A big mistake I made on my journey making money online was to focus far too much on how to do things – to the detriment of deciding what to do.

My Engineering background instilled an insatiable appetite for learning how things work and trying to understand how to use and improve the way they work – a real handicap for making money online.

Over a year ago at one Open Wednesday afternoon my internet marketing guru friends brought along a 15 year old lad to chat to us about how he was making $5000 a month.

The real key to his success was that he was just doing eaxactly what his mentors were telling him to do.
He didn’t have all the baggage of life’s experience to question what he was doing.
Instead he just got on with it.
Of course if he didn’t know how to do anything, he quickly learnt – but the most important thing was that he just focussed on doing what he was told to do.

One comment he made still makes me chuckle.
After a long career developing products, I thought I knew what ‘R & D’ meant – but no.
His definition was ‘rip off and duplicate’
In other words, just copy what the experts are doing – not what they are telling you to do!

I’ve always been skeptical about get rich quick schemes – particularly push button tools that promise $$$ on autopilot.
This view has constantly been reinforced every time I meet genuine Internet Marketing guru’s in real life.
Not only do they work extremely hard – often very long hours and ‘overnighters’ to meet product launch deadlines.
But they actually spend most of their time and energy on product development.

That’s why I have spent the past 2 years on my own product development – so that I have something of real value of my own to offer customers.
Now I just need to improve my copywriting and marketing skills to leverage sales of these products.

One of the best courses I attended recently was Jason Fladleins Product eClass
I love Jason’s training style – succinct and straight to the point without wasting my time on lots of spurious fluff.
His ‘1 problem, 1 sitting to create 1 product’ each day is so different from my approach of spending days and weeks sorting the minutia before completing a product that I don’t know if I’ll ever get to daily product creation.

Even using Jason’s Product Creation Tools I just seem to spend far too much time prvaricating and wondering what I should be doing next – even though I oprobably know how to do it!

But at least I now understand the need to get off my backside and finish my products quicker.

When things are going well online, I seem to forget about what can go wrong – and the consequences.

Yesterday after I finished a post on this blog, I noticed a typo.
But instead of being able to log in to wordpress, I got the dreaded “Internal Server Error”

As soon as this message appeared I realised I hadn’t bothered to even make a backup of my posts for quite a few days.
And it’s even longer since I backed up the complete site.

WordPress is great when it’s working – but it doesn’t take much to start making things go wrong.
And making proper backups invloves MUCH more than simple backing up posts, pages and comments.
If you don’t believe me check out what the experts say!

My hosting account for this blog is with  JustHost – and one of the reasons I like them is that they provide daily backups of all my domains for just $10 a year.

Anyway, I didn’t want to lose yesterday’s work and really don’t like messing with live MySQL databases (the blog was still working fine) – so I raised a ticket asking for help.

I don’t bother to pay extra to get 30 minutesupport  response from JustHost , so they tend to take their time – but are still much faster and more helpful than other hosting providers (such as one I have been waiting 3 weeks to get blocked access to FTP and cPanel sorted)

Anyway today’s a new day and I was very happy to discover the tech guys at JustHost have sorted the problem for me – thanks guys.

Now I’m back in to my wordpress site dashboard the very first thing I need to do is create an up to date backup of my site.

I bought John Thornhill’s WSO Domination training package a couple of months ago as a downsell One Time Offer along with his One Month Mentor program.

By the way WSO stands for Warrior Special Offer.

The package consists of:

• 29 videos almost 3 hours in total – the shortest only 1 minute, the longest over 15 minutes
• 9 pdf’s varying in length between 1 and 7 pages – 35 pages in total

Now that my Header Magic has been thoroughly tested and is ready to sell I plan on following John’s advice and offer it as a WSO.

Over the year’s I have learnt how to do most things online – including the techie stuff – so I wasn’t expecting a problem – but boy, am I glad I did decide to buy WSO Domination and check it out yesterday.
Why? Well I didn’t know just how much I didn’t know about launching a WSO until I took the time to check out John’s training program.
I like John style of training – showing and explaining how to do things in plenty of detail using short videos and pdf files I can print out.

It was a beautiful sunny day yesterday and I’ve been burning the midnight oil recently working on my software – so I thought I would dust off my Archos MP4 player and sit outside by the sea to watch WSO Domination and learn in a relaxed, productive state of mind.

First problem – the videos are an unusual size 700 x 526 – and not the 640 x 480 I knew was needed to play on my small Archos MP4 player – a gadget I haven’t used since having to travel each day by train a few years ago.
No problem – I powered up my trusty copy of Camtasia Studio and started converting them to 640 x 480 MP4s

Camtasia is pretty slow rendering new videos, but after converting 4, I downloaded them to my Archos only to discover it wouldn’t play that particular format of MP4!
I was pretty mad when I first paid $300 to buy the Archos MP4 player and found out that it wouldn’t actually play vidoes without forking out another 20 Euros for an encoder – and I certainly didn’t plan on paying them another 20 Euros to play a different format of MP4’s.

So back to Camtasia to change the settings to produce WMF format video.
Maybe I’m mad – but I spent the best part of 3 hours using my laptop and desktop to convert all 29 videos to 640 x 480 WMF format and download them to my Archos.

Was it worth it? Well I think so. I managed to watch half a dozen videos late last night whilst waiting at the station for my wife’s train to arrive from London.
Nowadays I seem to be a pretty slow learner. Most of the time I think I understand new things, but really need to watch or listen several times to fully understand them. Having copies of the videos on an MP4 player means I can watch and rewatch them whenever I have a few minutes of spare time – so the information eventually seeps into by brain.

I also printed each of the PDF’s – because I usually find reading these is a much quicker way for me to learn.
Just one complaint – they have no headers, footers or page numbers – so I got them into a bit of a muddle before sorting them out and stapling them together.

Today is another sunny day, my wife has a day off and I am all set to watch and rewatch the WSO Domination aideos until I really understand exactly what I need to do to launch my software.

So if you are planning to launch your first WSO anytime soon – I can hight recomment investing in John’s WSO Domination training package – it has already saved me a ton of wasted time getting started on my first WSO.