OneHourOneMillionOneYear

Not a Millionaire--Yet.

I haven't been keeping up with this blog and have since redirected the domain name to my primary blog at IcemanBaldy.com. Needless to say, I didn't make a million dollars by working for one hour each day over 2008; however, I did make some money--a few thousand, primarily via online sales via eBay and my directory--and I learned several lessons that will serve me better in 2009 and beyond.

Thanks for following me during this experiment. Keep up to date with my at the Iceman Baldy weblog and via my Twitter account. It's all uphill from here.

The Year is Almost Over: Where Do I Stand?

January 9, 2009 will be the one year mark for this weblog and I will have to come to terms with where I stand with my goal to make a million dollars in one year by working for one hour each day. There are a few days left and I suspect that I'll have good news and bad news to report on that day with the good outweighing the bad by a fair margin. I won't get into more specific detail now but suffice it to say that I've spent more time on making money than on talking about making money which was a key lesson in and of itself.

It's been a marvelous year and I'll try to begin detailing all the lesssons that I learned through this project in the post I'll provide at the end of next week. As for the future of this blog after the year has passed, I'll probably incorporate this page within my primary weblog for future updates on how you can use what I've learned and continue to learn in your own plan towards part-time profiteering.

Focus, Daniel San.

Not much going on here because of all the work I've been doing at my forum and at Rockstar Internet Marketing.com. By deciding on how to better focus my efforts on marketing my niche and making sure that everything that I do is geared toward building my list or toward selling product and services, I've found that I have less time to spend here in providing updates on my projects and progress. If you've been following me on my main weblog, you've had greater insight into what I've been up to. I've also been posting updates to Twitter while trying not to simply duplicate that stuff here.

That leaves me wondering how to keep things going at this location or whether I should fold this blog into my main blog. I think that for the time being, I'll leave things as they are. I'm still far from making my million but I'm encouraged by the progress that I have made in the release of a variety of new products that are doing well while my exposure and expertise on the internet continue to grow ensuring that that million gets closer and closer with every keystroke.

If you haven't been keeping up with my latest projects, here's a short list:

Niche: Black Internet Marketers and Online Entrepreneurs

Services

• One Million Black Businesses.com, an online black business directory
• Black Internet Marketing Forum, a networking and collaboration forum featuring an articles directory, social groups, pictures, free downloads, and more
• Squidoo Black Lensmasters Headquarters and Black Squidoo Lenses
• Rockstar Internet Marketing

Products

• Internet Marketing Speed Guide
• Black Internet Marketer's Guide to Squidoo
• Optimus Time: The Black Internet Marketer's Guide to Time Management
• 365 IM Tips, a daily email tip for productive and profitable internet marketing
• Ice Cold Lessons, a year of internet marketing coaching and comprehensive email tutorials
• The Rockstar Internet Marketing Vault, a membership-based access forum for ebooks, tools, email courses, MP3s, video, and more for new and developing internet marketers

In the Works:

• Profiles of Black Internet Marketers

Stay tuned for more.

Internet Marketing Junkies Unite!

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8/29/98 Friday Freebie: The Black Internet Marketers Guide to Squidoo

This guide will provide needed assistance to those internet marketers and business people who are new to Squidoo or curious about its use as a tool for building traffic, visibility, and expertise for their businesses and services. Squidoo is among the most popular and profitable of the social networks available for serious marketing initiatives. An understanding of how to use Squidoo to its fullest potential will distinguish your marketing efforts and pay both tangible (cash) and intangible dividends (visibility and search rankings) over the long term.

Get the Black Internet Marketers Guide to Squidoo at our forum. It's a free download and you are free to share it with your friends.

What Membership Model is Best for a Subscription Site?

I'm in the process of launching a subscribers-only area in my internet marketing forum. I intend to provide my subscribers with access to exclusive paid ebook content in addition to best-in-class weekly IM lessons. I will also have special threads for unique productivity tools and a growing ebook library. Each month, the paid ebook access will change with new books offered in addition to some master reseller rights products but the tools and library would remain available every month with additions as they become available.

I have two questions for those who are experienced and/or have interest in the topic of membership sites:

First, should I plan on removing content each month or not posting content at all and using my autoresponder to mail new content to each subscriber every 30 days? I don't want to make the mistake of having everything available all the time and become a target for content scrapers. What has worked best for others in terms of managing subscriber content?

Secondly, do most find that a monthly subscription model works best or is a one-time annual fee the better route? I suppose that I could offer the one-time annual fee at a substantial discount as an additional incentive to become a subscriber but I'm open to suggestions.

Internet Marketing Speed Guide Course: Premium Value and Content

The Internet Marketing Speed Guide is a series of five books and a bonus text (over 130 pages in total content) with complete PLR rights for the enterprising internet marketer. I'm offering this entire package with webpage sales letters and thank you pages in addition to the entire PLR series and bonus in PDF and Word document formats.

As an online marketer hungry for the best educational materials and products to offer your customers, you benefit from the outstanding knowledge contained in these volumes and can then offer it for free or for fee to others on your lists.

It's an incredible value for $7.95. I purchased my copy as soon as I was informed that it was available. Get yours here: Internet Marketing Speed Guide

Black Internet Marketing Forum Now in Syndication

It's not everyday that a forum has enough traffic to rise to the level of syndicated status but that's exactly what has happened with the Black Internet Marketing Forum. The forum has been syndicated via Feedburner so you can keep up to date with your favorite news reader or visit the syndication page for a quick view of new posts.

The best way to see new threads and replies is by visiting the forum directly but subscriptions to syndicated content provide our readers with yet another great way of connecting with our outstanding forum. Stop by and visit today!

Tired of the Slow Economy? Get Ready to Become a Rockstar!

That's all you get by way of a teaser for now. If you've read one of my recent posts and downloaded some of my Rockstar tools, you may have a sense of where my head is on this new site. I've got a lot of PLR content that I'm reworking to upload to the site and ensure that it gets a proper Grand Opening but I wanted to update you on the goings-on. A few other updates:

I've been tweaking my Adsense options on the forum and I'm pleased with how it's coming along. The goal is proper monetization without letting the ads overwhelm the site. I can probably do a few more things but that's enough tweaking for the time being.

The directory updates have been completed. The next steps are to contact former subscribers and offer complimentary upgrades for their loyalty over the past year. The complimentary upgrades will be time sensitive to provide an incentive to relist earlier rather than later. With over 2000 listings, we're well on our way to becoming the best and biggest directory in my niche. I'm also working with contracted researchers to provide me with traditional mailing addresses for a direct mail campaign to double the size of the directory prior to year-end.

I've streamlined my autoresponder mailing lists and decided not to send a monthly blog broadcast to my list subscribers. The last few broadcasts have resulted in some unsubsribes and I believe it's because the blog broadcasts don't provide any value beyond what you can already get by visiting my weblog. I'll need to do a better job of providing exclusive content or only the best features from the weblog, the forum, and friend recommendations if I want to provide the highest subscriber value possible.

My articles directory is coming along well with a number of very good submissions being made by forum members. This is the essence of creating a solid community where members begin to own the environment and the content begins to grow organically. I'm nurturing each of my key forum contributors by maintaining responsive contact and featuring their contributions on my other sites to give them maximum exposure.

I've also completed work on a fantastic feature article on forum marketing that will soon be published as part of a larger book by T.M. Harris, one of my internet marketing friends and an example of making the most of your marketing efforts. T.M. is also a master collaborator when it comes to joint ventures and opportunity sharing for mutual progress and profit.

I've downloaded and installed files to being using WordPress as a blog and site platform and I'm excited about how well WordPress will compare with TypePad in terms of functionality and features. More to come.

That's all for now. Back to the grindstone. Have a productive weekend!

Rockstar Internet Marketing Tools for Setting Productivity Goals

I'm working on a series of articles about internet marketing like a Rockstar since lately it seems I can't get the whole Rockstar theme out of my head. Whether you party like a Rockstar or market like a Rockstar or simply carry a Rockstar attitude about you in your quest for success, I think it's all helpful in keeping you focused and disciplined toward achieving your goals. Most of us want to enjoy the freedom and bling of a Rockstar lifestyle or at the very least, we want a taste of the independence and bravado that comes with most portrayals of what it means to be a Rockstar even if it's more glam and theatrics than reality.


Well you can't be a Rockstar Internet Marketer without a plan. I've been loosely working on keeping myself focused using two tools that I've committed to paper for your use. One is the Internet Marketing Efforts Analysis and the other is the Productivity Points Schedule.


The Internet Marketing Efforts Analysis is a tool that allows you to input all of the different media and tools that you use in your marketing: forums, social networks, social bookmarks, websites that you use, websites that you own, websites and blogs that you promote, RSS feed services, autoresponders--anything and everything that you use to run, promote, or network in your business should be added to this spreadsheet. You then choose categories for each of these mediums and evaluate your usage:

• Profit (used in list building, one of your products or services, or something where you are an affiliate)
• Promotion (used to promote your sites or used for networking)
• Provisions (used as a tool in running your websites or providing your products) and
  
• Usage (whether your use of this medium is high, medium, or low)

Based on your categorization and usage, each of the mediums is scored. High scores show you where you are spending the most of your time and low scores show you where you need to consider whether the time spent is really worth the effort. Each of the categories is rated differently as are the scores for usage with the final score being a function of what the medium does for you by way of Profit, Promotion, or Provision and actual usage. The spreadsheet has sample values based on my own usage and does the addition automatically so feel free to play around with your own data input. Sort the final scores from high to low and see if your scores align with where you believe you should be spending your internet marketing time and dollars.


The Productivity Points Schedule allows you to track what you do each day, each week or each month and determine what value your efforts are having in relation to goals that you can set to make the most of your time.
Sample activities related to creating product or content, conducting promotional activities, focusing on your existing customers or clients, networking for new business, or making site enhancements are all given a set and constant value. Some activities are rated more highly than others because they have greater impact on your business. For example, creating a feature weblog article is valued at 15 points where commenting on a site is 4 points. If you do more than one of the item in a day, week, or month, just multiply the value by the times you did it.


You can use the tool to decide what activities you want to get done each day, week or month and based on the total values that yet get for conducting these activities, you can determine whether you need to do more or less at whatever frequency makes sense for you. Again, I've provided example activities and values with some scores to get you started using the tool. I'm aiming for a daily score of around 19 or 20 (write a short post each day, bookmark the post and send a note to Twitter, and comment on another site) with a weekly score of around 50 (write a feature article, write a long post, write an email autoresponder article). I may be too aggressive in these goals but the point is to have a guideline to use for establishing baseline goals and being able to track my progress to the plan in a way that keeps me focused.


The idea for the Productivity Points Schedule came from a post I saw on Ben Cooks' Blogging Experiment with reference to work done by Darren Rouse at Problogger.net. I've gone a step further and enhanced the tools with some activities, addesd columns for frequency, provided summary totals that calculate automatically at the bottom and provided actual Excel spreadsheets that you can tweak for your own delight and amazement. Get both of these Rockstar Internet Marketing Tools at my articles directory.