If you have read my previous post I feel I need spend a little time re-thinking and planning my next steps for The Money Cult and this blog concept.  My thought is to be completely open with this process and share my thoughts with everyone as I put together my action plan thought a serious of blog posts over the next 2 weeks.  This way I can get readers thoughts and opinions along the way.  This exercise will cover some of my blog ideas, blog design and will result in a plan for this blog future.

Already I have received some valuable thought’s and encouragement and I expect that this will be a very good and helpful exercise.  It seems when you share and take things to a personal level with your blog that draws a lot of feedback and helps with connecting with others which is really what it is all about.

The Goal of this exercise it to figure out my plan an action steps for the next 2 months in so I will have a clear path to focus on.  This should also provide me with some insight to what I want to accomplish going in to next year.

To kick things off I going to start with a list of my areas of concern.  Each of these should turn in to it own blog post or thread so I can dig deeper in to it.

Areas of Concern

Content – (topics, categories, frequency)
Traffic – (SEO, How to continue to grow)
Blog Design – (Time for worthy theme and re-design)
Realistic Goal’s – ( I like having goals and hitting them)
Making Money – (Needs to be discussed, blog vs. new products)
List Building – (My Aweber account is wasting away)
Helping other’s – (Good things happen to those that help others)
Time Management – (Part time blogger’s don’t have time to waste)
Getting others to promote and contribute – (Find ways to get others to help, win-win)
Parking Lot

This is a good list to start with looks like most of the key fundamentals are covered here.  Please stay tuned as I dig deeper in to each of these area’s over the next couple weeks and hope to uncover the true blog concept and share some of my blog ideas in a public forum.

I just wanted to say I really blew it this month looking like I am going to take a couple steps backwards but that is ok.  I completely lost my focus and motivation.  I stop publishing regularly, I stopped spending time on just about everything.  I really took some time off from my blog and business which is not good for traffic or progress but I just couldn’t find the motivation and didn’t want to deliver crap.  So what can I learn and share from this.  First I going to look at some of my mistakes and then cause for lack of motivation.

Mistake #1 Regular Posting

With a newer blog or a regular posting schedule is extremely important to traffic and readership.  The good news is my traffic didn’t completely die but it did drop.  If your a rockstar blogger or have an more established blog you can probably get away with only a couple post a per month but  for me I need to continue to post at least 3 post or more per week.  That what been working so I need to continue this.  I think I might even have to kick it up a notch and do more as punishment for taking off the last 10 days.

Mistake #2 Failure to Following Though

I had a few things lined up that would have resulted in some very good content and interviews but didn’t carry though with them.  Let’s see if I can recover, it seems it is very easy to connect with people the key here is to connect the right people and when things don’t work out as you planned don’t let it stop you move on don’t let it become your excuse.

Mistake #3 Looking for Shortcut’s

I still find myself more interesting in the learn vs. doing.  I still find myself subscribing to just about everything under the sun.  I still find myself constantly analyzing what other peoples are doing and trying to figure out their systems.  I need to take more action.  I need to learn more from trial and error.  Focus on more on the things that help my business.  Producing content, traffic generation, connecting with others, building list, building systems and products.

Mistake #4 Time Management

What little time I spend I poorly managed.  Not exactly sure if this is a time management issue or lack of spending any time.  I pretty much only checked my e-mail for the last 10 days and left a few comment here and their.  I should have at least make a point to get a post in but didn’t like feel anything I was going to write about had purpose.

Enough with the mistakes I could go on for a while on these but lets talk a little bit about while I lost or am losing my motivation.

Reason #1 Money

I know it shouldn’t all be about money but time is money and I have put in a lot of time this year to my business and have not seen the result that I would have expected.  I now have more realistic goals and understand it will all come in due time with with right amount of effort and time but lets face it money is a motivator.  When it is not coming in then you have to ask yourself why are you doing it.

Reason #2 Distraction

Ok I must admin since hockey and football and a few of the new TV shows started back up I been spending some more time in front of the TV vs. plugging away on the computer.  Earlier in the year I had pretty much given up TV and replace that time with time spend on my business.  Also it seems since my personal laptop died back in August I just haven’t found my writing zone.  Back then when I had that I could socialize with my wife and the TV and still get things done now I have to enter my man cave and be away from everyone which seems to be a hard place to find myself going to late at night.

Reason #3 Time & Effort

Let’s face it running a blog and online business requires a lot of time and effort.  I could easily spend 40-50 hours a week doing this but I only have 10-20.  So I find that since I not able to spend the time I need I get frustrated and behind.  It’s not that I don’t want to spend the time it that I only have so much of it to spend as this is a part time venture for me at this point.  Another thing is I really like to do quality work in everything I do so I don’t like it when I get behind and try to make up time by taking shortcuts.

So what does all this mean?

Not exactly sure yet but I am going to continue blogging.  As punishment for taking some on un-expected time off I going to post M-F for the next 2 weeks.  The post are going to be more about my thoughts and what I need to do to fix this site and my motivation.  The goal of the post is really to come up with a future direction and action plan for this site.  YOUR COMMENTS ARE WELCOME as all this is for you.  I think part of the problem is I find myself posting about blogging vs. the original intent of this site.  I feel that I need to find a way to write faster.  So this punishment should help get me with getting in to the habit of publishing daily and also help me with learning how to do some faster post.

Everyone I wanted to get this published before it was to late.  For those that didn’t know this month I entered the best wordpress design 2009 contest.  I think I am in last place as far as votes go but if you ask me I am the real winner.

I didn’t enter this to win I know my free design pretty much sucks but right now I am more worried about content, traffic, learning and connecting with others then design at this point with this site.  I will be switching to a premium theme very soon as I know I need to do an overhaul now that the The Money Cult is developing a regular following.   I entered the contest to meet new people and saw it as an opportunity to drive some traffic to my site not to mention the prizes were worth a chance when the only cost to enter was to do a blog post about it.

So as far as the contest goes I am all ready a winner I have a huge increase in traffic from http://fresheventure.com and I landed awesome interview with the Keller Hawthorne from that site which has received a lot of attention.  I addition to that I have received visits, comments and e-mails from other competitors.  

READERS HELP ME WIN BEST WORDPRESS DESGIN 2009

If you haven’t voted for anyone yet you can still do so here is how.

Step 1 Click Here

Step 2 Scroll Down to The Money Cult

Step 3 Click the radio Button.

Voting Closes Midnight EST October 2nd.

YOU CAN Still Vote for me!

I know my design isn’t the best right now but I am hoping my readers , content and blogger friends would help get me some votes. 

Please take some action and help support The Money Cult

At lot of internet marketing guru’s are masters of all the different ways to produce media.  So I have been writing, I have made a couple video’s so I figured I would try and do a couple podcast just to see what it would be like.  One of my favorites Yaro Starak one of the best collections of free interviews and podcast about internet marketing and success stories available online.

One of the 1st set of Podcast that I listened to was Steve Pavlina over a year ago.  Steve was a computer game coder that decided he was going to become a motivational speaker a couple years ago.  His podcasts are pretty good I suggest you also check these out.

Some Tips

1. Just do it. Find something that records click record and do it.
2. Listen back to yourself.  When listening figure out what you don’t and do like make note of it.  I know I tent to clear my throat and say ummmm or ahhh.  THIS IS BAD break that happen if you have one.
3. Make sure it is quite and not windy if outside.  Elimate background noise.
4. Plan with bullets or an outline, if you do this and you get lost for words you can quickly look at your notes look for the next topic you wanted to cover.
5. Tell a Story.  People love stories, especially success stories.

Now I went straight from the hip on my 1st one and I was actually painting my deck at the same time but wanted to just see what I sounded like and I was really impressed with the results.  I wasn’t even sure where to begin and you can see cause I talk about how crappy my podcast is cause I didn’t have a plan but I quickly pulled it together and got my some great thought out of my head.

Now I have been listening to guru’s and other motivational speaks for a long time so maybe everything the have said came right back out of my month but now it is my version of the story.

It will take a lot of energy to talk straight for more then 10 or 20 minutes so know that going in but you can hit pause or play but make sure you talk in some solid chunks of 8-20 minutes or it might be hard to piece together if need be.

Learn from your mistakes, we all make mistakes, lets face it your 1st podcast is not going to be great but you might as well get that out of the way cause the just keep getting better from there.

My 1st podcast is available here

Please listen to it and let me know what you think.  I know the quality is a little low so I will work on that for the next ones this was done on my mp3 player outside while I was painting my deck so it is not studio quality.  In this 22 minute podcast I cover a lot of different things but really it is about me, my business and Internet Marketing tips and tools I discovers this last month which is really the month were everything started to click for me.  There is a lot of value in this to someone that is either just starting out stuck with there blog or business.

Here is a list of title’s I was thinking of calling this so you can get a idea of what it is about.

• My Crappy 1st Pod Case
• The Pod Cast about Crap
• How to make a Crappy Podcast
• Do I sound like Frank Kern?
• IT Guru unloads his thought’s on his 1st 3 months of building an online business.
• Blogging when things start to click

Seriously this is a really good podcast, you should listen to it if you want to learn more about the key rookie mistakes I made.  Along with the some of the things I figured out.  I have starter down the path to building my online business and there is no turning back now.

Warning the this raw, unedited, unscripted, unplanned but great stuff.  If you want to get to know me better listen to this and tell me what you think.

Please I would really like to here your thought on if this as I a plan to do more.

Here’s the list of the current tools I use.  I am always testing and looking for more tools but these are the ones that made my official list.  Please comment and let me know if you think you got something I must try.

Blog – Content Management System CMS

Wordpress

Don’t even waste you time on anything else!  I have been a IT GURU for many years and has install and tried close to a thousand of different programs.  Wordpress is easy to work with, there is a plug-in for everything and just so powerful.

My Plug-ins (still working on this find them as I need them)

Google Analytics
SEO Plug-in
Share This
TweetMeme Button
Akismet

Social Networking – Connectors – Distribution points

http://twitter.com/jaredplittle
TweetLater
TweetDeck
http://facebook.com/jaredlittle
http://youtube.com/user/MrLittlej
TubeMogel

E-mail List Management

Aweber I strongly recommend this a lot of Guru’s use it and also recommend it.  This is one thing you must paid for sign up today. Everyone says to start day one with your list, you need a list if you are serious about making money online.  Don’t be like me I waited almost 3 months before I started with this.  Big mistake!

Product – Sales – Affiliate Programs

ClickBank

Paypal

My Internet Marketing Team

Me, my kids, anyone that wants to help or connect with me please twitter me if your interested.

I personally want to thank everyone on the net that provides value!

Jared P Little

Quick post all, I want to capture a little bit about some of the success I had last month before I started in to this month.  It seems thing are starting to click a little bit.  June was a good month July is going to be better.

Some of the Highlights

I am starting to see traffic      
Tatics: Twitter, YouTube, Commenting, Social Book marking

I have a List!                           Aweber: (Small but I have one)

2000 twitter followers
I had 4 last month and wasn’t sure of the point of twitter.  This took little effort no cost
Tools:Tweatlater, TweatDeck, every once in a while go follow 25 or so people that follows someone you want to be like or that is in your market.

I had a meeting with a coach Bill Crosby,
Very helpful you should check him out.  Looking forward to his upcoming coaching program.  I see the value in a Good Coach.

A few other things.

• I have a recorded plan for my business and a great vision.
• I have a mega action plan for the upcoming month
• I Starting using Video and I like it! http://youtube.com/Mrlittlj

This month’s focus is going to be on conversion and revenue generation, it time to make a little money don’t care how much but at least some.

Some targets for July

Finish Tweaking for now overall appearance and format of Blog
Help 5 people complete The Newbie Challenge
Grow list to 100
Post 2-4 Videos per week – Finish Newbie Challenge Book Camp Training videos
Post 2-3 Blog Articles
Post 1-2 Articles
Learn SEO + Keywords move up Google rankings
Comment on other sites 5-10 per day
Build some solid relationships with others that have common interest.
Create a few more case studies
Make sure I got all my funnels pointed in the right direction
A bunch of other stuff that I will think off thought later…

Again thanks everyone for your feedback and thanks to everyone that adds value to the internet.

Please comment I really enjoy your thoughts.