Wondering if this is going to work for me?

I recently purchased John Thornhills One Month Mentor training program – and aim to publish my day by day progress following the course.

Initially I’ll report how much time I’m spending each day plus running totals.

Later I hope to add details of traffic and any income generated from the site.

Please leave a comment if you find this helpful – or want want me to record anything extra as the course progresses.

Day 5 Monday 23 April 2012 tasks involve changing blog graphics – header, footer and RSS icon.

This should have been a five minute job for me – but …

Changing WordPress Blog Graphics

I ran into problems with the hosting account I use for this blog as well as a completely different hosting account that both developed FTP problems.

When FileFTP didn’t work I tried to use Filezilla, then different FTP accounts on the servers – then reset passwords, all to no avail.

This meant a lot of non-productive time spent trying to find work arounds, raising tickets and providing details to tech departments.

24 hours later and the problems have still not been resolved.

I think these problems have been caused by recent cpanel security upgrades on servers.

For now my only work around is to upload files one at a time using my cpanel file manager – much more tedious than using FTP.

Luckily John’s tasks today involve uploading just 3 new graphic images and renaming them – usually just a few minutes work.

Summary of time spent for the day:

• 10 minutes creating MP3 audio files
• 13 minutes listening to audio files while out walking
• 5 minutes making notes of days activities (to help me rinse and repeat later)
• 15 minutes watching videos and doing the days work
• 150 minutes sorting out technology problems

Summary of time spent on One Month Mentor to date:

• 50 minutes creating MP3 audio files
• 104 minutes listening to audio files while out walking
• 45 minutes making notes of days activities (to help me rinse and repeat later)
• 315 minutes watching video and doing the days work
• 150 minutes sorting out technology problems

Today I checked the sites performance using Firefox Addon SEOQuake.

As expected, the site is not yet ranked by Google or Alexa – and SEO sucks.

For now I’m resisting the temptation to get things moving faster – using tricks such as the All in One SEO plugin – so that we can see how things progress following John’s blueprint.

Day 4 Sunday 22 April 2012 tasks involve editing theme files then FTP uploading them.

Today’s videos go into great detail explaining how to do things for absolute beginners. I spent more time going through the motions of checking out the training – but nothing new for me, so I was able to carry out all the actual tasks in a few minutes.

Starting to get technical

John recommended downloading and installing Filezilla to FTP files. Filezilla is a great program but my preference is to use Firebug integrated into Firefox as an “add-on”.

The longest and most tedious job today was editing 21 files to add my Google ID – but even that only took a few minutes.

Although I went through the exercise of checking out the new themes, without the graphics, the themes supplied have no graphic header at all (unlike the video examples) – so after checking everything worked, I reverted to my original default wordpress theme for now.

Update: In the process of working through day 5 tasks, I discovered that the Prosense Blue theme I planned to use was the only one of the 3 supplied themes to have a header graphic image missing! Just my luck!
But if you choose to use either the Prosense or Prosense-grey theme on day 4 – you shouldn’t have a problem.

Of course there is no problem if you want to use own graphics with the Prosense-blue theme.

Summary of time spent for the day:

• 10 minutes creating MP3 audio files
• 21 minutes listening to audio files while out walking
• 5 minutes making notes of days activities (to help me rinse and repeat later)
• 30 minutes watching videos and doing the days work

Summary of time spent on One Month Mentor to date:

• 40 minutes creating MP3 audio files
• 91 minutes listening to audio files while out walking
• 40 minutes making notes of days activities (to help me rinse and repeat later)
• 300 minutes watching video and doing the days work