Khalid’s Day 1 Summary

As promised, here is a post describing my efforts so far. Doug’s summaries will appear in separate posts.

As I was thinking how to sum up my day 1 of our contest, I initially thought it was mostly a failure, but then I had a second opinion and that was that it *is* important to plan ahead. As the saying goes “Failures don’t plan to fail, they fail to plan.” Honestly though, I did not get started as soon as I would have liked, and I have a number of excuses, but I won’t list them, because success doesn’t care about excuses, does it?

Here’s how I went about planning. First I did some mind-mapping. Essentially, I started with a blank whiteboard (yes, I have a whiteboard!), and drew an oval in the middle with my goal in the middle. From there, I started drawing more ovals with tasks and subtasks and ideas and linking them all up, as fast as I could think of the ideas. It’s interesting how your brain is able to generate more ideas when you write things down and/or talk about them. By the way, these are called Mind Maps.

My goal: 100% ROI (Return on Investment) – $250. Why did I pick that? Well I had to choose some tangible goal, and my reading/research to date showed that PPC marketers tend to shoot for 100% ROI. Now you may note that SEO and mail list and viral marketers get what amounts to an infinite ROI, but their efforts take time and we only have 2 weeks.

The largest initial task was creating a schedule with tasks & subtasks and time estimates for each item. I also created daily goals. To be conservative, I estimated a maximum of 3 hours per day, so that I would have some extra time in case I ran over, and I fully expect that I will on many days.

One last note regarding affiliate links in these posts. You will notice that as we go, we’ll be sprinkling in affiliate links in our posts. Some of you may question our honesty in recommending products, and we can’t say we blame you. However, if we left them out, we would be ‘leaving money on the table’, and any marketer/business person will tell you that is just dumb. We can only hope that our honesty shines through in our writing and that in time our regular readers will come to trust that we’re not simply out to make a buck off of you, but are giving back to the community.