The Four Hour Work Week Project – Allison Reynolds

With the 30DCHome 2 conference coming up in February I am working hard at making sure I get the most out of the conference in personal learning, but also in terms of brand marketing of the SWBN and of myself.

I have set the following goals which are fairly ambitious, but at the same time absolutely obtainable

• Introduce myself to every participant
• Make myself known via business card
• Gift something to each female conference goer
• Document the conference in interesting ways
• Create content from interviews with conference goers
• Invite conference goers to participate in The Pod Life podcasts
• Breakfast with new people to exchange ideas
• Meet and interview the Noble Samurai team and tour their dojo
• Meet and interview Luke Moulton of Flippa and SmallBusinessBigMarketing Podcast
• Create business alliances with like minded people

If you want to meet up with me at a special time then drop me a line, I am looking forward to getting together.

This is my breakthrough conference. The one where I emerge from the shadows and start selling myself and my ideas.

Thanks to Duplicom for the image

If there is one thing that people really, really dislike (especially on the internet) is to trust someone and then be betrayed. Humans will accept mistakes, bad judgement, and ill worded opinions, but they will not tolerate being sucked into believing something and then find out they have been totally conned.

Thus is the case with Chris Reynolds who believed that the product he was selling was above board, effective and successful. After all the creator Ashley Morgan had marketed it as such, and also marketed himself as “not like those other guys”. Alas that all came tumbling down when Chris realised he had been deceived by lies and that Ashley Morgan was actually worse than just a scammer, he would also chase his detractors with fake accounts and harass them to stop any negative feedback. Isn’t that stalking?

Anyway we can only hope that more affiliates stand up when they are selling a crap product and declare they are as mad as hell and they are not going to take it any more. I have always been a big advocate of self responsibility and industry self regulation.  I hope other affiliates of this Twitter spam product also have the integrity to call out what has gone on.

Chris’ blog post today tells it like it is and marks the death knell for the Twitter spam product, Genesis Rocket.

FINALLY The Immediate Edge Blueprint is nigh!! I have always been a big fan of the Immediate Edge (this blog has several reviews over the years see here, here and here) and in my reviews been very upfront that it takes an experienced and self driven person to “get” how to tackle the information inside. It’s kind of like being asked to write a university grade essay after coming out of primary school. Some people will be able to do it, and some will run screaming at the thought.

I am so pleased that Dan Raine and the guys at Immediate Edge have tackled the usability issue and in a very short time the Immediate Edge will have a lovely linear path to follow through the massive amount of information inside.

If you weren’t up to reading through my previous reviews let me give you a quick dot point breakdown

• The Immediate Edge is a repository of tools and information to help you with your current online business
• The immediate Edge provides some very cool tools as part of your monthly membership
• The people I consider down-to-earth real people in the A List of internet marketers are members (scum not allowed)
• The information will help you mature as someone making a living online, not keep you hooked on “schemes” and junior concepts

There is a waiting list to get in, but don’t let that stop you putting your name down as I hear a few more places will be opened up when the Immediate Edge blueprint is released.  You need to make sure you are on that list or it is a loooong wait to get in ( but SO worth it).

I have been a member for years and would never give up my spot in this privileged group (come to think about it, what other internet pay-by-month has been able to stand the scrutiny of time and still be full? I certainly don’t know of one).

To get on that exclusive list

This post contains affiliate links to the only internet marketing site I am a member of.

Read Ten Years Ago part 1
Read Ten Years Ago part 2

After a lot of huffing and puffing my nipple ring was finally extracted (and ultimately lost), I was quite sad about that, and even more so later on when I realised I would never get it done again as I required MRIs every now and then. Into the MRI I went and while I quite enjoy being in enclosed spaces, being told not to swallow for minutes at a time was a real exercise in mental control. Try it some time.

Next came admission and my first night in acute care. The next day brought some surprises. Firstly I could no longer walk at all,  I felt like an octopus with legs like string. No matter what I told them to do they would just flail about weakly not supporting my weight.

Then came a morning of tests by my neurologist that found that I had no sensation in my scalp, face and other places on my body. The biggest shock came when she asked me to raise my arms above my head. Brain said “arms go up”…arms went to about shoulder height and stopped, then flopped back down. I looked at them dumbly as they too were now traitors to me. I seem to remember letting out a “Woah!”.

My swift deterioration made me a cause celebre in the neurology department and I was asked if I minded being “presented” at some discussion thing at the hospital. Always the good girl I said yes, of course. Anything to help science and all of that.

Then I had visitors, my kids. I hadn’t asked for them to come but their father had a minor panic attack when someone rang him and told him I was in acute care. I really didn’t want them to see me in hospital as it was going to freak them out (they were 10 and 8). When they turned up I was less than polite to their father, looking back I can see that he was concerned, but he didn’t bother to check with me and I was pretty sure this was all going to be a big mistake and I would be released really soon. Still they seemed to enjoy pushing me around in my chair.

That afternoon I went off for one of those really fun things, a lumbar puncture. If you have ever watched House MD. you will know that people wince when a needle is inserted into your spine to withdraw spinal fluid. Of all the things I have had done to my body, my least favourite thing is a lumbar puncture…very very unpleasant. Especially when the punturer announces that they hit a blood vessel and not only I was bleeding, but if the blood has contaminated the sample too much they will need to do another.

The next day saw questions about the possibility of me having AIDS. This finally flipped me out and I totally freaked. I rang my mother in tears and asked her to come (when things get bad I need my mum). She dropped everything and was there within an hour. She calmed me down, told me that whatever was wrong with me we would deal with it like we always did, and that until a diagnosis was made I just had to roll with the punches as they ruled everything out. She tried to get more information from the medical staff but they were being very tight lipped (because they still had no idea).

That night I was hooked up to a mega dose steroid drip. Whether the dose was wrong, or I was sensitive to the drugs but my veins felt like acid was going in and I cried some more and asked the nurses for pain relief (and I NEVER ask for pain relief…yeah i was one of those crazy martyrs). They gave me the bad news that all they could give me was paracetamol as they had no authority to give anything stronger. That night was agonising and I bore it by crying quietly all night rather than make a scene and demand help.

My final day in hospital was really strange. The neurologist on duty came to see me and said “Good news, we know what you have it’s only Multiple Sclerosis” before I had time to absorb what that meant, he went on to say “We thought you may have had an aggressive tumour that would have seen you gone by Christmas”, he then told me that I wouldn’t need to be presented to their discussion thing as MS wasn’t very interesting (or that was how I heard it). I was to be released later in the day if the steroids had done their work, and I needed to do a visual acuity test to see if I had lost any sight.

And that was that… just like that.  I was given no information, no prognosis, nothing. Just a reminder to see my neurologist after I got out and see you later. 99% of what I have learned about MS I have learned through research rather than medical advice. But that is for another blog and another day.

A decade ago I learned that I had an uninteresting incurable auto-immune disease that would make the rest of my life even more unpredictable than the average person’s. Would I change having it for the lessons I have learned about myself in those 10 years, on a good day I say no, on a bad I say yes. I am still learning though, and that is the main thing.

‘Steel wheels @ Fishermans Wharf, Low…‘ by timparkinson via Flickr
Image is licenced under a Creative Commons Attribution licence

Read part 1 of Ten Years Ago

The next day I drove again for an hour to my mother’s house. She worked in hospitals for 30 odd years, and I knew I wasn’t going to fool her with my staggering gait and my flailing arms. Instead I chose to tell her straight out that the day after our girls night I would be presenting at the doctor, and that is what I did.

I felt like a fraud sitting in the doctor’s waiting room. Sure it was harder to walk than it was the day before, and somewhere along the way I had caught my wrist on something sharp and there was a bit of a gash that I couldn’t feel and didn’t notice at the time. Nothing hurt, I didn’t feel “sick” and I was pretty sure if I concentrated hard enough I could walk a little bit better than if I didn’t.

The doctor rang the closest neurologist and insisted I get in to see her NOW. So I drove round the corner to her rooms and she saw me during her lunch break. There was some co-ordination tests, some walking in straight line tests, and lots of hitting with a reflex hammer. Her next words stunned me.

“I want you to go to the emergency room. Don’t go home to get pajamas or toiletries. I will tell them you are coming and they will admit you straight away”

That sounded serious and when I told my then boyfriend who was waiting outside he went the colour of dirty milk. Still wanting to feel in control I drove myself and the boyfriend to the hospital and checked in at the emergency room. The ushered me into a curtained off bed and the waiting started for a bed in the hospital proper. I still felt like I shouldn’t be there, that I wasn’t really sick, just a bit wobbly. I didn’t feel scared, just interested where it would all end up. I was still heavily in denial.

A nurse eventually popped her head in and told e to strip down to nothing but underwear and put on a gown. She also told me to remove any jewelry.

“Any jewelry?” I asked

“Yes, anything metal. You are going to have an MRI and it is a giant magnet, you need to remove anything metal.”

My boyfriend and I looked at each other and started giggling like schoolgirls.

“Do you have needle nosed pliers?” I asked the nurse ” I have a piercing that I will need to take out”

She sighed in an exasperated way and went off looking for the medical equivalent of pliers.

To be continued….

‘Tools‘ by adactio via Flickr
Image is licenced under a Creative Commons Attribution licence

I was working in the IT department of a casino and we had been ramping up for the devil that was Y2K. The hysteria of the time had led to lots of government and corporate attention on our systems and the general feeling was “bugger planes falling out of the sky, we have to make sure the punters don’t get a new year’s bonus if something goes haywire”. In the last weeks of December many long hours and practice runs took place to make sure we were ready for anything.

Sometime during that period I noticed I had a patch on my right upper arm that had this weird burning feeling. Like sunburn, but it didn’t hurt to touch and there was no red mark or anything. It was more annoying than alarming and so I chose to ignore it.

New Years Eve passed as we all know with no ill effects and all of the stress and long hours were left behind with a sigh of relief and a lot of “told you so” between us techie types. I had some leave booked and was looking forward to sitting around doing absolutely nothing. The kids were with their father for the school holidays and while I had some social stuff planned, for most of the time I planned to be on IRC talking to friends and playing computer games.

It was a fairly hot January and where I was living had no air conditioning. I have never liked the heat much and so had a fan set up to point at me and the computer. The PC was not happy in the heat and would shut down every now and then and I would take the opportunity to take snoozes till it cooled down.

The burning feeling on my skin had migrated to my chest area and had grown to quite a large amount of skin real estate. On top of that the ends of my ribs developed a nasty pain. I wrote that off as being something to do with bad chair I was sitting in and my posture was bad. Also it seemed that my feet would occasionally tangle around each other and I would trip up, but as I wasn’t really moving around much I could ignore it.

It’s amazing how your brain can absorb and adjust to things such as these. I truly had no surface fear that something was terribly wrong. Even when my daughter’s birthday rolled around and eating the chocolate mud cake produced the weird effect of tasting like chocolate on one side of my tongue and tasted like poo on the other side. Probably a cold coming or something, nothing to worry about at all! Denial is an amazing thing.

The denial was sustainable while I was by myself, but a week later I went out with friends for dinner to celebrate Australia Day. I drove for an hour across the city to where we were to meet and staggered (literally) out of the car. As I grabbed onto anything that would support me as I walked into the restaurant I saw the face of one of my friends, and ex ambulance driver. The change from smiling to this horrible shocked look was like a splash of ice water, it suddenly hit me I was in trouble, there was no hiding it.

I copped a major lecture about going to the hospital ASAP and why hadn’t I seen a doctor. I remember that nothing was said about what it could be, probably not to freak me out, but I should have known by the shocked look that he thought that it was something serious. I managed to talk my way out of it pointing out that I had to go visit my mother the next day and that we had a date to go to the local club for a girls night out. I promised that I would get it seen to (whatever this was) after I had seen her.

To be continued….

‘Fireworks (Yellow-Red-Blue+Green)‘ by BONGURI via Flickr
Image is licenced under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs licence

There are so many people out there that try to convince the unwary that value lays in big numbers. They try to sell the fallacy that a billboard that has a million cars passing by it is worth more than a newsletter to 100 people passionate about the subject. They try really hard to say that hundreds of zero second visits to your blog is better than 50 x 5 minute visits. They try to tell you that a thousand twitter bot followers are better than 200 who listen and respond to your tweets.

Humans like the thought of big numbers, after all doesn’t it mean you have won if you have the biggest number? Thing is a million times zero…is still zero.

Here’s to 2010 being a year of great numbers for you. Not the biggest, but the best numbers. Professional numbers, not shyster crap.

‘2010‘ by doug88888 via Flickr
Image is licenced under a Creative Commons Attribution licence

Yes I am posting this for real (no auto-posting) on Christmas Morning here in Australia. Despite what many of the “get rich – live the lifestyle you want” courses out there say, until you make it big, you are going to have to work your butt off every single day of the year. Sure I should have auto-posted this but it only occurred to me while I was doing my weekly accounts that this is a message few people openly discuss.

If you are truly dedicated to getting what you want then you need to create that solid platform to base it all on. Every single person who I consider successful, has been a focused and determined person who has ensured that nothing got between them and their goal. That included holidays and down time.

Sure take a break, but if you are serious, then this time of the year is to double your efforts and get four times as far ahead of your competition as possible.

For me, work is now, fun is later.

Have a Merry Productive Christmas

‘I do work hard!‘ by JulyYu via Flickr
Image is licenced under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike licence

The internet lets us be whoever we want to be. Most of us choose to be ourselves, or the slightly annoyed versions of ourselves, but we maintain our inner goodness and judge others by our own moral compass. That is why so many people are caught out by emails and websites that promise the world and then proceed to rip off good people who don’t have  money to waste.

We expect people to be just like us

Some times it is obvious that people are not like us, we can make that call immediately. On the internet though, in text, it is hard to make that judgement call without some investigation. We give many people the benefit of the doubt because we are good people, and that is what good people do.

It is a difficult thing to chose what to do when someone you thought was just like you, turns out to be something completely different and not in a good way. In my experience, the best road to take is to cut off contact with that person and let them be. If they are dangerous and you want to warn the world then there is the price to pay as the whistle-blower and you need to be aware and prepared to pay that if you want to go ahead.

So saying that, any conspiracy of silence is unacceptable to me (and to others as we have seen in offline events regarding crimes against children) and the price I have paid in lost productive hours investigating the events that led to this post are more than justified by the thought that innocent, well-meaning people, will not be falling for the facade that had been created to encourage them to part with their money.

It all started with one headline that was too good to be true. Make sure you do your due diligence before committing to anything that requires any kind of investment from you.

As I am want to say, the internet is big….really big.

So big that many small businesses have believed that their presence is neither necessary or effective because they are just little guys and no-one will notice them against those slick websites the huge mega corps use. In 2010 it will become apparent to even the smallest business that being on the internet is not only essential, all other forms of advertising is rapidly becoming redundant (in fact some already are).

Owning your local keyword real estate is the next Klondike.The SEO shyster is on the way out as the “average Joe” starts to use the internet as the tool it is.  Shopkeepers will come to realise that how their customers search is not globally but locally for a great deal of services. It has been easy for SEO sales people in the past to start talking to their mark about trying to get #1 in Google. Yet we you and I know the average Joe has cottoned on to that fact that even if you are the world’s number 1 site for “candy pink buttons”, the woman who wants to buy them is actually searching Google for “buttons Liverpool”.

The iPhone, and other handheld internet devices, have been the brick to smash the barrier restricting local retail/services making their mark on the web. People who want something “now” or “close to now” are using their data phones to pinpoint where to get what they want locally. Around gift giving time this is especially so.

Not only that, authority for things/service comes from where they rank in Google. Buying something you have never bought before like …chiropractic services. You don’t know anyone who uses a chiropractor locally but all your friends swear that it works, so what do you do? You look for “chiropractor your town” and bingo a nice looking site pops up with Your Town Chiropractor dot com as top Google listing, with a nice video of Bob in his white coat talking about spinal alignment …well he HAS to be good, Google says so.

Nano-marketing is picking up momentum. The great thing about this shift is there are so many products and so many locations that rather than selling one site attempting to top a million keywords, having a million sites with one keyword each and one location is also quite viable The internet has infinite space, unlike the Yellow Pages, and so is able to chunk down to the tiniest market requirement.

Once you have successfully completed and sold a local website(s) it is not hard to then duplicate the process and move on to another location. Conquered “Buttons Liverpool”? Head to “Buttons Newcastle” etc etc etc. Build the site and find the businesses who need that listing, let them all make offers and sell to the highest bidder after setting a minimum amount, or set a buyout price and let the first business to pay it, get the goods.

Of course I am biased about all of this, it is how I have set up my business, banking on the details above coming to mainstream fruition.