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The Power of a List (or two)

As I scanned my email folder this morning there was an email from one of “Armand Morin”:http://www.internetmarketingexplained.com/x.php?af=53901 a widely known internet marketeer. Now his marketing machine sends literally millions of emails every day to people interested in marketing online. I read the emails he sends me from time to time if only to keep up with what he is doing.

Well, this email was offering me a seat at a teleseminar (or download of the teleseminar recording) on the subject of Adsense revenue generation. Since I have recently decided not to use Adsense in other than limited situations I was about to close the email and move on.

But then I noticed that the “payment” for this teleseminar was the purchase of 2 copies of a music CD from Amazon.

Intrigued I went to have a look at Labor Pains, by Michael Lee Austin.

Guess what, the CD being promoted is a debut CD by someone apparantly better known for his internet involvement. Better still, his debut CD is ranking #3 on the Amazon music sales chart!

Their’s more… the prominent review of the CD is provided by Joe “Mr Fire” Vitale, one of the best marketing guru’s around and a prolific author!

In today’s world, possibly the most vaulable asset you can own, is a list of people, with a common interest area, and permission to send information to them. The second most valuable asset is access to the people who own these lists!

Think on it, and start building your list TODAY

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Our Family Tree

Some time ago several members of the family researched and collated the family tree covering the Ball, Reith and Doyle branches.

My involvement, for what it is worth, is to have made the data available at “tree.nigelball.org”:http://tree.nigelball.org using the Opensource software “Geneweb”:http://cristal.inria.fr/~ddr/GeneWeb/

Unfortunately, whilst I am extremely interested in the family tree, and family history in general, it is just one of the areas that do not get allocated more than minimal time.

If you have information which can be added to the tree, please contact me. If you want to be able to see all the details of the living family members, please request the “friends password”:mailto:nigelball.org

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Do You Know Your Online Id?

Have you Googled yourself recently? It’s not a bad idea to do this from time to time remembering that others are probably doing it and quite possibly making decisions based on the outcome.

Prospective employers, clients and others thinking about forming some sort of relationship with you, or just the plain old curious, will do a Google on you. Why?

* To check on claims that you have made
* To make sure that there are no negative indications
* To find, and check, your blog or web site

So, you should be checking your “Google-Index” on a reasonably regular basis.

h3. What you find might surprise you.

For example, just last week I checked the online identity of three clients. The first yielded a link to his business web site as the first result.

The second, did not return any relevant hits on any of the first five Google results! This was a concern as it was highly likely that his potential clients would do this search and be disapointed.

The third case was interesting. My client was surprised to find himself on the first page of Google results. However, the overall results gave no indication that he is a widely published technical author in his consultancy field.

h3. Ok, so what?

There is a way to control your online identity. It’s very new (still in beta) and may or may not survive the test of time. However, it does work so I thought it would be a good idea to write about it.

The service is called “claimID”:http://claimid.com

You can see it in action by clicking on my hCard badge in the righthand sidebar on this page.

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How Scary is This!

Anyone even remotely connected with online developments, or who wants to be seen as an expert in some field, has to start their own blog. But how intimidating is the first day…

I’ve had a couple of experimental blogs, spent some time creating the template for this blog, and here it is, nothing posted.

All the blogs that I read on a regular, or semi-regular basis have hundreds of posts, huge archive sections. But I’m writing the very first entry in 19Seven today.

But then, I plan to publish here at least once per day, perhaps even more often. So within a few months there will be over 100 posts covering all sorts of topics that interest me.

Maybe it isn’t so bad after all. Every blog started with a blank page for at least one day.

You can find out a little more about this site “here”:/about