentioned before. It is Paul Norwine’s blog post titled, Goal Setting for Dummies. In this post he explores being specific about your goals and how to whittle down your goals to one main goal to focus on.

Another excellent post is Rob Willis‘ blog post titled, Simplify – Prioritize. Rob lists 5 action steps to help prioritize to make attaining your goals achievable.

A fun blog post was created by Huddson Lee titled What I Learned From My Dog about Online Marketing. It is a post about setting priorities and living in the moment. Well worth the read!

Heine Wentzel writes about his method for always staying positive in his post SOTOFOT.

Finally, a huge part of goal setting and moving your business forward is to remember the importance of continuing to learn. Many people, especially those who are comfortably successful, slow down or even stop learning new ways to use the internet. This attitude can quickly leave you behind. Daniel Scocco talks about this in more detail in his post, Always Be Learning New Skills.

The internet is a big place. Learning from others, networking with like-minded folks, this is what makes this business fun!

What are some of your favorite blog posts about Blogging, Traffic and Goal Setting/Motivation/Attitude?