Michaela Cernescu’s Blog

I like to start the New Year with my reflection on 2009, enjoying the good moments, learning from mistakes, enforce the plan for 2010 and organize to the bone, and whatever takes to make it better, and a humble thank you for the blessing friends and working JV partners of 2009.

It is fair to say that 2009 wasn’t one of my favorite year even though was better then 2008. It was a mix of too many events, projects which as a whole made me tired and not always happy.

This doesn’t mean that I don’t appreciate the accomplishments:

Learning:

•  It was a turning point on the way I looked at Web 2.0. A learned a lot and spend a value time analyzing some new trends. As a consequence I am going more towards: tagging, grouping, and blogging using only WordPress and the new born WP MU, abandoning some classic concept of putting my nose all over the net. I can see clearly now that this was a mistake of the past. Thanks you: Yaro, Eric, VanDyke, Joel for a friendly hand when I need it the most
• I definitely want to spend more time in small niches, but keeping in mind the main purpose of my business vision and its goals
• I eliminate a foggy area and I make now a clear difference between my main purpose and the  satellite “tools”
• It was an important step forward on my understanding of Google strategies, myths, and future trends. Thanks  Jonathan for “Search Engine Myths Exposed”, you are a marvelous researcher, deep analyst, and honest Internet Marketer. I learn a lot from you and I am using your scripts with a different prospective now
• I learned a lot about membership sites, scripts, and macros. Thanks: Eric, Jan Del Carmen, Stu  
• Learned WordPress MU, wrote the first eBook in JV with Alex: “WordPress Multi User”, read aboutit on this lens
• I know from sometime that the key of  long term success is to create automated systems, not to chase a couple of sales, but for the first time I made the creation of automated systems my priority, it is going to stay like this for 2010 as well 
• I’ll use an entire arsenal available for Automated systems: scripts, macro, autoresponders, recurring tools (membership sites, e-courses)

My 2009 Blessings and 2010 Hopes:

• In 2009 I was blessed with a couple of good new friends. Some were coming from working relations, others just happen to be the right person at the right place and time for me. I am really grateful for having all of them on my side, yes, the friends make our world. A special thanks for Jeanie, Alex, my dear musketeers, and a handful of very dear Squidoo friends
• In 2010 I’ll work at just a project at a time, no exceptions, the decision is coming as a hard to swallow learning experience from 2009
• I’ll eliminate all un productive activities, all volunteer work for hopeless experiences
• I’ll extend working relationships with people who happen to share what I  believe in, and I’ll continue to learn and grow within this friendly environment. I am glad  these type of people exist around me, I value their expertise, collaboration, and above all friendship
• I am convinced that if I want to work hard on my goals, my goals will work on me; I’ll continue to dream big, and plan to the last detail. I don’t want to face the future with apprehension; I want to do it with anticipation and joy. Yes, I always consider the joy of honest hard work a prerequisite of success 
• At personal level I have to put more time aside for family. My mother is 95 old now, she needs me, I’ll be available day and night for her, she is the best mother in the world for me
• My audience will find out about the progress from my blogs, published products, lenses, tweets, and so on
• To serve better my loyal subscribers, I’ll transform this blog in a monthly Newsletter-Blog, starting Jan 15th, and as usual I invite you to participate, I really love to hear from you

Quote Mark Twain

My Predictions:

• I am convinced that Blogging, Affiliate Marketing, and Internet Marketing in general will play a bigger role in 2010
• But a lot of changes will happen, new tactics, and trends will emerge, as of new FTC rules ( read lens ). To all the pessimists out there who are telling you that Internet Marketing is saturated, I say that they don’t understand essence. The Internet is big enough for you and me, and gazillion of other honest people, there are no fences, and the difference between the impossible and possible lies only in a person’s determination, not on outside influences 
• Among my good friends I clearly see 2-3 new stars in 2010, I wish them well, keep on open eye, and help as much as I can

To your success, Happy New Year Michaela

Popularity: 61% [?]

Part II  -  Graphics

Picresize  and Picasa.

You can use for Graphics: Photoshop or Corel Photo-Paint, both are expensive and there is a learning curve to use them properly.

But in majority of cases if you creat a Squidoo lens, or a Blog Post, re-sizing is all you need.  For just this operation I use Picresize which is incredible simple, follow this example.

The flowers you see in next pictute I need to resize at 50%

• Equalize
• Gaussian Blur
• Grayscale
• Raise
• Raise Frame
• Rotate or
• Go forward with the default

 

 For this demonstration I Chose Raise Frame, pres a button and this is what I get:

This is it, I have my picture reduced 50%.

As an alternative you can use Picasa  a great software from Google, the difference is that you have to download the software, and the process is similar.

GIMP.

If your needs are more then just resize, Gimp is a fantastic free alternative, is easy to use, intuitive and above all is free.

It is true you don’t need of spend hundreds of dollars, it is a great editor to use.

For Blogs.

Blogging is closer to my soul, I highly recommend:

Blog Pulse 

Blog pulse is a great free research tool that allows you to discover what’s hot and what’s not in the blogsphere.  All you have to do is typing:  a topic, keyword, or URL.

In the above chart is a comparison between:

• Google Chrome
• Google Wave
• Google SideWiki

Do yourself a favor, and start using Blog Pulse, it really is an excellent tool.

Until the next time all the best

Michey

Popularity: 17% [?]

What is a Blog we already know, but why are Blogs so popular nowadays? A Blog is a Journal. A place where you put your personal thoughts, ideas, knowledge, in a conversational mode, as you sit across the table with an old friend and just tell him what you have in mind.

Blogs are:

• Perfect tools for blooming your creativity
• They act as communication tools connecting, educating, and influencing people
• All of them but especial WordPress has a multitude of functionality
• Professional Bloggers build a business, an on-line asset which produces a full-time income from their Blog(s), and they manage their Blog(s) like a business.

What makes Blogs different from any websites of Web 1.0 generation? It is important to know as it helps you to develop the right mindset about Blogging:

• Posts on Blogs are listed chronologically, last in the top, in a journalistic style. They are also store by categories which make them very easy to retrieve
• In Blogs is easy to add new content, if you can write a letter using Word, you can Blog, cannot get simpler than that
• Being easy to add content is easy to update frequently, Blogs are more up-to-date vs. Web 1.0 websites which are static
• On Blogs interaction is a breath as they allow people to leave comments
• The conversational nature of Blogs make people trust Blogs more than old type websites
• Blogs in your domains allow affiliate links, which are not welcome in a lot of sites and environments as forum, ezine, even some websites

WordPress is a Blogging platform and a Content Management System (CMS).
It is not the single Blogging Platform or CMS, but the huge popularity of WordPress is coming from the following features:

• It is FREE
• It is Open Source, people as you and me can add functionality to WordPress adding our themes, plug-ins, widgets
• It contains over 4,400 plug-ins, they add a huge functionality, flexibility, and creativity
• Now Multiple Users extension (MU); is relatively new but is adding even more Web 2.0 functionality. We go now from individual users to:
  o   niche groups
  o   tribes which are communities with same interests
  o   companies as well
• It is a platform easy to use with the low level of restrictions
• WP is the single Blog Platform which let you create Blogs on your own domain. This is huge advantage for Affiliate Marketing.

The success fires up the imaginations of entrepreneurs. There are other platform easy to use but the difference is the number of restrictions on those platforms. Some of them are good for a non-technical person or a limited purposes, but a solid technical individual always closes WordPress and/or WP-MU.

What I notice in the last 2 years is the multitude of ways people start to use WordPress.

1. We use WP as a Blogging Platform
2. Some uses WP to create Websites, if you block the comment feature, and use your own domain, you really have a Website. Why people will use WP to create Websites? The answer:
   o   WP is a great system of organizing data for a Website
   o   The plug-ins which provide a huge functionality. The work behind the scene which is already done, tested, and implemented for you is a big plus of WordPress
3. Create Membership sites – this is again a great advantage of WP functionality, it is a little more work up front but is possible to do it and the easy maintenance will compensate you for the hard work at the set up point
4. Now we have an extension of WP which let us create communities, it is called WordPress Multiple Users (WP-MU). This is an example of MU: http://crabbysbeach.com/blogs/

The conclusion is people started to use WordPress Platform for almost everything. Blogs now can be almost anything you want them to be.

Welcome to the wonderful world of WordPress. In future posts I’ll take one of this functionality at a time and give you details.

I think the new functionality is more likely to interest my readers, but I always look to the comments to make my mind about what is important for you.

I’ll come back soon with new products, surprises, and more posts to keep you up-to-date.

To your success
Michaela
http://michey.crabbysbeach.com/blogs/
http://www.mc-ecovers.com

Popularity: 14% [?]

I’ll continue to give some sugestions about finding other streams of income and training yout need. If you enjoy Part I, keep reading Part II.

You will find info about selling digital products on eBay using Classified Ads, Blogging, drive traffic to Blogs, making money with blogs, learn to use a group training provide by an effective Forum, search engine loophole for MSN

3. Classified Ads for Selling Digital Products on eBay.

You probably know that eBay banned Digital Products with instant delivery and the Classified Ads was the single solution offered by eBay.
We want change, don’t we? Well, eBay gave us changes we barely can keep up with. The ban itself made eBay sellers angry some got out of eBay without to look back. eBay never pay attention to Classified Ads and all of a sudden they did a lot of changes to the rules of Classified ads. So many changes occurred in 4-5 month, all of us were confused with both: Digital Products and Classified Ads on eBay.
I waited to see when the eBay’s frenzy of changing rules settles down.

It is not a 100% grantee that the rules will stay as there are today, but at list they look stable and reasonable and I decided to start commenting them again.

Using Classified ads to indirectly sell Digital Product is a good solution as Classified Ads are:

• One of the quickest ways to build a list
• They are working for affiliate marketers and bum marketers for promoting other people’s products and earn great commission
• The new rules for Classified Ads are very easy to implement, if you are able to create a regular eBay listing then you can create a Classified Ad listing as well.

If you are looking for a step-by-step guide to start selling Digital Products on eBay using Classified Ads, look no further than Tracey’s “Auction Classified Cash 3”.
http://www.mc-ebay-resources.com/recommends/ClassAd
 
I give Tracey’s my highest level of endorsement and if you really want a step-by-step guide, easy to follow, you MUST grab your hands on Auction Classified Ads .

Talking about eBay, I also suggest David Guidon’s Hot Item Finder v 2:

http://www.mc-ebay-resources.com/recommends/HotItemFinder

This software will help you find items you can sell on eBay, what eBay customers are searching for.

4. Blogging and making money with Blogs.
There are a lot of digital products about Blogs, I’ll give you two examples I like and work with:

Alvin Phang’s Atomic Blogging v 2, that is referring to a new generation of blogs, it is highly recommended for beginners: 
http://www.mc-ebay-resources.com/recommends/ABVideo 

Atomic Blogging is a great guide for people who just started blogging and want:

• To get lot of traffic to it using Web 2.0
• Get your Blog indexed and bookmarked by the major sites and
• Drive massive targeted traffic, the unique type of traffic which will transform potential customers in buyers.

It really is a great step-by-step guide for people who seek to learn and profit from their own blogs, making good money from there Blogs.  I am not talking about 1-2 hundreds from Google AdSense, I am talking about at least 5-figure income per month from Affiliate Marketing.

Rob Benwell’s Blogging to the Bank 3:
http://www.mc-ebay-resources.com/recommends/BlogBank

I got Rob’s first version of Blogging to the Bank and I effectively used it. When V 2 came along, I considered that the amount of improvements wasn’t big and substantial enough to justify a new edition. But I discovered after I bought v 2, it is so much hype on landing pages, it is really hard to decide what is real.

Blogging to the Bank 3.0 is the best, it is my new step-by-step roadmap I start to use now and I am happy about the fact that is using Web 2.0, and I know it will bring money for me for years to come.

5. Lee McIntyre’s Standing Start Profit
http://www.mc-ebay-resources.com/recommends/LeeSSP

This is a membership site, if you really want the friendliest and knowledgeable people on earth, to help you all along, you must be part of Lee’s Forum on Standing Start Profit.

Lee offers a divers array of information for both experienced and novice alike:

• You learn how to make massive profits from scratch, starting with no list, no JV partners, and no product
• You get high quality content
• Monthly Videos Training
• Group coaching via access to the best Forum on Internet Marketing
• Underground Networking from Lee.

People are learning on different ways, if you are comfortable on group learning I highly recommend Standing Start Profit

6. The Ultimate Search Engine Loophole by Dave Kelly and Chris Rempel.
This is an advanced topic; you can learn how to get Rank #1 on MSN.

I don’t want to repeat content, I create a review on my review Blog, and you can read it there:
http://affiliatemarketingreviews-mc.blogspot.com/2008/11/ultimate-search-engine-loophole-review.html

As always, you are welcome to leave your comments here on the blog.

Until next time all the best for you
Michaela

Popularity: 8% [?]