This past week as been a balance between writing content and marketing the site, so there isn’t a heck of a lot to report. One thing I did do was join MyBlogLog.com and set up a community around the site.

MyBlogLog and Social Media
MyBlogLog.com is a great tool to market your blog or website. It offers a number of benefits like:

1) It allows you to track your site statistics – you can see where your readers are coming from, what pages they view, and the top links people are clicking on.

2) It offers you widgets to install on your website – you can put a recent readers box on your page and it will display links to profiles of other MyBlogLog.com readers.

3) It allows you to get to know who’s reading your blog or website – you can check out the profiles of those people who visit your site and leave comments – or even join their communities.

To sign up, just go to MyBlogLog.com and create an account. I found that I’m getting some traffic from the community already.

Article Marketing
Also, the articles I posted to iSnare.com and ezinearticles.com are now approved. I haven’t seen much traffic coming from any of the articles yet. As of today, these are the number of article views:

iSnare.com: 15 views
eZineArticles.com: 39 views
GoArticles.com: 19 requests

Both iSnare and eZineArticles just approved the articles on Friday evening, whereas GoArticles.com published that article back on 4/13, so from the looks of things, iSnare and eZineArticles offer greater opportunity for distribution. iSnare.com also claims to send the article to thousands of publishers, so it’s possible that article will get picked up later this week.

Email Marketing
In terms of finishing up my ecourse, I still haven’t written the last few articles. I plan on completing them by Tuesday night of this week. By Friday, I hope to send out the first website newsletter.

The JV Giveaway I mentioned I’ve signed up for has been building my mailing list nicely. I currently have 90 active subscribers, with 74 coming in since I joined (April 13).

I admit to slacking a bit last week, as I switched focus for 3 days to another of my websites and starting applying some of the techniques I’ve learned during this experiment to that site. This week, I need to pick up the pace and focus on writing more content.

Anyway, here are my current stats:

So far, I’ve made:

Adsense: $14.64
Amazon: $0
Affiliates: $39
= $53.64

So far, my spending is:

Adwords: $28.66
Findology: $8.52
ExactSearch: $3/month ($36 total for year)
= $40.18 this month

Some other numbers:

Visits: 788
Pageviews: 788
People view on average 3.44 pages per visit.
83% are first time visitors.
Email subscribers: 90

I didn’t get to work on the site much today as this weekend I’m seeing five films showing in the Philadelphia Film Festival over the course of today and tomorrow. (Today was two, tomorrow will be three.) That said, I did get to do a few things to the website.

First of all, I installed the WordPress sidebar widget plugin to allow me to install the ad rotator plugin. This allows me to rotate two (or more, but for now, two) different ads along the sidebar under “Featured Programs.”

Up until today, I was only running James Arthur Ray’s The Science of Success ad. Today, I decided to start promoting the Jack Canfield and Bob Proctor Science of Getting Rich program as well.

I’m only a basic affiliate of the SGR program. (You can be, too.) I haven’t actually purchased the program. But I thought I’d promote the product more extensively on this site. So I created an ad using the graphics from the main site in Adobe Photoshop and Image Ready and then placed my affiliate link along the side. The ad rotator plugin makes it simple to rotate as many ads as you’d like – no coding necessary.

I also finished up article #6 of my 10-day “Mindset of Attraction” ecourse. Four more articles to go! The good news is that people seem receptive to the content. I got my first “thank you” email today – it makes me smile to know that I’m encouraging others to succeed!

I was somewhat concerned yesterday about sending out the ecourse to those that had subscribed to the newsletter last week – would they be receptive to an ecourse they hadn’t signed up for. So far, I haven’t gotten any unsubscribes, and it looks like I’m getting about 50-55% open rates for each, which isn’t bad.

The best part about today, though, was I made my first affiliate sale. Someone bought the James Arthur Ray’s The Science of Success course, which means I get 20%, or $39! That means my site profit so far is:

Adsense: $5.23
Amazon: $0
Affiliates: $39
= $44.23

So far, my spending is:

Adwords: $15.80
Findology: $5.10
ExactSearch: $3/month ($36 total for year)
= $23.90 this month

Woohoo – that means I’m in the black! A big thank you to whoever purchased from my affiliate link!!!

Some other numbers:

Visits: 405
Pageviews: 1441
People view on average 3.56 pages per visit.
83% are first time visitors.
Email subscribers: 25

I mentioned that yesterday, I joined the Easter JV Gifts 2007 giveaway. That seems to have gotten me 6 new subscribers in the last 24 hours. I’ve got 10 more who haven’t verified their subscription. I maintain a double opt in list, which means that people fill out their name and email address to subscribe. Aweber then sends an email asking them to confirm their subscription. When they click the link, they’re added to the mailing list and receive the freebies. Those who don’t confirm never receive the freebies. So, it’s interesting that so many have not yet confirmed. Perhaps they will over the course of the next few days.

Tomorrow makes Day 15 – the half way point. Right now, I’m nowhere near my goal of $30/day – but at least I’m in the black Even a small amount of profit is better than nothing!

Yesterday, I wrote the first three articles of my 10-day ecourse. Today, I wrote articles 4 and 5 – and am about half way done article 6. I managed to set up my autoresponders so that the people who signed up for the mailing list last week will also start to receive the course. I’m not sure if this is a smart move, since technically, I wasn’t advertising that they’d receive the course back then. But hey, the worst that can happen is that those people will unsubscribe. Hopefully, they’ll find the content valuable and remain on the list.

I also managed to submit an article to iSnare.com and GoArticles.com. I’m still waiting for yesterday’s EzineArticles.com and today’s iSnare.com articles to be approved. The GoArticles.com submission went live at midnight. They say they publish articles once per day (and midnight EST seems to be that time – at least tonight.) If that holds true every day, it’s good information to know since my article didn’t actually make it onto their recent articles page.

However, the good news is that I’m the first article on the self help page, which means I should remain in that top position all day tomorrow – or at least until they publish tomorrow’s articles, whenever that may be.

I also signed up as a contributor to a JV Giveaway. I’m a bit late for Easter, but Bradley Smith is doing an Easter JV Giveaway, so I posted my mailing list freebies along with all the other gifts available.

If you’re not familiar with a Joint Venture (JV) Giveaway, here’s the gist. A JV Giveaway is a database of free software, special reports, articles, and ebooks. You go to the website, Easter JV Gifts 2007, and sign up. You’ll then be taken to a members area where you’ll see all the gifts that are available. You click on the freebies you want, and you’ll be asked for your name/email (to join their mailing list) in exchange for what ever freebie they’re offering.

You’ll find freebies on all sorts of topics, but most revolve around internet marketing or setting up an internet business. The quality ranges from virtually worthless to pretty good so be selective. If you’re new to this, don’t download everything, or you’ll soon find yourself bombarded with email from every list you subscribed to. Pick the freebies that sound interesting to you and download those you’ll read in the next few days.

From a marketer’s perspective, JV Giveaways are great for growing your mailing list. Since there are hundreds of marketers who’ve contributed a “free gift”, lots of people promote it, which means lots of traffic to the site.

My goal is to get the final five articles of the ecourse finished by Monday, and then start producing more content for this site by Tuesday. I’m thinking of writing some articles on either Napoleon Hill’s Think and Grow Rich! or Wallace Wattles’ The Science of Getting Rich – maybe something of commentary of some of the chapters. I also have a few book reviews I’d like to post.

Like I said previously, I’m now trying to balance marketing the site and producing content for it…

These past two days, I’ve been working on creating articles for my 10 day “Mindset of Attraction” ecourse that I’ll be delivering along with the Science of Getting Rich ebook and 40 minute audio on The Secret. I’ve written 3 articles so far and set up my Aweber.com account so that when people subscribe to the newsletter, they receive one article per day (right now, they’ll get the first three, but this is my motivation to get the rest done pronto!)

Most of my articles are between 500-700 words, which is long for email. I thought about cutting them down to under 500 words (a good length is around 400 words), but I think I’ll try what I have. If people start unsubscribing, then I know something’s wrong and should spend more time there!

Each email also contains affiliate links to 2-3 products that people can buy from Amazon.com that expand on my topic. I put them in a “recommended resources” section just after the article.

Since I won’t be publishing the articles to this site, I’ve decided to also distribute some to article directories so that others can publish my articles on their site (and drive traffic back to this one.) I started out on iSnare.com today, but they were having technical difficulties so I never did submit an article to them. Instead, I submitted an article to EzineArticles.com, which will hopefully approve my article within the week.

The purpose of submitting articles is twofold. First, I want to get traffic to my site. Second, I want to start building links from other sites to raise my search engine rank. When you submit your article to article directories, anyone is free to use that article in their newsletters and on their websites as long as they keep the “about the author” section in tact. Mine included a link back to this site and a link to a “landing page” where people can sign up for my newsletter.

Building links is a tricky process when your site is as new as this one. If you submit too many articles and have lots of sites linking back to yours, Google starts to smell something fishy. They’re looking for a gradual development of links over time, and if you get too many too quickly, your site ends up in the “sandbox” (that abyss that new sites fall into where they don’t show up in search results for a few months).

At the same time, you want lots of links back to your site because the more links you have, the more authoritative your site looks in Google’s eyes. Ok, that’s a bit of a generalization – quality of links matter a lot as well. If you only get linked to by a bunch of spammy sites, that’s not going to help your rank.

In addition, only distributing one article that gets posted on a bunch of sites isn’t going to do much since Google has a duplicate content filter. That filter uses all sorts of factors to calculate which site posted the article first, and gives that site prevalence. The content doesn’t count as much for other sites that post that same article – which is why every good internet marketer tells you to write unique content if you can.

There will always be times, however, when a publisher needs new content and will use submitted articles as a source of content. And even if the used article doesn’t count much towards your ranking, you still get a link back to your website – which means you may get visitors coming from that site.

One more thing about articles, there’s a lot of discussion in the marketing world about “spinning” articles. Spinning is the art of taking an article you’ve written and tweaking it just enough so search engines would think it was a different article. Then, you’d pick a different directory and submit the new version of the article to that.

Personally, I think it’s a lot of work creating variations of the same article. I’d rather just write a completely different one and submit that. That’s what I plan to do with my article submissions. I’ll be focusing mainly on getting 4-5 articles in EzineArticles.com and GoArticles.com for every 1 article I distribute through iSnare.com. This is primarily because iSnare.com has a larger distribution than the other two, and like I said above, I’m playing it cautious when building links.

Finally, I spent some time tweaking and experimenting with Google Adwords. The initial ads I wrote weren’t getting a high percentage of clickthroughs, as I had hoped, so I wrote a few more ads to experiment. I also decided to send traffic to my landing pages rather than to the main site.

A landing page is the page people land on when they click the ad. In my case, my goal is to get people to sign up for my newsletter, so I created two variations of the landing page with none of the distractions of site navigation and content. It’s solely a pitch to join the mailing list for your freebies. You can view my landing pages for The Secret and the law of attraction to see what I’m experimenting with.

I have two landing pages because it’s important to include the keywords that people are searching for on the page. It’s also important to test different pages to see which gets the better conversion rate (that is, the number of people that join my mailing list.)

Yep, marketing is all about testing!

I didn’t have the chance to post much over Easter weekend so this is my catch up post. Today’s day 10 of my 30 day Secret experiment – which means I’m at the 1/3 mark. I’ve still got a long way to go to achieve my ultimate goal of $30/day.

I’ll begin with some site statistics:

Visitor Statistics
Visits: 241
Pageviews: 776
People view on average 3.22 pages per visit.
83% are first time visitors.
Email subscribers: 14

Profit Made
Adsense: $1.80
Amazon: $0
Affiliates: $0

Search Engine Marketing Costs
Adwords: $9.33
Findology: $3.36
ExactSearch: $3/month ($36 total)*
= $15.69

* I decided to break this out monthly rather than lump the $36 in for this month.

The good news is that my main site is now listed in Google and is getting a small bit of traffic from the organic results (not much, but some!) Some of my other pages have been indexed but aren’t yet showing up in search results.

As I was looking over the listings today (you can view what pages are listed in Google by searching for “site:yourdomain.com” or in my case, site:www.secretloa.com), I noticed that some of my pages weren’t showing my custom title tags. I’m using a WordPress plugin to add specific title tags (the text that shows up in the top blue bar of your browser) to each of my pages. It turns out that it was working for most, but not all, of them. So, after some tweaking today, I got it working. Hopefully it won’t take that long for Google to update its index and relist the changes.

I’m also getting some traffic from Technorati because I claimed my blog last week.

Other interesting stats – no one visits my forum or store pages. By far, the most popular page is the index page. I added a block of text underneath my “join mailing list” box on the front page to help newcomers navigate the site, and it looks like people are finding them helpful (or at least, they’re getting clicks). What I’m not certain of is if those links are distracting people from joining the mailing list.

After the main page, the most popular pages are the watch the secret online page and the Esther Hicks Speaks article. People spend the most time reading the Is The Secret Harmful? page.

Right now, I’m trying to balance adding content with marketing the site. Here are the goals I’m currently working on for the next 7-10 days:

1. add more content on each of the teachers
2. write and send a weekly newsletter
3. write a (7 day?) ecourse to be delivered to those who subscribe to the mailing list
4. write articles to be submitted to article directories to build links/traffic to the site

I think I can use some of the content I write for the newsletter as articles I distribute to article directories like isnare.com and ezinearticles.com. The more overlap I can create, the less I feel like each of my goals are competing for my attention. Right now, I have the foundations for the ecourse. I know what I need to write the articles about. It’s now about creating a 7 or 10 day course that ties all the articles together.

The ecourse will be delivered through Aweber.com. Now, if you subscribe to the mailing list, you receive an email telling you where you can download the freebies I’m giving away. Once I add the ecourse, each day for 7 or 10 days (I haven’t decided yet), the recipient will also receive an article about “success”.

I’m also looking to publish a weekly newsletter. This will include an article of about 400-500 words and a book or program review. I hope to send out the first newsletter on Friday of this week.

I think I’ll make most of the profit from this site through Adsense once I drive traffic to the site – and through the mailing list by reviewing books and programs – so for these next 10 days, it’s critical I remain focused on getting this stuff together. I guess we’ll see what happens.

I’ve hit the 20 article mark – which is incredible for me – and in only 6 days! I know I won’t be able to keep up with that pace, but having content on the site is extremely important, and something that my long term plans for the site revolve around.

The great thing about picking a topic as broad as The Secret is that there is always something to write about. There were so many people mentioned in the movie that just by following them – what they’re doing or publishing – is so vast that there’s always inspiration to keep writing.

That’s really important when you write frequently about your topic – especially if you start blogging. If you pick too narrow a topic, it’s easy to write a few articles and then feel you’ve said everything you can say. Of course, you don’t want to be too broad, or it’s easy to stop being relevant to your readers – and the broader your topic, the less well you do in search engines who are looking for resource sites for particular niches.

Yesterday, I started focusing on metrics. I continued with that today. I registered my blog with Technorati. It immediately brought in some traffic through the keyword tags I gave my blog. If you have a WordPress blog, it’s really easy to “claim your blog”. You just need to sign up and create a profile. Then, it will ask if you’d like to claim your blog. Simply type in the URL and it will ask you to verify. There are a number of ways to verify that you are the owner, the easiest being that you log into your blog through technorati,

I also signed up for a basic Feedburner account. Feedburner allows you to see how many people are subscribing to your feed – and how many people click through to your website. A typical RSS feed doesn’t do that. (Learn about RSS.)

I can’t stress to you how important metrics are at the beginning stages of building an online business. They tell you how much you’re spending on advertising, conversion numbers (ie who’s signing up for the mailing list or buying an affiliate product), what type of traffic you’re getting, which pages are popular, which aren’t, etc.

I’m a numbers junkie, so I spend considerable time analyzing them to figure out how I can give people more of what they want – and make sure that people can find it easily. I’m currently out of town for the Easter weekend, but when I return on Monday, I already have some ideas to make the front page of the site a bit more user friendly.

It’s funny how easy it is to get distracted. I woke up this morning to find that my refrigerator was no longer working properly. I learned this as I poured clumpy milk onto my morning cereal. Luckily, the freezer still works. I took everything out and scrapped the frost off the back vent hoping that would help, but things only seem moderately cooler now… perhaps I attracted this.

Today, I spent some time looking over my site’s metrics. If you’re running any type of advertising, it’s important to know your stats. They tell you things like how much you’re spending, how many subscribers you’re getting, and how much it’s costing you per subscriber.

The site made it’s first $.03 today! Of course, that was offset by the advertising I’ve purchased. Here’s my cost breakdown for the last two days:

SearchFeed: ad still not live
Findology: $1.29
Google Adwords: $3.99
ExactSearch: $36*

= $41.28

* That ExactSearch listing is actually an annual fee regardless of clickthroughs. I’m going to ignore it for the time being as I calculate my subscriber conversion fee (I’ll add it back in by the end of the month.) After 2 days, I have 9 subscribers to my mailing list. So ($41.28 – $36)/9 = about $.60/ subscription. That’s not bad.

Technically, if you’re calculating results, you probably want to throw in the cost of the domain (mine was $7/year), web hosting was part of a hosting account I have to manage other websites so it’s essentially free (the overall hosting plan split between a number of sites is $120/year), and my Aweber email account (again, basically free since I use it to manage other accounts, but about $20/month).

I also signed up for a free basic account with HitTail.com, which I love. HitTail lets you monitor what searches people are doing to get to your website and then provides you with free keyword suggestions!

The other analytics program I signed up for was Google’s analytics program, which is available through my Adwords account. The stats program is fairly comprehensive and lets me see things like where people are coming from, what links they’re clicking on, the top pages people are entering and exiting at, and my conversions -what percentage of people are signing up for my newsletter. It’s all extremely useful stuff.

I also negotiated some links from a couple pages with relative content – from a PageRank 5, 4 and 3 – with various keywords in the link text.

Finally, I listened to the 2 hour James Ray teleseminar hosted by Alex Mandossian and wrote an article on James’ 5 Qualities of Successful People.

Now that the site is up and running, the rest of my month will focus on creating content for the site and finding ways to market it. My ideal goal is to rank well for a number of keywords related to The Secret and the Law of Attraction, but that’s going to take a lot of time and effort. So, to start generating a trickle of traffic to the site, today I focused on pay per click advertising and submitted my site to a variety of directories.

Pay Per Click (PPC) Advertising
I’m not looking to spend gobs of money promoting this site – which is easy to do with pay per click advertising, but I did want to get some traffic flowing to the website and start building my mailing list. I set up a campaign on Google Adwords and a couple of the 2nd tier PPC search engines like Findology and SearchFeed.

Figuring out the right words to bid on can be tricky. With any campaign, you’ll have a handful of keywords that get significant traffic, and then a “Long Tail” of keywords and phrases that are far less commonly searched for – but cost far less and collectively, add up to more searches than the top performing 5-10. But it takes trial, error and measurement to come up with all those keywords.

My goal was not to pay more than $.15 per click for any of the keywords I’m bidding on – with the bulk falling into the $.03-.07 range. That eliminated a few of the top keywords on Google, but I’m ok with that. I’m not looking to compete on price, and I’m content not having the #1 ranking for every keywords.

If you ever manage a pay per click campaign, keep that in mind. You don’t always need to be #1. Those that feel it’s an ego thing to search Google and see your ad at the top will soon find you’re blowing through money. Sometimes, this can pay off. Often, however, it just decreases your return on investment.

With the 2nd tier search engines, I find that the quality of clicks is always a crap shoot. Sometimes, most of the traffic comes from unreliable sources. Sometimes, you get lucky and find a few keywords that do extremely well. It’s all about experimenting, monitoring the results, and testing a variety of ads/keywords and the like.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
While I’ll use pay per click advertising in the short term, my ultimate goal is to get ranked well in search engines (primarily Google) for highly trafficked keywords. Unlike PPC advertising, this isn’t an instantaneous process. It can take upwards of 3-6 months to really start seeing results.

Search engine optimization is more than just putting keywords into your site’s content. It encompasses a variety of things – like how well your page is coded. For instance, if you have all your text as Flash animation or images, search engines can’t read it, and therefore won’t index your page. I also find that your ratio of code (like html and javascript) to your text content matters. You want to maximize the content and minimize the code.

That’s why I like WordPress. It’s built with good coding practices in mind, and there are all sorts of plugins you can use to make your site more search engine friendly (which I mentioned in my previous post on building the site).

If you look at the top of your browser window, you’ll see a blue bar. That’s where your title tag goes. This is really important and should contain keywords! Search engines look to this to determine what the page is about, so spend time crafting something coherent. Don’t just stuff as many keywords as possible into the tag, but do use phrases people are likely to search for – and that also describe your page contents.

Other tags that matter include – headlines (h1, h2, h3), bold (strong, b) and the text you include when you link to another page. Don’t just say “click here” but use keywords in your link. For instance, I might say watch The Secret movie for free. Notice, I linked to the page where I have the movie embedded? What I didn’t say was “click here” to watch the movie, and link the “click here”. Why? Because search engines use the textual content of the links to determine what the next page is about. They’re associating “watch The Secret movie for free” with my Watch The Secret page.

The other component to seo is building links back to your website. This is an art. Not all links are equal – those from spammy sites can actually hurt you. What do you want? Well, first, the best types of links come from other sites that have similar content to yours, and they link to your site using relevant keywords in the body of their content.

For instance, since this article is about search engine marketing, I could recommend Aaron Wall’s search engine marketing book and blog. (I do recommend the book, by the way. I purchased my own copy awhile ago. It’s great for beginners and advanced search marketers, alike.) Sadly, my link won’t do all that much good for Aaron’s site (at least not yet) because this site is brand new and doesn’t have much credibility in search engines.

What would give it credibility? If the official Secret site linked to mine – or one of the teachers’ sites linked. Or if any number of high trafficked and credible sites about The Secret or the Law of Attraction linked here. But I can also look for links from coaches or personal development sites or even psychic, paranormal, new age, or spirituality-based sites – there are all sorts of possibilities.

I haven’t gotten that far yet. Right now, I’m working on just using keywords within my site’s content and submitting my site to a myriad of directories. First and foremost, it’s important to submit your sitemap (created with WordPress plugin, Google Sitemaps) to Google’s webmaster section and Yahoo’s Site Explorer. Next, you can work on submitting your site to directories. Aaron provides a list of top directories to submit your site to in his search engine marketing book. You can also try here or here for suggestions.

That’s a lot for today. Tomorrow, I’ll focus on analytics – that is, how to analyze all this stuff – and add more Secret related content. I just got Mark Joyner’s Simpleology: The Simple Science of Getting What You Want in the mail today so I’ll review it soon. I’m also signed up for James Arthur Ray’s Science of Success teleseminar tomorrow evening.

I spent most of Day 3 working on integrating my mailing list with my website and finding something to offer people that come to my website free.

If you’ve read anything about internet marketing, you’ve probably read that it’s the mailing list that matters most. You want people to raise their hands, identify themselves and tell you that they’re interested in what you offer. They can do that in all sorts of ways – like making a purchase, leaving a forum post or blog comment, or joining your mailing list.

Starting a mailing list from scratch is hard work. One of the biggest questions in internet marketing is “how do I build my list of subscribers?” Well, that’s what I’m going to tackle during these 30 days.

Here’s what you need to get started:

1) The easiest way to start collecting names and email addresses is to sign up with an email service provider. I use Aweber.com because they have great customer service, they’re reasonably priced, their emails have a high delivery rate (that is, they make it into people’s inbox, not the junk or spam folder), and they have good email statistics (they show you who’s opened your email, who’s clicked through, on what links they’re clicking).

2) Once you set up your account, Aweber.com will give you specific code to integrate into your website. You simply copy and paste it into your website template and a form appears. You manage everything within the Aweber.com administrative section, so you don’t have to worry about handling subscriptions, unsubscribes, or making sure you have all the legal necessities in place (like a valid address) to comply with the law.

3) Next, you need to have something that will encourage people to actually join your mailing list. If you have good content on your site, you’ll get people to sign up for your mailing list as long as the form is visible and can be found easily. To give the rest of your visitors an incentive to sign up, you’ll want to offer something free. This can be anything from a free ebook, ecourse, audio or video – something that they’d find valuable and would like to watch/read/use.

4) Finally, you have to set up your email account so that when people fill out your form and subscribe, they receive an email that contains links to your free ebook, audio or video – or if you’re offering a free ecourse, that each day for the next few days, Aweber.com will send them an email automatically (an “autoresponder”) with today’s lesson.

I spent much of today getting my freebies together. Wallace Wattles’ The Science of Getting Rich is all the rage these days since Rhonda Byrne mentioned this was the book that changed her life. Luckily, the book happens to be in the public domain, which means anyone can distribute the content for free without worry that someone may sue them.

I found the text online, compiled it into an ebook, then gave it some design. I’ve seen a number of different versions of the ebook out there, but most are either secured (meaning, you can’t print them) or poorly laid out. I decided it would be easiest to create my own ebook, so I designed the book using Adobe Indesign and Adobe Photoshop. (Yes, Adobe products are expensive, but they’re the best! If you need substitutes, Free Serif Software has a number of freebies. You can get a scaled back graphics editing program, PhotoPlus, and a page layout program, PagePlus, for free.) I found a picture to use for the cover at IStockPhoto.com, and made my graphics.

Since there are tons of people out there giving away The Science of Getting Rich, I decided to sweeten the offer. My colleague, Kathy Perry of PeakPerformanceWomen.com, did a 40 minute teleconference last week on The Secret, and she graciously let me offer it as a freebie on this site. In it, she covered the basic principles of The Secret and some of the controversy surrounding the movie. The Q&A that followed also brought up some great points.

Now that I had an ebook and an audio program, it was time to “package” them. That means, creating the cover designs (which I did in Photoshop) and making web graphics I could display on the site.

I then integrated the mailing list form with some text and put it on the front page of the site – where you’ll see an offer to join the mailing list and get 2 freebies. I also created a download page, so once people confirm their subscription to the mailing list, they are immediately taken to the page where they can download their goodies!

I encourage you to give it a try – go to the front page and subscribe to the mailing list or use the form on the right side of the page.

In some ways it was a bit ironic because there I was sitting at my table typing away about the law of attraction on my laptop while these two guys next to me – computer technicians – spent virtually the same amount of time trying to upgrade a laptop from Windows XP to Vista.

This poor man had just purchased a copy of Vista and was trying to install it on one of his client’s laptops but unfortunately, he had some problems with the activation code. So he called technical support… and that’s when his trouble worsened.

I swear this guy was on the phone for 2.5 hours with numerous technical support people. Each time he was transferred to someone new, he had to repeat the problem, how they tried to fix it, and why he was being transferred. About 1.5 hours in, I was convinced that I wouldn’t be upgrading to Vista any time soon. We all laughed about it once he finally got the information he needed – as he was calming down, of course – but wow, Microsoft’s support staff (all overseas) obviously wasn’t briefed on Vista.

I, on the other hand, enjoyed my lovely cup of Seattle’s Best best mocha (my favorite of all coffee shops here in Philly) and a yummy Italian sandwich as I read or skimmed through a number of books.

When I came home, I watched 24 and then went back to work on the site – posting the content I had written and created a few topics on the message board based on the Powerful Intentions message board.