Master of your Domains
November 6th, 2009 by Ingrid Cliff
Every year I do a few weeks of professional development to hone my skills. This year I have been completing some online internet courses – the Thirty Day Challenge with Ed Dale. I do this one every year to keep current on the latest internet marketing trends (and it is free to do during August each year).
Myself, James Schramko & Donna-Marie Coggins
I have also been studying with James Schramko – one of the good guys of internet marketing. One of his courses I have been taking is the Underground Profit System which I have to say has been brilliant. It is a series of 8 videos with really comprehensive information about websites and traffic that I hadn’t heard elsewhere (and you won’t break the bank doing them). Even if I didn’t get an affiliate fee for recommending James’s course I would be telling all my friends about it … it is that good!
Now if you’re like me you need to lock yourself away in a darkened room for a couple of days to work with new material. My kids joke that when I am studying I descend into my cave like a hermit, only periodically opening the door to get coffee and food and then scuttling away again, while muttering about things like domains, links and traffic. This isolated state lasts until the last DVD is played and I have had a few days applying what I have learnt.
The application is the most important bit. Unless I apply some of what I studied in the few days after the course, the course material becomes the online equivalent of a treadmill sitting in the lounge room draped with clothes and good intentions.
So the past few days I have been living in my bunker and have had some great aha moments – like how to find fantastic domain names, different website models for businesses, brilliant tools for market research (that don’t cost a cent), places to source great products, how to have videos on your site (and not crush your bandwidth), simple ways to split test to see which headlines/content gets the best results, and places to get CDs & DVDs replicated for next to nothing.
I also had a massive whack on the side of the head in relation to some simple systems to keep tabs on my website information. I knew where I could find (sort of) which company my domain name was registered with, and who hosts my websites, but passwords and expiry dates of the subscriptions? This super simple one pager put it all together for me in a super-organised way. I now have all my website details and many domains (including all my kids names .com.au and .coms) in the one folder, neatly sorted.
But my hands-down favourite bit of James’s course has been the software. Last night I put together and published 3 simple websites in 2 hours which would have taken me an entire day to do otherwise. There would have been more but the thunderstorm meant the computer had to turn off. Now you have to remember I have some net knowledge which makes things a bit easier, but in my view even newbies to the net would be able to quickly get a great result.
Why am I telling you this? In business we need to keep on top of new developments. We need to take regular time out to sharpen our saw (as Covey would say), to learn new things and new ways of approaching our business. When was the last time you took time out to study? Yes, we are all busy and yes I have a mountainous backlog of emails and so on to tackle today … but it is worth it!
… And if you want to learn more about websites and the net – the two courses I have mentioned are worth doing.
Until next time
Ingrid Cliff
We put your business into words
This entry was posted on Friday, November 6th, 2009 at 6:13 am and is filed under Marketing Tips for Small Business, Web copywriting. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
