Day 3 Saturday 21 April 2012 tasks involve creating 5 blog posts, registering with Google Adsense and ordering blog graphics.

Most of my time and effort today has been spent creating, editing and re-editing blog posts – taking almost 3 hours.

Off to work

I’ve definitely wasted a good portion of this time looking for affiliate links created some time ago. Plus I need to improve my writing skills and cut down on the number of silly typos needing to be corrected.

I’ve not yet ordered any blog graphics – wanting to spend more time thinking about what I want to focus on – my Internet Marketing software products or wherever John plans to lead me. Doesn’t take much to get me prevaricating!

Luckily I already have an Adsense account – so nothing to do there.

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)
• 200 minutes watching videos and doing the days work

Summary of time spent on One Month Mentor to date:

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

Now that I’ve spent quite a bit of time on my blog, I’ve exported a copy of the content – to make sure I don’t lose it!

I’m off to London with my wife this evening – where our internet has been down for a few days. So it may be a day or two before I am able to update this blog

Day 2 Friday 20 April 2012 tasks involve registering with clickbank and setting up a blog.

Creating Links

Although I’m pretty familiar with wordpress, I wanted to follow John’s instructions and needed to spend a bit longer watching the videos – in particular those for deleting and setting up new links.

I already had a clickbank account, Akismet API, and a number of affiliate product links – so this saved me some time, probably 30 to 45 minutes.

One change I did make setting up my blog was the custom permalinks.
Instead of %postname% I used %postname%-%post_id%.html.

This allows me to have multiple posts with the same title and adding ‘.html’ makes the url look like a normal web page.

Summary of time spent for the day:

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

Summary of time spent on One Month Mentor to date:

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

A couple of years ago I bought some software that allows me to create custom wordpress themes from easy to use selection menu’s – great fexibilty but a few limitations.

So a couple of weeks ago I bought 3 great new premium wordpress themes with developers rights for just $10 as a WSO – so plan to learn how to use these when I have time.

I also installed the wp-recaptcha plugin to help further reduce spam comments.

Finally I imported some standard pages I keep for all my blogs:

• About
• Contact
• Disclaimer and Disclosure
• Privacy Policy
• Terms and Conditions

Maybe John will later recommend something different – but for now I wanted to include these on my site that already contains affiliate links, and I want to stay on the right side of the law and keep Google happy.

I was very pleasantly surprised to discover the format of John’s training – videos plus worksheet telling me exactly what to do and how to do it.

Time to get started

To make the most of the course, I decided to make sure I at least listened to ALL of the training material.

But I value my time very highly so wanted to focus on learning anything new and making sure I don’t miss details or tips to do things I think I know already about.

The training videos have been broken down into bite sized chunks – each one about 2 to 8 minutes long – which is great.

So I decided on an initial plan of action:

1. Extract MP3 audio files for my iPod from the training videos – I used the free version of AoA audio extractor
2. Listen to part of the days training in my ‘free’ time – usually when walking to my sports centre for some exercise or a swim and sauna.
3. Make notes of training and watch videos for anything I don’t understand or know how to do
4. Do it
5. Complete activitiy sheets each day

Day 1 Thursday 19 April 2012 tasks involve getting a domain plus hosting and setting up an email address.

I already had hosting accounts and an unused domain with my name – Steve Mackay – hosted with a free account – that started displaying ads so my jobs for the day were:

1. Change my domain nameservers to my justhost web hosting account – 5 minutes
2. Set up an email account admin@stevemackay.com – I’d never done this the way John recommended before – so this took about 20 minutes

Summary of time spent for the day:

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

John recommended using D9 for hosting. Maybe if I’d started out using them I wouldn’t have had so many problems – but my experience is that things can and do go wrong with hosting.

So I always buy my domains and hosting from separate companies. That way if any hosting problems arise, I can quickly and easily edit any domain nameserver settings to get a site up and running with a different hosting company.

Finally I added the newly created email account to my blackberry – to help me check how activity on my site progresses.