It’s been awhile since I’ve posted anything here. I’d apologize for that, but I’m not really sorry. I’ve been rethinking my whole business strategy and had pretty much decided to shut down completely because there’s one thing I’ve learned over the past few years… To be a success in any type of business you need to have great networking skills. And, quite frankly, I suck at networking.

But I made a promise to myself this year, and that is that I would give myself one more year. And if I couldn’t achieve the level of success that I intended for myself by the end of 2010, then I will pack it in and explore a new path.

Once that decision was made, it was easy to determine the next step — learn how to improve my networking skills, both online and off. I’m such an introvert that it’s really hard for me to interact with people. I don’t mean just meeting new people. Even friends and colleagues I’ve known for years have felt the effects of my introvertedness as I go through long periods where I don’t keep in touch, don’t know what to say or even how to act around them. I’m not kidding when I say that I am seriously socially challenged! I am the epitome of what Dr. Ivan Misner calls a “cave dweller” in his book Networking Like a Pro.

You know how they say that once you make a decision, the Universe does everything in its power to get you what you need to succeed? It wasn’t long after I’d made my decision that Dr. Misner’s book appeared in my path. And I have to tell you, it’s changed my way of thinking about networking and how to go about it.

I had always been under the impression that you had to be the ultimate extrovert to be a successful networker. You know, the life of the party, totally outgoing, winner of every popularity contest kind of person. And that is so not me.

Reading “Networking Like a Pro” taught me that even an introverted, bookwormish, stand-in-the-corner-and-speak-when-spoken-to (if you’re lucky) person like me can be successful at networking if they play to their strengths. Better yet, the book actually gives concrete examples and strategies that I can use to make myself more comfortable in group settings.

If you follow me on Facebook you’ll no doubt have noticed that I’ve been talking about this book a lot over the last little while. I’ve been more active on Facebook in the last few weeks, and it’s becoming easier every day because of the things I’ve learned while reading it. I can’t help but talk about it because I know how hard it is for shy people and beginning networkers to really get out there and do it. And there are so many examples of people doing it wrong too! I know that I’m nowhere near a networking pro, and probably never will be, but I’m confident that I can hold my own now.

If you want to take your networking skills to the next level, you should read this book. And now is a great time to pick up a copy. It’s International Networking Week from today (Feb. 1) until February 4th, and to celebrate Dr. Misner is giving away a six-month subscription to Networking Pro which includes access to the resources at NetworkingNow.com. You can find out more details here: Networking Like a Pro Special Offer. (not an affiliate link)

Happy International Networking Week!

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In order to have a starting point to measure from, I took a screen shot showing the daily visitors for this month so far. I also went through the individual URLs to determine the most popular posts by actual views and how many times they were used as the entry page. I’m not going to list the actual URLs here so as not to skew my results, but the top three we’ll be starting with have stats as follows:

• URL #1 – Page views = 80, Used as entry = 31
• URL #2 – Page views = 66, Used as entry = 22
• URL #3 – Page views = 54, Used as entry = 24

The goal by time we reach the 100 visitor a day mark is to have all of the individual posts bookmarked. I’m not using automation for this, nor am I outsourcing at this point because there’s no room in the budget for it. I also want to get a feel for how each site works and that’s not something you can really do using mass-posting software. (Not that I’m against the software, because I can assure you when the budget allows it’s on the list to buy!)

I’m also not going to overly concern myself with finding the absolute perfect keywords. I have, in the past, driven myself to distraction and inaction by over-analyzing keywords so this time I’m just not gonna worry about them and get things done. I do have a list of about 10-12 relevant keywords that I’ll be using just to keep the tagging consistent and that’s as far as I’m going with keywords for now since I’m not focusing on SEO at this point.

That’s it for me today. I’m off to get started on my social bookmarking tasks for the day. I’m actually really excited about doing this. It’s something I’ve always managed to find ways to procrastinate over, so I’m counting on the fact that I’m forcing myself to get it done publicly to keep the ball rolling. If you want to make sure you get the latest posts and results, be sure to either subscribe to the email version of The Ritchie Report, or subscribe to the RSS feed.

Have a great day!

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In the end the lack of hard success boils down to one major issue: lack of promotion. Even though I emailed, tweeted, and blogged about the giveaway I didn’t do all the other stuff that my coach suggested I do to get eyeballs on the pages. I didn’t social bookmark the daily posts; I didn’t mention it on facebook after about the first day or two; I didn’t do any article marketing (which is kinda touchy when PLR is the subject matter anyways); and I didn’t do video after the first one. Yes, I know better. Yes, I know that in reality the ratio of promotion to content creation should be 80/20. And yes I know I should listen to my coach because he’s a success and I’m not… yet.

But I’m going to rectify that. The blog is staying up (with the freebie links removed, but more on that in a minute). My next challenge is to take the promotion aspect of things more seriously than I have been. So I’m going to be doing the social bookmarking, creating some squidoo lenses, and definitely some video marketing. My new goal for the PLR blog is to get the daily visitor count up to 100 a day.

My second big mistake was that I didn’t ask for help. It wasn’t that I thought I could do it all alone… I knew that it was a lot to take on. It was more a case that I’m not very good at asking for help even when I know it’s necessary. It’s also that I’ve been away from IM for a long time and so having no list or other asset to leverage, didn’t feel like I had anything to offer in return. This giveaway was my way of re-introducing myself to the community and making a fresh start.

Lesson learned. As soon as I’m in a position to start building a team of helpers and partners, that’s what I’ll be doing.

There were a lot of positive aspects to the experience too, and these are what made it a success for me.

• I discovered that I can stick to a topic and a blogging schedule when I really put my mind to it.
• I discovered that I really love sharing information and resources that have the potential to make a difference in someone else’s life. I always suspected this but was too afraid of being a failure at it to really try.
• I learned that I still have some work to do to overcome my fear of failure.

I also learned that I’ve come a long way from the last time I tried to build a list and run a newsletter. I don’t take things nearly as personally as I used to. I used to cry and hurt for days whenever someone unsubscribed or sent me less-than-flattering email. I know now that I saw each unsubscribe notice as a personal rejection and a validation of my former abuser’s claims that I was worthless and that no one liked me or cared about anything I had to say anyways.

If you don’t know my story (an you probably don’t because it’s not something I’ve really talked about much) I am a survivor of domestic abuse, both physical and mental. By the time I got out of my last marriage, my career was in tatters, I had absolutely no friends left, and I thought that I was lower than pond scum. It’s taken me ten years to claw my way back to feeling even a smidgen of the self-confidence I used to have. So for me to look at the unsubscribe column and not feel like the world is ending is a major accomplishment. And for that reason alone this last month has been a huge success for me on an emotional and psychological level.

Would I do it again? You betcha! In a heartbeat. I had a blast finding things to write about and choosing the products to give away every day. I’m actually thinking of making this an annual thing.

As for what happens next, I’m planning on moving all the download links into a password protected area this week. You will get the password as soon as I get it set up, and it will change every month. I plan to keep adding to the gifts collection whenever I can. I’m also planning on setting up an affiliate program and you’ll be the first to know about that as well. I have the software, I just have to find the time to install and test it.

I want to thank you for being a part of this for the past month and hope that you enjoy all the experiments yet to come.

Thanks for being here!

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But it’s not, as I found out firsthand this week.

I really surprised myself when I decided to join the PLR-Giveaway this week. I surprised myself even more when I actually took the better part of a day to set up a gift, submit it, and get it approved. And I have to say I’m really glad I did.

There were no hoops to jump through. Sure the display of gifts on the download page goes by points, and I’m near the bottom but that’s okay. I don’t have an active list (that’s another story I might tell ya someday) so I don’t have a lot of people to promote to. I’m forced to rely on blog postings, and a few mentions on facebook and twitter to help me raise my ranking.

The really cool thing is that I’m getting signups. Even being mired down at the bottom of the page, I’m averaging about 10 new subscribers a day. And I’m ecstatic with the results. I’ve also picked up a few gifts myself of PLR products that I haven’t seen offered anywhere else.

If you get a chance, stop by the PLR Giveaway and check out all the great PLR products available for the cost of an email address.

What are your experiences with giveaways? … Leave a comment and share your story!

Have a great day!

Thanks for being here!

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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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One of the most important things I’ve learned so far is how to put Hill’s six step formula for turning desires into reality into action. I’m really great and the desire part and not so great at the follow-through but I’m aiming to change that starting now.

For August I have two main goals:

1. To complete the 30 Day Challenge successfully. I’ve started the challenge every year since 2006 and so far have found ways to distract myself from finishing every year. This year I AM going to finish all 30 days and have a positive result to show for it at the end.

2. To run a successful giveaway from August 5 to September 5 to celebrate my birthday, and to build a solid foundation for The Ritchie Report. To do that I’ll be giving away a gift with PLR every day when you subscribe.

Why PLR? Because I love the stuff, and I know that whatever direction I end up focusing my business on, that PLR will need to play a major role. I’m just not sure at this point where I fit into the overall scheme of things, and my ulterior motive in giving you lots of PLR resources over the coming days is to get to know you, and to find out how I can help you.

Ultimately, at the end of the 30 days I will have a fully developed USP and know exactly where I’m going in order to achieve the rest of my goals for 2009.

I’ll be spending the rest of today getting the opt-in page set up and ready. Although the actual giveaway doesn’t start until August 5th I’ve got a couple of surprises for the early-birds. If you want to know the minute the page goes live, please follow me on twitter because I’ll be posting there once everything’s set up.

Have an incredible day!

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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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As a reward for completing Day 3 of Dr. Mani’s CHD Awareness Squidoo Challenge (yes, I’m way behind), I’ve allowed myself to spend a half hour catching up on reading twitter posts and I’m finding some really cool stuff here.

First up, Merlene made my life so much easier today by blogging about a Firefox add-on called Vertigo. By putting the tabs down the side I can see everything I’ve got open without having to do the horizontal scroll. (Kinda sounds like a really bad line dance, doesn’t it?) I don’t think I could cope with anywhere near 74 tabs at one time, but I’ve got 12 open now and this morning that was driving me nuts.

From there I wandered over to check thefluffanutta’s twitter page (it’s a goldmine for Squidoo users) and found myself checking out a post on the SquidU forums which led me to this article by Darren Rowse on The Benefits of Twitter for Bloggers.

Reading that gave me some ideas for how I could use Twitter a little more productively, and it also led me to the Treader by Bob Lee. With that installed now I can tweet directly from my Google Reader. And considering how many times I’ve thought about tweeting about a blog post and procrastinating because I didn’t have Twitter open at the time, I’m really excited about the possibilities of this.

Not bad for a half-hour of semi-random trail wandering. As things go it’s a pretty good reward for having a productive and wakeful day. Sure, I could’ve opted for a nap as my reward, but if I make it until midnight it will be the first time in over a year that I’ve been able to stay awake all day.

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I’m starting on the traffic-getting portion of my new project on Monday. In the last two weeks I have set up a store using the BANS software, and added a new wordpress blog to go along with it. On Friday night I added a sitemap and fixed up all the pages so that they have proper titles, keywords and descriptions — all that good SEO stuff. It still needs some tweaking on the store side, and the blog needs more content yet, but it’s good enough to start getting visitors and making sales. I can tweak as I go so that any new content is tailored to what people are searching for. (At least that’s the plan.)

In the interests of doing this semi-scientifically, and so that I have a proper starting point for reference, here are a few relevant stats:

1. Site started January 10, 2008

2. Unique visitors since January 10: 112

3. The site has been visited by five different robots so far: Google, Yahoo, MSN, Alexa, and 1 unknown.

4. Alexa rank on January 26 was 2,205,535. That’s up considerably from the 5million plus it was a week prior.

5. So far I’ve been able to find 8 pages indexed on Google, and none in either Yahoo or MSN.

A couple of notes:

1. The best traffic day so far was the day I posted content on the front page of the site. That brought 104 unique visitors, mostly from Stumble Upon.

2. The best ranking I have out of the 8 pages so far is #286 of 34,100 competing pages. So there’s definitely some work to be done if I want to have any success with organic search engine traffic.

3. I’m not going to show you the site at this point because I don’t want to skew the site statistics. Normally I’m totally against not showing actual results, but I can see how that would render some of the testing less than useful if people were going just to have a peek.

Now that I have a starting point, it’s time to work at bringing in the visitors. Since I don’t have a budget for doing paid advertising at the moment, I’ll be focusing on no-cost methods such as bum marketing tactics, and social media marketing. I have a ton of courses and ebooks and videos that I’ve bought over the last few months, and this project will be an educational experience if nothing else as I put what I’m learning into practise.

Starting February 1st I’ll also be taking advantage of the social marketing training that Dr. Mani is offering. But since I don’t want to wait another week — I’d actually like to have at least my first sale by the end of this month — I’ll plunge into the deep end by myself for the first part of this week.

I’ll be posting updates here, so make sure you’re subscribed to the feed or the mailing list so that you don’t miss the good stuff!

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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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