» John Thornhill’s Marketing Masterclass

Time To Step Up A Level

Keith Blackburn — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 02:24:38 +0000

For me anyway, Masterclass Week 6 raised the stakes somewhat. John made the first webinar recording available which was very useful (I was ‘time zone challenged’ so could not participate in the live event). There was also the offer of free membership to Dave Nicholson’s Total Web Traffic, a great membership site designed to help drive traffic to your site(s) and is particularly aimed at newcomers to internet marketing.

However, the big deal about Week 6 was that each student was provided with links to all other student blogs. So what’s the big deal? Well I can only speak for myself, but apart from links to my blog in forum signatures, and my Facebook and Twitter accounts, I have not actively promoted my blog, and the chance of anyone coming across it and reading it are slim. Now all students are encouraged to view and comment on other blogs.

To me this essentially means that, since my postings are under some scrutiny now, I need to start thinking much more about content, providing value and, if possible, getting a ‘hook’ into my posts. I also need to be getting ‘outside’ traffic to my blog and will start using some of the ideas suggested by Dave in Total Web Traffic.

Week 7 has kicked off the product creation phase and this will no doubt be time consuming. Couple this with the launch of Mike Filsaime’s Butterfly Marketing 2.0 next Tuesday, and things are really starting to hot up now. So, there are plenty of different tasks to complete and I’m going to have to set up some kind of organizational and time management system – so that I do not miss anything nor spend too much time on any particular task.

Getting Graphical

Keith Blackburn — Sat, 07 Mar 2009 14:56:04 +0000

Masterclass Week 5 material was made available last Monday o2 February, and this particular week was handled by Daniel Sumner, John Thornhill’s support manager. I had just received my blogsite graphics from Planet Divinity and Week 5 was initially about adding these graphics to the site via the WordPress admin panel. This was followed by tasks designed to generally tidy up the site and upgrade to WP Version 2.7.1. Daniel continued the style of John’s previous presentations – brief and to the point videos which break the material down into a manageable workload.

Additional, but optional, Week 5 material included removing AdSense from posts, how to add YouTube and images to posts, using widgets and adding affiliate banners to posts and the blog sidebar. All interesting technical stuff which I managed to get through by Wednesday evening. I will probably have to review some of the videos until it all becomes second nature.

John has advised that the first webinar will be held tomorrow at 3.00 pm EST. As I mentioned in Update # 1, this is midnight my time and I won’t be able to participate – I need to be up at 5.00 am Monday for work so shall be well asleep by the time the webinar starts. I would have liked to have been involved, of course, and hopefully the next webinar date / time will suit me a bit better. Sunday’s event will be recorded so I won’t actually miss out on what is discussed.

Marketing Masterclass Update

Keith Blackburn — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 14:46:55 +0000

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I am enrolled on John Thornhill’s 2009 Masterclass and Week 4 material was made available last Monday evening. Week 4 entailed opening an AWeber account and then combining this with setting up a sign-up form at the top of the student’s blog. I managed to get through the material on Tuesday evening and I seem to have followed the instructions correctly - have a look at the top of this page. I’m a bit concerned that my blog has not yet been indexed by Google – I read that WordPress is very Google friendly and indexing normally occurs pretty quickly. Have to wait and see I guess. Update – got indexed on 28 February.

I have to say again how impressed I am with John’s tutoring style – short and succinct videos together with excellent narration makes for enjoyable learning. John has scheduled a webinar, the first for the 2009 Masterclass, for sometime in the next week or two (date to be confirmed as of writing). Unfortunately I don’t think I will be able to participate as the time is set for 3.00 pm EST on a Sunday and that’s midnight my time. I start early most mornings and will be well and truly asleep at that time. Hopefully, the next webinar will be on a Thursday or Friday which would suit me no problem. Meanwhile I’m looking forward to Week 5 next Monday – John has assured us that ‘things will get tougher’.