Day 6 Tuesday 24 April 2012 provides training for using and customizing wordpress widgets and adding youtube videos to blogs.

The only real task for today was to remove the ‘single post top square adsense ad unit’ – involves deleting code and takes seconds to do.

Learning more about WordPress

As usual, I listened to the to the MP3 recordings and watched the videos.
If you are new to WordPress this is great training but covered things regular users probably already know how to do.

What’s impressive is watching John add a few lines of code to embed one of his youtube videos – with great graphics that matched his theme! That’s where lots more time and effort needs to be spent – but not for now.

I also spent another 45 minutes today getting my FTP problems sorted

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)
• 38 minutes watching videos and doing the days work including blog posts
• 45 minutes sorting out technology problems

Summary of time spent on One Month Mentor to date:

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

Total time ‘working’ on the course is about 13 or just over 2 hours a day.
About 75% of this time was spent training and 25% sorting technical problems.

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.