Quick Start Challenge Update for Week 2

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.