Today I did some key word research using Market Samurai. I think I found a decent approach for my internet marketing company site. I’m in the process of reworking the entire site. During my first 100 days, I set up ScepterMarketing.com as an internet marketing training site that attempted to push some affiliate services. However, a few weeks ago, I got my first internet based client and my first check for $500! So I will be changing up this site to reflect all of the services that I offer which are internet marketing, website consulting, website design / development, and website management.

I have another service that I want to offer that I think is somewhat unique but is a great value. And best of all, it is a form of continuity – which is something that I’m currently studying via Ryan Deiss’s Continuity Blueprint that I got off ebay for $230 (sorry Ryan!). This content is great and it should be, after all it is a $2,000 product. I plan on signing up for Deiss’s Total Access Club soon which is a $97/mo. site that teaches the latest in internet marketing.

Shiny Penny Syndrome

I have a condition where I lose interest in ideas very quickly. Generally it takes me less than a month to come up with a newer, better, faster, idea than the one that I had been working on. So then I start on that idea. And then the cycle repeats!

So today I asked myself a question that I’m hoping will prove to be a wise one. I realized that there are people making money online that know less about internet marketing than I do. The difference is that I keep on learning and they took ACTION. So today I asked myself this question, “If I could no longer access all of the internet marketing information that I have, what would I do to get the ball rolling on my ideas?”

So I started taking action. I started doing keyword research and writing a new blog posts. I started doing. Now, it just so happens that I have 4 hours a day of data entry where I have nothing else to do but listen to podcasts, marketing videos, and home study courses but in the off hours, it’ll be all action!

Plus there’s good news! Ryan Deiss just explained a pretty simple way to get 300 extra members a month into a continuity site! I just need to save up for Camtasia and AMember and I should be all set to go!

Goals before March are:
- Write up sales letter type copy for the 5 areas of ScepterMarketing.com
- Write up a blog post targeting a “low hanging fruit”, “long tail” keyword and syndicate it
- Connect with the two potential clients that fell into my lap a few weeks ago (if things work out I’ll have enough money for Camtasia, AMember, a non-trial version of Market Samurai, and the first few months of 1ShoppingCart and a merchant account! + some!)
- Set up a blog 80% of the way on SmallBusinessTrainings.com.

Let’s get ‘er done! I gotta lot of living to do before I die and I ain’t got time to waste!

I’m out
– Marketer Matt

I’ve been out of commission for about a week due to work and a conference that I went to in KY for a few days. But I’m back now and ready to continue on this journey!

The rest of this week will be devoted to preparation towards my two-fold plan of marketing this blog and marketing my multi-level opportunity. The agenda for the week is this… to create some incentives for people to join my newsletters, create a series of letters to send to them automatically, and, in the case of my multi-level opportunity, to create another blog that functions as a squeeze page for products which I can hopefully also market and get ranked decent in the search engines. In the case of this site I also need to figure out a few things to write about to begin to draw traffic.

I’m excited to finally have this breakthrough, now I’m just trying to keep my head in the game and not get distracted with all the other things that there are to do. I get offers to try this program or that program or for a new internet marketing tool in my inbox several times a week. I’m trying to ween myself off of “shiny new object” syndrome As I said, this week is preparation week, next week I’ll dive into actually working the plan. I plan to do that for two solid weeks to get it rolling before I add something else like the 30 day challenge I spoke about before.

Well, I have work to do

Until Tomorrow,

-Matt

I started using Market Samurai as I mentioned in Day 19 as part of the 30 Day Challenge that I joined up with to help me on my 100 day challenge. It’s a sweet program and I’m glad that I don’t have to bother trying to download all of Google’s search results and export them to excel spreadsheets. That would suck.. royally!

Things are working out well, I got Market Samurai as a part of my StomperNet membership so it’s cool that the 30 Day Challenge people are using the same program!

Keyword research isn’t the most fun part of this process so far but I have started to understand how Google works a lot more since I started doing it. Hopefully, in no time, I’ll start to have my blog ranked for solid keywords!

Actually, I think I was ranked on the first page of Google for one word a few days ago! There’s NOTHING like seeing your very own site ranked on Google! Yeah it was for a crappy keyword but it was there nonetheless! It’s only a matter of time before I figure this thing out and “stomp” the search engines as StomperNet calls it (thus the name “stomp”ernet!)

I have a lot to study still tonight so I’ll make this one short!

OOH, I almost forgot to speak out the good news that I mentioned in my e-mail earlier today. One of my friends is going to be working with me to design a brand for myself. I’ll be branded across various social networks and this blog. It’ll be sweet!

Until Tomorrow,

-Matt

To be honest, this last week has been a bit discouraging. I was feeling like I wasn’t making much progress… because I wasn’t, and that I had no definite direction to roll with. I also nearly doubled my hours at my second job from 10 to 20 leaving me about 4 hours a day to live, learn, implement, etc. It got to be a bit overwhelming that I “lost the plot” as they say – I sort of lost what I was doing. But I thought and prayed a lot over the last few days and I think I’m back on track and ready for the next 80 days! Here’s why…

Training Acquired:

Today I found a site called ThirtyDayChallenge.com. It’s phenomenal! It is a completely FREE 30 day course on internet marketing by one of the guys who is on the Internet Marketing This Week podcast named Ed. I signed up and went through the first day and into the second. The point of the class is to get a newbie to the point where he or she has made their first $1 online by the end of the thirty days. Perfect! I figure I’ll try to speed up my pace since I’ve been learning and try to do in 10 what they do in 30 since I’m not a TOTAL newbie.

So far the site has been fantastic. It explains one of the tools that I got free with StomperNet called Market Samurai in a way that makes a lot of sense. I’m looking forward to doing this hard core over the next 10 days and making my first dollars online.

In addition, today I also received my Guru Mastermind Home Study Course by the prince of internet marketing, Eben Pagan, It is a 3 -in-1 training on how to create and market info products, how to market and sell online, and how to attract customers online. The value of the course is said to be over $3,000 and I got it for free through signing up for StomperNet through Eben. I also get a free ticket to a live event of his and a free 90-minute coaching session.

Plan of Action:

I know that my plan of action has changed about 5 times already but I’m strangely comfortable with it. I thought A LOT about it today and I think I’ve settled on a pretty solid plan. The major questions I’ve been asking myself this week is “Who is Matt Hall?” and “Who is my audience?” I’ve come to the conclusion that I am an internet marketer, entrepreneur, and just an overall cool guy and that therefore my audience will be made up of internet marketers and entrepreneurs (both beginners and established) as well as those who just think I’m a neat person.

OnlineSuccessIn100Days (this blog) will be for my personal journey in the world of internet marketing and I will market it to internet marketers, especially aspiring ones. However, I realize that some people might just find this type of journey interesting so I’ll try to cater to them too.

PlexusNation.com will be my blog for entrepreneurs. I’ll set it up for entrepreneurs to learn, grow, and find out about new opportunities.

My social media presence, therefore, will be an attempt to cater to all three types of people, internet marketers, entrepreneurs, and people who just like me. Fortunately, internet marketing and entrepreneurship overlap quite a bit so I’ll probably make 75%-90% of my content tailored to them and the other 10%-25% of the my content tailored towards people in general.

Whew! Glad I got that straightened out.

Projects:

1) 30-Day Challenge: I’ll use the 30-Day challenge to pick a niche and start marketing in that niche for the next 10 days in addition to this blog. I plan to make my first $1 in the next 10 days!

2) This Blog: First of all, I’ll get back to marketing this blog. If you read yesterday’s post (Day 17-18) I had thought that I would pretty much stop marketing this blog. But I’m going to market it, and as I said above, I’ll market it mostly to aspiring internet marketers. This means I’ll start hitting Yahoo! Answers again and other forums, Facebook groups, and other stuff again.

3) Social Media: After I focus on project 1 and make some money, and then project two so that I’m writing about it and marketing my blog about it. Project 3 will be building up my “YouInc” business model that I spoke about back on Day 7.

4) PlexusNation.com: After I’ve sufficiently begun to market the onlinesuccessin100days.com blog I’ll begin marketing PlexusNation which will be more about entrepreneurship in general.

5) E-Commerce: I have an idea for an e-commerce site that I might start.

6) Project S: I’m keeping this project low key for now until it becomes more solidified because I think it could be a game changer.

Anyway, I feel good about this plan of action and I’m ready to rock it out starting tomorrow with Days 2-3 of the 30 Day Challenge! I also have some exciting news that I’ll be sharing with you all tomorrow!

Tootles,

-Matt Hall

I met with my friend Jason again. We’re in the research stage of this new idea so I won’t say much about it until we have things a bit more solidified but it’s going well.

In the meantime, I just got confirmation that Eben Pagan’s Guru Homestudy Course has been shipped to my house!! It has hours and hours of content on how to develop information products and a bunch of other stuff. I got it for free for signing up with StomperNet as part of Eben’s promotion of StomperNet. I’ll also get to go to a live event of Eben’s and get a 90 minute call with a mentor-type person that can help me with a company! Needless to say that I’m excited to get this $7500 worth of stuff for free.

So I’m stoked about learning. I also realized that I have NO idea what exactly I’m doing with this blog yet so I’m trying to decide who I’m writing this to or for. Right now, it’s going back to be just for me and my few loyal friends and fans. I need to answer the question, “Who is Matt Hall when it comes to the internet?” That’s not to say that I’m someone else offline, but just that I need to decide who my audience is and then what they want so I can tailor an approach to them. I think there will be a week or two of thinking and planning that goes into this so we’ll see what comes out.

Until Tomorrow,

-Matt

Have you ever had that feeling when you were in a new relationship that it just wasn’t going to work? You know that place where things aren’t clicking, personalities aren’t meshing, and it becomes more of hassle than a partnership? Things finally came to a climax yesterday…

Sunset:

I’ve been in the process of negotiations for the development of my website for about three and half months now. It started our as a free project that a few guys I knew were going to do for me in return for business that I would bring them as I built my marketing company. It makes sense that businesses need to have a decent website before they can market it right? So I figured I’d bring them in a decent amount of business.

Anyway, the whole thing went down the toilet when one of the designers took a job in a different state a few months into the project. Little progress had been made over those two months. I renegotiated, or so I thought, with a two guys who were still in town. Things looked to be going up… that is until one of them decided that he’d like to get paid for the project. I can definitely understand paying him for the work he was going to do and so I agreed to his price. He also wanted me to buy some advertising from him which I didn’t really want to but I proposed paying for three months as a sign of good faith. I updated the agreement and added in a few things I thought were minor and what happened?

I got an e-mail back from him saying the price had doubled. Why? Because the first price sent was merely a “firm” estimate and that this is a more reasonable price! Now the price is still cheap but I don’t want to do business with someone who keep changing up the deal. How I am supposed to have confidence that if he won’t change up the deal further down the line with this project, or worse, a client’s project? I don’t have confidence in the relationship anymore so I’m opting out.

Sunrise:

So what am I going to do? Well, I’m still looking for another product to market – either an information product or an actual physical one that I can mail. It just seems that marketing would be a little more straight forward with such a product. I’m seriously considering my MLM products since I have seen at least one other person out there with an “approved” site which means I should be able to do it too!

But, perhaps more exciting is that I met with my friend Jason who I mentioned before. We got to talking about this idea that I came up with on Tudesday (Day 13) and he had been thinking along some similar lines. We’re doing research on how to make it work and it is looking promising! More on this on Day 16!

As the sun sets on one venture it rises on another!

I worked most of the day so I only got a minimal amount of work in but the meeting with Jason was encouraging. Most of my ideas, outside of Twitter, are still in idea form and I haven’t put much to them yet because I’m still learning. I figure around Day 30 I’ll have more of a solid plan to start actually working with. As always, if you have any ideas, send ‘em my way!

Until Tomorrow,

-Matt

(Yawn) I feel refreshed today. Despite another setback with the internet marketing website that I’m working on getting created, things are looking up. Yesterday’s rest is doing me much good!

Tonight at work I had a guest come in who is a regular. He ended up tipping me about as much money as I walked out the door with in total on Monday. I was grateful and said so. He replied by saying that he knows what its like to do what I do and that he just enjoyed “paying it forward”. Pay It Forward is a great movie by the way, I recommend it, and it goes along the same lines of what this guy was doing. It’s refreshing to see that there are still some people out there who are just generous and caring even to people they don’t know. This guy even picked up the tab of some of his friends who were in for a birthday party as well. It made me think about what generosity looks like and challenged me to think about what to with the resources God has given me. Paying it forward is definitely something I want to do more in my life whether in finances or in other resources…

So here I am Day 14 on my journey and God is good! I’m learning a bit slower now than I did last week because I’ve been working a lot more. It’s coming though. I’m realizing that this journey is more of a life overhaul than it is just a walk in the internet marketing world. I’ve started working out again (gonna be sore tomorrow!), I did some cleaning, and overall I’m just getting my life more in order. It feels good. And on top of all that it turns out I really like internet marketing.

I’m still going through 10 hours or so about SEO from StomperNet and the videos that Mike Dillard just put for his course that I’m going through. I’ve started to utilize the knowledge in marketing this blog and like I said on a previous day, I’m starting another blog called PlexusNation.com. That one is more about entrepreneurship in general and for the purpose of building my network marketing business.

I should have a schedule written up for tomorrow to post laying out how I’m managing my social media stuff too. But that’s it for today!

Twitter Followers: 883
Number of people to view this site: Around 100
In addition over the last few days I added a few people to my e-mail list and a few new marketing/business friends on Facebook!

Until Tomorrow,
-Matt

I think I forgot to mention it but last Thursday I got together with a group of guys to talk about business and life. It was great! There is something about being around a group of like-minded individuals that is inspiring and motivating. We’ve agreed to meet once a quarter for now to give everyone enough time to make progress in their various ventures.

So what is a mastermind group?

A mastermind group is a group that meets together for the purpose of helping and encouraging one another in their various projects or businesses. It is a safe place to let out your ideas because you are among like-minded people who are there to support you. It was actually out of one of these groups that this idea even came to me to do this 100 day journey!

You may be thinking, “Why would I want to tell anyone my ideas?” The wisdom in doing is as old as the Bible which says, “Where there is no guidance the people fall, but in abundance of counselors there is victory” (Proverbs 11:14). Other people will see things that I don’t see in my business. They will question things that I may have overlooked or haven’t thought out well enough. They will help me pick apart my business ideas to make sure they are actually plausible and workable. Some mastermind groups are also for the purpose of learning together and/or networking which gives an added benefit.

Nearly every successful person I know meets in these types of groups no matter what field they are in. I, myself, am involved in 3 of them! If you want to be successful, I highly recommend that you involve yourself in them as well! If you don’t know of any then start your own! Find some friends who are on the same journey you are on or want to be and start meeting with them once a month or so. See if it won’t do wonders for your progress!

Resources:

Here are some more resources that I have found that you may want to take advantage of in the near future.

- Internet Marketing This Week – this is a radio show that you can get podcasted or in pretty much whatever other form you may want. I have found it very useful for keeping up to date with breaking news in the internet marketing world as well as for finding out about new useful tools that may help me.

- TweetLarge - I used this program once to help me gain some Twitter followers… to be honest, I don’t know how it works but I gained a bunch more followers. On the one hand, I don’t know how useful those followers will be as far as marketing goes. On the other it doesn’t matter if it helps you gain a look of credibility. It actually DOES give you some extra followers and I think it is an important thing to have the number of people that are following you significantly higher than the amount of people you are following.

- SamePoint.com – This is a search engine that is apparently better to search conversations that are happening across social media platforms. If I remember correctly this is because it searches dynamically generated pages, meaning pages that are created when somebody sends you a comment on facebook or similar things whereas other search engines don’t pick up (index) these pages. I have only played with it a bit but I wanted to make sure you guys got your hands on it. Let me know what you find. You can actually get an RSS of this stuff to your browser or wherever you read your RSS so you can keep tabs on information easier.

And that’s about it for this day. Post a comment, or send me a Tweet and let me know what you think!

Until Tomorrow,

-Matt

I have never been more excited about Internet Marketing than I am today! I’ve narrowed in another project to market which brings me to a total of 3! And I may add more! I’m loving this! I DID decide to go with StomperNet. Their price, like I mentioned before was $500 off of their normal price + they gave me some free tools to use to help with different aspects of internet marketing. Of course, I don’t think that my education stops with them. It’s just beginning there!

On Day 7 I posted my current Twitter strategy which is WORKING!! I’m already over 800!! Twitter followers… and counting! Twitter is part of what I am calling my Long Term Strategy.

Long Term Strategy:

My long term strategy is the YouInc business model that I mentioned in Day 7. It is the continual building in popularity of Matt Hall – Internet Marketer, Entrepreneur, and just overall cool guy! I’ll do this with Twitter, Facebook, this blog, and another blog that I’ve started. The more I grow in influence and popularity, the more followers I will have. The more followers I have, the more I can sell products or services for myself or any other company! My goals are to eventually get to over 250,000 Twitter followers and have tons and tons of traffic to my personal website or blog site! Basically, it is to become an expert!

The second part of my long term strategy is my Online Success in 100 Days course. Yep! You guessed it! I’m planning on turning this into a course that I can sell to other people who want to learn and want to learn fast! I may even write a book and do coaching/mentoring sessions with people over the phone or in person! This of course can lead to me speaking at things like Yanik’s Underground seminar, Eben’s Mastermind Guru seminars, or even StomperNet’s seminars!! Sounds fun and exciting to me! So that’s the “long term” plan.

Medium Term Plan:

My medium term plan is two-fold. Firstly, I want to begin marketing a second blog site from which to build a Multi-level marketing company that I am in. I’ve been a part of it for awhile now but I haven’t come even close to breaking even. I currently don’t receive any checks from them at all, though I do have several people on one of my teams. This idea is why I signed up for Mike Dillard’s MLM Traffic Formula 2.0 class in the first place so I figured I might as well finish what I started.

The second part of my medium term plan is to put up website from which to market marketing services. I would like be able to create websites for small businesses, create branding for them across social media sites, and maybe even get into working with them in the various aspects of internet marketing that I am currently learning.

I call these my medium term plans because I estimate they will take a month to a month and a half before they actually get up and rolling in their full forms where they are generating decent incomes.

Short Term Plans:

As for the short term plans, they also are two-fold. Firstly, this site. The more I market it, the more people read it. The more people read it, the more people take advantage of the free information that I provide and click on some of my affiliate links. The great thing about affiliate links is that they are a win-win for everyone. The reader gets led to valuable information, products, or services, and if they buy, I get paid and so does the company! Brilliant concept!

The second part of my short term plan is to market to my Twitter list as it grows. Hopefully by early next week I’ll be over 1000 followers. I want to begin looking for some sweet deals that I can offer people on things that they are looking for so that 1) I’m adding value to their lives and 2) I can make some money by leading people to these companies through affiliate links!

So there you have it, my ENTIRE strategy as it stands right now for internet marketing. There is a chance that I may add another project to my marketing campaign but I have plenty to do right now!

Cool Tool of the Day:

I added four new plugins to this WordPress blog to make it more SEO friendly! They are All in One SEO Pack (Helps you optimize your site for search engines), Google Analyticator (tracks traffic to site), FD Feedburner (sends your RSS feeds to feedburner), and Smart Update Pinger (sends out your updates once instead of every time you change something which means that you are less likely to be seen as a spammer!). If you’re following along, you’ll want to download and install these plugins to help your WordPress blog site!

And that’s it for Day 8!

Until Tomorrow,

-Matt

Are You Connected?

In the last week I have found that there is a nearly endless amount of internet marketing information to learn. Why? Because honestly, I don’t think ANYONE has actually figured out Social Media fully. A few people seemed to have figured out different parts of it and most people agree that it has potential, but I don’t think anyone has this beast totally tamed. Things are moving SO FAST in this industry that almost as soon as someone comes up with a new program for mastering it, the program is outdated. So what are we supposed to do?…There are a few principles that seem to be emerging as basics that are foundational enough that they don’t change much from platform to platform. One thing I’ve learned is that Social Media is first and foremost about connecting people to myself, not a company and even less so to a product. This is called the YouInc. business model. I ripped this off from Mike Dillard completely! If you go here you can sign up for his newsletter and get access to a 36 minute video that explains the YouInc. business model in more detail than space will allow me here. If it doesn’t make sense to you at first, that’s alright, it makes more sense to me since I’ve started learning internet marketing.

Social Media Strategy Continued:

My social media strategy at the moment is three fold: 1) connect with experts and to build relationships with them 2) connect with as many real people as possible (real people, instead of automated systems which I see a lot of on Twitter) and 3) provide these people with useful, free information, humorous things, and just anything that will help them out or add value to their lives.

Doing the above 3 things will eventually build trust with people. Then, when I finally do send out something that both helps them and benefits me they will trust me enough to check it out. My virtual friends well-being must be a bigger priority then selling them stuff. However, done correctly, I think it’s possible to make $25K in an hour if someone has enough followers on Twitter alone. So needless to say, one of my BIGGEST priorities right now is just building my list on Twitter. I’ve gone from about 70 followers to over 700 in a week!!

I’m also narrowing my focus down to Twitter, Facebook, and Delicious and Yahoo! Answers for the next day or so until I get them down, then I’ll start adding some of the other ones I’ve mentioned. For those of you that are following along, I’ve posted my Twitter feed on my site via RSS so you can check out my strategy if you’d like! (I’ll discuss it later this week.)

RSS Feeds:

I’ve also figured out how to set up my blog to publish an RSS feed to several sites for gained exposure and for SEO purposes. One of the biggest things about SEO is getting links to your page (I’ll talk more about this on a later day as i learn more about it.) If you would like to subscribe to the RSS feed of my blog so you don’t have to come to my page all the time to read it, just click the icon in the top right hand corner of this blog to subscribe to my syndication!

Tracking:

In a previous post (Day-3) I gave out a tool called snipurl. I’ve since changed to using bit.ly. I like it a bit better, no pun intended I also added a widget called Google Analyticator to my blog. Both of these tools help me track how many people are coming to my site and where they are coming from. This is super important to help me know what traffic driving strategies are working and which ones are not.

Cool Tip of the Day:

I was listening to one of the guys from StomperNet talk last night and this morning and he brought up a very good time saving point that I wanted to pass along to you. The tip was to, as much as possible, finish one project at a time. If you have three projects that are going to take three hours each and you work on the first project an hour, the second one an hour, and then the third one an hour it will take you 7 hours to complete the first project, 8 hours to complete the second and 9 hours to complete the third. If you were to do one at a time it would take 3 hours to complete the first, 6 for the second, and 9 for the third. It has really got me thinking about my shotgun approach to internet marketing and is the reason that for the next day or two I’m going to only worry about Social Media and getting the beginnings of it figured out!

Well, that’s it for today. I’m off to work all night…

Until Tomorrow,

-Matt