I’m Sorry – Updates Galore Coming Soon!

I’ve been quiet too long. And I apologize.

It’s not that I don’t have stuff for you – I do. About 5 podcasts which have to be recorded and posted so you can be alerted by email or RSS feed/podcatcher/iTunes, etc. (You are subscribed, aren’t you? Good.)

Because I do this all for you.

What’s happened that I don’t want you to fall into.

I went back to my hard-drives and pulled every backup I had. Of course, because I didn’t always have this habit, they only went back to 2005. I look around old files and found that I’d been blogging since at least 2003, but they were on platforms which have since gone extinct.

Anyway, this gave me nearly 5,000 (yes, five thousand) blog posts to sort through. Taking out obvious duplicates narrowed it down to under 4,000. When I simply trashed or turned to draft anything you wouldn’t be interested in (like the details of getting a refund from a scammer company that finally went under last year) – this pulled it down below 3,000.

Finally, I had to go through everything which wasn’t assigned a category and put these where they belonged.

Moving back to WordPress off Blogger

I’ve always liked WordPress, but had a love/hate relationship with the free blog-hosting sites that used it. All free blog hosting sites have trouble with spammers. Some have taken fairly draconian (harsh) measures to protect their servers and financial backend.

WordPress.com was one of these. I’ve had more blogs and profiles turned off on that site than I can easily count. They simply won’t tolerate obvioius affiliate links. And will ban you at the drop of a hat. (While meanwhile labeling you a spammer – hope you’re not using your real name…)

Since I need to make an online living by offering products (my books) – I had to get onto a platform that would not just tolerate this, but encourage it. So I went to Blogger.

And I was happy, overall. I knew it was more limited than WordPress, but the minimalist simplicity of it didn’t keep you from feeding your muse and working to get paid for it.

Blogger has one major drawback – it doesn’t have categories, so exporting and then re-importing to a WordPress platform leaves you with a huge stack of stuff which is “uncategorized.”

Then the fun begins.

(I did see, after a couple of days at this, that it’s possible to turn tags [“labels” on Blogger] into categories. And then within WordPress, to move from one category to another, or combine them.)

Since “uncategorized” is a default on WordPress, I had to move all these over into a new temp category, sort them, to where they needed to go, and then delete that temp one.

It took days, close to a week of my part-time schedule working at this (the farm chores and other duties still take their fair share.)

And Just When I Thought I Was Done…

…I found out how deep this rabbit hole goes.

Rainmaker is an amazing platform. Amazing. As I don’t use that word often, it means a lot.

I was down to about 1200 posts (with at least that many as draft or trash to revive as needed.)

Unfortunately, it isn’t really like Blogger or WordPress, where you can pick out a nice template and just start in. It’s way more powerful with built-in memberships, podcasting networks, online courses, and of course – the ability to directly sell digital products.

I’m getting this podcast out to you on the old system to let you know what’s coming up. Because I’ve got a lot of work to do – still – just to help you get the data you want the way you want it.

The problem is that it’s going to take some time before I can get a nice base set up and turn on stuff bit-by-bit.

There’s no reason to have to have everything ready at once, but let me lay out what looks to be possible at this point.

The Grand Design Revealed

…drumroll, please.

You should really go over to livesensical.com to sign up. That’s my new site. Nice video there that starts to explain it.

This site will really be in four parts, which is how I’ve organized my 50+ years of research and all the workable resources I’ve collected so share with you.

There are going to be both free and paid memberships, which allow me to fine-tune this material. To begin with, it will all be a free membership – but I’ll have a lot of blog posts which live free out there to get people to sign up at all.

These four areas will each have their own podcast, probably bi-weekly, as that’s a lot of work.

Just in the self-help area, I already have 4 or 5 ecourses which can be revived. In the online marketing area, there’s another 3-4 or more. This is just what I’ve found when I was moving stuff around. Other courses exist on video and PDF which can be brought in and connected. Then there are PLR video and audio courses which I’ve got stashed away and are still fairly useful.

I’ve mentioned before that I have a couple dozen-dozen books out there already. Some are very applicable to your studies, some were just tests (aka: cannon fodder). There are a great number of these I want to make available for free, and then offer the other version of them (epub, mobi, audiobook/podcasts, videos) for small fees – well, at least higher than they are sold on Amazon.

Eventually, I’ll get onto some major projects I’ve been laying out and putting off – such as

a set of classic evergreen fiction bestsellers made available to authors to improve their craft.
There’s also an online marketing training course to enable people to really think with what they find online and be able to spot real winners and the scams. This has particular use to people who have been into Network Marketing.
My series on Masters of Marketing needs quite a bit more work – and porting to LinkedIn for their use.
There’s a final book on selling books online, which takes all the data I’ve set out here and packages it up in various formats. This also needs to be a course, plus bundled with audio.
Eventually, I’ll be caught up and will start in on Children’s Books, both writing and illustrating them, but they’ll have a companion set of books so anyone can train themselves on this genre. (It will probably be it’s own site, although that’s a future scene I haven’t fully figured out as yet.)

The Rainmaker platform has built-in SEO scripting, so all the surviving posts need to be gone through and updated. That alone would take weeks if I didn’t also have some forward progress to make (and bills to pay, and promises to keep.)

The backend bells-and-whistles to set this up take a bit of study – but there is an excellent set of tutorials and walk-throughs which tell anyone how to build their own stuff.

The great part of Rainmaker platform is that this is the same tools that Clark & Co. have used to build Copyblogger into a multi-million dollar annual income. Same tools – just like they use. In short: it’s truly powerful.

What happens to these old blogs?

Well, they stay right there. One datum you must know is that you never, ever delete a blog once you set it up. Fill it with usable content, put an opt-in form on it, update it if you can here and there. But like vintage wine, it gets more valuable with time, not less. Google gives them more authority (meaning: higher rankings) the longer they are out there. Even free blogs. Put them on a spreadsheet and drop some content in on them from time to time. (If you can set up IFTTT to syndicate your content, that fine.)

You see, each of these free blog hosts have their own community. So they recommend your stuff to their followers differently. That means more people can find your stuff that you’d not necessarily connect with otherwise.

Meanwhile, the search engines can link all these in on very long-tail basis to help other people find your stuff.

I don’t really have a system in place to deal with all these. Like I said, I’ve got a spreadsheet which hs most of them on it – some will stay forever lost to my access, but will never be deleted.

In some cases, like that scammer content, this can be posted back to specialty blogs just on that subject – the history of a particular Utah scammer company. Might even become a book if I can ever get around to it. But having this content on a Blogger blog is a fitting bookend to this chapter of my own history.

You also never throw away old content – you just re-purpose it when you can.

Well, thanks – Gotta run.

I really, really appreciate the time you spend listening to these rambles. It’s all designed to help you learn from my mistakes and earn your own extra online income faster.

I’ve got a long post (just written last night) on free blogs all by themselves. Another on how to effectively promote on social media without having your time sucked away with no income. And some others I wrote last week about what I’d been inspired on through this journey.

These are all waiting for me to find them, record them, and get them out to you.

Today, though, I though you deserved an update.

Let me know what you need covered in more detail. I’ll get to it when I can – you can see above that my schedule is a bit packed now…

Luck to us all.