It’s been a couple of days since I last updated, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t been creative. It just means I haven’t been as creative, or as productive as I would’ve liked to be.

That’s all about to change though. I signed on to be a contributor to a new self-help giveaway that starts this weekend. So the rest of this week will be all about getting a gift and a special offer together for that.

I’m going to try a new way of working as well. As in 9 to 5 instead of a few hours here and a few hours there between naps. Sometimes it works, but other times there’s just not enough structure in the day for me to get done what I need to. And since there’s no one here to create my structure for me, it’s time for me to put my big girl costume on and do it for myself.

And that’s about it for me tonight.

Thanks for being here!

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So, it’s Friday. I got a lot of creating done today for my first IPK site. I had hoped to have the whole thing ready to go live today but even though I’ve created all the images and the pages needed, I’m too tired to transfer it all to wordpress tonight. So it will have to wait until tomorrow.

Since this week was so messed up, it’s looking like a working weekend for me. I may take a little time off to go and watch the dragon boat races tomorrow afternoon, but that’s about it for me.

Have a great weekend, and I’ll see you with another progress report tomorrow night!

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I was working on my plan for the rest of the year, and thought it might be a good idea before I dive into something totally new, to write an update on how my two goals for August are going.

Goal #1 – To Complete the 30 Day Challenge successfully.

Well, it’s looking like 2009 is going to be a bust as well. I got stuck early on in choosing a niche and really haven’t moved beyond that point yet. I’m not making any excuses for myself this time. I didn’t get it done, and that’s that. But there’s still 7 days left and I am going to be doing as much as I can over the next week to see how far I can get with it.

Goal #2 – To Run a Successful PLR Giveaway for 30 Days

I started about 5 days later than I had planned because I totally underestimated the time it would take me to set everything up. But now that I have, I’m so glad I did it. We’re on Day 14 right now, and the blog is averaging about 20 visits a day. It’s not much at the moment, but that’s my fault too because I haven’t spent nearly as much time on promoting it as I should have.

My secondary goal now for the rest of this month is to focus on getting the visitor count up to 100 visits a day and I’ll be experimenting with several different traffic building methods to do that. So stay tuned because I’ll be sharing some of what I’m doing here.

Regardless of what happens with the traffic from the giveaway, I consider it a success. It’s taken me a long time step out from behind the scenes and actually start to do something for myself and having already done 14 straight days of blog posts and PLR gifts is a major accomplishment for me. And there’s still 16 more days to go! Who knows what they will bring.

Have a great day!

Thanks for being here!

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It’s been so long since I’ve written a blog post, it really feels like I’m starting out from scratch here.

There’s a couple of reasons why I decided to have a “do-over” of my internet marketing career.

The first reason is simple… it’s in my blood. I tried to walk away. I tried to do other things, like concentrate on niche markets, be just a service provider to others, and I can’t do it. I love building websites, creating products, testing new traffic methods, and sharing what I find with anyone who will listen.

The second reason is just as simple… I love helping people. I’ve been at this a long time, and although I’ve never reached “guru” status (and never wanted to either), I’ve learned a bit on my trips around the internet marketing block. I love being able to answer questions, share the things I learn, and know that even if just one person “gets” what I’m trying to say and it helps them, I’ve had a good day.

Someone asked me yesterday why I was in internet marketing and this is what I told them:

“I’m not really in internet marketing for the money. I do it because it’s something I can’t not do. I love trying new things, testing to see what kind of results I can get, helping people…. Helping people is a really big one for me — I get a real charge out of seeing someone “get it”. The look on their face when the light bulb goes on is a beautiful thing and even though I’m not very good at being a people person, when I do get a chance to help someone out, it just makes my day.”

What I hope for this new version of The Ritchie Report is that it helps you “get” internet marketing. I hope that you find the information that you need here, and that if you don’t find the answer you’re looking for, you’ll feel comfortable enough to ask questions. The hardest thing I find about blogging in any form is to know what to write about. So please, feel free to tell me what you want to know and I’ll do my best to make sure that you get the answers you need.

So please, don’t be a stranger. Introduce yourself, say hi, tell me what you need help with and we’ll take it from there. Oh yeah, and do leave me a link to your blog so I can return the visit.

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It’s been awhile since I posted anything here, or anywhere else for that matter, and I must apologize for that. Once again it seems I bit off more than I bargained for with various challenges and projects in the months leading up to Christmas. I even spent a week planning out how to do a “100 sites in 100 days” project after reading a discussion on the turbo membership forum.

Then reality set it, along with its attendant overwhelm. Who am I kidding? I have a hard enough time doing one site in one hundred days, let alone one a day!

And so I found a compromise where I can work on my list of 100 sites, but not move on to a new one until the first one has made at least its first dollar. I also decided that in doing so, I will find ways to make use of the mountains of private label rights and master resale rights material that I have hoarded on various hard drives around here.

Then I decided I would blog about the whole process, so that anyone who’s interested can follow along. But, in typical Ruthie style, I procrastinated a bit on starting the blogging process, so the project is actually in its seventh day today.

Part of me thinks, why would anyone care what I have to say. It’s not like I’m some super successful guru or anything. And being as introverted as I am, it’s really hard for me to intentionally put myself into a position to be criticized and not totally in control. So as much as this is an exercise in creating profitable websites, it’s also an exercise in stretching my own comfort zone. I’m taking bigger, bolder actions in order to achieve my bigger, bolder dreams.

So here we are, sixteen days into the new year. It’s finally time to say Happy New Year, and let’s get to work!

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Sometimes I can be a little thick. I started transferring domains over to their new home on Monday and the downtime waiting for them to resolve gave me lots of time to think. (Instead of taking 20 minutes or so, it took a good 36 hours for the first of them to show up here.)

Thinking can be a dangerous exercise for me because it usually ends up in a change of plans. This time is no different. (Yeah, I know there’s always a first time. This ain’t it.)

Anyways, as I was going thought the content from the old sites, it occurred to me that I’m not getting the most out of what I already have. So I changed the plan a little.

The good news is that I didn’t change the process this time. I just tweaked the structure a little, and changed the order I was going to test in. I’m going to work at making all the existing sites turn a profit before I start adding new niches and topics.

The way I see things now, it makes a lot more sense to at least try and make the most out of what I already have, and let that be the foundation for anything to be built on. At least this way I won’t be starting from total scratch, although given the neglected state of most of the sites and lists, I might as well be.

In the next post, I’ll lay out the stats I have on the first site to be worked on.

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I know… awfully presumptuous of me ain’t it?

I was writing an email earlier and it needed one of those proper business-like closings, but I never know what to put there.  I really hate labels and giving myself an executive style name just doesn’t suit my style. So I am now officially the Chief Blogger and Coffee Maker.   I still think that Chief Blogger and Bottle Washer has a better ring to it, but I thought that would make me sound like all I do is sit at my computer and drink all day. Except for when I’m washing out the bottles, of course.

It’s late, and I think the day’s coffee is finally wearing off.  G’night for now.

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One of the hardest things I find is to just get a project started. I have collected so much PLR stuff and other things with resale rights over the last year that I get totally overwhelmed just looking at my hard drive.

Sure I’ve heard all the experts say that it doesn’t have to be perfect, it just has to be good enough. Because you’re certainly not going to get any traffic to a site that’s sitting in bits and pieces on your hard drive.

The other thing the experts all say is that you just have to do something. Pick a starting point and get something — anything — out there to drive traffic to. And then tweak it as you go along.

So bearing all that in mind, I have formulated a plan to get us moved out to Nova Scotia by the end of this year. And believe me, this time I am taking action on my plan! (In case you hadn’t guessed… I’ve been here before and gotten sidetracked every single time.)

Right now the main obstacle to moving is regular income. We need to replace orexceed the income that is coming in now from other sources besides Ritchie Media. I’ve found it kinda hard to actually slow down to a plan that focuses on making me a reasonably regular income over a period of time.

Like so many others out there I fall into the trap of what I call the “one good launch”syndrome. And I’ve been at this off and on for over 10 years now, so I should definitely know better! I’ll talk more about that another day so that I don’t get sidetracked here.

Back to the plan…

Over the last few months I’ve been involved in a few internet marketing challenges. The first one I did was the Bum Marketing Challenge, and then in July I did the 1000 in 24 challenge, and finally for the month of August I was involved in doing the Thirty Day Challenge.

The mechanics of my plan to create a steady stream of income is basically a result of everything I’ve learned from doing all these challenges. I will be using all this new found knowledge about creating content, creating info products, and driving traffic to jumpstart my successful new life.

This blog is the central headquarters for my Moving East plan. You’re welcome to watch over my shoulder. Enjoy the view!

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Which comes first… the open door or the closed door?

I told myself I would try and keep my philosophizing to a bare minimum on this blog but it’s always been my belief that the first post on any blog has to be special. You can’t just jump right in and dump the marketing stuff on people as soon as they walk in the door. At least, I can’t do that (which is probably why after ten years of playing this game, I’m not the super-successful marketer I should be).

And speaking of doors…

It came to me the other day that the old saying “when one door closes, another one opens” is not always the way it happens. Sometimes the new door opens first, and all that’s left for us to do is close the old one on the way out. After all, logically speaking, you have to have a door already for opportunity to knock on it, right? (That’s probably a good thing for me to learn because I’ve always been one of those “burn the bridge, the boat will show” type of people.) And of course this presupposes that: a) you’re alert enough at the time to recognize the new door; and b) you’re willing to take the action needed to make sure it stays open long enough for you to get through it.

Why am I telling you this here?

Well, that’s pretty much how this site came into being. And the timing of it was just so cosmic that I had to write about it. Lucky you, eh?

Last week I spent three days reviving an old site to use as a base for my Moving East plan. (More on that later.) I gathered up all the plugins I needed, installed wordpress, configured everything, wrote the first post, and then…

During those three days I also had to renew the main company domain and a couple of others that we’ve had for awhile. While I was doing that the registrar was nice enough to inform me (love those upsells) that ritchiemedia.com was available. Thinking about branding and that we really should have the .com version of the company name, I decided to register that one while I could still get it, and worry about what to do with it later. At that point I was firmly focused on making sure my new plan was firmly in place and moving forward (or eastward, as the case may be).

Did you see that door open?

Back to the old site… Finally, I was ready to post my first post. On a whim I decided to check the old domain in Google to see just how many pages were still hanging around that would need to be redirected to the new blog. Thinking there might be a page or two from an abandoned blog, what I found absolutely shocked me.

The domain had pretty much been unused for about two years, but there were about 100 listings warning people that my domain was a spam domain. It seems that a pack of spammers have been using my domain name to send out their offers. By me letting it sit idle for so long, I guess they thought it was fair game to appropriate the name and use it as their “from” name. I’d never gotten any spam complaints from anyone, so never even considered that this would be done to me.

Once I saw that, it didn’t take me long to realize that if I tried to start a mailing list from that domain, my deliverability rates would pretty much suck. So I decided that if I was making a fresh start on my life, then I should have a fresh domain to go with it.

Instead of trying to revive an old domain, I would take the opportunity to close a door that should have been closed a long time ago, and step through the new door that had opened during the process. Had the new domain name not appeared when it did, and had I not taken the opportunity to register it at that moment, I have no doubt that I would still be trying to restart an essentially dead domain.

It feels really great to have a fresh, clean site to work with. And it’s a wonderful new beginning to my new life!

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