Quick Start Challenge Update for Week 2

by -

I started out with such good intentions to update my “week 2” post every day and add my progress and plans into it. That definitely fell by the wayside with a weekend full of local carnival (where I had to man a stand) and all the fun of Father’s day. I always try to keep Sunday a little bit apart from the rest of the week anyway, but this week it got completely wiped out 🙂

In the end, it’s not really a very visible way of doing it and it makes it much harder than it should be for folks to find the information, so here we are with a fully-fledged update post.

What has amazed me is just how time-consuming it can be to get the smallest of jobs finished….or even started. I had plans to add new WSO reviews in here every day and that has just had to take a complete back seat as the challenge needs more time than I originally planned.

I guess part of the problem is “knowing too much”….or maybe, just enough to be dangerous.

I intended to do all sorts of sexy graphics with my week 2 video, but wisely decided I was just wasting time trying to find the exactly perfect motion graphics. Then I thought “I’ll just use Prezi” only to discover it now needs a signup and they have added a load of new features – again, a stack of time to get anything done after learning it all.

I knew I wanted to keep away from a standard presentation style Camtasia video, so that really only left me with Animoto. This is a great little tool for knocking up quick video with transitions and stuff handled for you. I made a super-cheesy video and found some pretty good music to echo the sentiments of the Challenge too.

 

The other thing I have been trying the week, is an image signature on the Warrior Forum. There is some evidence that using an image can increase the visibility and hence the click-through of posts on that forum and since I had already paid my annual fee to use one ($60) I decided to try it.

I think it’s early days yet to tell if it has done any good, so watch this space for updates. One of the interesting things is that there has been a recent WSO dealing with just this way of making money from the forum which includes a load of pre-canned images to use as signatures. This was going to be one of my reviews, but I thought it was so relevant I’d deal with it here.

It’s a fairly short WSO but it is really the images you’ll be buying it for (since Dean has already said to use this technique – just without the picture tweak) – it’s pretty cheap and well-targetted to this one use, so it might be worth buying. Bear in mind that this will incur an additional expense from the Warrior Forum to use the pics in your signature, so may not be what you want just yet.

In other news, I have finally kicked off my Pinterest account with a pin to my new video 🙂 A whole new traffic source? Who knows, again I will be back with updates as it goes.

I don’t know how everyone else is doing. I’ve definitely seen an uptick in traffic, but I’m concerned that it is only QSC’ers who are visiting. Don’t get me wrong, I have no complaints about that, but it could all go away again just as easily.

Let me know what you think, and mash the like button in approval.

Chris Munch’s Spokespigeon and Quick Start Challenge Week 2

by -

Social Engagement Inspired by Dean Holland, I’ve decided to keep all of my affiliate promotion out of any articles on the blog. So, this is the first day of a new life, I hope you enjoy it 🙂 I’m going to move a lot of the video promotion to my new site IM Video Review where I will hopefully have some product walkthroughs.

For today, I wanted to write a quick review of Chris Munch’s latest product and realised that it would fit quite well with this week’s content from Dean’s Quick Start Challenge, so here’s a review mash-up of the two.

Spokespigeon, honestly?

Chris released this WSO yesterday to the usual fanfare of promotion from a million Warriors and I bought it after reading his own description of the content. Now, I have to say that this is pretty basic stuff, but it’s also a pretty solid introduction to the use of social sites and how to start automating the way you use them.

One thing – Chris, get over the pigeon thing! Move on, do some Eagles or Hawks or Albatrosses or something (actually maybe not the Albatross!) 🙂

I confess I’m a bit of a traditionalist where it comes to stuff like spell-checking and proof-reading and it falls down on those fronts slightly, but it does not deserve the criticism I’ve seen in a couple of recent emails. These claim to be warning you that “viral” stuff is hard and doesn’t work and then go on to try to sell you other stuff. Yet another example of the depths some folk will plumb while trying to portray themselves as the “good guys”.

I need to be clear about this, Chris talks about Social Traffic, NOT Viral Traffic. One can become the other if you write something awesome and it takes off, but this is day-to-day account running to drive traffic. If you know nothing about this stuff, it’s a fine buy. If you’re an expert, maybe be more wary of spending.

The reason Spokespigeon has come at such a good time is because Dean was covering traffic in this week’s course and social traffic was obviously part of that equation. So there’s definitely a bit of synergy available in plugging some of Chris’ ideas into Dean’s framework – et voila, a traffic omelette! You’ll need to check out the Warrior Forum if you want it – no affiliate links, remember!

What has been encouraging already about the Quick Start Challenge is the level of interaction between so many of the participants. There’s a bit of a buzz about the whole thing which will make it much easier for folks to get (and stay) engaged….and I’m including myself in that category. Week 2 will see us all starting to look for traffic sources and interacting with them and with others on the course as we build out online empire. Should be fun.

Week 2 QSC Commitments

I’m going to use this post to keep updates of my activities for the week and that should force me to do stuff, so I can keep posting on here. I haven’t set myself targets for all this, do you think I should? What’s a good number of “traffic activities” per day, do you think?

Day 1

I’ve decided to add a category to the blog so I can make all these posts more accessible from the menu system, so look for it somewhere up top. The other thing I have decided is that my week’s worth of traffic generation needs some kind of focus for my visitors. It’s all very well sending people here, but what do they find when they get here?

So, to that end, I’ll be reviewing a new WSO every day (in keeping with my no-affiliate, honest as possible policy). That should give some useful stuff to my visitors.

To help me get everything done, I am going to dig out my copy of Action Machine Pro which is a quick timer application that lets you put in your daily to-do list and set times for each job. I never seem to get through the list, but it definitely helps! I may stick a quick show-and-tell video on here later if you’ve never seen it before.

My plan for today is to put in an hour for each of the 2 main methods that Dean mentioned and to start to use some of Chris Munch’s Spokespigeon stuff to start playing with the social stuff. I’ll probably also try to work out the best way of getting the blog to feed Twitter and Facebook while I’m at it. So that’s 3 hours committed….then I will shoot for a final hour of starting my Pinterest account and see what that does.

Day 2

How did I do yesterday? Well, I spent far too long building a little image signature for the Warrior Forum, so that probably counts as procrastination, but I think it looks quite good now.

Having done that, I did manage to get in my WF comments and just a few visits to QSC blogs, so we’ll see what comes of it. Pinterest never happened, but I did manage to get my WSO review up and it seems to be doing fairly well in Google for a few terms so that’s a bonus too!

Today is going to be more of the same, but I’m going to try to comment on a few forums that come with paid products – I should probably have been doing that anyway. I’m also going to hit a few of the FB and Skype rooms that I’m in, but I need to think of a way to get that link back to my blog in there.

All of this is mixed in with a normal Saturday at Chateau Percival (:-)) so I may have to do all this when the weekend jobs calm down a bit.