Mid Life Marketer’s Kick Start

The road back to riches was forgotten for a week while I was on a short break in Norway. One of the reasons for a work at home business is to have the ability to have more flexibility with my time. One of the first and simplest decisions - after 3 years of wishing- was to go to the Rjukan valley for a week’s ice-climbing in the almost ghostly shadow of the “Heroes of Telemark”. This, the valley where the Norwegian partisans scuppered Nazi plans for a nuclear weapon, is home to a huge concentration of ice climbs.

As a beginner in e-business, now wouldn’t normally be the best time to take off on a holiday, but while there is a dribble of money coming in from the old job I think the mental health benefits of getting away from the ups and downs of getting my; elottery, uVme, Prosperizer and PIPS businesses rolling, was worth the break in routine. For an unfolding retrospective diary of the trip climbers, go to Ice Week in Rjukan

Life Recast

I left my employment as a teacher on December 31st 2007.

I know my BIG WHY now, with a crystal clarity that I didn’t have before today. More importantly, I understand that nagging gut feeling that I couldn’t articulate for so many years. It was called unhappiness and I never knew.

So, as a newly “ex” teacher and newbie at marketing online, the rest of the entries in this blog will detail how I find ways to overcome the hurdles of a completely new and for me, an almost totally unexpected way of life. The details of how I went from scared beginner to gradually build a list of subscribers. I’ll detail the ways I am learning from experienced people, how the different courses and ebooks rate: the ones that deliver the useful information that is helping me grow my business. I’ll describe the opportunities that I am using to help me reshape my life, including: uVme and elottery from VWD; Prosperizer the most supportive of new start up projects; traffic exchanges and viral list building. I’ll tell it the way it is and describe my cock ups and crowning glories in the hope that you the reader can take something from my experiences and shorten your learning curve on the way to growing your business.
With all best wishes,
Ray of Team CosmicRays
aka MisterC
Oh and by the way, look out for The Northern View!

PS.
What wouldn’t we all do to be at the top of Google’s search results? Well for a limited time - and I suggest you’re quick- 1 on 40 are beta testing their package for getting subscribers to the top of, not just Google’s, but at least 39 other search engine’s results. They guarantee to do this within 120 days and if you get in during this beta phase, you won’t pay them anything until you are top for your 5 keywords for at least a week. Even if it doesn’t work, it’s got to be worth a punt! It’s the first no hype - no brainer I’ve come across in this game. When you go to the web site, just be aware that there is a client login and an affiliate login that you need to keep clear in your mind or your records, to navigate their websites easily. Get ready for the traffic and sales flood!

My Big Why Part 2
Meltdown

Then the inevitable breakdown happened. As bad as it felt, I was lucky, because I had friends (including my wife) who forced me to get talking again. They persisted when I couldn’t do anything apart from get outdoors and focus on the beautiful simplicity of climbing a piece of rock or ice. Not that I could even organise myself to sort the gear out for climbing or a bit of paddling. All the time school hung over me like a black cloud on the horizon. I got back to work eventually and made it through to the summer holidays. After the years of stress and dissatisfaction at home my wife and I parted company just as the holidays arrived. We managed to keep everything very civilised. It was hard. She had already met an old flame and she was visibly blooming as her fires were rekindled. She had enough sensitivity still, to keep things relatively discreet to my eyes. Slowly we adjusted to the new order. ( I haven’t even mentioned the children - but they coped in a way that still makes both of us very proud and is quite humbling).

By this time I was slowly waking up to the fact that I was in several places I just didn’t want to be. I had already started dabbling in the on-line marketing world, just to see if it was viable, as I already spent a lot of time at the computer. I thought, “… if I can get my computer habits to make me a living, I might be onto a winner!”. Indecision and prevarication were, unfortunately, the flavours of the day back then. I was going nowhere. Except for one thread that had persisted. UVME was in its pre-launch period and I knew that this was a project I wanted to be involved with. Strong reasons for my WHY were beginning to form in my mind. I just couldn’t put my finger on them at that stage. In my next post, I’ll show exactly how clear my WHY has become.
Ray

My Big Why

I was reading another of the many ebooks that I have downloaded over the past several months and this one, for a change, really grabbed my attention. Something clicked and I started scribbling on the shopping list pad like a mad man. Success in 10 Steps, by Michael Dlouhy, resonated with my feelings about marketing in a way that hasn’t happened since I started this journey towards rebuilding my life and self esteem. The author, Michael, pointed out that you have to have a damn good reason for wanting success in our line of business if you want to get through the difficulties that crop up in any new venture. This industry has an appalling failure rate currently running around the 95% mark. Doesn’t exactly sound like the best arena for the Mid Life Marketer’s Kickstart! Well, Dlouhy’s comments flicked a switch and the writing poured out. As you can see.

My next posting here will tell you how I slowly gave myself the reasons for making this kind of work a success…

Hallo folks, CosmicRay here from the UK. I’m destressing after having jumped overboard from my teaching career. The last couple of years of professional and domestic stress have added up to my very own mid life crisis. Now, for some strange reason; being the most advertising resistant punter going, I have launched my Internet Marketing CAREER, to calm the crisis. I consider myself pretty lucky, because there’s a small nest egg to keep me going through the first few months of floundering. So, I’ve jumped in with both feet… and now my personal Internet fortune amounts to a magnificent, staggering $50- Yippee - yabadabadoo!

And that’s after only my first month of effort since breaking free to pursue this line of business. Obviously I am a powerful force on the marketing scene. LOL

Well, the drugs have worn off now and the real world has come back to haunt me.

The truth is, I’m a pretty raw beginner, but I’m in for the long haul as this will succeed. These Internet businesses are genuine. That’s the first truth that it took me a while to accept.

Secondly, these businesses are eminently doable. Like everyone, I imagine, I spent the last year or so of tentatively “looking into” this world; feeling totally overwhelmed by the sheer volume and diversity of information that was pushed my way as a “Newbie”. For a long time I was studying one programme, then another, then another… and sure enough I made the semi-fatal mistake of letting myself get drawn into too many programmes (English spelling - the real word!!) at once, so my little nest egg is dwindling rapidly towards cut off point.

Until quite recently I lacked the confidence to jump in and make my own splash pages and I am still nervous about the idea of blogging unless the mis-adventures of a numpty marketer could be a saleable item? So I hope this first foray isn’t a turn off for anybody looking in.

I have however, been fortunate to be taken under the wing of Paul Ward a pretty successful UK marketer. So I now feel a lot more on track. It’s amazing how quickly a guy, with a bit of mileage, can crystallise seemingly divergent ideas, into a coherent whole. Oh yeah - that’d be like a teacher then!! Thanks Paul.

During the summer, I started looking into real world conferences and on-line seminars and to be honest, I felt like a fish out of water. I was almost frightened to approach these apparently confident giants of marketing who were strutting around the foyers. I was very uncomfortable letting people see how clueless I really was. Until, I actually started an email conversation with one person, who turned out to be an ordinary bloke like me, or you or the lady over there.

So, what’s the point of this negative sounding monologue? Very simple; if you are new to this game and floundering, get in touch with your up-line and pick some brains. A recurrent theme in much of the sales copy is that it doesn’t take Einstein to work these systems. It may have been someone with a streak of the Einstein about them, who developed the system, but it was in their interest to develop a straight forward(ish) but DUPLICABLE SYSTEM.

The upshot of that for you new guys and girls, is that behind all of the glitz, the hype, the mega launches and the “never been seen befores” are just a few variations on a system or three. Most of these systems will work for you if you don’t system hop and YOU APPLY yourself seriously. Don’t be taken in by the instant wealth that is implied by much of the advertising copy you see. You’ve got some hard graft ahead of you to start building your own list of potential customers. That list and your relationship to the people those names represent is your starting point. It took me nearly 6 months to grasp and visualise what that simple point really meant. More about that in a future posting. If you are looking for someone to help you build your business, who isn’t already up there in the stratosphere, please get in touch. I’m not Terry the Tip Top Mentor, but by getting a gang of of us new guys together and swapping experiences we could probably save each other from a load of grief. I promise I won’t SELL everything at you in one go!! Honest! And together, I bet we couldn’t half pick some up-line brains!!

Seriously though, what I will show off now are the businesses I am involved with, which despite being too numerous for a simple bloke to keep a handle on, are the projects which seem to be genuine opportunities for producing life changing incomes. After a month of real focus, I haven’t “life changed” my income yet, but suddenly my lists have started to grow and I have pulled in my first couple of proper customers.

So, my main threads are: firstly, the best of the bunch, UVME This is a fantastic mixture of straightforward (!?) games of skill played on-line for cash prizes; with a superb and rapidly evolving social marketing system and the whole lot nicely capped by a superb back office to support the business opportunity. This is going BIG. It’s not cheap to commit to, but it really is a quality business. Before the “.com” games platform launched a couple of weeks ago, there were over 300,000 pre-registrations with lots of these becoming paid sign ups; once people had to show the colour of their cash.

Even more exciting is the news, revealed at the last training webinar: that there had been 15,000 completely new people who had signed up to play the games. Best of all, despite the hammer the servers were getting and despite the fact that we are only in soft launch / beta testing mode - the system works amazingly well and is being improved almost daily by 3 dedicated teams of software engineers, game developers and multi lingual support staff. Apologies if this gets close to hype, but it is a genuinely exciting on-line business opportunity with a highly desirable product - it’s cool folks! And you can have a look at (preferably) my site here. If you like what’s on offer, I wouldn’t say no to a few new associates in Team CosmicRays!
Go here for the games and play for free
Go here to see the business opportunity.

My second favourite is a new project by Paul Ward and his associates. Prosperizer’s best feature is that the team who have put it together are trying to build a resource and a business model where newcomers to marketing do not suddenly lose the support of their up-lines when the auto responders have banged out their last emails. If you are unsure of a direction to take, this is genuinely worth a careful look. It is developing into a very supportive community without the hype often associated with programmes trying to grab the newcomer.

Power Up Your Income With Prosperizer

At first I sank a lot effort into Stone Evans Plug in Profits programme. It’s a hell of a system even though it could be quite an expensive start up, if you blindly follow all of his recommendations straight away. Its big advantage for a newcomer, is that it opens up 6 separate but related streams of income. It does need a very focused approach but there are lots of subgroups of entrepreneurs who are willing to help or who offer full on mentoring. The products cover a very wide range from Vitamin supplements and audio books for your MP3; to Marketing and self development information; all the way through to Web hosting and domain name services. It’s a very broad church.

Plug in Here For Profit

For traffic building I am starting to get results now with Vital Viral. This clever set up, is a way of organising your activities in multiple traffic exchanges and then, if you gain an affiliate in Vital Viral, you gain that affiliate in the other exchanges as well.

Organise your surfing by using Vital Viral as explained here

So I’m up for networking but I daren’t get involved in any new projects unless they are very powerful, because I’m up to my eyeballs at the moment. But, instead of that sinking feeling that’s been around me for 2 years or more, I feel like I’ve just started surfacing.

All the best for a fantastic New Year in 2008
Ray