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You know, I talked briefly about my goals in My First Post here, but the concept of setting goals has been pretty heavy on my mind for the last few days.
As most of you know, I have an excellent mentor – Dean Holland. In his first session with his students, he asked these questions: “If you don’t have goals to work towards, how do you know what you’re actually working for in the first place? How do you know what you’re aiming to achieve if you don’t have goals in front of you?”
When I first started this blog, I told you I had two main goals: finish setting up the blog, and bring in at least $1.
Well, I have completed those two goals!
This website is set up, functional, and getting traffic. I’m pretty happy with my theme (although I may change that header later on), I’ve got some content that’s actually worth reading, I have people showing up to read the content, and I think I’m pretty much done with plugins (for now).
Plus, I have actually made money online! It’s not much money, admittedly, but since my goal was so low – $1 – even a few dollars meets my goal!
WordPress is really an incredible tool. It really is wonderful for all of us that this amazing piece of software is available free of charge! On top of that, there is a rich, full, community of developers who freely give their time to develop additional plugins to extend the already robust functionality of WordPress. I have been working with WordPress for months now (mostly at work), and I have been working on this blog for 3 weeks now.
Well, on this wonderful journey I’ve come across a LOT of good plugins, and even more not-so-good plugins. Right now I’m running 31 plugins on this site, although some of them I don’t really get much use from. Things like Advanced RSS or Category Order are useful, but I haven’t explored their functionality much at all. Other plugins like Smart YouTube or Maintenance Mode are installed simply because I know they will be useful at some point in the future. If I need to take my site offline at any point, or when I’m ready to post videos, I don’t want to spend hours looking for those plugins again. I could probably make them inactive, but I also want to make sure that they work with the plugins that I need.
So, without further introduction, here are my 12 WordPress plugins I can’t live (or at least blog) without! These are not in any real order – all are equally valuable in my book.
Well, today was great all around. Spent the early afternoon celebrating my mom’s 63rd birthday (it was the 14th), then had a 3 hour webinar as the first piece of Dean Holland’s Starting With Marketing Academy.
The birthday celebration was pretty fun, to say the least. The orange chiffon cake was really tasty (homemade)!
The webinar was really awesome too! One thing that strikes me about most training videos and webinars that I’ve seen is simply this: THEY’RE BORING! I have seen (and unfortunately paid for) videos that have practically put me to sleep. On top of that, a lot of videos seem to have a lot of ‘filler’ crap that isn’t necessary at all. Just last week I watched the first video of a 10 video course for work – 2 hours long. Reviewing the notes that I took, there was maybe a half hour’s worth of actual USEFUL information there. The rest was just fluff. If the training wasn’t for work, I would have shut it off before a half hour.
Dean, on the other hand, well – he got straight to the point. He spoke for an hour and a half before opening the floor up for questions, and that first chunk got me 5 full pages of notes (plus the beginnings of a mindmap to follow). There was very little time during the presentation where I wasn’t writing down something – and that blows me away!
Well folks, as you can see above, I’m excited and disappointed.
I’m excited because Dean Holland is firing up his Starting With Marketing coaching program, and I am proud to say that I will be a part of it! Looking through the members area there, I know that I will learn exactly what I need to know. Right now I have a good start on things, but there are still a few blanks to be filled in.
But I’m disappointed too. I am frustrated with myself, because I have no freebie today to give out. I spent too much time relaxing, not enough time working this weekend.
Well folks, I know it’s been a while since I’ve written anything here. The truth is, I’ve been working on quite a few things in the background!
I’m going through a lot of new material right now and deciding what exactly I want to give to you all. Really, I may just decide to give it all!
Also, Dean Holland is beginning his Starting With Marketing course – and I will be there soaking up new information like a sponge, I can tell you!
I have been giving a lot of thought to how exactly I want to keep everyone updated here. I’ll be posting about 3 times a week, and offering a step by step of how things are working. I have formulated a business plan – a good first step to get an online business going. Not just a ‘next week’ plan, but a full on “This is where I want to end up” plan. I have my goal written down – I’ll post those up early next week.