Preseason 30 Day Challenge Notes Part 1

Just walking (or should I say stumbling) though the Preseason training on the 30 Day Challenge and I am sticking some notes up on the blog. I thought it to be useful if instead of just making notes myself and storing them away in OneNote to actually go just one more step and make them (semi)readable so that they may be of use to anyone else following through. So I do hope it’s of interest to someone, please let me know so it will give this all a sense of purpose. 🙂

Well, here goes…

First off, right at this moment I am going to be quite sloooow. Partly due to my own attention to all the little details and ideas but mainly because I am finding this all  extremely difficult to do. I have had quite a severe hearing loss since the end of last year and so just the act of listening really is taking quite some effort right now. I am so sorry for my wife, Gülenay at the moment whose throat is getting quite sore having to raise her voice all the time and repeat herself. The children have adapted very quickly to the situation and have taken it upon themselves to make much more noise than usual just so that I can hear them 🙂 I am beginning to wonder how Gülenay can cope for much longer with this and that this hearing loss may in fact be passed on from me just through all the noise being generated around her.

I am moaning, not a good start…

Maybe I shouldn’t mention also that with an unforgiving PC Sound card with a death wish now occasionally crackles and pops and dies. So listening to the streams is now an even more painful process needing no end of stopping and starting. In fact I heard Ed talking about what I thought was MobileUS and couldn’t understand what it was, I was searching around while he talked and couldn’t find what he was on about. I managed later to hear him spell it out MOGULUS !!! A live streaming video site that is now called LiveStream at http://www.livestream.com.

Add this to machines crashing, streams drying up, wireless connection dropping and it all adds to my Internet experience of the 30 Day Challenge.

So now that I have removed all usefulness from these notes, here is the first bit.

I am still looking around at Ustream, the first module of the preseason training…

This has opened my eyes to what is possible on live streaming at the moment on UStream.TV. Looking back through the Ed’s archives in 30 Day Challenge TV I found useful stuff. Maybe not was intended but I am interested in seeing the development of the program itself. It starts of with him testing it out back in March 2008, OK, that bit not so useful, but it gives you an idea of the hoops you go through when starting off any of these facilities. It’s a shame you couldn’t see all the 2-way, 3-way video that was going on in the final recording. So I joined UStream.TV using Facebook connect and made a mental note to come back and see what can be done in the future on this.

I did spend some time looking through Ed Dale archives on Ustream and can recommend the following streams in reverse archive order so far. I realise that much of this could of changed in the development of their 30 Day Challenge program and sites even may be out of date, but again I am glad I looked – there are loads of interesting bits and pieces hanging around there.

Episode 4 – The One For Gary April 7th 2008 – http://www.ustream.tv/337000

The tribute to Gary Halbert who passed away April, 2007. First half hour to do with creating content and breaking writer’s block. A fantastic resource mentioned here are Gary Halbert’s Newsletters, which now are all free and archived, Ed especially points you to the  Boron Letters, which you’ll find on that page, which he describes as the best education on direct marketing that he has ever read.

Interesting also is Gary’s Golden Nugget method, which I will briefly outline here but watch the stream to get the full message. It’s a great way of overcoming something that I often become victim to – writer’s block. Gary came up with this strategy to help write direct mail letters, however it has been modified to work online and works for creation of content in many media. It is essentially noting down the Wow!, Aah! Huh! or even Eureka! info that you find in studying an area. The steps are essentially this:

• Look at the Top 10 (or Top 20 as Ed prefers)
• Take Heaps of notes (Google Notebook is mentioned here)
• anything that makes you go Hmmmm or Wow etc…
• Setup a mail account (GMail if you wish) just for joining any mail lists found in those sites

Some mention of the Bloglines video, which I will follow up later, but following these steps

• Make sure you have your Bloglines video setup
• subscribe to the blog feeds Ed shows
• read them
• take notes

Information from Internet groups

• Look for groups on Facebook, Google Groups, MySpace, Yahoo
• Join Them
• Take Notes!!!

Mention of peer to peer Social Bookmarking  – I’ll follow up later

Good advice on keeping up with streaming technology and maybe thinking about setting up a .tv domain, to look out for Livestream.com (was mogulus)

The Tao of Twitter – foreward thinking of Ed over Twitter (April 2008!) as side by side communication (Fly on the Wall) not face to face, where often sales defences are up.

Thirty Day Challenge TV – Episode 5 – 15th April – http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/353068

A bit of forward thinking about Twitter and a wonderful example (as I used to know only too well) handling family pressures whilst handling your online business – Well done Ed – I think your punchline should be “This doesn’t happen on NBC!” :).

Early use of personalisation and using Twitter in the Richard Ink blog – http://twitter.com/richardink/ (who seems to have stopped around April 2009)

Recommends book ‘A Whole New Mind‘ Daniel Pink – how right brainers will rule the world. I am certainly interested in Daniels idea of the upcoming Conceptual Age is – something that was right down my street with my own Beyond One World project. There is a link below (does have my affiliate link in there) which allows you to look at a few pages of the book.

A service called PollDaddy was shown, a polling service for Twitter. This is free up to 100 survey responses per month.

Quotably.com was demoed, but since has shut down – That’s a shame, will try to find another service that shows the Twitter conversations so easily. I am trying to find it’s up-to-date equivalent, but haven’t yet…

Became aware of how the Hashtags are used on Twitter – a good site for searching and explanation is at http://tagdef.com where you can define your own.

Useful advice from Ed about who you follow on Twitter, about keeping it right down to the people you really do want to follow. Took a little while to sink in but, I’m converted, went through the exercise of exorcising my lists, very therapeutic 🙂 I am losing loads of followers as we speak – but hey….